by Vann Chow
“Fuck it. I’ll give her a call now,” Smith bolted up from his bed and dialed his home phone number in Rosehill, Cincinnati. It took a while to connect, but eventually it started to ring. And it rang on.
“Urgh!” And down he swung the phone out of his hand in frustration. It bounced off the apartment door and made too loud a bang for 2 AM. Smith ran his palm forcefully down his face, wiping off the drips of perspiration from his forehead. His mouth hung agape, trickles of drool slipping out of the corners. And there he sat, no longer moving, for a good twenty minutes, before the attack of anguish finally subsided.
He crawled his way to the phone, cradling it in his arms as he turned around to sit with his back against the door of the apartment. Then he started to enter the number of the matchmaking service on the business card into the dial pad. At two twenty in the morning, he left a message on their answering machine asking to schedule a consultation with Marionette Newton.
No more than thirty seconds after he hung up, he started to regret having made the phone call. He thought about calling again to leave a message, saying that he had just realized that he would be out of the country in the next couple of weeks and that they could ignore his previous phone call. However, that would just make him look like a man in denial and denial itself, without the need for psychologist's opinion, was always the best proof. He didn’t want to appear even more desperate than he already was, he gave up on the idea of making a fool of himself by calling a second time and went out to get some late night snacks.
6. The Test
The next day, Smith received a phone call from Zwei Matchmaking Service. They asked whether he could come for an interview this afternoon, which he duly obliged, not wanting to be the ‘man in denial.' In the afternoon, Smith wore a fresh new set of clothes and went to see what matchmaking was like for the first time.
“Social status, is that important to you?” That was the first thing Smith was asked when he was sitting inside the office of Marionette Newton. The lady who asked him was a blonde in her thirties with a thick British accent. At first, he thought it was a joke and waited for her to budge, but she did not.
“Pedigree?” The lady asked again imposingly, slamming a catalog of some sort on the desk space in front of him. It made a loud, terrifying bang when it landed. “What about ethnicity?” Shocked by the unexpected interrogation, he was unable to react.
“Mr. Smith,” the lady stood up from her chair and walked over to his side. She sat on the edge of the table and crossed her arm and her legs seductively. The woman was wearing a tight-fitted black sleeveless dress with a thin leather belt around her waistline and a pair of black fishnet stockings. The whole visage was so overwhelming that Smith did not know how to respond. “Any special preference?” The woman pressed on. “Body shape? Blood type? Height? Sexual fetishes? Not to forget, are you against cosmetic surgery?”
“Lady,” Smith finally said, fuming. “I am afraid I have looked in the wrong place,” he said beginning to gather his belongings to leave. He realized that he was less ready than he thought he was for Japanese style matchmaking.
“Sit back down, Carson Smith Junior,” she halted Smith from getting up with a random pamphlet she had rolled up tightly in her palm in the way a traffic policeman did with his baton. Smith squinted his eyes skeptically, but docilely complied. The woman leaned once again on the desk behind her, scooted up and crossed her legs dramatically. Then she decided that it was not what she wanted to do, so she stood up again and waltzed over to the right hand side of the room that was lined with rows of filing cabinet in beige. She bent down to reach for one of the drawers that was labeled miscellaneous and slid her pamphlet back into its place. Smith could not help staring at her long, lean legs in black fishnet stockings as she was bending over.
Miss Newton could not seriously be applying herself for him, could she?
“You’ve passed the test,” she said, which snapped Smith out of his trance.
“A test,” Smith repeated, with a flood of understanding. “Mrs. Newton,” he expressed his relief by repeating her name in honorific, who only got him a cold stare in return. Then she laid her business card on the desk before him.
“My name is Marie Newton. I am Marionette Newton’s daughter and her best assistant.” Marie walked over and leaned on the same side of the table again, knocking the name on her business card lying on the table twice with the tip of her forefinger. “I have heard about you from Andy. From what he said, I wasn’t expecting any other answer from you to my series very inappropriate questions.”
Queasy with the closeness between the woman and him, Smith pulled his chair backward and asked, “Is the whole sex vixen thing,” he wriggled his forefinger in the air and asked, “supposed to be a test, too?” His question surprised her. She squirmed uneasily for a second and tugged the hem of her dress down.
“So,” Smith said, “The two of you are dating? You and Andy,” he did not need to hear the answer to know. That was the only way a testosterone man like Andy would want to be associated with a matchmaking agency.
“He found us online and did an interview with us, as you may have guessed, he failed the test miserably.”
“Somehow I’m not surprised by that,” Smith said. “Tell me what he said.”
