The Three Bookateers in Kamakura

Kyoko, Tsuneko, and I meet every two months to trade opinions on a book I've selected. In February we discussed Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and I assigned The Girl in the Blue Dress for April. As I was distributing the books, one of them -- Tsuneko, I think -- noted that we never run out of things to talk about in our three hours together. She proposed getting together in March for lunch and a leisurely discussion of non-literary matters. Calendars were whipped out and a date was set: March 29.

At the time, of course, I had no way of knowing how important this appointment would be in the wake of the March 11 earthquake. Yet I used a pen to mark the date in my calendar. I never, ever let a pen anywhere near my calendar.  I have no idea why I made an exception in this case.

Every other commitment in my calendar is written in pencil, which is fortunate since I had to take an eraser to most of March and April and part of May right after the earthquake, but lunch with Kyoko and Tsuneko is incredibly indelibly blue. Our date was the North Star by which I set my compass in the sad days of bidding so many American friends sayonara and mata ne.

We had lunch at Arkadas, a Turkish restaurant on the third floor of a building overlooking the Kamakura train station. None of us had been there before but I knew it must be good since both the Seventh Fleet officer spouses and the Oakleaf Lunch Bunch crowd went there last fall. We ate shish-kabobs - beef, chicken, and lamb - and Kyoko insisted the occasion merited dessert so we scarfed down sweet pastries that I'm calling baklava although they were shaped like tubes rather than squares. I simply had to try Turkish coffee because who knows when I'll have another chance. (When I mentioned this to Dr. T, he said, "It tasted like mud, right?" "Pretty much.")  Kyoko, who has actually visited Turkey, pronounced the food authentic.

We exchanged earthquake stories, of course. Tsuneko and her husband were in their car, driving to the nursing home where they installed her mother-in-law a few months ago. Their car was positioned between a large truck and a tall building when the earthquake hit. The tall building began to sway. "We were so frightened," Tsuneko confessed, "We were so worried that the building would crush our car, that we . . . we reached . . . we reached for each other and held hands until the earthquake stopped!" Tsuneko was blushing. Public displays of affection are unusual in Japan, particularly for Tsuneko's generation (she will be 70 this year). I am pretty sure that Kyoko will still be teasing Tsuneko about the "romantic earthquake" long after I have left Japan.

After lunch they took me to the shrine where they had prayed for easy labor many years ago when they were young pregnant ladies.  I thought the straw sculptures scattered around the temple grounds were quite interesting.  "Do they represent pregnant ladies?"  No.  Kyoko laughed as she poked her finger through several of layers of straw to reveal a peony bush.  The straw protects them from cold temperatures.  That rock star topknot is sheer whimsy on the part of the temple gardener.

I knew this picture would not turn out very well when the Turkish restaurant owner insisted on posing us in front of the red crescent flag displayed in his window. He also gave each of us little trinkets dangling from safety pins to attach to our lapels. I pinned mine to my backpack instead because these days my lapel is reserved for my Japanese-American friendship pin.