Luther, a garrulous and argumentative friend from Germany, joins me for a few days at the house – keen to get the full Japan experience in five days before flying back to Frankfurt.
Luther is as tall as me, thin, untidily blonde and rosy-cheeked, with that great dynamism that infuses people from the heart of Europe. He carries with him a sense that he is right about things. Somehow this creeps onto his face and is visible even at a distance. He can argue a point down to the death, with little regard for its importance. I like him because we can talk long and illuminatingly about many subjects. He is a polymath, well read in a number of languages, yet knows nothing of Japanese.
We have been invited for dinner by Harumi. We walk to her house this evening. I’ve briefed Luther on what to do and say. He thinks there is a lot to remember.
At the genkan we are greeted by the whole family and shown to the places of honour in front of the tokonoma. They struggle with his name. It sounds like they’re calling him ‘loser’. ‘ru-za-a’ I suggest, and they try to imitate, ‘ruzaa-san,’ but after one try they never use it again.
I ask Luther where our gift of sweet biscuits is and he tells me he left it in the genkan. I ask him to get it and give it to Harumi right now.
‘I didn’t know when we should do that,’ he says.
‘It’s OK.’
The family make a huge fuss about the biscuits, big smiles on everyone’s face, and much exclamation about the unparalleled excellence of our gift. Luther describes it correctly as a small gift.
Over dinner the conversation goes reasonably well. The family knows enough English not to be totally lost, and Naomi can help her father with translation of anything she thinks important enough. We talk about the coming New Year celebrations.
‘Do you send many New Year cards?’ Naomi asks Luther.
‘No, I don’t. Everyone writing a hundred cards every year and signing them like a production line, sending them to people they can hardly remember. It is all a big waste of time to me. Too artificial,’ he states.
‘You are too honest,’ says Naomi, and Luther takes it as a compliment.
Talk switches to what we each do and have in our respective countries. Luther does most of the talking since they have already heard from me. He describes his house on a hillside overlooking a river, and tells them how remarkably advanced his new daughter is for her age. They smile and say complimentary things.
It dawns on Luther that he has been doing all the talking, so he deliberately asks whether Naomi’s younger brother, who is sitting beside her, is doing well at school.
‘No,’ says Naomi.
To Luther this is a shock, like a slap in the face. He reels for a moment, wondering how to respond. Naomi knows enough to realise that under western protocol another answer was required.
‘Actually, he is doing fine,’ she adds.
Luther is even more confused now, but inside I chuckle. Naomi’s first response was the Japanese one, in which everything connected to her but not her interlocutor is lowly. Rather than say anything that could be interpreted as boastful, she talked down her brother’s school performance, regardless of his presence. The second response came because she is westernised enough to know that Luther will interpret the first response literally, and attribute a coldness and disregard to it that she doesn’t intend. She may also be playing a little game of her own.
Later in the conversation, Naomi refers to Luther’s ‘mansion’.
‘It’s not a mansion,’ he says, ‘just a nice house.’
‘But when you said it was a “nice house” I thought it must be a very nice house,’ replies Naomi, with a touch of playfulness.
‘No, it is just a nice house.’
‘In Japan, when we talk about our home we say “our shabby house”. If we said we live in a nice house it would mean a very special house,’ she tells him. She is on to him, and has begun the careful crafting of a Japan-sensitive gaijin.
‘A husband will refer to his wife as “my stupid wife,”’ she says. ‘It is the Japanese way.’
Luther nods. He realises that Japanese etiquette, which he has feared, has come to the party.
‘In the same way, when you present gifts, you say “please accept this worthless little thing.”’ I say, showing which side I am on.
‘Yes, the same,’ says Naomi.
Nevertheless, Luther habitually talks about himself. He tells them what he’s done, what he thinks, what he is going to do. I hear Naomi tell him ‘You are teaching me many things,’ which he takes at face value. He warms to his subject, and tells them he doesn’t think etiquette is very important, it is what is really meant that is important. People should just be themselves. He doesn’t have time to figure out what people might think. He prefers to talk straight. This is all designed to help them see him the right way, to help them understand how it is. From the noises they make you might think they were convinced.
