by KJ Charles
For most people.
I’m one of the other kind.
There are quite a few of us, actually. We hang on to our language engine like some people keep their milk teeth. We acquire new languages in months or weeks, new dialects in days. I’ve never “learned” Italian, but after a fortnight in Florence I was chattering fluently. I know German and Swedish, and if you have those you can manage Dutch and Afrikaans and Norwegian…
I studied Japanese, along with Korean, at college because it’s one of the oddballs, a language with virtually no living relatives. I could already read Chinese characters, which Japanese uses, so although the US State Department classes Japanese at the highest level of difficulty to learn, by the time I graduated I was as fluent as a native speaker.
So. There I was at twenty-two, Kerry Ekdahl (named for my Irish godmother, since you ask), straddling east and west, with any number of languages under my belt and absolutely no idea what to do with them. Because the thing about languages is: you can speak them, so what? There are plenty of people who speak Korean and Swedish and Japanese and the rest, maybe not all together, but who needs that when interpreters are ten a penny anyway?
Which means there isn’t much money in interpreting, and even less interest. You spend your days telling Norwegians what Koreans have said about DVD player production, and it’s just too boring to contemplate.
That was the problem. I’d strolled through school and won prizes at college for something that was as natural as breathing. I didn’t know what hard work was, and when I found out, I wasn’t prepared to do it.
I’d spent a blissful year in Japan while doing my degree. I met Noriko when I was helping out at an English course she’d attended (not that she’d learned anything), and formed an instant threesome with her and her childhood friend Yoshi. We’d had more fun than I could remember, shopping and skiing and spending long, giggly nights at hot springs and ultra-trendy bars, drinking lemon sours and eyeing up the men, and when I left, Noriko had made me promise to come back as soon as my course was over, insisting that I wasn’t fit to buy shoes on my own. So I told her to rent us a flat and took off for Tokyo, figuring that I could live as a schoolteacher in one of the language schools. But the job was dull and the pay was awful, and what exactly was I going to do with my life anyway? Japan is full of drifting gaijin teaching at language schools, and every one of them has the look of marking time, definitely planning to do something with their lives once they work out what their destinies should be, and many of them are pushing forty, often from the wrong side.
Yoshi listened to me whinge about this with amazing tolerance, considering his IT job gave him four days’ holiday a year. Noriko had no such patience, and when I was bemoaning my inability to afford the most gorgeous pair of boots in an insanely expensive Ginza shop, she told me to get a grip and use my talents. I was gaijin—a foreigner—and could look Western, and I spoke dozens of languages, and that added up to real money.
Not as an interpreter, though. Not exactly.
The Primrose Path was a discreet high-end hostess bar in Shibuya, Tokyo’s party quarter. The name was in English, so everyone called it Purimurosupasu without thinking further about it, and I don’t imagine many people understood the name, let alone the pun—in Japanese, “primrose” was an old term for a tart. It catered mostly for businessmen, away from their families, bored of the company of their mostly male colleagues, generally incompetent at talking to women and, frankly, needing to pay attractive young ladies to put up with their company.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong, or at least mostly wrong. The mama-san who ran the bar made it clear that we offered pleasant company, flirting, and a lot of drink. We also, once I arrived, offered language services second to none, and that was something the salarymen really thought worth paying for when they were stuck with foreign colleagues to entertain. But any extras were at the girl’s discretion and not conducted on the premises. And Mama-san was personally against extracurricular activity, partly because the sex trade was yakuza territory, and partly because it was in the end a waste of our assets.
“Never sell it, never lend it, never give it away,” was her trademark instruction to new girls.
“But, Mama-san,” we’d complain, “what do we do with it, then?”
“Invest it!” she’d yell, her fat cheeks bunching with laughter. “Speculate to accumulate!”
