Aika Kanda Reveals “The Wife Side I Don’t Show My Husband”

Various faces

I believe this: every wife has at least one face she never shows her husband. The clearest example is an affair. Wives who are having affairs skillfully use different faces for their husbands and their lovers. Neither face is a lie. They are simply choosing from the many faces they originally possess, adjusting according to the person they’re with. So both are real faces of themselves.

A more familiar example is secret savings. You there—hiding money without your husband knowing. The face you make when adding cash to your secret stash must be a pretty good one. Have you ever shown that face to your husband even once? Probably not. But that face is also one of your true faces.

When two unrelated people, raised in totally different environments, start living together under the same roof, there will naturally be certain faces that they never show each other, or have no need to show.

I, too, have faces I don’t show—and don’t want to show—to my husband. There’s Aika—the sharp-tongued, fully unleashed, dirty-joke machine when I’m with my junior high and high school friends. There’s Aika-chan—the obedient, pure version of myself when traveling with my mother. There’s Kanda—the version of me in the greenroom before a big job, brows furrowed, in full battle mode.

All of these are the real me. But they are completely different from the Aika-chan I show my husband—the one whose tension rises around the person she loves, squealing like a young girl.

Among all those faces, there is one forbidden face that I must absolutely never, under any circumstances, let my husband see. This face always appears on nights when my husband is staying out for work.

Every day I nag him: “Unhealthy habits are bad!” “Go easy on the alcohol!” To maintain credibility, I never let myself overdrink or overeat in front of him. I never eat anything outside the three daily meals—holding firm against all temptation with my disciplined Aika face. But on that night, things are different.

After work, I come home in the evening. My husband definitely won’t be coming back. Normally I’d change clothes immediately and start cooking dinner, but on that night I give in to the invitation of fatigue and drowsiness and sleep on the sofa in my work clothes. Around 9 p.m., I finally get up, change clothes, and devour a bowl of instant ramen—“Sapporo Ichiban Shoyu,” the very thing I usually forbid him from eating at that hour—while downing a can of beer.

Usually, that would be the end of dinner. But then I pour two bowls of cereal I brought back from an America trip into a soup plate, gulp it down, wash it down with a small 200ml bottle of champagne, then gobble up the expensive prosciutto I’ve hidden in the back of the fridge so my husband won’t find it, and empty the second bottle of champagne. My stomach is already stretched to its limit, but since I’m drunk, my sense of fullness is completely messed up.

The pleasure of when my husband is away

Saying, “I can still eat more!”, I then eat two Choco Pies I had hidden and five packs of Korean seaweed, and finally brush my teeth. The finishing touch is drinking a can of beer in bed—something I normally forbid my husband from doing. And then I leave the half-finished beer on the nightstand, leave the table lamp on, and fall asleep just like that.

This is my forbidden face—one I absolutely never show when my husband is home. When I wake up in the morning, I can’t help muttering to myself, “Ahh, last night was fun!” The truth of this face is that it’s the “Aika who admires her husband” inside me.

While I tell him, “You can’t gain any more weight!”, the truth is that I envy how he’s lived his life eating whatever he wants whenever he wants, without restraint. If he found out how I really feel, he’d happily eat even more. That’s something I must absolutely avoid.

Does my husband also have faces he never shows me? The faces he hides are ones I don’t need to know. I choose to think that way.

It started when we had just begun dating and I visited his home for the first time. While he stepped away to the bathroom, I peeked into the drawer of his TV stand. Inside were several adult DVDs—all featuring actresses who looked nothing like me. That was a face of his I saw without permission, and I’m sure it was one he didn’t want me to see. I was shocked.

Nearly ten years have passed since then. It’s not something I’ve constantly remembered, but now that I have a face I absolutely don’t want to show him, I suddenly recalled how I felt back then. And so I think, “Well, it’s fine. Now we’re finally even.”

Kanda Aika: Born in 1980 in Kanagawa Prefecture. After graduating from the Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Gakushuin University, she joined NHK as an announcer in 2003. She left NHK in 2012 and became a freelance announcer. Since then, she has been active mainly in variety programs and currently appears as a main MC on the daytime show “Pokapoka” (Fuji TV).

★ Her first book, compiling this very series, “Ōdō tte iu michi, doko ni tōttemasu ka?” is now on sale to great acclaim!

From “FRIDAY” November 28–December 5, 2025 combined issue.