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American
woman
Story
of a married man who finds an exciting relationship with an
American woman
By Ken Maeda
| It did not happen at a specific point in time. However, six years after our marriage, and almost 13 years after I first got to know Kyoko, we were not doing the same things as often as we did them in the past. And I thought that that was a change, howsoever ignorant we might have been to its occurrence. What surprises me though is that this happened so gradually that I did not even notice it. |
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Even today, I do not feel in any way that my love for her changed at any point in our relationship, though I often wonder if the word 'love' has any meaning in Japan. After all 'love' is an English word and obviously it represents a very western emotion. The Japanese word that is only roughly equivalent is
'ai' and I have never been convinced that they really mean the same thing. Growing up, I saw my parents in a
love-less relationship in the western sense because their relationship was nothing like the Hollywood movies that I used to watch or the books about the West that I had read. I never heard my parents say
'aishiteiru' though I recall that is how the subtitles read every time an American couple said, "I love you" in a movie. In fact I often used to wonder why they have to keep saying that so often. Don't they just get it when you say it, say, a few times?
Kyoko is probably as Japanese as my mother is. She was one of the most
attractive girls in high school and she sort of drifted towards me because of my being an academic star. She was
a bit shy like me and even though I heard the baseball players in my class often mention her in the locker room as the girl that they would love to date or get into bed with, they were
turned off by her shyness. I rarely paid more than the casual attention I paid to other classmates. I had no idea if she would be interested in me. I guess I was even shyer than she was. I still recall how unromantic our first few conversations were. She was dazzled by my skills in Math and Physics and we started off by trying to solve complex problems together. The unromantic way in which we came to spend our initial time together made it difficult for us to think of romance even as we spent a great deal of time together. As we increasingly studied together though, we often took breaks from our library sessions to walk to the nearest convenience store and grab a bite or an ice cream. We also started to ride our bikes together after school and slowly I came to know her more than just a study-mate.
It must have been at least 4-5 months that we were friends when Kyoko mentioned that she was going to the mall during the weekend and if I wanted to just hang out together. I did not think of it as a
date; I had nothing much to do during the weekend, so I agreed. Out of our ugly uniforms, as we walked from store to store, I thought of us as a couple. Looking at Kyoko dressed in a
pretty dress
with boots, I realized how attractive she was. We must have spent several hours just doing nothing in particular, but I got to learn a great deal about her that day - things that I had never bothered about before. I realized that she was just like a regular girl in a lot of ways despite her passion for Math and a rather quiet demeanor in front of other students. When I went to sleep that night, I thought of her as someone special. As a
teenager, I recall how
I fantasized about her body and drifted to sleep thinking if I would ever have the courage and luck to see her beyond what I saw in the mall. I think I found in Kyoko a girl that would ignite a teenager's imagination for the first time.
It was not long after that we
kissed for the first time though it was totally unplanned. It did not happen on a date, as was the case with most boys my age. It happened in my study room when we were solving complex mathematical problems the night before the exam. A problem that seemed so challenging initially to me became so easy to solve when Kyoko suggested that I write a differential equation instead. When the answer came so quickly, I was so excited that I hugged her and gave her a big rub on her back. The next thing we knew; we were
passionately kissing each other.
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