Advice Column

I hope you don’t mind if I skip the formalities. I’m writing because I read the column in your paper called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” and saw that you invite readers to write in for private advice as well, and I wanted to ask if maybe you could help with the problem between me and my wife. She’s been pestering me night and day saying she wants a divorce, and I’m really getting sick and tired of it, so I’m hoping you can tell me what to do. I’m not like that man last month who goes completely wild when he drinks or anything like that. I’m a hard worker and I’ve even managed to save a little. Though my wife keeps demanding that I hand half the savings over to her.

I’m 41 and she’s 37. We have a 13-year-old boy. On my side, both my parents are still living. My father used to work as a day laborer, but he’s laid up now, ever since his stroke. He sometimes used to get picked up by the police for public drunkenness in the underground mall at Ikebukuro Station. When I went to get him out, they’d tell me he was making a nuisance of himself yelling at pedestrians and lying spread eagle on the ground right in their way. That went on every so often for a while, and then suddenly he decided to become a Christian. He was out on a road-construction job in Minami-Senju when he ran into a street preacher named Sakamoto and heard him preaching, and that was what put it into his head. He’s a young preacher, no more than thirty or so, and I guess he ran off with another man’s wife when he was a student at some university up Kanazawa way, and the two of them then became Christians together. She’s something like ten years older than him. I guess he talks a lot about his past when he’s preaching on the street. In any case, I really have no idea what made my father convert, but for whatever reason, he started coming to my restaurant and preaching to the customers, babbling on endlessly about the fires of Helena this and the fires of Helena that. He said that was what they called the fires in the depths of hell. Especially since we keep a huge pot of hot oil boiling away most of the time at the shop, that kind of talk spooked some of my customers, and they’d just get up and leave after a while. He had stopped drinking like before, though, so I tried not to come down too hard on him even if he did bother the customers a little, since it’s not as if he was doing anything particularly bad, but this was another thing that started to come between me and my wife. Then he had a stroke last year at the beginning of November.

I have three brothers and sisters—two older and one younger. My wife has an older sister (she’s about thirty-nine), three younger brothers, and a younger sister.

I own a small Chinese restaurant, a noodle shop in Takinogawa, and business is pretty good for the most part. My wife and I started having problems two or three years ago, and recently she’s gotten really insistent about wanting a divorce. She badmouths me even in front of the customers, and when one of her brothers or sisters comes with a year-end gift or something, she immediately stashes it away somewhere saying she’ll do whatever she wants with it because it’s from her family.

The restaurant is a Chinese restaurant, so her folks back on the farm in Niigata sometimes ship us boxes of fresh garlic, or her brother brings us some, but she gives it all away to her other brothers and sisters so there’s never any left for us to use in the restaurant, and I wind up having to go out and buy some at the greengrocer next door.

We started the place five years ago with money we borrowed from her brothers and sisters plus our own savings, and we have about 180 square feet. Anytime we get into a fight, I can count on her reminding me that it’s only because her brothers and sisters lent us the money that we have what we do.

She refuses to stand behind me even for the tiniest day-to-day things, and she insists that she could manage the restaurant perfectly well all by herself. About ten years ago the place I’d worked at for seven years decided to go into a different business, so I quit and didn’t have a steady job for a while, and we left our boy with my parents so both of us could work outside the home, which in her case meant working at a drinking place, but I know that everybody goes through hard times sometimes, and it was by sticking it out through all those hard times that we got to where we are today, where about two years ago we were able to buy a house, it’s a two-story house, for my parents to live downstairs and our employees upstairs.

With Dad laid up in bed, us kids are looking after him as best we can. I did get my wife’s approval before taking my parents in, of course. But these days I can’t say a word to her without her sulking in bed and refusing to help in the shop. She seems to have gotten even more cocksure of herself ever since her sister (the thirty-nine-year-old one) opened a yakitori shop a year or so ago. The house where my folks live is about half a kilometer away, so it’s a completely separate household. Our own place is above the restaurant. If I make the slightest comment, she picks up the phone and calls one of her brothers or sisters and starts running me down like I’m the worst kind of evil in the world or something.

