by Ryu Murakami
“In that case, when the woman comes to the booth and asks you something, all you need to do is say ‘Yes.’ ”
“All right, then,” Frank said, “I will. I can’t wait.”
For someone who couldn’t wait he looked awfully bored. He sighed and picked up a weekly magazine next to the sofa. On the first page of color photos was a picture of Hideo Nomo in his Los Angeles Dodgers uniform. The short text was about the contract for Nomo’s second season not having been signed yet. Frank tapped the picture with his forefinger and said:
“So baseball’s pretty big in Japan too, I guess?”
At first I thought he was making a joke. There’s no such thing as an American who comes to Japan on business and doesn’t know who Nomo is. Not even one in a thousand. Among Americans he’s surely the most famous Japanese alive, and right now small talk about Nomo is probably the best way to break the ice and get negotiations off to a smooth start. And yet Frank was looking at a picture of Nomo and assuming he played in Japan. Was it even possible that a man who imported Toyota auto parts wouldn’t know who Nomo was?
“This man pitches for the Los Angeles Dodgers,” I said.
Frank peered at the photo dubiously.
“You’re right, he’s wearing a Dodgers uniform.”
“It’s Nomo. He’s famous. Last year he pitched a no-hit, no-run game.”
Maybe Frank didn’t know anything at all about baseball. That was the only way this could make any sense to me—if he knew nothing about the game itself. But then he pulled the rug out again.
“No-hit, no-run, eh? That takes me back. We were all boys in my family, a gang of brothers. I was the youngest, but all of us played baseball. We lived way out in the country, you understand, cornfields as far as the eye could see, and in summer we used to do nothing but play catch. There wasn’t much else to do, for one thing, and my father was a baseball fan too. I still remember the summer I was eight years old, when my second oldest brother pitched a no-hit, no-run game.”
Just an hour earlier, Frank had told me he had two older sisters. These two sisters, I distinctly remembered him saying, used to imitate TV comedians. But now he came from a family of only boys who all played baseball. The weird thing was that there was no conceivable need for him to lie right now. It was odd that he didn’t know who Nomo was, but no reason to initiate a coverup. This wasn’t a conference room where vital business talks were taking place, it was the waiting room outside a peep show, and I wasn’t some important client or supplier but just a nightlife guide. If he had simply said, “Nomo, eh? Never heard of him,” I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
“It was the middle of nowhere, but they made good beer there, and we used to all play baseball and then drink beer. I was just a kid but of course they made me drink too because you couldn’t call yourself a man if you couldn’t knock back a beer. That’s what it’s like in the countryside in America, cornfields stretching forever in every direction, the sky so blue it’s shocking, and unbelievably hot in summer. The sun is like a hammer pounding you down, and a weak man could pass out from just standing there. But the amazing thing was, when we were playing baseball the heat didn’t bother us at all, it didn’t even seem that hot. Even if the pitcher was getting bombed and we were stuck out in the field for a long time, even then we didn’t notice the heat.”
Frank seemed excited by these memories, if that’s what they were, and was speaking much faster than normal. I tried to concentrate, to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but at some point I started remembering my own younger days. I played baseball in middle school. Our team wasn’t very good, but I’ve never forgotten those summer practice sessions or the games we played. What Frank had just said was true: even on days when it was so hot you could hardly bear to be outside, you forgot all about it once you started playing. For anybody who’s had the experience, those two words “summer” and “baseball” are bound to summon up the smells of grass and dirt and oiled leather. It made me so nostalgic I completely forgot that Frank was almost certainly lying.
“I know,” I said. “When your team’s fielding, and you’re leading by a couple of runs, and it’s two outs bases loaded, you don’t notice how hot it is. But if you close your eyes for a second, suddenly you realize it’s like being inside an oven. In fact, that’s the hottest I’ve ever been. There’s no heat like the heat you experience playing baseball in summer. And there’s no memory more beautiful.”
