Warai-banashi

The Neighbor

2011-11-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

Everyone has a crazy neighbor. Think of Kramer. Or for my fellow babyboomers, Mrs. Kravitz on "Bewtiched".

This particular neighbor was a Japanese woman who lived across the street from us in Minami Azabu.

I suspected the minute I set eyes on her that she was crazy because of the frizzy mop of curls on her head. These looked natural. For the Japanese this suggested the taint of foreign genes, a sure indicator of craziness. For me, it was the certainty that no sane woman in Minami Azabu would allow herself such a hairdo. Curls – Yes. So long as they were perfect silky waves cascading down a slender back. Curls that practically screamed "Up since dawn with a curling iron….Oh, and by the way, I basically never eat" . Unkempt and unruly - No.

My suspicions were confirmed when my cheery “Ohayoo gozaimasu”-es were met day after day with an implacable “Good Morning”, delivered in textbook English. I knew that Curly didn’t hate foreigners per se. Our landlord, Fung-san, was Chinese and notwithstanding the 60 some years since he had landed on these shores with Chiang Kai-Shek’s occupation forces (yep, they had some here), spoke Japanese as though his lips had been tacked haphazardly together. Curly seemed to be on quite friendly terms with Fung-san and his unmarried son who, to Fung’s disgust, still lived at home. But Fung-san wasn’t a westerner and didn’t speak English.

Curly lived with her husband, two children and unmarried sister in a large house directly across the street. They were somewhat of an enigma. The husband went off to work every morning in a tweed jacket and owlish glasses. This meant that he was not a salary man, who would otherwise be wearing a dark suit. We learned from our landlord that he was very senior at one of the government ministries. To live in such a big house in that particular neighborhood meant serious money (it was a different equation for us foreigners, whose rent might be paid by an employer). And it was hard to imagine that happening with a civil service job. Prestigious and requiring a lifetime of scholarly achievement virtually guaranteed to result in brain death as they were, these were not particularly well-paid positions. That left family money.

All was revealed when one day a taxi pulled up across the street with Curly and a slightly shorter but older version of herself, deranged curls and all, in the back seat. My small-town sensibilities not yet entirely dulled, I waved hello as they disembarked.

It was the older woman who acknowledged us. “Hello,” she called out in quite passable English. “What country do you come from?”

With those words, I crossed to Curly’s side of the street and launched into my “20 years of coming and going from Japan” spiel, assisted by my then 6-year old daughter who knew the script verbatim. I paused for breath and then, with undisguised curiosity asked “ What about your family?”

“I come from Hiroshima,” the old woman said. “ I own a construction company. This is my daughter.”

She might as well have said “I’m a hard-bitten old biddy who bribes government officials for contracts to deface the Japanese landscape. This is the poor creature I have tortured and demeaned with unrealistic aspirations for her entire life. I managed to con a respectable (but poor) city man into marrying her.”

The pieces of the “Curly” puzzle dropped into place.

I had once lived in southern Japan and had been to Hiroshima many times. The tragedy that befell the city during World War II had put only the slightest of dents in its hardy culture.

Curly was the “Ojoo-sama” (“young miss”) of a wealthy, but not necessarily cultured, provincial family. She had come of age at a time when Japan itself still wanted to “be someone” on the world stage, before the great national explosion of the nineteen nineties when the bubble burst. A time when every Japanese school-girl (or at least, their mothers) believed that learning English would improve her chances of finding a good job, getting straighter legs, marrying a doctor… possibly even the holy grail of becoming a flight attendant with JAL (although to this day I do not believe those exquisite creatures have human blood flowing through their veins). The country teemed with English teachers and students toiled away at cram schools. Pairs of pasty-faced Morman boys, now the stodgy congregants I see on Sunday mornings down at the Morman church in Hiroo, pedaled through the streets on their way to English bible study sessions with gaggles of admiring students.

