by Ryu Murakami
Frank looked at the flier and said to the guy: “Your Japanese is amazing, where are you from?” When the guy said New York, Frank beamed at him and told him the Knicks were on a winning streak and looking like a new team. I know that, the guy said, handing another passerby a flier.
“We get all the NBA action—hell, TV here even tells you where Michael Jordan played golf on his day off, and what his score was.”
“You don’t say,” Frank said and slapped him on the back. As we walked away, Frank draped his arm over my shoulder and said: “What a terrific fellow, Kenji—a man in a million!” As if he’d known him for years.
We came to a stop in front of a sign with one big eye. “Even I know what this is,” Frank said. “A peep show, right?”
I explained how this one worked.
“You get in a booth with a one-way mirror and watch the girls undress. In each booth is a little semicircular hole, and if you put your dick in there they jerk you off. These places were really popular until just recently.”
“They aren’t popular now? How come?”
“Well, peep shows are cheap. To turn a profit they need a lot of customers, but they can’t pay the girls that much. If the money isn’t good all the young and pretty girls quit, and if the girls aren’t young and pretty the customers stop coming. It’s a vicious circle.”
“How much is it? The sign says ¥3000—what’s that, $25? Kenji, $25 for a peep show and a hand job? That is cheap!”
“That’s just what it costs to get in. You have to tip another $20 or $30 for the hand job.”
“Still, that’s not bad. The girl who does the stripping is the one who jerks you off, right?”
“Usually you can’t see who’s on the other side of the wall. That’s why there were rumors about old ladies doing it, or gay guys. Which is another reason these places aren’t so popular anymore.”
“So it’s not worth going in?”
“Well, they are inexpensive, and you wouldn’t need an interpreter. I could go get some coffee or something and you’d only have to pay for one.”
As we talked, the touts began flocking around us. Most of them were from the newer “lingerie pubs” and none of them knew who I was. The old hands know me by sight, but of the maybe two hundred touts on this street at least eighty percent were rookies. The dudes who become touts are generally at the end of their rope: guys who for one reason or another can’t work anywhere else, or who are desperate for some quick cash—which is why they tend to come and go so quickly and why they aren’t necessarily reliable. You can generally trust the touts who’ve been around a long time, though.
“Kenji, what are these fellows saying?”
I took a moment to explain what a lingerie pub was, but the touts were talking much too fast for me to translate: “Absolutely no additional charges! Normally it would be ¥9000 but because it’s the end of the year and we’ve just opened we’re only charging ¥5000! Would I lie to you? When I say the girls are young, I’m talking barely legal! Naturally your foreign friend is welcome too! It’s just down those steps over there! Right this way! We have online karaoke and a full catalogue of English songs! Please, gentlemen! If you’re not satisfied with the quality of the girls or the atmosphere of the pub, you’re absolutely at liberty to turn around and walk out! You can’t pass up an opportunity like this! Once the new year arrives, the price goes right back up! What have you got to lose?”
As we walked away from this fairly overbearing pack of touts, Frank said, “I heard that the Japanese were nice, but this is amazing.” He kept turning to look back at them, still milling about in front of the peep show. Most of them were wearing cheap suits like mine. This was Kabuki-cho, not Roppongi, and you didn’t see many designer clothes on these streets. The only way you could tell most of the customers from the touts was that the customers were walking and the touts looked like they were loitering. Even from a distance, touts have something lonesome about them. Most of the guys I know who’ve done the job a long time are sort of worn thin—not physically run down, but like something’s eroded away inside. Even when you’re talking to them face to face you have this feeling of not connecting, as if the words just pass right through them. Sometimes they remind me of the Invisible Man, but I’ve never quite understood why they end up that way.
“These fellows are nothing like the seedy characters who work for American sex clubs,” said Frank. “They’re more like Eagle Scouts or something! How do they find the energy to be so friendly all night?”
“For every customer they bring in they get a commission.”