When we get into fights, she insults my family and then spreads it all around to her own family, so how does she expect any of us to get along that way? There was this one fight we had about a year ago that was especially bad. Right in the middle of the afternoon, when we’re both working behind the counter and I’m having her chop some vegetables to top a bowl of noodles while I prepare some boiled potstickers, she all of a sudden throws down her knife and goes stomping upstairs. Noodle shops, especially Chinese noodle shops, are a lot like sushi bars the way you have to work with the flow. You just can’t have someone ditching out right in the middle like that. But the next thing I know, she comes back downstairs all dolled up and marches straight out the door without saying a word.

Well I’m human, too, so when she got home that evening I demanded to know what was going on, and when I couldn’t get a straight answer, I ripped off her clothes and dragged her other good things from the dresser and started tearing them to shreds, and afterwards her sister and my brother had to step in, which ended up with me paying her ¥10,000 a month to compensate her for the clothes I ruined, and I’m still paying for them.

I think marriage is something that goes smoothly if one or the other is willing to give a little, but our problem is that we’re both just too stubborn. When I think of what our boy has to put up with, our thirteen-year-old, I feel like I’ve failed him as a parent and I really feel sorry for him.

I do drink a little sake now and then, a couple of flasks a night, and because my wife is so cold to me I sometimes go to bars to drown my sorrows, but I never miss work because of it or beat her up.

The other day, after closing up shop for the night, I went to a nearby bar. The street my restaurant is on only has shops, but a couple of other streets in the neighborhood have bars. Even when I go to bars, I stick with one of the less expensive whiskeys. And I don’t mess around with bargirls either. I sat there watching this older gentleman trying to slip his hand up a couple of bargirls’ skirts but getting pushed away every time, and then after a while he put his hands under his own shirt and pinched the skin on his caved in chest, saying, “Look, I’ve got tits. I’ve got tits. Come on, honey, suck my tits.” The girls just laughed at him and told him, “Go ask your wife. Go do that for your wife,” but then he launches shamelessly into this big sob story. He and his wife sleep in separate bedrooms, he says, and any time he tries to sneak into her room, she suddenly starts yelling, “I’m freezing! Oooh, I’m freezing!” so loud that the children can hear. He claimed that even though they live under the same roof, he and his wife never talk, he has to communicate with her by letter, and he pulled a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket saying it was one of the letters. I asked to see it, and it turned out to be a shopping list of things he was supposed to buy—bread and butter and such, and the names of some cosmetics. I asked him if he didn’t give her money for food and other household expenses, to which he replied, “Yeah, but she’s always griping that it’s not enough,” and he told how he had recently given some incense money to a bereaved friend, but then his wife called the guy afterwards complaining that she couldn’t make dinner because her husband had given him incense money when they didn’t even have money to buy rice, and she went to the guy’s place to borrow the money back. One of the bargirls asked why he didn’t just leave her, and he said, “I’ve thought about it lots of times, but then I imagine what it’d be like after I’m gone, weeds choking the yard, the laundry never getting taken in, and I just can’t bring myself to do it.” When the girls laughed at this, he laughed, too, and started trying to feel up their skins again. After that he tried to get one of them to go out with him next Sunday, but they turned him down. I knew two or three more times through this charade and he’d probably get his way, and it made me sick to think of it. Just because someone’s at a pub or a yakitori shop or a bar shouldn’t mean they can forget all their morals, and what do people work for anyway if not to provide for their children and for their husbands and wives so they can all live happily together as a family? This kind of behavior really doesn’t deserve to be called human.

