18 April 2022
I rented a car for my third date with Hiro, unsure if my old Mitsubishi Charmant’s brakes would appreciate the mountain roads to Chichibu for the Night Festival.
(That’s one of the festival’s floats in the photo above. Photo credit in wikimedia belongs to a user named chichibian.)
Things turned accidentally romantic that night. It was about thirty minutes before dusk when we arrived, and I left the car’s lights on by mistake. When we returned after watching the parade and the fireworks, and after gorging on festival food—steamed Hokkaidō potatoess swimming in butter and soy sauce, grilled corn with more butter and soy sauce, okonomiyaki pancakes with mounds of cabbage worked into the batter—the car’s battery was dead.
Hiro suggested we turn everything off, sit in the car and wait. As the field around us slowly emptied of festival-goers, we talked. Were we seeing anyone? What was our dating history to that point? Did we want to continue?
We both answered in the affirmative to that last question—we made it official the following weekend by getting silver rings for each other from a sidewalk vendor in Asakusa—but our respective relationship expectations challenged each other.
Bicultural dating could delight or enrage us in turns, but Hiro always managed to find ways to surprise me with unexpected romance.
In April of 1994, six months into our relationship, it was my turn to surprise Hiro, however. I moved from Okegawa City in Saitama into the Tōkyō Metropolitan District. To Shinjuku Ward, to be precise, with a view of the skyscrapers from my new apartment’s balcony.
The move eliminated the longer train rides from our dating equation. No more forty-minute rides to and from Ueno Station. We both now worked in Tōkyō and Hiro found more and more excuses to spend the night at my apartment.
The patterns in our nights out changed, too. Before the move, we joined the gay universe that converged on Shinjuku’s Nichōme and its myriad gay bars. Shinjuku made it easy to get home to Saitama (I had the last-train-to-Okegawa schedules memorized).
After the move, we branched out. We found a new home base bar in Asakusa—our first date was in Asakusa, and that neighborhood exerted its gravity on us ever after. And nights at Uzumaki, under the attentive care of its master, Chikara (may he rest in peace) could go for as long as we wanted. To get home, we snagged a waiting taxi on Kokusai-dōri (International Street—how perfect for us!).
Once the driver stopped complimenting me on my command of the Japanese language (simply giving him my address always merited a 日本語がお上手ですね (nihongo ga ojyōzu desu ne)—your Japanese is so good!), Hiro settled his jacket over his lap.
Beneath it, he held my hand.
Every taxi ride we ever took together, he held me hand.
I looked at him with a new light in my eyes, and we shared a secret smile.
Every time.
