Red Door Magazine 23

ON SKINSHIP
BY BRIAN RICHARD BERGSTROM
Being a translator, I find myself developing
fondnesses for certain words—and especially types
of words—that exist in one language and not in another.
In Japanese, there is a class of words called
waseigo ( 和 製 語 ), or “language made in Japan.”
This refers specifically to words adapted from other
languages but put to new uses within Japanese.
One of my favorite pieces of waseigo is the word skinship
(sukinshippu / スキンシップ). It’s a waseigo that
seems to fill such an obvious need that it makes the
language from which it’s derived seem impoverished
for lacking it. Skinship is the term for the aspect of a
relation that arises from physical touch – the “ship”
is from “friendship,” and just as that word refers to
the various aspects of being friends, skinship indicates
various roles skin can play, the ways it enriches
and defines the relations that make up life itself.
Whenever I think of this term, I think of a story I translated
(that remains unpublished) called “Naked” by a
wonderful woman writer named Fumio Yamamoto.
“Naked” tells the story of a woman who has fallen out
of the workforce and the marriage system and is in
a kind of melancholy limbo. Soon, though, she finds
something to attach to: the body of a man she meets
one late night at a manga café, a “loser” named Little
Ken who once worked for her, back in her former life
as a hard-charging working woman. Little Ken is consistently
compared to a puppy, and she is bemused
to find that she takes solace precisely in his losery
doggishness. The animal self he signifies for her, the
animal comfort he provides by lying next to her and
offering his body so guilelessly, both grounds and
de-centers her. She chastises herself a bit for the ease
with which she succumbs to her own longing:
He and I are perfect together, a perfect pair
of losers, I thought, without a hint of malice
or contempt. All it took was a bit of
contact between my naked body and his
to get me liking some guy I’d never given a
second thought to before, it seemed – never
underestimate the power of sheer skinon-skin.
I struck myself as a bit funny
at that moment, as well as a bit stupid.
What I translate as “sheer skin-on-skin” is the waseigo
“skinship,” a word that seems infinitely more precise, if
only it actually existed in English. In this instance, skinship
refers to a sexual closeness (so “skin-on-skin” is
appropriate), but it can refer to non-sexual instances
of touch as well, such as between a parent and child
or between friends.
Here it refers to something within sex that isn’t reduceable
to the sexual—the animal being within us
that needs to feel the animal being of others, that
communicates feeling that cannot be expressed in
words, but rather only gestured at, via terms like “skinship.”
Never underestimate the power of this, Yamamoto
says here, spelling it out explicitly in a throwaway
line.
The relationship of the power of touch to the present
circumstance during the COVID-19 pandemic is so
obvious it’s a bit embarrassing to even mention. But
dwelling on touch is an unavoidable part of the way
this crisis feels. Think about the people most important
to you and count how many you can touch, and
then how many you are waiting to be able to touch
again, and then count the weeks till when that might
be for each one. I think of my parents, just turned 70
and living in rural eastern Washington State in the
U.S., in a situation where social contact is relatively
easy to avoid. At the same time, they are lifelong volunteer
firefighters, a calling that has developed into
also being volunteer first responders. My mother has
a condition that compels her to take immunosuppressants,
so she does not go on calls, but my father is
still compelled to. Yes, it’s volunteer, but if he doesn’t,
who will? This is the choice the infrastructure of the
rural U.S. compels.
I talk to them on the phone, across a now-closed
U.S.-Canadian border, hearing how my father is the
mobile one, his body going to town and sometimes
going out to try to save his neighbors’ lives, then returning
home. I worry about contagion coming back
home with him, his body’s one version of vulnerability
availing another to my mother’s.
They both assure me that all necessary precautions
are being taken, and I am relieved until they tell me
a story of my father going on a call to the house of a
woman who has hemorrhaged internally. The hemorrhage
is fatal, but at the family’s behest, the first
response team must perform life-saving procedures
until she is declared officially dead at the hospital.
This translates into my father performing CPR on her
for over an hour in the ambulance between her house
and the hospital, resulting in the internal bleeding
becoming external, bathing the inside of the ambulance
and his body with blood from her mouth for the
length of the trip. Laughingly, my mother recounts
my father’s return to the house “covered in blood still”
and bundling him and his equipment into the shower.
“What about the special precautions?” I ask, to which