The Passengers on the Hankyu Line

Koto’en Station

Misa swayed on the train, with the resolute intention of firing off the message saved on her phone tucked away inside her bag.

There were a few available seats dotted around, but standing suited her current mood.

‘That good-for-nothing. Have you thought about getting rid of him? For all he puts you through.’

It didn’t even take a year for him to make me into a perfectly devoted housewife …

He doesn’t give a second thought to hitting me during a fight. If I move in with him …

My mother would be so sad if she knew that my boyfriend hits me.

In a moment of decisiveness, she had composed her breakup message, but it only took another moment for Misa to start wavering.

She had intended to take advantage of Katsuya’s absence to retrieve her things from his apartment, and then to retreat to her own place …

But he’s nice when he’s in a decent mood, and he has other good qualities …

Plus he’s pretty good-looking.

Her friends were always green with envy whenever she displayed photos of the two of them on her phone. ‘Your boyfriend is soo cute! Misa, you’re so lucky!’ they’d say. It was something Misa had taken pride in, and it pained her to think of losing that cachet.

This too made her feel ashamed, that she’d falter over such a thing.

As she idly watched the residential scene pass before her eyes, the train slowed to a stop at the next station, Koto’en.

Koto’en is the nearest station to a well-known private university in Kansai, which means that, regardless of whether it is a weekday, weekend or holiday, many of the passengers here seem to be students.

The group of female college students who got on each had a lacrosse stick propped on their shoulder – maybe they were on their way to a scrimmage? A young guy, with kind of a punk style, the drone from his headphones audible, had his nose buried in a daunting-looking textbook.

This university was leagues above the women’s college where Misa went, and of course the one Katsuya attended didn’t even rate.

Among the passengers who boarded were also a number of high-school girls in uniform; they must have had Saturday classes. They were laughing boisterously. They seemed utterly carefree, without a thought for the future that lay ahead of them.

I used to be like them, not so many years ago, Misa thought. The sound of their cheerful, light-hearted laughter made her a little jealous.

The high-school girls occupied the empty space near Misa, grabbing onto the hanging straps and chattering away exuberantly.

‘Hey, Et-chan, so your boyfriend is like super older, huh?’

Misa’s ears automatically pricked up at this cheeky comment – how much of an age difference made him ‘super older’, she wondered? The girl who appeared to be Et-chan, who also seemed a bit more grown up than the others, waved her hand to deflect the comment. ‘No, he isn’t!’

Et-chan went on to explain: ‘He’s only two years out of university. He has an early birthday so he’s young for his school year – he’s a mere five years older than me.’

The fact that, at her age, she considered a gap of five years ‘mere’ showed she was one of the more mature ones among her friendship group.

‘What? I can’t imagine dating a guy with a real job!? I mean, if he was older but still in school, I’d get that.’ The girl who said this was elbowed by one of the others.

‘Yeah, but now that we’re seniors, we’re the oldest. And if we don’t go on to college, there’s not much chance of going out with an upperclassman.’

‘Huh, guess you’re right. But is it fun to be with a working guy?’

‘Yeah, but …’ Et-chan tilted her head. ‘It seems like you’ve all got the wrong idea. A guy can still be clueless, even if he has a job. My boyfriend definitely falls into that category.’

One of the girls gasped in disbelief. ‘Aren’t older guys supposed to be dependable and have their shit together?’

From Misa’s perspective, this girl seemed like the type who entertained a certain fantasy about older guys, though Misa was one to talk, since she herself was not quite an adult yet either.

‘No way! At least not my boyfriend! I mean, he just recently started living on his own, and he calls me in the middle of the night, crying for help!’

‘Eh? What happened?!’

This girl, Et-chan, was quite the storyteller. All of her friends were hanging on her every word – and Misa was too. In what kind of scenario does a grown man call up his high-school-age girlfriend in the middle of the night to beg for help?

‘So I was like, “What’s the matter?” and he goes, “I can’t get the iron to work.”’

Her captive audience squealed with laughter. The surrounding passengers began to shoot annoyed looks in the girls’ direction but they seemed completely unbothered – in fact they didn’t even seem to notice – and even Misa was tempted to break into a smile.

‘Now, I have to admit that my mom does all the ironing for me and the only time I’ve ever done it is in home economics class. Plus, my boyfriend hasn’t even told me what it is he’s trying to iron. He’s already like, “What temperature should I set it at? And what does it mean by ‘steam’?” He’s way ahead of himself!’

