There are a lot of things I don’t like talking about. Leaving Japan is one of them.
I didn’t write about that in this blog and I don’t plan to, but the short version is that currently I’m on a plane back to America. If I don’t go back, UNC won’t give me my spring semester credits. Rachael and Massiel have already left on the same grounds. We weren’t given a choice so much as an ultimatum, as our programs were suspended and staying in Japan would have cut ties between us and our universities altogether.
And so here I am, typing this blog post on a Delta flight. Incidentally, Grey is sitting about six rows behind me. We didn’t know we were on the same flight home until about two days ago, and even though we couldn’t snag seats next to each other, a stewardess still came up to me with a tray of chicken and the message, “Your friend asked me to give this to you.” I turned around. Grey was looking at me. We fist-bumped in midair. (Why yes, we are those people yelling across rows to talk to each other. Between us and the really obnoxious two-year-old, it’s a pretty lively flight.)
I have about six blog posts in the making, because I have too much to write down and not enough patience to sit and finish one without starting another. The one I’m about to write, though, is pretty important.
This is about our last night at Daikoku.
If you’ve been following my blog you know that we absolutely love that place, but the fact is that a lot goes on behind the scenes that I don’t write down mainly because the feelings don’t translate. If I told you all that we walked into a tachinomi (standing bar, essentially) and found ourselves caught in a whirlwind of the most personable and hilarious boys alive, it wouldn’t sound real, right? But if you were with us you’d get it. We joke all the time about how our lives in Japan have been a shojo manga (and it’s not over yet if we can help it), but that might actually be the truth.
We’ve been to that place at least once every week for the past three months. We were regulars, favorite customers, those crazy loud gaijin, the two Asians and the ones with weird hair colors, those exchange students from Nanzan, and—as Owner called us just last night—‘a group of good kids.’ That’s what we were to them, but Daikoku to us is a mess of adjectives and feelings that we’re not going to be able to place for a couple of weeks yet. Months, maybe. Or maybe we’ll never figure it out and stay in this wonderfully conflicted range of emotions until the day we see those boys again.
I could pick a few out of the staff that mean a lot more to us than the others—a certain one with a jaw and a reputation for being the strangest, yet most endearing, boy; another one who is a box of contradictions and who showed up to A Special Hanami; one more whom we refer to as Mr. Perfect. And then the rest: the one with all the women who turned out to be a nerd, the absolutely insane (but you’d expect it) one, Owner, the one with the fake boob who thinks he’s funny. (And yes, we do know all of their names! But if I listed them this paragraph would be miles long, and then I’d have to get into their birthdays and their hobbies…and I don’t have space for that.)
Daikoku may just be the name of the bar, but collectively it’s a bunch of boys who have the most distinct of personalities. And we’ve come to love those personalities in the most comfortable of ways. They’ve cheered us up with smiles, with single words, with dumb faces. We’ve cried in that bar and they’ve helped us through it (in the dorkiest of ways—let me just say it included red shoes, all the glasses of water ever, an inappropriate question, reassuring words from Mr. Perfect and “Hakuna matata!” from a not-so Mr. Perfect). And when we went there for the last time, they finally let us know that we mean as much to them as they do to us.
So here’s what happened.
As soon as we all found out we had to return back to America, we told each member of Daikoku individually and they each responded with a genuinely downcast expression and some variation of 「寂しくなるね」, which basically means “it’ll be sad.” We had to tell Yukki twice because apparently he didn’t understand the first time or something like that, according to the explanation he gave when I said “I TOLD YOU THIS, YUKKI, LIKE TWO DAYS AGO. YOU SAID IT WOULD BE SAD! DID YOU FORGET ALREADY!?” That poor boy. “I don’t think I understood,” he said. We all sighed. (It’s a good thing he’s cute. And a really good drummer.)
When we told Owner, he said to come on the 6th—Massiel’s last day before her flight.
“We’ll have a going-away party,” he said, and gave us a thumbs-up.
If we had the choice, we wouldn’t have had to have a going-away party until May. But we couldn’t do anything about it at that point—しょうがないor しかたがない, as the Japanese say (it basically means ‘you can’t help it’). So we told him that yes, we would definitely be there on the 6th. I’m pretty sure that even if he hadn’t said anything we would have still come on the 6th.
