Polite Lies Read online

  CHAPTER SIX

  BODIES

  A few years ago, I got together with some friends from work to trade old clothes. Each of us brought shopping bags full of dresses, blouses, skirts, and pants that were in perfect condition but didn’t fit or were no longer our style. We met at one of our houses, had a potluck lunch, and went up to the large bedroom upstairs to try on the clothes. There were six of us. We had put the garments on the bed; they made quite a pile. The first two women who found something they liked stepped into the corner, turned their backs to the rest of the room, and began to change.

  I wasn’t at all embarrassed to see them in their undergarments. These were women I knew pretty well; I swim at the Y and change in the locker room with women I don’t even know. Modesty shouldn’t be a concern among friends. The clothes I wanted to trade were the dresses and skirts from my first semester as a college professor, before I realized that no job was worth looking so unlike myself. They fit my friend Cheryl, who looked much better in them than I ever did. Another woman made fun of me in a good-natured way, saying, “I can’t believe you wore these. You must have been really nervous about your job.”

  Because I was having a good time, I didn’t notice right away that one of the women was sitting in a chair in the far corner, not trying anything on. When the rest of us asked, she claimed not to have found any clothes she liked. She wasn’t rude. She politely complimented other people from time to time. But sitting stiff-backed and cross-legged, she looked uncomfortable. Her cable-knit sweater, wool skirt, and thick brown boots seemed oddly bulky. In the meantime, another woman, who was a body-builder, began prancing around, saying that she looked fat and ugly so that someone else would say, “Are you kidding? You look gorgeous.” While the rest of us changed near the wall or in the corner, our backs turned to one another, the body-builder walked around nearly naked and then stood changing in the middle of the room. I found myself going as far away from her as possible to change. She made me nervous.

  A week later, I had coffee with my friend Diane, who had been at the clothes exchange. I wanted to know what she thought about the odd behavior of the two women.

  “Wasn’t that kind of weird at Maggie’s house?” I asked in a vague way because I wasn’t sure if Diane had noticed the same things I had.

  Diane nodded. “Yes, I felt so bad for Vivian. She didn’t have to sit in the corner feeling uncomfortable like that.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “If she was really embarrassed to change in front of us, she could have asked to use a different room. We wouldn’t have been offended.”

  “I wish she hadn’t felt so uncomfortable, though,” Diane said. “We’re good friends. We weren’t there to judge her. Of course we all hate our bodies, but we all understand that.”

  Stunned by what she said, I joked that our body-builder friend probably didn’t hate her body.

  “I think she does, too,” Diane said. “That’s why she’s so insecure and has to be so vain.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I nodded.

  People who are vain are often insecure, so what Diane said about the body-builder made sense, but I was taken aback by the matter-of-fact tone in which she had said, “We all hate our bodies.” I thought of the six of us changing in that big bedroom. It had never occurred to me that we all felt that way. We were six women in our thirties and forties, all of us in perfect health, none of us overweight, underweight, missing any toes or fingers, or having anything out of the ordinary that might make us self-conscious. Except for the body-builder, who was very beautiful, the rest of us looked mildly attractive in an unremarkable way: people wouldn’t turn their heads to stare at us out of admiration or disparagement. We had no reason to hate or love our bodies.

  Diane is one of the most thoughtful people I have ever met, so it seemed odd that she would feel insecure about something that didn’t bother me at all: I never thought much about my body in one way or another. I care about my health, but I don’t dwell on the shapes and the sizes of various parts of my body, the way many American women seem to. My attitude toward the body is more pragmatic, I realized, because I grew up in Japan. I was spared an American upbringing that teaches women that their bodies are sexual objects about which they should feel guilty or inadequate. In Japan, the body is not the inferior part of the body-soul dichotomy. It isn’t so heavily associated with sex, sin, guilt, or love. For a Japanese woman growing up in a polite upper-middle-class family, the body is desexualized. Maybe, I thought, that is something I should feel thankful about.