I had a flashback to the year 1981 when, living in Matsuyama (the largest city in Shikoku and 45 minutes by hovercraft from Hiroshima), I was stalked by a gussied up mother with gawky teenage daughter in tow. They followed me all the way home and asked my host mother if I would give English lessons to the daughter. The poor daughter, knock-kneed in a sailor uniform, cringed at the door. I vaguely recall a stiff session of green tea and cakes. I said a few words to the girl before they headed off, the mother triumphant as if her daughter had been anointed by the Gods.

This was the golden twilight of the “Showa Era” - a time of plaid skirts, fraternity jackets and big hair. Matsuda Seiko had one off-key hit song after another. Mister Donuts, now relegated to dingy stations in end-of-line towns, occupied the sites where Starbucks now thrive.

I was in Tokyo only once during those years, but my sense of that shining Mecca was formed, of all places, in Hiroshima, where I was once sent with a contingent of girls from my school in Matsuyama to attend a high school peace conference. I remember the girls from Tokyo – confidently tossing manes of sleek black hair, slices of toned thighs between skirts that were too short and socks that were too long. They wore lip gloss and had pierced ears, strictly forbidden to the girls from Shikoku and Hiroshima, who were held to dress codes little changed since the first nuns had arrived in those parts. Adding insult to injury, the Tokyo girls not only spoke textbook Japanese, rather than the cow-poke dialect spoken down south, but many of them spoke English as well, having been born and raised in the U.S. or having a Japanese-American parent. Being from the boonies myself, I instinctively sided with the local girls. If Curly had been there, and she may well have been, I can imagine the envy she must have felt.

Family money notwithstanding, Curly had done well to make it to Minami Azabu, a neighborhood so cosmopolitan that I sometimes wonder if I am really living in Asia – or just an Asian neighborhood of a western city, a Flushing or a Forest Hills of New York, or an Ultimo or Chatswood of Sydney.

Someone once told me that Minami Azabu has always been a foreign enclave, having been settled by Korean slaves brought back to Japan by a victorious Oda Nobunaga. The grounds of a local temple once housed the first U.S. embassy to Japan. It is not unusual to hear Japanese kids speaking English, or foreign kids speaking Japanese there. I once tried to intervene when I heard an altercation outside, right in front of Curly’s house, in which a few Japanese boys were hurling insults at a little white boy. I changed my mind when the white boy let fly with a volley of foul Japanese and chased the Japanese boys down the street, his white school hat parachuting out behind him on its elastic bands.

Unlike much of Japan, Minami Azabu is a place so sure of itself that most folks there don't actually care what language you speak. But not Curly. She was from a different place and a different era. Her indelible sense of “them” and “us” had also been informed by the grisly fact that some 40, 000 of “us” had been incinerated by “them”. And squarely within the boundaries of “them” were me and my family.

For ten long years after Curly’s mother broke the ice, Curly continued to greet me resolutely in English. Once or twice a year she would strike up conversations longer than “Good Morning”. These would be along the lines of “Aren’t you going back to your country for Easter/Summer/Christmas?” and, after several years had passed and the detritus of our existence transitioned from strollers to bicycles, skateboards and, eventually, a car -“When are you going back to your country?”

Curly’s children were surprisingly normal and always invited our kids to join them for firecrackers during the summer, a pleasure long since banned “in our country”. Every year as we watched the kids write their name with sparklers, Curly would say something along the lines of “Can you teach my kids English?” Her kids were much older than mine, and I did suggest that they could come over to learn English while they babysat my kids any time. But although this seemed to be the ultimate win-win proposition, Curly never took me up on the idea. When her kids eventually grew up and left for college, perhaps it was my imagination but every time I saw Curly I was sure I saw an accusing gleam in her eye that said “Why don’t my kids speak English yet?”

Curly could also be a bit of a nosy parker. When we got our car, she seemed to make a point of annoying the crap out of me by asking “Can you drive on Japanese streets?” and “Did you check your car at the garage?” This latter one was not ill-founded. After years of watching expats turn up in Tokyo and start to tear up the expressway as if it were the LIE about 5 minutes after arriving, we decided we should buy our neighbor’s third-hand car when they left. It was a bargain at $300. A few years later when we went to trade the car in for a “new” second-hand car , we found out about the “shaken” system (bi-annual mandatory safety inspections) and realized that we had been driving around uninsured for years. Curly was definitely on to us.

