Kyoto is Girls!

A bus came by the same as they had been coming by all day; sometimes I got on and sometimes I didn’t. It was all about the number. Is it the right number? If not, I would let it come and go and do nothing more than shuffle away from the paths of exiting bus people. If it were, I would shuffle into it and try to get a seat (if there were no place, I would stand). I was doing it all day by now. When I bought my 500 yen 1 day bus pass, the girl who spoke enough English to sell it to me gave me also a detailed map with all the most famous, accessible-by-bus destinations in Kyoto. With it, I went to the Golden Pavilion, the Silver Pavilion, to a flat-forever sized park, Kiyomizu temple, and to three different Family Marts and walked everywhere in between. The bus had become kind to me, it had become friendly and familiar. Once, not knowing which place on the map to visit next, I got on a bus just so that I could sit to eat my Nikuman. I was alone, so one open seat was always enough and Nikuman was always delicious. That day, every single thing offered a warm consistency; the quiet Japanese people, the hundreds of camera-carrying professionals, the on-time buses, the Nikuman. Until now, buses had come and gone all day and I hadn’t any mind at all for where they had come from or where they would go.

A bus came, the same as they had been coming. Outside it had become dark by now, and lights from the building behind me rolled off the bus's large windows as it hissed to a stop in front of me and a small group of people at the bus stop. It hissed again to kneel and then people started to come out of the front. The people who stayed in the bus were transparencies. The girl who was staring at me with dark, gleaming eyes didn’t seem real. We looked at each other shamelessly under the protective cover of the glass barrier between us. It must have become a game between us, to see who would lose their nerve first and look away. I thought that maybe no bus had been stopped for this long all day. The way that they make you exit the bus is always by the front, and so if everyone is exiting, everyone is paying on their way past the driver. She must have been hearing the microphone’d driver’s muffling of “Arigatogozaimasu, Arigatogozaimashita, Aritagozaimasu, Arigatogozaimashita” as each passenger slipped out the front. Her gaze was frighteningly human. Fully beautiful, she was staring at me. I lost our game. I couldn’t help nervousness. Hit with smiling, I looked away, and then looked back again. She was still looking. Now her friend too. I could’ve gotten on. Would it have scared them? I thought that if I got on I would run into something difficult: I might walk into a situation where I must impress two hot Japanese girls with my limited Japanese. If that were all, I would have gotten on the bus. But all the while, I would be subject to the silent scrutiny of a whole bus worth of Japanese surveyors. I didn't think hard. Her eyes were black. I couldn’t tell if it were because of their depth or pigment itself. I could feel her attention. Her eyes were real eyes; eyes that by looking affect the body of their owner and the body of the subject of their peering. I thought nothing about what I would say if they came out or if I went in. We stared through the window.

Outside, on the wet sidewalk, the bus made a sound. It rose up again off its knees and began rolling forward. They waved at me. I waved back smiling, feeling happy to have been played with. They got thinner and thinner and soon all that was left was the back end of the bus, a square getting smaller, rolling up the street.

I wonder what would happen if I did things like getting on that bus? Is it something I avoid? or deprive myself of? Even in this case, because I don’t live in Kyoto, and I was leaving in two days I could say it was better what I did, not getting on, but I think I know better, even though I don’t act like I do. I can’t imagine looking back and saying, “I should not have boarded that bus with the two pretty Japanese girls.” Silly!

(Then ヤン says, "Distance makes beauty.")