The White Man and the Pachinko Girl

by Vann Chow

  “Why would someone do that to a man like you? I mean this kind of harassment call only happens to attractive women or men like me,” he sounded as if he was insulted that he was not targeted.

  “Yeah, and I don’t think I know anybody well enough to make them hate me, or be obsessed with me that much. One call came like 4 AM at night, and I was so ready to break his fucking neck.”

  “Jesus. You've talked to him?”

  “It's a her.”

  “Tell her to go fuck herself.”

  “Maybe she was at it,” the two men laughed.

  “I have some clues about who that could be. I stopped by the police station and reported it just before I came.” At this point, Smith was pretty sure if Andy was the culprit, he would either call Smith out as a liar, since he never made that many phone calls to him, or start panicking for his foolishness and apologize. But he didn’t do either of those. He said calmly that going to the police was the right thing to do, and then he held out his cell phone to teach Smith how to block all unknown calls with a certain code.

  “That’s alright,” Smith said, “the police will take care of her.” There seemed to be nothing else he could do. Cell phone signals had been quite weak in one corner of his shoebox apartment. The mysterious emergency call could be routed to his number due to some odd signal transfer problems while Andy was trying to call him. Since there was no way to find out whether the caller was, in fact, Andy's doing, he put it out of his mind. Warming up after a couple of seconds, Smith started telling Andy the news he read today about Greg Wesley’s divorce. Andy decided to prod him on the topic he was afraid to touch himself.

  “Have you ever thought about remarrying and settling down here?” Andy interjected as he noticed the sour undertone in Smith’s voice when he spoke of Greg’s newfound romance.

  “In Tokyo?” he said. “Do you know how much an apartment unit costs in here? By the time I finished paying for the flat, I would be dead.”

  “Well, exactly! And you’d want somebody to be by your deathbed crying when you get to that point, right?”

  “Ug-hm. I am not exactly proud of the situation at home, but I did raise two great kids who’d do that for me, don’t forget.”

  “Debra and Ethan are married. I never called my parents, and they never called me. Once you go long distance, you voluntarily gave up your right to be a part of the family. That is how it is. It’s all about the few pennies they save by not making unnecessary calls.”

  “Don’t be so morbid. I’m pretty sure if I was sent to Europe, they would call me to tell me they want to bring their kids to visit every other weekend. Japan is just too far. Too foreign, too intimidating for them.”

  “What’s the big deal with Europe? Americans are too close-minded. Who needs Neuschwanstein when we have our own castle here in the Tokyo Disney Land? Who needs the Roman Coliseum when we have the Tokyo Keibajo (Tokyo’s Horse Racing Stadium)? I don’t care if they never sent me back to the States. I can stay here all my life. I don’t care about those people who think I am being exiled. Look who’s missing out. They treat me like a prince here. The Tokyo Tower is just as impressive as the Eiffel Tower. Even the women smell better here, which reminds me of the point I was going to make. Here, take it.” Andy dug out a business card from his suit pocket and handed it over to Smith. It was in beige color with scattering pink flower paddles printed on one corner. It read Marionette Newton, Professional Matchmaker. Zwei Inc.

  “Give her a call.”

  Smith grumbled at his suggestion. He did not need any matchmaking.

  “Just take it.”

  “No. It’s a fucking waste of time,” Smith dumped the card on the coffee table. “Besides, her name sounds fake. Marionette Newton. What kind of name is that? Next thing I know, she’s gonna ask me to go have tea parties in the backyard with her puppet friends.”

  “As long as she speaks English, who cares?”

  “Oh, so you’ve tried it?” Smith chuckled. Matchmaking was such an absurd idea he could not imagine Andy would give it a try.

  “I was there out of sheer curiosity. She’s good. She handpicked everyone in her book. She did background checks on them and interviewed them one by one to make sure they have a good lineage, good education, and good manners, you know, the whole package. Most of the women you end up meeting are the best of the best. Either an heiress to some big family business or an executive woman whom no ordinary Japanese man dares to court.”

  “Then why aren’t you married? Instead, you are fooling around with these disease-infested whores who would suck Miyamoto’s dick for a thousand yen?” Miyamoto was the ugliest man in their office who wore a comb-over. They were pretty sure he collected blow-up sex dolls and bought all sorts of custom-made outfits for them in his free time.

