Resolutions

In the Spring of 2006, Yoko and I were engaged and I had, in my diary, a countdown to the wedding date, a number that I crossed off every day when I got to work. I was working as an ALT, an Assistant Language Teacher, at a large private high school in Niigata, and when I showed this countdown to another member of staff at some point, I got the feeling that they thought this was childish in a way they couldn't quite put their finger on. Instead, they explained that it was not something a Japanese person would do. This was amusing to me, in the same way I found any judgement from Japanese high school teachers to be amusing because they seemed to not yet know the absurd truth I was just coming to realise myself, which was everything is made up — entirely made up — over time. And that despite ostensibly committing themselves to the project of internationalisation, they were all deeply conservative in the way you needed to be deeply conservative if you were a high school teacher. When I invited them to my wedding, they had a meeting to decide how much they should give me to attend after one of the teachers repeatedly asked for a price and I repeatedly told him there was no price, I just wanted to have everyone there. We both didn't believe each other, and the group decided, collectively, that the wedding price was 3000 yen, with the head of English, who helped lead this decision-making process, deciding to give 6000 yen, to differentiate himself. 

The counting down to the wedding was of course also a counting down to the end of a long run of celibacy, something I had grown less interested in or proud of, compared to when I was nineteen years old and not having sex — euphemised as a struggle or battle with sin — had been a hallmark of my personality. At 22 and then 23 and soon 24, it was beginning to feel a bit silly, and although we agreed to wait until marriage to have sex, my heart wasn't really in it conceptually. Still, the number of days I needed to wait was manageable, particularly compared to a whole lifetime of waiting and even if I didn't entirely believe in it and even if it probably didn't really matter in the end especially if we were going to end up getting married anyway, I believed enough to think it was probably a good thing to do. I knew better than to mention this to any of my co-workers as I didn't want to give them any more reason to think I was completely out of my mind. Because the truth was that I sort of was out of my mind. All-consuming desire for another person will make you do things you wouldn't normally do, or which you would warn others not to do. I was in love. 

As we prepared for marriage in the church, we had meetings with the pastor and his wife to learn about marriage. I remember very little about because it was just based on some bible verses about marriage that I had known by heart since I was seven, and because there was no talk about anything practical, particularly nothing about sex. I found this strange and was slightly uneasy about it, being basically a virgin and wondering how this was all going to sort itself out. I had received a concerned call from my parents about how a pastor in their church had told them Asian women stopped being romantic after they had kids and despite being enranged by the bald-faced racism, I was suddenly worried that maybe I hadn't considered all the potential eventualities I needed to consider. As a part of our premarital counselling, we decided we should probably also go see some American missionaries that we knew who lived a few hours away in the mountains in Karuizawa and who might, I thought, give us a different version of events, presumably with more America and less 'It's a good thing to get married' which is basically all I'd gathered from the Japanese counselling. As it turns out the American counselling must also have had nothing to do with sex, because I don't remember any of those conversations either, except them telling us about how sometimes monkeys would come through town and a car with a monkey herder would be dispatched to make sure the monkeys kept moving and didn't disturb anything. 

For the trip down to Karuizawa, we decided to take my little Nissan Alto. I got that car through a woman who worked for the same company I did and which had a paper bag of porn video VHS tapes under the passenger seat when I bought it. The car took me from primary school to primary school where I was teaching at the time, and although it was not a great car, it did the job and it was cheap to run: the reason, in the end, I thought we should take it down to Karuizawa was because it would be cheaper in terms of the petrol costs. Yoko went along with this, although I'm sure part of her knew what I would find out eventually: a Nissan Alto was not well-suited for the expressway and as I carefully maintained 80kph in the far left lane, I realised that whatever few hundred yen we were saving in taking my car was negligible in terms of the lack of safety and comfort we would have had in Yoko's Micra, a much more serious, adult car that she had because she was a serious adult with a full-time, permanent job. This situation was, however, a hallmark of that time of our relationship: my overconfident twenty-three-year-old male energy taking the lead and being whatever I thought I needed to be as a good Christian husband. On the way back from the counselling, Yoko drove a bit and did not have the same approach to the expressway and as I sat in the passenger seat, I remember saying at some point that I didn't think the car should go as fast as it was going and sure enough, about thirty minutes into the trip, the engine suddenly went from a high-pitched hum to, what I described at the time, the sound of a train locomotive, and we pulled off the expressway into the rice fields of Niigata, in search of a petrol station garage that would be open at six on Sunday evening. 