Another man I met at the bar that night said he owned a small clothing store. He looked maybe forty-five or -six, and like me, he had quit his job not too long ago and came home to work at the shop his wife was running. I hadn’t seen him there before, in fact I didn’t really know anyone at that bar except the madam, but this all came out in what he said. At first he was just listening to the older man’s sob story, but then he started talking about himself, saying he’d definitely decided to leave his wife, and he had even been to family court already.

As soon as he started talking, I realized his situation was a little bit like mine, so I paid pretty close attention. I think his story might be useful to compare so I hope the person who answers these letters at your paper will keep it in mind, too. The wife ran the shop all by herself before. Then when the husband came home to help with the shop, he decided they should remodel, so he hired an interior decorator friend of his to come in and redid the entire store, but after doing all this against his wife’s wishes, business dropped off. The husband insists there were other reasons for the drop besides the remodeling (I figure no matter what the reasons are, they still have only themselves to blame). This already made things worse between them, but there was also a young girl who worked there who broke into tears every time the wife scolded her for not speaking up enough when helping the customers, and because the husband stepped in to comfort her several times, the wife accused him right in front of all the other employees that he must be getting it on with the girl, so he flew into a rage and belted her a good one across the face, and after that he hauled his futon upstairs to the children’s room and the children came downstairs and they’ve been living separately ever since. I told him right then and there that he shouldn’t have done that, that even after something like that, I’d never live separately from my wife.

The man said he was embarrassed to have to admit it at his age, after 18 years of marriage, but both of the kids sided with his wife and said nasty things about him. Since the store originally belonged to his own father, he went to the family court saying he wanted his wife to get out of the house, but when the court called his wife in she couldn’t believe it and said she had no intention of leaving him. She told the judge that she had only said what she said because she didn’t want the other employees to start whispering behind their backs first, so the judge asked the husband if he really wanted a divorce, if he was really serious about it, and the husband said yes, that was definitely what he wanted.

I don’t think a man should go around spilling his guts in public, so I kept my lips buttoned about my own situation. But that night I started wondering just a little if maybe I should consider getting a divorce after all. I’m just not the type to let it all hang out, either in my own shop or in a bar. Maybe that means I’m uptight, but I can’t do what I can’t do, and there’s not a person in the world that doesn’t have strengths and weaknessesas they say, every man has at least seven faults no matter how perfect he may seem—so when one of the bargirls looked me in the face that night and told me I looked like a crab, it got to me a little. I mean, that’s what always happens when I get to thinking seriously about something, or when I’m trying to keep a stiff upper lip and grit my teeth and not let people see how miserable I am—I start looking like a crab. My wife says that all the time.

These days I often hear her muttering to our son that I’ve got my crab face on again. Well, what does she expect when I’ve got both this Chinese restaurant and my whole family riding on my shoulders? She can say whatever she wants, all I’m trying to say is that we may be having a hard time now but we’ve been through worse and couldn’t she please stand by me without making a fuss and help me out?—that’s what makes my face look the way it does, but then she goes around calling me crab face and it makes me feel really sad to be in a business where I have to work right in front of the customers all the time. Since I’m not working for someone else, I don’t have the option of sulking in bed. If I shut down the restaurant when it’s not even a holiday, I won’t have any face to show either my workers or my customers.

But I’d never haul off and punch anybody at a bar. If I did something like that, I know it’d turn into a great big ruckus, and then I’d wind up having to take the next day off for sure. My shop’s reputation would be on the line. My wife worked in a drinking house, too, so she ought to know. Anybody’d blow their top if someone suddenly threw a punch at them in a bar. I used to go every night to pick her up at the end of her shift, and the thing I hated most was walking in and seeing some jerk giving her a hard time. On our way home I’d think how badly I wanted to get her out of that whole scene and open our own business where we could work together side by side.

In any case, that night at the bar was when I started wondering if maybe I should think about divorce after all.

