I Looked Up at the Stars Too Late

Kakunodate and Akita Bijin

Do Akita bijin really exist? (Akita bijin: "the beauties of Akita," a long-standing expression for the women of this northern region.)

The answer is yes.

But it is not a matter of faces. There is grace in the smallest gestures. Words are chosen gently. They move people without ever raising their voices. When someone is in trouble they make no show of helping; they are simply already doing something about it, with an ordinary look on their face. Women like that are here in numbers, and no one finds it remarkable.

Even the back of a woman shovelling snow has a straight spine. Meet her on the road on a cold morning and the bow comes before you have noticed her. The Akita dialect has round endings. A single "nda" — yes, that's right — changes the air of a room depending on who says it. That is not something anyone acquires through training.

There were too many of them, and so I never noticed.
Or rather, I spent more than fifty years assuming this was simply how the world was.

It was like that from childhood.
Girls my own age, girls a little older, women far older than me. Every one of them charmed me.

I thought it was ordinary.
I was wrong.

It was not ordinary at all. That, I think, is what an Akita bijin actually is. And it is not only Kakunodate. This whole area had far too many of them.

Classmates Are Cheating

The worst of them, by a distance, are my classmates.

I remember middle school. A profile laughing with friends by the corridor window. The way a pair of hands moved while lunch was being served. Someone sitting on the cold gymnasium floor, hugging her knees against the chill. Whatever they were doing, I could not look away. I remember nothing at all from the textbooks, and those scenes are still oddly sharp.

If that were all, it would be a story about being young.
The trouble is that they are more attractive now.

Meeting a classmate approaching sixty is a surprise. There is a refinement that arrives only once a woman has stopped competing on youth. The way she pours the sake. The patience to hear a drunk man's pointless story through to the end. A memory that holds not only your name but the circumstances of your household. And it is usually the women who notice first when someone is having a hard time.

On the way out, one of them says, "Don't slip out there."
It is only a parting phrase. I know that. Knowing it, I can live on it for a night.

What a great number of appealing women there are. The older I get, the more clearly I see what is good in them. By the time I could see it, every one of them belonged to another household.

The Lie About the Stars

Hakata was the same. Every visit, every passing glance, I was charmed. In places that have long been said to produce beauties, there really are more of them. That is not folklore. I can state it as fact.

Strangely, in Tokyo, where all of them should have gathered, I never felt it once. This is not to say that Tokyo's women are lesser. There were beautiful people beyond counting. It was simply that I was a country man passing through, with neither the standing nor the ease to stop and look at anyone. A person's charm, I suspect, is invisible unless your own feet are on the ground.

When I was young, someone told me that women are as countless as the stars, and it put me at ease. No need to hurry. Somewhere, someday.

Only after growing old did I understand.
They are indeed as countless as the stars. That part was true.
What was false was my assumption that the countless number was mine. The stars may be beyond counting, but the ones I could reach were few enough to count from the start. And each of them had a season in which the meeting was possible.

I let every one of those seasons slip past.

On top of that, I suffer from an illness. Not chunibyo — the delusions of a fourteen-year-old — but what I call fuji-byo, otherwise known as Tora-san disease. (Tora-san: the hero of a long-running film series who falls in love in every instalment and always leaves without saying a word.) I fall for someone, I float, and at the decisive moment I go home having said nothing. No cure for it has been invented yet.

Women of my own year are the ones I still cannot face. When I was a warashi — a child, in the local word — I was so charmed that I had no idea what to do, and the only way I could express it was the stupidest one available: I was unkind to them. For them it can only be an unpleasant memory. More than forty years have passed and the debt is still unpaid.

The Verdict

Not long ago I met a classmate again.
She sat down beside me and said, laughing:

"You were mean to me when we were kids, weren't you."

A verdict delivered forty-odd years late. With a smile attached.

I should have bowed my head there and then and said I was sorry. Or I could have told her the truth, that it was because I had been in love with her. I had, in effect, been waiting forty-odd years for that one sentence.

When the moment finally came, nothing at all came out of my mouth.

I was not glaring. I was too embarrassed to produce a sound, so I simply looked back at her face. From the outside it must have looked like a sullen middle-aged man answering a smile with silence. Forty-odd years of preparation, and that was my defence.

Tora-san would set off on his travels at this point.
I panicked internally, kept a strained smile on my face, and had to sit in that seat until the party was over.

On the way home I looked up at the sky.
Class reunions tend to fall in winter. Not one star is visible. There is only a grey sky, and out of it comes fine white snow.

The stars that were supposed to be countless cannot be seen.
Instead the earth drops powder snow on me and says, "You've got no hoji." (Hoji: local Akita word for sense, or wits. Hoji-ne na means roughly "there's nothing between your ears.")

When it lands on my face, it is hyakkoi. Cold, as we say around here.