I was on the Odakyu line making my way to Shibuya when a couple got onto my car. The man looked like a typical Japanese business man, dressed in a casual suit, dark olive colored jacket, no tie, company ID still hanging from his neck on a blue lanyard. It was a Sunday night, he must have had some work to catch up on before his evening out.
The woman was in her mid-thirties, wore a modest black suit-dress with wide shoulders, long sleeves. She had clearly been in a terrible accident some time in the last few years. Icy-white scars traced the touch of fire across her face, stole the symmetry of her nose and cheeks. Her upper lip was gone, the residual grid work of skin grafts across the more vital areas of her neck. Her right hand as she held one of the straps looked crushed and abnormally square, her left covered in scar tissue as well. A car accident was my thought.
But she had beautiful eyes. When she looked down to smooth a wrinkle in her dress or to glance at her cell phone I could tell she had been pretty, perhaps even stunning. I watched through the reflection on the train door and thought I could see the sadness and pain in her eyes still. But it may have been a trick of the light. The man she was with stared intently at a train map for several minutes. Yet he looked like someone who was avoiding something, I'm sure he's seen that map countless times in his life.
But then it happened. He made a passing comment about the map or perhaps one of the ads next to it and tacked on a small laugh at the end. She leaned over to hear, smiled and gave a reply. Then she rested her chin in the crook of his elbow and rubbed her cheek briefly against his sleeve. They looked at each other and smiled again. Then it was over, she went back to her phone, he went back to the map.
I got off the train at the next stop. They continued on together.