Who does she think I’ve been busting my rear end for all this time anyways? I’ve always thought it was every bit as much for her as it was for me, but she complains that I don’t show her the receipts, I don’t give her any spending money, I must be keeping it all for myself. Well, it’s true that once every six months or so, or maybe once every three months, I go on a binge sometimes, and I guess that doesn’t sit too well with her. It’s really the only vice I have that I can think of, but to hear her tell it, I apparently have others as well. She does help with the restaurant, and in my heart I’m grateful to her for it, but being a man it’s hard for me to show my gratitude every time, and I know I’m partly to blame on that score.

When my wife brought up the subject of divorce again today (I still haven’t ever brought it up myself), she said she wanted the restaurant, I should take the house, and we could split our savings half and half.

I suppose since we worked together to get what we have there’s some sense to that, but as a man, what am I supposed to do without my restaurant? How am I going to make a living? That’s why I really want to keep the restaurant for myself. Well, there you have it, though it may be hard to follow in some places because I jumped back and forth, but since I’m in my forties now and I figure I only have about twenty more good years ahead of me, and I’d really like to be able to spend those days happily, I’ve set my mind to getting a divorce, which means I really ought to get myself down to family court, but I keep putting it off thinking I should wait just a little longer, and that’s why I finally decided to write to you. I know it must be a lot of trouble for you, but I really do hope you can help me.

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My apologies for the other day. I thought I was writing with a clear head but I realized afterwards that I was really pretty worked up. My wife has some things to say about all this, too, and I don’t want to get burned in the “fires of Helena” for not giving her side, so I thought I’d better write again. She says that when she works with me behind the counter she feels like years are being shaved from her life, and that there aren’t any other Chinese restaurants where the owner’s wife stands with him behind the counter all day long, we’re the only place in the whole country—that’s what she claims. To my mind, there’re lots of businesses where the mom and pop work together side by side, whether it’s greengrocers or dry goods stores or drugstores or print shops or farmers, and in fact for a lot of small businesses that’s the only way they can keep themselves afloat. It’s only because someone in the family can do the job instead of having to hire one more outside helper that you can put a little bit aside for your old age, and without that, how’re you going to get by after you retire?—that’s what I say.

My wife comes back that if a man and woman are going to work together right in front of the customers then the proper arrangement is for the man to be the helper, that’s how it’s done at all the yakitori shops and other drinking places. She’s perfectly capable of preparing all the Chinese dishes we make at our restaurant now, so it’d be a lot better if she was the cook and I was just the helper. When I point out that lots of yakitori shops are run by men, she says she wouldn’t mind working with me in a yakitori shop so much because then we could divide up the chores neatly, with me grilling the chicken and her tending the simmer pot.

But I really truly only want to do Chinese, so I don’t see how that gets us anywhere. I know I’m starting to repeat myself, but I still say there’s no way a woman can run a proper Chinese restaurant.

Actually, when I think about it, I think what my wife really wanted was to have her own business, way back before she ever even thought of splitting up. I think it was only because I wouldn’t let her do that that she started bugging me about a divorce. She’d sit on the step that goes up into the room behind the shop with a cigarette dangling from the hand on her knee and a faraway look in her eye, and I knew that’s exactly what she was thinking about, day in and day out, and after a while I could hardly stand it anymore. She was so positive she could make tons more money in her own business than we saved by having her help me. She always seemed so cheerful and happy then, not like now. But it really tore me apart and made me mad.

Back in those days, she didn’t resist like some stubborn beast when I asked her to do something for me behind the counter, and when we sat down exhausted after all the customers were gone and it was just the two of us and our boy, we didn’t immediately start spewing all our pent-up feelings at each other. She hadn’t started begging me to sleep downstairs yet, and she was always full of conversation. But if she’s going to do that, as far as I’m concerned I’d rather she came right out and screamed, “I’m freezing! Oooh, I’m freezing!” and told me to get lost. I enjoy seeing a happy face as much as anybody does. I may never have put it in words, but I’ve always liked it when my headstrong little wife is in a good mood and shows her feminine charms, and even at my age it makes me want to take her for a tumble between the sheets, but she’d always be thinking about something else and act shocked when I started to put my arms around her, which made me even madder.

