The Curry Shop Girl

After my home-stay went awry, I moved into the Canon dormitory managed by Oshikawa-san and his wife in Musashi-Nitta, in Ohta-ku, Tokyo.

Musashi-Nitta was a working-class neighborhood in the southeastern part of Tokyo, near the Tama River, which separates Tokyo from Kawasaki City. Tokyo lacks zoning laws, and Musashi-Nitta featured a diverse mixture of land uses, ranging from houses to shops (concentrated in the business district near the station) to small factories doing piece-work for Japan's big companies. There were even a few rice paddies scattered in the neighborhood near the Tama River, existing on some of the world's most expensive real estate due to extremely farmer-friendly tax policies. (I always wondered if people would eat the rice if they knew it came from a field next to a car-parts manufacturer, but they probably never knew where it came from.)

Like most neighborhoods in Japan, Musashi-Nitta featured a shotengai (shopping district) near the station, consisting of a street sloping downward in the direction of the river, demarcated at both ends with a gate reading Musashi-Nitta Shotengai. The shotengai featured a couple of convenience stores, a supermarket, a home electronics-goods store, a store where could buy household items like linens, pots and pans, and even small furniture items, and a few restaurants and "snacks" -- the Japanese name for a kind of local bar with a very small number of seats, very personalized service, and a reputation for looking askance at new people. The shotengai always had some kind of seasonal decorations hanging from the telephone poles -- pink plastic cherry blossoms in the spring, red and yellow plastic leaves in the fall -- that added some color to the drab grey exteriors of the neighborhood shops. The shotengai lay directly on my route from Musashi-Nitta station to Oshikawa-san's dormitory, so I would traverse it twice a day.

One of the restaurants was a curry-rice shop, occupying a location toward the bottom of the street at the Y where two streets came together. The shop was run by a middle-aged woman and her daughter, who was a year or two older than me. After a while, I started going there a couple of times a week. I was usually the only customer there, and it was a good chance to practice my Japanese.

The daughter always seemed sort of shy and sad, and I figured that being trapped in a curry shop in Musashi-Nitta with her mother was not exactly the kind of life she wished for, but it was nice being able to talk to someone during dinner. She would pepper me with questions about the U.S. and I would try my best to answer in my still-halting Japanese. She always seemed happy to see me when I came in, and I thought I had made a new friend.

I guess she had bigger ideas than that. She suggested that we go out one Saturday afternoon, and I accepted, thinking it was harmless. I don't remember where we went, but the next day, she showed up at my dormitory with a present for me. It was then I realized that she was interested in more than just friendship. I am not cynical about her motives, but I am sure that part of her interest resulted from the fact that the possibility of dating a gaijin (and Musashi-Nitta was not exactly the kind of place where you met a lot of them) offered her an exciting escape from life in the curry shop.

Although I was not happy to be put in this position and didn't want to hurt her feelings, I knew it would be crueler to lead her on, so I told her, as best I could, that I was only interested in a friendship. She burst into tears, which needless to say, only made me feel worse.

I pried myself away from her and went back to my room. I stopped going to the curry shop after that, and always walked by very quickly from that point onwards, hoping that I would not run into her, which I never did again.