It was a trap of the friendliest kind. Most learners could manage polite Japanese. Dialect was where the pretending ended, because dialect could not be memorized from a book.
Jasmine felt a grin rise up before she could arrange her face into anything more professional, and she answered him in kind.
"Newscasters!" she said, in matching Kansai, the endings of her words bending the Osaka way. "My host mother said newscasters sounded like they had swallowed a ruler. She made me practice shopping instead."
The table erupted. Fujita covered her mouth, too late. Takagi laughed outright, a young man's laugh with nothing held back in it. Even Kuroda made a sound he immediately tried to turn into a cough.
Ishida pointed at her with his chopsticks, delighted. "There it is," he said, still in dialect. "That is Osaka. That is exactly how she would say it."
"You sound pleased," Jasmine said, riding the rhythm now, letting the words come loose and quick. "Were you hoping I would fail in standard Japanese but embarrass myself properly in yours?"
"Worse," Ishida said. "I was hoping you would sound like a textbook. Textbooks are easy to forget. You, I think, nobody at this table will forget."
The warmth of it spread around the table like heat from a hearth. These were not people performing respect anymore. These were people enjoying her, in their own tongue, in the register they used with family.
Pierce watched their faces change and understood only that the change excluded him. He turned to Takagi, the youngest, the one he judged most likely to be helpful.
"What is she saying?" Pierce asked, with the air of a man asking for a weather report.
Takagi hesitated. Something in his expression suggested he was deciding how much of the truth courtesy required.
"She is keeping up with Mr. Ishida," Takagi said carefully, in English. "In his home dialect. It is, ah, more difficult than it sounds."
That was not an answer Pierce wanted, and his jaw tightened around it. He had paid for this dinner, this room, this evening down to the flowers, and the evening had left him behind.
Ishida, meanwhile, had leaned toward Jasmine with the conspiratorial air of a grandfather about to be wicked at a wedding.
"Tell me honestly," he said in Kansai, glancing sideways at Pierce without lowering his voice, because lowering it was unnecessary. "Your boss there. Does he always talk as if the room is lucky to have him?"
Jasmine should not have answered that. Every instinct from two years of service work told her to smile, deflect, and protect the man who signed nothing but still somehow held her livelihood in his evening.
But Ishida was watching her with kind, mischievous eyes, and the dialect loosened something honest in her, and the truth, dressed gently, slipped out before caution could dress it better.
"He talks," she said in Kansai, "like a man who practices being the tallest building in a city of one story houses."
The laughter came like a wave breaking. Fujita actually set down her glass so she would not spill it. Takagi bent forward over the table. Kuroda shook his head slowly, smiling despite himself, a man defeated by a perfect sentence.
Ishida laughed longest of all, a deep, surprised laugh from the belly, the kind that cannot be faked for business. He wiped at one eye with his napkin.
"A city of one story houses," he repeated, savoring it. "And he believes he is the skyscraper. Ah, that is good. That is very good."
Pierce's fork stopped halfway to his mouth. He looked from face to face, hunting for the joke, finding only its echoes, which faded politely whenever his eyes landed on them.
"Someone translate," Pierce said. It came out less like a request than an order, and orders, he was discovering, had no currency in a conversation he could not follow.
Takagi straightened, composed himself, and did the brave thing. "Miss Cole was making a small joke," he said. "About, ah, confidence. She said some men speak as though they are the tallest building in a very small town."
"About me," Pierce said. It was not a question, but Takagi answered it anyway, with admirable honesty and visible regret.
"Gently," Takagi said. "About you, yes. She said it gently."
The silence that followed belonged entirely to Pierce. Around it, the table tried, with varying success, to become serious again. Fujita pressed her lips together. Ishida examined his tea as if it had become fascinating.
Jasmine kept her eyes on the tablecloth for one moment and mastered her own face. She had not meant cruelty. The joke had been affectionate, almost, the way Osaka people teased what they found grand and fragile at once.
But she knew how it landed for him. She had spent two years learning exactly how a man like Pierce heard laughter he was not part of. He heard it as a verdict.
He set his fork down with great precision. "I see," he said. "How wonderful. My own dinner, and I am the entertainment."
"No one is laughing at your expense, Mr. Pierce," Fujita said quickly, in English, smooth and diplomatic. "Miss Cole has a gift for images. In Osaka, teasing is a form of welcome."
"Welcome," Pierce repeated, flatly, as if testing the word for fraud.
Jasmine lifted her head then and met his eyes, because hiding from them would have been its own insult. "She is telling the truth," Jasmine said in English. "In Osaka, they tease the people they have decided to like."
It was, she realized, the truest translation she could offer him, and kinder than the joke itself. She left out only the skyscraper, standing alone in its one story city, certain of its height because nothing had ever stood beside it.
Pierce held her gaze a moment too long, searching for mockery in it. Finding none he could name, he looked away first, toward Ishida, who had already turned back to Jasmine.
And just like that, the river closed over him again. Ishida asked her, in rolling Kansai, whether Osaka had spoiled her for American food, and she answered that it had spoiled her for everything except her mother's cooking.