Chapter 12

Robert’s turn:

To be completely honest, before Sachiko came into my world I had resigned myself to the idea that in the event that I actually DID find a girl to marry me, we’d end up with somebody’s church looking like Saint Paul’s cathedral for a day, all the trappings, ranks of bridesmaids, groomsmen, yards of lace, you know, the thing that so many families do for weddings these days.

Nope. Family church on a Saturday.

Naturally Mom and Dad are there, Mom frantically dabbing her eye with a real handkerchief, Dad in his Sunday suit, looking uncomfortable as only a rice farmer can look while wearing a suit. Darcy was the maid of honor, her fiancé Sam standing as best man.

We had a few old aunts there, a couple of friends, and looking very nice, Lady Ramona.

“Honestly, Robert! I am a spiritual person. I’ve been in all manner of churches. Do you expect me to burst into flames?” she’d said when Sachiko and I personally invited her.

Uncle Pete stood in for Sachiko’s father, to present the bride. He and Aunt Patricia had met Sachiko just one time at Mom and Dad’s, heard the ‘for publick consumption’ version of her story, and offered to stand in. “It’s part of our wedding tradition, sweetie,” Aunt Pat told her.

“It is an honor,” Sachiko replied. “I have no family here and only the most distant relatives left in Japan. You honor me by becoming my family.”

So, simple, but not too simple. Church-going Mom’s admonition – “My son is NOT getting married in front of a judge!”

Our pastor’s agreement came after he’d sat and spoken with me and Sachiko at length. He was concerned about her not being Christian. “We try to speak of a husband and wife being “unequally yoked”, the Scripture says.”

“I very much understand that,” Sachiko replied. Then she unloaded “His god will be my god” and he was rocked back.

“You’re serious? In your heart.”

“Yes, in my heart,” she said. “Just like my love for Robert. If he is a child of God, then I shall be equally. Head. Heart. I believe, and I will learn.”

He looked at me. “Robert, have you read to her from the Book of Ruth?”

“No, sir.”

“Sachiko, in our Bible are many books. One of them is about a lady called Ruth. She too left her people to live with her new husband and his people. She said what you have told me.”

“Is it not the way I should be, sir? Robert explained to me of baptism, where the water marks leaving the old life behind. It will be so with me.”

So it was, when Uncle Pete presented her, she stood beside me, and in front of the congregation of friends and family, we publicly made the vows that already existed in our hearts.

The church’s multipurpose hall easily handled our reception, then Sachiko and I slipped away to a honeymoon, choosing a destination on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Honeymoon. Sachiko and I were already lovers, but something about this lifted us to new heights in exploration of each other.

“Lady Sakura told me of many things I would be expected to know and to understand when I was sent with a man,” she said. “Some sounded very distasteful. Others, I was curious, but knew that I dare not even think about them very much. I was sent to The Void before I was old enough to be sold. When I was summoned forth and given my task, I thought of those things, and I thought of Lady Sakura’s gentle words given to me to endure the unpleasant.”

Her little fingers toyed idly with my depleted dick. “I saw you. You were not like many men who found entertainment at the inn, men who needed to be clean, men who treated women as things to be used and discarded. You ... I could see you ... I knew what I was expected to do. It was commanded. It was a task. But the first time I took you it stopped being a task.”

“You were something I couldn’t ever imagine. I didn’t know what to dream.”

Sachiko’s turn:

Robert says he didn’t know what to dream. I was in The Void. Dreams were impossible.

Now we are in sunlight together in his car, driving to a little place some distance away for what I have learned is called a ‘honeymoon’, a time for a couple to be together after their marriage, free of cares.

I was free of cares, like a bird freed of winter, finding food and beauty and comfort and yes, a mate and a nest.

And yet there’s this American custom, and we’re staying in a beautifully clean inn. Robert says ‘motel’. I remember Lady Sakura’s inn, the one where I stayed. It was also meticulously cleaned and properly furnished. Lady Sakura, an astute businesswoman, owned another of much lesser class, catering to travelers lower in status. I accompanied her to make a visit to oversee her investment there. It was clean as well, but not as well furnished.

Robert assures me that this is not a high level of luxury, that this level of accommodation is within the reach of those of modest means.