On that night—a Wednesday—I’d gone back home to change because my shoe had broken earlier that day and I needed to change into a new pair, so the plan was that I’d meet Massiel and Grey at Daikoku (Rachael had already been in China for some time; she was supposed to come back to Nagoya but couldn’t anymore). It had already been a really stressful day; I’d been running around since morning doing last-minute shopping and before that I’d been lying in bed for hours writing letters. I don’t often write letters, so I feel that when I do I have to make them count. Because of all of that—and especially since I was writing the group letter to Daikoku as well as a certain someone’s which I will talk about later—thrown together with the fact that I didn’t get much sleep and that my shoe had broken in the middle of a Tokyu Hands department store where I wandered around for ages trying to find envelopes, I wasn’t having what you would call the best day.
I was on the train to Kanayama, where Daikoku is, when Massiel sent me the following text: “As a last act, Shino has infuriated me.”
Shino is the one we’ve connected with the most. We all went to Nanzan, but it isn’t really about that because he wasn’t around for our semester (he just went back this week). But from the very start he’s been the easiest one to talk to and get along with, and also the easiest to bully into speaking English (“SHINO YOU’RE TAKING THE TOEIC, YOU HAVE TO PRACTICE! SPEAK ENGLISH!”). He was the only one of the whole Daikoku staff we had outside communication with (we didn’t have his phone number but we did have his phone mail, which is the big thing in Japan anyway), and even if he wasn’t the best at replying it didn’t matter because we learned so much about him that way and also discovered that he is possibly the funniest, most adorable (in that ‘oh honey you’re so dumb’ way) person we’ve met in Japan to this day. Despite the fact that we have a language barrier and that American and Japanese humor is very different, we managed to break all that down with Shino. In my letter to him I told him—among other things—that he is my favorite. And it’s the truth.
As soon as I got that text, though, the anxiety pains in my stomach grew worse. Shino has tendencies to make you wonder where the hell his brain is, but he’d never done anything to infuriate one of us before.
I asked her why.
“He left for band practice,” Massiel replied.
My first thought: oh, Shino, why? On our very last day, too! He’d promised us that he would be there on the 6th; the day before when he, Yuuta and the three of us went to an izakaya he’d pointedly said またあした—“see you tomorrow.”
When I walked into Daikoku, Massiel simply looked at me and shook her head.
“He came in,” she said, “did work in the back for 20 minutes and then left for band practice. He told us he’d be back by 10:30.”
It was, at that point, about 8. I didn’t mind waiting, but we had to leave at 10:50 to catch the last train. I was about ready to cry.
And Massiel knew it. “I asked if he would wait for you,” she said. “But he said he couldn’t.” The look on her face could have killed baby birds in mid-flight. “I made him feel really bad. He just put his hand on my shoulder and said sorry, and that he would be back by 10:30.”
“Shino,” I said, and his name is a familiar one on my tongue, but not in the way I said it at that moment. “Shino, really?”
But there was nothing we could do but wait. (And in my case, send him a text that said, ‘BAND PRACTICE!?!?’ in English.)
“I need a drink,” I mumbled, because I did. Luckily Ryou-kun, aka Mr. Perfect (because he is) was working and was in top form with the smiles and took my order for me.
He also reminded us that it was our last time there, which we really did not need at that moment.
“Oh, Ryou-kun,” Massiel groaned. “Please don’t remind us.”
He made the cutest face and took out the Tupperware of raw liver.
It was the third, and the last, time he would ever make us free liver sashimi.
But it wasn’t time to cry yet, because we were just angry at the world and not exactly sad (that would be later; oh, you will see). We had our drinks and stood around talking just like we’ve always done at Daikoku, except this time was different and we didn’t quite know what to do about that.
Finally Massiel suggested that we give Ryou-kun his letter. It was in a big, baby blue manila envelope—the one I had trekked all around Tokyu Hands looking for. He needed a big envelope because we’d made him a present; we took the three songs from his band’s second EP and translated them from Japanese into English. It was HARD, because Japan doesn’t like to use subjects (“What is he talking about? You? Me? The cat?”), and also because apparently Ryou-kun likes to be difficult as we even took some problem lines to our translation teacher who also had no idea what the boy was trying to say. But we did our best.
