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entire family for several days.“Stocking up” is what our robust Americans called it, laughing nervously, because profligate abundance automatically evokes its opposite, the unspoken specter of dearth.
    Locating our subjects felt like a confidence game, really. I’d inveigle a nice woman with her civic duty to promote American meat abroad and thereby help rectify the trade imbalance with Japan. Overwhelmed with a sense of the importance of the task, she’d open up her life to us. We’d spend two or three days with her, picking through the quotidian minutiae of her existence, then we’d roll out of town and on to the next one. We tried to be considerate, but you have to remember that My American Wife! was a series. You are doing a wife or two a week. While you are shooting them, they are your entire world and you live in the warm, beating heart of their domestic narratives, but as soon as you drive away from the house, away from the family all fond and waving, then it is over. Their lives are sealed in your box of tapes, locked away in the van, and you send these off with the director to edit back in Tokyo, and that’s it. Easy. Done.
    That was the idea, anyway. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t happen exactly that way.
     
     
    “Mrs. Flowers?” I knocked loudly on the door. “Ub, Suzie?”
    Finally she answered, opening the door a crack and peering around the edge. She was dressed in an old bathrobe. Her face was mottled and her eyes were swollen shut from tears. “Yes,” she whispered.
    “I am so sorry to disturb you....” I was struggling. “Ub, I just wanted to tell you we’re leaving and that I’m so sorry about what happened.”
    She sobbed once, then gulped. “It’s okay, Jane. It’s not your fault, really.” She opened the door a little further, even tried to smile.
    “Well, we just wanted to say good-bye, and ...” I gestured toward the street, where the van was waiting. The PA had the engine running, and Oda, Suzuki, and Ob were inside. Oda flapped his band at us from the front seat. He hadn’t even wanted to come to the door with me. Suzie waved back.
    “... and, uh, Suzie? One last thing ... Mr. Oda wanted me to ask you for the photographs. You know, the ones you said you’d lend us? I mean, if it’s still all right...”
    They were her wedding photos, in her wedding album, and Oda wanted to shoot some of them to use in the show. I had tried to talk him out of it—it just seemed too cruel—but he was adamant. Suzie stared at me, then nodded. “Sure. I’ll go and get it.”
    When she came back, she was bugging the big puffy album to her breast.
    “You won’t forget to send it back?” she asked anxiously.
    “No, I won’t forget,” I promised.
    “And a videotape of the show too? You said I could have that....”
    Reluctantly she handed me the album.
    “You see,” she said, as her tears welled and her voice dissolved, “it’s all I’ve got left....”

    Mind you, I had Kenji send the album back promptly, although without the tape. But even so, I felt bad about Suzie Flowers—like I’d stolen something from her that could never be replaced.

AKIKO
    Sometimes Akiko felt like a thief, sneaking through the desolate corners of her own life, stealing back moments and pieces of herself.
    It hadn’t always been like this. She and “John” had been married for three years. Before that, Akiko had a job at a manga publishing house, writing copy for comic books. She had studied the classics in college, but there wasn’t much of a market for that these days. Not that she ever really thought she’d have a career or even continue her education.
    She liked the job at the comics because it gave her a chance to write things. Her specialty was action-adventure and her coworkers teased her, said she had a knack for gore. When she got married, she gave up the job in order to learn to cook and otherwise prepare for motherhood. Since then she’d written articles for maternity magazines from