Articles

by Graeme Lottering

The first glances mixed among a cascade of glittering vowel sounds, kick-started by an unsuspecting interlude. Communication, it seemed, lurked behind eyelashes and curious irises. The girl behind the lashes was short but athletic, and she somehow suggested a seven-year-old in a dress, prancing and dancing on oldskool 6mm film. She had the innocence of backyard tire swings embedded in her spirit. To me she was a beautiful animal. We couldn’t communicate except for gestures, charades, and some deeply penetrating glances. She danced around me in storms and floods of た ち つ て とs; I stood baffled, bubbling with excitement as I watched her lips: “Ta, chi, tsu, te, to!” I believe the Japanese language evolved in the rainy season. Sounds, like water drops, splash with the rhythmical tip-tap, drip-drip of unintoned sentences. It’s the language of mermaids, sirens, and river spirits. And I was definitely enchanted—intoxicated by shapes her lips made. The first time I talked to her, I started to speak in French. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was a natural reaction to jump to a more well know foreign language; otherwise, it might have been because I have come to associate that instantaneous flitter-flatter heartbeat of a first flirtatious encounter with the rrrrrrroling ‘r’s and velvety ‘sshwisshhing’ (like windblown curtains) in the langue de français. After all, French is the language of love, illumination, and foreplay.

Her reaction—like the seven year-old performing for the camera on scratchy, slightly sienna film—was to smile, cock her head and flick her bangs off of her forehead. I must have blushed and I’m sure it was a rare sight for her, being used to the ‘social mask’ of tattemae which Japanese wear in their daily lives. Thus our first exchange was dreamlike in the nebula of unintelligible, but serenely beautiful, consonants. A rainstorm seen through a Mediterranean window. The room we were standing in—me looking down into her big, almond-shaped eyes—was, for a moment, transformed by the audible heartbeats of two people searching for understanding. And in that absence of words, of sounds, we telegraphed thoughts through an uninterrupted line of sight into each other’s profoundly black pupils. I imagined kissing the nape of her neck, visible beneath the black hair resting on her shoulder. An unexpected image indeed. And I wondered how to kiss in Japanese. Much later, while I held her in my arms, she would explain the sound a Japanese kiss makes. We would be gently woken up by drifting piano sounds on a sluggish, but sunny Sunday morning. Communicating in the drizzling droplets of Japanese mixed with sober sounds of English, she’d explain: “a kiss is a lost raindrop, falling into a still pond on a misty morning.” The sound, most simply, is pronounced ‘chu,’ with a short echoing vowel that can make a stoic body ripple.

<more from 120