I had launched into this little soliloquy without even thinking. I was enjoying my own reminiscences, and it all came bubbling out fairly smoothly. I didn’t have to stop and think about present perfect or comparative degree or whatever.
“So you played baseball too, Kenji?” Frank asked without much enthusiasm.
“Yeah. Yes I did.”
I was glad to be able to say that. And now that I thought about it, Frank had probably grown up in a complicated family situation, one that a Japanese like me would find difficult to comprehend. We often see magazine articles about the divorce rate in America being over fifty percent or something, but that doesn’t give us a real sense of what it’s like. We just think, Hmm, how about that, and turn the page. But I’d worked as a nightlife guide for nearly two hundred Americans so far, and when it came time to say goodbye after hanging out with them for a couple of nights, more than a few would start drunkenly telling me about their childhoods. This is especially true of guys who hadn’t managed to find the kind of sex they wanted with the kind of woman they liked—which is almost everyone, since there’s not much chance of going to a foreign country for two or three days and finding a woman you like and having sex with her. I think that’s part of the reason so many of my clients, after wandering through the long Tokyo night, end up drunk and tired and determined to confess their loneliness to me. Because of my father dying when I was a kid, I do feel like I understand to some extent when they talk about their sense of loss or whatever, but still. This is the sort of story I’d hear, for example: Pop stopped coming home, and then the next year at Christmas there was a man I didn’t know, and my mother said from now on this is your father. I was only six so I didn’t have much choice in the matter, but it took me a long time to accept it, two or three years about, and then at some point the man started hitting me. This was back in North Carolina, and we had a custom where we didn’t mow or walk on the grass until May, to let it grow, and the man was a salesman from the West Coast and didn’t know about that, so he used to walk all over the lawn in front of the house in early spring, and Pop had planted that lawn, so it really upset me, and I warned the man, I told him again and again, but he kept walking on the grass, and finally I called him this really bad name, which I must have just learned because I didn’t even know what it meant. That was the first time he hit me, and then I had to start all over again, trying to get to a point where I could, you know . . . accept it.
I remember the American making this particular confession, and the way his voice caught when he said “accept it.” Americans don’t talk about just grinning and bearing it, which is the Japanese approach to so many things. After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you’ll get through if you just hang in there. I don’t think I could stand the sort of loneliness Americans feel.
I was sure Frank had a similar sad story. Who knows—maybe he was a foster child who got bounced around from home to home. At one time he might have been in a household with only older sisters, and later in one with only older brothers.
“I played in middle school, second base,” I said. “The shortstop and I were best friends. I had a pretty good arm for a second baseman, and he had a good arm too, and we used to practice double plays a lot. In fact, double plays were everything to us. Like, even if we lo
st a game, if we managed to turn a double play we’d give each other the thumbs up when no one was looking.”
After spilling out this little reverie, I asked Frank what position he had played, but just then the previous show finished and an announcement came over the speakers: We’re sorry to have kept you waiting, please enter the booths, please enter the booths. “It must be our turn, Kenji, let’s go,” Frank said abruptly and stood up. I stood up too and moved toward the door to the booths, but I was fuming. The bastard gets all pumped up talking about baseball, and then when I try to join in he suddenly loses interest and seems anxious to drop the subject altogether.
We were led to separate booths some distance apart. For a guy who claimed to have such a strong sex drive, Frank didn’t look all that eager to get into his booth. Not that he seemed nervous, just uncomfortable and bored. What a weird guy, I muttered under my breath as I entered my own little cubicle. It was furnished with a round stool and a box of tissues and was so narrow I was glad I wasn’t claustrophobic.
The show started right away. As in most of these places, the stage was a half circle no more than two meters across, separated from the booths by one-way mirrors. The dancer can’t see inside the booths, but she can tell which ones are occupied, thanks to a little light in the wall above each mirror. The music started, and the cheesiest illumination imaginable began to glitter as a door opened in the right rear of the stage and a small, skinny girl walked out. The music was something by Michael Jackson. The girl was wearing a negligee.
