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Americans and watch them glance dubiously at him and wonder, Where?
    Suzuki had a passion for Jack Daniel’s, Wal-Mart, and American hard-core pornography. “Waru-Maato wa doko?” It was the first thing he’d ask when we pulled into a new town or had some time off. Not that I blame him. There wasn’t anyplace else to go in those towns. I mean, if you took a Sociological Survey of the people who lived there, they all spent their days off at Wal-Mart too.
    The soundman, Oh, was a quiet man who spoke in monosyllables out of the corner of his mouth. He was always turning away. He was walleyed and mean, except to animals. He loved animals. Sometimes you’d see him holding his boom pole, taking sound, and his coat would be alive, stuffed with a writhing litter of barnyard kittens poking out from his collar and cuffs. But if he loved animals, he worshiped Suzuki. The two of them would get drunk on Jack Daniel’s and tape pictures of blondes from Hustler all over the Sheetrock walls of motels across America, then use the girls for target practice, shooting out their tits and crotches with air guns they’d bought at Wal-Mart.
    The PA was American, an ex-flight attendant. He was a short but handsome young man who wore cowboy boots with heels for added elevation and blue jeans with carefully pressed,creases. He sent his laundry out to valet services at every hotel we stayed in and racked up huge bills on toll calls to phone-sex chat lines. I’d hired him because I thought his chiseled blond looks would come in handy wrangling the wives. He loved to talk about Making It on Airplanes and the Mile High Club. This made him popular with Suzuki and Oh.
    The directors were sent from Japan on a rotation basis, showing up every couple of months to shoot a show or two. The ones I remember were like Oda—dumb, or disaster prone.
    We left our mark in truck stops and motels across the country. So much was new to them. In Taos, New Mexico, Suzuki and Oh stayed in a pink adobe suite with a fireplace. They got drunk and made a small, cozy fire in the hearth, and when they ran out of firewood they burned the telephone book and the Bible, then a chair and a bed-post, and finally the bedroom itself. After the fire department had left, Oh explained, somewhat sheepishly, “In Japan fireplaces are not so common.”
    In Austin, Texas, after Suzuki passed out while running a bath and flooded thirteen floors of the Radisson Hotel, I asked him if baths, too, were not so common in Japan, but he just shrugged. “Of course we have baths,” he said. “We are famous for our baths. It’s just that our tubs are so much deeper.”
    But what really impressed them was the sheer amplitude of America. I’ll never forget the look of astonishment that lit up Suzuki’s moonlike face the first time he walked into a Wal-Mart. To a Japanese person, Wal-Mart is awesome, the capitalist equivalent of the wide-open spaces and endless horizons of the American geographical frontier. All this for the taking! Your breast expands with greed and need and wonder. I followed Suzuki around the store as he pored over a dozen brands of car caddies, fingered garden hoses, and lingered on the edge of Lingerie, watching farmwives choose brassieres. He loved the fact that you could buy real firearms, not just air guns, over the counter at Wal-Mart, but that was where I drew the line.
    I was learning. This was the heart and soul of My American Wife!: recreating for Japanese housewives this spectacle of raw American abundance. So we put Suzuki in a shopping cart, Betacam on his shoulder, and wheeled him up and down the endless aisles of superstores, filming goods to induce in our Japanese wives a state of want (as in both senses, “lack” and “desire”), because want is good. We panned the shelves, stacked floor to ceiling, tracked women as they filled their carts with Styrofoam trays of freezer steaks, each of which, from a Japanese housewife’s perspective, would feed her