We agree the training was difficult this evening. I study the hand grasping a pilsner glass as intently as if it were a piece of martial sculpture: the knuckles classically misshapen against the makiwara, the nails raggedly cut (or bitten) too short. He nods his head in a sort of sitting bow before taking a first swig.
He stops now at a booth near the front, gestures for me to take a seat, slides in beside me without a word. I’ve been in this bar before, carried along to cavernous back rooms by the sweating, thirst-maddened dojo mob at the end of a week’s classes.
The lean expanse of leg between his callused foot and the hoisted cuff of his gi pants is lush with coarse black hairs. A point at the right corner of this plump, placid mouth is pulsing, pulsing. On the contrary, though the effect can’t be an entirely calculated one. But his lips: his lips are as full, as pink and pretty, as a girl’s, without unmanning him in the least. His eyes are hooded, removed from the scene his nose, a remote little ice cliff with a chillier flourish at the nostrils. I speculate that I can, safely, glance maybe once or twice more. I’m too far away from him to hear the sound of real flesh against beard, and I can’t say if he’s speculating on anything or not. The next moment, in fact, he raises his knuckles to his jawline, scrapes them across the indigo shadow, still squatting there facing his mirror image. I can anticipate the faint rasping sound, the speculative look in his moody eyes. And I see that he keeps his beard stubbled, like some cinema samurai (the young Mifune in Hidden Fortress comes to mind.) I imagine him languidly rubbing a half-clenched fist along his jaw. The hair on his head, though, is thick, short-cropped, jet.
#I SEE THE LIGHT TANGLED JAPANESE ROMAJI SKIN#
Its ties are half undone, baring skin which is pale, nearly hairless. The white uniform sticks to his broad chest in places. He is perspiring heavily, almost panting. I step back and away from the mirror, and sit on the floor to rest, I can still watch him if I care to,īy slightly turning my head as if to catch a glimpse of the city beyond the casement windows.Ī whirling back kick to the mirror, and he squats, eyes lowered, and begins to stretch his legs.
#I SEE THE LIGHT TANGLED JAPANESE ROMAJI FULL#
I gaze into his reflected eyes: they are full of nothing but his own image, and, even as I watch, the irises seem to blacken, vision turning inward, focusing on something I can’t possibly see. His gaze rests on the distant looking glass. But now he no longer snaps his head from side to side to meet the eyes of unseen enemies. He continues thrusting, right, left, right, left, right. But he sees through this silly subterfuge, doesn’t he. I watch him for a moment, my left arm curved to conceal my face, right arm drawn close to my body, fist cocked against my hip. His black belt dangles between sturdy thighs. He is working his thrust kick, patiently, purposefully, and with full power: first one leg (hip thrusting it out at a sharp right angle to implode a solar plexus), then the other (hip thrusting it up and out to fracture a jaw). Finally, I see him as he moves into view in the mirror, some distance behind my reflection. And then: tonight, as I work on a face-block combination before the mirror that covers the west wall of the dojo, he’s suddenly there. An invisible creature, possibly imaginary, apparently even lacking in imagination, mind utterly do-devoted. I’m no one, an American, female, and scarcely elevated from non-existence by my recent acquisition of a brown belt. Of course, he would have had no reason to notice me, either, much less desire my attention. There is no point in being here, it is said, without seriousness, single-mindedness. Then, too, I’ve focused on the work, fiercely. Understandable, maybe: it isn’t so strange for a woman to overlook a man whose head she can look over. Seeing without seeing: surely he’s been here, in plain sight, all along? Nevertheless, these months and months have gone by without his presence registering.
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