  “‘Cause I’m not ready.”

  “Somehow I'm not surprised to hear that. And how’d you know I’m ready?”

  “‘Cause… you look like it?”

  “I’m fifty-five, and I just got a divorce.”

  “Exactly.”

  A waitress in the club’s signature pink and black uniform walked in gingerly with a couple of drinks while they were speaking. Quietly she placed the drinks on her platter in front of Andy, tucked the platter under her arm and took out her electronic server book.

  “Hi sir, my name is Misa Hayami, and I will be your server today. Would you like to order some drinks?” And she started to kneel down on the floorboard. She was one of those maid-hostesses. How could one be a maid and a hostess at the same time? Normally, Smith would comment on it, but his mind was preoccupied with something else.

  “Did you call me?” Smith snatched the girl’s wrist. He was ninety percent sure that the voice of the girl in the mysterious phone call belonged to her.

  At his sudden assault, the frightened girl staggered back and knocked the decoration lamp behind her over. The platter and the order device fell out under her arm and rolled away. Andy was aghast.

  “What are you doing?” She shouted while struggling to wriggle her wrist out of his grip.

  “Hey! Take it easy, man.” Andy had stood up from his seat too.

  “No! This girl. It’s the same voice,” he let go of her wrist as he was trying to explain himself. “I’m not trying to hurt her. Far from it.” Now he pointed at the girl. “This girl used your cell phone to call me just now. Did you let your cell phone out of your sight?”

  “Wait. What?”

  “I got a call from some girl, as I told you, just a few minutes before your call. It displayed your numbers, too. And she sounded like she was in some kind of trouble... It was not funny, okay?”

  “Oh! Okay, I see what’s happening now. I was showing the girls what a BlackBerry could do. All these online poker stuff. It went around. I don't care. They are good people here. Typically, it's no big deal you leave your stuff lying around. Baby-chan, did you try to make a call or something?” Andy repeated the question in Japanese.

  The girl shook her head slowly in answer to his question. Smith could not help but look skeptical. Like a frightened animal, she had scooted to the corner of the karaoke box with her back against the wall.

  “It’s just an accident probably,” Andy laughed. “Smith, you don’t have to scare her. She’s just a kid.”

  “Well, I know,” Smith lowered his head, thinking hard how he should approach the situation. When he lifted up his head again, he asked the girl in a serious voice. “Are you alright? Daijoubu desu ka, Hayami ?” Andy listened to his query with a baffled look. When she did not answer, Smith said to Andy, “She gotta be. Here she is, standing right in front of me some 45 minutes later, after asking me what I would like to drink. This is just…” Smith paused there and sighed.

  Andy turned to the girl. “Misa, you cannot just take people’s cell phone and make prank calls like this. I’m going to have to tell Sawada-san.”

  At the sound of her manager’s name, the girl started to sob uncontrollably. One of the hostes
ses in red dress witnessed all these and went to call the manager Sawada-san anyway.

  “What’s going on?” Sawada –san hurried into their lounge and asked.

  “Misa…” The hostess in red said, pointing at Misa, who was crying in the corner.

  Smith stole a glance at the manager and saw a look of panic on his face. His facial expression changed into a look of admonishment and started to yell at Misa, “What did you do to our customers? Apologize now.”

  More tears rolled down her face at his yelling.

  “Get your ass over here, Misa, now! If you don’t want to be fired!” The manager threatened.

  “It’s okay,” Andy stood up from the lounge couch. “Smith, can you just let it go?” Andy asked.

  “I–,” Before Smith could finish saying that he was not offended, but just concerned, the girl had grabbed the stems of two of the champagne flutes from the coffee table and hurled them in Smith’s direction. The flutes smashed on the couch in the space right between Smith’s legs, splashing the champagne all over him from his crotch up to his face. Everyone in the room made a collective gasp when the two glasses made a loud clang on the floor and shattered. Crying, Misa sprinted out of the lounge, dodging Sawada-san’s attempt to stop her. For one reason or another, a surge of guilt swelled in Smith’s chest. He bolted from where he was sitting and ran after the girl, his face still dripping with liquor.

