by Ryu Murakami
“Look what a pretty pattern it made,” Frank said with a smile. I translated this.
“What’s he talking about, he doesn’t know anything!” Maki spat back, refolding the hand towel and dabbing at the stain some more. Yuko clucked sympathetically: “That’s a Junko Shimada, right?” “That’s right,” said Maki, glaring at Frank and me and adding pointedly: “I’m glad somebody knows quality when they see it. You might not think it to look at me, but I’ve always worked in the highest quality places, even as a student working part-time, and not just nightclubs, either, my first part-time job was at a market in Seijo-Gakuen where they had nothing but the best gourmet foods that only rich people could afford, like sea bream sashimi, five slices in a pack, ¥2000. Tofu too, I couldn’t believe it at first, they had tofu made by hand somewhere near Mount Fuji that they can only make five blocks of it a day, and it was ¥500 for one piece.”
Making a point of ignoring Frank and me, Maki had turned to Yuko, the only one here who could possibly understand. Yuko nodded and sucked up her yaki-soba as she listened. Lady #4 was leaving. She’d been left on her own after the Mr. Children guy chose Lady #5. Of the five women present, #4 and #5 were dressed in the most conventional clothes—sweater and skirt, sweater and slacks—but as it turned out, they were the true professionals. The Mr. Children guy, familiar with places like this, had sniffed it out. The only one left alone now was Lady #3, who was holding the karaoke mike and leafing through a song catalogue. She was wearing a suit, but she was young. She was also the prettiest woman here. It was just past ten o’clock, so I figured her for a hostess on the late shift—midnight till four or five in the morning. This place was more like the waiting room in a train station or something than a pub: a random mix of men and women killing time till something happened. They say that not just in Kabuki-cho but in entertainment districts around the country there are fewer and fewer customers whose main goal is sex. I know of a street in Higashi-Okubo where older men form a queue for a chance to talk—just talk!—to high-school girls. The girls hang out in coffee shops on that street and get thousands of yen an hour for chatting with these guys. Lady #1, who was still going on about how she’d lived her entire life in contact with items of the very finest quality, had probably once done similar things. Maki sincerely believed that because she’d come up surrounded by ¥500 tofu and ¥2000 sashimi and whatnot, nothing but the best was good enough for her. Naturally the Junko Shimada dress didn’t suit her in the least, but she didn’t have a single friend who would point that out to her. Then again, even if such a person were available, she’d have made sure to avoid them.
I once heard a psychiatrist type say on TV that people need to feel they’re of some value to go on living, and I think there’s something to that. It wouldn’t be easy to keep going if you thought you were of no use to anyone. I looked at the manager of this place, who was standing at the counter tapping away on a calculator. He might have been the prototype of men in the sex industry. You could tell by his face he’d long since stopped even asking himself if his life was of any value. Men like him, managers of soaplands and Chinese clubs and S&M clubs, not to mention gigolos and pimps—men who eke out a living exploiting women’s bodies—all have one characteristic in common: they look as if something has eroded away inside them. I talked about this with Jun once but couldn’t explain it very well. I tried to describe it in a lot of different ways, saying it was as though they’ve given up hope, or lost their pride, or lied to themselves too long, or have no emotions left whatsoever, but she didn’t really get it. Only when I described their faces as blank—only then did she say she understood, kind of. About two or three weeks after that, I saw a news report on North Korea. It was about how people were starving there, and they had shots of some of the children. And in the faces of those skinny, dying kids was the same whatever-it-is that you see in the faces of men who live off the traffic in women’s bodies.
