by Francis King
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, how disappointing! And there’s Bill. Anyway he hasn’t changed. Except that he looks fatter and more prosperous.’
‘Come and join us.’
‘Well, I was going to suggest your coming to join us. We’re over there!’ She pointed to a large table in an embrasure overlooking the view; it was one of the three best in the restaurant and Nishimura had asked in vain for it when we had come in. ‘ You must meet my little brother. This time he won’t be able to bolt! … He’ll like you, I know.’
‘All right. But what—what about Nishimura?’
‘Nishimura?’
‘Our host.’
‘Well, bring him along too. Why not?’
‘He’s rather a bore.’ I knew that it was disloyal of me to say this, but that was certainly how Nishimura would strike both Bibi and her guests.
‘Who isn’t in Kobe? No, bring him over with you.’
Nishimura was delighted by the invitation and I thought that I knew why. It was not that he was eager to see Bibi again or to meet the party of foreigners with her; but as an ambitious business man at the outset of his career, he knew the magnitude of the Akulov interests and sensed that perhaps he would be able to make some contact that would be useful to him later.
‘This is my baby brother, Sasha!’ A slight young man, bloodlessly blond and pretty rather than handsome, got to his feet and greeted us awkwardly with a stammer. Nervousness made him look vaguely cross. He was wearing a suit of black Italian silk with excessively narrow lapels and trouser legs, elegant Italian moccasin-type shoes of a soft tooled black leather, and a hand-woven silk tie which I recognised as having come from the stall of the folk museum in Kurashiki. The phrase ‘the valor-ruined man’ suddenly came into my mind as our eyes met. ‘Joe and Rachel Fleishmann.’ Bibi indicated an American, totally bald in spite of his youthful face and figure, and the woman who was seated opposite to him, her breasts looking as if they were about to burst out of the constriction of her low-cut bodice, and her eyes circled by bruise-like shadows. ‘Tom Starkie.’ This was the American with the long legs and the curiously high buttocks whom I had seen playing ball on the beach at Abekawa. ‘And Yuki.’ Yuki was Tom’s Japanese friend, the otherwise perfect symmetry of his face spoiled by a squint.
‘Now come and sit by my baby brother,’ Bibi told me. ‘I know that you’re going to like each other. You’d better go next to Yuki,’ she said to Nishimura. Obviously she had already forgotten his name, even though I had supplied it again for her when she had made the introductions. I knew that Nishimura would certainly not wish to sit next to one of his compatriots, much less to one like Yuki. But he complied with a shrug of the shoulders.
Mrs Fleishmann turned to Bill, who had been placed between herself and Bibi. ‘Are you visiting here?’ she asked, lethargically raising her glass of champagne to her full lips and sipping from it.
Bill explained that he was working in Japan and that our home was in Kyoto.
She did not ask what work he did. ‘My husband is over here about a movie,’ she volunteered.
‘I design sets,’ Fleishmann said.
‘He won an Oscar the year before last,’ Bibi put in—more, it seemed, because she wanted to forestall them from providing this information than from any desire to provide it herself.
Nishimura and Yuki had already started that elaborate game of trumping each other’s credentials which two Japanese invariably play when meeting for the first time. Nishimura seemed to be winning; until his opponent first produced the information that he had twice visited the States and then followed it up with the announcement that he and Starkie-san were about to start on a voyage to Europe. Starkie-san was a world famous photographer, he added, to whom he was assistant. Game and set.
Bibi’s brother had remained completely silent since our coming. Whenever, after that first introduction, there seemed to be a possibility that my eyes might meet his, he at once looked away. Once I caught him staring fixedly at Nishimura; but as soon as he knew I was watching him, he lowered his head and picked up his glass, from which he gulped as though the champagne were a medicine.
‘Do you ever visit Kyoto?’ I at last asked, for want of any other topic.
His glance flickered nervously over me, then flickered off. ‘Sometimes. Not often. I d-don’t know why. When one lives so near to a place.…’
‘Do drop in and see us if you find yourself there.’
‘Thank you.’ His voice was husky and almost inaudible.