“Well, that’s only fair, I guess. But can you trust what they tell you?”
“It’s best to be suspicious if the price seems too cheap.”
The idea of a lingerie pub clearly appealed to Frank.
“Shall we go see some Japanese girls in their underwear, then, for starters?” he said.
“You can’t have sex there.”
“I know. I want to build up to that slowly anyway, and right now girls in their underwear seems like the best way to start.”
“One hour, at this time of night, will cost ¥7000 to ¥9000 per person, and since hardly any of the girls speak English you’ll have to pay for me too. There are pubs where you can touch the girls and pubs where you can’t, and there are ones that put on shows and ones where the girls will dance on your table, but the prices don’t vary that much.”
“I prefer your normal kind of place, where the girls just sit next to you and talk,” Frank said. “After all, if the price doesn’t go up much even with all those options, then the pubs without the options must have the prettiest girls. Right, Kenji?”
I found a tout I knew and had him guide us to his pub. Satoshi was the same age as me, twenty. At eighteen he’d come to Tokyo from Yamanashi—or Nagano, I forget which—to attend a college prep school, and almost immediately went mental. I didn’t know him then, but he once showed me a souvenir of those times. He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children’s building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train. Why would you do that, I asked him, and he shrugged. I don’t know, man, I found them at Kiddyland and I just wanted to buy them and play with them somewhere, you know, and then I thought the train would be good, and it was good, man, it’s fun trying to build a castle on a moving train, you can like lose yourself or whatever and not have all these weird thoughts, because at the time I kept having this weird thought about poking some little girl’s eyes with a pin or a toothpick or a hypodermic needle, something pointy like that, and it scared me to think about what if I really did it, but once I started playing with my blocks on the floor of the train I forgot about that obsession or compulsion or whatever you call it, because it’s not easy to stack blocks on the floor of a moving train, you really need to concentrate, and the Yamanote Line has some major curves, like between Harajuku and Yoyogi especially, and I had to cradle the little castle in my arms to keep it from falling apart. Sure I got yelled at, man. I don’t know how many times conductors and station workers yelled at me, and I was even picked up by the railway cops a few times, but, hell, it’s not like I was doing it during rush hour. Anyway, this went on for about six months, but then when I came to Kabuki-cho it cured me. Hey, I wouldn’t say I love Kabuki-cho—I mean, I doubt if anybody loves it—but it’s an amazingly easy place to be, and who’s going to think about sticking needles in little girls’ eyes when they’re working in a town they like and have a chance to go to the university of their choice?
“One of our girls speaks a little English, man. If she’s available I’ll send her over to you for no extra charge.”
Satoshi led Frank and me to a green door in the basement of a nearby building. I’d been to this pub any number of times, but I can’t remember what it was called. All these places have similar names, for one thing. No one racks their brains to come up with something origina
l because no customer in Kabuki-cho would ever choose a club just because it has a clever name.
The interiors of all lingerie pubs look pretty much the same, too. They don’t actually share a common design, just the same sort of crappy materials. Frank looked at the girls clustered on the sofas in their underwear and gave his bizarre bashful grin.
The girl who could speak a little English was called Reika. She wore her hair up and expensive-looking purple lace underwear, and aside from a flattish nose and coarse skin, she was pretty cute. Along with Reika came Rie, a big girl with average features and a physique like a volleyball player, who liked white underwear and laughed a lot. Just because a woman laughs a lot doesn’t mean she’s got a sunny disposition, though, especially in the sex trade. Once we were all seated and the whiskey tray was brought to the table, Satoshi turned to me and said thanks, man, and headed back out to the street. There were only two other customers in the place, and I vaguely wondered how much Satoshi would get for bringing us here. We know each other fairly well, but we don’t talk about stuff like that. Not trying to find out too much about other people’s finances is one of the most important rules for surviving in Kabuki-cho.