The waiter, slouching against the counter next to the manager, wasn’t in that category. Men who make a living off women don’t pierce their noses and lips. He was probably in a band. The band not being successful enough to pay the bills, one of his buddies may have helped him land this job. There’s an astronomical number of young dudes playing in bands, and in Kabuki-cho you can hardly spit without hitting one. Ours was miles away, his eyes staring at nothing anyone else could see. In a small voice, Lady #3 had begun singing an Amuro tune—something about how lonely everybody is deep down inside —but the waiter didn’t look at her, didn’t even seem to be aware of the fact that someone was singing. Meanwhile, the Mr. Children guy had loudly and brazenly opened price negotiations with Lady #5, who I now realized was probably over thirty. The room was warm and she’d perspired a bit, dissolving some of her makeup, and you could see some serious wrinkles on her neck and around her eyes. Mr. Children was badgering her: I bet you work the telephone clubs, I’ve met loads of women like that, and I know one when I see one, honey. Maybe #5 was in desperate need of cash, because nothing he said seemed to piss her off. She sat with her hands on her knees, simpering and shaking her head from time to time or looking up at the door as if willing a more appealing man to enter. Something’s wrong with me, I thought. I don’t normally spend so much time studying other people, especially in places like this. Maki was still blathering away. Yuko had finished her yaki-soba. Frank asked me to translate what Maki was saying, and I did, mechanically.
“After I quit the job at the market I took some time off for a while and then I started working in nightclubs, but I told myself I would never work in a low-class place, because the only people you get in low-class places are low-class people, right?”
“Just a minute,” Frank interrupted her.
“What?” Maki said, but her face said: Put a sock in it, Fatso.
“What are you doing here? What is it you came here to do? That’s what I can’t understand.”
“I’m here to talk to people,” Maki said. “I’ve got the night off at this exclusive club I work at in Roppongi and normally I don’t come to Shinjuku that much but sometimes I come here just to talk to people, and people usually get a kick out of my stories because they’re full of things hardly anyone knows about. When I say ‘my stories’ I mean like, for example, I’m the sort of person who even going to America or someplace I never want to fly economy, you know what I mean?”
She took a sip of whiskey and looked at Yuko for agreement. “Mmm,” Yuko nodded, “some people are like that, aren’t they.” Yuko had been glancing at her watch a lot the past few minutes. Having left a boring party, she’d simply decided to pass the time at an omiai pub before heading home, and now she was planning her exit. Not being as hardened as Maki, she apparently considered it rude to bolt immediately after wolfing down the noodles we’d treated her to. She hadn’t noticed that Frank and I were finding Maki very difficult to take, and as she timed her escape she was absently chiming in with a word or two whenever Maki paused to breathe. Yuko was thin, with a pale, unhealthy-looking face. Her flat, straight hair hung down over her collar, and from time to time she would flick it back with unmanicured fingernails. Though not particularly interested in what Maki was saying, she’d nod in agreement whenever called upon. She was more of a regular civilian than any other woman here, but she was here. Plainly no stranger to loneliness.
“If you ride in coach, the atmosphere of coach soaks right into you, that’s what one of our regular customers told me, and I think it’s really true, don’t you? This customer is a man who works for a TV station, and believe me you’d never see him in a place like this. He says he’s never traveled anything but first class in his life, and on domestic flights he always gets the SuperSeat, except Japan Air System doesn’t have the SuperSeat, so when he wants to go somewhere only JAS flies to, he books a seat in the Green Car of a bullet train instead. I mean, there are people in this world who live like that. You may not realize it if you’ve never flown first class, but it isn’t just about the seat being bigger. Fo
r example, did you know that if your flight is delayed or canceled, the way you get treated depends on the class you’re in? They put everybody else up at a hotel right near Narita Airport, but if you’re in first class they put you in the Hilton next to Disneyland. The Disneyland Hilton, can you believe that? It’s always been my dream, to stay there—well, I guess that’s true for everybody, right?”
Yuko acknowledged the question with another ambiguous Mmm. I was still mumbling into Frank’s ear a translation of whatever bullshit Maki came out with, like a simultaneous interpreter. I’m not used to that sort of thing and don’t really have enough English to do a very good job, so my translation grew rougher as Maki rattled on. The last bit, for example, came out something like, “All Japanese dream of staying at the Hilton,” but I didn’t think it mattered much.
