by Vann Chow
“ U-so! No way!” It was a Saturday. A nervous-wreck as he was, naturally, he did not choose to believe it so quickly. He pulled apart the curtains of the small bedroom window and peered down at the parking lot three levels down to look for proof. To his surprise, almost all of the parking spots were still occupied, and his colleague, Nakamura-san's Honda, was still parked in its usual spot A-32. Its wheels aligned perfectly parallel to the white painted lines on the two sides of the parking spot. “U-so!” he said again. How could he forget! It was the weekend. The first weekend he had all to himself for a very long time since he started working there. In his ridiculous looking white-and-gray-striped pajamas, he jumped up and down on his mattress like a kid who just heard school was canceled for the day, with the biggest, brightest and happiest smile on his face until a migraine caught him off guard and pulled him down to the ground again as if a huge WWF fighter had crashed down on him from one corner of the fighting ring. As he lay on his bed rolling in pain, he laughed hysterically at his foolishness. It had scared his wits out of him when he thought he had overslept for work. He could not stop laughing still after a minute has gone by – the aftereffect of a self-induced panic attack.
After the panting had subdued from this early morning shock, clumsily Smith staggered into the narrow kitchen in his shoebox size apartment, provided by his company as a dormitory for single men, and started to rummage through the overhead cabinets for the can of Gyokuro green tea he brought back from his Kyoto business trip a couple months back. However, as soon as he found the can, the next few steps of this hangover-morning routine were relatively easy. Smith did it with the efficiency and precision of a machine designed, as if, solely for making tea. He nicked a chuck of green tea the size of a sugar cube from the compressed tea brick inside the can, crushing the tea leaves with technique between his thumb and forefinger as he went and sprinkled them inside the electric kettle with a gentle circular motion, using only his wrist. Deftly, he filled the kettle with tap water and turned the power knob to the third position that said Medium-High. Even with his eyes closed, for the wave of nausea had hit him again, he did not have to fumble around for the metal lid of the tea can. He had done this so many times in the one and half year in Japan that he knew exactly where the lid would be sitting already. With a quick sleight of hand, the tea can was resealed and skillfully replaced back into its original location on the cabinet where it was always hidden behind the cheaper, non-medicinal green tea he bought from the super-market downstairs for daily drinking and serving guests.
When the tea was done, Smith drank two cups of it in quick succession. By now, he was already numb to the poignant fragrance of the tea that he had stopped pausing between gulps to savor it lavishly as he used to. He used to be so careful about not wasting any of the Gyokuro tea, not only because of how expensive it was but also how good it tasted. Between every gulp, he would let it glide on top of his tongue and roll around his mouth until his taste buds were all fully saturated with the refreshing flavor of it. Then slowly, he would let the tea trickled down his throat, tickling it with a nice, warm sensation, which he liked so much, before swallowing everything. Now, he only saw it as a headache remedy, no more and no less. Almost immediately, his head had stopped throbbing and his vision cleared up. It happened almost instantly. It made him wonder whether the green tea was curing his hangover or his deprivation of the tea itself. Can one be addicted to tea? The rest of the world certainly was and still is, he thought to himself.
Because he did not own a television, Smith’s only way to the outside world, apart from listening to occasional exchanges of news inside the company that was in English, which was minimal because of how few other English-speakers there were and that it was considered impolite to engage in a long conversation in a foreign language in the presence of others who do not understand, was to read the International Herald Tribune . The International Herald Tribune was the global edition of the New York Times . There happened to be an article on page 7 about the CEO of the American stainless steel supplier and manufacturing company, Wesley and Sons, with whom he went to school with back in the days. Apparently, Gregory H. Wesley had filed, on the day before the Thanksgiving Thursday, for a legal separation with his wife Marian Wesley after 28 years of marriage. Wesley, at 55 years old, and his wife, 52, who had two grown sons together, both agreed that their marital relationship had become incompatible, and they were reported to be living separate and apart for years already. According to the report, Wesley, the fifth generation of the Wesley family, had agreed to evenly split their properties and assets, including shares of Wesley and Sons.
Then on page 21 of the same newspaper in the Discussion section, Smith found another article concerning his divorce, speculating the real reasons behind the split of the Wesley couple. According to it, there were rumors that Wesley was having an affair with a much younger and more attractive woman thirty years his junior. Many who sighted the couple believed the woman to be an ex- Playboy model who went by the name of Ashantia whose photograph was also displayed on the paper. Rumor had it that Greg had met her through a friend of a friend who invited him to a huge corporate party staffed with bunny girls as ‘facilitators’.
At that point, Smith put down the paper on the table and let out a sigh. He already knew the rest of the story. This kind of things happened all the time in Japan. The only difference between having an affair here and having an affair there was that the American men would always end up losing half of his estate, while Japanese men would only earn more respect from their subordinates. Having an affair with a beautiful, younger woman was a sign of prowess and affluence. Their wives at home, as if collectively educated by rulebooks distributed nationally on ‘proper’ marriage etiquette, would turn a blind eye on their disloyalty quietly.
