Aimi is why I get up first thing every Sunday morning for yoga and meditation. She always plays a great soundtrack, songs like Willie Nelson singing “You are Always on my Mind.” Every week she has a theme and today it was “heart-opening.” She performed open-heart surgery on me and two other foreign guys (sanbiki no ossan) who come religiously every Sunday and, in all truth, probably not all for the healthiest of reasons.
After class this morning, over delicious muffins, Aimi joined Benoît, me, and José, who leads an ideal life: spring and fall in Kyoto, winter in India, and summer in Luxembourg. As ingenuous as she is beautiful, Aimi is frequently the butt of Benoît’s teasing. When Aimi told us she was twenty-four, Benoît told her why he came to Kyoto exactly twenty-four years ago: “I heard you were coming.”
The conversation revolved around colours. Aimi had led us in a visualization meditation in which we were asked to imagine the colour emerald green, which Aimi told us was the colour of love. José complained he couldn’t keep the colour in his mind, it kept changing to magenta, then black. Aimi told us that, contrary to most thinking, black is a good colour. “It certainly is,” said José. “As you can see, all my clothes are black. So that I don’t have to wash them as often.” Aimi averred that she mostly wears white, but that gradually she too is leaning to black.
We discussed our real age and how old we actually felt. Clearly, we were all feeling younger than usual this morning. I rattled on about the subjectivity of time in the noh play I saw last week, Kantan. I told her the plot, about how a young man in China who is on his way to the capital to write the civil service examination stops in Hantan (Kantan in Japanese). The lady at his inn bids him rest from his travels while she makes some gruel for him. She gives him a magic pillow, and he dreams that a messenger comes from the capital announcing that he has been chosen as the next emperor of China. There follows in his dream a lifetime that only gods and emperors can enjoy: fine food, sweet music, beautiful companions … Fifty years flash by in the blink of an eye. Then the old lady wakes him from his nap. “A magic pillow?” Aimi was intrigued.
Benoît steered the conversation back to colours. “I have a story,” he said. “So, José and I were having this debate over white and black—which is better? He said black, I said white. It went back and forth. Finally, I convinced him to buy my black and white TV, saying it was colour.”
Aimi was bemused. “Don’t you know he’s pulling your leg?” said José. “I’ve known this guy for ten years and still can’t tell when he’s being serious. Why, just yesterday, Benoît told Eri I was opening a kakigōri shop this summer in Luxembourg and she laughed at me. But the fact is, I really am!”
A shop selling Japanese snow cones in Luxembourg? Maybe the joke was on José. But no, I find out, the joke’s on us: José is spiking his snow cones with alcohol, like frozen daiquiris.
A year later, Aimi left for greener pastures, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say she took a piece of my heart. This morning for the first time I returned for the morning class with her replacement, Tina. As I entered, the ladies behind the counter told Tina that this was the guy they’d been talking about (kore ga uwasa no Cody) “Huh?” (nan ya sore?) I replied. God knows what they’ve been saying about me.
In Tina’s class I ran into an old friend of Aimi’s whom I hadn’t seen in months, Nanami. The last time I saw her she’d told me she was tired of life with her old partner; they didn’t have the same interests. “You’re young,” I said, “maybe it’s time to move on and find someone who lights the spark you need.” Today, she thanked me for my advice. Not only had she broken up with the old boyfriend, but she’d found another guy and they got married! She’d brought him to class with her and introduced me to him as the man who had brought them together. I felt conflicted, both cupid and homewrecker, but it was clear that she was happier than before.
The studio is on the third floor. On the second floor is a smaller studio and the cafe and shop selling hippie things. At the back every Sunday morning is Yūko, baking muffins. I ordered a cup of chai from her and, delivering it, Yūko said she approved of the advice I’d given Nanami. “Cody’s everybody’s dad here” (Cody wa minna no otōsan da), she concluded. Well, I thought. There are worse things to be.
Homewrecker
A family of pigeons have made a home out of one of my pocket balconies ever since I moved in. Last spring two pigeons became five: I discovered that they’d nested under the heat pump fan. The building manager was on at me for all their shit that was landing some ten stories down on the pavement, right in front of Wasabi, which is frequented by my drinking buddies Odani-san and Oi-chan. This spring, as I sat on my couch I looked out and mom and dad were at it again, fucking on the fan. Here we go again, I thought. On the manager’s urging, I contacted my landlord, and he sent over a crew to install some netting to prevent the birds from roosting there. Mother pigeon had already laid five eggs. I felt like the guy who’d sent a hitman to do a job. “What did you do with the eggs?” I asked. “We disposed of them,” the foreman said, but I noticed later they had left one. Mom was back this morning, perched on the netting looking at the one child left behind, looking at me, askance in the way pigeons do.
