Midnight and the Meaning of Love

  The brief exchange with Yuka got my mind to roaming. For the past week in Brooklyn I hadn’t had the ease or comfort to let my thoughts run free. Like sand spilling through the narrow passage in an hourglass, I had been in a mad race against time. I had to focus, control, and execute precisely. Now I laid my study cards down and closed my eyes.

  BOOK 2

  JAPAN STORY

  Mayonaka

  Chapter 1

  DIAMONDS IN THE SKY

  First darkness and then a small spotlight. Akemi’s thick, natural lips appeared. They began moving, speaking to me in her foreign tongue. Her voice was a melody of whispers. Her words were not as important as their intensity—or the subtle shapes that her lips made when forming certain phrases. She had perfectly white teeth in both worlds, the real one and the one I was seeing now, and a pretty, pretty smile. Uniquely shaped eyes wide and dark, filled with both curiosity and mischief, hers were magnetic and seductive. Those eyes of hers always shined for me and reflected my image. In them were written her confessions of love.

  I saw her long, pretty neck and lean and feminine shoulders where her dark hair draped. The feeling of her was all softness mixed with nothing else but sweetness. She was always warm for me, and got more warmer the closer I came to her. Even when her lips were not moving, her silence was elegant and she made it known in her every gesture and movement that everything she had was exclusively for me.

  Suddenly I opened my eyes and the seductive images slipped away. Absence is a powerful aphrodisiac, I thought to myself. But I didn’t want to go too deep, feel too much, too soon, or have a private reaction in a public place. Instead I reached into my inside right pocket and pulled out the translation of the letter Akemi had written to me a week ago on Saturday, the last day that we saw one another in New York City. It was sealed in an envelope. Even though I’d had the option, I had refused to read it while still standing on American soil and before I was coasting through beautiful blue and white swirled skies to the Land of the Rising Sun. I didn’t want to know or hear anything from her that could possibly interrupt or delay or distract or discourage my journey to get what belonged to me—her. Now that I was suspended midair with no possibility of anyone or anything turning me back, I opened it and read it slowly, carefully.

  MAYONAKA

  We are young, but not too young to love.

  We are naïve, but not too naïve to know what we are feeling.

  Who put this love into the atmosphere and this craving into our bodies? Who put this love into the atmosphere and this craving into our bodies?

  Who put this feeling into our hearts and these thoughts into our minds?

  Who brought us together, if we were supposed to be apart?

  We did right. So why do they say us is wrong?

  If not speaking any words in common could not stop our love,

  If being divided by culture or blood relations or even oceans

  Could not stop our love,

  What can stop our love?

  No one, none, nothing …

  OTOSAN

  Please don’t hate my father, because Okasan loved him so,

  And I love my mother more than anyone could know.

  She has returned to the Earth but lives on in my heart.

  Sometimes still, we speak, even though we’re worlds apart.

  Daddy asks me what do you see in him?

  I answer, a hot spring on top of a cold mountain.

  Or my bare skin against a sizzling hot rock.

  Remove him from your heart!

  Could I pull my teeth out, one at a time?

  Or maybe peel off all of my own skin beginning with my fingers?

  I couldn’t ever …

  I need him, like a poor girl needs everyday rice.

  He is the deepest feeling I have ever felt,

  Like water rushing down from the steepest waterfall.

  If you are asking me not to love him, kill me.

  But if I should be reborn, I would love him still.

  My soul loves his soul. His soul loves my soul.

  No one can say they love Akemi, yet try to separate me from this feeling.

  MAYONAKA, they could never understand us. How could they? They don’t even want to.

  MAYONAKA, I’m so nervous …

  I read it once. Then I read it again, more slowly than the first time. I imagined my wife locked in the bathroom in the VIP section at the Museum of Modern Art on the day of the New York and American debut of her artwork. Wrapped in an awesome kimono with a multimillion-dollar hairstyle, she stood barefooted on the cold marble floor with pretty feet and designer toenails. She was drawing kanji onto the page of her letter to me, the black ink smeared only by her tears, her heated thoughts and fears put into poetic verses. The crowd waited for her, while she worried and waited for me. I could tell from her letter that she had argued with her father, her heart being pulled to one side by the man who had sired her and pulled the other way by the man she had married.

  Download the free Microsoft Tag app at http://gettag.mobi. Then hold your phone’s camera a few inches away from the tag image, and it will automatically play an audio of Akemi reading in Japanese.

  But I didn’t know, never knew. She knew I didn’t know what was happening to her. So she sent a woman flying by foot to my job in Chinatown to deliver a letter to me written in a language that I couldn’t understand because she felt that it was urgent and that something was about to go desperately wrong. And even still, she didn’t spell her situation out clearly, or fill the pages up with rage and curses. She knew that would be too much. She knew me and what I was capable of. So she tried to convey the seriousness of the situation in the carefully placed words of her poem. I could feel my love for her swelling in my chest.

  After the feeling subsided some, my brain took over and shifted strictly into strategy. I looked up the word otosan, although I believed I already knew what it meant. It means father, and okasan means mother.

  “Would you like chicken or beef?” The fight attendant had returned. “For your dinner service,” she added.

