Somewhere I Have Never Traveled
by Claire Tristram


It is 1981. I live in Japan, under the shadow of Mt. Fuji. I'm twenty-one, and I've been hired by a Japanese teacher's college to recite books on tape for the English department. Every day I spend eight hours reading "Sister Carrie" into a studio microphone. That's all they want from me. No one speaks to me unless I stumble in my delivery. Then a voice from the recording booth will ask me to begin again.

Each night I go home to my one-room apartment, where I listen to the train run past my window every fifteen minutes until midnight. I live alone. I don't know the language. I am the only non-Japanese person in town. Since I am blonde and nearly six feet tall, I attract a good deal of attention. Adults whisper and stare. Children point at me, and will scream if I come too close. On one particularly bad day, the boldest of them runs up and plucks some strands of hair from my head, before running away again squealing with laughter and terror. That night I write a long letter to a former lover in California about the peculiar and deep xenophobia of the Japanese people.

In the evening as I walk home from the train station to my apartment, I pass a rustic building about the size of a basketball court, where a group of twenty men are practicing a martial art on a shiny woodent floor. The men are tonsured, like monks, and wear cotton uniforms of blinding whiteness. Sometimes they are punching and kicking the air in precise unison when I walk by. Sometimes they sit in meditation, backs perfectly straight. One of the men will march slowly and silently among the others, carrying a bamboo pole before him, his elbows out. If any of the others begins to slouch, he is struck across the shoulders with the pole, viciously and without warning. Every night I watch for a few minutes, from the darkness, before going home to my rice cooker and futon. I have a television, too, but rarely turn it on, since I understand nothing at all.

One night a latecomer rushes by me as I stand there, watching in the dark. He graces me with a closed-palmed gesture of greeting before slipping off his shoes and stepping inside, into the light. I feel a rush of gratefulness towards this man, that he acknowledged in any way that I am human, in a country where I have begun to feel like a freak of nature. It bolsters me when, one evening many weeks later, I find the courage to slip off my own shoes and step inside, myself.

I sense a reaction to my presence, immediate, organic, entire, as if a body has swallowed something it doesn't know how to expel. I feel an awareness, without acknowledgment, even as the men sit in meditation, eyes closed. I wait for something to happen.

When the meditation is over, the men get up and begin to spar with one another. Still I wait. Finally, a small man who seems to be the teacher approaches me, bold and jovial, as if he has just noticed me for the first time. He knows no English. I know no Japanese. Much later I learn that I was asking to join the martial-arts team of a men's technical college. The teacher doesn't try to explain this to me. Perhaps the challenge of explaining it is too much for him. Instead, he barks out a command, and another man runs to his side.

"Yoshimoto," the teacher says.

Yoshimoto. Now I see you again in my mind, as if for the first time. Your head is shaven like the others. But a moustache follows the line of your upper lip, thin and provocative, the only facial hair I've seen in Japan. You are an inch shorter than I am, and stocky and solid, like a brick. You gesture for me to follow you to a corner of the practice area.

This is how it begins, then: Our first meeting, our first touch, still seared in memory. You bend your knees a little, and gesture for me to do the same. You extend your arm, a right cross of glacial slowness, so I can observe the slight turn of the wrist at the end, the final snap. When I try to follow, you shake your head in digust and grab my hands roughly, molding my fingers impatiently into a proper fist. It is the first time in months that anyone has touched me, except for the random and soulless pressings of the too-crowded train at rush hour. I want to cry out with the relief of it. I want to break, like an egg, and flow into you. I will do anything for you. You don't notice.

The next evening you are annoyed to see me show up again: your irritation pulses towards me with each clench of your jaw. The other men call out to you, laughing, as they spar. You frown more deeply. I begin to understand that I am your special trial; that the teacher has chosen me, this odd, large, white, awkward woman, to test his finest student. We retire to our corner once more to begin our slow drills. But tonight your don't touch me, as if you know already that I am aching for your touch.

The next night you force my body into strange and painful positions. You make me stand on one leg, the other stretched out to one side at right angles to the floor until I think it will break and fall off. Then you walk away and leave me there. You seem to forget about me, never looking in my direction, even as I follow you with my eyes from one side of the floor to the other. When you come back at last, it is not to relieve me, but to apply more torture. Now you force my body into a submissive crouch, knees bent, until my thighs burn with pain and rage. When you come back again, you gesture for me to kneel in meditation, sitting on my feet until I can feel them no longer. You walk away.

And still, each night I come.

You change tactics. You stand with your arms flung wide apart, taunting me, daring me to strike at you. Your uniform opens in front to reveal your hairless golden chest, and the small, perfect, delicate roundness of one nipple. You dance in front of me, and when I try to hit you, or to kick you, or in my fury and frustration to reach you in any way, you grab me easily and throw me to the floor, your knee applying pressure between my breasts, pinning me there. Over and over again.

I come back. Night after night you force me to submit. You never say a word to me, in any language, and yet I learn to understand your commands. My life has become an endless progression of tense and sweaty couplings without any hope of consummation. Your approval becomes the most important thin in my life. You must touch me often, to put my body into the correct position. You have touched my body everywhere now. But you won't look at me. Your eyes are dark, like a Noh mask, but a golden light breathes out from your skin. You are very beautiful.

One night, a hot fury rising up in me, I manage to grab one of your wrists as you taunt me. I force it into a particularly agonizing lock, one that you have demonstrated on me many times. You drop to your knees before me in surprise and pain. You look up, and your golden neck arches forward, like a woman's. For the first time you look at me. I see in your eyes such longing and intense fragility that I hesitate, and my hold on your wrist grows less secure. Then I am on the floor again, and you are over me, breathing hard, your knee applying the familiar pressure to my chest.

