Harajuku Sunday

by S. Michael Choi

  As promised to Julian the filmmaker, I grab a copy of his film. Melanie, Julian’s girlfriend and one of the leading figures of the artsy girls, gladly gives me a copy in her energetic promotion of all things cultural and artistic. I do not regret watching it. The film is about two hours long, but in its way riveting: starting with this existentialist opening (working class Japanese guy ("Daiichi") being forced to ride motorcycle away from his small Hokkaido town after being framed for murder, decrepit dirt-road bridge collapsing as metaphor for complete break with youth), the story follows the protagonist as he makes contact with and is slowly accepted by Tokyo gang. Tokyo gang shown to be being squeezed by economic pressures and a rival out-of-town gang moving in, ultimately leading to leader of Tokyo gang being killed. Esoteric exchange of public posturing/ritual insults with the other gang, and then young junior foreign (Australian) member of gang decides to go for kill against enemy leader in violation of yakuza code (and perhaps as positioning for leadership of gang). But in surprise twist, former girlfriend of the Tokyo gang's leader, herself member, turns on the young upstart, (out of race solidarity? protection of gangster code?) and the gang, now utterly without hope, reduced in number its forces turning in on itself, starts to run amok with the film in its jump-cut, blaring-rock music conclusion leaving you no doubt that they're all going to be wiped out, one-by-one.

  It's a bleak, pessimistic work. I walk around for a few days in a sort of daze. Even a second or third viewing later, I still get drained watching the thing, that's how perfectly tuned the work is. But despite my best efforts, Soren refuses to watch.

  "Screw him, man, that guy's bad news."

  "I think it'd be cool just to know what it's about so you'll understand when people talk about it."

  "Thanks, but not thanks."

  So winter passes, and then spring arrives with its season of endless rain, and our carefree life in Japan's capital continues. With an actual corporate job, however mindless, I'm one notch above the NOVA drones and "English conversation-monkey” tutors and earn just sufficient to keep up with Soren's lifestyle of living by whim. I live for the day, and my credit card balance is incrementally growing. But there's no particular reason to stop.

  "So just out of curiosity, dude, why does Julian annoy you so much, anyway?"

  Soren looks thoughtful. "Ritchie, the guy would be a nobody back home. He probably was, and the problem is that when people like him arrive in Japan, it's like they suddenly get to be somebody, girls pay attention to him, and it gives us normal people a bad name."

  "The charisma man effect." I offer, blowing out cigarette smoke.

  "Yeah, exactly! You have these thousands of people who are essentially McDonalds fry clerks back home. They arrive here, and suddenly, bang! They're immediately rock-stars or 'filmmakers' because the girls here think they're really cool. Give me a break. He’s a total nobody. And the effect of that is that it ultimately hurts us. It’s when you get somebody like me, genuinely an item back home, who actually was a figure in London or in New..." But by now I am tuning Soren out, even if nodding sympathetically in pretend interest. And by the time we forcefully bang open the sliding door and troop back in, I notice, for the first time, that there's a sort of Soren-smell to the apartment, a sort of masculine, leathery stink. The thought occurs to me that this has something to do with why three or four girls vomited at his last party.

  "Anyway, I do have something for us tonight, something you'd be interested in." Soren says, stretching as he walks across the clothing-strewn living room.

  "Eh?"

  "Some Brazilian girl's dad is having a reception at the American Club. Big trade deal closed with the Nipponese. Lots of businesspeople, way-o."

  "So why the American Club?"

  "No clue."

  We've just gotten off a huge party, the apartment isn't even fully cleaned up yet, and there'll have to be a sayonara night for a couple people leaving soon. Soren's birthday is coming up in mid-August, and that will only cap off another hot summer of consecutive all-nighters, another killer season. So for tonight, this Brazilian thing's a good event: something low-key, relaxing, requiring absolutely no preparation. We laze around with a Playstation 2 for a while, and then get changed to go. Expectations are met--the trade reception turns out to be a bunch of middle-aged people, pot-bellied middle-aged middle-managers trying to tell bad jokes (e.g. "I work for DHL. Do you know what DHL stands for?" "No." "Delayed, Held-up, Or Lost") or smirking at dirty stories ("Do you know what the H in DHL did with his money?") Yet the food is decent; the Americana furniture a pleasant change of pace. I suck on a rib while a black U.S. federal trade official goes off on "most favored trading status."