Shortly before giving Curly the ultimate signal that we had no intention of going back “to our own country” by actually buying an apartment in Minami Azabu, we adopted a stray kitten, who we called “Sugar”. Sugar was so weak when we found her that we had to bottle feed her for about a month. We pulled a fast one on Mr. Fung, sending the kids over with Sugar in their outstretched hands to plead with him to let us keep her. Because of my husband’s allergies, Sugar had to be an outdoor cat and before long Mr. Fung had taken a great liking to her. So much so that he set up a rope with a ball on the end in his garden and spent hours teasing her with it. Rather ungratefully, Sugar ran away when we moved and who should find out but Curly. Mr. Fung had been really upset about it (not us moving after living next door to him for 10 years, but the cat running away) and when I bumped into Curly in the neighborhood, she made a point of berating me about how careless I must have been to let the cat run away and get Mr. Fung all upset. This after I had sobbed for hours about losing Sugar. “Curly is human after all,” I thought. “She just doesn’t think I am.”

After this, I made a point of avoiding Curly, ducking into a store or crossing the street when I saw her heading in my direction.

It was several months after the earthquake and tsunami of March this year that I next came face to face with Curly. My daughter and I had gone for a walk late one evening when, taking a detour, we saw her frizzy silhouette approaching us from the opposite direction. We clutched each other briefly in panic, and then, having no choice, proceeded stoicly forward.

When Curly recognized us in the darkness, she too momentarily froze in her tracks. And then she was upon us, the words gushing from her, all in Japanese. “Konban wa”, the first words of Japanese she had ever spoken to me. Then, again all in Japanese, “We were so worried about you in the earthquake! We didn’t know if your new house was OK. ” And then, pinching my daughter’s cheeks like a Jewish grandmother, “And what a beautiful big girl you’ve become.” “Oh,” she said, “I am so happy that you didn't go back to your own country!”

And more than ever, at that very moment, so was I.

The Doll

2011-10-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

I had seen the old woman with the doll in the park before. She was well dressed and her hair still showed the vestiges of a stylish bob notwithstanding the strands of grey feathering out from the roots. Probably the wife of a retired company man, taking the grandchildren for a walk to the park. The owner of the doll, no more than 5 or 6, would be on the swings or in the sandbox, black horsehair ponytails poking out under a little sunhat which only on a Japanese child could stay fixed to the head on a trip to the park.

There was something familiar about the doll. It reminded me of a doll I had received one Christmas when I was a kid. "Little Miss Pee-in-her-Pants" or something. A rather large doll with splayed arms and legs. Two milky teeth showing through cupid-bow lips and eyelids which would roll shut and then snap open again when sat upright to reveal glassy blue orbs framed by molting black lashes. An iridescent mop of tangled fishing line hair. My best friend had received one too, except that hers had brown hair while I got the red head. We had spent endless hours on the back verandah playing "Beryls and Doreens" - the little mummies game we had named in honor of our two favorite "aunties" - one of them a real aunt (of hers) and the other a mutual friends of our parents. They both had the distinction of never failing to turn up with bags of lollies.

As I gazed at the old woman, I was hit by a creeping wave of gooseflesh. There was just something a little too tender in the way she held the doll to her body. Something a little too muted in the way she appeared ready to head purposefully towards the sandbox or swings to check on the phantom grandchild and then pivot away in a different direction at the last minute.

Yep, it was hers all right.

I felt the same involuntary revulsion as years ago when the swaddled bundle in a baby carriage turned out upon closer inspection to be a softly snoring Alsation pup. But at least a puppy was a real, warm, blood and flesh creature which would wake up to lick its owner and romp cheerfully around a house. This was a "Mother-in-Law-of-Chuckie" scenario.