Still, seeing news like that amazed him because he and Greg were acquaintances from way back. Greg was such a pitiful wimp when they were still in St. Luke’s together as far as he could recall. He could not imagine why anyone would be attracted to Greg at all. Everyone at school knew that he was going to inherit some kind of family business, but judging from the emaciated look on his face and his scrawny body, nobody thought that he would inherit anything more than a puny little corner pharmacy where he could have access to endless supplies of Parker’s Pain Relief Cream, which he would certainly need from all abuses he took in school. Then after they graduated, Greg went to Yale , and Smith went to Ohio State . Greg moved to New York and took over his dad’s fledgling material supply business and went on to take his master in business administration in North Western . In the years followed, he had managed to turn Wesley and Sons into a multinational company with net sales of 4 billion US dollars, while Smith got kicked out of the Ohio State Buckeyes football team for some dilly-dallying he refused to remember, decided that he probably need a real job from then on when he could no longer play football anymore. Smith switched from the Department of Philosophy to Department of Chemistry and became the average salaryman that he was today, working for a company that had business deals with Gregory H. Wesley's, someone he thought many years ago would be the last person in the whole wide world he would have any respect for. Even now when both of them were in the process of divorcing their wives, Greg had to show himself off by flaunting his new found girlfriend in front of the media to make sure that the insulting news would end up in a newspaper that came all the way from New York into his tiny single-man company dormitory in Ikebukuro, Japan for him to see.
Smith sighed again. He felt as if he had heard similar stories before. The wimp at school had grown to become stronger than the bully. By some devious twist of fate, he would pop back into your life years later and take his revenge in the most unimaginable ways, and make sure that you suffered as much, or more than he ever did before. “Where did I hear stories like that from?” Smith asked himself. “Was it from my father? Perhaps from grandpa?” He loathed the thought of being born into a family of losers.
3. The Emergency<
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It was 3 PM in the afternoon when the sudden onset of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C Minor from his cell phone shook him out of his afternoon stupor. His anxiety level always heightened whenever his cell phone rang outside of the office because he would have to risk making a fool of himself with his limited Japanese when his secretary was not around to help. Luckily, a quick glance at the front display revealed the caller to be Andy Wilkinson; an American colleague sent over from the States on a one-year assignment three years ago who still hadn’t got sent back to the home office yet. The incompetent Human Resource people claimed that they were unable to locate a job opening for Andy back in the US office at his level because he had since then been promoted to a project manager during his assignment in Japan. With three years of experience living in Tokyo under his belt, Andy would help Smith get around in Tokyo while Smith would give him general advice on life in return. So Andy, a young man who was stuck in Japan indefinitely, and Smith, who was a novice in this society, had become best buddies since the first day they met at the office despite their glaring twenty years’ age difference. Besides, both of them were huge Buckeye fans. When Andy was not schmoozing with off-duty bar girls, he would call Smith up for some fun pastime activities together.
Seeing the caller was him, Smith flipped his cell phone open and answered cheerfully.
“Hey! How’s it going?” he said.
“– Tatsukete kudasai. Tatsukete! ” A stranger’s voice had come from the other end of the line. ‘Tatsukete’ was the word for ‘help’ in Japanese. Caught off guard by the plea for help, Smith found himself speechless. The voice belonged to a girl who sounded no more than twenty years old. He wanted to ask who she was and what happened to her, but in the moment of shock, he had left all his Japanese outside the door. His mind raced to search for the right phrase in the back of the Living in Japan for Gaijin book he studied from time to time during the subway ride to work that might come in handy in this kind of situation. Yet his mind drew a total blank, and he could remember nothing useful. Before long the girl started to speak again. Her torrent of words was interspersed here and there with two ominous words he recognized, “ Tatsuekete kudasai” , or please help . Her voice was trembling, and she sounded frightened.
“ Ano… Nan ga ata? ” He finally thought of a useful phrase and asked her what had happened.
In response to his query, Smith only heard a series of deep, heavy breathing followed by some rustling noises that indicating that she was making a lot of movements. Then he heard a gasp. The call was cut off immediately after, leaving nothing but a dreadful silence behind. Smith stood frozen in his spot not sure exactly what had happened and how he should proceed. In fact, he was not even sure what had happened. It was 3 PM on an autumn Saturday afternoon. What kind of atrocities could any woman be facing on a day like that? A day almost worthy of being glorified eternally by the brush strokes of Monet for those who come after to admire? And why was she using Andy’s phone? What had happened to Andy?
Before he had time to think this through, the phone rang again. It was coming from the same number. This time, Smith did not hesitate to answer the call. He minded himself to focus and make sure he catches any useful information regarding the girl’s identity, her situation and Andy’s.
“Moshi moshi. Smith-desu!” Hello, this is Smith, he said, greeting the caller with Japanese this time.
“Hey!” In came Andy’s juvenile’s voice from the other end. The tone of his voice morphed into a sound of pain. “I-tai, i-tai, i-tai….” Smith heard him say. It didn’t seem to be directed at him, though.
“Where are you? Are you okay? What’s wrong with you?” Smith asked, concerned.