Marie blushed at the question and did not answer, and almost immediately a new side of her emerged, and she said to Smith in a deeper, more professional sounding tone of voice, “Let us get back to business. You are qualified to be our candidate. We are a proper matchmaking agency, and not an agency selling just anything you would ask for. And most importantly, we dislike clients that came with a closed mind. From now on, we, and I meant my mother Marionette Newton, and I will represent you on Omiai. Our success rate is very high, and most of our past clients were able to meet their future husband or wife within a year. We do not charge a monthly fee or an annual fee, but for each individual consultation. Any calls we made to you and your prospective wife and family will be charged an hourly rate as well. For dates arrangement, there are different levels of fixed charge depending on the type of hotels or restaurants you choose to use at the time. You can stop using our matchmaking consultation service any time you want, but you need to submit a formal written notification three months in advance. During the period indicated in the contract between us, you are not allowed to use any other dating consultation services or online dating consultant. If you successfully find a bride through us, your service would, naturally, be automatically stopped with a final commission charge. The fee will not be waived if the wedding falls through. Now do you have any question? If not, put your name here and your signature down here. ”
Smith looked at the contract placed in front of him for a quick second and thought to himself, “Take this, Gregory Wesley,” and he signed the paper full of hope.
7. Winning the Jackpot
Smith noticed her voice again, sweet like the sound of the Pied Piper. It was that hypnotic. He had wondered about the possibility of mixing up some other teenage girls voices with hers, but the voice was impossible to forget. At the moment, the voice was conversing with another girl. Laughter boomed, the punctuating soft, feminine chatter of innocent young girls. What were they talking about? Smith wondered.
“Eh, Oyaji !” A boy with bleached blonde hair, atypical dark skin, and light blue Hawaiian shirt nudged him forcefully in the back with his ice cold, sweating beer bottle. The beer itself sloshed precariously up the neck of the tinted bottle. He felt the perspiration on the bottle soaked into the fabric of his jacket.
“Sorry, what is the matter?” Smith eyed the apish looking boy who was looking for trouble and asked.
“Can't you speak Japanese, you turd?” he said, or so Smith guessed from his gibberish.
“ Hottoite kure .” Smith mumbled the phrase Andy taught him when he first arrived in Tokyo, meaning, “Leave me alone, please.” and tried to sidestep the boy. He wondered as he spoke those words he memorized, why Japanese people say �
��please’ all the time, even when they were upset.
“ Ne, nani o miteiru? What are you looking at?” The boy asked, ignoring his request. “She’s mine. Don’t you dare to look at her again like that if you want to walk out of here with your eyeballs!” The menacing young boy took a swig from his bottle, the expression on his face was one of offense. Only then, Smith realized he had been ogling at Misa.
“Service,” Smith lied. “I need ser-vi-su .” He was used to using the tourist card when he found himself in a difficult situation. “No trouble. Onegaisumasu . Please.” He added that ‘please’ again, which to him really meant nothing. To explain that he did not have enough trays, he gestured at a Pachinko nearby.
“ Ser-vi-su ?” The boy repeated it skeptically and swayed, almost sloshing beer, presumably by mistake, at his face.
At the moment, Misa lifted her gaze from the girl she was talking to and saw the little drama about to unfold in her working area. She caught the eyes of Smith. The second of hesitation betrayed her. Her mouth quivered, as she began to recognize who he was.
“ Ano ...” Smith immediately said to her direction. “ Torei. Torei o... motte... dekimasu ka ? More trays. I want more trays.” Jabbing his hands in the air in an attempt to show his desperation for more metal trays to hold his invisible winnings. No doubt, the boy must think he was a Baka , a retard. However, being regarded as an unimportant, old fool was much better than if he were to be mistaken, or perhaps more accurately speaking, caught red-handed, for ogling a teenage girl in public.
“Ahhh. So...so...so...” The girl scrambled to pick up a few trays from behind the counter.
Her boyfriend strolled away, mumbling harsh words, no doubt, at God.
When she looked up, Smith and her eyes met. They were the same big set of black, watery eyes that gazed up at him in distress the other day. This time, her attractive white neck and the beginning of her breasts peered through the opening of her white over-shirt, like two little halves of peeled green apples. The little package scuttled to his side with trays in her hand.
“Can we...” Smith wanted to ask if she would like to have a chat, but he was unable to do it in complete Japanese. “English? A-e-go, Daijoubu desu ka ? Is it okay?” Ignoring the perhaps fuming young man claiming to be Misa's jealous boyfriend at the back of the store.
Misa dropped the trays at his feet in front of the Pachinko machine and stacked them nicely around him. Her big eyes staring at him with an emotionless expression all the way. Then she straightened herself up again, showing off her body and her delicate sensuality unknowingly to her, to Smith.
“ Cho to . I come. I come later.” For the next five minutes, she did not return. Smith heard, however, that Misa reprimanded the boy whom she called, as far as Smith can catch, Tatsu for harassing her clients. She seemed to have reasoned it into the boy, for the boy nodded regretfully and answered something back as if being scolded by his mother.
