by Vann Chow
The White Man
and the
Pachinko Girl
by Vann Chow
The Pachinko Girl
Part I: The White Man and the Pachinko Girl
Part II: The Kiss of the Pachinko Girl
Part III: The Secret of the Pachinko Girl
THE WHITE MAN AND THE PACHINKO GIRL Copyright © 2016 by Vann Chow
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For information contact address www.vannchow.com
Book and Cover design by Vann Chow
ISBN: 1534701834
First Edition: December 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Recognition
THE WHITE MAN AND THE PACHINKO GIRL of the Tokyo Faces Series has been awarded the 2016 Wattys under the Hidden Gems category, selected from among almost 140K entries. Wattys is th e world’s largest online writing competition hosted by Wattpad, a global multiplatform entertainment company for original stories.
Words From The Author
The Pachinko Girl is an ambitious story about a group of people in Japan whose lives intersected because of a series of mysterious deaths. The story is told in three parts. The first two parts were published as The White Man And The Pachinko Girl and The Kiss Of The Pachinko Girl at the end of 2015 and 2016 respectively, and the third and final part, The Secrets of the Pachinko Girl is planned for release at the end of 2017.
The story was a story that was inspired by social injustice and crimes against women and underprivileged minorities in Asia. The story was not based on one singular person's story but the collective stories of many that I have gathered through many years of research in gender roles, relationships, as well as sex and crimes in societies that still hold on strongly to traditions. While the book intended to bring awareness and understanding to the lives and hopes of a certain group of people in Asia, it is, to me at least, a work of art, a work of self-expression and healing for me, and not a tool for entertainment and might cause indigestion for those unused to similar type of works.
The pace of the books were not the pace that one would expect from common contemporary crime fictions. And readers won't be able to guess where the story is going even when they have completed part one or even part two of the story. There was no model for the story. Book agents and content publishers have asked me to tell them if they could think of them as “an Asian version” of some great book series, or book series like such and such with an exotic twist. I really appreciate their efforts in trying to understand it, but no, there was no easy way to explain the books. I wouldn't dare to compare myself to Charles Bulkowski, but indeed, the story was born out of similar frantic desperation in as in Bulkowski's Tales of Ordinary Madness. Frantic desperation was a state of mind that was unique and personal to each of us, with no two persons experiencing it the same way.
The Pachinko Girl was the condensation of my struggle as an Asian woman in my younger years. It was the greatest surprise to me, therefore, when I learnt that the book has won an award. I am glad to hear that there are people out there who liked the stories, but perhaps, they liked them not only because of the stories but that they have found the consolation, empathy, and acceptance of selves they needed.
I dedicate the story to all of us who feel we might be a little bit flawed inside.
“Hell and heaven are the hearts of men.”
Japanese proverb.
Prologue
“You know what, Sumisu -san, you're the first Sumisu I've ever met.” Mr. Uchida slid his food tray next to Smith's. “Welcome to our company. Welcome to Japan!” He gave Smith a hearty slap on the back as encouragement.
“Thank you,” Smith replied with a smile. He held up his knife to cut into the Tonkatsu on his plate, but he decided that this was as good an opportunity as any to raise a question he’d had in the back of his mind since that morning, the first day of his external business assignment in Japan. Smith lowered his knife again. “I can't help but notice that you're all calling me Sumisu ,” Smith replied. “I'm a regular Smith. Sh-mith. It came from the German word, Schmidt. It would be fine to end it with the 't' sound if the 'th' sound is too difficult for some, but to add a 'su' to the end of it is really just plain wrong.”
“I know your name. Sumisu is one of the most popular Western names in Japan. If there's a Gaijin in a movie, a play, or a dialogue in an English language textbook, he would be a Sumisu , ” Mr. Uchida explained as he sat himself down on the plastic chair. His eyes fixated on the whipped cream on Smith's apple strudel. “You're of German descent? Many Japanese are fascinated by German culture. Your colleagues would be thrilled to make your acquaintance,” he mused.
“Well, uh, yeah. I don't know any of that,” Smith contemplated the historical implications of the Japanese admiration for the Germans and how his ancestors had to hide their German blood by Ameicanizing their lastnames to avoid being seen as 'the enemy'.
He put his knife into the Tonkatsu. Steam rose from the deep-fried pork cutlet sliced open in front of him, quickly fogging his glasses. In the time that had elapsed before his glasses regained clarity, Smith had decided that the Tonkatsu looked uncannily like a Viennese Schnitzel.
“It might sound a little strange, Sumisu -san, but I have to tell you this: meeting a real Sumisu for the first time in my life excites me,” Mr. Uchida had bunched up the paper napkin in his hand as he spoke. “It's almost like meeting your pen pal from childhood for the first time.”
“Really?” Smith squinted his eyes with suspicion as he listened to his colleague's unfounded admiration for him. He decided that it was best to focus his mind on the challenging task of leaving as little crumbs on the plate as possible.