“This will make us feel better,” Massiel insisted as we crouched under the bar (Grey was also crouching in order to finish a drawing that we couldn’t let any of the Daikoku staff see until she was finished). “Because it’s Ryou-kun.”
“And he’s perfect,” I said. “What did you write in the letter?”
“That we think he’s really talented and one of the kindest people ever, and that whenever we listen to his songs we’ll think of Japan,” she said. “And also, when he plays Tokyo Dome to invite us.”
Because one day that man and his band will make it to Tokyo Dome. They’re already apparently on the Oricon website, which is equivalent to the US Billboard charts. We didn’t know that until he told us, but rest assured that if Japanese people gave hugs we would be climbing over that bar and throwing our arms around him in less than a second.
When he walked by our spot, Massiel called him over and presented the envelope.
“It’s our present to you,” I said, and his face exploded into the most surprised of sparkles.
“For me?” he said, and took the envelope from us. “Can I open it?”
We nodded, because if we’d said anything at that moment it would have been something along the lines of YES RYOU-KUN OPEN IT AND SEE HOW MUCH WE LOVE YOUUUU.
He opened the letter and pulled out the lyric sheets. I told him, as he skimmed them over, that we’d translated the Humanism Portrait EP, and he had the biggest smile on his face.
“Wow,” he said, “I’ll sing it in English next time!”
“Uh,” we said. “Please don’t do that, it sounds much better in Japanese.”
He laughed, then proceeded to take the letter out of the envelope and read it.
As soon as he was done (Japanese people read really fast, as I learned from that night), he looked up at us and thanked us about six times.
Then he looked conflicted.
“Ah, this is bad,” he said, and squeezed his eyes shut. “This is bad!” (Yabai!) “I feel like I’m going to cry….oh no, this is bad. I seriously might cry.”
While my heart was chipping into little pieces, I turned to Massiel. She also looked like she was going to cry.
“But it’s too early,” Ryou-kun said then, and hugged the envelope, lyrics and letter to his chest. “It’s too early to cry.”
“Two more hours,” I said, and pointed to the clock. It was about 9; we were going to leave at 11.
“Yeah, two more hours,” Ryou-kun agreed. Then he gave us one of his perfect grins (we swear they cure the infruenza). “Thank you again!”
He then went into the back to put his envelope away, and I told Massiel 50 times that if Ryou-kun said it was too early to cry, then it was too early to cry. She laughed, so crisis #1 was averted, and then Ryou-kun came back out and told us that he was having a live with his band tomorrow and that he would be mentioning us and how much we moved him by giving him that letter and working so hard on his lyrics.
“I’m really touched,” he said. “I’ll be sure to talk about you, because it’s really sad that you’re leaving…ah, this is bad…but I’m really happy that you gave that to me.”
Again, if Japanese people were okay with hugs we would have been bawling and all over that man in a second. But he was still smiling, which helped a lot.
“But it’s too early to cry!” he finished, and then went back to work.
And Massiel was right. We felt so much better than we had an hour before.
So much better, in fact, that when the lights went out we had no idea what was going on. Usually when that happens someone is having a birthday at Daikoku, or it’s another special occasion like a graduation.
“Whose birthday is it?” Massiel wondered aloud.
“I don’t know…” I said, but I had an inkling and my mind was going wait—could it be? But—!
It was.
Ryou-kun walked out of the back with a cake in his hand. Suddenly, one of those sad power ballads that sing of good-byes came on the loudspeaker. And he was starting a speech.
I can’t remember it to save my life because I was too busy being the most shocked person on that earth. Massiel was crying her eyes out (it clearly wasn’t too early anymore), and Grey was just as surprised as I was. I do remember Ryou-kun saying to everyone else that we were going back to America and that it was honestly going to be lonely without us (that’s the Japanese equivalent of saying ‘we’ll miss you,’; that phrase doesn’t exist in the language). He thanked us about fifty billion times, said a bunch of other words that were just making me tear up, and then—and then—
“This isn’t goodbye,” he said. “It’s ‘see you again.’”
