Mishima lives

"It doesn't say what you think it does," I hissed.

"Sssss," my husband said, sucking in his breath slowly. It's one of those lovely Japanese mannerisms that demonstrates the power of non-verbal communication. Basically, he completely disagreed but was pretending to consider my opinion, with a slight hint of condescension. He continued to cast furtive looks at the massive biker.

"Anyone, the kanii for warumono just sounds dumb ", I countered, trying to keep my voice down. "They probably wanted to say something like 'bad ass', not ‘bad person’, but used Google translate and got it all wrong."
The internet is full of such stories: the guy who asked for the kanji for ‘loyalty’ and got the kanji for ‘noodles’, the woman who tattooed ‘friendship’ on her neck and found it really said ‘oni’ (ogre).

My husband continued to eye the man sideways. I punched him lightly, to suggest he stop staring, get his keys out and get going before we learned something about biker gangs.

Oops. Apparently our staring was not as unobtrusive as intended. Suddenly the mountain of long hair and beard turned in our direction, moving as purposefully as 280+ pounds of muscle could move in a full suit of black motorcycle leather.

My husband immediately adopted a pleasant, fixed smile, which for Japanese is the default expression for harmless ingratiation.

I forced a cheerful smile and faced the man, hoping to steer the conversation into a safe side alley.
"Sorry if we were staring," I chirped, playing the suburban mom. "My husband liked your tattoo and we were wondering..."

"Ore ga warumono to iu no ka!!!," he rumbled, in flawless gangster Japanese.

I was transfixed. If you've ever seen a Kurosawa movie starring Toshiro Mifune, you know exactly what he sounded like. Gravelly voice, the words near unintelligible for their hyper-masculine slurring, evoking an age of swashbuckling, filthy, starving ronin. His pronunciation was flawless. What's more, he had a voice that would do James Earl Jones proud.
"Are you an actor?" I blurted out.

My husband, meanwhile, had jerked and brightened. Fear of the biker had almost but not quite transmuted into the knee-jerk Japanese reaction of surprise and curiosity whenever a foreigner uses the barest smattering of Japanese. In this case, possibly it was also the kind of curiosity that gets people to descend into dark basements where they hear a strange sound. Or at least the kind that gets cats stuck in tall trees.
Regardless, he had lost enough of his fear that he followed up with the predictable question: "You speak Japanese?"

"Kisama to ha nanimono ja?!" the biker sneered, drawing the attention of nearby bikers and people entering the roadside restaurant. My husband recoiled, but continued to peer at the tattoo in helpless fascination.

My view of the biker had transformed, like one of those pictures of colored dots, that resolves into a dog or sunrise.
"Can you do the line from the end of Seven Samurai? You know - 'Now we'll have some peace in this town'."

The biker turned to me, face set and teeth bared in a rictus of displeasure, but I swear his eyes twinkled.
He delivered brilliantly, roaring in Japanese, "I have to kill some men first!"

The couple with their hands on the door of the diner couldn't have known what he was saying, but got the gist, and fled inside. My husband, not recognizing the quote, jumped four feet backward.

I fumbled in my handbag, "Can I get your autograph?"

The biker looked at me with exasperation and said in a mild voice. "You want an autograph from a software test manager at Microsoft?"
I proffered the pen and my pocket notebook. "From Yojimbo?"
Instead, he wrote in Japanese, "I hate pathetic people. Now I'll have to kill you."
I laughed and clutched it to my chest. “Oh my god, that’s brilliant, thank you so much.”

His penmanship was not great, but I framed it anyway, and stuck in the obligatory photo my husband took with him, posing by the bike, my husband's face grinning, his fingers spread in the archetypical V-sign.

We laughed all the way home, and have since taken to waving at every Harley rider we see. Because sometimes people aren't what they seem, and life is more interesting with a dash of curiosity.