  Even the word body in English sounds heavy and portentous—the broad o, the solid b and d. It’s one of the words we think of in pairs: body and soul, black and white, heaven and hell, good and evil. Words that come in pairs usually suggest a conflict or need for choice. The commonly used Japanese word for the body, karada, does not have the same associations. The word has connotations of health rather than those of sin or sex. Karada ni yoi means “good for one’s health”; Karada no choshi was yoi means “My health has been good” even though, literally, the sentence says, “My body has a good pace.” Karada ni ki o tsukete, people advise each other as a form of farewell: “Be careful with your body.” It’s a casual expression, just like “Take care of yourself.” There is nothing personal or intimate—much less sexual—about these references to the body in Japanese. In English, I would not say to people who aren’t close friends, “My body has been acting up,” because any reference to the body seems too intimate. It is more polite to say, “I haven’t been feeling very well” or “My health has been poor.” In Japanese, the word karada simply does not have the same feeling of taboo.

  Growing up in Japan, I thought of my body, my karada, as something practical that I had to take care of by gargling, getting enough sleep, and eating the right foods. There were plenty of things we were forbidden to talk or think about—even a reference to how we really “felt” or what we “wanted” was usually unwelcome—but the body was not on the long list of taboo subjects. That is not to say that we acted in an uninhibited manner. My friends and I were modest. None of us wore low-cut dresses or rode on trains in halter-tops and miniskirts. Nobody wanted to. Showing off one’s body seemed like a bizarre and embarrassing form of behavior, rather than a forbidden and daring adventure. For the most part, we acted as if—and believed that—our bodies scarcely existed except when something went wrong with our health so we had to think about stomachaches or sore throats or sprained ankles.

  Our attitude toward sex was similar. We didn’t have sex education classes, but our tenth grade biology class had a unit on reproduction. By that time, we all knew “the facts of life” through hearsay or movies or magazines. The biology lessons didn’t give us any new information. The lectures were dry and abstract. There wasn’t any discussion. Human sexuality seemed as unrelated to us as the genetics of different colored beans or peas we had to memorize.

  My friends and I had no language to speak about sex, in or out of the biology class. Even the few articles we found in women’s and young girls’ magazines used English words for anything related to sex—sex, penis, orgasm, etc. To this day, I am not sure what the original Japanese words for these things are, if such words exist at all. The borrowed English words gave an impression that sex was something that happened only in foreign countries or on another planet. None of the articles gave practical advice or encouraged discussion. They seemed just as abstract and faraway as the biology lessons.

  My American friends—especially those who grew up in Catholic families—recall feeling confused about sex throughout their adolescence. One of them still remembers the sex education classes that were taught by priests. “I think some of those priests enjoyed talking about sex, in a sick kind of way. They went into a lot of detail,” he says. “So my friends and I knew everything about sex, and everything was forbidden. We felt scared and guilty.” My experience at my Japanese girls’ high school was the exact opposite. My friends and I knew the scientific facts about reproduct
ion, but nobody thought or talked about how these facts applied to our own bodies and lives. Sex didn’t have the allure of a forbidden subject. It was something we were too well-bred to worry about.

  This polite denial of sexuality wasn’t all bad when my friends and I were teenagers. It kept us out of trouble without making us feel rebellious. We never considered becoming sexually active, not because it was a sin or an immoral and forbidden act—as many of my American friends were taught—but because the consequences could only inconvenience and embarrass us. We didn’t grow up thinking of ourselves as sexual beings, and perhaps that is good in a way since most human interactions—at work, at the store, on the bus, with friends, co-workers, and strangers—don’t revolve around this aspect of ourselves. Maybe the Buddhists are right: desire increases suffering. People who seem driven to express their sexuality at all times are usually unhappy. I am thankful not to have been taught to hate my body out of guilt because sex is a sin—or out of a sense of inadequacy because my body isn’t good enough to let me enjoy my sin.

