A box of sweets to share

a spot in the shade,

and my sisters about me;

how I miss those hours.

---Lady Suzume Murasaki, 1766-1790.

Had I seen Suzume around the campus as she was then, without thumbprints on her forehead and in the sunny cardigan and skirt the saleswoman had chosen, I would have guessed she was a tourist from Japan visiting an older sibling. Not because she was Asian and therefore foreign, but because she was foreign in a way not easily defined, which had something to do with her slenderness, something about her apparent innocence, and quite a lot to do with how unconsciously comfortable she was in how she knelt in front of my old television. Any American over the age of nine would be suffering numbness and cramping within fifteen minutes in that position.

She wasn't so much watching The Seven Samurai as living it, her face echoing the emotions she saw on the faces on screen. Having read about how people screamed and fainted when the first movies ever were shown, I was a trifle concerned about how she would react, but she was fine with it—perhaps the subtitles running across the bottom for my benefit were keeping her grounded.

I had seen it before, and so as the first samurai shaved his head and donned a monk's robes to rescue a child being held hostage by a thief, I could turn my thoughts inward and think.

While the blow she delivered to my privates had been painful, I had been hit in the groin harder than that—an incident playing dodge ball in fifth grade came to mind, not to mention the time a patient turned out to be insufficiently sedated about a year and a half ago—but never when I was in such an...oversensitive state. That made the kneeing hurt worse than it would have otherwise, but the ache was subsiding. To her credit, Suzume did not hold a grudge. She had fetched the ice promptly and was quite apologetic , albeit prone to break out into scolding so mild it was hardly worth calling a scold. I had been scolded by experts in my time, women who could excoriate with the power of a belt sander, and Suzume was not in their class.

Nothing so pointed out the difference between our cultures so much as the revelation that kissing was unheard of in polite Japanese society of her day. She had explained that the practice had been introduced by foreign traders and sailors when they visited the dockside brothels to slake their need for kisses, among other forms of affection, and consequently was thought of as something of a perversion. She had also explained that if we were married, that would be one thing, but as we weren't, she wasn't going to put out, in effect.

"If one has to marry someone, she wouldn't be such a bad choice," Dr. Crane thought out loud. "If she reacts that negatively to a mere kiss, then it's not likely that she would be very...demanding." He had manifested for the first time around the start of The Seven Samurai, for reasons known only to him, and was now sitting apart from the rest of us, on the built-in bench. Like the Scarecrow, he had his own 'look', which was that he looked like I would if I were wearing a white lab coat with a surgical mask and gloves.

"There's the problem," the Scarecrow stated. "I want her to be demanding. You, on the other hand, would rather just leave that ice bag in place until our balls develop frostbite, and Jonny here wants to get to know her as a person—and not in the biblical sense."

That was where he was mistaken. I wanted to get to know her as a person first before doing anything irrevocable.

"You wish," sneered the burlap-masked third of my personality. "Listen, we are twenty-six, and the entire extent of our experience consists of ten incomplete minutes with our sophomore year lab partner, which ended when she started crying and saying she couldn't do this after all. This is a goddamned ridiculous and humiliating state of non-affairs—why are neither of you listening to me?"

Dr. Crane wasn't listening because to him, we didn't exist, and I was watching both The Seven Samurai and Suzume.

Strange...kissing seemed so natural to persons born and raised in twenty-first century America. A kiss was the most basic gesture of affection there was, a common denominator in close relationships, bestowed freely between parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers, even between friends, provided at least one of them was female. Of course it all depended. My great-grandmother had never, to my knowledge, kissed anyone since her wedding day. My grandmother did a great deal of social kissing or 'air' kissing, the kind which never made contact for fear of spoiling each others' makeup, but that did not extend to unwanted grandsons.

My mother did kiss me, when I was a child, but since we spent very little time together when I was growing up...

Four and a half days together, to be precise. She took off a few weeks after I was born, running away once again, and more successfully that time. I don't precisely blame her, since I knew better than anyone what Great-Grandmother was like. No doubt she abused Mother as she would later abuse me.

When I was seven, my mother came back for me. I remember it very well—who wouldn't remember the first time in living memory that one met one's mother? I was in class, trying hard to sit still and not call out the answers even though I knew them all, when over the loudspeaker came, 'Jonny Crane, your mother is waiting for you in the principal's office.' I thought it had to be a mistake, because if anyone was waiting for me in the office, it would be Great-Grandmother, but when I went in, there was a beautiful, smiling lady with golden hair and eyes so blue looking at her was like looking at a summer sky. Even though I'd never seen a picture of her, (Grandmother had destroyed them all), I knew who she was straight off. I would have known even if no one had said my mother was waiting for me, because she looked so much like me. I ran to her and threw my arms around her waist, breathing in her scent, drinking in the sensation of being so close to her, and she dropped to her knees, hugging me back. "Mommy," I mumbled into her hair.

My mother whispered back, "Jonathan, oh, Jonny." Then she kissed me, the first kiss I could ever remember receiving. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but it'll be okay now." She must have said something to the principal, but I don't recall exactly what. The next thing I knew, she was leading me outside into a day more glorious than any before, to a car where a man waited for us.

"Is this my daddy?" I asked, childishly direct, and my mother laughed.

