A Woman's Nails Read Online Free Page B

me, and so like a starving man standing before buffet, I pencil in as many of them as I can into my Saturday and Sunday.
     
    2
     
    Shortly after work Saturday evening, I hurry downtown where I meet with Bachelorette Number One, a plain-looking young woman in her early twenties who leads me with a string of “please, please, please’s” to a coffee shop in a maze-like underground shopping arcade. As soon as we sit down, she produces several sheets of paper from her handbag and starts to read from it.
    “My name is Hitomi. It’s nice to meet you.”
    She looks up at me, smiles broadly and pauses. I take this as my cue to tell her that the pleasure is mine.
    “Pleasure?” she asks.
    “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I say.
    “Pleasure?” She says with a puzzled look.
    “Nice to meet you, too.”
    “Oh, I see. Thank you.” Studying her crib sheet, she says, “Please forgive my poor English.”
    “It is forgiven!”
    “Pardon me?”
    “Never mind.”
    “Mind?”
    “Please, go ahead. Dôzo .”
    “Please forgive my poor English,” she repeats after checking her notes. “I want to be your friend.”
    “Okay.”
    She looks at the paper, mouths the words as she reads them silently, and asks, “Will you be my friend?”
    “Well, it’s gonna cost ya! ”
    “Pardon?”
    “Okay.”
    “May I ask you some questions?”
    “Shoot!”
    “Pardon?”
    “Sure, go ahead. Dôzo .”
    “What is your hobby?”
    What the hell is it with the Japanese and these stupid questions? I can count the times on one hand I was asked this before coming to Japan, but here it’s the most pressing thing that needs to be addressed. Ridiculous questions deserve ridiculous answers: “I enjoy groping strangers on crowded trains.”
    “Trains?”
    “Yes, trains. Groping.”
    “ Guroappu ?”
    “Er, I like traveling by train.”
    “Trouble?”
    “Not, trouble . Travel . I like traveling by train.”
    “Oh, I see. I like to travel, too.”
    “You do? Where have you been? Have you been abroad?”
    “Next question,” she says looking down at her sheet. “Can you eat sushi ?”
    Good grief. “Yeah, it’s okay, I suppose.”
    “Okay? You can eat sushi ? Let’s have sushi next time!”
    We whiz through her questionnaire in no time then sit in awkward silence until it’s time for me t o meet Bachelorette Number Two.
     
    3
     
    Mika is an attractive 24-year-old woman, who asks me what my dream is. The question itself is not as surprising as, say, the complete lack of context in which it’s asked: our order has just been taken by the waitress. But then, many Japanese mistakenly believe, like Bachelorette Number One, that rattling off a random list of questions in English amounts to communication .
    “My dream? Huh.”
    I’ve often asked the same of women and am usually disappointed by the replies.
    “I want to master English,” one girl told me.
    “Okay, then what?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “What are you going to do after you master English?”
    “I don’t know. I just . . .”
    “English is a tool, nothing more. A hammer, if you will. If you haven’t got any idea of what you want to build with that hammer, then it’s just going to sit on a shelf in the shed and get rusty.”
    “Oh.”
    “Oh, is right. If you don’t know what you’ll do with the English once you’ve mastered it--sorry to burst your bubble--you probably never will master it.”
    When I asked a young college student the same question, she replied that she had never really thought about it. I was flabbergasted. “How the hell can you not have a dream? I mean, how the hell can you even get up in the morning?” The poor girl. She fell silent and stared at the table after that.
    Mika’s English is pretty damn good, so I can indulge myself: “Most people are like flotsam drifting on the surface of the ocean their whole lives. They make no impact on life. Life, on the other hand, has a huge impact on them. They’re tossed about, they flow