Epigraph

Lisa says on a night like this it’d be so nice if you gave me a kiss.

—The Velvet Underground

Author’s Note: This essay is the first of several essays on the theme of my 27 year marriage to and recent divorce from my wife Sachie. As noted below, I met her in the summer of 1997 in Kumamoto Japan, her home town. I had just accepted a job with NOVA Corporation in that same city. This essay traces the first few months of our relationship.

The dates in this essay are reconstructed from memory nearly thirty years later. While I have tried to be as accurate as possible, the chronology is necessarily approximate.

Introduction:

In January of 1997, a few months before I departed for Japan, my grandfather Bill Kolb handed me an envelope.

Inside was $1,700 in cash.

Even now this sentence doesn’t sound quite real.

My mother still can’t believe it. Truth be told, neither can I. Bill wasn’t a wealthy man handing me money because he had too much of it. He simply believed in me. I don’t know exactly why. I was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college, without much of a plan beyond teaching English for a year somewhere on the other side of the world.

“Go with God,” he said. “Good luck in Japan.”

Nearly thirty years later, I still believe it was one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me.

Kumamoto and NOVA:

I left for Japan in April with two duffel bags, a stack of CDs, a handful of books, several pack of cigarettes, and the sort of confidence that belongs almost exclusively to young people. I wasn’t fearless. I was simply too young to appreciate all the things that could go wrong.

Before arriving in Kumamoto, NOVA sent me to Osaka for about a week of training. Most of the details have faded into that blur reserved for airports, orientation sessions, and hotel conference rooms, but I do remember how Japan felt.

Little things amazed. The stations. The food. The language. Even the convenience stores. I’d never been anywhere remotely like it.

Then I took the train south to Kumamoto.

People who have never been to Japan often imagine Tokyo whenever they hear the word “Japan.” Kumamoto is not Tokyo. It moves at its own pace. The downtown area is was built around a long covered shopping street—the Shotengai—that functioned as the city’s living room. People shopped there, met friends there, drank there, wandered there, and, if you stayed long enough, discovered that everybody seemed to know everybody else.

I arrived without knowing a soul. That didn’t last very long.

NOVA occupied a building at the north end of the Shotengai. At the time it was an enormous company, hiring English teachers from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. It has since gone downhill. The classrooms had glass walls. Lessons ran almost continuously. Teachers appeared, disappeared, smiled, taught, smiled again, and hurried off to the next class. It all worked surprisingly well.

It also felt a little like living inside an aquarium.

Things became even more interesting when I learned I’d be sharing an apartment with one of my supervisors.

Her name was Sam. She was from Wales, probably in her mid-thirties, and had an almost supernatural awareness of everybody else’s business. She wasn’t mean about it. She simply seemed constitutionally incapable of not knowing who was dating whom, who had called in sick, who had stayed out too late, and who might be about to break one of NOVA’s many unofficial rules.

My other roommate was a fellow teacher named Heather. The arrangement wasn’t terrible. It just wasn’t private.

Most afternoons I’d finish teaching, wander through the Shotengai interested me more and more with each passing day. I was also hoping to meet someone.

Not because I had arrived in Japan determined to find a wife. I had come looking for adventure, work, and maybe a little direction. If romance happened somewhere along the way, that would simply be a bonus.

Then one afternoon, sometime around late May, the classroom door opened and in walked Sachie Asahi.

The first thing I noticed was her haircut. It was incredibly short—shorter than mine—and on almost anyone else it probably wouldn’t have worked. On her it looked perfect.

The second thing I noticed was her T-shirt. Across the front was Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can. Now at twenty-two I saw connections everywhere.

My first thought wasn’t, She’s wearing Warhol.

It was, She might actually know the Velvet Underground.

As soon as class ended, curiosity got the better of me.

“Miss Asahi,” I said, “can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know the Velvet Underground?”

She smiled.

“Yes I do. They are one of my favorite bands.”

Mine too.

That certainly got my attention. Looking back, that conversation probably lasted less than a minute. In memory it lasts forever.

