“Me too. Who is he?”
“A painter.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You’re coming home, right?” he asks. “Soon, right?”
“Yes.”
“I need to know when.”
I struggle to figure out what to say.
“I really need to know when.”
“OK. How about five months? Can you wait five more months?”
He sighs, dips his hand in the cold water, and flicks droplets with his wet fingers.
“Yeah, OK. I can do that. But I want a kimono. And not one of those cheap ones we were looking at at the Grand Asia Plaza. I want one that feels like flower petals against my skin. Got that? Flower petals.”
I do some quick calculations in my head and try to remember the name of that cheap, secondhand kimono shop in Kichijyoji a student once told me about.
“OK.”
“OK.”
“What if I found one that-”
“Flower. Petals.”
“OK.”
Our Tokkaido Line train glides back into Tokyo’s Shinagawa Station, and I snap Jimmy out of the daze he fell into thirty minutes ago as he watched an old man across from us reading a big fat manga comic and picking his nose. We change to the Yamanote train, then to the Chuo Line, and finally reach Koenji. We slump back to my tiny room and collapse onto the bed.
I awake slowly the next morning, wondering groggily what we should do on Jimmy’s last day. I know he’s had a great time, I know Tokyo has shown him her best, but his visit is still lacking that transcendental moment when the world explodes into a widescreen Technicolor and people start dancing around you Busby Berkeley-style. Hmmm. What could we do? Where could we go? Who could we see?
“Oh my God! Fucking Itoya!” Jimmy cries, popping awake and jumping out of bed.
“Who?”
“Itoya!
I stare at him with big dumb eyes.
“The goddamn washi paper store! We’ve got to go there!”
Itoya, of course. Everyone who knows anything about washi knows Itoya. What? You don’t know what washi is?
Well, dummy, washi is a traditional Japanese paper made from rice or bamboo or some such type thing and then dyed and used to make things like art and stuff. Jimmy loves washi paper, and pretty much the only thing on his to-do list when he came here was to go twirl around Itoya, the famous washi paper store in Ginza, a plan that had completely escaped his mind once he’d gotten here and had his mind blown by how thin I am.
So we scuttle eastwards to Ginza on a mission to get Jimmy some artfully made, tradition-bound transcendence.
The first floor of Itoya is your standard stationary shop. (For me, it’s a big pile of “meh,” but those who are into stationary had better fasten their seatbelts.) It’s the second floor where the magic really happens, when the strings start to flutter and the horns start their low burbling. There, for the world to see (if the world could be crammed into a five-hundred-square-foot room) is roll upon roll upon roll, sheet upon sheet upon sheet, of wild, wonderful washi. All different colors and designs. And as soon as Jimmy sets foot in the room it’s like
Upon our entrance, the floor staff immediately goes on full alert, nodding to each other that there’s a big whitey in the room and he may want to dirty up the place with his greasy American hands. Jimmy doesn’t care. Humming the love theme to
“Don’t worry! Washi is his favorite paper!”
“He came from America to see this washi!”
“He is an artist with the washi!”
The young male floor manager, looking exceedingly worried, starts following Jimmy around to make sure he doesn’t compromise the washi and its proud Japanese tradition.
“He won’t drop the washi!” I assure him. “He is very famous in America for loving washi!”
The manager asks Jimmy in extremely hesitant and uncertain English if he can help.
“Do you have a darker blue version of this?” Jimmy asks, holding up a piece of blue washi, not bothering to adjust his vocabulary or speaking speed for his ESL audience. “Like something a little cloudier and ominous, like a storm is about to break out, you know, like there could be some thunder and lightning coming? That kind of blue.”
The manager’s face falls.
“He ask any darker blue washi!” I translate, and while the manager starts looking for a darker shade, I shadow Jimmy, making sure he’s careful not to breathe too hard on any of the paper.
“Jimmy, you’ve got to speak more slowly and use easier words,” I tell him. “Also, look at him when you’re talking. And open your mouth a little wider.”
“Oh,” he says. “Can’t you just translate what I say for him?” he says.
As much as I want to tell him that my Japanese skills are indeed up to that demanding task-even though just a little over a year ago it had taken me the better part of two weeks to understand the grammar structure of the sentence, “The notebook is on the desk, and the pen is on the notebook”-I don’t think I should commit myself to it. But pride and the instinct to show off beg me to give it a try, so I do.
“Uh, yeah, I guess I could do that.”
“Great,” he says. “Can you tell him that I’d like to see the different types of green he has? With Japanese symbols on them.”
“This is OK?” the manager says, holding up a sheet of dark blue.
Jimmy nods.
“Yes, that is good,” I venture in Japanese. “He also has an interest in seeing green things that you have here.”
The manager smiles, sensing that, for the first time since he began helping us, he just might have the upper hand.
“Green? Green washi, right?” he says, continuing our Japanese tete-a-tete.
“Yes, kanji green washi.”
“Also,” Jimmy interrupts in English, “ask him if they have paler colors with little flecks of other colors in them.”
“Also,” I continue, “do you have bright colors and small various colors on the washi at the same time?”
“And,” Jimmy continues, “do they have any with that little waving cat on them or like one of those demons you see at the temples? Or like those old crazy Noh masks! Ask him if they have Noh masks!”
A single bead of sweat pierces through the skin of my left underarm, thus opening the floodgates for an all-out perspiration celebration.
The manager hands Jimmy some green sheets decorated with various kanji characters and then starts trying to find some bright colors and small various colors on the washi at the same time. He hands more samples to Jimmy and waits expectantly for more instructions from me. He’s not ready to let us browse freely.
“Are you going to ask him?” Jimmy persists.
This charade really shouldn’t be allowed to continue. My ability to say where I am and where I want to go in Japanese is pretty flawless. My ability to request different kinds of washi paper according to Jimmy’s whims-for which I would have to remember the words to all the colors as well as come up with ways of saying “flecks” and “demons” and probably eventually “Arabian sunset” and “mother of pearl”-are negligible. There’s a bunch of washi here, and we are perfectly capable of sorting through it ourselves. But the Japanese are sometimes infuriatingly unwilling to let foreigners touch and pick things out for themselves. Sure, sometimes gaijin break things or stain