A Yoga Sex Comedy
Mark and I had gone to see the comedian Issey Ogata perform at the Kyoto Prefectural Center for Arts and Culture. We noticed a young foreign guy having an avid conversation with a young Japanese woman after the show. In the bicycle parking lot, Mark started chatting with him and we ended up inviting the lad to dinner with us. Joseph was from Boston and had a BA in Computer Science, but he was currently working for an NPO in Mongolia. He was visiting Japan to give a couple of talks. The woman at the theatre was a circus acrobat and had invited him to a party in Osaka that weekend.
Joseph had spent his gap year between high school and university in Florianópolis, an idyllic beach resort in Brazil. Mark, who had once had a boyfriend from Brazil, plugged Joseph about Brazilian sexuality. It was Mark’s sense that Brazilians were highly sexed, yet their sexuality existed along a non-binary spectrum, the object of one’s desire being entirely situational, fluid.
We took ourselves to Que Pasa on Kawaramachi, which is run by a Japanese guy who learned on YouTube to make his quite authentic Mexican dishes. Another young fellow, a Filipino American from San Diego, was also working in the kitchen. A student at Ritsumeikan, he was a serious foodie. Simé, an Argentinian woman with a lot of tattoos and piercings, was serving us. Two other friends, Josh and Chris, presently joined us, making it a table of four middle-aged white men and one young, twenty-three-year-old white boy. We had been the first bunch into the door and had ordered our food early, but Simé had evidently lost the order, because we watched latecomers getting their dinners and leaving before we even got our food. The drink service was quicker, and the men were getting liquored up. A crude joke about the taco’s resemblance to the female genitalia had a Chilean friend of Simé’s, who was sitting next to us eating a burrito, rolling her eyes.
Josh invited Joseph to his guitar gig in Gion on Friday night. “Are you free?”
“That depends on what night the acrobat invites me to her birthday party in Osaka,” said Joseph. “My plans are a little liquid at the moment.”
“Fluid, you mean surely,” said Mark.
“I was trying to avoid that word,” said Joseph, parrying Mark’s earlier remark about gender and sexual fluidity among the Brazilians.
“More liquid, like I spilled my drink on the floor.”
We were all trying, each in our own way, to make the new boy our pet. Joseph was smart, well read, and adventurous. Who wouldn’t want his company?
Joseph, on the other hand, was looking for a good exit. This came when Josh noticed an attractive young woman at the next table. Josh eyed me. “Don’t you think she’s got a yoga body?” he asked me. “I’m gonna introduce her to you.”
“Hello, young miss? Senorita? My friend and I were having a debate here. I was saying you must be a yogini, but my friend doesn’t believe me. This is my friend Cody. He’s seriously into yoga.” Nice opening, Josh.
The girl turns and smiles. No, she doesn’t do yoga, she says. We all introduce ourselves; her eyes vaguely survey us, then turn to Joseph, who is sitting closest to her. Her name is Nanaho. Why are there so many Nanas passing through my life? The two young people immediately connect.
“You’ve been to Brazil?” asked Nanaho. “I’ve been to Brazil! You play the drums? So do I!”
The two of them immediately connect on whatever social media platform they use and take their party elsewhere.
Hanachan
One Sunday afternoon I attended another class at my downtown studio. There were just three of us, the instructor, who had lived in Toronto, and Hanachan, a young woman with whom I had taken classes before. The last time I saw her was on a retreat in Ishigaki this spring and she threw herself into my arms when I left. After class she told me she would be returning soon to Nagano where her husband awaited her. She has been periodically shuttling between Kyoto, where her mother is, and Nagano. “I bet it’ll be cooler in Nagano this summer,” I said. Not so, she said. Where they lived sat in a bowl surrounded by mountains just like Kyoto. Matsumoto? I wonder. That’s where Aimi was from. Maybe the girl of my dreams lives there, not in Kyoto. As I was leaving, she said, “give me a hug,” and we embraced warmly and for a long time. “I may not see you till next year,” she said regretfully.
I am too old (if not too wise) to fool myself into thinking there was anything romantic budding between us. Chalk it up to some paternal charge I gave off, or some unaccountable bond that sometimes Japanese people pick up on—袖擦り合うも他生（多少）の縁. In other words, perhaps it was karma from another life or something. Whatever it was, it made me unaccountably happy for the rest of the day. It is good to love and be loved.
Memento Mori
How I am feeling today. Life has its ups and its downs and sometimes its spills. A couple of weeks ago I sprained my left shoulder, then last night, trying to avoid an old couple, this old man slipped, riding his bike over a wet manhole cover. I managed to right the bike without falling over but tore my rotator cuff in the process. Where’s Hanachan when I need her? In Nagano no doubt.