Frank nodded at the girls on either side of him, that weird smile still scrunching up his face. His cheeks were turning pink, and I don’t think it was only because the room was so warm. It’s hard to relax with girls sitting next to you in their underwear, even for guys who go to lingerie pubs all the time. It’s not like seeing girls on the beach in bikinis. The swell of breasts in a lacy brassiere, the waistband marks on tummies, the subtle shadow of pubic hair through white panties—unless you’re drunk, it seems almost cruel to look and you find yourself averting your eyes. Turning away from the girls and Frank’s bashful grin, I fixed my gaze on the computerized tropical fish in a virtual aquarium against the wall. Anyone who didn’t know better would have thought the two brilliantly colored angelfish were the real thing. I don’t know much about angelfish, but even the way they moved their mouths looked real. There did seem to be something indefinably unnatural about them, though. Like Frank’s grin.
“Whiskey-and-water okay?” Reika asked in English. Frank and I nodded, and she poured the unlabeled whiskey into our glasses, then squirted it with water from a siphon.
“Kochira Amerika no kata?” Rie asked, sidling closer to Frank. You weren’t allowed to touch the girls in this pub. But sometimes, if you stuck to the rules, the girls themselves would initiate contact. Frank must have caught the word “Amerika,” because he turned to Rie and softly said: “Yes.”
Afraid that Frank might take the same tiny sips as he had with his beer earlier, I made sure to explain that since the pub worked on a time system he could drink as much whiskey as he liked for the same price. He took tiny sips anyway. You couldn’t tell if he was drinking or just wetting his lips, and it was annoying to watch. Reika was sitting on the far side of Frank, and Rie was between him and me. Reika put her hand on Frank’s thigh and smiled.
“What’s your name?” Frank asked her, and she told him.
“Reika?” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Really?”
“I think it’s very pretty.”
“Thank you.”
Reika’s English was about middle-school level. I’m not a whole lot better, mind you, just more accustomed to using it.
“Do a lot of Americans come here?” Frank asked her.
“Sometimes.”
“Your English is good.”
“No! I want to speak better, but difficult. I want to get money and go America.”
“Oh really? You wanna go to school there?”
“No school! I am stupid! No, I want to go Niketown.”
“Niketown?”
“Do you like Nike?”
“Nike? The sporting goods maker?”
“Yes! You like Nike, aren’t you?”
“Well, I do have some of their shoes—or wait, maybe mine are Converse. But why do you like Nike so much?”
“No why! I just like. Do you go Niketown?”
“See, I don’t know what this Niketown thing is,” Frank said. “Do you, Kenji?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said.
Reika adjusted her bra strap and said: “One big building, many Nike shops! And we can enjoy Nike commercials on giant video screen! My friend said to me. She go to shopping Niketown and buy five, ano . . . ten shoes! Oh! It’s my dream, go to shopping Niketown!”
“Your dream?” Frank registered disbelief. “Shopping in Nike stores is your dream?”
“My dream, yes,” Reika said and asked him: “Where did you from?”
When he told her New York City, she gave him a funny look.
“Impossible!” she said. “Niketown is in New York.”
Naturally, all Reika meant was that she was shocked he could live in New York and not be familiar with her dream store: nothing for Frank to get all bent out of shape about. But his expression underwent the same transformation as when the black tout had ignored him. From where I sat I could clearly see the vinyl-like skin of his cheeks twitching and the capillaries appearing, his face going like a watercolor wash from pink to red. I sensed trouble and turned to Reika, saying: “Only the Japanese make a big deal about Niketown, you’d be surprised how many Americans don’t even know about it. I’ve heard that half the customers are Japanese, and New York is a big place, it’s not just Manhattan, you know.” I repeated this in English for Frank’s benefit. Reika nodded, and Frank’s face slowly morphed back to something more or less human. My guess was that Frank was lying about living in New York, but I decided to avoid the subject from then on. Nothing good could come of a guide like me, with no official license, making a customer angry.
