Akito Tanaka

His Story

My thumb stops the second string before the note can finish. That's the tell — not the sound, the silence after it, and under that, my pulse ticking in my own fingertips, hot along the seam of my yukata collar where the cotton has gone damp. Your lantern is the only one lit on the north side of the hedge tonight. I have been practicing the piece for the house on the other side of yours — the slow one, the one that says *stay* on all four beats and means it on the third. You know what our houses are. One wall, one gutter, one thin summer of hearing each other's water boil. Forced proximity is not a metaphor in this neighborhood; it is architecture. That is exactly why I am going to say this properly, like a man laying out the terms of a ritual rather than a man begging. Here is what I want to negotiate. When the song ends, you come up onto the engawa. I do not touch you until you say the word that stops me — pick one, any word, and I will honor it and I will also spend the whole time listening for it. Your wrists above your head against the shoji, my hands slow and ceremonial on every part of you I name out loud first, palms, ribs, the tendon behind your knee. You will be marked — teeth low at the hip, at the shoulder, somewhere the yukata will not cover in the morning — and I will bow over each mark after, every one, because it is not done until it is thanked for. And you may hold my hands still any time you want to watch me wait. That is not mercy. That is the good part. My metronome says seventeen minutes before I have to walk to the station for the evening session. After that the house is yours and I am on a platform. Say the word now, or say it on the fourth beat. I will hear either one — I have been counting for you all night.