  But I don’t think Japanese girls are truly lucky, either, to have a politely desexualized view of the body. In my mid-twenties, already living in Wisconsin, I was shocked to learn that sex was, in some ways, a big deal in Japan. I read an article about Japanese businessmen who go on “sex tours” to Thailand. The article said that the wives of these businessmen fully understand the nature of the tours and even pack condoms in their husbands’ suitcases. Around the same time, I met Americans who had studied in Japan and visited nightclubs where they saw strip shows and “live sex acts.” They insisted that American pornographic movies are modest compared with the shows in Japan, which are easily accessible to any man who is interested. The Japanese men who go on sex tours and visit live sex shows are ordinary middle-class and upper-middle-class businessmen—the kinds of men my Japanese friends have married.

  I suppose I had been naive not to notice the erotic dimension of Japanese culture. In high school, I had read parts of The Tale of Genji, which is a chronicle of the sexual adventures of a handsome court gentleman of the twelfth century. But I didn’t think that the old novel had anything to do with my reality, any more than a typical freshman English student thinks King Lear has any bearing on his or her life. My art history books had a few reproductions of the ukiyo-e woodblock prints depicting courtesans in erotic poses. Again, I thought of those pictures the same way I thought of Michelangelo’s David—as something to discuss in an essay exam.

  I did not realize that Japanese erotic culture had lasted into the present and was easily accessible to Japanese men. Nor did I know that the “nice” Japanese women, raised to regard themselves as nonsexual, had to pack condoms in their husbands’ suitcases. I had been ironically right when I thought of sex as something that happened in a foreign country. I finally understood why many upper-middle-class Japanese women talk about their marriages in practical and businesslike ways, as though being a wife was a job or a position they had to hold. There is a division of labor among women. The job of a “nice” woman from an upper-middle-class family is to become a wife and a mother; another kind of woman—a woman from a poor family or a foreign woman—is exploited to perform the job of sexually satisfying men. Although sex is not completely synonymous with romance, love, or happiness, a marriage in which sex has nothing to do with romance, love, or happiness—merely to do with reproduction and health—can only be a business arrangement.

  If marriage is like a job in Japan, it is a job that most Japanese women are desperate to get. For a Japanese woman, to be unmarried carries the same sort of stigma that being unemployed holds for Americans—especially for American men. People think that you are not contributing enough to society or making the right kind of progress through life: you are not fulfilling the role you were born for.

  I am painfully aware of this stigma every time I go to Japan. During my last visit, I went to see an old high school friend, Hiroko. We had tea at her house and talked about other school friends.

  “Did you know that Nobuko has gotten married?” Hiroko asked me.

  I was surprised to hear the news. On a previous visit I had learned that Nobuko was regional manager for the Japanese branch of Hilton hotels. Always traveling to Europe on business, she loved her job and was perfectly content to live with her parents in their big house in Ashiya.

  “About a year ago,” Hiroko continued. “Nobuko decided to get married.”

  “To whom?” I asked, expecting to hear about some exotic and dramatic romance, possibly with a foreigner. (I already knew that Japanese men usually don’t have big romances with the nice Japanese women they marry.)

  “She had no one in mind,” Hiroko said. “But she quit her job so she could put all her efforts into finding a suitable husband. She and her mother looked at stacks and stacks of resumes from older men looking for a wife.”

  Hiroko was saying that Nobuko had gone through an omiai, or marriage-arranging process: when someone is looking for a husband or a wife, her or his family consults other families to get the names of suitable people. Folders of information—résumés, photographs, birth certificates—are exchanged. Once a match is made, the families set up a group meeting at a public place like a restaurant or a hotel lobby. The man and the woman meet in the presence of their parents and even some of their siblings. If they like each other and the other members of the families have no objection, the couple begins to date so they can get to know each other a little before getting married. The marriage generally takes place within a few months.

