Free A Woman's Nails by Aonghas Crowe Page A

s mile on her round chubby face! “ I shee , I shee ,” she says. “Hokkaidô.”
    I break out the chalk, write WHEN and WHERE on the board, stab at the WHEN causing the chalk to crumble in my hand and ask for the last time. She apologizes then answers that she's going in July. Progress! But wait, it's only April, why's she all fired up to go now? She says she can't wait to go to Tokyo Disneyland to see “ Mickey Mouse ando Donarudo Ducku ando Poo.” I tell her what poo means, then ask whose poo she wants to see, Goofy's? She waves her hand frantically before her face. She doesn't want to see Goofy's doodoo. She wants to see the bear. Oh, you mean Winnie the Pooh. She says, “ Yesh, yesh, yesh ,” and asks why on earth Christopher Robin would be so mean to call his bear doodoo . I shrug and say, “Maybe it sounded nice.”
    She tells me she's sad to learn what Pooh's name means . I try to comfort her, telling her that she now has something funny to share with her friends at school tomorrow. She says she'll never tell them. Why not, I ask.
    “ Because they'd be sad, too. ”
    I ask her why they're also going all the way to Hokkaidô which is an hour-and-half-long flight from Tokyo and I'm told that they'll visit the city of Fukugawa to see Clark's statue. When I ask who this Clark person is , the rônin answers, “Boys be ambitious!”
    All of the students nod thei r heads collectively, and say, “Ambitious.” The phrase rings a bell and I recall having read about the missionary and educator who founded a school in Hokkaidô over a century ago. The sophomore points upwards, imitating the statue. I ask her what Clark's statue is pointing at. She replies, the sky.
    “What the hell 's he pointing at the sky for?”
    She g iggles and says she isn't sure.
    I tell the girl she's lucky she isn’t a boy.
    “Why's that?”
    “ Because if you were a boy, you'd have to be ambitious and work hard. You're a girl. You can take it easy and have fun.”
    She shouts, “Yea! Yea!”
    The poor rônin , however, hangs his weary head.
     
    3
     
    After work I squeeze onto a cro wded train and head back to the condominium. The worn out passengers hang loosely onto the overhead handles, swaying gently and bumping into each other like racks of beef, frozen and s uspended from steel meat hooks.
    Earlier in the day, Abazuré told me the students were happy to have me as their teacher, that I was doing a wonderful job. Compliments are cheap in this country, like smiles at McDonald's, they don't cost a cent, but Abazuré was sincere, eerily so.
    So many of the adult students have declared me “a great teacher” and introduced their friends to the school that most of my morning classes are now filled to capacity. Even dreary old Yumi after sitting in on one of my evening lessons has rediscovered something to be enthusiastic about. All this praise depresses me because there is nothing that makes me feel more like the loser than being told how well I perform tasks embarrassingly beneath my potential. The compliment jars my confidence as malignantly as insults; I feel my dreams begin to slip through my fingers.
    As I ride the train, pressed between the carcasses of salarymen and office ladies, an appalling realization finally begins to seep in. The deposit I paid and the contract I signed with Abazuré as my guarantor have all but indentured me. I was so eager to escape, at any cost, from the inaka , from the condominium in the middle of nowhere, that I didn't give fuck about anything else. Now I do. As much as I am loath to admit it, I am probably looking at another two years performing the old eikaiwa soft-shoe routine. God, how depressing!
    I look at the meat around me. Do they have dreams as well, or have those been extinguished by damp circumstance and necessity? What possesses them to be packed like cattle into trains, to work until they can barely stand? Just to pay off the mortgage on a place where they can drop their weary bones