This story’s got multiple punchlines! Misa couldn’t help it any more and gave in to her laughter, covering her mouth so it wasn’t completely obvious that she was listening.
‘So then I looked it up in my textbook and helped him figure out how to iron his shirt. But it’s a bit outrageous, isn’t it? I mean, for a college graduate with a job?’
It was outrageous. There was no question. It was inexcusable for a college graduate with a job not to know how to read the label on his own shirt.
‘Did you tell him it’s the kanji for “silk”?’
Et-chan nodded. ‘He was shocked when I told him. You wouldn’t believe how shocked he was.’
‘I wonder if your boyfriend knows the character for “cotton”? Seems like there might still be some landmines there …’
‘Oh, wow – I don’t know how I’d manage to explain that kanji to him!’
Et-chan’s friends laughed again at her deadpan assessment.
‘Then, well, I wasn’t sure how he’d take it coming from me but I kind of told him off over the phone. I said that even though he always uses a computer and hardly ever has to write things out by himself, at some point not knowing kanji is gonna come back to bite him in the backside. I told him he better study up. And he was like, “I know, you’re right. I’ll get myself some kanji drills.” Honestly, I feel like I ought to make him take a reading aptitude test.’
It was cruelly amusing to imagine a grownup getting such a talking-to from a high-school girl.
‘How did you meet him again?’
‘Uh, well, that’s not important.’
For the first time, the effusive Et-chan hesitated.
‘You’ve never told us, we want to hear,’ one girl said.
‘Yeah, tell us!’ said another.
Et-chan hemmed and hawed and then she warned them not to laugh before reluctantly confessing. ‘He chatted me up. At Tsukaguchi, no less.’
‘Wow, that’s random!’ Her friends didn’t laugh but their voices exclaimed in unison.
By ‘random’, they meant the location, not the way Etchan and he had met. Tsukaguchi was a large train station where the Itami Line linked up with the Kobe Line, predominantly known for the big hulking shopping centre in front of the station where there was a chain-store supermarket and a bunch of restaurants. Very mundane.
The majority of patrons were housewives, as students from the nearby women’s college or high school only ever shopped at Tsukaguchi by necessity, preferring to go to Osaka or Kobe for their real shopping. It was a totally random location for a pick-up spot. In front of Tsukaguchi Station, anyone who might be calling out to passers-by was usually soliciting for surveys or a blood drive.
‘It was my dad’s birthday, you know, and I figured Tsukaguchi was a reasonable place to look for a present for him, so I stopped there on my way home from school.’
‘There’s a Muji at Nishi-Kita, you know.’ The girl who volunteered this was referring to Nishinomiya-Kitaguchi, one of the terminals on the Imazu Line they were on now.
‘Why would I buy my dad a present at Muji? Muji’s more expensive than you think. And my dad’s birthday is in February – winter stuff always costs more. I only had a thousand yen to spend.’
‘All right then, so Tsukaguchi makes sense.’
Not much love for the dads from these girls.
‘Riight –? So I got him a scarf that was on sale for only one thousand yen. At Muji it would cost three times that. They wrapped it up for me and I was about to head home when someone called out to me in front of the station. He asked if I wanted to go to a café with him, his treat.’
Aw, that sounds just like when Katsuya chatted me up … Misa identified with Et-chan’s story.
‘Then when I turned around, he saw that I was wearing school uniform. And I saw that he was a salaryman. “Oops,” he said, and clapped his hand to his head. When we first passed each other all he saw was my face, and then I had on my coat so, from behind, he didn’t realize I was wearing a uniform. He was like, “What should we do? If I take you out, will it be like enjo kosai?” But I don’t know the first thing about sugar dating.’
‘So, not to be rude but, it sounds like he was clueless from the start.’ One of Et-chan’s friends chortled.
‘I said that if the cops arrested everyone who was sitting in a café together, it’d keep them pretty busy, wouldn’t it? So then he said why don’t we go to a tea shop?’
‘Wow, the guy’s got a job so that means he has money. You won’t end up at McDonald’s.’
There was something heartwarming to Misa about how wholesome these high-school girls seemed. It would cost less than a thousand yen to treat one of them to cake at a tea shop. Then again, that was Et-chan’s entire budget for her father’s birthday present.
Her friends finally seemed impressed by the notion of an older guy, one who could offer to treat a girl on a whim without putting a dent in his wallet.
‘So, does that mean …’ one of the girls said, lowering her voice. Misa found herself straining to hear. ‘Have you done it?’
Right – girls this age have a lot of superficial knowledge without much actual experience. Misa smirked wryly to herself.
‘Not yet,’ Et-chan responded nonchalantly. ‘He’s worried about it looking like enjo kosai.’
‘Yeah, but he’d have to pay you for it to be enjo kosai, right? That’s like prostitution, innit?’
‘Like I said, he’s clueless – he doesn’t even realize!’ Et-chan flashed a plucky smile. ‘He just keeps telling me to hurry up and grow up!’
‘As if you can do anything about that?!’ the whole group exclaimed. Surely Et-chan’s young man would be surprised to know the extent to which he was up for discussion.
‘But has he ever tried to pressure you?’
‘If he was that kind of guy, I’d break up with him.’
Ah, ouch. Misa involuntarily clutched at her chest.
Et-chan kept on talking. ‘Of course I’m scared too. I love my boyfriend but I’m nervous about having to do something that I don’t want to do. He knew that I was in high school when we first started dating, and he loves me too, so he’ll wait until I graduate. And he knows I’m studying for exams this year.’
Misa thought about her own boyfriend, over whom she was now wavering whether to break up or stay with. If that had been Katsuya and me …
If she were to point out to Katsuya that he had misread kanji, he’d be pretty annoyed and it would most likely lead to a fight (he was particularly sensitive about being told things he didn’t know, always accompanied by a high risk of him becoming violent). And the two of them were the same age so they had both been keen to go all the way, but if Misa had had any qualms, Katsuya probably would have fumed and accused her of not loving him.
Misa had never refused Katsuya, not for anything. She knew that if she did, he would get angry and hold it against her.
But had he ever given any thought to how she felt?
On the rare occasions when she had screwed up the courage to say that she doesn’t want to do something, had it ever occurred to him to wonder how hard it was for her to do that, or maybe to consider not doing something because she didn’t like it?
Love means not doing the thing that the other person dislikes.
Despite the fact that, as a grown man, he didn’t know how to use an iron or how to read the character for ‘silk’ on the label of his shirt and had to be told these things by his high-school-age girlfriend, Et-chan’s boyfriend was still a good guy. He was a good boyfriend.
Even just from eavesdropping on this stranger’s conversation that she happened to catch on the train, Misa could tell that they were a happy couple.
I may be older than Et-chan but I let myself be misled by Katsuya’s looks and attitude. Turns out, Et-chan is a much better judge of character than I am.