Translating Fujoshi

The restaurant had opened its doors at this location thirty-odd years ago, during what Ei had heard described as a decently lively period in the neighborhood’s history. The simple cross-grain exterior was likely a hallmark of that era. The wooden two-story building was blackened and sagging with age, but the weather could be called part of its charm now. Duck past the navy blue curtain emblazoned with “Toshishun” and you would be met with a sliding door of frosted glass panels mounted on a wood lattice frame. Every time it slid open and shut it made a dry rattle, heralding a customer’s arrival. “Welcome, come on in!” Ei hailed on reflex at the sound, plating some stewed fish as he glanced up at the door. The man who stepped inside was the very same one he had shooed out of his establishment mere hours ago. “Oh, it’s just you, Tsuda.” “ Just me? That’s a little mean, waka. You’re open now, aren’t you?” Tsuda stood in the entranceway, cutting a fine figure in his suit and lookin...

“Oh, oh, yes, yes…! ” The flickering light from the television screen cast three long shadows on the dingy white walls as the sounds of lusty moans and wet slaps bounced around the dim room. The ill-fitting sliding door did nothing to dampen the noise, which spilled with increasingly loud and heedless enthusiasm into the room next-door. “Oh, oh, OH! ” she screamed in piercing ecstasy, her voice joined by a man’s low, breathless “ whoa ” mere milliseconds before the ostensibly faulty sliding door slammed wide open. “For fuck’s sake, can you turn that shit down!” came a resounding bellow, popping the room’s stuffy air of debauchery like a balloon. The white glare of cheap fluorescent lights silhouetted the towering figure in the doorway: a man dressed in traditional Japanese clothing and radiating anger. His fit frame was clad in a casual kimono of indigo silk, sash tied low on his hips. His short black hair shot up in unruly spikes, only a whisper short of brushing the door’s he...

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Mashiba’s long silence came as no surprise but filled him with anxiety all the same, and once again Hatano found himself passing the quiet, lonely nights of six months before. Their trysts had never followed any regular schedule, but Mashiba had never once set a date and failed to show. Ever since that day that Hatano had delivered Mashiba’s documents and bumped into Kamata, however, there hadn’t been so much as a word from him. Now, nearly two months had passed. His clumsy foray into costumery was finished, and the sweltering blaze of summer had spent itself. Even here in the city, the sky seemed crisper, grander, vaulting an endless autumn blue overhead. Mashiba’s embrace, and the whisper of, ‘ see me again ,’ on their last morning together, had sown hope’s faint, painful seeds inside him. The earnestness in Mashiba’s voice, and that first glimpse of bashfulness, had seemed to Hatano heralds of some change to come, and he had no wish to doubt himself. He had seen the wide-eyed ...