from the July heat, while his thin sushi-pale lips curled into a smile over his slightly protruding front teeth.
“How ’bout you convince her to do her thing out in the main area, where the customers could watch her, huh? She’d bring in more business.”
“But it is not sanitary...there is blood, out there...there is none back here—”
“Not so literal, Masa, not so literal...just wishin’. I know ’bout all the health regs for the food business. I’m just sayin’, she’s one fine lookin’ woman, and yes, you can go meet her at one. Now don’t go givin’ me the look, kid, remember, this door’s got air holes.” He gave the strings of beads a clinking shake for mock emphasis, then went on, “I’m just yankin’ your chain. Sounds to me like she’s got somethin’ on her mind, and believe you me, there’s nothin’ more intimate than when a woman starts unloadin’ from the inside out. Better then her takin’ off her clothes. Clothes, they come off, they’re off, but a woman who’ll unburden, that’s a one-way ticket to real intimacy. Some guys, they don’t want no part of it when a woman dumps a mental load on them, but take ’er from me, that’s when you can get real close to ’em. And that one is worth getting’ next to, from the inside-out. Now me, I’ve done all her inkslinging, and I’ve felt damn near every part of her, but do I like know her? She don’t say so much as ‘ouch’ when I’ve worked on her. Not even when I’ve given her the kiss of fire with a branding tool. But you, you got the e-ticket, man. She’s gonna have A Talk with you. Tell you whatever’s been makin’ her so jumpy lately. Now that is getting’ close, my man. Consider yourself blessed. Uh-oh, I hear someone comin’ in. But enjoy the flavor, man. That woman, she is how you folks say, oishii. Peace, man,” and with that, he was gone, headed for the main section of the establishment, leaving Masafumi to his stainless teel autoclave, and his low-sided vats of dye-bathed nano-tube ribbons.
Giving the nearest tub of crimson-dye a gentle slosh, to better infuse the nearly transparent ribbons (far thinner than human hair) with a shimmering wash of color, Masafumi winced as he thought of his boss’ misuse of the word “delicious”...true, in a vulgar sense the word might apply to a woman, if one were to think of her in such a crass way, but in a more elemental sense, Harumi was oishii, if one merely thought of something delicious as that which leaves a beautiful memory of its flavor in one’s mind. Not like his memories of Meiko, she of the underlying bitter emotional aftertaste. Even as she had helped him, she had also taken something from him, and that created the sour lingering lack of palatability which forever clouded her good intentions in his impression of her.
But what Ignacio had said, about someone who unburdens themselves becoming more naked than one who merely disrobed (not that the Miami transplant had uttered anything that eloquent), only served to remind Masafumi of his former passion and nemesis, the kimono...given that there are so many layers to a kimono, one cannot begin to remove it without first untying the obi which bound all the individual robes into one garment....
II.
(Osode)
“Ancora Imparo (“I Am Still Learning”)
Michaelangelo
When she saw Masafumi walking toward her, Harumi held out two black lacquered bowls of zaru dofu, the mauvish-blue-colored “black” variety he had not seen since he’d left Japan, and each bowl had a spoon stuck directly in the center of the moussé-textured tofu. Masafumi’s spoon was sliding downward to the east as he took his bowl from her, but he’d grabbed the long silver handle of the utensil and shoveled a frothy rounded spoonful into his mouth before the handle had a chance to fall against the side of the shiny bowl.
As he swallowed down the delectable treat, Harumi said, “I didn’t know if you like zaru dofu, but I figured it was way too hot out for me to bring over a plate of katsu-dou.”
Considering that a fried pork cutlet with scrambled eggs and sweet donburi sauce-covered rice might be considered by most non-Asians to be a breakfast dish, and since Harumi was seven-eighths non-Asian, Masafumi decided that this was a joke. Smiling as he swallowed down his next spoonful of fluffy tofu, added shyly, “And two orders of tekka-don might be too messy to carry, no? The strips of raw tuna and pressed seaweed might fall off the rice?”
“I’ve been telling my boss that he needs to start putting food like that in a wrap, pita bread or a soft taco, but the man’s a purist. He totally jumped on the couch when I suggested he put zaru dofu in his big soft drink cups, and stick a straw in it. I mean, the straw part was the joke.”
The image of a tall plastic cup filled with white, green or black mousse-like tofu was a funny one. Chuckling as he scraped the bottom of the bowl clean with his spoon, Masafumi said, “Ignacio, my boss, he likes to repeat something that singer Johnny Cash once said. ‘You know you’ve made it when your face is on a Slurpee cup.’ Or perhaps it was ‘famous’...sometimes Ignacio says that, too.”
“Ignazzy’s a cool dude. He did all my ink, he tell you that? I thought so. He wants to put pictures of me, on his wall, but I told him no. Last time I refused, he said he’d sign the next fineline work he does on me. Ever hear what he says about doing portraits, on customers?”
Ignazio was the type of employer who spoke so much, and so often, it was difficult for Masafumi to try to take in everything he said, especially while trying to do his own inkslinging, so he merely shook his head.
“Ignazzy says, ‘If you’re doin’ a dude’s face, and it ain’t turnin’ out so hot, turn it into Johnny Depp. He’s already played everybody there is, so chances are whoever you’re tryin’ to ink looks like him anyhow: I thought he was talking just to hear himself, but I looked into it. And Ignazzy wasn’t lying. Depp was Hunter S. Thompson, John Dillinger, Ed Wood, George Jung, that dude who pretended to be Donnie Drasco only I can’t remember what his real name was, the guy who wrote Peter Pan, some English poet who was like a total sexual pig back when guys all wore those high powdered wigs, and somebody else I know I’m forgetting—”
“The chocolate maker?”
“Yeah, only he was a character in a book, but yeah, he was him, too. He played everybody at some point or another, though. So chances are, you put his face on somebody’s arm, they’re gonna be pleased, even if they wanted something else. But you should listen to Ignazzy more often...he was smart enough to get his butt out of Miami before that big hurricane hit in ’24. A lot of people didn’t learn from Katrina twenty years before that...of course, Miami wasn’t way under sea level like New Orleans was, but still, who would’ve known they’d get the category five one they did—”
Masafumi wondered if the mental unburdening his boss had spoken of was preceded by a woman clearing her mind of inconsequential trivia; he doubted that her concerns over Ignazio’s portrait tattooing methods or his fortuitous flight from pre-Hurricane Xenia’s path had made her so nervous this morning that she’d almost knocked over a tray full of freshly inked tofu.
Between blurted out observations about his boss (“—he told me the other day that white and green zaru dofu would ‘give Wayne Thiebaud a boner’ and I had to go on the ‘net to find out who he was, turns out he was a guy who mainly painted desserts...cakes with layers of frosting, with the paint so thick you could spoon it off the canvas—”) Harumi slid spoonfuls of the frothy tofu into her mouth, and when her bowl was empty, she set it down on the ground next to Masafumi’s discarded bowl and spoon, and began pawing through her shorts pockets for her pack of clove cigarettes and a lighter.
It took her a few puffs of her smoke to calm Harumi down, but once she began tapping fragrant ash upon the back wall of the building she was leaning against, she half-closed her eyes and asked, “Does a wanna-be donut-graveyard named Walker Ulger still come into your boss’ shop? Sorta fat dude, in a security guard uniform? Has this shapeless round face, like a maniu?”
Masafumi tried to picture a man with a face which resembled a bean cake filled with red azuki bean paste and sugar, but it was difficult. Yet, there was something about her description which had the vague half-remembered reality of a post-dawn dream—“If you’d seen him, you’d remember him...has these