  "… mutually beneficial to all three of our great countries, yet energizing synergies all over the world. Free trade is the foundation for any true global-wide specialization of economies, the fundamental foundation for societies that have free-speech and freedom of thought. So…"

  There's really reason for me to pay special attention, but for lack of anything better to do I find myself paying close attention to the speaker. He’s a middle-aged black man, glasses, stuffed full of theories and intellectual arguments rambling on and on with all these over-blown theories, some string and string of words effortlessly gliding out. There's something tremendously earnest about the man. Mr. Trade Commissioner LeFauve. The cutting edge of historical forces, driven along a holy mission, possessing so much vitality that his ideas will renew America, a volcanic force inside of him bursting to get out, hero against the world. Somehow completely missing some major, unspoken point that everyone else understands, however. When I crack one of the bones with an audible snap, an old dowager at the table throws me a dirty look. But I don't care.

  "Oh man, check this out." Soren hands me his cell. "STUCK IN TRAFFIC" reads the display.

  "Brazilian girl."

  "Yep."

  "Well let's at least load up on champagne, hey?" We ditch the table and make for the drinks.

  At the drink table, we discover there is one person our age present tonight, a half-black American girl with intensely green eyes. She's wearing a skirt that's about five inches long.

  "Hello. Dominique LeFauve." She offers her hand

  "Soren Soutern."

  "Ritchie Ufuo. So I hope you're not too bored by tonight?"

  Dominique laughs. "Call the ambulance."

  The three of us find a quiet corridor where we can compare notes and in short order establish our situations. Having completed a year at Bryn Mawr, Dominique's now taking a year off and spending it in the most exotic of the comfortable foreign countries. Tonight's speaker, the trade official with his relentless paean free trade, free trade, free trade is actually her father, a senior political commissioner with the American consulate here, a rising new star in the Republican Party. Japan has intrigued Dominique since childhood, "it's so futuristic here. I think they're ahead of us by twenty years," and though she doesn't really speak any Japanese, she's eager to learn. She'd love to be shown around. Dominique flirts with us both, a little tipsy on champagne, and it's enjoyable, but is there the undertone of something suppressed. "I will expect to hear further from you gentlemen," she says, at the end of an evening, two hands on each of our shoulders. Dominique LeFauve, 19.

  In the heat of the summer that begins to slither in and then grip tenaciously to Tokyo Special Metropolitan District, in one first wave of heat that seems almost luminous, the rules of a lazy, timeless game become implicitly recognized by all parties. Soren and I are casual rivals; Dominique is the prize, and although Soren has the apartment, the cash, and the circle of sycophants, I am not even all that interested in the girl, I am trying to win her just so Soren can't, Soren who has everything else in life. I take Dominique around the city, showing her Harajuku and Shibuya first, and then Roppongi, Shimokitazawa, Odaiba, Ebisu, and the Ueno area. And here I have certain advantages, a genuine street-level knowledge of things and perhaps a slightly wider circle of acquaintances. Ther
e is a pleasure in this, in being the knowledgeable guide to a girl discovering a city, the one in the know, complete with anecdote and insider's insight. After a long afternoon with sweat on your brow, it is a good thing to have a beer with a pretty girl, a girl who attracts attention from onlooking men. My lips brush hers on TokyoTower observation deck; she sighs and says something about Japan as dreamland, a future in now, and I accept this as common ground. If there are moments of unaccountable weirdness, a strange, conflicting feeling sometimes of desire and repulsion, (we have coffee this one time, and she has some sort of fit, almost inviting me to push her around verbally, to dominate her on a psychological level if we're going to have any conversation at all pushy submissive people are looking) there are also good, fine, pleasant times as well, the Tokyo aquarium, the day at Venusfort and Decks in Odaiba, where we drop coins into the penny arcade and play video games side-by-side, as carefree as grade school kids. Everyone else in the city becomes a sort of scenery, useful merely for how they provide a picturesque setting to the progress of things, which is slow, intentionally deliberate, pleasurable. For Dominique, she is playing around with two guys she calls "really handsome" without being too serious, playing them against each other. I'm not sure exactly of the depth of her involvement with Soren—there are plenty of times as well when we hang out in a comfortable three. He does at one point make some inquires and decides to share with me what he's found out. Tyrell, an old friend, on the phone, scoffs at the suggestion that Dominique is "taking a year off from Bryn Mawr to travel." He is evasive; he alludes to something that happened at a Lower Merion Country Club years ago, but he refuses to commit to any one version of events. All he leaves us with at the end of the phone call is, "Dominique LeFauve spent seventeen years being a perfect little Catholic schoolgirl from a rich little Southern family, and then one day she woke up and decided to f-ck Satan."

