ASHIYA PRINCESS:

Karin was constantly aloof with no display of affection, private or public and though I didn’t know her father, she reminded me of him, whom she said was the typical Japanese male. In public she was especially cold, according to her, out of fear of our being discovered by our co-workers. Months after we had been intimate, I still had not been to her place, the result of some traumatic experiences a few months before we met which added to her girl school derived paranoia of men. Three months before we had met, a Japanese ex-boyfriend of hers had severed a dog’s head and placed it in front of her apartment door. Initially, passing judgment on the guy, I thought he was crazy, and indeed, he had to have been. But placed in proper perspective, I understood why he resorted to such a heinous act. Perhaps his Japanese socialization had deprived him of necessary communication skills and in his anger, he resorted to this unspeakable act of cruelty. On the other hand, I pondered deeply, what she could have done to evoke even a fraction of rage, which would cause someone to behave in such horror. I would soon find out.

For three days from New Year’s Eve, Karin and I spent 72 hours cemented in bed in orgasmic bliss, connected like Siamese twins at the lips and at the genitalia, and other times genitalia to lips. We separated only for toilet breaks and when we were not conjoined, we peered deep in each other’s eyes incessantly. Eating only whenever we remembered to, we simply engaged in an orgasm - a - thon. Surprisingly, even though like all Japanese she was anal about time and appointments, during her sojourn on my futon, she ignored telephone calls from friends wanting to know where she was and why she hadn’t shown up for their engagements. This I interpreted as sure attachment on her part, and it seemed like my plans for roping her in were coming to fruition. But all this backfired as her arctic personality only intensified, converting me to a stalker, whipped and obsessed. After those three days of paradise she disappeared, ignoring my countless emails and phone calls.

By then my schedule had changed and was unable to accommodate Japanese lessons, but as we worked for the same company, I ventured upstairs to the teachers’ offices to find out what was up and why she was dissin’ me like that. The other teachers knew me as an employee of the company and her former student, and as such, were unsuspecting of our relationship.

“Oh hiiiiiiii,” greeting me with pretend sincerity as she stepped outside the office and in a harsh angry whisper she blurted, “What are you doing here?”

“I work here. Remember? What, is, up? Why are you ignoring me? It’s been three weeks since you left my apartment.”

“I’m busy.”

“Oh, and you can’t email me at least to tell me you’re busy?”

“I wanna see you,” I commanded.

“Can’t, I’m teaching in ten minutes.”

Sensing the fragility and the potential catastrophic scene outside her office, she agreed to go to my apartment that night. “Matta ne (see you later) and thanks for visiting,” waving mendaciously, flashing that perfidious smile.

Karin and I embarked upon a volatile, tumultuous relationship, with her ripping my heart from my chest, hurling it in an osterizer, whipping it up and feeding it to me. Possessed and helpless like a rag doll in the jaws of the fiercest Pitbull, after a discombobulating two days of dissociation, I began plans to abandon Japan, for a retreat to California. No plethora of sex could help me recover from that state and it now became crystal clear, how someone would be motivated to sever a dog’s head and place it outside her door. For six months we separated almost every Saturday, succeeded by my trudging up to her office on successive Tuesdays to beg for reconciliation. Frequently she flipped and went into volcanic rages, quarrelling about things of little or no significance.

Our first such experience came after one of our frequent episodes of pure animal sex. We had started a conversation where I stated that if I were to be caught driving without a license by the Japanese police, I would fake an inability to understand Japanese. “YOU WOULD DO THAT?” She yelled. “I can’t believe I am with someone who would do that.” And in no time it escalated to her shouting, “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY APARTMENT,” threatening to call the police and immigration, which of course led to one of our many separations. Sometime later she lamented about paying too much taxes and needing to find ways to deceive the taxman.

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “You kicked me out of your apartment because I would deceive a cop about not understanding Japanese, but you think it’s ok to cheat on your taxes?”

“Yes,” she answered. “You were going to lie to a person. I am not lying to anyone?” Sensing the futility of arguing and knowing full well that it would have lead only to another rupture, a crash from our intermittently euphoric relationship, I acquiesced. For it was then that I was introduced firsthand to the red herrings of Japanese reasoning, a form of inference generally awash in illogical constructs and extremely loose associations.

Outdoor smoking ban has been spreading slowly, very slowly throughout Japan, enforced by a 2,000 yen fine and posted signs informing us of the reasons for the ban: cigarettes are held at the level of a child’s eyes, the butts generate litter and last but not least, we should be mindful of those with respiratory infections. However, given the overmuch of information on the dangers of secondhand smoke – including research by an Osaka medical institution that second hand smoke can affect the heart in just thirty minutes – authorities are lethargic about limiting second hand smoke indoors. It wasn’t until April 2020 that Japan finally passed a law limiting indoor smoking.

In a perfect example of red herring reasoning like Karin’s, popular author Masako Bando, addressing Japan’s problem of over-populous stray cats, advocated murdering kittens over spaying and neutering cats. Bando wrote that as soon as her cats gave birth, she murdered them by tossing them off a cliff near her house. Sterilizing cats for human convenience is no better than killing newborn kittens, she reasoned. Opting to allow her cats to live to the full, in her words, “despite the huge pain and grief in doing so, I kill their kittens as my social responsibility.” In other words, it was wrong to take away the cats’ reproductive rights, but its right to take the life of the cats’ offsprings.

After Karin’s explanation of why one form of deception was acceptable and the other not, I looked at her as though she had lost her mind. But it was a rhetorical look, if there is such a thing, because in fact, she had lost her mind long before we had met, long before she even had one.

Around 7 years old, under the pressure of archetypically overbearing Japanese parents, and perhaps genetically predisposed, she began to experience illusions. On the train while traveling with her family, she reported seeing hands emerging from rivers.

“I always tried to show my mom the hands as the train passed the rivers, but she couldn’t see them.”

“I wonder why she couldn’t?” I thought sarcastically. People around her - parents included - labeled her talent, sixth sense. I on the other hand, having spent most of my life in a non-folk society, thought sick sense was more appropriate. Karin’s parents, mother especially, hammered and berated her for anything less than stellar performance in everything. The constant recounting of her mother’s torture was enough to cause me to develop a strong disdain for the woman, having never even met her.

Obsessed with familial honor and saving face, her mother was always showing her off to the neighbours and comparing her to her peers.

“You are so worthless,” her mother would say, sometimes in tears.

“You have shamed me, you’ve let our neighbor’s child take home a better score than yours. After all we do for you!”

As I concluded, given the high self-monitoring tendencies of the Japanese, Karin was extremely self-conscious about her hyper-orgasmic condition, especially with Japanese men.

“I just couldn’t allow myself to come so much with Japanese men, ‘cause they would think I’m some kind of slut. So, when I was with Japanese guys I always had to pretend I wasn’t enjoying it too much. But with foreigners, I don’t have to hide.” In fact, she frequently complained about not being able to be herself to her parents or to anyone, bounded by the custom of tatemae and was always expected to be this goody two shoes. But in reality, she was a licensed, buck wild freak. And it only made sense. Japan is equivalent to one enormous Catholic School and to exacerbate things, she had attended an all-girl Catholic School.