Furniture

Furniture Marilyn Abildskov (bio) chairs The Japanese furniture maker specialized in chairs—light and airy chairs that still looked sturdy. He took his time, carving each chair from hinoki cypress. I was told the chairs sold for a lot of money. He’d been married to a Danish woman. According to the story I’d heard, the Danish woman had gone to Tokyo on a whim and then decided to stay. So the Japanese furniture maker married her to assure her status in Japan. By the time I met them, they had relocated to the countryside and been married for ten years. He wore his hair long, pulled back in a ponytail. She, too, had long black hair, which she wore loose and curly. They made an attractive couple, both dark and thin. She taught English. Listening to her speak, you could not detect a Danish accent. When I saw them it was usually at a vegetarian restaurant that foreigners frequented. They rarely sat together. She wore brightly colored shawls over thin shoulders. He smoked. Eventually she returned to Europe. Rumor had it she didn’t know if or when she’d return to Japan. The question of his status, then, remained. Was he married? Soon to divorce? After a few months he began seeing a Canadian woman who taught English at an elite high school in Matsumoto. One night, she told some of us the following story. The furniture maker frequently called her to ask how to spell a certain word. His English was OK, not great. But he needed to communicate in writing with clients who bought his chairs. [End Page 54] She spelled each word he asked for, including “possible.” I could hear her spelling it out in her posh accent: p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e. He thanked her and she thought that was that. There had been nothing unusual in his request. In his business, he corresponded with people from all over the world, using English, the language of international requests. A few days later, she went to his house, as she often did, and saw on the table a letter he had written to the Danish woman, his wife. The handwriting, I imagine, was neat, the spelling perfect. I want to see you as soon as possible. doors Once, on a train ride to the countryside to visit a mutual friend, Ben quizzed me on how long I’d lived in Japan. “Two years and counting,” I said. When would I leave? he asked. I said I wasn’t sure. “How is that possible?” he continued. He knew my Japanese didn’t amount to much. What was I doing here? He was finishing up a year of teaching in Japan and then it was back to his home country, Australia. For life. For good. He couldn’t imagine living in a country where he couldn’t vote, he said. I thought of what I missed—peanut butter; people laughing loudly on public transportation; my little black couch, which I’d stored in my parents’ basement along with the rest of my belongings. But I said nothing. The next weekend, I went to the restaurant whose name I could never remember. The Vegetarian Place, we called it in Matsumoto, where a lot of foreigners hung out. Mid-evening, I slipped away from friends and natto and edemame to use the restroom. As my hand slipped into the moon-shaped handle on the sliding door, it struck me—something so beautiful, I could not bear to leave. Does anyone stay in a country for a certain door handle? tables At a small kitchen table, Chieko and I talked about Snow Country. In high school, she said, she’d hated the man in the novel for having an affair when he had a wife and child back in Tokyo. But this time, reading Yasunari Kawabata’s novel in English, she was struck by how beautifully [End Page 55] written the novel is—how, from the first line, there is a boundary between imaginary and real worlds. “Have I gotten more realistic?” she asked. We talked about infidelity. Interpretation. Silence. A toleration for silence. She said...

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