‘What is it you said you did?’

‘Free-lance travel writing.’

Something about secret identities lends even the dullest bar chat a buzz. Clark Kent and Superman are both secrets. Two Secret Identities for the price of one and Kaori always loved a sale. She doesn’t ask him what he does. The resumes of guys in bars are like the faces of girls in clubs: clumsily slathered in concealer. The resumes of white guys in Japanese bars are only more so. People who need to put an ocean between themselves and everyone they know inevitably have something wrong with them.

‘I’m a photographer myself.’ He gestures to the device with the smug pride of a child at show and tell.

Perhaps, she shouldn’t be so harsh. This isn’t any more her world than it is his. Moving here after college was supposed to be easy. Kaori was the sort of girl who always crossed her legs on the subway and never let her particles dangle. In third grade, she washed her pencils. Years of being dragged to Japanese Saturday school meant that she knew the language.
‘Shall I take your picture?’

It had been a long time since anyone asked that. Back in Cali, there were a lot of Asians but she still felt unique. In Japan her face was a print of the face of every girl walking down the street. Every weekday morning Kaori left her apartment at seven and so did the rest of her street. All suited in grey and black, black hair, black briefcases. These single-souled organisms overwhelmed the world. There was nowhere to sit and think. Nowhere unobserved or un-judged. Even the playground was clogged with them. It was more of a concrete corner than a playground, to tell the truth. Three swings. A tree. A small low fence separated the playground from the street. Whenever she walked by there were men in suits standing, blowing smoky kisses at the sky. She had never seen a child. Kaori told herself that this was because her hours precluded the possibility, but sometimes she wondered if there were, in fact, any children. At times she longed to leap over the two steps and onto a swing, to kick her heels against the ground and aim for the sky. But she did not, the men were always there and her office skirt might get wet.

On the phone she told her mother that the morning exodus reminded her of roaches escaping a burning building. To which her mother had told her not to badmouth her own people and to stick it out. She found small ways of rebelling. The Japanese sort their trash. She put inflammable things in the flammable trashcan. Kaori liked to imagine her glass bottle as the black heart of the fire. The newspapers, letters and chicken bones were her ashen confetti.
‘Hey, let me get you another one.’

Kaori hadn’t noticed that she had been clicking the ice cubes against the sides of her glass. Ami, the name she gave to the men as her own, was an expert at the behind-the-hand titter, the chewed lip and so on. So, Kaori never needed to do that much actual listening. She looked him over. Long blonde stubble like some genetic mutation had grown eyelashes on his chin. He was tall and lumpy with muscle, not her usual type. She looked around the bar, not that much going tonight. He’d do.

‘No. It’s on me.’

‘The lady shouldn’t have to buy.’

‘But how do I know you won’t drop something in it?’

As she walks away, she lets each hip drop, a little low, a little slow, like a child dropping rocks into a river. She comes back with two glasses and hands him his. She lets her hand brush his, subtle but intended to register like a secret being whispered from mouth to ear.

‘Hey we could be a team. You know that? I’ll take the pictures and you can write the captions.’

‘Let’s take this one night at a time, buddy.’

Later, when dragging him into her car, she regrets the choice. If you’ve ever tried to pull a completely unconscious man onto the side of the highway, while wearing four-inch heels, you would understand. If you haven’t, it’s sort of like trying to get a cat into a carrying case— a lot harder than it looks and you spend the next day discovering scratches in unlikely places. She doesn’t take the camera. They often have identity numbers and other nuisance. She pockets the cash. That’s the great thing about these foreign guys: they try to avoid bank fees, getting it all out at once. She takes the film, thank god for camera snobs. If it had been digital and he’d snatched a shot of her, there would be ghosts in the wires. Her face might be floating there.

As it is, she’s gone. What can he tell them after he wakes up in the middle of nowhere? Black hair, yellow skin? We all look the same after all. Sometimes Kaori thinks it was when she realized this that she began to forgive the Japanese. She vanishes into the hoard. Like most explanations though, this is not her whole story. As the plum rain— the rain that falls just as the plum trees are enveloped in purple blossoms— falls, Kaori sits on the steps of her apartment building. These unconscious Caucasian boys may be cute to play with, but it is the plum rain that washes away her animosity.

Her first summer in Japan, the rain began to fall as she left work. Umbrellas blossomed everywhere. Each suited person, black twisted trunks, was suddenly adorned and so different. She saw midday sky blue, midnight sky blue, river rapid blue and blind man’s eye blue. And that was only the blues. Some were adorned with hearts or notes, schoolgirl’s wishes that middle-aged women carried above their heads. Even amongst the black umbrellas hid a mahogany handle or a white thread trim, asserting itself here and there. Kaori stood counting souls like a child counting in a field of poppies. Around the twentieth soul, it came to her that rain was slurping down her back and she had no umbrella of her own.