  “Nobuko and her mother didn’t find anyone by asking their family friends, so they consulted an omiai-arranging service,” Hiroko told me. “They must have looked at hundreds of resumes. They were looking for a well-to-do older man in Kobe or Osaka.”

  “What do you mean, older?” I asked. Nobuko would have been thirty-three at the time.

  “Late forties, fifties, sixties,” Hiroko explained. “There aren’t many men younger than forty-five who are widowers.”

  “But there must have been some men our age who were single because they’d never married,” I pointed out.

  “Sure, but those men have never been married because they have health problems, or they aren’t the settling-down type, or their mothers are too domineering. Men like those don’t make a lot of money, and they don’t make good husbands. Nobuko and her mother were looking for reliable men who had been married once and then widowed. She didn’t quit her job only to marry a playboy, a mommy’s boy, or an invalid.”

  I picked up my teacup and tried to drink, but I felt sick. Hiroko made it sound as if our friend had to look for a job in a bad market.

  “Anyway,” Hiroko said, brightening, “Nobuko got lucky. She found a business executive of a trading company whose wife had passed away a couple of years ago. He was younger than most—in his late forties—and both of his kids were already in college, so she doesn’t have to raise someone else’s kids. It was by far the best situation.”

  “Have you met her husband?” I asked.

  “No,” Hiroko sighed. “My husband and I were still in Chicago when they got married. Soon afterward, Nobuko’s husband got transferred to New York, so they moved there. I didn’t get a chance to meet him or to say goodbye to Nobuko.”

  “Have you heard from her, though? Is she happy?” I asked.

  Hiroko didn’t answer right away, so I knew that meant some form of no.

  “At least she’ll get to use her English,” I offered. I didn’t know what else to say. Nobuko speaks English, German, and French, as well as Japanese.

  “I know,” Hiroko said. “That’s one of the reasons the man wanted to marry her. Even when he was stationed in Osaka, he worked mostly with Americans and Europeans. Foreign businessmen like to socialize at people’s homes. Being a widower was a real disadvantage to him. He wanted to marry someone who could carry on conversations with his guests, not just serve drinks and food and disappear into the kitchen. Nobuko was a good choice. She�
�s smart. She can talk about anything.”

  I felt depressed to think of our friend quitting her job to become a multilingual hostess. “Why did she want to get married anyway?” I asked. That was the part I didn’t understand: she had wanted to get married even though she had no one in mind. It wasn’t as though she had met and fallen madly in love with someone and sacrificed her job to be with him. At least that would have made sense—she would have been driven by something compelling, if destructive. Although I would never choose reckless love that demands a big sacrifice, I understand its appeal for other people. That kind of love is like religion. Once you can accept the apparently irrational premise—that someone was crucified and then resurrected to atone for your sins, or that you and your lover were destined to be together and only he can make you happy—then everything else follows in an almost logical fashion. You can predict, accept, and even enjoy the consequences, the way skydivers must love the freefall that is the inevitable and desired consequence of their leap. Nobuko’s actions were different. Her choice seemed both calculated and reckless, for no good reason.

  Hiroko didn’t really answer my question. She just said, “Nobuko had to hurry because it was the last chance for her to be married. Time was running out.”

  “Why? You said that she was only looking to be a second wife to someone older. A second wife almost never has her own kids. She could have waited ten, fifteen years to be an old man’s wife.”

  “Oh, come on,” Hiroko said. “Nobody marries a woman over forty, even if he doesn’t plan to have a child with her. Nobuko didn’t have that much time.”

  I stared at my cup of cold tea, feeling suddenly too angry to speak. It was so unfair for a sixty-five-year-old man to say that a forty-one-year-old woman was “too old” to be his wife. How can Hiroko accept this prejudice so easily? I wondered. When I looked up, she shrugged her shoulders and made a sour face, a gesture of resignation. “All right,” I said, trying to calm down and get back to my original question. “So let’s say she was getting too old and didn’t have much time. But I still don’t understand. Why did she want to get married at all? I thought she was happy working for Hilton.”