Taste

Note: This story is long and takes time to unfold. That said, it's my first work, and I hope you enjoy it. All names of people have been changed. Would love some feedback if you can spare the time. Peace and love.

Part 1 of 6: The Onsen

In March of 2004, I moved to Ichihara in Chiba Prefecture, Japan to teach English at an

Eikaiwa.

I was a month shy of turning 26, had graduated from university with a bachelor's in Mathematics, and had decided that teaching was to be my life's calling. I'd cut my teeth as a private tutor for years and worked at various cram schools in and around Vancouver. Despite all this, I felt I still needed something more, something impressive that I could put on a resume down the road. Teaching overseas just felt like the obvious choice.

At least that's how I sold it to my parents when they asked why I wanted to fly halfway around the world to teach in a country I knew nothing about. Truth be told, I just wanted to move out of the house. I was a man by this point in my life, but only by age I felt, having grown up very little under my parents' roof.

As the oldest of three boys, I always strove to do everything first. But even with my one- and six-year head starts, my brothers would often beat me to the finish line. The elder of them, Tommy, had moved out the previous year to pursue his master's at the University of Waterloo. At the start of this story, he was eight years into a relationship with his girlfriend, Janet. In contrast, I was single and living with my parents. My longest relationship up till then had lasted all of three months.

My parents adored Janet. She was polite, well read, and respectful of her elders—perfect daughter-in-law material. She got along great with me and my friends. To us, she was just one of the boys. Heck, she even looked the part: shoulder-length black hair; a slim, athletic build; skinny jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt most days; and even a raspy, masculine tinge in her voice.

Before Tommy moved out, we saw a lot of Janet around the house. My parents would have her over for dinner three, four, sometimes five nights a week. I didn't mind it at all. The lovebirds respected my privacy and remained mostly out of sight.

Four months into my stay in Japan, I received an email from Janet. She'd been accepted into the JET Program as an assistant language teacher in Mito up in Ibaraki Prefecture—three hours north of Ichihara. Till then, I'd had no clue where Mito was or that Janet had entertained the idea of teaching overseas. I guessed it made sense. Tommy was going to school out east while she was searching for jobs (unsuccessfully) in Vancouver. If they were fated to do a long-distance relationship, what difference would a long

er

distance make?

I replied to Janet, telling her how psyched I was. "You're gonna love it here," I said, making sure, however, to temper her excitement. Meeting up with any kind of regularity was going to be challenging given the distance between our cities.

That's fine,

she wrote in her next email.

At least I'll have a friend close by.

It would be another two months before Janet would make it to Japan. The day of her arrival—a Friday—I took an evening train into Shinjuku to visit her at the hotel that she and the other new hires were staying at. Orientation would be the next day, all of Sunday was set aside for travel, and Monday would be their first day on the job.

Janet was sitting patiently in the hotel lobby when I arrived. She had on sweatpants and a faded denim jacket over a sweatshirt. When she heard me call out to her from across the lobby, she got up, scurried over, and hugged me for possibly the first time in all the time I'd known her.

"How was your flight?" I asked, happy to see a familiar face after so many months.

"Long," she answered, letting out an exasperated groan. I'd suffered through the same gruelling 10-hour flight back in March, so I knew she had to be exhausted.

"Come up to the room," Janet continued. "I want you to meet Sonya, my roommate for the weekend."

We took the elevator up to her floor and walked down the hall to her room. Sonya, a fellow Vancouverite, was in the middle of unpacking the contents of an oversized suitcase. She casually waved to us, finished her unpacking, and fell forward onto her mattress with a thud. Like Janet, she looked completely spent.

The three of us would spend the better part of the next hour talking about all things Japanese, the girls asking the questions, and me answering them the best I could. I taught them some useful phrases from my limited Japanese, mostly salutations and ways to ask for help. As the night dragged on, the girls got sleepier, so I wished them the best with their new jobs, gave Janet another big hug, and showed myself out.