I accept that and find it very pleasing, especially when there is a huge, exorbitant bed for us.

“You expect us to use this whole bed?” I ask my chosen.

“We’ll start in the middle.”

For a couple who were both virgin when we met, we have become artistic and inventive. We used ALL the bed.

A lovely thing is this ‘honeymoon’.

Somehow when I was released from behind the veil into Robert’s world, my mind was given much knowledge of the modern world, but that knowledge did not erase the knowledge of my life before. The presence of two realities, two different times, in my head gives me much to marvel at.

Travel is magic. We are in Biloxi, Mississippi. We drove in an afternoon – over a hundred ri, two hundred and fifty miles. Such a journey would have been a major event, very expensive, and at least a week’s time for anybody except the most important of messengers. Robert says it is a very normal thing available to all who can afford it, and he says that even he, a lowly student...

“You are the son of a very successful and powerful farmer.”

“Dad loves it when you say that,” he laughs.

This is a pleasant thing to me because I am bound by my upbringing to regard my elders with respect, especially so the family of my husband, so when I treat Mister Richard deferentially, he smiles and laughs. “Mister Ray ... Mizz Pat ... it is as I was brought up.”

“It is getting rare today,” Mizz Pat tells me.

“Robert is that way. Very polite.”

“We raised him up like that,” she said. “Still, it is getting rare. I love that he has chosen you, that you’re as polite as he is.”

So inside me will always be Japanese, but some things, politeness and respect, are not only Japanese, but revered here in Robert’s America.

I observe as we are out and about and it is obvious that not all hold the same ideas of correct behavior and self-restraint.

Everything is easy. Clothing? I do not have to go with Lady Sakura to the tailor, have him take measurements, discuss the type of cloth, the color, then wait days for my new clothing. I walk into a shop, a girl greets me, we look, I try on things, as Robert tells me, ‘off the rack’, choose one or several. No small bag of copper coin to pay with. Credit card. Magic of the very highest order.

Food is the same. Places are waiting for us to come in and select and dine.

We have things to see. There was an ancient oak tree. It was just across the road from the water, scarred, but still huge, still alive. I was awed. I clapped my hands twice and bowed deeply before it.

“What’s that for?” Robert asked.

“In Japan we have many little shrines. Some say the shrine belongs to a kami, a spirit. I know now that I am Christian and there is one god, and that kami, well, God created this tree and he created us with spirit to enjoy this tree. I am acknowledging that His creation has moved me and I give a gesture of respect.”

Robert clapped his hands and bowed.

I see a thing happening. I am fitting into Robert’s world and he is fitting into mine.

We continue our walk, appreciating the things we see, talking.

“Maybe the tree was a powerful kami,” Robert said.

“No kami. God. And he let us feel His presence in that moment. With a tree.”

“I love the way your mind works, princess.”

“No princess. Just a simple little girl at an inn.”

“You were never a simple anything.”

He charms me. He feeds me. He clothes me. He presents me to friends and family as if I were a rare and costly jewel.

We spent a week on our honeymoon, then it was time to return home.

Part of the morning the day after we got home, we spent in a bank doing things to get some of the money in MY account in Switzerland to a bank in Louisiana.

We then visited some people who will take some of that money and invest it. They say that the return will be a significant income, either for us to live on or to reinvest.

And part of it is to build OUR house, a place that Robert and Sachiko will call home.

Very near the corner where I wish to have my moon-viewing pavilion is what Mister Ray calls the old family place, once home to HIS grandparents, now decayed and falling down.

“If it were in a little better shape, I’d refurbish it,” Robert told his dad.

“Son, you could build TWO nice houses for what it would take...”

So, evenings we spent looking over house plans. It’s hard for me to get an idea of what a house might look like from the drawings, but the books also have pictures and although I am very new to American furnishings, I am seeing and understanding.

Daytime, though, we’re at that old home place. It’s overgrown, but under the brush, I can still see parts of the lawn that once surrounded the house. I noted the large porch on the east side, the windows, and we risked a very careful walk inside to see the rooms.

“This is quite different than your parents’ house.”

“Different time, Chiki. No air conditioning. In the summer you opened the windows and hoped for enough breeze to cool the place. The porch was where you spent the evenings in the summer. Screens kept the mosquitoes out and let the breeze in.”