  “I don’t want anything, thank you,” I told her.

  “Something to drink?”

  “No, nothing,” I responded. She smiled and moved on to the next passenger.

  All that hard memory work only ate up two more flight hours. Just as I reclined, random people in the cabin began getting up and heading for the bathroom. I glanced down the aisle and saw that there was a line building up. I decided to try out Yuka’s music and slipped on the headphones. She was listening to Megadeth, Killing Is My Business. She must’ve liked heavy metal, ’cause that’s what I was hearing. It was cool as long as it was instrumental. The bass player and the guitar player were killing it, but then some dude started screaming out his lyrics. His voice was so loud, rough, and scraggly that I couldn’t even figure if he was singing in Japanese or in English. I fast-forwarded and the music got worse. I took it off and laid it to the side.

  “The in-flight movie selections for your enjoyment tonight are Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies or The Color Purple.” The announcement was made in Japanese and then in English.

  Unfastening my seat belt, I got up to head to the men’s room. I needed the short walk to splash some cold water on my face. As I walked the narrow aisle, the now-familiar flight attendant approached heading in the opposite direction. I turned sideways to allow her through, yet still she brushed her body against me. And when our bodies connected, she paused right there. “When you’re finished in the lavatory, stay in the back. I’ll come and quiz you,” she said with a lowered voice, and then smiled and flashed forward. I didn’t know what the fuck she was getting at.

  Coming out of the toilet, I bumped right into her. She was leaning on the opposite wall that was filled with compartments.

  “Ready?” she asked. “Where are your cards? Let me see them.” She held her hand out. She wore light pink-tinted polish, had clean nails, and a cheap watch. Realizing her
intent, I pulled the cards out of my pocket, so she could use them to quiz me.

  “Ohayou gozaimas,” she said in a small voice not to disturb the other passengers.

  “Good morning,” I answered.

  “Tasukete?” she said smiling.

  “Please help,” I answered.

  “Otosan?” she asked.

  “Father,” I answered.

  “Migi?”

  “To the right.”

  “Hidari?” she said.

  “Um, to the left,” I answered.

  “Masugu.”

  “Straight.”

  “Chotto matte?” she asked.

  “Um, wait a minute,” I remembered.

  “You’re good!” she said, smiling some more. “Are you sure you didn’t know these words before you boarded our plane?”

  “No.” I smiled at her distrust.

  “You have a great mind. At first I was expecting to find an unaccompanied minor sitting in your seat. Instead I found a handsome man”—she gestured with one hand beside her face and moved it downward, actually touching me—“well dressed and a genius!” she tried to gas me up. “Okay, one more. Here it goes,” she said excitedly. “Utsukushi!”

  I had a mental picture of the words I had printed on my cards and I didn’t recall that word at all. “That’s not one of my words,” I told her calmly. “What does it mean?”

  “It means beautiful,” she said, handed me back my cards, and proceeded down the aisle before me. An elderly woman seated in the last row beside the men’s room lifted her mask to reveal only one of her eyes and smiled at me. Then she put the mask back on. I guess she had overheard our exchange and had an opinion about it.

  * * *

  Four more hours into the blackened and now cloudless sky, I became restless and wanted to get my music back. I headed up to seat 42A, where I discovered three solid rows of teenaged girls sitting side by side in Yuka’s section. I wondered what kind of group they were traveling in.

  I didn’t see any adults, but I figured there had to be a chaperone. Come to think of it, there were not any complete families traveling on this flight, it seemed, at least not in the coach section.

  “Yuka,” I called, but four arms went up immediately and all at once each turned on their overhead lights. Now I had eight Asian eyes focused on me. But one girl in the middle didn’t turn on her light. She was asleep. She was also pretty enough to distract me from swapping back my music. She was obviously Japanese and also obviously black, her skin the color of honey. Her eyelashes were as black as could be and unusually long. She wore cornrows, precise and perfect, that looked like bolts of lightning laid tight and zigzagging across her scalp. Her hair was thick like ours but long like theirs. I predicted that when she awakened and stood up, she would stand about five feet seven inches tall. Even though she was still sitting, I could see that she had the curves of a filled-out African female but the delicate frame of a Japanese woman too. I thought to myself, Seeing her is like looking at a blue diamond, something you would hardly ever see, but if you happened to get a glimpse of one, you’d find yourself looking at it again and again.

  “Chiasa,” Yuka said. Her voice brought me back to the reason I was there.

  “What does that mean?” I asked her.

  “Her name is Chiasa,” she said, concerning the sleeping girl.

  “I came for my Walkman,” I told her. But I glanced at the sleeping one again. She had a gold medal dangling on a red ribbon that she wore around her neck. It was rising up and down as she breathed in and out.

  “Are you part of a team?” I asked Yuka. The other three girls were all watching curiously, but not speaking or joining in.

  “I speak English, but my friends only speak a little,” Yuka said, holding up her two fingers to gesture, “a little bit.” Yuka turned her body around away from me while still seated, revealing the chenille fabric kanji letters across the back of her jacket.

  Looking at them by the snatches of available light on the mostly darkened plane, I asked, “What does it say?”