‘So true!’

‘Then I asked him what he wanted to iron and he said, “A shirt.” But there are all different kinds of shirts. So I get out my home economics textbook and I ask him what material it is and he’s like, “Huh? How am I supposed to know that?!” I tell him it’s written on the label and he goes, “What label?”’

The girls erupted into more squeals and high-pitched laughter. Misa’s shoulders quivered with a suppressed giggle. The looks from the other passengers in their car grew sterner – but rather than give them the side-eye, thought Misa, they’d be better off listening to the conversation and having a laugh.

‘There’s no use being angry and he’s about to lose it so I tell him to look for a little cloth tag that should be attached inside the collar or along one of the side seams. He finally finds it but then …’

Wait for it … Misa thought as she continued to eavesdrop. Here comes the punchline …

The finish to Et-chan’s story was a cracker.

‘He says he can’t read the kanji! This is a grown man who went through university!?’

‘What an idiot!’

Et-chan’s friends were brutal in their assessment as they howled and chortled and their laughter gave cover to Misa’s audible giggle.

‘And then …’

There’s more?!

‘So I ask him to describe what the characters look like over the phone. He goes, “Part of it is the character for ‘thread’.”’

‘That must be the radical!’ said one girl.

‘How are you supposed to figure it out from just that?’ said another.

These girls were all cramming for their entrance exams that year, so their questions were merciless as they gasped with laughter.

‘Well, I know how clueless he is so I take pity on him. I ask him patiently, “There must be something else next to the character for ‘thread’, right? What does that look like?” and he says, “It’s like the character for ‘moon’.”’

‘He must mean the character for “silk”!’

‘Though he still missed the part that’s above the character for “moon”!’

This story’s got multiple punchlines! Misa couldn’t help it any more and gave in to her laughter, covering her mouth so it wasn’t completely obvious that she was listening.

‘So then I looked it up in my textbook and helped him figure out how to iron his shirt. But it’s a bit outrageous, isn’t it? I mean, for a college graduate with a job?’

It was outrageous. There was no question. It was inexcusable for a college graduate with a job not to know how to read the label on his own shirt.

‘Did you tell him it’s the kanji for “silk”?’

Et-chan nodded. ‘He was shocked when I told him. You wouldn’t believe how shocked he was.’

‘I wonder if your boyfriend knows the character for “cotton”? Seems like there might still be some landmines there …’

‘Oh, wow – I don’t know how I’d manage to explain that kanji to him!’

Et-chan’s friends laughed again at her deadpan assessment.

‘Then, well, I wasn’t sure how he’d take it coming from me but I kind of told him off over the phone. I said that even though he always uses a computer and hardly ever has to write things out by himself, at some point not knowing kanji is gonna come back to bite him in the backside. I told him he better study up. And he was like, “I know, you’re right. I’ll get myself some kanji drills.” Honestly, I feel like I ought to make him take a reading aptitude test.’

It was cruelly amusing to imagine a grownup getting such a talking-to from a high-school girl.

‘How did you meet him again?’

‘Uh, well, that’s not important.’

For the first time, the effusive Et-chan hesitated.

‘You’ve never told us, we want to hear,’ one girl said.

‘Yeah, tell us!’ said another.

Et-chan hemmed and hawed and then she warned them not to laugh before reluctantly confessing. ‘He chatted me up. At Tsukaguchi, no less.’

‘Wow, that’s random!’ Her friends didn’t laugh but their voices exclaimed in unison.

By ‘random’, they meant the location, not the way Etchan and he had met. Tsukaguchi was a large train station where the Itami Line linked up with the Kobe Line, predominantly known for the big hulking shopping centre in front of the station where there was a chain-store supermarket and a bunch of restaurants. Very mundane.

The majority of patrons were housewives, as students from the nearby women’s college or high school only ever shopped at Tsukaguchi by necessity, preferring to go to Osaka or Kobe for their real shopping. It was a totally random location for a pick-up spot. In front of Tsukaguchi Station, anyone who might be calling out to passers-by was usually soliciting for surveys or a blood drive.

‘It was my dad’s birthday, you know, and I figured Tsukaguchi was a reasonable place to look for a present for him, so I stopped there on my way home from school.’

‘There’s a Muji at Nishi-Kita, you know.’ The girl who volunteered this was referring to Nishinomiya-Kitaguchi, one of the terminals on the Imazu Line they were on now.

