A Woman's Nails Read Online Free PDF Page B

towards what Kumiko indicates is Oyafukô-dôri , I am hit hard by the realization that I have been here before. It’s all disturbingly familiar.
    On the left is a yakitori restaurant, belching out black smoke from a massive vent blackened with oil and soot. Above that is an Indian restaurant run by Sikhs, beards and turbans and all. Across the street is another tall and narrow building with a Yoshinoya outlet on the first floor that serves, gyûdon , bowls of rice topped with a mystery beef. The two opposing buildings form a gate of sorts at the entrance of Oyafukô . A sea of bodies flow in from the main avenue attracted like moths towards the neon lights and bright signboards. The street itself is clogged with dozens upon dozens of taxis, the lights on top of their cabins forming a string of illumination that runs the length of the street, all the w ay to a gazebo like police box.
    Kôban . Police box. It had been a new word for me when Mie said it. “You don’t have police boxes in America, do you?” We’d just got out of a cab. “I di dn’t see any when I was there.”
    I told Mie we didn’t, that we had police stations and precincts and police roaming around in cars like stalkers, but no police boxes .
    It was Mie and my first time to get together and I had only been in Japan for about a month and a half. Mie would treat me to dinner at a noisy Japanese-style pub, an izakaya she’d teach me, where the staff was constantly yelling at the top of their lungs, “Two drafts, hey!,” or “Welcome, hoi!” or what the fuck ever. Later, we’d go to a hostess bar, called a snack , where she’d get jealous when a hostess tried to hit on me. Back at her place, we would sit on her bedroom floor drinking sak é until there was no more left, and then we’d kiss for the first time. In the months that followed, Mie and I would go dancing at the discos or dri nking in many of the bars here.
    I can feel Mie’s presence as we cross the street and enter Oyafukô-dôri . I see her in the middle of the street on a Monday morning, wearing a simple, but tight-fitting orange dress with white polka dots, and smiling broadly, arms stretched out. I see myself ignoring the annoyed honking of a taxi driver to take her picture. It’ll become my favorite photo of her and will always remind me of everything that I loved about her, her vitality, her spontaneity, her smile and her body. I see us sitting at the Mister Donut where share a cup of coffee and an old-fashioned donut and talk about going to America together. Oyafukô is as haunted with memories as my old apar tment in god forsaken Kitakyûshû was and being back after all this time, after six months, is unsettling to say the least.
     
    “Peador, we’re here,” Kazuko says, tugging at my arm.
    Is Mie out there somewhere? Is she having dinner with her roommate? Is she drinking with friends in a bar nearby? I look down the street beyond the milling mass of people towards the police box, at the passengers getting out of taxis. Is she there? I scan hundreds of faces but can’t find hers.
    “Mistah Peador?”
    “Huh? Oh, right,” I follow them into a modest little bar called Umie .
    After the unexpected onslaught of memories, I’m not much of a companion to Kumiko and Kazuko. It’s difficult to put up with Kazuko’s incessant questions with my thoughts lost on events that are nearly a year old. God how I want to go back in time and relive that first night, that night which changed everything for me. I wish I could go back and undo the mistakes of last summer, so that it would be Mie I was with rather than these two. But I can’t. All I can do is try to chase after forgetfulness one cheap bottle of Heineken at a time.
    “Is something the matter?” Kumiko asks later while Kazuko is off harassing someone else for a change.
    “I’m sorry, I’m just feeling . . . “ I can’t remember the Japanese for depressed . “I’m just feeling blah .”
    “Blah? The band? I love