The Red Gate

            His eyes were opened wide and his English words burped out in sporadic bits.

            “Please…you…come…sing!”

            My friends and I had just finished an hour and a half of karaoke.  After crooning along to Old Blue Eyes, I broke my singing voice trying to match notes with Nic Cester’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl.”  We were about to miss the last train home.

            “If we stay, we could take a taxi,” suggested Amanda.

            Goran looked thrilled.  Amanda and Suzie were unsure but willing.  I rubbed my throat.

            “Okay.  Let’s sing,” I said to our new, wide-eyed friend.  He led us back to the elevator and the karaoke room on the fourth floor.

            “Please…no worry,” said our guide.  “We are…not dangerous.”

            In fact, his daily working life was wholly concerned with not being dangerous.  Our guide was one of the employees at a nearby automobile air bag manufacturing company.  We snuck by the front desk and up the stairs to a large, dimly lit karaoke room where the other employees sat around a long table watching song lyrics light up on the TV in the corner.  They were surprised to see us but quickly made room along the table.  Drinks were ordered.

            The Boss sat in the corner, legs crossed, looking passively amused by his employees.  One particularly energetic man stood with microphone in hand as our wide-eyed friend pointed at the lyrics on the screen.  Someone passed me the remote and I put Lenny Kravitz in queue for Goran and me to sing.  Our turn came up and we earned definite cool points for our fluent English.

            In between songs, I learned that the Boss had visited Boston on business.  We tried to converse on this subject, but the background noise was too loud.  I finished my plum wine and the ice cubes clinked in my empty glass when I set it back down on the table.  Our guide immediately noticed the sound.  More drinks were ordered. 

            A middle-aged man with a protruding belly pitched his voice high as he sang along with a Japanese boy band.  Someone asked for more song suggestions.

            “Hirai Ken no Pop Star,” I suggest.  My secret weapon.  After my study-abroad year in Kyoto, thanks to my host sister, Pop Star is one of the few Japanese songs I learned to sing with any confidence.

            I sang note for note with another guy down the table, but all eyes were on me.  It looked like the air bag safety employees were about to explode.

            “Look!”

            “He’s like a real Japanese person!”

            “Unbelievable!”

It was too easy, but I couldn’t resist.  Amanda ended with a Japanese song as well, and the energetic man sitting next to her promptly fell in love.  He motioned to his ring finger and frowned dramatically at us from across the table when he felt his wedding ring.

The party wrapped up, and large bills were passed from one wallet to the next, but our portions of the songs and the drinks were apparently free of charge.  In the tiny elevator, everyone quickly returned to their normal selves.  We walked back towards the station through empty streets lined with closed shops, chatting quietly.  I introduced myself to the Japanese man walking next to me whom I had already sung with for the past hour. 

On Monday morning, the students lined up in neat rows across the dry dirt field, all eight hundred and forty of them dressed in simple uniforms of black pants or skirts with white shirts.  One thousand six hundred and eighty eyes watched me curiously.

            “We have the best brass band in the prefecture,” said the Vice Principal.  Off to the right of the crowd, the student band played the school anthem, precisely synched with the conductor’s measured instruction.  It was the end of school vacation and the start of the second term.  The brass band had been at school every day of summer vacation, practicing their scales down the hall from the teacher’s office.  They were always there along the hallway to the exit door, even after I left work, horns blaring in my ears as if they were trumpeting my departure.

            The Principal stood on a small metal stage and introduced me as one of two new teachers.  I wiped the sweat off my brow with my handkerchief.  The cloth had a grassy farm smell from the new tatami mats in my apartment – a scent that was finally starting to smell like home.  I took the stage and spoke my first words to my new students in a mix of English and Japanese.  My voice, then recovered from the hours of singing, echoed across the field.  I calmed my nerves and paused frequently to let the words sink in.  As I finished my short introduction and stepped off the stage, the students were eerily quiet.  There was no applause.  No astonishment at my fluent English or my attempts at Japanese.  Nothing but respectful silence. 

I took my place with the other teachers behind the crowd of students – shepherds watching over the flock.