Elizabeth Hashimura
She has a theory about bilingual marriages.
Admittedly unresearched.
(Gifted freely to any PhD student desperate for a dissertation topic.)
But still.
An informal survey of couples she knows—friends, friends-of-friends, a few overheard arguments—suggests this:
When two people in a relationship speak different native languages,
it’s usually the woman who yields.
Not always. But more often than not.
She ends up speaking his language.
Not out of submission, exactly—
but something quieter. Something closer to adaptation.
Like a body bending toward a shared current.
When she mentions this, people usually say:
Huh. I never really thought about it.
Then comes a subtle shift.
A flicker of discomfort.
Like the idea might scratch something under the surface that’s best left sleeping.
If she pushes—if she starts talking about yielding,
or emotional labor,
or whether you can ever truly know someone in a second language—
she can feel the air tighten.
Almost as if she’s accusing them of something.
She’s not.
She’s just… noticing. Curious, not combative.
Sometimes she and her husband go to Costco.
At the best of times, Costco is a spatial gauntlet for the coordination-challenged.
Another friend has a theory of their own: the carts are deliberately a little too wide for smooth human maneuvering. The geometry is all wrong:
Too much torque in the turns.
Wrong angle-to-aisle ratio.
You think you’re steering.
But mostly, you’re just managing the resistance.
Sometimes she wonders if Costco designed them that way on purpose—
not to frustrate her and her husband, but to slow them down.
To force them to navigate more carefully.
To make sure every desire—every oversized condiment bottle, every argument over bulk toilet paper—comes with a bit of drag.
She herself believes people should have to pass a shopping cart obstacle course before being let inside.
Just for the record:
she has never—not once—stopped dead in the middle of an aisle,
causing a ripple of cart stasis behind her.
She moves with purpose. With clarity.
She knows her lane.
She maintains flow.
She does not block products.
In fact, she’s thought a lot about the etiquette of approaching a shelf when someone else is already in front of the thing you want.
She’s even conducted informal interviews:
How long do you pretend to look at the item next to the item you actually want
before making your move?
(Just decide, she thinks. How can you not know? It’s a fifty-pack of frozen ravioli, not Sophie’s Choice.)
Five seconds? Ten?
Is it okay to crouch dramatically near the shelf below as a distraction?
Does eye contact make it better or worse?
Do you cough?
Do you stretch?
Tut? (Too bold—she could never.)
There’s no consensus.
But she’s certain of this:
you can’t just… stop.
There are rules, even in bulk. Especially in bulk.
Now picture that—
but in Japan.
People aren’t used to the size of the carts, the products, the portions.
It’s like dropping a Ferris wheel into a rock garden.
(That would be on brand for Japan.)
Add in cultural norms of politeness and hesitation, and you get a store full of cautious people gawking upward at shrink-wrapped mayonnaise like they’re at Epcot.
It drives her to the brink.
Still—she loves it.
Loves the language of it.
Loves eavesdropping.
Loves watching couples negotiate this slightly off-kilter moment in their relationship.
Loves the horse-trading.
Who defers.
Who decides.
“But we don’t need it!”
“We already have two packs at home.”
“Exactly—we’re almost out.”
“Where else are we going to get toilet paper at this price?”
(It has, in fact, been proven that the toilet paper isn’t actually worth it.
Multiple studies. Blogs. Unit-price breakdowns. Sorry.)
But by now, the argument isn’t about logic.
It’s about power.
It’s about who gets to sneak their thing into the cart.
Once, she was in the bath-and-beauty aisle when a Japanese woman was trying—earnestly, almost shyly—to convince her husband (who seemed, it must be said, like a real jackass) to buy a bulk pack of Australian lavender soap.
She made her case.
Explained the cost-benefit analysis.
Spoke with hope.
And this fucker just said:
“I don’t want to smell like lavender.”
That was it.
The Japanese woman looked crushed.
Not dramatically—just a little collapse in the face.
A folding in.
Watching, she wanted to put the soap in the cart for the woman.
Just slip it in and say: We’re allowed small things.
Her heart broke.
Just a little.
But enough to remember the woman’s face.
She likes to scan the checkout lines like a border crossing.
The final negotiations.
The last-minute smuggling.
Who managed to slip in that one final thing without a word.
The subtle shifting of items on the conveyor belt—
how some stand proud while others stay tucked under the bag of rice.
Sometimes there’s a stare-down as the total flashes on the screen.
Not hostile. Not warm.
Just long enough to register an unspoken, almost-gentle fuck you.
The tiniest salvo in the Cold War of a marriage—
fired never to wound, but to remind.
Contraband cleared. Borders crossed.
No raised voices. No open hostilities.
Just a receipt that says: I win.
Circled in ink on the way out.
Just like on the way in.
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Elizabeth Hashimura is a writer, translator, and academic in southwestern Japan. Her work is forthcoming in Fictive Dream and has been published elsewhere.