“I have always imagined what Sumisu looks like. I think most Japanese do, because we hear so much about him, everywhere,” Mr. Uchida explained his overt interest in the simple subject of Smith's last name. “ Sumisu could really be anyone's imagination. I'm glad mine doesn't deviate too far from the real thing,” Mr. Uchida said. He had now turned his head toward Smith and was appraising him as if he were a priceless antique.
Albeit his will to fight it, the exchange had made Smith uncomfortable. The fact that Smith was such a commonly known Western surname in Japan that any foreigner was essentially a Smith to them did not sit well with him.
“God, what strange ways you lead us to question the importance of our individual existence,” Smith thought.
1. Pachinko Parlor
There was no place like the Passage in Ikebukuro, Tokyo at 10 PM every night. Recently renovated, this massive gambling establishment that only housed pachinko machines could easily be mistaken for a ladies’ department store by the unknowing eyes of the foreigners. Its blazing fluorescent light lit entrance and grandiose lobby were covered by two to three hundred intense light bulbs all cleverly arranged on the ceiling and behind the translucent floorboards to direct all the stumbling pedestrians from the relative gloominess of the outside world to the top of the staircase where the gambling activities were concentrated. It was a living entity, convulsing with violent laughter and angry cries over a collage of no
ises coming from the Pachinko slot machines. As if vying for attention, the pre-recorded voices of young females from the under-clad cartoon characters depicted on the plastic covers of the machines, grew ever more high-pitched and pushy when too much time had gone by in idleness after the last customer left, full-handed or empty-handed. With the shrewdness of jealous girlfriends who tried to seduce their married lovers into the endless abyss of disloyalty and ensuing unhappy divorces, the computer programs inside these Pachinkos would carefully select new sales pitches based on the length of its idle time and the weight of the reservoir where all the pinballs were collected. Eventually, they would be rewarded by the pinball that pushed through the plastic flaps at the inserting slots and be activated into a frenzy mode consisting of even more shrill sales pitches and blinking tiny light bulbs arranged on the upright panels in a diamond or heart shape. They would greet the white-collar man who, typically, either had too much to drink or too heavy a briefcase to carry to continue on his search for the lucky machine of the night. Enticed by the comfort of the worn out leather stool before a particular machine that seemed to forebode a great conclusion to his lonesome, trying day at work, the man would try his luck.
Among these cheerless men, only occasionally stirred to irritation by the clanking sound of steel balls pouring out in an enviously large quantity into the winning buckets of their lucky yet despicable neighbors, was a white man in his fifties sporting a wrinkly gray suit called Smith. A bottle of half-empty Lipovitan in his hand, a well-known brand of energy drink that was even more well known for its aphrodisiac effects which he did not know because he did not really read Japanese, he inserted the 387th ball of the night into the same machine he had been playing for the past hour and a half. He habitually murmured under his breath the part of the Lord’s Prayer that said ‘Give us today our daily bread’ multiple times in quick succession.
The pinball dropped through the panel making various jingly noises as it hit the barriers on its way down. Smith dabbed his sweaty forehead nervously with the sleeves of his suit as his eyes glued painstakingly onto the ball watching it cascade downwards under the force of gravity and pure chance. He had a good feeling in his gut. “This is it. This is it!” He whispered to himself. He followed the fall of the ball so intently that he scooted off his leather stool and anchored both of his arms on the two sides of the screen to support his body weight leaning forward in anticipation for the revelation of his fate. His change of posture was so dramatic that the people surrounding him, paused their games momentarily to watch him and see how his game turned out. Even the girl who was serving drinks in the parlor had stopped dead in her tracks to watch as she passed by on her way back to the workstation. When the ball slipped through the lowest pair of flippers, a collective gasp was to be heard in the vicinity of Smith’s Pachinko machine. However, in a quarter of a second, it transformed itself into a collective sigh as the ball fell into the zero bracket at the bottom making an almost inaudible, ominous ping.
“Chikuso!” Smith slapped his sweaty palm on the glass panel in frustration. Then he sighed. As far as he could remember, he had never been lucky anyway. Since there were only about 15 balls left in his coin cup from the four hundred he bought at the beginning of the night, he decided that there was no better time to leave. At least he had not lost everything. “Knowing when is the right time to leave,” he said to himself, “ is the true wisdom of life.”
Certainly, one would argue that he should never have gone into the parlor in the first place if he was indeed a wise man and could otherwise avoid wasting five thousand Yen in a matter of hours. However, to be honest, he had nothing else better to do on a Friday night like this when life left him on his own accord. It was a rare and peaceful night with no work to catch up, no company activities to attend, no customers to settai or entertain before the signing of contracts, and no late-night phone calls from the Americans to answer on the Friday before the Thanksgiving weekend. He had looked forward to this empty slot in his schedule for about two months now, and he was hell bent on making use of this precious personal time to recuperate. Perhaps he would meet a nice Japanese woman and have a whirlwind love affair with her. Now that the weekend had arrived, however, he realized that he did not really have anything particularly enriching or relaxing to fill his schedule with, nor was he shameless enough to risk embarrassing himself in front of the opposite sex, whom he didn’t know where to meet to begin with, and certainly not with his broken Japanese. What could he even say to them? “ Konichiwa. Watashi wa Smith desu. Hajimemashite. Ima hima?” Good afternoon. My name is Smith. Very nice to meet you. Are you free now?
