by Marianne Kimura

“Omigod!”, I exclaimed in a slightly theatrical, artificially loud voice to my husband Satoshi and shoved my phone in his face just as he was about to bite into a shrimp-flavored rice cracker.
“Wha..?” he mumbled idly.
“Japan’s debt is like 220% of its GDP! It’s the worst one in the world!”
Without answering, he tossed his rice cracker into his mouth and washed it down with green tea while judging me with dismay, as though I had just ventured to do an impromptu performance as a manzai comedian that could have been a lot funnier.
Across the subdued peach-colored living room, my father-in-law raised his head from the game of shogi he was playing with my teenage son, and peered narrowly at me.
I should tell you that my father-in-law is an economics professor at a large and famous national university, so I was secretly delighted that he had decided to rise to my challenge.
My point in bringing up the issue wasn’t because I actually gave a damn about the national debt crisis but because I always thought that Japanese families, when they gathered together, tried overly hard to avoid fractious debates on current events.
I wanted to remedy that.
I wanted things to be like back in the States in my own family, where we screamed and yelled a bit more about politics, where things got a little hysterical, and frankly more than a little annoying. For some reason, I missed the needling, the noise, the dramatic tears, the baiting and the passive-aggression. I know that sounds crazy, but the drama and the boisterous, generation-gap-fueled excitement of ridiculous political debates en famille, though much derided in the western press around the time of American Thanksgiving, was starting to seem to me, thanks to living so long in Japan, like a sport I’d not appreciated enough in my youth.
“I’m sure you know”, said my father-in-law, calmly leaning back in his comfortable beige armchair, “what a koma, a spinning top, is.”
I nodded, and he continued.
“A spinning top doesn’t suddenly explode or burst into flames as it comes to a stop, does it? No, of course not. It spins more and more slowly. It winds down. To do that, it needs some space to spin. That’s just natural.”
I couldn’t very well disagree with him about things like this, which were just basic physics. So I just sat there silently.
“The Japanese government is just giving it the space it needs. Of course, to you that maybe looks like some odd and treacherous game. Some trickery. But the actual opponent is our planet, also a spinning top of a kind, not any human entity. We, here in Japan, play out the game in our own way. We don’t care about following stupid human rules. This game is not a matter of human things only. Or rather, we can say that we humans are not just human.”
With that cryptic comment, which seemed to gently amuse him as a private joke, he gave me a brief and encouraging conspiratorial smile, as though surely I had grasped his elusive metaphor. Then he turned and resumed the game of shogi.
With an undisguised look of concern on her face, my mother-in-law quickly filled up my cup with freshly brewed green tea. I thanked her with a mild, mechanical nod, and with that, the calm and quietly harmonious atmosphere of the cool and collected peach-colored living room returned.
In a last-ditch effort to avoid defeat, and also because my mother-in-law had gone back to the kitchen so she couldn’t watch me like a hawk, I hissed at my husband, “But surely, he doesn’t publish stuff like that in scholarly journals, does he?”
Satoshi only shot me a brief, pained look and I gave up, concealing my humiliation by leafing through a tabloid magazine to which my mother-in-law subscribed.
The well-known periodical was filled with reports of every sort of political scandal, both domestic (the deputy culture minister had purchased 20 cases of fine amontillado sherry with public funds) and foreign (Trump was in there), and a lot of sensational gossip related to the dalliance between a female Korean pop singer and the handsome, but married CEO of a major Japanese tech company (they had been seen together at a moon-viewing party). Even the graphics were loud and splashy. Clearly, though my in-laws had a very peaceful living room, they didn’t mind these graphics and dramatic stories.
I sensed a deep disconnect, some disruption, an awkwardness, or even an impropriety under the decorous surface, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was only a magazine, after all.
Picking my way through the thicket of kanji, understanding some but not all, I began to feel sleepy and nodded off on the peach-colored sofa until Satoshi gently shook my shoulder and said “it’s getting dark, let’s go home.”
The magazine had slid off my lap and was open on the floor, exposing the midriff of an elegant fashion model dressed in a sequined bra, fur boots and a leather mini-skirt, a few downy swan feathers stuck gracefully (but how on earth?) in her long tresses of hair.
For some reason, seeing her, the phrase my father-in-law had tossed off, ‘That’s just natural’, popped into my brain. But how ridiculous! I swatted away the offensive idea. The model was just all artifice, make-up, hair-dye, photos retouched to a fare-thee-well.
Nevertheless, the same phrase taunted me that night after we’d returned to our apartment a long train ride away across the city. Looking out through our bedroom window at the midnight sky, where hardly any stars were visible due to all the lights, I heard it again.