Our First Two Dates:

A few days later I found myself lingering outside NOVA around lunchtime, pretending I wasn’t waiting for anyone in particular. I was waiting for her.

The door opened. Out walked Sachie.

“Are you heading home?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Would you like to get some lunch?”

She thought about it briefly and said “I know a nice coffee shop.”

We walked over together. The owner was an older gentleman who made coffee the traditional Japanese way, pouring hot water slowly through paper filters with the concentration of a surgeon. We ordered sandwiches, lit cigarettes, and settled into conversation as though we’d been doing it for years.

At one point I looked at her cigarette and smiled.

“You know,” I said, “nurses probably shouldn’t smoke.”

Without missing a beat she smiled back.

“Teachers probably shouldn’t either.”

Touché.

It was such a small exchange. I’ve remembered it for twenty-nine years.

I wish I could tell you I played it cool after that first lunch. I did not.

Whenever our schedules lined up, I would find myself outside NOVA around lunchtime. Sometimes I really was heading out for lunch. Sometimes I was just hoping the door would open and Sachie would walk through it.

Sometimes it did.

As we were finishing our first lunch together I asked if I could call her. She said yes.

I called her the next morning around eleven, thinking this was an appropriate time. When she answered she laughed.

“Why didn’t you call earlier?”

“I didn’t want to seem too eager.”

“Eager would have been good.”

This was encouraging.

Our first proper date was a screening of Hal Hartley’s Amateur. I remember the movie mostly because I remember the evening. Hartley has always struck me as one of those directors I admire more than I love. I’m glad I’ve seen his films, but they never quite found a permanent place in my heart.

Near the end of the film she leaned toward me. Not to kiss me. Not yet.

She brought her lips close enough that I could feel her breath against my ear and whispered, in English,

“What is this music?”

I didn’t know but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that one moment of intimacy.

She was close enough that my entire body lit up. We didn’t kiss in the theatre. I think we held hands on the walk back to the car, but that’s about all. It was wonderfully innocent in the way that only the beginning of a relationship can be.

Kumamoto is not a very big city, and we quickly settled into a rhythm. We’d grab coffee, wander through the nearby Shotengai, or simply drive around with nowhere in particular to go. Looking back, it strikes me that we spent an awful lot of time in her little Mitsubishi. We couldn’t exactly go to my apartment—I lived with my boss, after all—and bringing a young American teacher home to meet your very traditional Japanese father wasn’t something either of us was ready for after a week or two.

So the car became our living room.

We’d park by the river or find a quiet place to talk, windows cracked just enough for the cigarette smoke to drift outside. We would make out in her parked car. I would finger her and she would return the favor. It never felt dramatic. It just felt…comfortable. We were both twenty-two, trying to figure each other out one car ride at a time.

I Join Washington Language School:

Around the same time another opportunity came along.

Washington English School offered better hours, more independence, and what sounded like a healthier working environment than NOVA. I handed in my month’s notice and, sometime around the middle of July, packed my two duffel bags yet again.

Leaving NOVA turned out to be one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made. Fortunately, Washington was only a short distance away. The boss gave me the use of a cheap apartment, which was a bonus. For the first time since arriving in Japan I had a place of my own.

It wasn’t much. A small furnished apartment on the second floor of a walk-up, two tatami rooms, sliding doors, a tiny kitchen, an even tinier bathroom, a loft that was far too hot to sleep in during the summer, and just enough room for one young teacher who didn’t own very much.

I unpacked my books, stacked my CDs beside a little stereo, purchased groceries I barely knew how to cook, and slowly began settling into something that resembled ordinary life.

When I wasn’t teaching, I was usually doing one of two things. I was either with Sachie or working on a baseball simulation game.

That probably sounds stranger now than it did then. My uncle Steve had inspired me to try designing a tabletop baseball game based on real statistics, and I became completely absorbed by it. Most evenings found me surrounded by notebooks, pencils and baseball encyclopedias, trying to solve statistical puzzles. For weeks one pitcher, Lefty Grove, refused to cooperate. His adjusted ERA simply would not behave the way I wanted it to.

