Two Weeks

Two weeks left. Two weeks left of understanding language as a vague impression. Two weeks of cultural fumbles and mistakes. Two weeks of receiving stares and whispers.

There are other things that I am counting too:

Three more days of working at the chuugakko, where I am called assistant teacher and I am treated as such. M. Sensei has me sit at a desk in the classroom while she gives a lesson—something like a rote memorization worksheet verbalized. In my head, memories play of my Peruvian students who I cooked meals with and built low ropes courses with and who improved their English considerably by the year’s end. M. Sensei’s teaching is terrible. It’s arrogant of me to believe that I could teach the students better, so I tried to quell those thoughts when I first arrived, in respect of this foreign culture.

While M. Sensei drills vocabulary and makes the students fill out the same worksheet four times in a row, she talks to the students about me. My Japanese has improved. Now I understand.

“Joshua-Sensei isn’t a real teacher. He’s an assistant teacher.”

“Joshua-Sensei can’t explain this grammar to you.”

“Joshua-Sensei can’t teach these lessons; He doesn’t understand Japanese.”

Such comments are accompanied by laughs and giggles. Had the students been mine, their English would be much better by now. Three more days of being M. Sensei’s assistant.

Eleven days left of being an employee for a corporation. There are emails regarding moving out and final salaries. Your last paycheck will be subject to decreases in order to pay expenses after you leave. Return all supplies to the company. You cannot leave before submitting all the necessary paperwork.

Six days of school lunches—bland salads, miso soup so sour that it’ll put hair on your chest, milk as thick as direct from the cow’s tit.

I have two weeks left in Japan. I can’t help but count down.

 

On my drive to work, there is an old, fading poster that hangs on the side of a crumbling barn. It’s from the inauguration of the prefectural airport, which must have happened before I was born. The poster shows the airport in the background, as an after-thought, faded down from weathering. The woman in the foreground is the focus—a slender Japanese woman, traditionally dressed in a kimono that has had its color bleached from the sunlight. Her gaze is steady, her smile coquettish. She has a proud, long neck, and docile, balanced shoulders. She looks out at me as I’m lifted through the rice paddy laden countryside, to another day in classrooms filled with Japanese children. “Here you are,” she whispers. “You made it.”

Two more weeks of that drive.

In the climbing gym, Tomi-san, the owner, sits next to me on a giant crashpad. In Japanese, he asks, “You didn’t go to Dainichi Iwa on Saturday? I went there in the afternoon and you weren’t there.”

“No,” I say. “I was busy on Saturday. A friend came from Tokyo. We ate dinner. We went to Inawashiro lake.”

“Oh really? I went to Dainichi all by myself and no one was there. The weather was great, but no one was out climbing. Funny, huh? Today the weather was terrible, but still Kawamura-kun and his friends went out there.”

“It is cold,” I say. “Kawamura-kun tries his best. He is training for Half Dome. Half Dome is hard. Training is good. He should try his best.”

Tomi-san’s Japanese is still hard for me to understand, but he does not slow down for me or talk to me like I am a child. When I arrived in Japan almost two years ago and went to the climbing gym, all I could do was gesture that I wanted to climb, and he showed me the routes with the colored tape. “Yellow,” he said in English. “Very easy. Black: Very Hard.”

Despite the wall of language, he invited me to go climbing with him for two days, just a month after I had first met him. Now, able to convey most of my thoughts, I wonder how to culturally approach saying, “Thank you for that climbing trip Tomi-San. I needed friends then, and you were the first. That made Japan good and now it makes Japan hard to leave. Thank you.”

The climbers threw a going away party for me. I man who I have talked with infrequently and whose name I do not know, approached me and handed me a brand new piece of climbing equipment. “Here,” he said. “I hope you can use this in America. Are there good places for you to climb outside in Colorado?”

I bowed and said, “Hai. Arimasu. Zettai tskaimasu yo. Honto ni arigatou gozaimashita.”

He looked at me, smiled and said, “You will be missed.”

My friend Kondou-San handed me the copy of the Ishikawa Bouldering guide book that I had made for him and the others, and asked me to write him a message on the back.

“Kondou-San, I can’t write in kanji,” I explained. “And you can’t read English.”

“That’s okay,” he responded. “I just want a message from you.”

My first month at the climbing gym, there was a barbecue and a climbing competition. As we ate together people asked me questions that I didn’t understand. I sat quietly and tried to learn the language quickly. Now with two weeks left, at the going away party I could speak with my friends and make jokes and understand. Strangely, there is little sense of accomplishment. Rather, I feel tired and still very far away from a goal that I have not defined. And when I count the two weeks that are left, I know that I will not reach that goal.

There are only two weeks left with Eriko. I could write a novel on the goodness of Eriko. On conversations in the loft above my kitchen, or during long drives on our dates together. I could write about the softness of her hands, the sweet kisses she gives me on the cheek for no reason, that long embrace before leaving one another for how long. I could write of sitting in hot springs together, and eating nabe in her apartment, and of massages in the evenings. She sometimes feigns anger and raises her voice at me, and I start to laugh and she giggles as I wrestle her down to the futon. I could write about the slight feeling of helplessness when we don’t quite understand each other, about the patience she has with my Japanese, about the language spoken with each other that has no words in English or otherwise. There is too much good to that woman and writing it all would cripple me. It’s easier to not write it, to leave it to memory and to question. That way I do not have to believe it—that such a good person can exist, and that we once shared time together in that life I had in Japan. Two weeks is not enough time left with Eriko. But I bought that ticket home.

In two weeks I will say goodbye. I will board a plane. I will sleep poorly and watch movies on a screen in front of me. I will see the Pacific. I will land in L.A. and then take off again. And very soon I will see those Rocky Mountains, and my mother and father, and I will sit down with friends over dinner. And they will ask me about the good things in Japan, and I will have many stories to tell. For there were many more good things than bad, and in the end, those good memories will be the ones that stay with me.