I recalled that some Japanese toymakers had hit upon the idea of making dolls for the lonely elderly. Some of these involved quite advanced robotics. One was the "Snuggling Ifbot" which supposedly had been calibrated with just the right amount of conversational ability to prevent senility, though clearly it was too late for that in this case.

And that was that until a month or two later when my husband and I, summer camp empty-nesters, found ourselves sharing the park one afternoon with the mother and child. This time they were accompanied by a tall young woman who, whilst dressed top-to-toe in pink (complete with high-set beribboned pigtails and bright red apple cheeks), sported the broad shouldered physique of an athlete. She looked like the offspring of "Hello Kitty" and "Mighty Mouse".

We were taking a break from our frisbee throwing when the threesome passed within a few meters of our resting place. I forget who spoke first, the old woman or me. Each one of us compelled by the rituals of village etiquette to exchange courtesies with those encountered during our daily rounds. Her village of course would have been a few close-knit blocks of urban Tokyo, or perhaps, in her childhood, an earthy brown jumble of cottages backed into the side of a mountain at the edge of the rice paddies. Mine was a small town in a completely different continent. Yet we spoke the same language.

"You speak very good Japanese" she said, a spark of curiosity lighting warm brown eyes under slightly raised eyebrows. I stood up deferentially as she approached us. "Thank you," I said. Glancing over at my husband and then again back at me she asked "Don't you have any children?" "Our children are away at summer camp in America at the moment," I explained.

And then, again in a gesture as ancient as humankind itself, I looked at the doll and said with a smile, "You have a very cute baby." "Oh, thank you," she said. "This is Tama - mi, named after myself, Tama-e. I had her rather late in life". "Here", she said, proffering the bulky package, "do you want to hold her?"

I reached out and took Tama-mi in my arms, jiggling her up and down gently as if to soothe colic. In deference to the gritty humidity of the park, she was dressed only in a diaper and a light blue cotton sheet. I noticed that her skin had a patina of grey and that patches of scalp had been filled in with brown marker pen where the hair had fallen out.

"I would like to have another baby," I said. "But my husband doesn't want to." The line between reality and fiction, already blurring, melted away completely at this point. Tamae-san looked over at Peter, who was sitting back watching us with a look of complicit bemusement. "How can that be?" she said accusingly, "with such a beautiful wife." He shrugged helplessly.

I turned to Ms. Mighty Kitten, who had remained mute throughout the whole exchange. "Are you a relative of Tamae-san?" I asked. "Her companion," she said flatly. "You look like you do quite a bit of sport!" I said. "Basketball, swimming, wrestling," she intoned.

I could feel my husband's eyes boring into the back of my head by this stage. "Star.....bucks....Star....bucks..." he signaled.

"Well, Tamae-san, Tamami-chan, Ms. Hello Mighty," I said, "It has been really nice chatting. Look forward to seeing you again in the park!" I handed Tamami-chan back to her mother. We bowed deeply to each other and went our separate ways.

The Noble Watch

2011-10-01T00:48:00.000-07:00

It is well known that the Japanese take a singular pride in their work, however humble.

Toilet cleaners line up on the Shinkansen platforms, spruce in natty little uniforms, ready to spring into action with bucket and mop as soon as their scheduled train arrives, which it will do at the appointed second every 20 minutes.

The garbage men, looking for all the world like the Lego version of some benign Star Wars army (the "Garbos", they could have had a cult following of their own by now....) in sky blue velour with white buckles and matching helmets, jog (yep) down the street, bowing to residents whilst picking up and dumping their trash cans into the slow-moving Legoland garbage truck which heralds their ant-like procession through the tiny jumble of alleyways that count for streets in Tokyo.

