My love always wears white gloves when her
hands caress me. Her body is hidden
behind a smart uniform, but I can feel her brawny arms, her muscles impressive.
Does she know that I love her? Every morning I keep my face carefully
neutral as I turn to face her, masking my excitement. Regretfully I have to waste a moment as I
glance down to check my footing. Then I
gaze into her face as she pushes me away from her.
It’s 7.55am on the Tozai Line on the Tokyo
Metro. Part-time “oshiya”, or people
pushers, are employed between 7.30am and 8.30am to deal with the rush hour
commuters. So many more people board the
trains than their designed capacity that the last passengers have to enter the
crush of bodies on the train backwards, and be pushed inside to allow the doors
to close. For three years now Car no.3
has been handled by my love – a woman in her late thirties with freckles around
the eyes, a look of pinched concentration as she works, and arms that are as
strong as a mother’s love.
It takes a little guile to always find
myself last to board. Sometimes I have
to let trains pass. I leave the queue,
fiddling with my bag or patting my pocket.
Then I let the queue build up again before joining at the back. Once or twice I couldn’t avoid being swept
along by the crowd and had to enter the train.
I couldn’t bear the thought of going to the office without her send
off. So I got off at the next station
and went back, and made sure she pushed me properly the second time. She must have noticed. Doesn’t she realise how much I love her?
Why do I love her caress? It’s like an “unbirth” – a birth in reverse. I stand freely on the platform, before turning
around and being pushed into an enclosing womb.
She is mother, doctor and lover, all in one. I dream that one day she will acknowledge my
love. She will look into my eyes and her
pinched face will break into a smile, her freckles dancing at the edge of her
eyes. And instead of pushing me away with
her pure white gloves, she will pull me towards her, into her loving embrace.
*
This is not an autobiographical story. I am not in love with a people pusher on
Japan’s subway network! But I was
inspired to imagine the story above when I heard that the friend of one of my
students works part-time as a female oshiya.
Is there really never any romance to be found in the pushing of sardines
into a tin can on wheels?
Vocabulary:
to caress – to touch or stroke gently or
lovingly
brawny – physically strong; muscular
to mask an emotion – to hide an emotion
capacity – the maximum amount that
something can, or is supposed to, contain
a crush – a mass of things or people forced
closely together
a freckle – a little brown spot on the skin
guile – sly or cunning intelligence
to fiddle with something – to move or
handle something in a nervous way
a womb – the part of a woman’s body where a
baby grows
autobiographical – of a piece of writing,
about the writer or based on his or her life
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