I wouldn't see Janet again for another three months. In late January, my best friend, Bruce, came to visit for two weeks. I'd made a list beforehand of things to do and places to see. At the top of this list was a ski trip up to Aomori with teachers and students from Janet's school. The school administrators didn't mind us tagging along. They could always use an extra chaperone or two, we'd been told.

The Friday of the weekend of, Bruce and I rode the train up to Ibaraki to meet Janet at her school. The school turned out to be quite the trek from the station, and we had to stop and ask for directions on more than one occasion. Luckily, we arrived just as the final bell of the day was sounding. A line of buses was already parked out front, their drivers standing in a small circle and having a smoke.

Bruce and I waited by the buses. Slowly, teachers and students began to pour out of the school. Janet appeared not long afterwards and introduced us to her colleagues. I would forget all but two of their names within a minute. Takashi, the trip coordinator, was a 30-year-old punk rocker with dyed blonde hair. There was also Kiera, a fellow JET teacher from Los Angeles, who was half-Japanese and quite well-endowed.

After exchanging a few pleasantries, we loaded our bags and boarded our bus. One final headcount, and we were off to the resort. The drive up to Aomori was another eight hours, most of which I spent napping. The farther north we got, the colder and snowier the passing landscape became. By the time we got in, the mountain was closed, so we all met in the dining hall for a quick supper before retiring to our rooms for the night.

The next evening, after a long day of skiing, several of the adults suggested going to an

onsen.

These natural hot springs were found all over Japan, but the ones at this resort, our Japanese friends were saying, were some of the most beautiful. I'd never been to one myself. Ichihara was an industrial town that didn't offer such amenities.

Eight of us, including Takashi, Kiera, Bruce, Janet, and me, met in the lobby half an hour later. We squeezed into two rented cars and drove around the resort-town looking for places that were still open. We were disheartened to find most of them closed. The two that weren't didn't prove any better. We watched twice from the car as Takashi would enter, only to re-emerge shortly afterwards, shaking his head dejectedly.

"What's the problem?" I asked Takashi, garnering no response. No one else in the car seemed to know either, or at least no one was saying. I started to fear the worst, that we were being turned away because of our foreigner—or

gaijin

—status. It wasn't an uncommon practice in Japan. A teacher friend of mine had been asked to leave an

onsen

because of a small tattoo on his arm.

After our next rejection, I discreetly leaned over to Takashi and offered to take Kiera, Bruce, and Janet back to the hotel so that everyone else could go on. To this, Takashi let out a hefty guffaw. "You're not problem," he clarified, laughing some more. "Problem is,

onsen

separated—

by gender."

Well, thank God we weren't the problem,

I thought—

—At least initially.

When the realization hit me that Takashi and company were searching for a

co-ed onsen,

my relief quickly morphed into panic. I turned to Janet and could see the same terror in her face. After all, she was Tommy's girlfriend, and I was Tommy's brother. Neither of us was jumping at the prospect of being naked in front of the other.

At the same time, I didn't want to be

that

guy, the person to ruin it for everyone else on account of a little bashfulness. I could tell by her eventual response that Janet felt the same way. "It'll be fine," she assured me. "Just keep your eyes forward, and I'll promise to do the same."

At the next

onsen,

we finally struck gold. It'd taken the better part of an hour, but we'd managed it. Our Japanese friends put us at the front of the line to see for themselves that we would be let in. The four of us got in without a hitch, with Janet and Kiera going down one hallway to the women's locker room while Bruce and I went down another to the men's.

With the others still outside, I suddenly found myself alone in a locker room with my best friend, unsure of what to do next. Bruce had never been to an

onsen

either, so he was no help to me at all. We waited patiently for someone to join us, someone who could tell us what to do next, but a minute passed, and then two, and we were still alone.

"Do you think they ditched us?" Bruce asked, concerned.

"They better not have."

And so we continued to just stand around like idiots. I didn't know which was worse: a) showering with Bruce or b) continuing to do nothing. Not wishing to make things any

more

uncomfortable, I quickly undressed, threw my clothes in a basket, and put the basket in a cubbyhole. Bruce followed my lead, and we walked over to the showers.

