A Woman's Nails by Aonghas Crowe Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn't wait for the day I was finally paroled from that all male correctional institution of a Catholic high school I attended. So, it struck me as odd that anyone could be ambivalent about graduation. Their answer: we don't want to grow up. Who does? But if growing up was the price to pay for being done with high school, many can afford it.
    Aya has just started her second year, making her fifteen, I guess.
    “I'm sixteen,” she corrects.
    She doesn't look or act it. Not only is she assertive for her age, but she's got a woman's body, too.
    She tells me men always think she's older.
    Men ?
    When I hear that she goes to the exclusive Catholic girls' school in town, I say she must be an ojô-san , that is, a girl from a good family.
    She replies that she isn't, that it's just the image. Most of the girls going there, she tells me, are the daughters of pachinko shop owners, Koreans, yakuza and other nouveau riche .
    Aya's own father is a doctor, but only because her mother who runs a couple of hostess bars and a mahjong parlor happened to fuck a doctor the day she was ovulating. Aya has a younger sister, she says. This second girl is the product of a lawyer who happened to squirt his sperm into her mother's vagina, like a law clerk serving a subpoena. "She's ugly and stupid," Aya says of her younger sister. "She's an embarrassment to me."
    I'm not particularly interested in this Aya. When you're twenty-six, high school girls just aren't quite the turn-on I imagine they must be for middle-aged Japanese men. Salarymen are seemingly tortured with lust every time they see a girl sashay by in her sailor uniform. Still, this Aya is funny in a jaded kind of way, so we meet again a few days later during my afternoon break.
     
    We walk through Maizuru Park to the castle ruins. The momoji trees have stretched out new leaves like the open hands of an infants waiting for the sunlight to pour over them. The ground below the sakura trees, which have lost all their blossoms to the wind and rain of the past weeks, is speckled with soft pink petals. Under the cool shade of centuries-old oaks, sculptured azaleas are starting to bloom.
    Of the former castle grounds only the stone foundation and a few wooden gates remain. At the center and highest level where the dungeon was, a steel observation deck has been constructed offering a view of the city far more attractive than that from the IMS building.
    When I tell Aya that I come up here a lot, she asks me why on earth for. To think, to look at the sky, to make sketches, to write, even to study. She tells me that she can do all that in her bedroom. So, you can. So, you can. She calls me a romantic. I tell her that's just another way of saying someone's a hopeless fool. She says she knows that.
    She's wearing her school uniform today, a navy blue pinafore dress with the schools badge above her left breast, a white blouse with rounded collars under it, white socks with the school initial and black patent leather loafers. She hates it, she tells me, wishes she had a simple sailor uniform like the girls at the Buddhist girls high school have. I ask her why, and she says this uniform makes her look like a child. With those large breasts of hers pressed against the bib of the uniform , a child is the last thing Aya resembles.
    Aya tells me a friend of hers met an American who then took h er to a love hotel and had sex.
    “Oh?”
    “ I couldn't believe i t.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he was too old.”
    “How old?”
    “ In his thirties. And h e was a college professor, too.”
    I can't help but laugh. What a country. I tell her he could be put in jail for that in America.
    “Whatever for?”
     
    That evening after work, my co-worker Reina says that she saw me walking near Ôhori Park with a high school girl. “ She 's not your girlfriend, is she?”
    “ No, no, no. That's just someone I know.”
    “ That's hanzai , you know,” she says with a playful smirk.
    “ Hanzai? What's