He then produced a lighter, flicked it on and asked me to blow it out. I still don’t know why our see-you-again cake required a “candle,” but I blew it out anyway, and everyone in the bar clapped.
If we could have said anything at that moment it would have been a jumble of tears and nonsense. I think we managed to get out just as many thank yous as Ryou-kun had said, and he and the rest of the staff kept saying no, thank you, and we just kept on with our shocked faces and our exploding hearts.
The cake was strawberry and there was a chocolate placard that had our names written on it in katakana. After all that effort of getting them to remember our names, they actually, properly did.
“I can’t eat this,” Massiel said, as we took 50 pictures of the thing.
“Our names are on it,” I said. That was it for me. I didn’t think I could love that place any more than I did, but people surprise you. “They bought this for us. They turned out the lights. There’s sad music playing.”
What none of us said, but were definitely all thinking: they love us.
The next thing to come out of the back room were four bottles of jasmine plum wine, which were handed to us with the explanation that they were a present from Keisuke (Shino’s real name). The truth was, however, that we’d poked and prodded the kid into getting us our own bottles. :)
For the next ten minutes we took pictures of the cake and the wine and with the cake and the wine, and we then asked Ryou-kun (I make it sound like he was the only person working; he wasn’t, the others were just busy with other customers) if we could take a picture with the staff. He said yes, but in a little bit.
“Keisuke’s not here yet,” was the reason.
We all rolled our eyes, but we were now in an uplifted (and yet still so sad) a mood to be angry at him anymore. At that point we just wanted him there.
“Gosh, Keisuke,” Massiel said, “who the hell goes to band practice while this is happening?”
“I GUESS we can wait for Shino,” I said, and Ryou-kun laughed at us.
And then things got even better. We were getting the rest of the letters in order, Grey was still finishing her drawing (caricatures of the whole Daikoku staff), and I didn’t even notice when Shino came back in at 10, thirty minutes earlier than he’d promised. I was leaning against the pillar talking to Grey and Massiel when I turned and saw a jaw (he has a big jaw, y’all; and though I love him to bits it’s the easiest thing to poke fun of).
I waved. It was a reflex from my heart, which had jumped out of my chest and onto the floor. “Hi,” I said (in English) and waved.
He waved back and walked into the back room, then came back out and settled himself on the wall by us.
“Shino,” I said flatly. “BAND PRACTICE?”
“SORRY,” he said, in his accented English that we have gotten so used to hearing. “VERY SORRY.”
We probably gave him grief for about ten minutes, because it was hilarious, and then finally Massiel and I handed him our letters.
Now, about this letter.
Like I said, I don’t handwrite letters often because I find them A Really Big Deal. Handwritten letters mean something; clearly you have to spend a lot of time on them and they have to really be taken care of if you want to keep them forever. And the person writing the letter can’t just type and go; if you have something important to say you have to think about it and how you want to phrase it before it goes down on paper. Because if you mess up, you’re starting over completely.
I spent about an hour on Shino’s letter. I had a lot to say, and it took three pages’ worth of paragraphs in both Japanese and English to get my message across.
He read both of our letters at lightning speed and thanked us, but Massiel and I didn’t believe that he’d actually read the English parts and understood them, mainly because we’d watched his eyes totally skim over the non-Japanese paragraphs.
“No, I read them!” he insisted. “I swear!”
“NO YOU DIDN’T SHINO,” Massiel said, because again: it is our past time to give this boy grief.
“Okay, fine,” I said, and pointed to one of the English paragraphs in my letter. ”What does this say?”
He got that part, at least, and summarized it in Japanese.
“And this?” I pointed to the next paragraph.
He got that one too.
Then to the important part. The sentence was, in neatly written English: “Thank you for everything, Shino. If I had to say whether or not I like you, it would be yes. But that’s a secret, which means YOU DON’T TELL ANYONE” (with ‘you don’t tell anyone’ underlined three times in red).
This was the one he had trouble with. Which was obvious, because had he understood it his reaction would have been much different.
“Thank you for everything,” he mumbled, reading and squinting at the paper. “If I had to say…whether or not….”
At this point he looked up.
“I only get it a little,” he said in Japanese.
