In Plain View. Julie Shigekuni
grotesque by Satsuki’s delicate fingers. “What are you doing here, Satsuki?”
“Where else do you shop?” She smiled demurely.
Daidai replayed the question twice before answering, her attention shifting from the whiteness of the woman’s fingers to her impressively shiny teeth. “I tried those once,” she said, still not understanding. “They’re bitter.”
“That’s because they’re for pickling!” Satsuki laughed, tossing the spiny cucumber into the batch of slender, darker green ones Daidai had been sorting through.
Satsuki gave no advanced warning before showing up the next afternoon, this time on the doorstep carrying a heavy, round stone, which she claimed to have brought with her from Japan. Where just the day before Daidai had thrown out the flowers, believing Satsuki’s stint in the apartment over, now the woman had returned with a small boulder, presenting what seemed to be yet another puzzle. Even beyond that, wasn’t it strange for a grad student to show up unannounced at her professor’s apartment? Was there a different code of etiquette in Japan, one that prevented Satsuki from understanding this?
Daidai followed Satsuki into the kitchen, where she rolled the stone onto the countertop. “I’ll need it back, but I want you to use it,” she said, blotting a line of sweat from above her lip with her tongue. Out of breath, perhaps from the stairs, still she looked lovely with her eyes alight, her skin flushed and flawless, her fingers visibly trembling.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what this is for.” Daidai turned from her observation of Satsuki to the stone.
“Its weight will speed up the pickling process.”
“Oh, of course.” Hadn’t her mother used a similar stone for pickling vegetables? Daidai recalled the exchange at Whole Foods the day before while she rummaged through the vegetable bin for the cucumbers, embarrassed to have missed her cue.
That afternoon, Satsuki demonstrated in quick, even strokes of the knife her prowess as a chef, transferring the thinly sliced cucumbers to a bowl, then mixing them with salt using her bare hands. She talked as she worked, glancing up to make eye contact when she wished to emphasize a point. The weather had turned fine in the week since the party, yet a memory of heat lingered in the kitchen.
The stated purpose of her return three days later was to check on the pickling process. Lifting the stone and the plate beneath it, she pinched a sample and declared the batch of Japanese-style pickles ready for consumption. Hiroshi arrived home from campus to the table being set for otsukemono, which was served over hot rice with a cup of genmai tea. Pleased with the meal, he ventured into the kitchen for a refill of water and returned palming the pickling stone like a football. “Where’d this come from?” he asked, apparently having not noticed that it had sat on the countertop for three days.
“I brought it with me from Japan.” The question had been asked of Daidai, but Satsuki addressed Hiroshi directly.
“Sansen ishi. Ii desu neh! My mother had a similar one.” Hiroshi held the stone at eye level, tossing it into the air a few times before turning down the hall to his office. “This one would make an ideal paperweight.”
“You can’t have it, Hiroshi,” Daidai called to her husband’s back. “It belongs to Satsuki. Can’t you see she was using it?” Daidai surprised herself with her harsh response, but she’d felt left out of the repartee between Hiroshi and his student, and of the secret knowledge of pickling stones apparently known to everyone but her.
“It’s okay, really.” Satsuki reached across the table and touched Daidai’s arm to keep her from following Hiroshi. “Hiroshi can borrow it. I don’t need it right now.”
In mid-October, halfway into the semester, Satsuki brought a gift of tea. She’d just arrived and was standing with Daidai in the foyer, explaining how she’d had the tea sent from Japan, when Hiroshi came bounding up the stairwell. Satsuki’s visit had not been well timed, the purpose of Hiroshi’s lunchtime appearance being sex, prescribed by the fertility specialist at six-hour intervals when Daidai was ovulating.
“Hiroshi and I are late for an appointment,” Daidai lied, struggling to avert an awkward moment in case Satsuki should wonder over Hiroshi’s arrival home in the middle of the day. “Could you come back tomorrow for a pot of tea?”
Satsuki clasped her hands in front of her, barely waiting for the invitation to be made before responding. “Would two o’clock be good?”
Daidai was not in the mood for sex that afternoon, nor was Hiroshi. Neither bothered to undress fully. He slid his pants down perfunctorily while she pulled her T-shirt over her head and released the clasp on her brassiere, lifting her heavy breasts to give him a good look before letting them drop. She pinched his flaccid cock, flipping it from one side to the other, deliberating on the task at hand before resigning to take him in her mouth. Alternating long strokes with light, teasing whispers, she began a private conversation with his cock, shutting him out when he writhed beneath her, issuing orders. She didn’t need his help to get what she needed from him. Let him rant about being late for class. She’d take her time, make him return with an ache and a still-fluttering heart. Besides, it would be over soon enough. No use for him to go on to someone who’d waited him out before. With the crisis inevitable, she shifted herself onto him and bore down, riding him hard until his load poured into her.
The doctor had suggested twenty minutes on her back postcoitus, which she timed while cycling her legs in the air for exercise. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Hiroshi rush to tidy himself up, wondering whether he’d run into Satsuki when he returned to campus that afternoon.
True to her word, Satsuki returned the following afternoon at two straight up to prepare a pot of the very fine tea she’d brought over the day before.
“What’s the occasion?” Daidai asked, waiting for the tea water to boil.
“No occasion,” she said. “Just an excuse to spend more time with you.”
Pouring water over a measure of leaves, Daidai breathed in the distinctly foreign, woody aroma, considering it an irony that her job at the museum had taken her all over Asia but never to Japan. “Haven’t you made friends in the program?” she asked, shaking herself from her reverie.
“I don’t find any of my fellow students particularly interesting,” Satsuki said, after appearing to give the question some thought. “I’m far more interested in what you do. Hiroshi says you’re an art curator.”
Daidai smiled her assent, volunteering nothing more, wondering what had prompted Hiroshi to discuss her work with his student.
“What is your area of specialty?”
“Postwar art made by Japanese living on the West Coast. You’re familiar with wartime internment, I assume?”
“Of course.” Satsuki narrowed her eyes, as if homing in on an object in the distance. “This subject is very interesting to me. Were your parents imprisoned during the war?”
“No. My mother’s family still lived in Japan at the time. And my father is Irish,” Daidai explained. Having tried to avoid the subject of her work, she was irritated by Satsuki’s probing.
“But this was Hiroshi’s parents’ experience?”
“Yes,” Daidai said, believing she’d hit upon the underlying reason for Satsuki’s interest. “Hiroshi’s parents were both interned. They were children at the time. I’m interested in the generation that was born after the war. Not enough is known about the experience of people like Hiroshi. But I believe the trauma is as pervasive as lung damage caused by secondhand smoke, damage that began decades ago. It needs to be studied.”
“Japan is so different.” Satsuki shook her head. “We are an almost entirely homogenous society.”
“What about Japan’s treatment of non-Japanese?”
Satsuki shrugged. “I’ve never had non-Japanese friends.”
This