The Fourth String. Janet Pocorobba

      I found Sensei in the classified ads of an English magazine, under “Learning” or “Arts,” I can’t remember which, as she used both, depending which brought more students that week. Free lessons in shamisen and singing! Take something home with you from your stay in Japan! That it was so small and sandwiched between other ads made it no less extraordinary, the most radical word being “free.” This was usually reserved for old futons or space heaters. And the appearance of the word “shamisen,” appearing nowhere else in the hip contemporary magazine, was so unusual that it prompted a friend to cut it out and send it to me. She had circled the ad and written on a Post-It: “I thought you might want to check this out.”

      So she remembered, I thought. The living room of our dorm at Smith College, in the fall of 1985, our freshman year. I was playing the grand piano in the living room, appreciating the fine keys and action. She was sitting on a sofa in wraparound shades, swinging her room keys around the tall neck of a Rolling Rock beer. On her feet were black canvas high top sneakers, spiking up from her skull was a prickly blond Mohawk. By the end of four years, she had a bob, an art history major, and a job teaching English in Japan. She’d married a Japanese and now worked in an art gallery.

      “No matter what you see, it’s Japanese underneath,” she had told me over tempura on my first outing to Tokyo, where she pointed out that energy drinks contained nicotine, and a bottle of something pearly pink in the supermarket was squid poo.

      But at times, she confessed her loneliness, like at a shrine festival that summer, when she gestured to the families in cotton kimono strolling past. “This is when you know you’ll never fit in.”

      I couldn’t imagine making a life in such a stark, drab place, such a scrambled city, full of ugly buildings like the school where I worked in Odawara, made of cinderblock, with its plain classrooms where I could not even leave a pair of pumps overnight because of the rules.

      Odawara was known for pickled plums, trick wooden boxes, and fish paste. From the veranda of our apartment, you could see its hills ringed in mist, the sparkling sea, the wing of a reconstructed castle roof. On the streets downtown, electricity ran over ground in thick cables trained up like wisteria. The sky was always inflamed, like a hot puffy sore.

      I had come to Odawara with my boyfriend Larry, whom I’d met in graduate school in Chicago a few years before. Larry was Southern, soft-spoken, shy. In Japan he refused to bow. “It’s undemocratic,” he said. I wanted to know how deep to bow, and to whom. He had trouble folding his long lanky frame under lintels and tabletops, and struggled with his cowboy boots in genkan entryways. One boy in his class, Tetsu, pointed excitedly to his steel-tipped toes and said, “Dirty Harry.”

      Two hours south and west of Tokyo, Odawara offered little to do aside from work. I planned outings to nearby temples and shrines, but sometimes it was just as fascinating walking to the stationery store, passing the train station where an old woman grilled skewers of meat on a charcoal hibachi and high school girls ringed their calves with glue to get the perfect slouch on their socks. At a gas station, eight men and women in green jumpsuits alighted on the entering car, as swiftly and intently as dragonflies, to fill its tank, wash its windows, check the tires, and refill fluids, all in one choreographed sweep, then lined up and bowed as the car sped away.

      How to explain that these moments of mystery were here before Sensei, and that they only increased after, not to be solved but to be known in all their unknownness?

      Larry was everything I could want in a life partner, and this wasn’t not on my mind. I was twenty-eight and had given myself until thirty-one to get married, thirty-three for my first child, though I had no idea where those numbers had come from. We were good friends, he was smart and liked to talk, he was trusting and gentle.

      These were all good reasons but on the plane over I was already leaning into the window, writing in my journal that I didn’t want to be pressured into commitment by a “middle-class spinster specter.” I envied a girl in overalls sprawled across three seats, dozing. “I don’t know if I ever want to get married,” I wrote that first year in Japan.

      In the corner of our bedroom sat two backpacks filling rapidly with travel guides, maps, and paperbacks for a trip to Thailand in December, when our teaching contract was up.

      At night I wrote stories of invented languages, weird occurrences, a haunted apartment. And the strangest of all, a vision I had on the eve of leaving for Japan: a woman abroad wearing the high collar and long skirts of Victorian dress, sitting at a desk writing letters. She was a friend to the “natives” and spoke their language perfectly. She defended their cause and used her power to earn them equality and protection, to preserve their endangered culture.

      I told no one of this vision. It was an Orientalist fantasy, a colonial embarrassment, this portrait of a woman who was utterly and capably alone.