  “Hey!” Smith yelled after her. The girl didn’t stop, beating Smith to the entrance. Smith pushed open the automatic closing doors after her and cried her name again. As he said that Misa had already pushed through the fire exit door and ran down the stairs in a fury. When Smith got there, he paused and peered down the stairwell. He could see Misa’s pink uniform flashing in and out of his view as she jogged down the staircase below, leaving nothing but the sound of her sad wails in her trail. Smith went back out the stairwell and pushed the button for an elevator. They were on the fifteenth floor. Smith could not run down fifteen floors without killing his knees. So he waited impatiently for the elevator and scooted in as soon as it arrived, closing the doors on Sawada-san who had also come out to look for Misa.

  “THIS WILL BE F-A-S-T-E-R!” Smith mouthed the word to Sawada-san, who looked helplessly at him through the gap of the elevator doors as they closed.

  5. The Chase

  Dogen-zaka Road was still as busy as earlier in the afternoon when Smith’s first went into the Metropol Lounge. Smith swept his head nervously left and right trying to locate Misa but to no avail. All of a sudden, he caught a glimpse of the pink and black uniform in the reflection on the glass exterior of a road-side café across the street. It was her , Smith thought to himself, and he hurried across the streets to catch up, completely disregarding the traffic on the three-way intersection. Luckily, the traffic was so congested the cars were hardly moving. Most drivers were kind enough to stop for him. Many had craned their necks outside of their rolled-down windows to watch who this blundering white man in a business suit was chasing after, wondering if they had accidentally run into the sets of a Hollywood action movie in shooting. However, Smith was oblivious to his surroundings. He only thought of Misa and carefully, he weaved through the stopped cars across the streets. However, he lost sight of Misa again when he got to the opposite side. He followed his gut feeling and turned left down the streets, but Misa was nowhere to be seen. Eventually, Smith’s ran out of breath, and his body started to complain, so he had to give up his mission. He sat on a fire hydrant on the side of the road to rest until his panting stopped.

  “What’s the point of running after her anyway? I do not know her. Why should I give a damn about what happened to her?”

  At that moment, his phone rang. It was Andy.

  “Hey, so, here's the story. Sawada just explained to me. He was being a little bit too friendly with the girl a little over an hour ago. He assured me nothing of the sort you'd need to worry about. At least that's what he said.”

  Smith was speechless, hearing what Andy just said.

  “And you trust that slanty-eyed freak?”

  “This is just how it is here. The men have little respect for women.”

  “Fuck the Japs!” Smith yelled over the phone.

  “For fuck's sake, she might even like it like that. Sawada said he saw her on films. Professional adult films if you know what I mean... Get over it. Sawada said nothing happened.”

  Smith spent the rest of the Saturday wandering about in Shibuya. He didn’t want to stay when Andy was hosting Yoshida-san, the Shitencho, or the Local Brand Manager of an Osaka company he was negotiating the purchase of their entire rolling mill equipment from two of their disused factories, especially not in this state. They should respect the meaning of ‘weekends’, the Japanese, he thought to himself. He looked down at his own clothes. The champagne that had soaked his clothes had dried out when he ran around the streets. However, the stains were visible on his white shirt, and he probably smelled like a gutter from all the sweating he did from running around. He decided to go into some place with good air-conditioning.

