Quest for MelonOne thing I was pleased to find on my recent trip is that reading to my son before bedtime is a tradition, and one that he looks forward to. Often this is not done with books as such, but with
kamishibai, series of picture cards with text on the back from which the storyteller reads and which the local library lends.
One night, I was sitting with him as his mom read one involving extreme closeup pictures of fruit and clues from which he was supposed to guess which each one was. One fun moment came when he whispered to ask me one answer, and I whispered back, "It's a pineapple." But then he utterly couldn't guess the melon, his mom saying, "Well, because we're poor you've never seen one." Ouch!
A quick aside on melons. In the US, I suppose our standard fruit flavours would be orange, grape and cherry, but in Japan they're more likely orange, strawberry and melon. This always refers to the "mask" melon, a yellow-green fleshed variety with a netted rind resembling a cantaloupe. You may have heard of these selling for $100 or more, and those destined for gift-giving are so pricey because they are intensively manicured for perfection in shape and color (each plant only producing a single fruit at the high end).
But I had spotted a pair for sale in the local supermarket for about $20 each and decided to leave one as a thank you gift. I vetted it by conversationally pointing it out while we were all in the store, and my wife declared it too expensive. Good, not a bad melon but one that was too expensive. But then the day before I left one vanished, so as a precaution I scoped out a $25 melon in the station complex's market as a backup.
Dawned my last day, with my wife and son leaving for Japan, Inc. and daycare respectively, but my flight out of Narita so late in the day that I had the whole morning before having to leave. Kind of wanting to nail it down, I decided to head over to the station market (which opens early) and pick up the $25 one.
It was gone.
You could barely see the display in the first supermarket (which doesn't open until 10:00, typical in Japan) from its locked door, but the the cupboard looked bare there too.
"Ah," thinks I, "lets walk across town to the little fruit and vegetable shop in Shimizu neighborhood, where we used to live." But on reaching it I found its blast doors closed and its hours not posted (that would be telling). The supermarket around the corner turned out to be abandoned, a derelict frequented perhaps by ghosts but no place to get a melon.
So I walked over to the supermarket on the other other side of town, but they stocked no melons except wimpy, baseball sized, $7 ones. A personal pan melon would not do!
"Well," I speculated, wondering where had all the melons gone, long time passing, "perhaps the original supermarket will restock them." Nope, though I was first in the door, greeted with a bow from the manager and handed a shopping basket, it was only to see that space being filled with similarly wimpy, baseball-sized, $7 melons.
Sometimes one must grasp the nettle, though it makes one's fingers bleed. Already being near the station and with time a-wastin', I bought a ticket for the neighbouring city of Kawagoe and its department store. In the store's basement supermarket I found more wimpy tiddler melons, but they were arranged in a circular display around a $50 melon, vassals doing obeisance to the local petty noble of the melon hierarchy. I dethroned him.
Carefully shepherding my double-bagged, globular fruit of victory home, I was distressed to see a cloudburst soaking the houses along the Tobu Tojo railway. Let me turn the clock back to establish why.
While in Japan I had been sleeping on my son's futon, which had been mine previously. Now, a futon is far too big to put in a washer, so basically what you do is hang them over the balcony railing periodically in the air and sunlight. Indeed, big plastic clamps expressly designed to hold them there are a common item in Japanese home stores and ¥100 shops. Before leaving, my wife had put his/mine/ours out in this way and told me that since it looked like rain I should bring it in before leaving.
Oh . . . damn.
Ever dried a futon with your wife's blow-dryer?
So, at last, in the already sweaty clothes that I would that day wear a fifth of the way around the world and trepidatiously wondering if my son's bed would wet
him that night, at the last possible moment I hustled out to the station, changing at Nishi-Nippori to the airport Skyliner. This train runs elevated above and through Tokyo, both modern highrise and seedy rabbit warrenish, and always feels like riding an air car through
Blade Runner.
I had left the melon on the table with a note reading the Japanese for "Thank you for everything." I had felt this important to do as my wife had really been careful to show me a good time this trip (not necessarily a given, under the circumstances) and had even splurged on some fairly pricey foods that only I like. Also, one reason that a small melon would not have done was that it had to be big enough to share with her mother. I am
persona non grata with O-baasan and not allowed in her house, but she nevertheless cooked most of the dinners I ate while there. Duty, surely, but leaving me with a duty to somehow show my thanks without inflicting my presence.
Heh heh . . . my first evening there my son explained that Mommy can't cook but she can drive, and Grandma can't drive but she can cook. It's always nice when the world divides up along nice, sensible lines.
There were a few worries about how this could backfire, especially if the futon weren't as dry as I believed. Japanese gift etiquette involves carefully balancing the value of gifts so as to neither short-change the recipient nor--easily as big a faux pas--give them something too big and burden them with a requirement for a return gift to even things up. I was very careful to take both the melon's price tag and receipt with me.
Another mental image: "This thing's from Chiba; don't you know it's radioactive,
bakayarou?!"
But when the die is cast, you really just have to sit back, relax, have a complimentary Sapporo and hope that sometimes good intentions really are rewarded, even when laced with carelessness.
It was a relief to get back to find an e-mail expressing how surprised and pleased they were to find the melon that evening. My son apparently said, "It's as big as my head!" Next time we talked on the phone he told me it had been delicious.
Least he'll know one next time he sees it. (^_^)
. . .
"He say you meron runner, Mr. Ashen."