Yoshimoto. I come to understand that you desire me, too. You tell me so by the way you begin to say my name with a soft, fuzzy-edged intimacy, even as I'm crying out from the torture of your teachings. You tell me so every time you defeat. You tell me so every time you press your knee into my chest, or between my thighs, or into my ass. Sometimes as I lie beneath you one bead of sweat will drop, like a tear, from your temple to my cheek.

Now you are over me again, your body rocking, your breathing hard and fast, your lips parted with exertion and elation. You have pinned me by the wrists this time, behind my back. My face is pressed against the cool floor. Your knee is shoved between my thighs, making my vulva sing and ache for you. You make a sound low in your throat, like a big cat purring, as you exert the final pressure on my wrists to master me completely. Only when I cry out will you release me. I know I need only make a sound, and the pain will be over, and so will be this unbearably sweet throbbing between my legs. I clench my jaw and taste the floor and writhe beneath you for as long as I can stand it, before I must cry out, both from the pain and from the disppointment of feeling you let go of me once more.

We never make plans to be alone together. It is unthinkable. Neither of us knows how to break the rules of this stange and secret game. The tension between us is too precious, too forbidden, like an addiction. It is here, each night, in the company of twenty sweaty and grunting men, that we make love to one another, over and over and over again. When it is done, I go home alone to my bed and rub my little hooded knob and imagine that my finger is your tongue, that your face is buried in my cunt, until I ride one glorious spasm and find liquid release. When we do one day find a way to be together at last, I know that you will continue to taunt me and to tease me, and when you finally take me it will be in the ass, hard, swift, mercilessly deep, until I split apart, until you break me utterly.

Now each night there is a small crowd of spectators by the door, amazed at the large white woman who has learned the ways of Japan so quickly. Their presence adds to the voyeuristic pleasure of our fierce duet. I earn my brown belt in record time. At this pace, I'll earn my black belt in a year. Only you, Yoshimoto, understand that my devotion to the art isn't about earning a black belt at all.

Then, diaster. The teacher gives me over to another sparring partner. Now I feel your eyes on me now from across the floor, watching as I and this other man, this nothing, perform the same intimate couplings that you and I performed together. I want to tell you it is not the same thing, that it means nothing to me. But I don't know the words.

Your lust makes you clever. The next night you strike me with the bamboo pole for the first time, as I sit in meditation with the others. The blow is sharp, clear, and relentlessly hard. It sings out your desire even as it cuts through the air.

I wait each night for your blows. It is all we have. I try to anticipate them, to hear your cat steps behind me before the stick lands. Always you take me by surprise when the blow finally falls, sending such a vicious flame of want through me that I feel my wet dripping lips open with their need for you, so much so that I want to bend over and let you enter me right there, while the others meditate, unseeing and unknowing. Each night your blows grow harder. Each night when I go home, I touch the bruises that mark my shoulders, and you are with me. But it is not enough. I feel your frustration building with each blow, and I know that your yearning matches my own.

One night my regular partner does not appear, and you and I are together again. We fight fiercely, the relief of touching you at last! My reach surprises you and I strike a sharp jab to your kidney, just barely checking my thrust as I hear you grunt with surprise and approval. We clash again. Our sweat mingles. You enfold me in your arms, a neck hold that forces me to my knees, pressing me forward, forward, until I must bend over in a tight ball and crawl away from you to escape the pain, and still you do not release me, and I feel myself spasm, the joy of it! When you finally let me go I feel my soft sweet juice between my thighs, and I can see from your eyes that you know my secret, that I have come.

I stand up again. I think of planting a swift kick to your ass, a love tap, but something goes very wrong, somehow your knee gets in the way and I collapse in a heap. Pain comes, the wrong kind of pain. The men all huddle around me, whispering. I have broken my foot. The teacher shouts out the news in slow Japanese and asks mo over and over if I understand, even as my pulse sends a jagged torment from my foot up my spine and makes me dread each heartbeat.

Somehow, in my haze, sitting there on the floor at the center of this throng of sympathizers, I know that this is our chance.

A taxi is called. You conspire to be the one who rides with me to the clinic. Just as I knew you would. When the taxi comes, you and another man carry me outside, stretching both of my legs across the back seat. Then you get in and close the door, holding my bare feet in your lap.

We drive away into the darkness. We are alone, alone at last, save for the anonymous white-gloved driver in front. He won't tell, Yoshimoto. Surely you understand that this is to be our only chance. Surely you understand that I will do anything for you, anything at all, be your rough concubine and let you hit me across the shoulders every night with your bamboo pole. Even as my mind explodes with pain from my broken foot, I hold my breath and wait for you to unlace the drawstring of my uniform trousers and to unfold me, petal by petal, until you find the small and secret place that is singing for your touch.

You sigh. It is a sound that strikes me, then and now, as unbearably sad. You raise my good foot to your lips. I feel your breath. Then you kiss my instep. The kiss is long and full, a caress so focused, and so sweet, that I understand at once that I haven't understood you at all. Tears come.

That is all.

After a month with my foot in a cast, I earn my black belt. My name goes up on a plaque on the wall, never to be removed. I go home to America. We never learn to speak to one another. We never find a way to be alone.

But now, seventeen years later, walking along the tide line on a beach near my Northern California home, I find myself thinking of you. The tide is coming in. One foot feels the cool shock where a wave has just left the sand. The other feels the warmth wher the tide has not yet reached. One foot I broke. The other, you kissed. Even as we travel away from each other, with each step you are with me. Whenever I think of you, Yoshimoto, it is with this exquisite tension between the pain and the light, never to be resolved, like a hot wind rising just before a storm that never breaks.