Okay, it was sleazy. There’s no way hostess work isn’t a bit sleazy. But I never sold it or lent it (giving it away was my business), and I had a lot of very interesting conversations among the drunken slobber, often with some surprisingly nice men. I had to “gaijin up”, because looking foreign got better tips, and I wore a blonde wig (three, in fact, in slightly different lengths which I rotated so it looked like my hair was growing) but that wasn’t much of a hardship. And the money was amazing, even if you weren’t selling anything but time and sympathy. The salarymen tipped like cash was going out of style. I once made a vulgar but clever pun to a Korean guy—you’d have to speak Japanese and Korean to get the joke, but take my word for it, it was a killer—and he actually fell off his chair laughing, then fished three ten-thousand-yen notes, close to three hundred dollars, out of his wallet and passed them to me, hands shaking as he giggled. Just for a joke. God knows how that showed up on his expense account.
So the money rolled in, and I learned lots of interesting things about Japanese business, and the Primrose Path expanded its clientele, and we were all very happy indeed, and if my life was still going nowhere in particular, now I could afford boots from any shop in Ginza I liked.
Then Kelly the Bitch joined us.
The first annoying thing about her was—oh hell, everything, really. She was tall and slim, with oversized breasts, long blonde hair and huge blue eyes. Her Japanese was dreadful, but it didn’t matter because who wanted to listen to her talk? She walked in, and the rest of us could feel the cold draught as our regulars shifted away towards her.
And then there was her name.
The thing is, clichés apart, Japanese just doesn’t have an “r” or an “l”. There’s a sound transcribed in Roman alphabet as “r”, but it’s actually somewhere between the two—make an “l”, but don’t let your tongue touch your tooth ridge, and you’ll be somewhere near it. Most Japanese native speakers don’t really hear the difference between English “r” and “l”, since the sounds don’t exist in their language, and even those who do detect the difference often find it hard to reproduce it in speech. So, having a Kelly and a Kerry presented something of a problem to most of our clientele, and even the staff.
But she refused to change it.
That bitch. I was there first; I had regulars; I’d been there for nearly two years. Mama-san agreed that I shouldn’t change my name, but Kelly insisted she’d keep her own and made it a sticking point, and Mama-san wasn’t going to let that tall blonde money-honey walk into someone else’s hostess bar. This wasn’t just me being petty: it was a problem. We got each other’s calls and so on, but the real issue was that the customers came to us to be flattered and listened to and pampered, not to have their faulty pronunciation rubbed in their faces as they asked for Kelly-not-Kerry and the wrong girl pranced up. It caused embarrassment, and you don’t do that in Japan.
That was Kelly all over. She had what another of the American girls described as a sense of entitlement. “Because I’m worth it” was her theme song. She wanted to keep her name, no matter if it was bad for me and the business and even her customers, so she did. She was a shocking miser too. The money flowed in at the bar, and the rest of us spent accordingly, buying presents and exchanging clothes and treating one another to dinners and drinking sessions, but I don’t think Kelly ever bought a round. She almost never came out and hardly spoke to anyone, partly because her Japanese was so awful (which didn’t stop her laughing at the other girls’ English), partly because she was a miserable bitch. She stiffed the cleaners on their tips and made tw
ice as much mess as anyone else. And she was absolutely, utterly arrogant. She looked down on the rest of us, and her customers, and she swanned around as though she were the mama-san herself, until Minachan, a hostess with a wicked turn of phrase, dubbed her “Wagamama-san”—Miss Selfish.
She was stupid enough to think herself clever, and she was greedy and manipulative, and she thought the rest of the world was just like her. I remember the row when Yukie, another hostess, found her dragging an extension lead into the bathroom so she could use her electric straightening tongs in the bath, and tried to stop her. Kelly stood there naked and shrieking that Yukie was a jealous bitch who was trying to sabotage her beauty regime, while Jun ran to pull the plug before Kelly dropped the tongs onto the soaking floor of the wet-room.