Smith decided to return to his seat at the Pachinko machine number 458, the one he randomly picked as his, with the ripped red leather seat. He noticed that Misa was agitated. She stroked the ruffles of her light pink uniform and readjusted her nametag carefully before she went over apologetically to a senior-looking staff at the parlor.
So she was working here now instead. Smith seemed to have made her look bad in front of her colleagues by asking directly for service, instead of waiting for her to come over like how it was dictated in the good old book of unwritten etiquette for customers in Japanese establishments that he failed to attain a copy of. And he made it all the worse by almost provoking a scene with her little boyfriend. For a country super focused on quality of service, one could not pull down his own pants to piss, so to speak, even at the urinal in Japan, he thought with distaste. Cultural blunders aside, for a second time in a few days, Smith realized that he had inadvertently messed with the girl's livelihood because of his curiosity.
Another thought crossed his mind –this was no decent place to work for a girl. This Thunderbird, a recently opened Pachinko parlor next to Passage, which he typically frequent, was set apart only by the comic bookstores on the third and fourth floor of the same commercial building. It will soon be filled with the same chain-smoking gang members that passed the days here until the next deal, unemployed idiots who wanted to try their luck on Pachinko, or drunk salarymen with a penchant for molesting any unfortunate female person that came their way, like in all the other Pachinko parlors in Japan. He would not let anyone he knew work in such a place. And certainly not a girl that reminded him of his own daughter. The sight of this young, awkward Japanese girl working in a place like this upset him.
The gambling business in Japan, however, employed over 300,000 citizens a year around the country. Alone in Ikebukuro, there was at least half a dozen of them along the 1 st street, which the biggest shopping and entertainment district was practically built around. One seldom witnessed any exciting police-rascal dramas as portrayed in Japanese soap operas, movies, and video games. Yet Smith has a fishy feeling about the whole gambling business. There were rumors of the Yakuza controlling all the parlors in the areas, as money laundering hubs, and occasionally, things must get out of hand here and there. Though the news never reported them, the myriads of violence in the media must have gotten their inspiration somewhere.
While minding your own business had been his motto living in a strange foreign country with a world- recognized social issue of failing morals, he could not subdue the urge to poke his head into this messy business about Misa.
What kind of place breeds what kind of personality, Smith believed that to the bones, notwithstanding his own phantom presence from one parlor to the next? By doing nothing and letting Misa work in the Thunderbird was close to hand-delivering her back to the dirty palms of men like Sawada, and this was absolutely against his English gallantry, conveniently in his blood in dire moments and good old American values.
This boyfriend of hers, one word with him revealed his dubious origin. The lack of manner, the overbearing gestures, and flouncy outfit – he seemed to come straight out of the GTO animation that was playing on television.
In the background, the jingling and the clinking of metal balls hitting the internal gates and barriers within the active Pachinko machine around Smith continued to buzz.
Distracted by a myriad of thoughts, he slid his second last thousand-yen bill into the machine in front of him for two hundred fifty new metal balls, while keeping an eye out for Misa. Pachinko had helped him to pass the time when he was alone. He believed that if he sat long enough at the same machine, he would always be able to break even, or even win. Deep down, he knew better than this. Still, he considered that the best investment of his free time, soaking in the local stench and bad breath of other lonely Japanese people as an alternative way of blending into the colorful local scenes which he yearned to be a part of but could not. And with that excuse, he was not ashamed to just be the fly on the wall observing with pleasure the daily lives of ordinary folks playing out around him every single day. He was used to the routine of pulling the lever time after time without winning, only to be occasionally interrupted by the change of tunes when the balls fell into the center gate which activated the digital reels on the screen above. They then spun autonomously without his control, an option he typically picked after he grew out of the initial excitement of actually doing something that would cause something else to happen. As the myth-busters from a Japanese TV show had revealed, the outcome of the game was already determined the moment the ball entered the monetary fighting ring. He usually waited for a few seconds for the game to play out, telling him that either he got nothing, or small marginal wins, then repeated the same process again. Ruminating a George B. Bernard quote on game theory –
“ In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is alwa
ys in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos.”
He concluded that conventional wisdom nor scientific, mathematical proof of randomness in life could do nothing to deter human curiosity for the unknown. However small the chance of a positive outcome may be, people wanted to gamble on. And George B. Bernard was most definitely correct, because, at the moment, he was at a total loss when the elusive celebratory tune of winning the jackpot sounded above him on the overhead speakers. He kept staring at the slot machine, which was pelting one metal ball after another into the bottom tray in frenzy, not knowing what to do when he managed to finally win the second biggest Jackpot of the house, a good 1.4 million Yen.
Yes, he had won something.
In a split second, all the philosophies were emptied out of his brain. There was only one emotion left in his rattling skull, which was busy resonating to the sound of the heavy falling balls, not of joy, but of complete embarrassment.