Voice Two: Andrew
At Tokyo Station most of the passengers push their way off the train, and the girl pressed up against the freckle-faced foreigner scowls and darts to the empty seat next to me. She takes out a Nintendo DS and starts playing Tetris. On the screen she fits one-two-three-four pieces into a line, which flashes and disappears into the background. On her DS is a sticker with some Japanese characters I don't understand. (Right now I only know about 200 out of 2000.)
I reach into the book bag between my feet and get my notebook and new kanji dictionary, which still smells like a National Geographic or a videogame manual. A photo falls out of the dictionary, lands upside-down and slides to the feet of the girl beside me. She pauses her game to pick it up, glances at the Japanese writing on the back and hands it to me.
"Gaafrendo?" she asks, smirking.
"Thank you," I say in Japanese. "Yes, she's my girlfriend."
Reiko and I have been dating for almost a month now. My Japanese isn't good enough yet to figure out what she wrote on the back of the photo, except for the "Happy time Anjuru!" in English.
I dab the dust off the picture with my shirt and put it in my coat pocket. I stare at a shaving cream advertisement hanging from the ceiling, and then my eyes drift back to the sticker on the girl's DS.
It has four kanji. The first looks like an arrow pointing to a box on a stick. That's one I learned last week; it means "god." The next is easy - two flat U's on top of each other, connected by a vertical line: "exit." The third is a box with legs, meaning "ghost" or "demon." The last I've never seen - it's divided into left and right parts, which makes it a pattern one kanji, with three strokes on the left, and one-two-three-four strokes on the right. So I look up 1-3-4, and my dictionary says it means "disappear." Together, the four kanji mean "unexpected appearance," or "phantom."
With the dictionary on my stomach and the notebook folded open on my knees, I scribble down the word, trying not to grind my elbow any deeper into the girl's ribs. I started carrying the notebook with me when I came to Tokyo three months ago, and everyday I write down pieces of the language I don't understand, slowly putting together more of the puzzle. My girlfriend's part of that puzzle. Whenever we talk I understand a little more about her and her country. It's so much more exciting than dating girls back in Seattle, because really, what's interesting about someone who grew up in the same place?