I'd never showered with another person before, let alone another man. In the end, it wasn't as bad as I'd feared, with both of us minding our own business for the most part. After our shower, we each grabbed a towel to wrap around ourselves. My curiosity got the better of me, and I peeked over at Bruce. Bodywise, he was more muscular than me. Downstairs, mine was a little longer, whereas his had slightly more girth.

Upon entering the pool area, I was immediately struck by how scenic everything was: snow-lined branches from surrounding trees hung low over the water; snowflakes, seemingly weightless, danced up and down in a slow waltz; where the cold winter air met the hot surface of the pool, a steamy white mist swirled and rolled from one end to the other.

The beauty, however, was lost on Bruce, who couldn't see beyond the half-dozen men lounging naked around the pool. He wouldn't even remove his towel and kept his gaze on the starry night sky the whole time. When I saw him get up to leave after only five minutes, I tried my best to convince him to stay, asking, "You're not going to even wait for the girls?"

Without answering, Bruce disappeared into the locker room from whence we came. I wasn't sure if he'd even heard my question. Luckily, the others would join me not long afterwards. Janet and Kiera had towels wrapped around their bodies, with Kiera's towel barely able to contain her breasts. They apologized for taking so long and asked where Bruce was.

"He chickened out," I told them, eliciting a disappointed laugh from the girls. Janet and Kiera took a seat along a pool's edge perpendicular to mine, letting out a collective moan as their bodies entered the water—a sound bite I would jerk off to before the end of the trip.

Kiera did little to hide her impressive set of tits, her towel struggling to cling to her body. "Are you gawking at our boobs?" she would ask, every time I so much as looked in their general direction. From how much the girls were giggling, I got the sense they enjoyed the attention.

I couldn't stop ogling Janet's tiny body and imagining what she looked like without her towel, which looked as if it'd been spray-painted on. Every time she arched her back, I could just make out the outline of her nipples. Once or twice, she caught me staring, and I quickly averted my gaze elsewhere as coolly as I could.

Ultimately, all the excitement and trepidation about co-ed bathing proved to be anticlimactic as the girls would keep themselves covered up from start to finish. The guys, however, chose to go naked, flaunting their junk for the girls to see, half by accident and half on purpose. Me, I (eventually) did away with my towel but remained submerged so that my junk was mostly obscured to Janet. In the end, I didn't know if I was more disappointed or relieved with the outcome.

I would only see Janet twice more in Japan. The first was after my transfer to Tokyo in April of the same year. My youngest brother, Chuck, came to visit, and she was nice enough to make the trip down to see us. The other was a week before she was due to leave Japan for good. She'd fulfilled her one-year contract but, unlike me, had no desire to stay on for a second year. When I asked about her plans post-Japan, she said she was flying to Toronto for a month. Tommy had completed his master's and had taken a job in the city with a software company.

"You must be pretty excited to see him, no?"

She nodded and said she was, adding, "A bit nervous too."

Part 2 of 6: The Video

By the summer of 2005, I was a completely different person from the one who'd stepped off the plane at Narita just 15 months earlier. I was no longer a timid child but a curious and—I'll admit it—reckless adult. I opened myself up more, went out more, dated more, and inescapably slept around more. The best word to describe this chapter of my life was just that:

more.

Tokyo, with her bounty of temptations, had no small part in my transformation.

This was also when I started writing. I bought a laptop from the Ginza Apple Store and wrote whenever I had a chance. Talking to a friend one night, he suggested that I start a blog. Till then, I'd been communicating with friends back home via email. A blog, he explained, was a

web-log

that people could visit and read whenever they wished. Facebook hadn't been invented yet—not the Facebook we know now—and no other forms of social media existed at the time.

I would end up writing a blog entry each day, every day, for the next 14 months. Initially, my friends enjoyed reading my posts, often leaving comments and living vicariously through me. That changed over time, after they saw what kind of person I'd become: I cheated on girlfriends, used people, and put myself above others. Still, as tough as it was to read—and even tougher to write—I kept with it, including as many details from my personal life as I could.

