Offstage was another matter. The singer wasn’t nearly as cool as she had seemed. Or as smart.
She couldn’t expound much further upon any of the topics she had carried on about on stage. All of her politics seem to be pre-approved soundbites, more suitable for places like TikTok than in real life.
The singer also didn’t seem to have a clue as to how economics worked. She’d gone on for what felt like hours about not getting paid enough and how every other punk rock outfit in the city was trying to copy her band’s style.
When Koyamo asked her about her cut of the merch, the singer had just shrugged and dismissed it as “manager stuff.” As if her band’s business wasn’t, in fact, any of her business.
After a series of unfortunate events in Japan, Koyamo had somehow ended up teaching fashion and textile merchandising classes to business grad students at the Geneva Institute of Finance. So she was probably biased. But, come now, the singer couldn’t complain about how little musicians made in one breath and claim complete disinterest in the one extra income stream available to her in the next. Where was her curiosity? Her economic ambition?
No, she was nothing like Nora. Plus, she smelled like hashish and talked way too much for someone who had so little to say.
“Okay, then maybe lunch or dinner?” the singer suggests running a hand through her lank, jet-black hair. “I am not sure what people your age like to do, but we should see each other again. I would like this.”
People her age? Now Koyamo feels old.
It’s true she isn’t in her 20s anymore, more like the other side of thirty-five. Her parents had been lamenting her spinsterhood ever since she’d been dumped by Japan’s most eligible bachelor shortly after she blew the engagement meeting with his father for reasons she still doesn’t quite understand.
But she never actually felt old. Not until the young singer asked her what people her age like to do.
Nora had been around the same age when they met. In her early 20s. But the young Chinese woman had the confidence of a man twice her age. And ten times as much as Koyamo.
She had been a student in the Fashion Merchandising in Asia elective Koyamo taught to graduate and undergrad students alike. She turned in her final paper three weeks early and then had the audacity to come up after the last class to ask if Koyamo had graded it yet.
“It will be another two to three weeks,” Koyamo informed her as politely as possible.
And Nora leaned in to say not so politely at all, “Well, hurry up with mine. I want to ask you out after we’re done with this nonsense.”
Yes, Nora was fourteen years younger, but she dragged Koyamo to raves, music festivals, dumpling shops in the red district, all-night DJ sets—completely uncaring of her Japanese girlfriend’s age.
“I want to be here, and I want you with me. So that’s how it’s going to be with the two of us,” Nora told her the one time she tried to complain about not fitting in at some farm field rave in Liechtenstein.
By the end of their two years together, Koyamo learned to stop using her age as an excuse not to accompany Nora on her spontaneous trips.
“So then would you prefer brunch or maybe the cinema?” the singer asks, mistaking Koyamo’s silence for indecision.
Koyamo ends up rushing her out of her fourth-floor walk-up while spewing excuses.
She has papers to grade, she explains to the singer. Finals and all of that. Oh yes, sure, school was still in session despite it being August. Mm-hm, mm-hm, the summer students are even more terrible than the traditional students.
Koyamo thanks the singer for her time—not a good time, just her time. And promises to text if her schedule lightens up. At this point, she has no idea what’s coming out of her mouth. She simply throws more and more words at the singer while propelling her toward the door, saying whatever it takes to get her out of there.
After Koyamo closes the door behind her, she sags against it.
At first, she sighs, so relieved to be rid of the singer. But then, a wave of incredible loneliness washes over her. And she just feels sad. And dumped.
“You don’t have to worry about that. Not with me. I don’t get dumped. And if I dump you, I promise not to stalk you.”
That had been Nora’s saucy comeback when Koyamo explained why she never dated students. Even former ones.
Nora boldly called Koyamo on her apartment landline the very day she received her end-of-term grade for the class. And Koyamo, who hated confrontation of any kind, had been forced to explain that she couldn’t date former students because it could lead to awkwardness.
She gave Nora a gentle no that night. But Nora called back the next day and the one after that until Koyamo relented to a date—just one date. But that had been that.
Before she was Koyamo, a late bloomer lesbian who’d taken a fellowship in Geneva to escape her parents’ grief over not getting the daughter they had always wanted.
But with Nora, she became herself. Someone who tried things that were wholly unfamiliar to her. Someone who learned to love someone else with all her heart. Because Nora told her after just a month of dating, “I am in love with you, Professor, and I want you to be in love with me back.”
Koyamo had never met someone so direct and honest. And that made her want, for the first time in a life of worrying about what others would think of her, to be honest about her feelings for the outrageous Chinese woman too.
So she decided to love Nora back.
And she probably would’ve gone on loving Nora forever if not for her tearful confession right before her graduation from the Geneva Institute of Finance’s graduate business school.
“I’ve tried everything I could to get out of it. But I must marry someone else, and my fiancé won’t allow me to keep a lover. Koyamo, I’m so sorry.”
A lover? Was that all she was to Nora? All she’d ever been?
“What happened to loving me with all your heart?” Koyamo asked her soon-to-be ex-girlfriend.
“I do! I do love you with all my heart!” Nora insisted with tears streaming down her face. “That will never change. I will never stop loving you. But I have family obligations.”
Family obligations? Koyamo had those too. Before she, in her parents’ words, “ruined everything” with Hayato Nakamura, the youngest scion of the Nakamura Motor Corporation family.
Koyamo had never met her girlfriend’s parents. Nora’s mother had died of cancer when Nora was young, and Koyamo had assumed her relationship with her father had been the same as hers with her own parents. Estranged and mostly silent, save for dutiful visits once or twice a year.
But according to Nora, that wasn’t the case. It had never been the case. From the age of sixteen, she’d known that she would be expected to marry a particular man of her father’s choosing.
“You don’t understand my world,” Nora explained to her. “It’s not pretty like yours. I can’t just call off my engagement. Men have all the power. And the women in my world must do as we’re told.”
“And what if you didn’t do as you are told?” Koyamo asked Nora, her heart shattering in slow motion. “What if you stayed with me like you claim you want to?”
“I can’t do that,” Nora had answered with a mournful look. “My father is a very dangerous man who will stop at nothing to get his way. I will marry who he wants me to marry. Or else he’ll have me killed. Possibly you too.”