“What’s wrong with me? I should ask you what’s wrong,” Andy blared into the phone. “I-tai, i-tai, i-tai….” He said again to the other person Smith could not see.
“What?”
“What do you mean ‘what’?”
“I’m asking you! Are you hurt?”
“Well, why? My feelings are hurt because you’re not here.”
“Where?”
“Shibuya. The karaoke lounge in Shibuya! Did you forget?” Andy shouted into the phone over a background of cheesy Japanese pop music. Not hearing any response from Smith’s side, he blared into the phone again, “It’s the third station on the purple line! The PUR-PLE line! Dogen-zaka, write it down.” Then a wave of girlish giggling was heard in the far distance. “I-tai, i-tai, i-tai…. baby, stop! Kinchiru! This is forbidden! Do you understand?”
“So you mean you are fine?”
“Why would I be? The girls here are giving me the time of my life. There are eleven of them here! Almost double that time the Korean dude was here. But this Yoshida guy will be here at 6, so you’ve gotta come over here ASAP. We only have the girls till 5:30!” The call ended abruptly as soon as Andy finished his sentence.
“Fuck,” Smith threw his cell phone angrily on his bed. While Andy was having the time of his life singing karaoke with the bar girls, he was worrying himself about some imaginary nonsense.
“I am going to make sure that sucker gets a piece of my mind,” He went into the bathroom to change.
4. Misa Hayami
The club Andy was talking about was located on Dogen-zaka, or Dogen’s Hill, one of the busiest entertainment districts in Tokyo concentrated with nightclubs and love hotels. At this hour in the afternoon, Dogen-zaka looked harmless enough. Like most Tokyo streets, its two banks were lined with stores that sold the latest and greatest creations from all around the world, whether it was telecommunication devices or women’s accessories, CD records or healthy drinks. If it was not necessary, Smith preferred to avoid walking on streets like that where it was nearly impossible for one to stay focused on his track because every step he took he would open up a new landscape of even more distractions. Apart from the plethora of billboard commercials he felt compelled to read, he would inevitably be tackled by some overtly enthusiastic road-side salesmen trying to talk to him about mobile services or something that was equivalent to the Japanese Scientology. And since people from all walks of life would pour into Shibuya on the weekend to shop or dine, many companies would seize the opportunity and send their staff out to conduct a survey on the streets with research questions like what the average number of magazines Tokyo households subscribed to, the amount of time a housewife spent on cleaning bathrooms, or the percentage of teenagers who used this type of deodorant versus competitors. Whenever that would happen, the pedestrian ways would be jammed as badly as the car traffic.
Given his appearance, Smith suspected that he was targeted less than an average ‘Tokyian.' The English level of the Japanese youth was getting better and better, and it started to worry him, though. Not only would he be stopped by salesmen, sometimes he would be stopped on the roads by eager university students who wanted to practice the foreign languages and would not give up any potential opportunity to practice them. Oddly, once he was pulled over in the line to buy coffee by a pair of French literature majors who thought he was French and wanted him to teach them how to order their drinks in French. Another time, a boy stopped him on his way to the subway station who asked if he would like to help him with his study in fluent German. At least that was what it sounded like to him. Smith sometimes wondered whether his midwestern accent was really that hard to follow that he was beginning to sound like Europeans. While he was still in college, he had explored both French and German before he decided on Japanese. Therefore, he was able to politely reply in the language of inquiry, however, rusty it may be, that he was actually an American who speaks American English (to deter those students who only wanted to learn British English) and was very sorry (well, not really) that he could not help them.
When he entered the Metropol Lounge on the fifteenth floor of the Metropol Building after successfully avoiding all the obstacles on his way down Dogen-zaka Road, he was immediately taken to the biggest lounge in the facility at the back where Andy was. Andy had always h
osted his visitors here and had over the years brought in a lot of businesses for them. Almost everyone from the lounge owner to the janitor knew him and would always take good care of any customers who came through his recommendation. He certainly never disclosed that he thought the snacks they provided stunk and their collection of English songs was pitiful. He had stayed a loyal customer because they let him reserve the lounges by day not by hour, which meant whenever he had a guest to host for business in the same evening he could have the girls come in a couple hours earlier before the actual guests arrive, play a few drinking games and have a couple of good sake while underwriting all the charges to the company account.
Contrary to what Smith expected, he was actually glad to see Andy in his old womanizer self, flirting shamelessly with the bar-girls. As he was shoved into the center of the sofa clumsily between some of the more hospitable girls, he tried to listen intently to the voices of the girls as they introduced themselves and tried to match the voice of the mysterious caller. None of them sounded like it, though. Smith was going to confront Andy if he thought making a prank call on him was very funny, but before he could say anything, Andy asked,
“You sounded kinda out of it on the phone. Everything’s alright?”
Still considering the possibility that Andy was the mastermind behind the call, Smith said, “Lately I am just getting a lot of weird calls to my cell. I would hear these bone-chilling breathing sounds, but nobody would talk. These weird Japanese bastards. I got one again just minutes before you called.”