“Yeah, I can tell,” I said. If I had felt so inclined (what am I talking about, we all want to do this to him) I would have smacked the boy upside the head.
He blinked. “What does ‘whether or not’ mean?”
Massiel looked at me with this face that clearly said ‘are you going to confess to him in the middle of a crowded bar’ mixed with another expression that read ‘this boy, I will punch him in the face one day.’ I shook my head.
“Nevermind,” I told him. “I’ll explain later.”
From there all I can remember is a lot of laughter, a lot of Shino and the throbbing background feeling that in about an hour I was going to have to say good-bye to this place and these boys and that boy. We all knew it, too. So I’m glad he was there to distract us, and distract us he did, at least for a half hour—we taught him the English phrase ‘the truth hurts,’ which he kept using whenever we made fun of him (i.e. A LOT). When we started gushing to the staff about Shota, whom we have swooned over more than once, we ended up ranking the most beautiful of Daikoku boys.
Shota was clearly at the top.
Ryou-kun was a little under.
And then in my case, the gap between Ryou-kun and Shino was so large Shino’s ranking was on the floor. (Massiel had ranked Yuuta 3rd. No one is surprised.)
But Shino was aghast. “WHY AM I DOWN HERE?” he demanded, and practically hit the floor.
I told the boy to shush.
“OUCH,” Shino said, and grabbed his heart. “THE TRUTH HURTS.”
This adorable thing carried on in a similar vein for all the other times I told him to shush, which was a lot. I also elbowed in him the gut more than once when we were taking a picture and he decided he wanted to make a stupid face.
I wasn’t having that. “SHINO, STOP ITTTTTT.” Elbow, elbow. Jab, jab.
“THE TRUTH HURTS!” And the boy pretended to double over in pain.
Other things: we talked about him visiting America and said he had to come in March for our spring break/his long break or at least during the winter so we could see him; there was a pinky promise involved but I can’t remember what it was about—I highly suspect it was a ploy on Massiel’s part so that he and I could link pinkies. Also, one of the other girl customers stumbled over, clearly drunk, and asked Shino what the word ‘ejaculate’ (in English) meant. (I find that people are always curious of that word no matter what the language is.) Of course the kid had no idea so he asked us very innocently; I pulled it up on my dictionary, showed it to him, and he gave it one look, laughed in that oh my kind of way, shut it and handed it back to me. He then told the customer to ‘stop talking’ and when we asked him what it was in Japanese, plaintively said ‘you don’t need to know that.’
A little before it was time for us to leave, they all went into the back room and started messing with a Polaroid camera. They do this a lot—the general messing-around thing, that is, so we didn’t really pay much attention to it until a few minutes later Ryou-kun, Yuuta and Shino came out of the back holding a stack of Polaroids and some pictures of the staff that they’d taken off their bulletin board.
They were for us, of course, and I’m not sure how I kept myself from crying—oh wait, yes I do. Ryou-kun had spread the Polaroids and pictures out on the counter and asked us to take them home, so we were about to have one of those moments where you realize everything is coming to an end…
…Until Shino butted in.
He sidled over and proceeded to flip each picture upside down so that it was basically a lottery.
“Choice, choice!” he said in English, and then laughed.
I shoved him aside with all the affection I could muster. “SHINO, NO,” I said, and we all kind of batted at him. “SSSSSH!”
“What’s ‘sssh?’ That’s weird,” he whined, now pushed out of the way. “You’re so cold!”
And in the end I ended up taking his Polaroid home with me. (No one is surprised.) I also snagged Shota’s. Good choices, if I do say so myself (even though I haven’t looked at them since then because I just—I can’t, yet). There was also a photo of a bunch of them bowling with ‘Thank you! See you again!’ written on the back, which Grey got though she later gave it to Massiel.
Remember when I said we had to leave at 10:50 so we could catch the last train on time? It was already 10:55 by this time, and Grey decided that she was just going to sleep at Massiel’s house so we didn’t have to leave until later (the ‘last train’ depends on where you’re going to; each destination has a different time and since Grey lives the farthest out hers is the earliest).
So since we had time we bought the staff a round of drinks. I say it like we decided to do this on a whim, but Massiel explained earlier that she had taken out a 10,000 yen bill from the ATM for a reason.