  “Girls’ Kendo Club of Japan,” she said with pride.

  “Kendo Club?” I asked.

  “We fight,” she said, smiling.

  I laughed. “What kind of fighting?”

  “Sword,” she answered smoothly.

  I stepped back one step, impressed. “How many are you?” I asked.

  “Sixteen,” Yuka said. “We are returning home from the competition.”

  “Your team won?” I asked, while assuming.

  “Our team came in third place,” Yuka said. Then the girl seated next to her pointed to the sleeping girl but didn’t say anything.

  “She won?” I asked her.

  “Chiasa won the one-on-one competition,” Yuka said reluctantly. “Now she is just sleeping.”

  Yuka wanted me to stay and talk to her about music and everything else. “How many pairs of sneakers do you have? Who’s your favorite performing artist? Have you ever seen the movie named Wild Style? Is this your first trip to Japan?” She hit me with a slew of questions. Meanwhile her three friends watched intently and seemed impressed with their bilingual leader, Yuka. They were in awe of her command of the all-English conversation. None of them could put together a complete English sentence, but when they did try and make little comments, I could understand their simple meaning and gestures each time. Each one of them was different from the others in looks and ways and feeling, and believe me, they checked me out thoroughly also.

  “Let’s trade something we don’t have to take back,” Yuka invited.

  “I don’t think so,” I told her. “Everything I have I’m planning to keep.” Just then, the sleeping girl shifted in her seat.

  “Later,” I said, and then turned to leave.

  “Wait!” Yuka said. “You didn’t tell us your name.”

  I paused. “Midnight,” I answered.

  “Oh,” Yuka said. “Doushite?”

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “Why are you called Midnight?” she asked, her head looking up to me from her seat.

  “Why are you called Yuka?” I asked, standing still in the aisle.

  “I’ll tell you,” she volunteered. “Chotto matte! Will you stay a little longer?” I was noticing, as I listened with the intent to learn, that Yuka was mixing a sentence half in Japanese, the other half in English. “Here, I’ll write it out for you.” She took out a pen and some paper. “All Japanese names have a meaning. It really depends on which kanji your parents used when they gave the name. My name is like this.” She wrote on the paper. “It means ‘Superior flower.’ Her name is Yuki. It’s like this,” she said, writing. It means ‘snow.’ Her name is Hikari and it means ‘light.’ And her name is Chou. It means ‘Butterfly.’ I watched and listened closely. To me, the kanji writing always looked powerful, passionate, and mysterious even without me knowing its meaning.

  “Chiasa, what does her name mean?” I asked casually, noticing that Yuka had skipped over her.

  “I don’t really know which kanji …,” Yuka answered hesitantly, and laid her pen down on her tray.

  “One thousand mornings!” Yuki answered, proud to participate and overpronouncing and pushing out each English word separately.

  “One thousand mornings,” I repeated. Chiasa’s name sounded soulful to me. Then I wondered about the true meaning of it. I wanted to know why she had that name, the story behind it. It sounded more powerful than the simple definitions of the other girls’ names.

  “What about yours? What does it mean?” Yuka asked.

  “Think about it,” I answered. “It was nice meeting you, Yuka, Yuki, Hikari, and Chou.” They applauded because I remembered.

  I wondered if they had met other foreigners who couldn’t remember or pronounce their short and simple names. Then I threw the thought right out of my mind. Them girls were just bored and anxious to get off this tight flight, same as me. We were all teenagers traveling in an adult world, our bodies packed with en
ergy but forced to sit still on a flight for hours and hours.

  * * *

  As I returned to my seat, I caught glimpses of one of the in-flight films playing on at least half of the screens in my area. Even without the volume I could see a full cast of black men as fools, clowns, and useless, cruel creatures. Those are the black Americans, I thought to myself.

  With time I became more and more anxious to see my wife. So time cruelly doubled down and began to move twice as slow. We were halfway there now. I prepared to have the dinner that my family packed me, feeling some strange sense of comfort about eating as most of the other passengers slept. After washing up in the men’s room and pulling down the shopping bag with the metal tiffin containers of my food I hit the call button and requested water.

  “Mizu,” the flight attendant said, offering the Japanese word for water. “Kappu,” she said for cup. She looked at my food and said, “Oishi mitai deska! It looks delicious! Karai?” she asked. “Is it spicy?” she translated.

  “Definitely spicy,” I admitted, as I tried to write these new words that she was using down in my memory.

  “Definitely better than plane food,” she said, leaning in too close. She laughed lightly.

  “Right” was all I said. Finally she left.

  As I enjoyed the way Sudanese leftovers can taste even better and even richer than when they were first prepared and served, I thought about how Ramadan began at sunset on Saturday in America, which meant fasting would begin at sunrise on Sunday morning. I kept myself occupied trying to figure out what time it was now and what was my exact location over which country. I recalled the map I had surveyed, then purchased at Marty Bookbinder’s bookstore. I was flying from the United States—New York, to be exact—out over Alaska past Canada, past the Siberian mountains past Russia … Then I broke out into a smile. A man has to work hard for his woman, I thought.