January 7, 2003
Happy New Year. Haruna recently took me to her parents' house to meet them for the first time. Introducing me as her boyfriend is a big deal, it seems. I wanted to make a favorable impression. Her mother had periodically given homemade baked goods to Haruna to give to me, but I had never before met her mother in person.
So, on the day of the big meeting, Haruna drove to pick me up from the Shitahara train station in the late afternoon. She was waiting outside and I hopped-in her car.
"Hi darling." She beamed. "I baked you a cake, and it's waiting at my parents' house."
"Really?" I asked. Another cake? Not five days earlier, Haruna had baked me a poppyseed cake. "That is so incredible of you." I kissed her forehead. Yeah, I know. All saccharine and honey, aren't we?
But I tell ya, Haruna is a dreamlike girlfriend. The following is not embellishment, I am telling the truth: on weekends, she will come to my apartment dressed in her prettiest outfits and she will cook really good meals for me. And after we finish dinner, she will cuddle in my lap and ask me to get naked with her. "Please, please take me to bed?" She will ask, caressing my hair and drizzling kisses on my face. "I wanted you so badly last night. And I want you right now..."
I am not making this shit up! She is totally like that! Every weekend!
As I have said emphatically so SO many times before-- North American chicks are WORTHLESS! Stay away from 'em like the plague!
But anyway, I was carrying a small flower arrangement to give as a gift to her mother.
"I hope your mom likes this." I remarked. "Meeting the parents is always a little bit stressful. Your dad doesn't collect katanas, does he?"
"No, he doesn't. Don't worry. I was a bit nervous to introduce you because... well... they are a little unsure about having their daughter infatuated with a foreigner."
"Ah, I can understand. Some of us are very unscrupulous. I used to run a Ponzi scheme, you know. And I also killed a hobo down by the railway tracks. The police would never search for a missing hobo." I mumbled. Couldn't hide the body in the long grass, that's plain stupid. Had to stuff it way back into the corrugated drainage pipe. That night, the raccoons ate his face-off. Still can't get that smell out of my nostrils. In some dreams, I still see that skull grinning-out of the pipe. Licked-clean. Those empty eye-sockets glaring at me. All accusational-like. Oh God, but that smell...
Haruna's cheerful voice knocked me-out of my attempt to conceptualize a madman character for a short novel I'd like to write one day...
"One of my cousins married a half-Japanese, half-Peruvian man she met in college. And they got divorced after a few years. So they are a little uneasy for me."
"I see. Well... I guess I'll be careful then. Don't want to give foreigners a bad name."
Married.
Married?
Hm.
Who said anything about marriage? I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.
Ahem.
Anyway, we arrived at her parent's house. It was not huge by American standards, but it was certainly very nice by Japanese standards. A tile Japanese-style roof, two stories, with a rather spacious garden on one side. Really charming.
She parked in front of the garage, and we walked through the walled garden. I was agog at the meticulously-manicured plants. Terraced bushes. Stone lanterns. Gravel walkway with granite steppingstones. I can tell that her parents really pour a lot of effort into it.
"Sugoi kirei!" I raised an eyebrow. "Very meticulous work."
"Tell that to my father." Haruna remarked as we walked-in and took-off my shoes.
Her parents came-out into the hallway, and Haruna introduced me. They exclaimed salutations.
"Yoroshiku onegaishimasu!" I bowed and offered the flowers to her mother.
Immediately, we were taken into their living-room. I tried to make as much small talk as my limited Japanese allowed.
Her mother was a matronly-looking housewife in her early sixties, but without a single strand of gray hair. Her father was a wiry, balding man with a rough voice, I could tell he had done quite a bit of tobacco over the years. I was half a foot taller than both of them.
We sat-down and had cups of obligatory green tea with cake. Her dad works as an engineer at one of the largest auto makers in Japan, but I won't name which one. He designs die-cast machinery which stamps-out transmission cases. He retired three years ago, but went back to work this year as a consultant when the company decided to retool their assembly line.
Her mother keeps a tidy and orderly house, I could see. Naturally, I praised the garden. The dad talked for ten straight minutes about sculpting the hedges and how he needs a ladder to trim the top of their persimmon trees.
I brought some pictures of my home back in the U.S. to show. Much to Haruna's horror, they suddenly reciprocated by showing me pictures of Haruna as a child.
"Naiiiiiii!" She squealed and put her hands over her eyes. "So embarrassing!"
"Aww, you're so cute!!!" I teased as I picked an image of Haruna as an infant. "In this one, your hair is sticking-up like there's a million volts shooting-through you!" She grabbed it from me and stuffed it into the folds of her sweater, pretending to pout. I selected one from when she was in kindergarten.
"Are you picking your nose in this one?" I joked.
"I was scratching my nose! I had an itch!" Mortified, she grabbed that one away from me, too.
After an hour of chitchat, we went-out to a really fantabulous restaurant.
Wow, what a great meal it was! Plenty of seafood: abalone, squid, various roes, tuna, salmon, yellowtail, scallop, bream and octopus. And I ate some sort of sea-snail that I can't recall the name of. And shrimp the size of bananas. Translucent slices of fugu were served, they were arranged on the plate in the form of a crane. (Yes, fugu- the poisonous blowfish that can kill you within hours if the chef doesn't prepare it correctly. It was somewhat bland and flavorless.) One of the vegetable dishes had flecks of shredded gold foil sprinkled on top. And there was plenty of sake for all.
It had to rank among the top ten dinners of my life. And I didn't die from fugu-poison. Obviously.
Anyway, long story short: I think the first meeting with the parents went well. They were very sweet, and they were enthusiastic about meeting me. Or, at least, they faked enthusiasm really well.
At the end of the evening, Haruna drove me home. She told me that she thought her parents liked me very much. I could tell she was really happy how the evening went. And when we got to my apartment, I kissed her long and hard. I stroked her cheek with my fingertips.
"You are so gorgeous." I whispered.
Snuggling into me, she whispered back: "Please, can we go to bed? You look so sexy right now..."
(God, I love the women here...)