I looked up, startled. I was not used to being addressed in public, especially in English on this nearly empty twilight train out towards Gifu. The other passengers, stragglers who are bound for the end of the line as I am, rarely have a word for me as tightly wrapped up around themselves as they are. My silent companions in raw umber light as the sun sinks lower over the rice fields. Even more surprising was the small older woman who addressed me, her meek demeanor belied by a strong voice.
"Excuse me?"
She pointed directly at the book in my hands. "Is it about religion?"
I closed the small paperback. The book was one of two I keep on hand for commuting. Novels that I can start from anywhere; familiar stories that are more a linked serial than a cohesive narrative, so I can pick and choose where I begin, and then read for as long as I can. One is a battered copy of Cat's Cradle I bought a few years ago in a tiny used English book shop when I lived in Rome. The other, the one currently in my hand, is a Kerouac my brother bought me for Christmas half-jolkingly after I made fun of him once too often for liking Kerouac.
Her wrinkled fingers hovered over the dharma splashed across the cover. "A book of religion?"
"Ah," I breathed, understanding. I tried my best not to laugh. "Sort of."
She smiled, and the creases in her face grew deeper. "Are you interested in Buddhism?"
"I was," I answered truthfully. "I guess I still am." I looked at the worn paperback in my hands, the Dharma on the cover slightly more faded than the Bums beside it. "This isn't really about Buddhism."
"No?"
"It's fiction."
Her smile turned unexpectedly bright, teetering on excitement, and I marveled for a moment at how easy conversation with her was. I was out of practice - I had learned, after enough time here, to close myself off to people when I am traveling alone. When one is often purposefully ignored, it's easier to believe that you blend into the background.
"I have read some fiction," she said then almost mischievously, as if we were sharing a secret. "English fiction."
I tried, and failed, not to look surprised. It dawned on me then how easily her words came to her. No stilted pauses, no raised eyes and searching for words - just easy flowing, accented language.
She was small and unassuming in the way that many other women who have made it old age here are; hunched over with measured movements, wispy hair and deep wrinkles in her face. A woman like so many others, one that I would just as easily ignore on the afternoon train as the rest of the populous pretends to look past me. What had her life been, I wondered for a moment, that she spoke English so well.
"Your English is very good," I told her simply.
Her shoulders raised slightly, an almost involuntary motion, as if to disregard the compliment.
"What do you read?" I asked instead.
Her crinkled eyes stayed on me, and for a moment I thought she looked mischievous again.
"Drama," she pronounced. "Great romance. I like Nora Roberts."
I thought then of those paperback romance novels, the ones you can buy for a few dollars in the supermarket that end up lining the walls of rental houses or my mother's beach bag, and tried again not to laugh.
"I know those," I told her. "I've never read them."
"They are very good," she said with the gravitas of someone recommending Henry James, but then proceeded to giggle. It was rough and throaty, but no less genuine.
Conversation lapsed, and we joined the silence of the rest of the train car. I felt my own failure at not responding, but I knew nothing more to say about Nora Roberts. I searched for the words beneath my tongue, just behind my lips, but I could not find them. I alone seemed uncomfortable; she smiled still contentedly at me.
The train lurched towards a station, the gears creaking as they slowed on the tracks, and she rose from her seat by the window. I quickly jumped to make way for her, but she moved with careful, deliberate steps around me.
"They have happy endings," she said suddenly, and I looked just as startled as when she first spoke to me.
"Sorry?"
"Happy endings," she repeated slowly, as if I were the one speaking a second tongue. "Nora Roberts books."
She paused a moment, like she was thinking deeply about it.
"I like happy endings," she decided finally.
I smiled sincerely. "I do too."
She graced me with a smile one last time, the type that intensified the many lines and creases and years in her face, and walked off the train - leaving me with a punch-drunk and dumbfounded look and a vast number of questions that would never get any answers.
I sat back down as the train churned to a start again, but I did not open my book. I did not distract myself with music or thoughts of work or anything else. Instead I sat, staring out the train windows at the low sun and the rice fields, and thought only of happy endings.
