So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(13)

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Why did I not count on David picking me up on his motorcycle? I don’t know. I knew he was buying one, but because both motorcycles and Japan were abstract concepts to me at the time, I guess I couldn’t imagine being on a motorcycle in Japan. Since I had moved to New York, I thought I was really cool, so I arrived with my jean jacket and impractically gigantic Kenneth Cole weekend bag (purchased at Marshall’s). As soon as I saw David, who met me at Narita, his face fell. “Oh…,” he said, in a disappointed tone that sounded like I had just given him socks for his birthday. “You’re gonna be cold.”

I contemplated this on the train we took to where the motorcycle was parked.

Like childbirth—I have to assume—the romance of riding a motorcycle obscures the realities of experiencing it. The helmet is sweaty and tight on your head, and once you get going, the whole thing shakes you the entire time. It hurts, and the effort required to hang on is a lot—particularly if you have very short legs. I knew I was going to be sore.

We’d been driving for about half an hour before the lights flashed behind us. There was a siren, but it was like a baby siren. It’s always interesting to hear emergency sirens in foreign countries—Japanese sirens sound very non-menacing. We pulled over, and I started to panic. We hadn’t been speeding, so I had no idea what it could be about. Had I committed some grave error at customs and been tailed by authorities the entire time? Was David on the run? Involved in some elaborate cheese-smuggling ring? (Something as wholesome as cheese is the only thing I can imagine him smuggling.) Regardless, my vacation was off to a great start.

Within Tokyo—but not in the rest of Japan—it’s illegal to have two people riding on a motorcycle. This was how it was in 1999, at least. We explained the situation—well, mainly David; I didn’t have my Japanese confidence yet—and the police drove me to the city limits. They were very friendly, and there was no barricade in the car, so I soon found myself sitting in the back seat of a Toyota Corolla practicing my vocabulary on the Tokyo police. We discussed the weather, what brought me to Japan, and what it was like to live in New York. Language practice in a jail cell might have been more comprehensive, but I have to say I’m glad I never got that opportunity.

After they pulled over and let me out, we drove a couple of more hours to the home of the host family David stayed with during college. Two aspects of this visit were nerve-racking: (1) The reason David’s Japanese was so good was that none of them spoke English, and (2) men and women traveling together without being married was not so much of a thing at the time. Luckily I had any anxiety shaken out of me—literally—as we progressed up the family’s rocky driveway. The bike stalled, and the sudden jolt of the stop combined with the way I’d wrangled my awkward, heavy bag onto my back sent me flying backward, rolling down the hill with my Kenneth Cole.

You know how they say that babies often leave car accidents uninjured because they’re so relaxed and don’t know what’s going on? I was so loopy from the flight and the hours of clinging to David on his roaring motorcycle that I just bounced—definitely at least one concrete bounce.

“Are you OK?!?!” David yelled down after me.

“Hai…,” I replied (Japanese for “yes”), and trudged back up the hill. Although the family was nice, my jet lag combined with my recent tumble meant I didn’t have it in me to respond to their totally comprehensible Japanese. Instead of trying to get through it politely I said I was tired and went to sleep.

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Back on the road the next day, things were glorious. I’d slept some time-warping number of hours on a bed that was not a mat on the floor. Our itinerary was to drive up along the west coast of Honshu, the biggest island, stay the night on the way, and then hop a ferry the next night to Hokkaido. That night, we’d get to see a beautiful sunset over the Sea of Japan. It was cold, yes, but not that cold.

But first: I realized I was getting my period.

I poked David in the ribs—maybe a little too forcefully considering he was in charge of my life—and screamed into his ear: “WHEN WE STOP TO GET GAS I NEED TO USE THE BATHROOM!” He said: “WHAT?” And I said: “BATHROOM!!!!” And he nodded.

The thing about tampons in Japan is that they were not prevalent at the time, particularly in the more rural towns we were traveling through. As my readers will know well, now I overstock my bag with several variations of feminine hygiene products, but at age twenty-three I was still a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-(stained)-pants kind of girl. I assumed I’d be able to get them. Not so. Although I was disappointed in the lack of urgency in his warnings about the weather (or maybe just my lack of attention to that detail), David had no way to know that the tampon availability situation would be dire. Besides, this was still back in the days when women didn’t necessarily discuss their bodily functions, and men certainly didn’t. Me and the four or five spare tampons I had rolling around at the bottom of my bag were on our own.

The gas station, like many public places in Japan, was equipped with a squat toilet, aka a hole in the ground. My legs were so tired that I worried I would collapse and fall in. As I was hovering painfully over the hole, I looked down and noticed the entirety of both inner thighs was bruised, from knee to cooch. There should be more What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting to Ride a Motorcycle for Hundreds of Miles but Somehow You Ended Up on One books. Or at least blog posts!