23 November 2022
It had been a strange year since I kicked my ex, Nori, out of my apartment in Okegawa at the end of 1992.
Desperate for a relationship upgrade, one that didn’t include manipulation as a feature, I wove my way sequentially into the lives of three amazing men. Except it didn’t work out for any of them.
In between and along the way, I also fed a unique delusion: that a one-night stand (or even a one-hour stand) could end in romance. As months of that behavior wore on, my friends were losing patience. Our phone conversations had become rote.
I met this awesome guy last night.
Oh?
Yeah, I can’t wait for you to meet him.
Are you seeing him again.
Definitely. He said he’d call.
Except they never called. Not the male nurse. Not the rugby player. Not the bathhouse hottie. None of them.
An intervention was called for but the best my friends could do was a remote ultimatum: stop sleeping with people on the first date, dammit!
It took me a week to admit it, but they were right. November of 1993 was resultantly grim without my man-snacks. But I tried to distract myself. A big festival in Tōkyō’s Asakusa neighborhood happened to fall on November 23, a public holiday in Japan (Labor Thanksgiving, a type of May Day event).
I revved up my modem and connected to GayNet Japan, a Tōkyō-based BBS, to post an invitation: I’m planning on attending the Ōtori Festival in Asakusa next week. We could make it a group outing. Anyone interested?
Quite a few people expressed interest, and I looked forward to traipsing through one of my favorite parts of Tōkyō with friends in tow. Except something went haywire.
I arrived at the meeting place for the event on time and began to wait. No one showed. And just as I was about to give up and sulk my way home, a young man in a pea coat came running up to, calling me by my GNJ name: Momotaro?
Hai!
It’s me, P-TA. Please call me Hiro.
Call me Brian, then.
Hiro and I had spent the summer getting to know each remotely via BBS messages and phone calls, but he had always demurred whenever I suggested we meet IRL. But here he was in a fit of serendipity, the only person who heeded my invitation.
Tall and thin, he wore glasses like I did. His hair was cut short; mine was tied back in a ponytail. His face was alight with a radiant smile, and in his eyes sparkled laughter.
We set off into the festival but before long, as the crowds grew denser, he surprised me by grabbing the hem of my down jacket. I don’t want to lose you.
I was done in with a gesture hardly anyone would consider romantic, but each time I looked back, his smile glowed my way, his eyes laughed all the more, and his gloved hand held tight to my jacket.
I did everything in my power to keep this date-that-was-never-meant-to-be-a-date from ending. We had noshed our way through the festival, but I suggested we have dinner afterwards. Hiro agreed (and I am happy to report that a quick search on Google confirms that restaurant, San’ei Tempura, is still in business). After dinner, we shook hands at the sidewalk-level entrance to Hiro’s subway line, and I walked my way back to Ueno Station, happier than I’d been in a long while.
Allow me to note two postscripts: I called my friends and alerted them that I had passed their test. We all laughed but I begged their permission for horizontal hanky-panky with Hiro on the second date.
Secondly, a few years ago, as Hiro and I reminisced on our anniversary (and the weirdness that was our second date, but that’s another story for another day), he told me that he had dinner before meeting me for the festival. And that all the food we ate at the festival stalls and the tempura dinner I had begged for were on top of that earlier dinner. He truly didn’t want to lose me, and the same holds true today, mutually so, twenty-nine years later.
