Anyway, the film features various heroes with different superpowers, one of them played by Scarlett Johansson. And as I sat there watching them perform their many jaw-dropping stunts on screen, I started pondering what my own superpower was. Of course, I’m fully aware of how ridiculous it is to think about such things at my age. And yet, my dear readers, that was how I arrived at this tiny revelation. As it happens, I’m pretty content with my allotted superpower!
I’m aware that I’ve shown you a slightly different side of myself in this month’s column, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit self-conscious about it. Now I’m really curious to hear what all your superpowers are! Don’t be sheepish!
Drop me a line and let me know.
Until next month,
Kumiko Watanabe
Quite a Catch
Hina-chan has such beautiful skin, I think as I wash her. Using a linen washcloth I’ve specially ordered to avoid irritating her delicate skin cells, I start from her toes, working slowly up the length of her body stretched out supine in the water. When wet, the cloth molds itself perfectly to her smooth contours as if it were held there by some magnetic force.
The candle flame flickers as if trying to muscle in on our conversation, sending patches of shadow and light dancing across the bathroom walls.
I lift Hina-chan’s right leg up a fraction. As my arm moves, the bathwater rocks and ripples, making little lapping sounds. My hand brushes the top of Hina-chan’s thigh, and she lets out an embarrassed yelp, laughing and twisting her lower half away from me. We both know, of course, that this is just fooling around on her part—Hina-chan is fully accepting of the situation. With total composure, I clean each part of Hina-chan’s body. This is a very important ritual for the two of us.
Perhaps there’s a gust of wind outside, because the scent of flowers working its way through the high window grows stronger. Hina-chan flares her nostrils and drinks in the smell. As she does so, her flat little stomach arches upward, and my hand, which happens to be resting above her navel, feels it move.
“What kind of flower do you think that is?” she asks me.
“I wonder. I’ve never stopped to think about it.” I tug at the chain of the plug to let out the bathwater, which is by now a sludgy brown, then say teasingly, “If you’re curious, why don’t you pop your head out and take a look? You’re good at that, no?”
“It’s the imagining that’s the fun, silly. That’s the problem with you, Shigemi-chan. No sense of adventure whatsoever.” Hina-chan puffs out her cheeks, pretending to sulk. The water glugs its way down the drain.
“If I had to guess, I’d say camellia,” I venture.
“Yes. Well, it’s not a tulip, that’s for sure.”
“Wow, you’re surprisingly clueless about flowers, aren’t you?” I say, feigning outrage.
“You know what, Shigemi? That’s what’s called prejudice.” Hina-chan wields her newly acquired piece of vocabulary with assured accuracy. She’s a bright spark, that’s for sure.
I rinse her down with the showerhead, and now her pearl-white skin comes into view. That glistening body of hers! Though I see it every day, it still has the power to amaze me every time. I reinsert the plug and turn on the tap so fresh water comes chugging through.
“Right!” Hina-chan says, as she passes her eyes proudly across her renewed body, free of mud. “Now, if the good lady would allow me the honor of massaging her feet . . .”
Sitting opposite each other in that smallish bathtub, Hina-chan’s face is incredibly close to mine. Seeing her skin at such close range, so clear it seems almost translucent, still gives me the butterflies. She really is quite a stunner.
“You’re so stiff! I guess that’s the price you pay for working on your feet, you poor thing,” Hina-chan coos as she kneads my soles. Beneath her deft fingers, I feel the fatigue that has built up in my feet over the course of the day simply fall away, as if it had never really been there in the first place.
“This water smells really nice,” Hina-chan says.
“Yeah, it’s lavender bath milk.”
“La-ven-dur-barth-mulk?” Hina-chan pulls a strange face, but it is obvious that she’s gone and added a new word to her internal dictionary. By tomorrow, I’ve no doubt she’ll be using it perfectly.
Until I met Hina-chan, I had no interest in bath milk, and I never really spent much time wallowing in the bath either. I went about carrying with me the fatigue I had amassed throughout the week. It was only after meeting Hina-chan that this small bathroom, whose uniformly cream-colored surfaces I had initially found rather depressing, became my favorite place to be.
My lover comes to me at night. Come rain, come gale-force wind, Hina-chan turns up on my doorstep every evening wearing the sunniest of smiles. Even if I’m utterly worn out, or if there’s been some trouble at work and I am fed up with everything, I perk up as soon as Hina-chan arrives. She’s my sun, my rainbow, my ray of light—she is every light source in the world rolled into one. Not to mention every source of loveliness and wondrousness too. We bathe together, eat dinner together, and fall asleep together. Then, when I wake up in the morning, Hina-chan is gone.
I get out of bed and pass my hand over the cold patch next to me, where not long ago Hina-chan was sleeping, her face the face of an angel. I give the sheets a shake to smooth the creases, fix myself breakfast, then head out to work.
Hina-chan worries that I’m not taking proper care of myself in the hours we’re apart, so since our courtship began I’ve started living more healthily. Rather than buying my lunch from the convenience store, which inevitably means getting by on soggy pasta or rice balls shaped into triangles by machines rather than hands, I’ve started taking my own lunch boxes in as often as I can. It feels to me as if the badly formed omelettes and grilled salmon fillets and florets of steamed broccoli I make at home to bring to the office all contain Hina-chan’s love. By eating my homemade food at work, I can be together with Hina-chan during the day too.
“Did you tell Yoshi about me yet?” Hina-chan asks now as she bores into a pressure point on the sole of my right foot.
“Didn’t I tell you? Owowowowow!” I arch my back and try to flap my foot in pain, but Hina-chan keeps a tight grip on my calf, refusing to let go. Those tiny arms contain unknown reserves of strength. She flashes me a cheeky smile as if to say, Do you have any idea who you’re up against? I’m pretty sure Hina-chan would be the most requested masseuse at any salon in town.
Yoshi is my next-door neighbor, a single guy in his late thirties. Before I met Hina-chan, he and I would occasionally go drinking in one of the cheap izakaya in town—two singletons whiling away the time, talking about nothing of significance. After breaking up with my then-boyfriend, I had crawled into life in my current apartment like some bedraggled survivor of a natural disaster, and Yoshi had done more or less the same—or the opposite, depending on how you looked at it. I was sick and tired of men; he was sick and tired of women.
Living with that boyfriend, my exhaustion had kept growing. He was a perfectly decent guy, and it wasn’t like we argued all the time or anything, but sharing that cramped space with a creature so inflexible in both body and mind, and changing my existence to fit in with his being, wore me out like nothing else. Cohabiting with a man, I felt my body growing heavier, and I stopped acting on my own initiative. Instead, I would watch him, trying to gauge what move he was going to make next, or what he thought about things. It felt like I was accumulating a mound of pebbles inside me. In principle, the flat we’d shared was my home, but I always felt like I was in someone else’s house. At some point, it dawned on me: I didn’t want to live with another person. We broke up soon after that. So, when I met Hina-chan, I felt like patting myself on the back for the incredible luck that had befallen me.