I discovered years ago that the Garbos are in fact entirely humanoid when I tried to throw out some of the children's baby toys and was caught in the act by the little tikes. With my back to the trash can (fingers tightly crossed), I told their distraught little faces that the toys were headed to loving homes with some Japanese orphans. When I turned around, I discovered that the universal language of our little family tableau had been understood by our local Garbo - he had left the bag of toys in the trash can. Or perhaps (more realistically) it was not the designated trash day for pieces of partially recyclable plastic smaller than 1.5 cm. It was the day for plastic 1.5 cm and above. Or maybe I put them in a shopping bag rather than the regulation-sized, labelled "GARBAGE BAG". Anyway, for whatever reason, the poor orphans were to miss out and the toys stay in our garage until we finally moved house 7 years later and I paid someone to take them away.

The incredible levelness of Japanese society somehow promotes this possibly unique ability to be satisfied with one's station in life. On the subways, everyone wears the same Burberry trench coat, irrespective of whether they are headed for jobs as janitors or CEOs. Even the Government spokesmen wear the same utilitarian jackets as the emergency workers, labelled with their name and station ("Yukio Edano", "Chief Cabinet Secretary"), as they reassure the world that TEPCO is making sincere efforts to find out what is the source of the massive radiation leak spilling into the Pacific. My husband has observed that you could put a noodle-chef's white hat on any one of our Japanese friends and no-one would know the difference.

But I digress. The whole point of this will hopefully become apparent when I move on, as I am about to, to a completely different but truly astonishing Japanese quality - a mania for gadgets. Before the Sony Walkman (it's OK, I do know that the Walkman is to the iPOD as the newt is to homo sapiens but this story wouldn't have the same punch because the iPOD is an AMERICAN gadget..HELLOOO!!!). So as I was saying, way way before the Sony Walkman, like way back in the late 19th century, when foreign gizmos such as steam trains were being introduced to Japan, the Japanese discovered clocks and watches, which I think was really the crossroads in terms of the westernization of Japan because they realized that timepieces could help them achieve their near-mania for perfection in terms of time management. Moreover, they discovered that with their wonderful tradition of craftsmanship and high, pure mountain air, they could make watches as precise as those of Switzerland. And thus were "Seiko" and "Citizen" born. This latter brand has a particular resonance for me.

My mother was for many years a saleslady in a jewelry store which sold Citizen watches. In the days before the Chinese figured out how to make rip-offs at $1 a pop that they could sell for $20 and Swatch gave us the ability to express our innermost being through what we wear around our wrists, we were brought up to believe that a Citizen watch was the mark of a person who had arrived in the world...and on time at that.

When I was an exchange student in Japan in 1982 and my mother and brother came to visit, my mother's boss actually arranged for us to visit the Citizen watch factory, which was kind of neat though to this day I cannot understand why the friendly PR people who had custody of us were so surprised when we asked if we could buy a couple of watches.

Almost 30 years later, I bought my mother a gold Citizen watch, which pleased her greatly.

I now have that gold Citizen watch and the stinky leather band finally gave way from wearing it in the gym too often. So I decided to take it to the Watch Repair counter of the Bic Camera electronics store in Yurakucho, together with a cheap but trendy plastic Alessi watch I had bought at the Conran Shop in the Maru Biru whose battery had died.

The Watch Repair counter at Bic Camera is an orderly little universe in its own right, overseen by a distinguished looking grey-haired gentlemen wearing an immaculate white lab coat and hair combed back in a perfect gray upsweep. He looked for all the world like a Japanese version of Cary Grant. If you could even find a watch repair shop in America, the guy running it wouldn't look like a cross between a Clinique saleswoman and an old Hollywood star.

Before approaching the counter, I selected a brown leather band, which I thought would look OK on the gold watch. The white-coated gentleman politely told me that the band was too wide for my watch and sent me back again for a second try. At the same time, he took the plastic Alessi watch and gave it to one of the technicians to stick a battery in, handling it as gingerly as if it were a piece of dreck.

Back at the watchband display, I decided that I might be better off with a metallic band, as these tend not to stink up so much when they get sweaty. I picked up a couple of candidates, art-deco-ish numbers which I thought might go well with the watch, and took them back to Cary Grant, who was watching me debonairly from behind at the counter.