"He's going to be your daddy from now on," she explained, "because he and I are getting married, and we're all going to live together and be a family like we always should have been. And we'll be happy. You want that, don't you?" I don't remember his face now, but I remember how he smelled; slightly skunky and a little like apple pies, for some reason. My mother smelled of a perfume with vanilla and lilac in it, such a lovely fragrance.

I thought for a moment of Great-Grandmother, and then endless chores that awaited me when I got home, and ate every waking weekend hour. I thought of school, and the children who teased me for my old-fashioned, moth eaten clothing, the bullies and the scorn, and I replied, "More than anything in the whole world."

She laughed again, a rippling, genuine, wonderful laugh, and said, "You sound like a little old man—my little old son. That's okay, we'll soon have you sounding more like a kid should. Hop in the car now, we've got several days driving ahead of us. We're going to Texas!" She whooped at the sky, startling some birds out of the trees.

It was the happiest moment of my childhood. Unfortunately it did not last. Little did anyone know, since I so rarely rode in a car for any distance, but I got motion sick. That was soon fixed, as we stopped to get me cleaned up (not to mention the car) at a gas station which supplied not only paper towels but also Dramamine, an over the counter anti-nausea remedy. The down side was that it made me very sleepy. For three days, we drove, stopping for dinner (and more Dramamine) and staying in motels where I slept on a cot while my mother and her fiancé shared the bed. I do not believe that what my great-grandmother said was true: that they were not engaged, that she was a whore and he her pimp, that she entertained dozens of men a night while I lay in a drugged sleep, nor that their only reason for collecting me was to sell me to a pedophile.

In the morning, we would eat at a cheap diner somewhere nearby. I thought the food was wonderful—I finally had enough to eat!—and then we would get sandwiches to go for lunch. On the third day, I bit into a sandwich that had more than chicken salad between two slices of white toast. It had a special surprise lurking in the mayonnaise—salmonella poisoning. The initial symptoms were enough like carsickness that my mother and her fiancé shrugged it off and gave me another plastic bag, but by nightfall it was obvious something worse was wrong with me, namely bloody diarrhea as well as nausea, and with fever, chills, and headache thrown into the bargain. I recall sitting on a toilet with a wastebasket in front of me, waiting for the next bout of excrement to tear its way through me, more abjectly miserable than ever before in my life, while outside in the motel room my mother wept and my prospective 'daddy' shouted at her.

A gap of some eighteen hours in my memory follows that. I woke up in a hospital bed, an IV in my arm and my great-grandmother sitting by the bed, her mouth a hairline fracture in her granite face. My mother had not reclaimed me, it seemed. She had abducted me from the care of my legal guardian, and I was never to be free again until Time and dementia opened the prison gate and I went to college.

The next time I saw my mother was at my high school graduation, and I almost didn't recognize her. She was alone—no mention of her fiancé, and she had let that golden hair go back to its normal mousy brown. She was thinner, and looked much older, and the joy was gone out of her too. When she tried to kiss me, I turned my head. We stood there, uncomfortable as only family can be with one another, making small talk until she could escape from me. I have not seen her or spoken to her since. I don't know where she is, and in all honesty, I don't care. I bear her no ill will, but I find it difficult to feel anything for her at all.

While I mused, The Seven Samurai had reached the intermission. I paused the DVD player and asked, through my computer, what Suzume thought of it so far. She replied, via the dictionary, that it was an excellent story, but nothing like a play at all. Plays were very stylized and unnatural, whereas this movie was like being there while it was going on. Were there very many movies like this?

I replied that there were, not all by Kurosawa and not all as good, and not only from Japan but from other countries all over the world, including America. Would she like to see others?

She definitely would. I said we would watch another one the next night, in English with Japanese subtitles. The movie was called Romeo and Juliet, and it was about a young man and a young woman from two noble families in a city called Verona. I thought she would like it. She said (again, through the dictionary) she was very curious to see more movies, and she would very much like to see one from Europe. Then she sprang up to clear away the dinner dishes—she had produced a clear soup, vegetables and rice balls stuffed with salmon for us—and I considered how different Suzume was from any other woman I had ever known. She was especially different than any woman in my family. She was thoughtful, appreciative—and speaking of appreciating, I had bought some chocolate.

When Suzume returned with tea for us, I unwrapped the candy and invited her to try it. Apprehensive at first, she broke off a square and nibbled on it. Having never before seen anyone try chocolate for the first time, her reaction was, to say the least, ecstatic. She looked as though she were having a vision of God. She swallowed very carefully and asked if she could have more, (in Japanese, but her meaning was very clear.)

I said that half was hers, and to help herself. She did. Starting the movie up again was out of the question; this chocolate sensory experience was too overwhelming for her to pay attention to anything like a movie. When she had finished every last morsel, she looked around, at the television, at the packages of food still on the counter ( I had bought one of everything in the Japanese section in the grocery store), at the clothing she was wearing, and at the empty candy wrapper.

Then she threw herself on her face at my feet, an unexpected move, and begged my forgiveness. (going by tone and gesture) When she raised her head, there were tears in her eyes. Reaching for the dictionary, she praised me for my kindness, thoughtfulness and generosity, adding that I was far, far better to her than she deserved.

"Wow, " said the Scarecrow. "Who knew chocolate was so powerful?"

"If that's the sort of attitude she's going to take, it only seems right to make the arrangement permanent, " offered Dr. Crane.

For some reason, the fact that they were agreeing like this disturbed me. However, there was still the rest of the movie to watch, and I started it going again.