We went on to talk about the temples and gardens of Kyoto, Tom Starkie joining in to give us a list of those which he had photographed and, even longer, those which he had not. ‘ Chion-in.… Yes, I did Chion-in. And Todaiji—I got some really beautiful shots of Todaiji, didn’t I, Yuki? Hey, Yuki! Didn’t I get some marvellous shots of Todaiji?’
‘That was Toji.’
‘No, Yuki, I’m sure.…’
Yuki shook his head vigorously.
‘O.K., O.K. You know best.’ He turned to us grinning, so that the freckled skin puckered about his small green eyes. ‘ Yuki always knows best.’
Sasha suddenly pushed back his chair and, to my astonishment, asked me to dance. Bibi, who was talking to Bill, looked up. ‘You’re not going to dance, are you? You’ll find the floor impossible. Look how many people are on it.’
‘All the better,’ Sasha said. ‘Then Mrs Warner won’t notice how badly I d-dance.’
But in fact he danced beautifully.
‘You’re a marvellous dancer,’ I said. ‘And I’m so clumsy. Bill hates dancing, so we never go to dances. And most Japanese don’t dance in any case.’
He did not answer. It was the first time that he had looked relaxed since our arrival at the table.
We remained on the floor at the end of that dance. ‘ You’re not tired, are you?’
‘Not at all. I’m loving it,’ I said. ‘But I wish that my dancing were nearer to your standard.’
‘You’re d-doing fine.’ There was a silence, then he said: ‘I missed you at Abekawa.’
‘Yes.’
‘L-later I was sorry about that. Running away. It was silly of me.’
‘Oh, it was very understandable.’
All at once his usually graceful body had become oddly stiff and awkward. Neither of us spoke again.
When we returned to the table, Bibi exclaimed: ‘How energetic you both are! You seem to have been away for ages.’ The Fleishmanns had also been dancing, returning to the table just as we were resuming our seats. Mrs Fleishmann took a handkerchief out of her bag and dabbed at her upper lip and firm, rounded chin.
‘I thought that this place was supposed to be air-conditioned’, she said.
‘Yes, it is air-conditioned,’ Nishimura confirmed; he had proudly told us this as soon as we had entered.
‘Well, it certainly didn’t feel like it on the floor.… Did you see those two geisha dancing together? It was one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen.’
Starkie said in his gruff yet over-stressed voice: ‘ I don’t understand all this one hears about Japanese women being so attractive. To me they’re like the Japanese dolls—pretty, of course, but sexless, entirely sexless. No appeal at all.’
‘Joe wouldn’t agree about that. Would you, darling?’ Mrs Fleishmann said.
‘Japanese women? I think they’re gorgeous.’
Yuki looked first at Fleishmann from under his long eyelashes and then at Starkie. His lips parted in a small, secret smile.
Soon Bill asked me to dance.
‘What’s come over you? We haven’t danced for years,’ I said as he propelled me across the floor with more vigour than finesse so that I bumped into the two geisha, who at once separated, tottering away from each other and raising tiny hands to their mouths as they giggled their apologies.
‘You seemed to be so eager to dance.’
‘Did you mind my dancing with Sasha?’
‘Of course not. Why should I?’
‘What do you mean?’ His face began to flush; his hand gripped mine tighter.
‘Nothing.’
When we returned to the table, Starkie and Yuki were having some kind of argument.
‘Yes, I knew you’d say that. God! I just knew you’d say that. Wouldn’t you have known he’d say that, Bibi?’
‘Oh, don’t be such a bore,’ Bibi said goodnaturedly.
‘I think that you are very illogical,’ Yuki said, nibbling on the words, his small mouth gathered into a pout.
‘Illogical! Illogical!’ Starkie looked at each of us in turn. ‘ Well, that takes some beating. Now would you—’ he turned to Nishimura—‘ would you say that I was illogical? Would you? I mean, you know what we’re talking about. You know something about Japanese history, don’t you?’
Obviously terrified at having to give any opinion at all, Nishimura smiled nervously, and then glanced down at the tablecloth.
Bibi picked up her bag. ‘I’m beginning to get bored here. Let’s all go to Mi-fuku. Joe and Rachel want to see Mi-fuku. How about it?’
‘Do you mean sister-boy bar?’ Nishimura asked.
