Let's do the Time Warp Again...
About four months into the relationship, Kenji stunned me by asking me to do something so deviant, so unheard of, that at first I thought I must have heard him incorrectly. I made him repeat the question.
“Do you want to meet my family?”
Like most young Japanese men and women, Kenji lived at home. This was perfectly normal in Japan, a nation roughly the size of California, but with fully one-half of the entire US population crammed into it. Land was like gold, and rents tended to be far beyond the reach of younger, unsalaried workers. While large companies often ran dormitories for their unmarried employees, those who worked part-time jobs, or in the service industry, usually remained at home. Kenji, who was just finishing university, had a part-time job in an electronics shop, occupied the same bedroom he had grown up in.
I’d been to his house once. Usually he came to my place, but there had been a time when his parents were away for the weekend and I spent the night with him in his room. There was something vaguely kinky about the whole thing, making love in what was obviously a child’s bed, with posters and plastic models looking down from overhead. It reminded me of San Francisco, when I dated a Vietnamese guy who was a student at UC Berkeley. 27 at the time, I found myself staying over in his dorm room, having flashbacks to my own college life. That experience had been completed by the inevitable roommate-walking-in-on-us-during-sex shtick that was a required part of living in a dorm. The same evening, some drunk students had a 3 A.M. fire extinguisher fight outside the door, reminding me of all the reasons why I didn’t miss being in a dormitory. I was getting way too old for that crap.
We were at my place when Kenji extended the invitation, and having made him repeat the question, it still was sinking in. I had dated several Japanese guys, and knew several more. None of them introduced boyfriends to parents. Hell, Shouhei wouldn’t even introduce me to any of his friends, friends of his friends, or any other living being. Being gay in Japan, I had started to get used to the idea of being my significant other’s dark secret, the thing that if it leaked out would cause him only embarrassment. But as I was starting to learn with Kenji, none of the rules ever applied to him. Whether he was too naïve, or some sort of social maverick destined to liberate Japan’s gay community from the shadows, I couldn’t be sure. Regardless, my curiosity was piqued.
“Introduce me as what?” I asked.
“Well, my friend.” He replied. “They already know I come over here a lot. It would be strange if I didn’t introduce you.”
I could see some logic in this. Maybe Kenji wasn’t a rebel after all, maybe he would simply be hiding me in plain sight. Why not? He had lived overseas in Canada and the UK. He had had foreign friends before. Maybe his parents were used to him bringing stray gaijin back the house. Reluctantly, I agreed.
I was sure that Kenji’s parents were perfectly nice people; after all, he was a pretty decent guy. But I also knew how this sort of thing went down in Japan. Nothing in the Land of the Rising Sun ever just was, nothing ever just happened. No, there would have to be ritual, and ceremony, and etiquette. A production would have to be made. But this was Kenji, and he was starting to become important to me. Sacrifices would have to be made.
Time travel is a fact of life in Japan. For someone with family back in the States, you live a day in the future ahead of them. Flying back to New York, I once boarded a plane at 4:00 P.M. and after a twelve-hour flight, disembarked at 3:55 P.M. on the same day. Surely this proved Einstein was right? But aside from the weirdness of speaking to people back home on the phone while you were eating breakfast and they were getting ready for bed, there were other temporal anomalies as well. Japanese young people, by and large, were somehow still living in the 80s. Big hair, thin ties, shiny suits, androgyny…it was all still in play. And the music…well, let’s not go there. By contrast, the generation before them was living in the 1950s. Women wore aprons, and were professional stay-at-home housewives. Men wore suits and hats, went out the door in the morning, and expected a meal on the table when they got home. Japanese home life was thus a kind of Asian Father Knows Best, a time warp that had to be experienced to be believed.
I was not disappointed by Kenji’s parents. They met me at the entrance to their home, his mother wearing the apron. She looked exactly like a shorter version of him with a wig. His father really did look like one of those Fifties TV dads, with the short, slicked back hair, a white, short-sleeved dress shirt, and a cocktail in his hand. They bowed. I bowed. We all did some more head-bobbing as introductions were made. Then they welcomed me into their home.
The older brother was there as well, with his fiancée. Introductions were made again before we entered the living room. True to form, Kenji’s mother had prepared dozens of little dishes, a bewildering variety of food. I was giving the place of honor at the table, and soon his father was filling my glass with beer.
We stuck to our story. Kenji and I had met because he needed help on his Mark Twain paper, and after that we became friends. Everyone seemed to find this plausible, but even if they didn’t, you could be sure they would show no signs of their suspicions. We drank, we ate, I answered questions about my life back home and the inevitable series of “can you eat sushi/use chopsticks” inquiries that all foreigners in Japan receive. At the end of the evening they insisted not on dropping me off at the train station, but driving me all the way home. I was cautious, but I found them all to be genuinely likeable people. His father and I in particular talked late into the evening over glasses of shouchu, a kind of Japanese gin. His mother, however, was clearly no fool. I had the sense all evening that she knew the score. Maybe mothers just make me paranoid.
Having passed through the encounter unscathed, I became increasingly wary as Kenji invited me to more and more family functions. A barbecue seemed innocuous, but then I was invited to his mother’s birthday party. After that, it was Japanese New Year (roughly the equivalent of Christmas). I was becoming part of all the family functions, treated the same way as the older brother’s fiancée. But when I questioned Kenji on this, he assured me that they all thought we were “just friends.”
Nevertheless, I still thought it was rocking the boat a bit too much when Kenji left his brother’s wedding early to come see me. The wedding had been held, coincidentally, in the same seaside town where I was living, so he took the opportunity to come pay me a visit. “Don’t you think this is all a bit too much? Aren’t we making everyone suspicious?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kenji said to me. “You don’t understand Japanese families. Maybe my family knows. Maybe not. But they will never say anything. We won’t talk about it. Ever.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Somehow, having a White Elephant in the room seemed worse to me than if I had never met them at all. Even more troubling, I was really begin to care about these people, and as months became years I started feeling guilty every time I went over there. I felt like I was lying to their faces each and every time they invited me to dinner, and I hated it.
Kenji was wrong, of course. Eventually they would talk about it, but that day had not arrived yet. Until then we lived like those lines in the old Peter Murphy song, Cascade; “We have no image, we’re just called ‘the good friends.’”
It was like being gay back in the 1950s rather than the 21st century.
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