After the diagnosis from Dave about the C3 Picasso last week that it was going to need a £1,500 rebuilding of the engine, I had a series of other conversations, including with the church organist, about the nature of my problem and a growing sense I had that the symptoms of the car did not really comport with the diagnosis. The problem was almost certainly electrical, but I felt stupid saying this, first, because it reinforced ongoing stereotypes I've heard from people who were diagnosing the car based on stereotypes about Citroëns, and second, I only have a very marginal understanding of car engines and Dave, who was pretty confident that he had found the problem, has been working on them his whole life. Still, though, I got in the car on Monday and drove out to the new garage in Northfield, feeling a sort of dread that was only cemented when suddenly, inexplicably the seatbelt alarm went off when I was very much still strapped in. It went off after a minute or so and the car coughed its way to Northfield, my own stereotype about European cars growing steadily and begrudgingly. I dropped the car off with the woman at the desk and told my exasperated story, of Dave and the other garages, my frustration with the car, my inability to communicate effectively with those around me including my wife, and my desire for everything to just resolve itself without me having to make another decision. She seemed sympathetic the way that women at desks in garages are sympathetic faces of the garage: Dave too had his wife call me the week before to tell me they were closing soon, like everyone knows the garage needs an element of interpersonal communication but they can't be bothered to ask any of the men to try.

I ran the eight miles into work and just waited all day for the phone to ring, both dreading it and hoping that there could be some definitive solution, maybe that the car repairs would be worth more than the value of the car and I could put it behind me without any question that it was the right thing to do. I reviewed an article I had been putting off and met with a student. I watched YouTube videos about the war and edited one sentence of a grant bid I had been rushing to finish until it became clear we would miss the deadline and there was no reason to rush. I called at three and there was no answer. I cycled through the social media pages and called again at three-thirty with no answer and again at four with no answer, coming to accept that the problem if it was going to be resolved, would not be resolved today.

Yoko and I did, in my dying Nissan Alto, find an open place and a young man tood us that there was no chance they could look at it that night and anyway, it would have to probably be towed somewhere. The car was still running, very loudly but running, and somehow we decided, or more likely I decided and Yoko went along with it, to just head out towards Niigata City, the last 20 km because if we needed to be towed, it would be closer to the city. The car, although incredibly loud, did manage to drive fine, albeit slowly, and we didn't say anything to each other as we crept slowly towards the city, through the fields. The car made it, and Yoko drove me home in her Micra — the next day, the Nissan garage in Niigata declared the car dead, and I decided that because summer was coming and Yoko and I were marrying, I would prefer to ride my 50cc Super Cub anyway and become a one car family in July after we married. Yoko's Nissan Micra was a good car for us for the rest of the time we were in Japan. Naomi was born and there are pictures of my parents with her in the back, in her car seat, being doted on and loved. My Christian husband's leadership worked for a time until it didn't, and I realised that I actually didn't know what I was talking about, that I didn't want to be in charge, and marriage was not, as I was told, a good thing — that it could be a good thing, that the potential for it to be a good thing exists, but it was not by its nature simply a good thing. 

At four-thirty, I called the garage in Northfield again and the woman picked up the phone, apologised and said they found the fault between the sparkplug coils, a connection, something that seemed too good to be true. How much would that be to fix, I asked, and she said, it's covered in the diagnostic test, it'll be £107, but I need someone to do a safety check before I release it, and did I need it tonight. I didn't, I said, I could pick it up in the morning, and I hung up and messaged everyone to share the good news, that the stereotypes were right and the European car with the BMW collaboration engine which burned oil and was made by substandard French electrical engineers, something Japanese and British people know because of their own superior electrical system knowledge, had an electrical problem. I accepted this, finally, happily, and ran the next morning to pick the car up. I paid the £107 and had some banter with the engineer who called me young man and, when he pulled the car around, put his hand on my shoulder as he turned over the keys. The engine light was off and I nervously pulled into traffic, waiting for the light to come on again and for the inevitable failure to reappear. It did not and I got home and parked and left Yoko a message that it was fixed, and took my bike out of the shed to ride to work under my own power, with the relief that I had at least, for now, bought myself another two or three months. It doesn't need to work perfectly, or well even, I said as I recounted the drama to another colleague. For now, it just needs to work.