There was a knock, and someone opened the door to my booth and poked her head inside.
“Excuse me. Would you like the special service?” She peered at my face, then said: “What the hell, if it isn’t Kenji.”
About six months ago she’d been working at a show pub in Roppongi, and her name, if I remembered right, was Asami.
“Asami?” I said, and she laughed and told me they called her Madoka here. “Listen,” I said, “I’ve got a favor to ask you. Three booths down from here is a gaijin who’s going to want the special service.”
As soon as Asami/Madoka heard the word “gaijin,” she creased her brow in a frown. Like I said, the popularity of foreigners in the sex industry has completely bottomed out.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to ask you to give him something extra or anything. I just want to know if he, um, ejaculates a lot? Quantity-wise, I mean.”
“What? What is it, a contest or something?”
“No, I just want to know. Humor me. I’ll treat you to dinner sometime.”
“All right,” Madoka said and shut the door. I had requested her as a hostess at the Roppongi show pub a few times, and girls in the sex trade remember that sort of thing. What I was asking of her now sounded crazy, I know. But the newspaper had said that the dismembered high-school girl showed signs of having been sexually assaulted. She’d been killed less than two days before, and I figured if Frank was the one who raped her, he probably wouldn’t have much semen stored up yet. Of course, it was crazy for me to suspect Frank of having anything to do with the murdered girl in the first place. I was thinking too much, is what Jun, for example, would probably tell me. But after two years of working Tokyo’s sex scene I’d developed a sort of sixth sense for danger, and even if Frank wasn’t a murderer my intuition was definitely telling me not to trust him. Everybody lies at one time or another. But once someone makes a habit of lying, once it becomes a part of their everyday life, denial kicks in. Even the fact that they’re lying begins to fade into the background, and in extreme cases they actually forget. I know more than a few people like that, and I make sure to steer clear of them, because they’re the world’s biggest pains in the ass. Not to mention dangerous.
On stage, the small, thin woman was opening the front of her negligee and gyrating her hips. She wasn’t a professional dancer, just another girl in the sex industry, so there was nothing very seductive about her moves. Comical and sad, is more like it, but nobody had come to this place expecting to see an artistic striptease. The woman pressed against the one-way mirror before each booth for about thirty seconds, giving the customers what they’d come for by pulling down her bra and squeezing her breasts, sticking her finger down her panties, and so on. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, and her skin was so pale you could see the veins in her face and arms and legs. There was something cruel about the way the cheap illumination highlighted those blue veins, I was thinking, when Madoka opened the door to my booth again and stuck her head inside.
“Well?” I said quietly. A wave of strong perfume washed over me. Madoka was wearing a sort of negligee with frills, looking for all the world as if she were off in search of the bluebird of happiness. She was also holding a vinyl bag full of condoms and moist towelettes.
“The . . . the gaijin in Booth 5, right?” she said.
“I don’t remember the booth number, but surely there’s only one gaijin here?” The booths are dark, and with the light behind her it was hard to see Madoka’s face, but she sounded troubled, as if she didn’t know what to say.
“Didn’t he ask for the special service?”
Madoka shook her head and said: “No, he did, but . . .”
“Did something weird happen?”
“He stopped me after a while and said ‘No more.’”
“So he didn’t come?”
“That’s not what I mean. . . .”
“How big was he?”
“Size-wise, about average I think, but . . . Something wasn’t right. First of all, I’ve never seen anybody make a face like that when they’re getting jerked off. And his dingaling was, like . . . creepy.”
“Creepy.”
“Yeah. It was hard in some places and soft in others.”
“Silicone injections?”
“No. I could tell if it was silicone or pearls or whatever, but this was different. And that face! At first it was dark and I couldn’t see very well, but then a light shone on his face, and it was like, I mean, he was looking at me, but . . . Can I go now? I get yelled at for talking to customers.”
