Turning Japanese - Part 2

For the next several weeks, I lived in denial, or tried to. The memory of that afternoon haunted me, but like a ghost: impossible to pin down, always just beyond reach.

With every repetitive task—folding laundry, washing dishes, grinding through spreadsheets while my boss droned on in the background—I caught myself drifting, not into fantasy, but into a kind of vivid, involuntary recall. I’d see my hands, my real hands, and imagine: what if they were hers? What if, instead of this pale, pocked surface, I saw that delicate lattice of tendons, the clean ovals of her nails?

I told myself the incident was an anomaly, a product of stress or boredom or the undiagnosed neurological weirdness that ran in my family. But it wasn’t fear that kept me from repeating the experiment. It was longing, and the shame of that longing. I wanted, with a sick and secret desperation, to vanish into her again. I wanted to know what I was when I was not myself.

I tried to talk myself out of it. I googled "dissociation," "depersonalization," "body swap psychosis." I read Reddit threads from lonely, horny men who spun elaborate tales of transformation, of waking up as their high school crushes or favorite celebrities.

I rolled my eyes at them by day, but at night, I lay in bed next to my wife—her breathing steady, mine erratic—and stared into the dark while the urge to slip out of my own skin swelled inside me until I thought it would burst.

Still, I waited. I let the days cluster and multiply. I pruned the hedges, scheduled the exterminator, changed the oil in my car. I watched my neighbor’s house and, through the thin scrim of privacy glass, occasionally glimpsed Akari as she moved from room to room. She was a constant now in my periphery, a lodestar I pretended not to orbit. When we passed in the driveway, she would wave, sometimes with that same teasing, formal bow, and I would force myself to smile, pretending to forget that I’d ever lived inside her skin.

I lasted almost a month.

The day it happened again, I had made up my mind hours before. I sat at my desk in the small, windowless office that passed for my study, the door locked, the glow of my monitor painting blue shadows across the walls. I had planned, in my own limp way, for this: finished my work early, set my phone to silent, poured myself a small glass of whiskey to steady my hands. I turned off the overhead light, rolled the chair back, and closed my eyes.

I was in a bathroom, bathed in warm, indirect light. The air was humid with the memory of a recent shower, and the counters were littered with cosmetic bottles, tiny tubs of cream, and the unfamiliar ornament of a hair straightener. I looked up and saw myself—herself—in the mirror.

For a long moment, I couldn’t move. My limbs felt disconnected, as if each was awaiting new instructions. I had seen Akari from a distance, in passing, but this was anatomy, not observation: the delicate tendon lines of her neck, the faint shadow where her collarbone met her shoulder, the glint of a ring on her finger that caught the light.

I reached out and touched my cheek. The fingers felt wrong: too slender, too responsive, the skin impossibly soft. My hand trembled as I traced the edge of my jaw, the faint peach fuzz at my temples, the stretch of my lips as I smiled experimentally. I watched myself—watched her—perform this intimacy.

The sight staring back was undeniably female, with all the signifiers I’d learned to catalogue since adolescence: pronounced cheekbones, soft jaw, the elegant sweep of neck, the long hair that curled slightly at the ends. But what transfixed me, what sent a shockwave of conflicting awe and terror through my borrowed nervous system, was the simple presence of breasts. They were there, undeniable, pressing against the fabric of a silk blouse I had never worn, rising and falling as I hyperventilated in short, panicked bursts.

I raised a trembling hand and cupped one cautiously, half expecting to wake up, half expecting the hand to pass through like a hologram. But it was solid, warm, startlingly real. The sensation of my palm against the softly yielding flesh triggered a riot of responses—heat, tingling, the phantom memory of other hands doing this same thing to bodies I had only ever wanted from a distance. I squeezed reflexively, then released, mortified at my own boldness, but unable to stop.

I stared at her reflection, at my reflection, and felt the world tilt again. Holy shit. I was a woman. A woman with breasts.

I hesitated, breath caught in my new throat, as I reached for the top button of the silk blouse. My fingers trembled with a mixture of fear and anticipation, and I was painfully aware that this was not my shirt, not my body, not my moment to claim. Still, I watched myself in the mirror as I slipped a fingertip under the cool, pearlescent button and nudged it through the narrow thread loop.

The blouse gaped a fraction of an inch, revealing a hint more of the elegant neck. I should have stopped. This was private, sacred—an invasion not just of Akari's body, but of her secret life, her unseen rituals, her selfhood. The guilt was immediate and crushing, amplified by the thought of my wife, who even now sat at home, trusting in my loyalty, assuming my mind was fixed on the mundane things it was always fixed on.

But I couldn't stop. Driven by a force that was equal parts compulsion and curiosity, I undid the next button, then the next, each one a small betrayal. With each snap free, my heart hammered faster, my hands moved more surely. I watched the fabric slide away from the edge of my shoulder, marveling at the smoothness of the skin beneath, at the way the blouse slipped off me—her—with a kind of liquid grace. 

The top parted, and beneath it was the pale slope of her chest, rising and falling with shallow, rapid breaths. The cleavage was accentuated by a lacy blue bra I had never seen before, the kind of thing my wife would dismiss as impractical, unnecessary. I ran my hands along the edge, marveling at the sensation of my own touch—how foreign, how intimate. I traced the straps over my shoulders, slipped the hooks free, and let the bra fall away.

The breasts were perfect, yes, but not in the way I had imagined them. They moved with gravity, with time, with a subtle resistance to touch that belied their softness. I lifted one, cupping it gently, and the weight of it startled me.