The evidence led me to just one conclusion: S had manipulated and used me, and he had done so in calculated ways. That conclusion, once I reached it, required action on my part. I demanded that S move out of my apartment in Okegawa, the small city in Saitama where I worked as a high school teacher from 1988 until 1991.
Thirty-two years ago.
Some days I feel like I have made my peace with what S put me through. Some days anger returns, as hot as it ever was.
In September, it will be three years since I put fingers to keyboard and began working on Crying in a Foreign Language: The Deity That Answered My Plea, my memoir that describes the decisions I made in the ten years before Japan and the consequences I experienced in the ten years I lived in Japan.
I followed a chronological timeline. And early in my Japan era, I met S. As my relationship with him came to an end, his actions crystallized into villainy, and I wrote about him as such.
It felt good to exorcize some of my anger onto the page. But one of my writing teachers prodded me to think further.
Even a villain as rotten as Darth Vader, she opined, didn’t consider himself as such. He had spent his life in service to his goals, and hoped to one day pass the family business on to his children, only to watch as they betrayed him.
And as chuckleworthy as that description was—I pictured Vader in Death of a Salesman—it prompted me to reëxamine S and his motivations.
I arrived in the relationship with a set of expectations, fueled by romances in the Western canon. Gay romances? Hardly. Aside from the research I conducted when reading The Joy of Gay Sex (research that in truth helped me phrase my coming-out to my parents), the only representations of same-sex relationships I had consumed in high school and college were pornographic.
Mentally fusing Sleeping Beauty and The Other Side of Aspen—Al Parker as Prince Charming?—when S asked to move in put my fairy into fairy tales. I was emotionally desperate for the love-sex combo that had thus far evaded me and was certain S was signing up for that.
S, however, needed something more fundamental: a home.
S told me that he loved me on many occasions, in itself strange—Hiro shows me he loves me but he’s not fond of effusing in either Japanese or English, which I have seen is frequently the case among Japanese men. Despite those protestations of afriction, however, S evinced no interest in sex after our initial play dates—sex with me, I should say.
Looking back, there were bright spots in my struggle to understand S. He taught me a few things. He shared his love of Pink Lady and introduced me to his mother, a brilliant cook.
But S was also cruel. He flirted with other men to provoke my jealousy, and then, in turn, encouraged the other men to financially apologize to me so that S and I could afford to travel somewhere. (Within the nearly two years we were together, we visited Korea twice and Manhattan twice.)
I will save the theatrics of our break-up for the pages of the memoir, but my reconsideration of his potential motivations granted a little more empathy and touch of forgiveness. He did what he thought was normal, whatever his reasons might have been. His normal, however, was toxic to a boy like me, no relationship experience to reflect on.