Japanese Lovers: An Urban Legend

Their story is an absurdly urban tale of boy meets girl, girl hates boy because he works the DPS counter and she forgot her second form of photo ID and has to drive all the way to the other side of the city in rush hour to get it and all the way back through the detour that goes through the interstate that curves up high and she hates heights, really hates them and is shaking when she walks back through the doors because it’s raining and she looks like the hairball at the bottom of the shower with her matted hair on that one spot on the side of her head. She glares at him, trying to contain his laughter in her presence and she’s freezing and curls her fingers at her sides, trying to keep from strangling him. Instead, she tilts her head to the side and rests her cheek on her hand. You want to hear a story? He wants to give her the default answer, the cordial remark he makes to everyone who attempts to break the fourth wall beyond a how are you, but here’s this edge to her voice that’s slightly tempting and almost completely pissed off, so he says yes, and he listens and laughs and jokingly tells her that he’ll buy her dinner to make up for it, and she half-jokingly says yes, and (as they’ll tell the story later) it begins.

They share her working lunch on a Saturday in the hospital cafeteria—she needs the extra hours. She gets paged twice and their burgers are cold by the time she gets back, but they establish that John Mayer is overrated and Republicans suck, so they consider it a success. Four dates after that, they decide that they can agree to disagree on the subject of Boondock Saints (she loves it, he can’t stand it) and change their Facebook relationship statuses.

Except it’s hard. Because he works days and she works nights and weekends—their license plates are from different states, for Christ’s sake. They invest in more caffeine so they can keep awake when they see each other—breakfast and dinner, breakfast and dinner. After a while, she starts sleeping over—not because they’re having sex (they’re always too tired) but because it’s just practical. Granted, it’s the only practical aspect of their relationship because they’re spending more money at a point in their lives when they really shouldn’t, but they know that you have to fight sometimes to find someone who also changes the station when it plays “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room.”

When it ends (because it does have to end—fighting is sometimes necessary but love doesn’t conquer everything, like distance and a need for sleep), the realization comes like a big wind, and they’re blown, washed up on the uneven landscape of his bed, naked as newborns, and he tells her the story of the Japanese lovers Kengyuu and Orihime, who neglected their duties and were punished by God, only allowed to meet once a year in the summer, when their constellations brushed against each other in the heavens.

They usually end the story there. Too many more details are awkward, because they’re still Facebook friends, and most of their friends are friends with the other’s friends. Lots of friends, and they have a nonverbal agreement to keep something private. It’s their due, their acknowledgment that something happened in an age where relationships are like dandelion seeds, floating around and getting stuck to your new sweater. The story, as they tell it, does it justice, in their opinion. At the end, people always sit back and look thoughtful. “That’s really something,” they’ll say, pause, then go back to whatever they’re doing, change the subject. The idea of such a pure connection is somehow too overwhelming.