Bibi nodded. ‘You’ll come with us, won’t you?’ she said to me. ‘You know about the sister-boy bars, don’t you?’
‘I’ve heard about them, but I’ve never been to one.’
‘Then this one will amuse you. To Japanese there’s nothing strange in ordinary people going to them. We often go, don’t we, Sasha? We know all the boys there. In fact, last summer two of them came and spent a weekend at Abekawa with us. Our only stipulation was that they should not appear in drag. We have a bad enough reputation in Abekawa without that.’
Sasha laughed. ‘But needless to say as soon as they arrived they asked if they could try on some of Bibi’s clothes.’
‘And I must say that they looked far more elegant in them than in those dreadful flowered kimonos they wear at the bar,’ Bibi took up.
‘I don’t know if this is quite my kind of thing,’ Starkie said.
‘I should have thought that it was very much your kind of thing,’ Bibi retorted.
‘I just loathe effeminacy.’
‘Oh, come on! It will make a change for you.’
Nishimura turned to Bill, puzzled but not alarmed: ‘You wish to go to sister-boy bar?’
‘That’s the idea. Would you like to come with us?’
‘I have been once to sister-boy bar in Atami. I think that foreigners are shocked by such bar.’
‘That depends on the foreigners,’ Sasha said.
As we followed Bibi into the cavern-like bar, its walls draped with festoons of purple silk and its narrow banquettes covered in black velvet worn to patches of threadbare silver at the seats, as though the dim lights above them were being reflected in muddy puddles, a host of screeching, giggling ‘girls’ descended on us, swinging forward on their high lacquered clogs and fluttering fans before their mask-like faces. One grabbed my coat, another caught my arm, crying out, ‘Please, please.’ Like Starkie, I realised that I just loathed effeminacy. It was nothing logical—my reason told me that if it amused or satisfied these boys to be girls, then they had the right to be girls; and yet as the small, claw-like hand, coated with a liquid white paint, still rested on my forearm, I wanted to push it off.
‘It doesn’t upset you?’ Bibi said.
‘Of course not.’
‘We call this one Michiko. She looks so like the Crown Princess.’
‘Yes, yes, princess, me princess!’ The boy pointed at himself in the Japanese fashion, forefinger to snub nose, as he grinned to reveal teeth as white and sharp as a stoat’s.
‘Aren’t they cute?’ Rachel Fleishmann said, settling herself on the banquette beside me. But her expression, no doubt like my own, was one of vague disgust and alarm. ‘Now, Joe!’ Joe had perched himself at the bar with Bill and Yuki. ‘ I hope that you’re going to behave yourself.’ She gave her throaty laugh. ‘It’s bad enough having him chasing real girls. If he went after one of these, I’d never forgive him. Or myself.’
‘Now, honey, what are you making me out to be? A pervert or something?’
The boy called Michiko stretched out his hand on top of mine and was delighted to discover that mine was considerably larger.
‘Relax.’ Bibi leant across the banquette to admonish me.
‘I am relaxed.’
‘You look as if you thought that you were going to be offered up as a human sacrifice.’ She put an arm round the shoulders of the diminutive creature beside her, the only one of the boys to be in western dress. His beehive of hair was an improbable shade of orange; his falsies, thrusting up through a black woollen sweater shot with gold threads, were the same size as Rachel’s breasts opposite to him, although otherwise his skinny frame provided a sad contrast to her robust Jewish voluptuousness. ‘This is Marlene. She has the best legs. Or so she likes to think. She’s been here longer than anyone except La Traviata. She’s a great favourite with the Greek seamen. She even speaks a little Greek. Don’t you?’
Marlene produced what I assumed to be some obscenities in Greek since it caused a swarthy man with a moustache at the neighbouring banquette to turn round and indulge in a lengthy exchange of Greek back-chat in a manner at once affectionate and brutal. This was terminated when Marlene suddenly threw his arms around Bibi to announce in English: ‘This is girl I love! I am Lesbian girl.’ He leant forward, pursed his lips and then made a farting noise in the face of the Greek. All the other boys went off into shrieks of laughter.
The proprietor, an elderly man with liver-coloured patches on the backs of his hands and under his bloodshot eyes, had been talking in an undertone to Sasha at one end of the bar, their heads close together. Now he straightened to scold Marlene in Japanese.