By August we were seeing each other almost every day.

One evening another young woman came on to me at a bar. I was briefly tempted. She was perfectly nice, and yet while talking with her I realized, almost in the middle of the conversation, that I didn’t want to be talking to anyone else except for Sachie.

The next day I told Sachie what had happened. She listened quietly and then she smiled. I said I would like to become exclusive. She agreed. Sometimes the most important decisions in life announce themselves quietly. This was one of those cases.

A few weeks later we decided to spend a weekend together in Tokyo.

Like so many romantic plans made by young people, ours was perfect in theory. Reality had other plans.

Our weekend in Tokyo was supposed to be the moment. We agreed we would have sex in our hotel room. By then we had been dating for a couple of months. We were crazy about each other, and it was time for the real intimacy to begin.

For dinner we had fish and soup and a few glasses of wine. Sachie was never much of a drinker, especially in those days. A few glasses of wine were enough to leave her happily, gloriously intoxicated. By the time we got back to the room she was laughing, stumbling a little, and having a wonderful time.

Then she collapsed across the bed. She was too drunk. Sex was off the table. We went to sleep

Somehow that failed evening made me like her even more. Real relationships, I was beginning to discover, aren’t built on perfect moments. They’re built on imperfect ones that two people survive together.

A week or two later back in Kumamoto life intervened in a somewhat dramatic way.

During the afternoon of August 31, 1997, I was walking home from work when someone stopped me on the street.

“Princess Diana died in a car accident.”

For a second I thought I’d misheard. I was shocked.

News traveled differently then. There were no smartphones and no social media. One stranger told another stranger, and for a few moments the whole world seemed strangely quiet. Such was the case here.

I walked the rest of the way home thinking about Diana, about Paris, about how somebody so famous could simply disappear in the middle of an ordinary night.

History has a curious habit of attaching itself to our private memories. I can’t think about Princess Diana without thinking about that afternoon.

Sachie came over later that afternoon. The mood was quieter than usual. We talked for a while, made coffee, listened to music, and eventually stopped talking altogether.

This time there was no hotel. No elaborate plans. No expectations. Just the two of us in my tiny apartment.

It happened naturally. We fell into bed together. We became lovers.

The sex was good; however I had nothing to compare it to. I was a virgin at 23. She had had some limited experience. I wore a condom for perhaps the first and last time. After that we weren’t trying to make a baby necessarily. If it happened it happened.

Outside, late-summer Kumamoto carried on exactly as it always had. Cars passed. Somebody’s television drifted through an open window. Somewhere in the distance a train moved through the evening.

The world hadn’t changed.

Mine had.

Looking back now, it’s tempting to search those first months for signs of what was coming.

Were there clues? Warnings? Promises?

Possibly.

There was simply a young American teacher who had wandered halfway around the world with two duffel bags, too many cigarettes, a head full of music, and absolutely no expectation of meeting the person he would build his adult life with.

And there was a young Japanese English student who happened to walk into one of his English classes wearing an Andy Warhol T-shirt.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Conclusion:

Sachie and I stayed together for twenty-nine years. We were married for twenty-seven of these.

Our marriage eventually came to an end just this spring, as many marriages do. Time changes people. Interests diverge. Careers pull in different directions. Habits change. Sex stops. Sometimes two people simply grow into different versions of themselves.

We tried our best. In the end our best was not good enough but we had fun along the way,

This essay belongs to two young people on the cusp of life. It belongs to coffee and cigarettes. To our long walks on the Shotengai. To Kumamoto. To our friends who were also young and looking to make a little life of their own.

To a little Mitsubishi with the windows cracked on warm evenings and making out passionately in the front seat.

To the Velvet Underground and an old man carefully pouring coffee.

To a whispered question in a dark movie theatre.

And to a grandfather who slipped an envelope into his grandson’s hand and said, “Go with God.”

Dedication:

For my wife, Sachie. And for my grandfather Bill Kolb, my hero. I love you Grandpa.