  The summer passes in sweet succession and then August arrives. Up north, the air is already crisp, as crisp as the cheerful gleam in Soren's eye, as he plans out the delicious details of his 25th. If there is one talent this individual can be said to have, if there is one area in which he must be recognized as a past master, his skills superlative, it is in the art of throwing a truly legendary party. And in this activity, Soren is energized and on a mission; he walks around all day his phone buzzing, working out the details of who will be there and who must be shut-out, who will help him organize and bring bottles and arrange for trays for appetizers, and what exactly the perfect time and date is among the three hundred immediate acquaintances and some seven hundred friends of friends, taking full account of all the news and up-to-the-minute changing plans of the immediate preceding days. We have known each other for a full year now and out of our synergy, we have built up something great.

  "And yo, Ritchie, sorry to break your heart, but I've been hearing your girlfriend is seeing another guy."

  "Uh, okay, Soren, whatever you say," I call back, opening up a cardboard box of Absolut. We are busy preparing for the event in his apartment.

  By now Soren has figured out it wasn't going to happen between him and Dominique, but she and I are not quite a number, either. Soren's messing around with me, displaying a mock resentment that perhaps serves to clear the air. Yet I stop what I'm doing, trying to figure out what his devious mind has come up with this time. "So who's she seeing?"

  "Wait, I thought she's not your girlfriend? What do you mean, 'who's she's seeing?' Why would you care? Why is this any of your business."

  "Stop being a tool, Soren. This isn't amateur night at the Apollo."

  Soren would play it out longer, maybe even for multiple days, but he's just located a legendary Brazilian caterer, an aunt-figure who deals completely exclusively with fellow Brazilians. Soren had had to find a go-between, but now he's going to get otherwise unobtainable food, a legendary master of unattainable culinary traditions working exclusively for the Brazilian community and their immediate friends, legendary food for his party and he needs to confirm it's going to absolutely go through. Thus he lets me in on what's he's heard straightaway, "Shan, dude. Chinese Shan."

  I laugh. I mean, I literally laugh out loud. Of all possibilities, this is the most ridiculous. Tom, Bernie, Rick, Herrera, I could list a thousand names of people who might have the slightest of possibilities. But Shan is a fresh-off-the-boat Mainland Chinese from Shanghai poor as dirt university student with a bad hair-cut and ill-fitting clothes. He barely even registers as a proper expat; he's a scholarship student who always checks out when people head to a proper bar. If he paid the slightest attention to MTV, then maybe in ten years, he'll be remotely hip enough to even talk to a girl. But this is clearly just a weak joke. "Shan?! Chinese Shan? That guy is a fricking coolie!"

  Soren retorts, "Reliable sources. Anyway, I will provide details as soon as I bring back the food!"