This reminded Rachel to scold her husband. ‘Now, Joe! Remember what I said! Remember!’
‘Honey, if you only knew! I’m not interested. I’m just not interested in this kind of—’
‘You’re interested in anything in a skirt.’
Bill caught my eye and winked. He had got into conversation with an elderly German who, it turned out, was captain of a freighter at present in port. The German was explaining that he came to this bar, not because he was interested in boys, but because he found it easier to remain faithful to his wife in such a place than if he went to a bar with girls in it. The nails on his rough old hands were varnished pink.
Starkie was saying to Nishimura: ‘No, now I want to buy you a drink. Whatever you want, you name it.’ He was obviously slightly drunk. ‘ No, that’s enough of that crap: I buy the drinks! O.K.?’ He banged with his glass on the counter of the bar until the proprietor went over to him, leaving Sasha alone. Nishimura saw me gazing in their direction and bowed stiffly from the stool on which he was perched. He was also slightly drunk.
Suddenly Yuki who had been giggling in a corner with a sallow, tall ‘girl’ in a kimono of dark blue colour and an unusually restrained pattern, jumped up and flounced over to where Starkie and Nishimura were sitting. He said something to Starkie in a voice so low and rapid that I could not hear it.
‘All right, all right. So what?’Starkie replied.
‘That’s La Traviata,’ Bibi was saying to me simultaneously. ‘The one that Yuki has just left. She’s awfully pathetic really. She was once the proprietor’s girl friend, years and years ago. They started up the bar together. But there’ve been innumerable ones since her. She goes in and out of hospital with T. B. The proprietor—he’s half Turkish, you know—would like to send her back to her village but of course she doesn’t want to return there. So she hangs on and on. No one ever asks for her, she seldom even gets a drink out of a customer. And as she beds down with all the other girls in a dormitory upstairs, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she’d infected some of them as well.’
‘La Traviata’ knew that we were talking about him; his dark eyes above the aqui
line nose, in the puffily white face, were fixed on us.
Suddenly Yuki’s voice was raised. ‘So I go! I go!’ He grabbed at Starkie’s glass, but the American, obviously prepared for what he was planning to do, got his hand over it first. Briefly they struggled, Starkie swaying back and forth on the stool and Yuki swaying above him, while Nishimura rose and backed away. Bill jumped up and hastened over.
‘Now that’s enough of that. Stop it!’
But he arrived too late. Yuki, bent himself double, clutching at his hand from which blood began to trickle on to the black tiled floor. ‘La Traviata’ gave a piercing scream and then rushed over to Yuki, to gaze down at the blood, lips apart as though eager to lap it up. Starkie began to beat a hand on the bar counter: ‘My God, my God, my God! What have I done? What have done?’ Since fragments of the broken glass still littered the counter, a splinter eventually entered his thumb. Screwing up his face in simulated agony he jerked it out, then plugged his mouth with the thumb like a huge, disconsolate baby.
In all this pandemonium Bibi and Sasha remained unmoved. ‘It always ends like this,’ Bibi said, picking up her glass and sipping from it. ‘I think it’s the only way they can manage to have satisfactory sex these days.’
‘I leave! Now I leave!’ Yuki’s hand had been bound up in a towel.
Starkie extended an arm: ‘No, Yuki! Wait! Yuki, wait!’
Yuki rushed out, followed by ‘La Traviata’ and ‘Michiko’. Excited squeals could be heard from outside. Then the two ‘girls’ returned.
‘Where is he?’ Starkie enquired, moving aside, drink in hand, for the proprietor, who was attempting to sweep up the glass with an expression of complete uninterest and even boredom on his face.
‘Yuki gone!’ said ‘La Traviata’ with conaderable satisfaction.
‘Oh, my God!’ Starkie clutched his head with both hands.
‘Now you know very well, Tom, that if he’s gone, he’s gone no farther than your hotel,’ Bibi said.
‘But he said that this was to be my last chance. That’s what he told me the day before yesterday when we had that terrible row at Osaka station. And now he’s met that awful Frenchman I told you about, that university teacher. Oh, what am I going to do?’