  Eventually, he settled for electronic stores and tried to educate himself on the latest technology while he was taking advantage of their cooling. He got really interested in a new Sony Netbook model when one of the salesmen was demonstrating the computer to a group of students how to use the built-in webcam to do online chat. The salesman noticed him standing at the back and beckoned him to come forward and give the product a try. Hesitantly, he pulled the earpiece and the microphone around his head. He moved around trying to position himself in front of the camera, but he still could not get all of his face on the screen. The salesman started to signal animatedly that it was because he was too tall, being over six feet and that he needed to squat down a little bit in order for him to see himself. As he was doing so, the group of students giggled behind him, and he felt slightly embarrassed at his clumsiness. The salesman who was wired to another microphone connected to another computer running the same video-conferencing software started to talk to him. As usual, he could not catch up with the guy’s Japanese, so he mumbled some gibberish Japanese phrases over the microphone. However, as soon as he did that the group of students started to laugh again. Some were actually clapping, applauding his heroic attempt to speak their language. Impressed, the salesman started to speak back to him in English asking him how was the weather in California, almost as if it was a sentence he memorized word for word from some English learning software. Smith replied in Japanese that Shibuya had a much better weather than California. (That was if he had placed California and Shibuya in the correct order around the two conjunctions no ho and yo ri ). The salesman asked him again how long would he be staying in Japan, and he replied that he loved Japan, and he wanted to live here permanently, which was a white lie. As they ping-ponged back and forth between Japanese and English, a huge crowd had gathered around them as if some kind of improvisation performance was staging. They laughed at almost everything Smith was saying to the salesman and cheered whenever he successfully completed a sentence. A few of the teenagers had taken their cell phone out and started to take pictures of them. The throng was giving the two accidental comedians so much credit that Smith found himself perspiring uncontrollably under the spell of renewed passion for dramatics. He had never been received in a more heartwarming and welcoming way as a foreigner in Japan in the past than at that moment. It might be the first time in a while that he had truly felt any confidence in himself. In fact, he was having so much fun that when the salesman asked him if he liked the computer, he answered light-headedly without thinking “ Kai tai. Todemo kai tai ,” which meant I wanted to buy it, I really want to buy it. In all the glory of a well-received actor, he held up his Citibank credit card in front of the cashier for everybody to see as proudly as an Olympic champion would hold up his gold medal and the crowd gave him a big hand of applause. Shyly, he bowed his head a couple of times to his audience behind him in gratitude. As the crowd started to thin ou
t, he shook the hands of the salesman, noting his name on the name tag on his shirt, before sambaing away with his brand new computer back home.

  After showering, Smith pulled out his new toy from its casing and started to play with it. He had a computer at work too, and he was proficient in using Microsoft Office Suite. He knew how to play video and music with Real Media Player and knew how to go online to browse websites, but that was about all the experience he had with computers. Since the user manual came was bi-lingual, he spent the last couple of hours of the night before his bedtime perusing the book from the beginning to the end with the diligence of a standardize test taker. He learnt about firewall and spyware alerts, the rewritable DVD disk, the graphics card and the proper use of USB devices. However, none of them was immediately applicable to him. Just then, a speech bubble had appeared on the bottom right across the screen, letting him know that he was connected to a wireless network. It seemed like there was a free Wi-Fi connection in the employee dormitory, he did not know about previously. The Internet Explorer popped up on the screen greeting him with the latest news on Yahoo! Japan. Delighted at the free internet access from the generous neighbor who did not set an access password, he started to roam aimlessly but satisfyingly online.

  Then Smith remembered the business card Andy gave him. He remembered seeing a website address on the bottom of the card, and it would not hurt to check it out. After he had retrieved the card, he started to type in the address. As soon as he hit Enter, a 3-by-4 photograph of a couple smiling happily at each other in a wedding popped up on the screen. The head of the webpage read Zwei Matchmaking Counseling Services. Voted best in the industry by readers of AneCam magazine. After spending the next hour devouring success stories on its webpage, Smith had become convinced of the agency’s credibility and good practice. At the same time, something in those beautiful love stories listed in the site touched him and reminded him of the wonderful feeling of being in love with someone. His yearning for a life partner had grown full-fledged and by the end of the hour, he was drunk with illusions of love like a teenager. He kept tossing and turning that night and could not go to sleep. In half-consciousness, Gregory Wesley and his new wife, their backs against him, appeared in front of his eyes. They were laughing happily about something in a busy restaurant and the woman raised her wine glass to make a toast. Her voice was so familiar. Smith struggled in his hidden position to see her face, but he could not. She muttered something to Greg again and then she turned. Her face had belonged to Debbie, his ex-wife! She gave Smith a cold smile that chilled him to the bones and turned back to Greg, who said “Cheers!” as their glasses banged loudly together with such a force that they smashed into pieces just as the champagne flutes had earlier today in the karaoke box. The sharp clank woke Smith, who had broken into a sweat in his not-so-pleasant dream.