Mostly everyone on the staff had a beer, except for Shino, who asked for a Coke because he was driving—GOOD KID. Except we’d forgotten about that and, once again, gave him grief for working at a bar and yet not ordering alcohol.
“DRIVE,” he explained, and gripped an imaginary steering wheel. “I’m driving home.”
And we were proud of him.
If anything came between the round of drinks and the crying, I can’t remember, but it doesn’t really matter anyway. It can’t compare to the fact that Ryou-kun started tearing up and talking, still, about how much he felt like crying, or that Shino put his fingers between his eyes and made a scrunchy face because he didn’t want to cry.
“What are you doing?” Massiel asked him. Well, I mean. It looked like he had a sinus headache.
“I am very sad,” Shino said in English, and part of me died.
We took pictures with ALL OF THEM: individually, in pairs, in groups and with three different cameras. If they minded, they didn’t say anything (the only thing I pretty much heard during that entire time was Yuppe screaming about furniture in the background. Don’t ask me for an explanation because I’ve been wondering for ages and still don’t know). And if they did mind we probably wouldn’t have stopped.
Then it was time to leave.
Shino, Ryou-kun and Yuuta showed us out. It was fitting, for our last time.
We said a lot of good-byes. We said a lot of good-byes. And we were told to come back someday, to definitely come back someday, because they would be waiting.
Then I told Shino, “Okay, so about that letter.”
He looked at me expectantly.
I bit the bullet. “’Whether or not’ means,” I explained slowly in careful Japanese so as not to totally embarrass myself, “if I had to say I liked you, Shino, it would be yes, I do.”
Later that night I was told he had a look of shock on his face, but I couldn’t really tell because I was too busy trying to keep myself from bursting into fifteen-year-old fireworks. All I remember is him turning a little pink and mumbling something that went into one of my ears and spiraled out the other in a fit of pink smoke.
Massiel had also asked that I confess for her. So I pointed to her—“And Massiel”—and then Yuuta—“Yuuta.” There didn’t really need to be a verb.
Ryou-kun thought we were a mixture of hilarity and cuteness. Shino pointed to him and asked us, “What about Ryou-kun?”
We were too high on adrenaline to give a proper answer, which would have been “All of us, because you are Mr. Perfect.” But we were silent instead, which made him laugh. In the end we told him that it was just fine that he wasn’t any of our 好きな人s (object of affection, basically) because he had a really pretty girlfriend.
And then, after another round of embarrassed good-byes, we walked down that flight of steps for our last time in a long time…
…And Grey and I proceeded to run right into the giant Daikoku sign.
The three of them laughed so hard I’m sure it hurt. It was, in a word, appropriate. As Grey said later, we’d left them as we’d always been around them: drunk (Grey) and in love (Massiel and me).
Then we walked down that familiar strip of sidewalk, past the window of Daikoku, past the hostess bar, past the Family Mart and the CoCo’s Curry and the izakayas, and cried.
But this night isn’t over yet.
We hit the station at around 11:30, which put us at 20 minutes to get to Yagoto before Massiel’s last train. That would have been doable had it not been for the fact that NONE of the trains were going to Yagoto. They were all stopping at stations before that one, which we’d never seen happen before, but then again we’d never been at Kanayama station so late.
The fact remained, though, that we had no idea how to get home.
So we asked Shino to drive us.
Ever since we learned that Shino had a license and a car (which isn’t as common for Japanese students as it is for Americans) we used to joke about the kid driving us home whenever we were tired and didn’t want to walk to the station/take the subway somewhere. It was essentially us whining, “SHINO, DRIVE US HOOOOME.”
And that he did.
After Massiel sent him an e-mail explaining that we were going to miss the last trains and couldn’t get home, he didn’t reply for about ten minutes (causing us to break down into choruses of “SHINO NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO SIMPLY STARE AT YOUR PHONE AND DO NOTHING”) but when he did it was a very punctual, “Okay, I understand! Give me your phone number!”
I was on the other side of the platform trying to figure out if I could somehow make it back to my dorm when Grey called me to tell me Massiel was on the phone with Shino and that he was going to drive us home.
“Are you serious?” My heart was in my throat.
