Fault Lines by Emily Itami

Author:Emily Itami
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474620277
Publisher: Orion

18

Over the next few months we don’t date quite a lot. Our meetings often coincide with days when I give Japanese lessons, so I go and legitimately sit in a café with Laurence first, doing my job, then almost coincidentally go on to meet another man. We visit a lot of places I know and that I think he’ll like. Curating the city for him, I’m reminded of just how much I love Tokyo, its zebra stripe of neon and technology interspersed with dark, dingy noodle bars and age-old public baths.

I feel a ridiculous sense of proprietorship over neighbourhoods inhabited by thousands of other people, and an even more disproportionate sense of pride when Kiyoshi likes them, as if I invented them myself. We go walking through the cemetery in Nezu, our destination an ancient house so tumbledown it has a tree growing inside it, where we stop and have a cigarette and a tin of ice coffee from the vending machine standing next to it, like the tree is no big deal. ‘We’re in a Miyazaki movie,’ Kiyoshi says appreciatively.

We go to watch taiyaki being made, the fish-shaped pastries filled with red beans, in the downtown neighbourhood of Monzen-Nakachō, and attend a service in a temple where people take their belongings to the holy fire to have the smoke wafted over them. One Sunday, when both the children are at friends’ houses and Tatsu is mutely reading the paper, we admire the troupe of Elvis impersonators dancing with sincere abandon outside Yoyogi Park, and all the cosplay and J-pop dance practice going on inside.

‘You never needed to go to New York,’ Kiyoshi tells me seriously. ‘You could have had a career singing Sailor Moon songs right here in this park. Imagine.’

As the weeks turn into months, I’m increasingly nice to Tatsu as I remember all his excellent qualities. Tatsu doesn’t have a controlling bone in his body, which was one of the reasons we used to get on so well. The fact that in recent years this has mainly translated to disinterest is, it turns out, very convenient: as long as whatever I’m doing doesn’t interfere with his life, he has no concern whatsoever about what it is, and once the kids are safely tucked up in bed, I’m free to do what I like. On the rare occasion he asks where I’m going, he is satisfied that I’m going to see Ichiko, the impassive, slow-talking mamatomo I have chosen as my cover because I know that if Tatsu ever crosses her path, which is highly unlikely, he will avoid talking to her for fear of expiring of old age before she reaches the end of a sentence. The fact that Tatsu accepts this without question is almost offensive. And yet in another way, it endears him to me. When we first met, he was the nice guy to my bitch, always mildly mystified by my distrust of everybody and anybody and the barbed comments that would come out of my mouth and leave me slightly ashamed.

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