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Confessions of a Japanese Salary Man

Claire Tristram

We Japanese are at home in crowded places. We conceive our children while lying together only yards away from our parents, separated by walls made of paper, in houses where we can reach outside the windows and touch our neighbor's front door. We ride in trains and elevators so full of people that the railroad companies and department stores hire white-gloved attendants whose only role is to push the last of us fully inside so the doors might close. While riding in those railroad cars and elevators, we breathe one another's air and feel one another's sweat, and can even stare into one another's faces and never once really look into each other's eyes. It takes great concentration, but if everyone cooperates it's as if each of us had that elevator or that railway car entirely to ourselves. We can create stillness and solitude even where there is none.
     It's clear from the behavior of foreigners that they will never be completely at home in this world, with their gangling limbs and fleshy bodies. In the rush hour trains they mumble "excuse me" and "hello," or may even look us in the face and smile, attempting to forge some sort of temporary intimacy, thus defiling the purity of our solitude. I see them on my daily ride on the Tokaido line from Fujisawa to Tokyo's Shinagawa station and back, a one-hour trip I've made each day now for twenty-five years. I've always avoided any direct association with them, before this time, just after I had entered my fiftieth year, when I found myself involved in an incident that still troubles me today.
     That morning I was late and almost missed my 7:40 train from Fujisawa. I was one of the last to board, and was pushed into an already-full car by the station guards before the doors closed and we were on our way. That is when I saw her, a red-headed foreign woman, who was holding onto a strap, her eyes half-closed, her body swaying with the motion of the train. She was halfway down the car's length from where I stood in the doorway, but I could see her clearly over the heads of those who had managed to find a seat. From her dress I could see that she was what we Japanese call 'hen na gaijin'--a term we reserve for those Westerners who have lived so long in this country that they begin to think they belong. Her skin was the blue-white color of a person who burns easily. Her breasts and hips had a fleshy weight to them that you never see in Japanese women. What annoyed me about her so? Not just the wrongness of her, or the way she stood out so different in color and body from the rest of us. It was the way she presumed to mimic us, trying to fit in by making herself as small as possible rather than spreading herself about the way those of her race usually did. By the time we reached Yokohama station, halfway to Tokyo, I was filled with an overwhelming desire to knock her off balance, to make her uncomfortable enough with an elbow or shoulder that she would get off at the next stop and wait for another train and I would be rid of her.
     A wave of people disembarked at Yokohama, followed by a backwash of those entering the car, who swept me forward to where the foreigner stood. But instead of being in a position to elbow or jostle this woman out of her complacency, I found my right arm pinned behind my back in the crush of passengers, entangled in a group of schoolboys. An old woman dressed in traditional yukata and geta, her back humped with bone disease, had lodged herself against my left armpit. The foreign woman, directly in front, was pressed into me in an alarmingly intimate way. She was perhaps an inch taller than I, and my groin was planted snugly into the valley below her hips. I had merely wanted to jab her in some rough way that she could never be sure was deliberate or not. Instead I found myself embracing her--that was the only word for it--in this embarrassing and familiar manner, unable to move away for the crowd. The crush had left me with my lips a bare centimeter from those absurd orange hairs that erupted from the nape of her neck.
     The train lurched and my body pitched into hers, so much so that we both lost our balance. I was flooded with the cloying nearness of her, the dip of her spine, the sponge-like texture of her hips, the dampness of her clothes, the slight parting of her legs. To my shame, my body responded with a rush of pleasure. I attempted to ease my erection by studying the paper advertisements that lined the train above my head. I tried to tell myself I had nothing to feel ashamed of. After all, the train was crowded. This woman could never have accused me. She could never have said, ah, this man is deliberately molesting me. Indeed I could not have touched her with either of my hands if I'd wanted to, since they were held fast by the shifting mass of people that surrounded us as surely as if I had been tied with ropes. I was helpless to change the situation. Another lurch of the train left my flesh digging all the more deeply into her backside. The grandmother to my left was pressing against my side, the top of her balding head grazing my chest as we rocked and swayed along. I had to do something, to act, to redeem myself and my race! While my hands could not reach the foreign woman, I found that with concerted effort I could reach down and at least squeeze this old grandmother's bottom--softly, as I did not want to alarm her, or even make her aware that the motion was deliberate. Within moments the old woman's mouth opened, her dry tongue extending as if searching for a drop of water.
     How powerful I felt then! I became intensely aware of the schoolboys behind me, and the way they were rubbing my back and hips with their squirmings, my right arm still imprisoned in their midst. I discovered that I could brush my hand against bicep or thigh or chest, and, how curious! the bicep or thigh or chest would respond to my gropings, not by recoiling, but by coming closer. One of the boy's book bags was digging into my shoulder in a way I would have thought painful, if it weren't for this sudden, heightened sense of mastery, this awareness of all that was touching me. I grew bolder, allowing my hand to find its way from thigh to testicle, squeezing it before traveling on to another boy, while my left hand continued to massage the old bag's ass. The recklessness I felt seemed to travel through the car, from body to body. A mob of college girls wearing Hello Kitty sweatshirts, just out of reach to my right, began to sway with our forward motion in such a way that their breasts would touch; then part again, and they would roll their eyes upward. To my left I saw a salary man like myself masturbating against one of the doors. I began to knead the old bag's ass with a fierce urgency until she was rubbing her pubis over my hip bone, searching for release. My right hand began to encounter open zippers, engorged cocks, and other hands that were busy giving pleasure. One of those hands, perhaps the old woman's, found its way into my trousers, where it began to abuse me. But it was what was happening to the front of my body that left me weak and dazed. If only I could have freed my hands to touch this foreign woman, this alien, exotic, dangerous, unknowable Other! I would reach up under her clothing to grab her great and terrifying breasts. I would roll and pinch her nipples. I would violate her red-haired, foreign cunt with my fingers until we were both covered with her juice and sweat. I may have cried out in my frustration, one hot exhalation on the nape of her neck with those hairs the color of copper wires. She arched slightly--I'm sure that she did--and a flash fire passed from her to me and from one body to the next until the entire carload of us, old women and the salary men, schoolboys and college girls, all the arms and hips and legs grinding together in that rail car, all gave it up, and I heard soft gruntings of Iku! Iku! from every direction, which is what we Japanese say at the moment of supreme pleasure.
     Then it was over. We had arrived at the terminus. The hands withdrew. I stood there, my legs weak, and wondered if like all miracles this one was some sort of illusion. The car quickly emptied. Passengers ran away in confusion and embarrassment. I looked to the foreigner for her assurance that indeed some truths exist. Just one look, not even a nod, was all I needed. But she was already out the door, and soon even her memory faded into that restless, milling crowd.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

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