She was a problem in the bar too. She flirted too much, too seriously with the clientele. The tips started to look like deposits to secure possession, and we all saw she would soon have to make good on her promises or move on to another bar a long way off. Jun, Mama-san’s driver and factotum, was running a small pool on when she would start to sell it, and who to, and I put two thousand yen on a rich and heavily married guy from Seito department store. Minachan thought she’d cut and run.
None of us imagined she’d be fool enough to move on a yakuza.
As I say, you can tell yakuza a mile off once you know what you’re looking for. Mama-san’s rule was hard and fast: if yakuza come in, you smile, you excuse yourself politely and you get management. You aren’t rude or unfriendly, but you let Mama-san do the talking. They run the sex trade—strip clubs and soaplands, lingerie bars and whorehouses—and if they come into a hostess bar they don’t own, you should smell trouble and you stay the hell out of it.
Kelly saw Mitsuyoshi-san walk in and all she smelled was money.
I tried to stay away from it all at first. I heard Mama-san heaping imprecations on Kelly’s unrepentant head after the first night—she had talked to him for two hours, she had charmed him, he would come back every night, she hoped Kelly was prepared to put out if that was what Mitsuyoshi-san wanted, because she was not going to have a boss of the Mitsuyoshi-kai yakuza family upset by one of her girls. And so on. Kelly didn’t care: she had him hooked and he was spending.
After the first few days—this was about three weeks ago now—she asked me to come and translate for her, since his English was as lousy as her Japanese. I told her to go to hell—why should I lose my own earnings for her benefit? We settled on a fee amounting to forty per cent of her tips. That was absurdly high, since I didn’t want to oblige her, and I didn’t see why someone so grasping would let that money go when she could have found another translator. But, as Mama-san said, you have to speculate to accumulate, and once she got properly talking to Mitsuyoshi-san in the way you only can with a really good interpreter, the money picked up even more, so I supposed it was an investment. She tried to deduct the amount he tipped me directly from what she owed me on her tips, though. Bitch.
She got me to come over a lot. Mitsuyoshi-san was about a hundred and as wizened as a turtle, and the rest of us made rude comparisons to another pneumatic American blonde who’d married an incredibly old billionaire. Kelly cooed and purred, and I smiled and interpreted, and between us Mitsuyoshi-san chuckled and pawed, and behind us the bodyguards sat and stared, their hard gazes making my spine itch. He didn’t let them sit at the table or even look directly at him—they had to be behind us, he insisted, so he could feel like a normal man courting a beautiful girl. Or as close to that as an octogenarian gangster and a greedy bitch who couldn’t speak each other’s language were likely to get.
That was all there was to it, as far as I knew. Stupid Kelly was going to end up sleeping with that horrible old crime boss, and hopefully she’d be more careful in the future, or maybe he’d sweep her off to be his mistress and she’d screw him into his coffin and that would be it.
Then the day before yesterday, Kelly came up to me, looking a little bit shifty, perhaps, in retrospect, but with a smile. She had this great idea, she told me. We had the same name, blonde hair and blue eyes, and my taste for very high heels meant I was nearly as tall as her (she exaggerated there, but not by too much). Why didn’t we dress up the same tomorrow? It would be a great joke for our clients. She’d even bought two dresses the same. I stared at that, since she was so miserly, but she explained she’d bought a size too small in the sale, and she couldn’t return it, so why didn’t I have it, and here was lipstick to go with, and she knew I had just the right shoes…
I didn’t know. I had no idea. I actually thought she was trying to be nice. I even asked her where there was a sale on. What a fool.
And she didn’t bloody turn up. There I was, teetering around the dark, smoky bar with pink heels and pink dress and pink lipstick, looking like Hostess Barbie for no reason in the world. I was mentally preparing a little speech for Kelly on the topic of pointless and feeble practical jokes when Jun grabbed my arm and dragged me into Mama-san’s office.
