My marriage to Lu Ting was arranged by our parents over a single dinner. I worked in design in Tokyo; he ran a company in Tokyo. I needed a reason to stay in the country; he needed a wife to hold off his family. So we signed a contract, filed the forms at the ward office, and became husband and wife in the eyes of the law, having known each other less than a month.
After the wedding I moved into his apartment in Meguro. Large, and empty, like the man himself. The first night he gave me the master bedroom and took the study, leaving only one line: "Clause three of the contract. Neither of us interferes in the private life of the other." His Chinese carried the stiffness of too many years in Japan. Holding my luggage in that unfamiliar living room, for the first time I felt that something about this deal was not quite right.
But the next morning, when I woke, there was a bowl of miso soup still warm on the table, and a note: "I did not know your taste, so I just made something. There is food in the fridge. — Lu Ting." The handwriting was ugly, the soup exactly to my liking. Cradling that bowl in the sunlit kitchen, I suddenly thought: this man who wrote non-interference into a contract might not be so cold after all.