“The Hilton’s not such a high-class hotel,” Frank said to Maki softly, as if to help correct a misconception, but depending on how you took it it might have sounded like a putdown. In fact, that’s how I took it—I thought Frank was trying to dump on her. And that sort of nuance tends to leap language barriers. “You don’t know much about anything, do you?” he told her. “Take the New York Hilton, for example. It’s said that four hundred rooms is the maximum number you can have if you want to maintain the very best service, but the New York Hilton has over a thousand. That’s why the truly rich never stay there. They prefer the European-style hotels, like the Plaza Athénée or Ritz-Carlton or Westbury. The only people who choose the Hilton are hicks from the country and Japanese.”
Maki’s face reddened. She didn’t like being grouped with hicks. Which meant she was probably from the country herself. Yuko said: “Hmm, I guess there must be lots of things about America that only Americans would know.”
Maki pushed her lips out in a pout. “So where is this person staying?” she asked me.
“I can’t tell you that,” I said.
Frank wanted to know what “the broad” was saying now. I translated the question, and he said: “The Hilton.” Yuko laughed, but Maki just resumed her monologue, telling us how she’d stayed at all the finest hotels in Tokyo. How the front desk at the Park Hyatt must be hundreds of meters from the entrance, and how her room at the Westin in Ebisu Garden Place had the most comfortable sofa she’d ever sat on, and so on and so forth. She also made it clear that she only stayed in these places with important people like doctors and lawyers and TV station people, so in effect she was admitting to being a hooker after all, much to Frank’s amusement. As she rattled on I noticed we’d been in this place for just over an hour now and asked the waiter for the hourly tally. He brought me a bill for nearly ¥40,000.
“What’s this?” I said, and his mouth dropped open slightly, making his lip-ring jiggle. “That’s not the price Noriko told us,” I said, trying to speak in a calm, friendly manner so as not to cause any sort of scene. “Who’s Noriko?” he said, then looked over at the counter where the manager was standing. He immediately glided over to us and inquired in a hushed, deep voice if there was any problem. I asked him to bring a breakdown of the bill, but he already had it with him. The original table charge was ¥2000 apiece, the charge to change tables and sit with the ladies ¥4000 apiece (doubled because we’d stayed longer than one hour), the yaki-soba was ¥1200 per, the potato chips ¥1200, the oolong tea ¥1500, the whiskey ¥1200, the beer ¥1500, and in addition to sales tax they’d added a service charge.
“I wish you’d told me when an hour was up,” I said.
Frank looked at the breakdown and shouted: “That’s insane!” He couldn’t read the Japanese, but he could read the figures. “I’ve only had two whiskeys, and Kenji, you only drank one beer!”
They were on an hourly system here, the manager explained in his funereal tones, but as we could see, they were a bit short-handed, so they couldn’t really be responsible for keeping track of how long each customer had stayed. “I’m sure you understand,” he said. I understood all right. Shafted. No matter what I said, he would point out that they were merely charging the standard amount according to the pub’s clearly outlined system. And if I continued to complain, a specialist would show up and suggest we discuss the issue in the back office. End of “discussion.” I told Frank there was nothing we could do. He nodded: “So that’s the type of place this is.” I said yes, I was afraid so, but none of this was strictly illegal so it was useless to argue.
“I’ll explain it all later. But this is partly my fault, so feel free to deduct half the bill from my fee.”
I was really willing to let him do that. It was my responsibility to watch the clock.
“Never mind,” Frank said. “Let’s just pay up for our time so far.”
So far? I thought. Frank pulled four ¥10,000 notes from his snakeskin wallet and handed them to the manager. They were the oldest, filthiest bills I’ve ever seen. The manager held them between one thumb and forefinger, a look of disgust on his face. The bills were heavily stained and caked with greasy dirt and seemed on the verge of disintegrating. I remembered hearing rumors that some of the homeless in and around Shinjuku Central Park had packets of money stowed away among their bags and rags.
