Right now, I’m living in a Japanese metropolis where I’m employed by the English-teaching industry. An English friend of mine, Michael, and I took a weekend trip to the city of Kobe to check it out. We planned to stay with Len, a mate of his from university who turned out to be this funny, skinny guy . . . British dry wit and all that. He lived a half-hour train ride outside of Kobe in a dingy, concrete apartment complex. On our way into the city, he was complaining about his luck with women in Japan. He can’t communicate with them. He doesn’t know how to meet them. Often, he goes out on the town, but he always ends up getting so drunk that he sometimes can’t even make it home, let alone hit on girls.
We spent the day seeing Kobe which was a rather charming and low key (for a Japanese city), wedged in between the sea on one end and mountains on the other. In the evening, we met his friends for dinner and then went out in search of some nightlife but could only find these mellow, loungey places which wasn’t what we were after. For a big night out on the town, it was best to go to nearby Osaka, or so they said. Still, we found a cheesy nightclub which in the end was pretty fun. I danced and had a few drinks. The Japanese are down with O.P.P., and they’re getting jiggy with it. Two girls in mango-colored bikinis and no hips posed at a table to promote some new mango liqueur.
By the time we finally got out of there at about 3 a.m., I realized Len’d had more than a few drinks. He had gotten himself blind and stumbling drunk, about-to-pass-out drunk. The guy could hardly talk. He hailed a cab, and Michael and I followed him inside. He shouted at the cab driver the name of the suburb where his friends we’d met for dinner lived. Near there was this place they called the Rock that overlooked a valley, a good place for stargazing. Len apparently wanted to take us there.
Off we went. The city streets quickly gave way to quiet country highways. Soon, we were up in the mountains. The driver stopped at a dark junction and obviously wanted us to tell him which way to go, and we asked Len.
“Nancy’s!” he burst out.
“Len, the driver doesn’t know your friend Nancy,” Michael and I told him.
“Sensei!” he yelled.
“Len, the driver doesn’t care that you’re an English teacher.”
Len fell back in his seat. We tried to coax some information out of him, but we couldn’t get him to say anything coherent. Meanwhile, the yen were quickly ticking off on the meter, already past twenty-five U.S. dollars, and Michael and I had no idea where we were, where to go, or if we had enough money left between us to pay the fare.
“Station?” the driver said. Maybe from the train station we could find our way. We told him yes and then no, then yes, then no. Len was leaning out the window as if he were going to puke.
Michael fished Len’s cell phone on him and found Nancy’s number on it, but she proved just as incoherent as Len was even if she wasn’t drunk. Both Michael and I tried to get directions from her through the poor connection, but she kept prattling on and on and wouldn’t listen to our questions and just wouldn’t shut up; we could hardly understand a word. Somewhere in there, she mentioned the name of her ward which the driver knew, but once we got there we were still lost, so I passed the phone to the driver. Nancy kept babbling on at him for minutes on end just like she had with us before she realized she was talking to a non-English speaker. Len was still useless, but we were getting closer. The driver worked his way to a quiet neighborhood where he somehow found some woman to ask, and she helped out. I realized Len had kept saying “sensei” because his friends lived in government-owned housing for teachers.
The driver drove up a hill and Nancy was waiting there at the top. Michael and I cheered, and I patted the laughing driver on the back. We thankfully had enough money, and I tried to give him a tip, but he wouldn’t take it.
We stayed the night on someone’s floor and went to the Rock in the morning.