“Do you want to karaoke?” Reika asked Frank. One of the other two customers, a middle-aged salaryman, was crooning euphorically into a hand-held mike. He was with a younger colleague, who was drunk and red-faced and humming along, lamely trying to clap in time. In one hand the singer held the mike and in the other the hand of a hostess in pink lingerie. Block out her surroundings, and the hostess might have been holding a sacred flame in a temple in ancient Greece. I figured the two men to be from the sticks. A lot of salarymen from the provinces who visit Tokyo on business trips come to Kabuki-cho at night, probably because it’s the one part of town that doesn’t put on any airs. It’s easy to spot these guys because they always turn bright red when they drink. There’s something different about their features, too, not to mention their fashion sense. Untold numbers of them get taken in by hardcore clip joints, and I’ve often thought guiding tour groups from the farm belt might be profitable. But I’m not about to try to learn all those dialects.
“No karaoke for me,” Frank said, “but how about I study some Japanese? I’d like to practice my Japanese with girls in their underwear.” He extracted Tokyo Pink Guide, the book this time, from his bag.
“The Way of Sexual Liberation!” shouted a blurb on the cover, above the title. Translation: This book will make you horny and show you what to do about it. Below the title it said: “What? Where? And How Much? All the information you need to navigate Tokyo’s sexiest spots!” I have a copy of this book for business purposes and am slowly wading through it, partly to brush up my English, but I have to admit it’s pretty interesting. For example, Chapter 9 is about the gay scene. It starts with historical background, how the Buddhist prohibitions against women and the machismo of samurai society gave rise to a love of boys, and goes up to the present, taking care to explain that even though the entire sex industry in Japan has developed xenophobia because of AIDS, gays from more enlightened countries are still given a warm welcome in Shinjuku Ni-chome. It even names the best clubs to visit if you happen to be foreign.
Frank opened the bright pink book and looked from Reika to Rie, saying: “All right then, here goes.” In the back of the book was a simple Japanese-English sex glossary, and he be
gan reading words in alphabetical order.
“Aho,” he said in a booming voice, and gave us the English translation (Shithead).
“What did he just say?” Rie asked me, not quite understanding his accent. When I repeated the word, she began laughing and slapping her knee, saying: “Iya da! Kawaii!” (I can’t stand it! How cute!)
Next Frank read the word Aijin (Mistress), then Ai shiteru (I love you). He muttered the English translations under his breath, but his voice was loud and resonant when he read the words in Japanese.
“Aitai (I want to see you), Akagai (Ark shell; Vagina), Ana (Hole), Ana de yaritai (I want to stick it in), Anaru sekkusu (Anal sex), Asoko (Down there) . . . Asoko . . . Asoko . . . Asoko. . . .”
It’s endearing when foreigners try their best to communicate in broken Japanese. When they’re giving it all they’ve got, you find yourself wanting to reward them by comprehending. My English is probably about the level of a decent high-school student’s, but I’ve found that you actually get on better with clients if you struggle to choose the right words rather than try to sound like a native speaker, the way so many idiot Japanese DJs do. As Frank kept repeating asoko, Reika and Rie began giggling uncontrollably, and even the other hostesses were turning to see what was so funny. Without the least hint of embarrassment—or lewdness, either—Frank plowed ahead, stumbling over the pronunciations but with an earnest, innocent expression on his face, like an actor on stage, projecting each syllable: A-SO-KO.
“Dai suki (Love ya!), Dame (No!), Dankon (Penis), Danna-san (Mister), Dare demo ii desu (Anyone will do), Dechatta (Oops! I came), Debu (Fatso), Dendo kokeshi (Vibrator), Desou desu (I’m going to come), Doko demo dotei (A total virgin), Doko demo dotei dakara desou desu (I’m a total virgin, so I’m going to come), Doko demo dotei dakara desou desu, Doko demo dotei dakara desou desu. . . .”