"How about one of these?", I asked. "No Madam", said Cary. "Those bands will not do for this watch". "Why not?" I asked. "They are 12 mm bands, which is what you said would fit this watch....". "Yes Madam", said Cary patiently, " but I cannot put a band like this on your watch. This is a noble watch."

Frustrated but at the same time delighted that someone cared enough about my mother's Citizen watch to make sure I put the right band on it, I headed back for the third time to the watchband display. This time I hit on a gorgeous wine colored lizard skin band which Cary assured me was the real thing from a genuinely endangered species. "Come back in 20 minutes to pick up the watch." So for 20 minutes precisely I wandered happily around Bic Camera then headed back to the Watch Repair counter where Cary Grant stood poised to chastise me if I had been a second late. The noble watch was carefully wrapped and handed to me with a perfectly executed bow. As I carried it home, I thought how happy my mother would have been.

The Abalone

2011-09-27T20:56:00.000-07:00

We had taken the Shinkansen north an hour and a half to the town of Echigo Yuzawa, seeking some relief from the subways, skyscrapers and Starbucks which define daily life in Tokyo. We planned to hike in the early autumnal hills, take a steaming hot bath in the onsen and then laze around in the straw-scented haven of a tatami-floored room at a traditional Japanese inn, or ryokan.

Located at the southeastern corner of Niigata Prefecture, Echigo Yuzawa was the setting for the Nobel Prize-winning novel “Snow Country” (“Yukiguni”), by Yasunari Kawabata, a story about the tragic affair between a rich playboy from Tokyo and a poor geisha. These days, the ease of access from Tokyo by train has made it a popular destination for skiers, hikers and foreigners like us looking for a quick dose of the “real Japan”. The ranks of visiting foreigners has expanded from the English-speaking Tokyo expat crowd to take in wealthy Russians using their petrodollars to make the trip West from the sordid Sea of Japan port of Niigata City.

Our ryokan, like many things in our lives, was selected quickly and randomly online. It was located close to the railway station, a few meters past a rag-tag assortment of noodle restaurants and souvenir stores selling carved owls and bears and boxes of steamed red bean cakes It was set back from the road somewhat, in behind the museum dedicated to the history of the town and the story of Yukiguni. Ours was one of the more “Japanese”-style ryokans in the town, distinguished by its tan mud-daub walls, slanting tiled roof and giant tanuki (badger dog) statue, complete with little pink penis dangling to one side.

After hiking for several hours along an asphalt road which traversed the mountains behind the town, we were looking forward to a bath and dinner. Dinner in a ryokan is typically an epic affair marked by multiple courses of delectable morsels served by capable matrons in gracious but practical kimonos.

Perhaps the Russians had not quite filled the economic void created by the GFC (global financial crisis), but for reasons we still don’t understand, our meal was brought to our room not by the kimono-clad waitress we were expecting, but by a young man who, it emerged, had grown up in Hokkaido and moved South in search of work. Though not particularly gracious, he was friendly and capable enough and we relaxed back into our seats expectantly as he laid out the dishes and lit the small individual burners which would sauté the main dish.

We had thought that this might be beef, or possibly even deer, which ran wild in the hills surrounding the town. Somewhat to our surprise however, the waiter brought in a plate heaped with seafood, in the center of which rested two large abalone shells. These he picked up with tongs and set precisely, shell-side down, on the hotplates over our little burners. “Leave them this way up,” he instructed us, “because they are more delicious simmered in their own juices.”

My husband and I had both lived in Japan for many years and were rather inured to the easy cruelty with which the Japanese approached food. Hunting whales with harpoons in the southern ocean seems completely humane compared to the torture reserved for lesser creatures. Shrimp are regularly thrown live onto hotplates, where they will flail about erratically for several minutes before capitulating, inert as spiny frankfurters. Fish are sometimes sliced into elaborate cantilevers of sashimi, to be delicately picked over by the chopsticks of diners while their gills continue to bellow air. And one of the favorite epicurean pleasures of the Japanese is the tickling sensation from the death throes of a shrimp, marinated for a few minutes in soy sauce and grated ginger, as it makes its way with a little assistance from peristaltic waves, down the esophagus.