She bowed low when she saw me. That wasn’t right, and the first thing I thought of was a death.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You have to leave Tokyo. I’ve sent the boy to buy a ticket on the first bullet train. Jun-san will drive you around, collect your ticket, drop you off when it’s time. Call your friends now and tell them to pack you a bag. Don’t go home. I’m sorry.”
I don’t know if I said anything. I stared at her.
Mama-san looked back at me, before her strained, fearful eyes flicked away. “Mitsuyoshi-san has been assaulted,” she said. “He was hit on the head. In a love hotel. He went there with a blonde girl in a pink dress, from this bar. Kerry-chan, there are yakuza outside. They want to take you to their family to ask questions.”
“What? But—”
“Just go. Mitsuyoshi-san is very badly hurt. They don’t want explanations, they want someone to blame. There is no time to talk now. Get out of Tokyo and hide. Come back later, when it’s safe. Go, Kerry-chan.”
She bowed again, too deeply for her fat frame, and I felt Jun’s hand on my arm, steering me out.
Then it was a nightmare of panicked phone calls. Jun said not to ring my home phone, and Noriko’s mobile was switched off, so I had to call Yoshi, who was, thank God, still awake, working on some urgent project, and get him to go over to the flat I shared with Noriko to give her instructions. I remember sitting in the car for what seemed like forever, waiting for my phone to ring, driving slowly around the huge city, neon lines leaving garish trails in my vision against the darkness. When Noriko finally called back, we’d somehow ended up over to the east side of Tokyo, and I sat there chewing on my lip, trying not to scream at Jun as we drove well below speed limits through the still-busy roads to the flat. I remember Noriko’s white face as she waited with my bag on the corner we’d arranged, and her leaning into the car, asking me in a shaking voice what was happening, did I need money, what could she do? She’d obviously put on her work clothes to come down, a black skirt and jacket, and something in her bearing made me think of how she’d looked at her father’s funeral last year.
“I’m fine, Nori-chan,” I told her. “It’s just a misunderstanding. It’ll be sorted out soon.”
“Be careful.” She thrust something into my hand. “Oh, Kechan, be careful.”
There was no time to say goodbye. Jun put his foot down, and I skewed my body around to look back at her, small and alone on the empty pavement, then looked at what she’d given me. It was a battered little blue cloth pouch, worn threadbare from being carried around in bags and pockets for years, embroidered in red with the image of one of the more menacing Buddhist deities. I’d seen it before. It was a charm, the kind of thing you pick up in a temple for a few hundred yen, in the hope of exam success or road safety or many children. The kanji on it said “Good fortune”.
Noriko had given me her luck.
I was still looking at it when Jun’s pager bleeped and informed him that the yakuza knew I was
heading to Ueno station.
And that’s how I ended up on the run.
Chapter Two
Auntie was telling me about a complicated scandal involving her next-door neighbour’s niece and a flower-arranging night class when my phone went off. I stared at it with wide eyes, jolted out of my numbness by the sharp sound drilling through the air.
Auntie tutted, and I mumbled an apology as I grabbed it from my handbag. I didn’t recognise the number, and a shiver of sudden fear rippled over me even as I answered it.
“Moshi-moshi?” I whispered.
“Kerry-chan?”
“Oh, I’m so glad—can you hold on a moment?” I scrambled out of my seat, past Auntie, muttering an excuse about work, and hurried through the sliding door into the end space of the carriage. The toilet was empty and I began to go in, then hesitated. If I went in, I couldn’t see who was listening outside. In the standing space, at least I could be sure of who was overhearing or approaching me. The goons had surely got off the train earlier, at the Oomiya stop a few minutes back, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
I dare say it was paranoid. But they were actually out to get me.
“Yukie-chan,” I said, clutching the phone. “Chan” is an affectionate diminutive, a verbal hug. I needed the human contact desperately, and the raw sound in Yukie’s voice suggested she felt the same. “Yukie-chan, can you talk? Where are you?”
“Shinjuku station. At a payphone. Jun-san said not to use my phone—”