“Of course, sorry to ask such a weird favor,” I said, and Madoka said no problem and shut the door again. She didn’t seem to want to talk about Frank. The girl on stage, braless now, had her panties down around one ankle and was masturbating. She lay on her back with her legs spread and her eyes closed, moaning softly. No one but she herself could have said if it was just an act, or if she was actually a bit turned on, or if in fact she was the type who really gets off on having people watch. I certainly didn’t know which it was, but her voice and facial expressions were a pretty good facsimile of what happens when a woman is genuinely aroused. There’s not that much variation, which I’m sure is true for men too. Someone like Madoka has seen the faces of hundreds, if not thousands, of men in that state. What sort of face could Frank have made that she’d find so disturbing?
After we left the peep show Frank hardly spoke at all, and I didn’t much feel like talking either. We just walked along, drifting away from the neon lights and the cries of the touts, and the next thing I knew we were in front of a batting center on the outskirts of the love hotel district. It was past 1:00 A.M., but we could hear a syncopated clank of metal bats beyond the tall green net and rusty chain-link fence. Frank stopped to listen to the sound, and gazed curiously up at the fence. I’m told that in America they don’t fence in batting centers or driving ranges. I’d always assumed that enclosed driving ranges, at least, were something you could find anywhere in the world. I thought that vending machines for booze and cigarettes and magazines and whatnot were everywhere, too. Well, maybe not everywhere, but it never occurred to me that having vending machines for beer or whatever on every other corner was unusual. Clients with any curiosity always ask me about this, though. Kenji, why are there so many vending machines? Who needs them, with convenience stores everywhere you turn? And why do you need so many different types of canned coffee and juice and sports drinks? With so many brands, how c
an anyone possibly make a profit? I’ve never been able to come up with answers to questions like these, and at first I didn’t even understand what the big deal was. But from the point of view of foreigners, any number of things about this country seem abnormal, and I’m not able to explain most of them. I get questions like: If Japan is one of the richest countries in the world, why do you have this karoshi problem, people literally working themselves to death? Or: Girls from poor Asian countries I can understand, but why do high-school girls in a country as wealthy as Japan prostitute themselves? Or: Wherever you go in the world, people work in order to make their families happy, so why doesn’t anybody in Japan complain about the tanshin-funin system that sends businessmen off to live on their own in distant cities or countries? If I can’t answer these questions, it’s not because I’m particularly stupid. Nobody writes about these things in the newspapers or weeklies, or talks about them on TV. No one teaches us why karoshi has to exist in this country, or the tanshin-funin system that the rest of the world seems to think is so perverse.
Frank stood riveted to one spot, gazing up at the batting center. I thought maybe he’d enjoy hitting a few. “Wanna try it?” I said, and he looked at me as if startled and bobbled his head ambiguously.
On the ground floor was a game center. We climbed a metal staircase to the second level, a surreal open space illuminated by fluorescent lights. A sign hanging about midway up the chain-link fence said: FOR YOUR SAFETY, ONLY THOSE TAKING BATTING PRACTICE ARE ALLOWED IN THE CAGES. There were seven batting cages, all set at different pitching speeds. The one farthest to the right was the fastest, 135 kph, and the one on the far left was the slowest at 80. Two of the cages were occupied—one by a young man in training wear and the other by the male half of a drunken couple. His woman was egging him on. “Go for a home run!” she shouted before every pitch. The man was staggering drunk and missed most of the balls completely, but the woman kept at him as if their lives depended on it: “Don’t let ’em beat you! Don’t let ’em beat you!” Don’t ask me who or what was trying to beat him. She stood behind the fence on a long concrete walkway like the platforms you see at little train stations in the country, with a roof but no walls to block the wind. In a shed about the size of a highway tollbooth the batting center attendant slumped in his chair, asleep, and next to him a kettle sat on a small kerosene stove that flickered with orange flames. The little shed must have been warm, because the dozing attendant inside had nothing on over his T-shirt, and a homeless man lay with his back against the outer wall. He was sprawled out on a couple of flattened cardboard boxes, drinking some colorless liquor from a Cup Noodle container and leafing through a magazine.