“Remember me telling you I’m only one-eighth Japanese? Translation, please?”
“It means ‘holder of an intangible cultural property’ a great honor—”
“Oh, like those Kennedy Center Awards they give to old people?”
“I...suppose. It is something to be...strived for, within any artistic community. To be name ningen kokuho implies more than a mere mastery of one’s craft—”
“Like, you’re the best of the best?”
Wondering if she literally meant “you’re” to signify him, or if she was merely being linguistically imprecise, Masafumi slowly replied, “You are beyond ‘best’...you are interwoven with the entire culture of Japan. What you have done has become part of Japan. Something which cannot be disconnected from its origins.”
“Oh...like when you stick nano-ribbons into someone, and there’s no way to pull them out once they’ve healed?”
Glancing down at his watch, and seeing that they’d spent far more time in the alley than his boss had allotted to him, Masafumi avoided comment on her incorrect analogy by merely nodding vaguely and saing, “Break time is over...I must return to the shop—”
“Yeah, me too...old Ulger should be in soon, to mooch his miso zuke dofu...I swear, one of these days I should substitute a slice of old rubber tire for the knobu wrapping, just to see if the oaf knows the difference between retread and dried kelp. Now that would really be a dish with some ‘bite’ to it!”
Glad that Harumi could make even a weak joke about her tormentor, Masafumi picked up the empty bowls from the ground at their feet and handed them to her, saying, “Tell your boss the zaru dofu was oishii—and thank you again.”
“Anytime, Masa,” she smiled, then smacked back to the rear door of the restaurant, the echo of her hard soles hitting the rubbery insides of her flip-flops following him as he walked back to his job.
He didn’t know if his boss would consider this encounter to have been “getting’ close” to Harumi, but in his own mind, Masafumi decided that this meeting was the equivalent of gently freeing a woman’s big-sleeved outer osode kimono from the remaining layers of kimono beneath. Even as that unveiling had served to reveal emotional layers of his own psyche which he had tried his best to keep pinned down, much like the weights placed on freshly-made tofu, in order to squeeze out the remaining nigari, that salty coagulating agent which both created the tofu, and threatened to ruin its taste if it were not expelled from the cured tofu. Just as his own thwarted creative urges had had to be expelled from his being, lest they dilute his present artistic course.
But yet, as he let himself into the back door of the shop, he realized for the first time since he’d ended his years of isolation, of hikikomori, he’d actually managed to come back to, and not distance himself from, that which had made him retreat into himself in the first place. Always that maddening conundrum: How to make that which is merely worn into something which comes alive because it is worn?
He had thought that his new vocation, that of inkslinging, was more direct than kimono painting—you spot the stencil on someone’s body, you ink it in, and after wiping away the blood and bandaging it, your job is finished. But after spending time with Harumi, taking sly glances at her tattooed body (an Irezumi-like body covering from collarbones to elbows, and down to the bottoms of her thighs, in a swirl of native Japanese flowers, clouds, and distant mountains, surrounded by foamy-crested curlicue waves), and listening to her rant about that fat-eared security guard, Masafumi had come to realize that with each movement of her body, each rapid fuming breath she took between words, her tattoos ceased to be mere ink imbedded in flesh, but an additional garment in and of themselves. An article of indelible clothing which had no doubt helped to make her a target of that goon with the toy gun, who nonetheless wanted her to procure him that suit of nano-armor. For Masafumi doubted that Harumi was the only person in this city who smoked clove cigarettes (which even he realized did not smell anything like cannibas).
“Well, my man, you score?” Ignazio’s sweaty face was open-eyed and leering, showing virtually all his teeth in a tight white stacked-stone line. Masafumi debated about mentioning that Ulger person, but decided not to; instead, he slipped past Ignazio and walked into the main part of the building, the tattooing room with the various paper-on-a-roll covered chairs and padded tables, whose walls were covered with glass-fronted flash design displays, and print-outs of digital photos of most of their customers’ finished tattoos. Sitting down in one of the chairs, Masafumi said carefully, “I learned what has been bothering her. It is a private matter...but one she could share. In part. She brought me some black zara dofu. It was very good.”
“Yeah, I suppose it hit the spot. Me, I like the green and white kind better. Why don’t you ever go in there, where she works? I’ve never seen you in there—”
There was no way to explain to his boss that back in Japan, Masafumi would have eaten the same dish at a riyori, a tofu restaurant, and not at a place which served a multitude of dishes, from sushi to katsu-don to yudofu, plus a wide variety of sakis to go along with the simple manju dessert. The extreme mixing of various culinary disciplines was far more alien to Masafumi than the fast food hamburger place down the block where he chose to eat instead. There, the mixing of seemingly unsuited foods was a normal thing, and thus not bewildering.
“This is my country, now. So...I eat what others eat. To go back to my origins in one way would mean wishing to go back to them in all ways.”
“You are one weird duck, kiddo. But cool. Seriously cool, my man. Best worker I’ve had since this place opened. Know what? You’ve been doin’ flash for too long. Time you started to branch out. Start learnin’ how to work the nano-ribbons. Insert ’em, the whole ball o’wax. Now I’m aware you still can’t brand nobody, and as far as the piercings go, you’re still gonna have to take some classes which I’m not gonna pay for, so you’re gonna have to spring for those, but seein’ that there ain’t no place you’re gonna officially learn how to work nano-ribbons, classes start as soon as someone comes in here wanting some work done, ok?”
Biting his lip so that he couldn’t ask about Ulger, and his thwarted efforts to “get some work done” Masafumi nodded, before saying, “You are the boss...you want me to learn the ribbons, I will learn them.”
—even as his mind began to whirl like suminagashi, leaving whorls of half-formed ideas and urges to settle like ink swirls on marble paper, as he realized how he just might be able to solve Harumi’s problem...not to mention the central puzzle of his own creative existence.
If he told her next to nothing beforehand....
III.
(Kosode)
“Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true.”
Bruce Nauman
“So you have never worn a kimono?”
Harumi worked the tattoo gun over the tray of momengoshi without speaking for a few seconds, then said, without looking up, “No, in my family, we were lucky to know what tofu was when I was a kid. I have an old picture of my great-great-to-the-I-don’t-know-what power grandma-san wearing one, but that’s about it. The picture wasn’t in color, either, so I don’t know what it really looked like. There were clusters of birds on it, I think. Plus this big sash around her middle, with what looked like a flat pillow on her back.