After dinner our biscuits are brought out and everyone exclaims at how delicious they are. When we have nearly finished them the real desserts are brought out – several elaborate confections of fruit, pastry, cream, caramel, cheesecake, icing, sauces and chocolate. Our biscuits look decidedly mundane by comparison. I praise the desserts, Luther does too.
On the way home I talk to Luther about the idea of the ‘real Japan’.
‘I think I’ve seen the real Japan tonight,’ he says.
Yes, it was dinner of sashimi, tempura, oden and sake, kneeling on the tatami, in a room of shoji screens and precise decoration. It was a Japanese family talking among themselves in Japanese, happy to let their guard down a little and just get on with things. It was something many visitors to Japan do not get to see, especially during a trip as short as Luther’s. But I want to tell him about all the undercurrents I detected, all the double meanings and skilful handling of guests that had been going on.
He feels chuffed that he taught them so many things about our way of looking at life. He tells me so.
‘I think they really enjoyed having us. Naomi told me several times that I taught her a lot,’ he says.
‘Yeah. It is not quite as straightforward as that though,’ I say.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah. That is really just a Japanese way of saying your ideas and mine on this subject are very different.’
‘Oh!’
A few seconds later he says, with a chuckle, ‘she told me I was too honest.’
‘Naomi knows about the things you were talking about. Obviously she sees things differently. It is important that you send all your New Year cards, even though everyone knows it is a chore. No-one would ever admit that. She was being polite. In Japan, appearances are important. If you remember ‘appearances are important’ and act accordingly you will be much closer to the real Japan – if such a thing really exists.’
He is crestfallen.
‘What you say makes me doubt they even liked us now.’
‘Oh no. They enjoyed the evening. There’s no doubt about that.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s not what they say, but how they act. You can tell if people are comfortable or not. If they are comfortable, they enjoyed themselves.’
He is not confident in using abstract intuitions about comfort and tension levels to judge how things are going. He would like to be with people who say things like ‘Gee, this is a great evening!’ and mean it, but he knows that even back home, they often don’t.
Next day we stop at the Okamoto temple. I want to let Luther meet the family – and they have been looking forward to seeing one of my friends.
After the introductions – his name causing problems again – we shuffle in under the kotatsu for tea. We chat for half an hour, and then it is time to leave. Maya pulls out two painted uchiwa fans to give to us. She looks at them and sees that one is clearly prettier than the other, and is thrown into indecision. Who should she favour with the pretty one? Luther, who is more of a guest than I am, or me, since I am a much closer friend of hers, and Luther has only been here a few minutes. After a second’s hesitation she solves the problem by giving them both to me, and giggling mischievously, says I can decide who gets which. I know exactly what to do. I turn to Luther and ask him to choose.
‘I’ll take that one,’ he announces triumphantly, and quickly grabs the pretty one out of my hand. He had been sure I was going to give him the other. I am deeply irked by what he has done, but my reaction is nothing compared to that of the Okamoto family. They all suddenly stare at Luther in disbelief, as if he’s just shouted a few obscenities at them.
Luther is pleased and oblivious. I feel ruffled, as if the finely tuned harmony of the day has been broken. Of course, I would have liked the more graceful fan, but these days that doesn’t matter as much as getting along harmoniously. He should have offered to let me choose, then I could have insisted that, no, no, he should choose. Then it would have been OK for him to grudgingly admit that he did privately covet the pretty one, and it would become a treasured reminder of a fine afternoon with pleasant company. Who could have argued with that? Now the fan is back in Frankfurt he admits he doesn’t know what to do with it, so what was the point of all the brutal honesty anyway?
The problem is I’m turning Japanese, and he isn’t. Over the few days of his visit I develop a nagging irritation with Luther because he does not pick up on my subtle suggestions. I know if I tell him it is his turn to do something, like carrying the backpack, he will do it, but I feel it is undignified for both of us to have to be so direct about it. If he listened to the gentle signals he could pretend that he had thought of it himself, and I could have given him credit for this. We could have been comforted by how smoothly, how naturally, how intuitively, how instinctively, we were getting along.
