by
TAJ
"My wife," said Saito out loud as he finished lathering his face. "Uchi-no oku-san."The words left a strange sensation in his mouth. In fact, he had never spoken them before. As he stood there, looking in the mirror, his chin covered with shaving cream, he tried to imagine Keiko in the adjoining room, setting the table and saying, "Dana-san, dear husband. It's time for breakfast."
Ridiculous, he thought, and a smile broke through the white foam. What would Sakamoto say when he was invited to the wedding? "No, Saito-kun, you trickster. Is it true? Are you really leaving all the girls in our section for me alone?"
He smiled again. If the meeting of their parents went well -- and there was every reason to believe that it would -- he would marry Keiko at the beginning of summer, in about five months, and they would honeymoon in Hawaii. Conveniently, Keiko worked for a travel agency. She could take care of all the arrangements herself. And afterwards... well, no more eating out every day, no more tiresome trips to the laundry, no more cleaning up the apartment. He'd enjoy being pampered.
Saito rinsed off his face when he finished shaving and took a long look in the mirror. as he handsome? Had she told her parents he as handsome? Certainly he looked more rugged than a lot of the men he knew -- pudgy Tanaka and even Sakamoto, for instance. But the face he saw reflected now seemed much too pale, the hair too coarse and hard to comb. She had probably noticed the dark rings around his eyes when he took off his glasses. Could he possibly have seen handsomeness in such a face?
There was no doubt that she herself was good-looking. Even his parents had said so. She wore her hair in a bob -- cute, shiny and thick. He particularly liked her chin, which dove-tailed into two perfect little curves, and her neck, too, a smooth, creamy arc with just the slightest trace of soft hair. Yes, that would be the best way to describe his future wife: when she walked, talked or moved, Keiko was smooth.
When his parents had met her during their visit to Tokyo in September, everything had gone fairly well. She was shy at first, just as everyone expected her to be, but engaging enough once the formalities had passed. At dinner that evening, his father had dominated the conversation, telling stories about Saito when he as on the high school baseball team, sometimes flattering, sometimes embarrassing Saito, who sat silently through most of the tales. He told of Saito's first and only sayonara homerun, and Keiko had sighed with admiration. He told the story of how Saito had tripped over second base on a routine double and was tagged out; she giggled behind the palm of her hand with sympathetic restraint. His mother hadn't said much at the meal, either, but he sensed approval in her eyes. And although his father had reservations, Saito was certain that Keiko had passed the first test.
"You know how I feel about marriage," his father had told him as they walked back to the hotel together slightly ahead of the two women. "If her family is good, the wife will be good. That's why I have always favored arranged marriages, you know. But from what you tell me, she comes from a good family. Silk merchants, are they? Descendants of samurai, too? Well, if all is true as you understand it to be, and if we meet her parents and we like each other, I suppose I should be modern about this and consider setting a date. But I do wish you were both a few years older, you know."
It doesn't matter, thought Saito now as he began to get dressed. If you are ready, you are ready, and chronological age makes little difference. He was 25; she was 23. Statistically they might be a bit young, but there was nothing else holding them back. His job with the securities firm was a good one, an honest and reliable one. He wanted to marry her and she wanted to marry him, or at least that was what she had said when he'd asked her.
Did she really want to marry him? Saito found it hard to believe that someone was really prepared to spend a lifetime as his wife, sleep in his bed, look after his home, raise his children....
Just then, the telephone rang in the main room of Saito's small apartment. It was Keiko.