“We think so,” she said, and I forgot all about trains and getting home. I sprinted off the platform.
When I found the two of them, Massiel was on the phone with Shino telling him we couldn’t get home. After she hung up, she looked at me and said he would pick us up from the station.
I wasn’t sure this was really happening. In fact, I would be thinking that for the entire night and most of the next day. I was also wondering how I was going to sanely get into Shino’s car after I had confessed to him not even an hour before this moment.
We ambled outside to the back of the station, not really sure where he was going to pick us up or where he was going to take us—initially Massiel had just said Yagoto, but by that time the trains had stopped running altogether. It was close to midnight. We were trapped.
That is, until the black Toyota Porte rolled up and honked its horn at us.
“Is that him?” I was experiencing a wide range of emotions, most of which made me want to throw myself on the kid in pure gratitude. Or, alternatively, just throw up. “Did he just honk at us? Is that a Toyota Porte?”
“That’s his momma’s car,” Grey said, and we all agreed.
He pulled up in front of the taxis and we began apologizing even before the door had slid open. If I had ever said such a long verse of ‘sorrysorrysorrysorry’ before in my life, not including the Super Junior song, I didn’t remember it. We were a pack of three girls bowing to the open door of a Toyota Porte, and it must have been the most amusing thing to Shino, because he laughed at us.
But then he was also the kindest person on the earth at that moment. “It’s perfectly fine,” he said. “Get in.”
Massiel made to get in the front seat.
“Get in the back,” I mumbled in what I hoped was unintelligible English to non-native speakers.
She raised her eyebrows at me. “You sure?”
“Yessss,” I hissed behind my circle scarf. It was wound over my mouth and it would stay that way for the next hour until I got home. “Get in the back.”
We kept on with the “Shino, we’re so sorry!”s and “Thank you so much”s for the next fifteen minutes and embarrassed the boy so much that he could only shake his head and tell us it was fine, just fine, that he had left home to come pick us up at Kanayama station. I didn’t know this until later, but the fact that he’d already gotten home and then left to come pick us up in our time of trouble actually almost made me cry. I owe him so much. We all do.
Anyway, so we piled in and he looked at me and asked if this was the first time we’d ridden in a car since we’d been in Japan.
“No,” I said, voice still muffled behind my scarf.
If he thought the situation was awkward, he didn’t let on. He was himself. And I liked it that way.
He said that for the meantime he would drive us to Yagoto, which ended up being a bold-faced lie because he drove me right to the door of my dorm and then all the way to Toyota—which is almost an hour from Nagoya—to drop off Massiel and Grey. If it bothered him at any time that he had to tow around three girls in his car to farthest reaches of the city, he didn’t say a word and it didn’t show on his face, either. He was a perfect darling about it and kept reassuring us that it was ぜんぜん大丈夫—absolutely fine.
A number of amusing things happened on that drive, including how he kept drumming his legs off-sync to the music (which was, surprisingly, nice acoustic guitar—until I left, when it apparently turned to really bad punk) and then telling us that he played the “elec guitar and bass.” He also got lost trying to find my dorm no thanks to our ridiculous directions, so we drove around for 20 minutes in circles since he pulled the I Am a Man and Don’t Need a GPS front.
When he dropped me off I said thank you for what must have been the thousandth time that night and sprinted upstairs—crying, because I couldn’t believe that had actually happened and because it was the very first and the very last time it ever would.
But we won’t get into that.
Massiel kept texting me after that, telling me that Shino had yelled “TOO YOUNG!” when she informed him that her high school-age host sister had a crush on him. He also apparently showed her letter to his mother, who complimented Massiel’s handwriting, though we have no idea if he showed her mine (I would have been the most embarrassed if he had. It was three pages long! Of complete mush!).
I texted him that night asking that he please not throw away my letter.
His reply—a full 24 hours late, which is usual for him but absolutely nerve-wracking to me—was, in Japanese: “I’ll never, ever throw it away!”
I read that text at least ten times and did not manage to keep myself from tearing up even once.
(Also, in response to the part of my text that read ‘I’ll send you a present when I get back to America!’, he’d written, ‘I’M WAITING.’ Oh, Shino, one day I will punch you in the face out of sheer affection.)
