The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World by Tracy Slater

Author:Tracy Slater
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Travel, Asia, General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Japan, Women
ISBN: 9780399166204
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Published: 2015-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

TEN

I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING achy and low. Toru had gotten up earlier, and now he came to the side of our narrow bed and knelt. He stroked my forehead lightly: he’d sensed my anxious mood from my restless shifts throughout the night, tangling the sheets around his tranquil sleep.

We looked at each other silently for a few moments, neither one of us moving. “Poor my love,” he muttered.

“I feel low, Tof.”

“I know.”

“I think. I’m not sure.”

Toru’s gaze held: direct, steady, waiting.

“I feel kind of freaked out. And yesterday, after the consulate was closed and, and I felt relieved, and now I’m wondering what that means. Or if I can really go through with this.”

Toru looked down. Swallowed a moment.

“So you mean,” he said, his eyes rising back to mine, “you don’t want to marrying now?”

I felt stuck, bog-heavy.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I don’t know if I don’t want to get married. I mean, I do want to marry you. But now I don’t know if we should wait, or put it off for a while, or what. I mean, I know we have a week before we can do anything anyway, with the New Year holiday and all.”

Toru looked down again, his jaw clenching in tight little pulses.

“So I’m not saying we need to do anything, or rather not do anything right now because of the holiday.” My words came in a rush. “But I just feel like I need to tell you, to be up front, that I’m not a hundred percent positive that next week, when the consulate reopens, I can still go through with this.”

He shuddered then, a quiet shaking beneath the usual equipoise of his body, as if it might take all his strength to call that stillness back once more. Then he just exhaled slowly. “Okay,” he said finally. “But please just think on it.”

For the next few days, indecision plagued me, jabbing me like a bully. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to marry Toru. I just didn’t want to make a decision I was supposed to be sure about forever. I felt trapped, not by Toru, but rather by Japan. Like the country was a prison I could never fully escape if I married someone who called it his home. Our home.

Screwing up my brain, I tried to imagine if I’d ever fall in love with Osaka the way I’d fallen in love with him: the strange rhythms of the city, its rushing crowds and jigsaw buildings, its housewives and same-suited salarymen. Would this ever be a place where I felt at home? I couldn’t wrap my heart around the vision. I saw an endless sweep of days with unreadable signs and blank stares, smiles covering or conveying unreadable emotions. Doors with strange shapes printed above their handles. Is this PUSH? Is it PULL?

I tried next to imagine going back to Boston to build a life without Toru. I envisioned the safe, familiar sidewalks of the South End. Neighbors with broad, easy smiles offering greetings, trading expressions.

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