‘Why would I buy my dad a present at Muji? Muji’s more expensive than you think. And my dad’s birthday is in February – winter stuff always costs more. I only had a thousand yen to spend.’

‘All right then, so Tsukaguchi makes sense.’

Not much love for the dads from these girls.

‘Riight –? So I got him a scarf that was on sale for only one thousand yen. At Muji it would cost three times that. They wrapped it up for me and I was about to head home when someone called out to me in front of the station. He asked if I wanted to go to a café with him, his treat.’

Aw, that sounds just like when Katsuya chatted me up … Misa identified with Et-chan’s story.

‘Then when I turned around, he saw that I was wearing school uniform. And I saw that he was a salaryman. “Oops,” he said, and clapped his hand to his head. When we first passed each other all he saw was my face, and then I had on my coat so, from behind, he didn’t realize I was wearing a uniform. He was like, “What should we do? If I take you out, will it be like enjo kosai?” But I don’t know the first thing about sugar dating.’

‘So, not to be rude but, it sounds like he was clueless from the start.’ One of Et-chan’s friends chortled.

‘I said that if the cops arrested everyone who was sitting in a café together, it’d keep them pretty busy, wouldn’t it? So then he said why don’t we go to a tea shop?’

‘Wow, the guy’s got a job so that means he has money. You won’t end up at McDonald’s.’

There was something heartwarming to Misa about how wholesome these high-school girls seemed. It would cost less than a thousand yen to treat one of them to cake at a tea shop. Then again, that was Et-chan’s entire budget for her father’s birthday present.

Her friends finally seemed impressed by the notion of an older guy, one who could offer to treat a girl on a whim without putting a dent in his wallet.

‘So, does that mean …’ one of the girls said, lowering her voice. Misa found herself straining to hear. ‘Have you done it?’

Right – girls this age have a lot of superficial knowledge without much actual experience. Misa smirked wryly to herself.

‘Not yet,’ Et-chan responded nonchalantly. ‘He’s worried about it looking like enjo kosai.’

‘Yeah, but he’d have to pay you for it to be enjo kosai, right? That’s like prostitution, innit?’

‘Like I said, he’s clueless – he doesn’t even realize!’ Et-chan flashed a plucky smile. ‘He just keeps telling me to hurry up and grow up!’

‘As if you can do anything about that?!’ the whole group exclaimed. Surely Et-chan’s young man would be surprised to know the extent to which he was up for discussion.

‘But has he ever tried to pressure you?’

‘If he was that kind of guy, I’d break up with him.’

Ah, ouch. Misa involuntarily clutched at her chest.

Et-chan kept on talking. ‘Of course I’m scared too. I love my boyfriend but I’m nervous about having to do something that I don’t want to do. He knew that I was in high school when we first started dating, and he loves me too, so he’ll wait until I graduate. And he knows I’m studying for exams this year.’

Misa thought about her own boyfriend, over whom she was now wavering whether to break up or stay with. If that had been Katsuya and me …

If she were to point out to Katsuya that he had misread kanji, he’d be pretty annoyed and it would most likely lead to a fight (he was particularly sensitive about being told things he didn’t know, always accompanied by a high risk of him becoming violent). And the two of them were the same age so they had both been keen to go all the way, but if Misa had had any qualms, Katsuya probably would have fumed and accused her of not loving him.

Misa had never refused Katsuya, not for anything. She knew that if she did, he would get angry and hold it against her.

But had he ever given any thought to how she felt?

On the rare occasions when she had screwed up the courage to say that she doesn’t want to do something, had it ever occurred to him to wonder how hard it was for her to do that, or maybe to consider not doing something because she didn’t like it?

Love means not doing the thing that the other person dislikes.

Despite the fact that, as a grown man, he didn’t know how to use an iron or how to read the character for ‘silk’ on the label of his shirt and had to be told these things by his high-school-age girlfriend, Et-chan’s boyfriend was still a good guy. He was a good boyfriend.

Even just from eavesdropping on this stranger’s conversation that she happened to catch on the train, Misa could tell that they were a happy couple.

I may be older than Et-chan but I let myself be misled by Katsuya’s looks and attitude. Turns out, Et-chan is a much better judge of character than I am.

Misa was no longer wavering. She would break up with him.

This younger high-school girl was much better at love than Misa.

But Misa was not so resigned to being unhappy that she didn’t feel a twinge of envy, and she still had a sliver of pride left.