A Woman's Nails Read Online Free Page A

end of March and settle into my new job. The schedule is dead easy and so far I have no complaints except that I am working six days a week instead of five. One morning I mention to my co-worker Yumi that it would be nice to have the occasionally Saturday off as well so that I could do a bit of traveling on the weekends, because I wasn’t really in Japan to work all the time, ha, ha, ha. Later in the day, my boss takes me aside to reprimand me for complaining about the schedule.
    “If you’re really not interested in working here,” she says, “I’ll be happy to find someone to replace you. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to travel, then.”
    My conversations with Yumi are reduced to sparing exercises in polite banality after that. We comment on the weather, on the beauty of the sakura which were in full bloom my first week on the job, the azaleas which have started to blossom, and the mud nest the sparrows have built under the awning of the boutique downstairs, then fall silent. I retreat to the morning’s paper, she busies herself with whatever it is that she does at her desk before me. It’s very weird to say the least.
    Most afternoons I’m free for four to five hours until it’s time to teach the evening class. On warm, sunny days I go to either of the two large parks that are near the school to write letters or read a book or wander. When the sky is overcast, I take a bus downtown, to Tenjin, and browse for books or CDs.
    Evenings at the school are a huge improvement over the grim mornings. Yumi and the boss leave for the damp, dark caves they must surely inhabit shortly after I return from my afternoon break, meaning I am alone with Reina, a vivacious woman with wavy brown hair who teaches the junior high students in the evenings.
    Yumi and Reina are like night and day, and the heavy veil of silence Yumi drapes over each morning is torn apart in the evening as soon as Reina punches in. Yumi and Reina do, however, share one thing: dread. Just as I dread my mornings alone with Yumi, I dread saying good-bye to Reina each night. Because there is nothing waiting for me but a sixty-minute-long train ride back to the condominium I’m living in. The condominium is located deep in the countryside, surrounded by untilled rice field s and an unshakable loneliness.
    Though I am allegedly sharing the condominium with two other Americans, I am more often than not the sole inhabitant of the eighth story, four-room mansion , as the Japanese call it. My “roommates” are MIA on the weekends and don’t usually come home until well after I have retired to bed most weeknights .
    I am no early bird, but my boss has so put the fear of being sacked into me that I find myself waking at the crack of dawn. I trudge like a somnambulist through a path between two rice fields to the unmanned station where I catch the seven-thirty train. I’m usually in town early enough that I can drop in at a shitty l ittle coffee shop called, only G od knows why, Henry the Eighth, where I have the môningu setto of tôsuto, bâkon, sukuramburu eggi ando kôhi (i.e., the morning set of toast, bacon, scrambled eggs and coffee) before confronting Yumi and her intractable gloom.
     
    In the middle of April once I’ve settled into a routine, I go to the International Center to look for a Japanese teacher and, I am embarrassed to admit, put a card on a bulletin board there, seeking “friends.”
    I have often heard from the woman I have contacted through the International Center that I am the only person who has bothered to call them, so I don’t expect much of a response from my own card. Boy, am I ever wrong!
    The day after my card is up, calls start pouring in. It takes several minutes to get through all the messages that have accumulated on the answering machine at the condominium while I was away at work. Three days later, letters written on adorable stationery start to arrive. By week’s end, I’ve got over a dozen women eager to meet