When I told her it would take all the enjoyment out of doing my restaurant if she opened her own yakitori shop, she just laughed and said I should have an affair if I wanted to, but as far as I’m concerned, my wife is the only woman I want, and even if we fight a lot, when I think of her, no other woman can compare, and when I think of my son, I just don’t see how I could go on enjoying my work. It’s not like I’ve gotten to middle age and suddenly decided I want a mistress, all I want is for my wife to take care of the house and stand behind her man like a proper woman should, so I basically think she’s got her priorities all screwed up, and I’ve told her so any number of times, but I guess maybe working at a tavern has made her callous or something because she starts saying all kinds of shocking things. So it hit me that maybe she wanted to have an affair, but I think I understand her pretty well, and I know she’s not that kind of a woman, she just gets into these moods that make her say things like that sometimes.

I’m embarrassed to say this, but since I couldn’t wait to get your reply, I debated between going to talk to Reverend Sakamoto and asking one of the bargirls out to get her advice, and in the end I decided on the bargirl. I wasn’t real happy about the dent it made in my pocketbook, but I gave her a big tip and bought her a pendant I thought she’d like, and we saw a movie and then went to a big Chinese restaurant in Ikebukuro that has private rooms. At home, we don’t have a TV in the shop, and though we do have one upstairs, neither me nor my wife has any time to watch it. We used to watch as a family on our days off sometimes, but I couldn’t care less about it anymore, and it’s put away in the closet so my wife and son can’t watch it either. I haven’t been to a movie in years, and I’ve never bought a pendant or anything like that for my wife. The spirit hasn’t moved me, you know, and besides, if she wants something, she goes out and buys it herself. Of course, when she buys expensive clothes without asking, I start to sweat about making ends meet, and I do have something to say about that. Anyway, I figured so long as this bargirl and I were going to eat, it might as well be at a place where I could learn a thing or two, which was why I chose that particular restaurant in Ikebukuro, but I have to say it turned out to be a real disappointment. Then again, I suppose that’s not so surprising when you consider that back when I first opened my restaurant I really did my homework and spent a lot of time asking the customers what they thought of the seasonings, though I was always careful not to be too pushy, because I figured if I was going to set up shop in Takinogawa then there’s a certain Takinogawa taste that I needed to satisfy, I couldn’t expect to get away with just any old recipe because taste is one of those things you simply can’t fake, you have to try different things and keep learning until you get it right. The bargirl had insulted me once, but she apologized the next time I went. I had already decided I would forgive her if she apologized, and of all the things that make a guy happy, I figure having a girl who believes in him is pretty much at the top of the list, besides which she was divorced and her kid was with her ex, who was now living with the woman who caused their breakup to begin with, and the kid even had a new half-sister, so I figured she was a woman who knew a little bit about hardship, and she seemed willing to listen to my story, and to be perfectly honest, I was thinking that if worst came to worst maybe I could ask her to be my next wife.