With the jaded disdain of those who have lived in Japan for a little too long, we sometimes reminded ourselves of the story of the foreign businessman, taken to lunch by his Japanese hosts, who had to be escorted back to his hotel room green faced after just such a spectacle. Indeed, to prove our gone-native bravado, we occasionally promise each other that we will one day eat at the whale restaurant in the main street of Shibuya, assuming that they don’t take us for Greenpeace activists all set to serve a citizen’s arrest warrant on the chef for serving meat supposedly destined for scientific research.

Such squeamishness was beneath us, or so we had thought until the abalone on our hotplates began to froth and curl, oozing a sallow scum as we grazed on the fare arrayed around us. We looked anxiously at each other, seeking mutual reassurance that it was OK to watch as our dinner writhed in agony before us.

It was my husband who blinked first, some vestigial guilt at not only eating treif but torturing it first stirring him into action. One-by-one, he scooped up the abalone and removed them to the bathroom where he placed them in the hand basin. I was close on his heels, hesitating only for a second before deciding that the risk of killing the abalone with chlorine was worth easing their suffering with a cooling bath of water from the tap. "Hang in there little fellas," I thought.

We slid back into our seats just as our waiter arrived to see if we needed anything else. Guiltily averting my eyes from those of my husband, I wordlessly begged “please don’t ask about the abalone, please don’t ask about the abalone”.

“What happened to the abalone shells?” the waiter asked.

My husband opened his mouth as if to answer but I beat him to the punch. “We are taking them back to Tokyo as souvenirs for our children,” I said. In the split second before I answered, a number of possible responses had flitted through my mind. A straightforward answer along the lines of “It was too barbaric and we put them in the bathroom sink” would have been serviceable. The waiter would have put this down to our strange foreign ways. But to invoke a souvenir would both spare our waiter the embarrassing loss of face at having failed to please the foreign guests and enable him to answer the matron-in-charge who, though not yet visible to us, surely lurked in the bowels of the kitchen.

As those who have been to an international airport anywhere will know, the Japanese have a mania for souvenirs. The entire global crop of macadamia nuts is diverted into chocolates purportedly from every conceivable destination the Japanese may travel, however remote from the nearest macadamia tree. Back in the 1980’s, coin purses made out of kangaroo scroti were all the rage, along with handbags made of horsehair that sold for a few thousand dollars each. So important a matter of etiquette is a souvenir for family and co-workers that Narita airport has a souvenir shop in the arrival lounge dedicated to the kitschy junk one should have bought but couldn’t actually find overseas. That our children might shriek with delight at the gift of a couple of abalone shells was just within the realm of the possible to a young Japanese man from Hokkaido, who could know nothing of the sickening over-abundance of manufactured crap we ply them with on a daily basis.

The abalone stayed in the sink until the next morning when it was time to pack up and go home. I hardly dared look at them but my fleeting glances caught little twitches of fibrous muscle that confirmed they were still alive.

Just before checkout, we scooped the abalone out of the sink and placed them in a plastic bag. My husband thought that we should release them into the open hot springs that bubbled up through the streets of the town. But if memory served me correctly, abalone thrives in slightly more temperate climes. Thus it was that they made the journey back to Tokyo with us tucked into our luggage.

Before the modernization of Japan, Tokyo was a city of canals, sometimes dubbed the “Venice of the East”. The stagnant vestiges of these still course indolently through the concrete jungles of Tokyo’s central neighborhoods. One of them, camouflaged by the ramparts of the modern freeway overhead, is located just a few hundred meters from our house in the Azabu neighborhood of Tokyo.

After greeting our children and handing them the little souvenir carvings we had bought them from Echigo Yuzawa, we walked down to the edge of the canal. My husband gingerly shook open the plastic bag and dropped the abalone, by now reeking of putrefaction, into the canal.