By Christmas, I learned that Janet and Tommy had made the difficult decision to break up. This came as a shock to all of us, especially my parents. It'd happened during Janet's trip to Toronto, but we were only being made aware of it now. The official reason as per the ex-couple was irreconcilable differences. I received a long email from each of them, which read mostly the same: the breakup was for the best; there was no need to feel sorry for them; they would remain best friends; they didn't want this to affect the dynamic within our circle of friends.

By early June of 2006, I was ready to return home. I'd been in Japan for 27 months and had saved up enough money to put a down payment on a condo in Vancouver. I'd also been accepted into the PDP Program at SFU in the fall. As much as I wanted to remain in Japan, it was time to close that chapter of my life and move on to something larger.

Once I'd made the decision to return home, I decided, next, to keep it a secret from my friends and family. It wasn't every day that I had a chance to show up at my house unannounced after a two-year absence. I felt like a soldier returning home from duty and got a good chuckle whenever I imagined how everyone would react. Of course, to pull this off, I needed help. I emailed Janet and got her to make up a bogus reason for getting everyone together.

When the big day came, Janet picked me up at the airport. We had a few hours to burn, so we drove to a café to pass the time. It'd been a while since my last extended chat with her. She was still living with her parents and was now an ESL instructor at an international school downtown. Even though I was curious, I kept my questions as far away from Tommy as possible.

"So," Janet said, during one of our exchanges, "you've been busy since I left." I wasn't sure what she meant, so I asked her to elaborate. She brought up my blog and admitted to reading it—probably more than she should.

"It's fairly—"

I could tell she was looking for a word that would offend me the least.

"—

Detailed."

I didn't know why, but this made me chuckle.

"You don't know the half of it," I responded. "If I told you some of the stuff that

didn't

make it on there, you might have a very different opinion of me."

Janet kept quiet for all of two seconds before responding with a, "

Try me."

Her response caught me off guard, and I casually tried to change the topic. However, it became clear very quickly that she wasn't taking no for an answer. I settled on a story about a student of mine named Miu, a woman three years my senior whom I tutored outside of work after my transfer to Tokyo.

"Miu informed me one day via text that she was suffering from—in her words—

pre-wedding blues.

I'd known her for almost a year, but in that time, she'd made no mention of a boyfriend, let alone a fiancé. We chatted for a bit, and I eventually got her to cheer up. We didn't speak again till after the wedding, a week later. Miu's husband had flown to Niigata for Golden Week to visit relatives while she stayed behind in Tokyo. That week, she revealed to me over drinks that she and her husband slept in separate bedrooms and had not had sex in seven years. I was dumbfounded and told her she needed to get laid—

immediately!

Long story short, Miu and I would fuck not just that day but

every

day till her husband returned home—with all of this happening, remember, just days after they'd tied the knot."

"That must've been wild," Janet responded. "To be the beneficiary of that much pent-up sexual frustration!"

We shared a laugh and reminisced about our respective stays in Japan. I realized, sitting there across from Janet, that she'd grown up a lot. The old Janet would've crossed her arms, looked at me disapprovingly, and condemned me for sleeping with another man's wife. I asked her not to share the story with anyone, and she assured me my secret was safe with her.

"You know," Janet said suddenly, "I never realized till now how alike you and your brother are." I asked her to elaborate, but she wouldn't. In the end, I decided to leave it rather than press her on it.

In the weeks that followed, I gradually settled back into an ordinary, mundane life. It was painfully depressing at first, and I longed nightly for the noise and bright lights of Tokyo. There was never a doubt in my mind, at least initially, that I would be back there sooner rather than later. But weeks turned into months, months into years, and after two years of being back in Vancouver, I found it harder and harder to commit to another major move around the globe.

By now, I was living on my own, had completed my B.Ed., and was working in the district as a substitute teacher. Gone were the halcyon days of my mid-twenties, replaced with deadlines, and bills, and budgets. A different friend, it seemed, was getting married every month and having children not long afterwards. Soon, my unmarried friends numbered just two. On the relationship front, I was sexually involved with several women, all of whom knew about the others.

"And they're okay with that?" asked Oscar, my one unmarried friend

not

named Janet.