I’d never realized just how much it could take out of a person to walk beside a woman, but I kind of gritted my teeth and stuck it out. Back when my wife was working at the drinking place and I used to go to fetch her home after her shift, I kind of liked the way she’d heave a big sigh and say how tired she was and lean on my arm and long for the day we could have our own place where we could work side by side, especially since I was dreaming of how happy we would be then, too, but ever since we opened our own shop and started working together all the time, and this was true before her drinking house days, too, we always get into arguments when we go someplace together, so I avoid it when I can. Since I don’t even try to humor my wife that way anymore, it was really tiresome to have to do it for someone else, but as I say, I gritted my teeth and let her prattle on about all her personal trials and tribulations. When she said she’d been wrong to think that single life would be so much easier and who needed a husband anyway, I thought of my wife and said to myself, You better believe it, two or three years is about all that woman has left for running a drink house or yakitori shop, and then somewhere along the way she’ll probably shack up with some young guy and make herself miserable between trying to take care of her kid and trying to keep her boyfriend happy at the same time. The bargirl thought that my wife giving the garlic to her relatives was just her way of telling them, Thanks to you all, our restaurant is doing well, that was all she meant by it and I shouldn’t be so small-minded, so I told her, No, you’re wrong, she’s definitely being partial. But then the bargirl says, Why don’t you stop harping about garlic this and garlic that and just put down your foot, tell her she can’t have the restaurant but she can go off and do whatever else she wants, she can even spend all your savings if she wants, and you can just hire someone new to help you behind the counter. Either that, or expand the restaurant and make her the manager. Think big, do something bold. Women really go for men like that, even if they wind up going bust in the end. That’s what she told me.

Well, when I brought up the business about the garlic, I wasn’t really talking about the garlic itself, so it just goes to show you how hard it is to get people to really understand you. When I saw her picking only the pork out of her Eight Treasures Stirfry to eat, my sixth sense told me she was a loser. She’d gotten a little tipsy, and when I stopped to buy a paper on the way back and stood there reading the advice column, she laughed and started poking fun at me, asking if I read the column everyday. The thing is, I’m just completely at a loss, and I’m still really anxious to get your reply. Besides that, I read the column every day because I’ve started to think that maybe all the other families in this world only seem like they’re happy on the outside, but if you could see what was really going on inside, you’d find out about all the problems they have. That was certainly true for the shopkeeper and that other gentleman from the bar where this girl works, and I bet it’s the same for the couple with the dry goods store across the street, and the greengrocers next door, and the big dry cleaners next to them, and also for office workers and civil servants and government ministers and even the imperial family for that matter. The perfect example is the dry cleaner, who was at my restaurant the other day grousing about how he’d found out a couple of days before that the employee he put in charge of deliveries and pickups and also settling accounts with customers had been dipping into collections again, and I guess he’s never had a single employee who didn’t dip into collections, so you have to feel sorry for the man. He says that no matter who he hires, they always dip into collections, so he has to hire them knowing it’s probably going to be the same story again, but it’s really sad because it basically wipes out all his profits. Of course, he can’t very well close up his shop, and there’s no way to get around sending hired help on collections because it’s the same person who has to bring back orders and the jobs can’t be separated, so it’s sad. Plus, the greengrocer’s wife is in the hospital with cancer, and the dry goods man has a mistress.

I realized the girl wasn’t going to hear my side of the story, so I said I thought I’d go on home, but she clung to my arm and made such a fuss that I reluctantly let her take me to her apartment, which of course led to the usual, and in the end I had to agree to lend her some money, though since I hadn’t really wanted to go along in the first place, it made me mad, but a man can’t refuse a woman at a time like that, so I agreed to bring the money the next time I saw her. Then I found out she’d slept with that man from the bar, too, which was kind of the last straw, and you can be sure I kept my lips buttoned up tight about getting remarried.

I got home around ten o’clock and found out my father had died, and when I went to my parent’s place Reverend Sakamoto was already there, so I asked him what had made my father become a believer, and maybe it worked out fine for a day laborer, but could you be a believer and run a restaurant at the same time, I mean, not that both me and my wife would join the flock but just me, could I still go on running my restaurant, but he didn’t seem to understand what I was asking. I was thinking that if he told me I should become an evangelist starting tomorrow, I was willing to do it because it’d be a whole lot easier. He only told me I should come see him sometime, and if possible my wife should come with me, but she just kept puffing on her cigarette. When I asked him about the fires of Helena, he said my father must have been thinking of a book called Pilgrim’s Progress, written by somebody or other, where a man named Christian starts telling everybody one day that a huge fire’s going to burn the city down so they all better get out, and he tries to convince his wife about it but she just brushes him off, so he flees the city by himself, and basically my father must have been calling out to everybody just like this guy named Christian had done. To begin with, as I wrote before, my father used to get drunk and yell at people in the underground mall at Ikebukuro Station, and I guess I understand now that that turned into the fires of Helena. After Reverend Sakamoto left, my mother was saying something about how even if my father had become a Christian sooner he probably still would have put them through the same kind of hardships, when my wife suddenly let slip right there in front of her that we were getting divorced, so I belted her a good one across the face, and once I got going, I was so furious that I hit her some more, and I also gave a few good ones to my boy who tried to stop me, and I started screaming that I was going to kill her, and I might have done something really terrible if the other people there hadn’t stopped me.

