We’re Pregnant and I Can’t Speak Japanese. William Hay

but picked up English anyway, it rang quite true. I really am an idiot, but a proud one at that.

      Also, I can bumble my way through everyday life with my retarded language skills and not be too inconvenienced. What does it matter if I buy a pair of socks which are too small or take thirty minutes to find a can of coconut milk on a shelf in a supermarket instead of asking the staff for help to find it? However, for important matters such as filing tax returns or dealing with government departments where an error can be costly, I rely on my wife.

      There was nothing notable about meeting my wife; no kismet, no serendipity, no, What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this? We worked in the same place where most relationships develop in Japan. I don’t know if it is true, but I’ve heard certain Japanese banks have an unwritten policy of hiring attractive female staff as bait to lure the best university graduates into their fold. Bank workers are known for the long hours they put in after the bank doors close at 3.30pm. Hence, their social lives evolve around the conversations between desks and the late night drinks after work. We didn’t work for a bank but a language school. Her job was to sell lesson packages mostly to young office ladies looking to snag the star performers in their offices, who would be posted overseas at sometime during their tenure with the company. English would bolster their stakes in being the perfect corporate wife. My job as a teacher was to give them a formulaic forty-minute lesson which mostly consisted of listen and repeat exercises. Fortunately, most Japanese have six years of English classes in junior and senior high school, so there is a reservoir of English in their heads, which classifies them as false beginners.

      My wife was the latest staff member to join our small suburban branch in a revolving door of sales staff who either quit after a few months due to the lousy pay and long hours or were transferred to another school in the network, which spread nationwide. I wasn’t actually impressed on being introduced. The novelty of seeing pretty new sales staff walk into the office had worn off for me. Most were friendly, polite, helpful, hardworking and exceptionally cute. The cuteness was the biggest turn off. Everything in Japan seems to be cute. There are the cute characters, which endorse products and companies, and the cute boy and girl singing groups. With average ages of around fourteen, they dress, sing and act in a way that can only be described as cute. Imagine living the rest of your days as a prisoner in Disneyland. It wouldn’t take too long before you wanted to strangle the oh-so-adorable Mickey Mouse.

      For the first few months, I hadn’t said much to my wife beyond the morning greetings. She was doing a language exchange with a Canadian teacher from another school on Sunday nights so she never joined the staff for an end of the working week drink. During their lesson, the first hour would be in English then they would switch to Japanese for the second hour. Most romances between teachers and staff developed this way so I guessed he was her boyfriend.

      One morning, when we were the only staff and teacher pairing on duty for the quiet period she told me she had just come back to Japan after two years living in Melbourne. Being the only Australian in the school, I was impressed, as most Japanese seem to look to America, as the leading country for English language learning and as the purveyor of true western culture. The brief conversation ended with an invitation for a drink one night after work. She asked me and of course I said no. How forward of her! We had just met and here she was hitting on me in the staff room. I had grounds for a sexual harassment complaint if this had happened back home.

      She wore a dress and Blundstone boots on our first meeting outside work hours. The last time I saw someone wear a pair of Blundstone’s, he was concreting a new section to my mother’s driveway. I have a pair of Blundstone’s, the all-purpose boot you can wear while mowing the lawn or attending a friend’s wedding. I was intrigued. I wanted to know more about this girl, but as the night progressed I discovered one huge disincentive; she had an Australian boyfriend who had come back to Japan with her but was teaching for a school in our network at the other end of Japan, down in Kyushu. There was no ulterior motive to her invitation; she just wanted to have a drink and a chat with someone else who was missing Australia.

      We went out for the occasional drink over the next few months until she realised sales were not for her and quit her job. We kept in contact through a mutual friend at the school until it was my turn to quit and return to Australia. I only intended to stay in Japan for a year or two and now, approaching three years, I needed to get away from the endless feeling of claustrophobia of life in Tokyo.

      Back in Australia, I was thirty-seven years old without any job prospects and a shrinking circle of friends who had kids in school, soccer on weekends and mortgages to service. I was living with my mother.

      After almost eight months of not really trying to find a job or a place to live, and with my working visa for Japan getting close to expiring, I started to wonder whether I should return to the relative ease of teaching English in Japan or let the door to Japan close permanently. The crunch came when my application for a post graduate course at my old university was rejected on the grounds it was received too late; Australia Post had let me down. The plan was to complete my course and possibly join the public service in Canberra, which wasn’t so sensitive about the age of applicants for positions.

      The next day, I booked a one-way ticket to Tokyo.

      A week before I left, my mother started to complain of a sore back. She was rarely sick and very active for a lady in her late seventies, so we dismissed it as something muscular. A month or so later, when she finally went to the doctor to find out what was causing the discomfort, she was told she had a tumour the size of a clenched fist in her stomach. At first, the prognosis wasn’t good, but after a year of chemotherapy, the tumour shrank to a size where it could be treated with blasts of radiation. She was going to beat cancer, a real tough old bird, which I’d know all my life, so I didn’t go home for Christmas. The plan was to go back when she was in good health and my bank account balance was in a healthy condition, as well. But, over the holiday period when she was given a reprieve from her treatment, the cancer spread rapidly to other parts of her body and there was nothing that could be done to stop its march. A few months into what should have been a much better year for her, she was dead. She was seventy-eight years old.

      I caught up with my wife again at a farewell party for someone we both knew. She was now working for an American company in the centre of the city and comfortable in her skin as a Japanese person in Japan; no more longing to return to Australia. Our first conversation in almost a year unearthed lots of useful information. Her Australian boyfriend didn’t want to move up to Tokyo and she wasn’t asking him to make the move, anymore. Also, her language exchange partner, a potential new boyfriend, had moved to Hong Kong for work. She was free and still wearing Blundstone’s. This time I asked if she wanted to go for a drink, and the rest, as they say, is history.

      Lately, my wife has complained of sore breasts, which is something that is not uncommon in our household because my wife always has sore breasts just prior to the start of her period. It has been a signpost that her period was coming and that we were entering the PMT zone where the terrain could get a little rough for the next few days. Don’t mention her hairy armpits in winter, which usually gets a laugh under normal, hormonally balanced circumstances. For the year, year-and-a-half, however long we’ve been married, I watch what I say for those few testing days.

      Yes, that’s right, I don’t know when we were married. No, don’t I have the memory of a cicada or the sensitivity of a feral cat in heat. And yes, I have an explanation.

      Normally, getting married in Tokyo is a simple process of stamping a marriage application with your personal seal, lodging it with the city office, and you’re married as of the date you have chosen. No ceremony or exchanging vows or waiting period is involved. Similarly, getting divorced is just as easy as long as there are no child custody issues involved or contests over joint property.

      For us, the simple process of getting married was an administrative mess, for which I am happy to blame my wife. Based on a phone call she made to the city office in her hometown, as a foreigner in Japan I needed to provide a copy of my Alien Registration Card, which is my temporary resident’s I.D. card and not a membership to the Star Trek fan club, my birth certificate, and “one more thing” with our marriage application. We didn’t submit that “one more thing”, because, even though my