  I dismiss Soren's story from my mind within moments of his leaving. Despite two years of being exposed to metropolitan sophistication, Shan not just dresses funny, but his pathetic attempts to unleash cool American slang just end up turning into a train-wreck ("Where you at, my homies representing?") and some American is just looking at him like, "oh my god, that's just terrible." Shan, is in short, decidedly the most uncool and ridiculous of potential contenders for even a passable let alone an exotically hot American girl, and he has absolutely no chance for a chick like Dominique or any other American girl for that matter. I return to my Fruits magazine, to looking agog at strangely dressed Japanese subculture-types, but am interrupted not long thereafter by the arrival of the first partygoers.

  "Yo, yo, yo, let's get this party started! Ritchie, represent!" It's Herrera. The evening kicks off with Herrera and Max and the rest of the boys tumbling in. They're a little rougher around the edges, a bit urban, but they're absolutely the best sort of people with whom to start a party. And fair to say, Herrera's entire L.A. group is supposed to show up that night, something like twenty people taking a group vacation together, package tour, the possibilities are endless.

  "The obaasan then gives us a bill for four mahn! We were like, what the hell?" Some prune-faced izakaya owner had gypped the crew cold-facedly. It ended with them skipping the tab and fleeing into the uncaring night. More people start to stream in.

  "Do you think we can go up to Sendai? Oh, I want to go to Niseko this season dude."

  "He said Lexington Queen was way cooler, but you know, I've never been there…"

  "Laney's been doing boatloads of drugs lately. She better stop or..."

  The party has begun.

  Alcohol begins to flow. I have an ice-cold Heineken in my hand, and I'm catching up with people from around the scene when Soren gets back, this time with two delivery boys carrying the much-anticipated Brazilian food, the holy grail. It's an outrageous success; people are immediately talking in louder voices and instantly surrounding the food grabbing for plastic forks and paper plates. Beef, pork, chicken barbeque; appetizers, no two alike, that are folded dumplings of meat and beans and spices; black beans and rice; iced cocktail mix—everything just has this glow of freshness and savor that you just can't get in Japanese cuisine. The stuff really is unbelievable; we are literally salivating over what we have been missing. People are drinking, smoking, chatting with each other, getting introduced. Soren dims the lights, and now the swarm of people becomes relentless.

  "Oh, hey Dominique! Thought you said you might not…"

  Dominique walks in. We make eye contact, but then she looks away. Green eyes. Soren is standing near the door, so he hugs her, they cheek-kiss, and I don't feel any special need to go welcome her. Her elevator ride also had all of Herrera's Puerto Rican crowd who had as promised were visiting Japan; actually the entire entourage needs to use two elevators, and they're flooding in, they're all dressed up to go clubbing, uniquely Latino and clubkid and glam. They end up enclaving in an entire bedroom, Soren's spare room, and now we have easily one hundred fifty people in one, if somewhat large, apartment. Whit
e-hot intensity. The volume is deafening. I take a breather in Soren's bedroom, and he's there too, cuddling with two girls who are obviously quite drunk.

  "Hey, Ritchie, how's it going dawg? Meet the two Melinda's!"

  "It's Alinda," corrects one of the girls.

  "Whatever. Toyota brought them here from Oklahoma, they're in Japan for a week!"

  One of the girls has her own private stash of marijuana, and she rolls up a joint, which people pass around while listening to rock music. And then, maybe because of the marijuana smoke in the air or maybe just because there's been so much going on out and about these days, Soren and I fall to talking. The girls get bored; they're just not interested in politics and What It All Means. They try to cut in a few times, and then give up, have their own private discussion, some intense clarification of What We Think about some third girl, not present. The cacophony of party noise floods in, then, as somebody—Herrera—comes by to pay his respects, followed not too long afterwards by Tucker, one of the new friends on the scene, an aspiring club promoter. Time stands absolutely still; one's concentration is completely focused. I want to ask about Soren's new job responsibilities, how he feels about turning into the Man. But he denies it; everything I know about him is just wrong; it's a media/branding company, they're Left. The four of us are just going back-and-forth. We come to agree to that we just have to disagree, Herrera and I are bright young idealists, and there's nothing that will crack Soren and Tucker’s essential cynicism. Night of the Wolfeans, tho' it's already been done. "Party like it's the last party you'll ever have." And then we go out to the main room.