Like when I tore up my wife’s clothes, I’ve never once apologized to her, but this time I decided that I would, at least in my heart. It’s true I’m not a very good person, and like that bargirl said, I realized it was small-minded of me to keep harping on the garlic, so I looked for a chance to talk to my wife, but she was always talking with her relatives, and even when we ran into each other she would look away and walk right past me without a word, so in the end, though I was worried about the restaurant, since I’d taken several days off for the funeral anyway, I decided to take our savings passbook, which fortunately was in my name, and get out of the house, and since then I’ve been spending the night at a flophouse in Ikebukuro and wandering around the streets during the day. But I’m much calmer now in my mind than I was before, and so I wrote this letter to fill you in on all that’s been happening. I’m very sorry for the trouble, but please send your reply not to my home address but to the address on the back of the envelope. I don’t intend to let this be the end of it with the restaurant, so I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you. I’m enclosing postage to cover special delivery. Trusting in the bonds of fate, I am placing my complete faith in the advice column editor of your newspaper.

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Since I still haven’t received your reply, I thought I’d fill you in on what’s happened since I wrote before. Day before yesterday I opened the morning paper to read that the wife of the clothing store owner I met at the bar had hanged herself, so I bought three other papers to see what else they might have to say, and one of them went into a little more detail. Apparently the family court had mediated to make the man patch things up with his wife, but then the wife had had a nervous breakdown, and that was what made her kill herself. When I went back to Takinogawa yesterday to check on how things were going at the restaurant, it was open for business, and I could hear customers talking inside and I saw our delivery man Goto leaving on his bicycle, so I wanted to see how she was managing, I was worried that the customers might be complaining about her cooking or making fun of her and giving her a hard time, but when I peeked inside I saw my wife standing cheerfully in front of the gas stove cooking up some potstickers. Then she said. “Give me just one second, okay?” in an oddly coquettish way, and she moved over to chop some vegetables and began preparing some fried rice in another fry pan. She was like a changed woman from how she used to go around before with her head hanging low, never looking at anybody and barely mumbling her words, and I came away feeling completely dumbfounded. I suppose she might somehow manage to carry on the business like that all by herself for a while, but I know it’s only because the customers still assume I’m around somewhere and they think they don’t have anything to worry about. Give it a month or so and I bet they’ll be coming not for the food but with designs on her, and when that happens, the restaurant will be finished. The woman will turn into a slut, and my son will be corrupted, and she could even go and kill herself like the wife of the man from the clothing store, which is why I decided to write again, because I was worried about that. I’m also thinking that maybe I put the wrong return address on the envelope, or maybe your answer to my first letter reached the restaurant after I left, so tomorrow I’m planning to wait for Goto when he goes on a delivery, hoping maybe he can tell me something. I’ve been eating at lots of different Chinese restaurants to see what I might be able to learn, and I haven’t found a single one being run by a woman. I haven’t seen any place where the wife is working alongside the husband, either, but if I treated her nice, and if at least every night after we closed up I got down on my knees to thank her, I’m wondering if you think we might be able to somehow still make a go of it. I am on hands and knees as I beg you to please reply as soon as you possibly can.