We all stared at the bills. None of us, I’m sure, had ever seen anything quite like them before.
“There,” Frank said, “now we’re paid up for so far.”
“What do you mean ‘so far’?” I asked him.
He wanted to stay longer, he said. The manager, who’d obviously done his share of time in Kabuki-cho, must have sensed something disturbing about Frank’s face and attitude, not to mention the unbelievably dirty money. Generally, he said, their customers liked to wrap things up at about this point. Translation: Please leave. “Frank, let’s go, the system here is for us to finish up now,” I told him, clapping him lightly on the shoulder. The muscles there were as hard as cast iron, and a chill ran from my fingertips all the way down my spine.
“All right, then, shall we move on?” he said. “Oh, wait—those bills I just gave him, I dropped them in the gutter earlier, maybe I should pay with a credit card?”
He pulled out his wallet again as the manager, recognizing the words “credit card,” gave him a quizzical look.
“Kenji, ask if I can use a card.”
A credit card is fine, the manager said warily.
“I have a really unusual American Express card. Look at this. See? You girls look, too. Seriously, lean in here. Now look closely at the card. There’s something unusual about the face of this warrior fellow, right? If you move it back and forth like this in the light . . . Look there. It looks like he’s smiling, doesn’t it? Now watch carefully. . . .”
The two staff members and the pair of women leaned closer and closer to the card, as if pulled toward it. A familiar, creepy vibe told me that Frank was up to something again. The air seemed so dry it pricked my skin, yet so dense it was hard to breathe. I, for one, wasn’t going to look at Frank’s card. I kept my eyes on the manager and waiter, and sure enough in a matter of seconds I saw a change come over them. Something in their eyes. I once read that when you’re hypnotized you temporarily enter the world of the dead, and whether it’s true or not, I do know that something spooky happens. I saw the manager’s pupils dilate as he stared at the Amex card. Then, a moment later, the muscles of his jaw and cheeks tensed up so tight you could hear his teeth grinding, and veins stood out on his neck. It was the expression of someone absolutely petrified with fear, but it lasted only a few seconds. Then the veins deflated and the light went out of his face.
“Kenji,” Frank said in a very soft voice. “Step outside and call your girlfriend.”
“Huh?” I said, and he repeated it slowly, enunciating the words.
“Step. Outside. And call. Your girlfriend.”
The Face was gone. Frank looked strangely radiant, like someone who’d finally finished a long and difficult job and was now about to celebrate with a cold beer. The manager, the waiter, and Maki and Yuko were all in a trance of some
sort. The waiter’s lip-piercing jiggled as if in a small breeze, but he looked like a mime frozen in position. Everyone’s eyes were unfocused, and I couldn’t tell if their muscles were relaxed or tense. Maybe both at the same time. Meanwhile, Lady #3 was still singing, and Mr. Children was still negotiating with Lady #5. None of them seemed to notice the extraordinary atmosphere surrounding our table.
“Frank,” I said, nudging him, “that’s not cool.” I assumed he intended to leave everyone hypnotized and walk off without paying. “We can’t run out on the bill. I’ll never be able to show my face in Kabuki-cho again.”
“I wouldn’t do anything like that, Kenji. Just get out of here and let me handle this, will you?”
Or do you want me to kill you? his eyes seemed to say. My spine felt as if it were packed in ice, but before I knew it I was on my feet, which made me wonder for a moment if I’d been hypnotized too. I turned sideways to squeeze past the manager and waiter. It was like threading my way between a pair of mannequins. My elbow brushed against the waiter’s right hand, but he wasn’t there to feel it. As I walked away from the table I glanced back at Maki and Yuko. They were both leaning forward in their chairs, rocking back and forth as if on seesaws.