The last time he used that phrase was to a thirty-something-year-old Japanese woman reading a Time Magazine in a small coffee shop by his office building about a year and a half ago. It was when he’d first transferred to Japan, and he was not even thinking of hitting on her. It was just one of those moments on a nice day when you want to make small talk with people, and it did not really matter whom it was with. Noting that she was reading an American news magazine, he thought they might be able to perhaps make a simple conversation in English after the initial introduction in Japanese. They didn’t even go beyond that, though. In reply to his uninvited disruption, she only shot him a look of disgust and continued reading her magazine as if he was invisible, making him so uncomfortable that he decided to leave on his own accord. After that, he was terrified of Japanese women, except his own secretary at work who was always courteous to him even though he suspected that it was only because he was her boss. Japanese women, in his opinion, turned out to be far more capable of inflicting pain on men due to the sheer improbability that a simple facial gesture they made could mean so much more than the abusive language of women, much taller and bigger usually as well, in his home country.
And it wasn’t like he had someone to go home to. His family, an ex-wife and two already married kids of twenty-five and twenty-eight, were miles away in Ohio. If he was to go back home today as he secretly yearned, he doubted that anyone would welcome him in the greatly dramatized ceremonious way the ‘Priceless’ Visa commercials used to portray a family reunion to be – the reunion, in reality, was often much less sympathetic and much more frightening. His wife had filed divorce six months ago while he was in Japan. The possibility of his wife being dissatisfied with him after so many years of peaceful domestic life together was such a distant thought that he reserved the next flight homeward the same day he received the notice from her lawyer, thinking that it was only a misunderstanding. As it turned out, it was not. He begged, and he pleaded. He admitted to everything she accused him of and apologized in the most heartwarming fashion any living man could ever perform. “ But why don’t you let me go?” His wife said, however, “We had stopped loving each other since years ago,” and dispelled any notion that she might even consider withdrawing the case. She talked about their extinguished love with such conviction that Smith, usually dexterous in business negotiation, was absolutely dumbfounded. He knew it would not matter that he proved her wrong by showing how much he still loved her because she had apparently stopped loving him. And he was disinterested to know when exactly that had happened. He had always listened to his wife. He thought he could listen to her one last time. And so quietly, he left the house, suitcases completely untouched in the back of his Volkswagen and drove back to the airport the next morning while his wife was sound asleep in the bedroom, exhausted from the previous night of debate. So here he was, alone in Tokyo, the true City that Never Sleeps, located on the east side of Honshu Island, drowning in pain among twelve million Japanese people on a Friday night with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
As he had exhausted his wallet after the 387 th game and was feeling kind of lethargic, he pulled his coin bucket out from the cup holder and dragged himself up to leave. His feet had grown numb from hours of sitting in the office and then the Pachinko parlor making him stagger. As he stood there trying to wait for the sensation of his two legs to com
e back to him, he glanced around him. The Japanese men that had once curiously turned their heads away from their own games to watch his had resumed theirs and became immediately absorbed into their own world that nobody seemed to even have time to give his bad fortune a second thought, let alone a compassionate grunt. Knowing that he would not get much sympathy out of this crowd, he took a deep breath, sucking in the bitter, invisible insults underlying the stolid atmosphere of the parlor. He regretted it, however, when the thick scent of second-hand cigarette smoke mixed with the sourness of his own sweat hit his senses. He slowly stumbled towards the staircase, pouring the rest of the steel balls into a losing fellow’s coin cup on his way out.
Only when the sliding glass doors opened did he realized it was a huge mistake not to take more interest in watching Japanese television. It was pouring outside, and he did not have an umbrella with him.
“What a fabulous country!” He threw his hands up in dismay and yelled sarcastically to the salarymen around as they slipped past him to leave. From his sour expression, they did not need to know English to understand what he said. The face of self-pity was universally understood.
2. The Bully
The alarm did not go off as usual at 6:30 AM and Smith only realized this when the hour hand struck seven.
“Ahhh! Saiyaku !” He knocked his disloyal digital alarm clock off the bedside table in a rage. It rolled a couple of times on the carpeted floor before coming to a stop under the dressing table. Already late, Smith shot up from the bed trying to get dressed for work as soon as possible. As he did so, however, an unpleasant wave of woozy, dull pain struck him down with such force that he fell to his knees. Bracing his aching head with both hands, he noticed the florescent SAT on the alarm clock that was lying on the floor through the gap between his two forearms.