by Vann Chow
“Elbows on the table,” Tanaka whispered his advice, his eyes darted for a second to the lower right, before returning to his depressing book.
“Thanks.” It was indeed a lot more stable and a great deal less tiresome than it would have been otherwise. Arai was thankful for his mentor.
17. Japanese Lesson
Good morning. No, good afternoon. You are very kind. Yes, you have. No, I am not. Thank you, thank you, thank you again. Shall we start? – Smith had rehearsed speaking these words in Japanese to her all night, but he was stumped immediately when the well-oiled machine of a waitress came over and asked him whether he had been here before, what would he like to drink and eat and whether he wanted to at all, or something like that. There should be a rule against bombarding customers with questions within five minutes of entering cafes as far as he was concerned. At his age, he needed his time to direct his mental capacity towards the drinks section from the small-talk section.
“ Menyu o misete kudasai. ” Misa bowed, smiled and spoke at the same time to the demanding waitress. She trotted away and came back with an insult for Smith, an English menu, a badly translated one.
“You should proof-read their spellings,” Smith reverted into his comfort zone and complained to her in English. She raised her neatly plucked eyebrows to his comment, which made him aware that he had been too critical.
“Teach me Japanese.” He begged, as soon as the waitress took his order. Realizing that the whole night of rehearsal did not jump-start his conversational skills in the language, he no longer felt the pressure to impress. This was the time to be humble. There was nothing to lose in front of a... child. Could he work his many personal inquiries for her into the lesson? “Teach me how to introduce myself,” he asked. It was a brilliant topic.
“Let's start with the basics. But I want to know something about you first.” Misa asked.
A mutual interest, Smith, thought. “How long have you been in Japan?”
“Well, it's been a year. I took half a year of Japanese at the adult university before I came...” Smith cleared his throat. Misa did not seem surprised to hear that. Expectations and abilities were duly matched in her eyes, it seems. Smith relaxed a little.
“You are an American? How is America like? I have never there. I have never been anywhere, on a plane, I mean.” she bit her lower lips.
“Quite different.” He smiled at her in fond memories. “In general, people don’t move at such breakneck pace as they do here. They conduct their lives in a more leisurely pace.”
“What else is different?” Misa asked eagerly.
“And most people are quite friendly and like to ask you how you feel and how you're doing all the time. Although some people thought Americans hypocritical because of that.”’
“Why?”
“Because people are not really listening for the answers most of the time. They say ‘How are you?’ as a kind of greetings instead of a question.”
Misa smiled. She found it interesting, so he continued on.
“Another difference would be that Americans rarely ask permission for, well, anything, if it's within the laws, as oppose to the Japanese. We say what's on our mind. It's in our constitution to express our opinion freely. You know what constitution is? It guarantees our freedom of speech, the freedom of expression in order to pursue – do you know the word 'pursue'? – happiness.”
Misa thought about the difficult English words that Smith used for a moment, and then she asked, “does that mean there are laws that tell you to be happy?”
Her interpretation was not entirely wrong. Smith replied, “it’s not far from it. Don't get me wrong, though. We aren't all just fat potato sacks of self-importance. It’s our rights, and all of us deserves a chance to be happy. Like, like if I bought something from, say, Isetan, the department store, that I do not like. I might have used it already, but I'd still go back to the store and tell the manager how I'd feel and return it, and he would probably not give me a hard time. I could be getting a full refund, or a different model of the, whatever it is that I bought instead as well.”
“Really?” Misa's eyes widened. She pouted her lips. “I'm always afraid if I have to return something. No, I wouldn't do it.”
“Try it, next time. Then we'll see how it goes in this country,” Smith said. “If everyone protects their rights, then the society as a whole will get better.” Despite what he said, he had not dared to return anything yet in Japan.
Misa repeatedly nodded, lost in thoughts about this faraway country she would never visit.
The song in the background of the cafe ended, and an annoying, repetitive electronic tone beat inspiration into Smith.
“And Americans don't listen to this kind of music. They like country music. Have you heard of country music? Chet Atkins, Jerry Reeds...I doubt you know them. But anyways, country music is often played with banjos, and you don't hear that in any other music anymore. And of course the fiddle, which is the violin, guitars, and harmonicas. Americans like that. Well, not all of them.”
“Like Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood!” Misa said.
“Ya...” He searched the country music department in his head for these names in vain. “Something like that.”
“They are really amazing singers! I have their songs on my music player,” Misa said enthusiastically, “the whole album from American Idol.”
To avoid lingering on the subject of pop stars, he continued, “But above all, Americans are very hard working, just like the Japanese people. We can really say we created one of the best countries in the world, with creativity and bravery.” He smiled, wondering if Misa understood. “My hometown, though, was not that.” He snorted, which stirred her curiosity. She leaned forward and Smith begun his tale. It was as his friends have always complained, that once Smith started with a reverie, he was not to be stopped. And Misa's keen interest unstuck the memory dam. He took Misa by the hand and walked her through his childhood growing up in Cincinnati, in Midwest, as a Catholic, in a middle-class family, with conservative small-town values. He showed her the great landscape, the acres of land his father own where he and his brothers had played on, the bird house they built together, and the big Collie he owned. The story of the absurdly clever Collie that bit the postman three times got Misa grinning from ear to ear. “And my father, if he is still alive, would NEVER let me come here.”
Suddenly he was pinged by a feeling of lonesomeness talking about his dead father.
“Oh well, I have talked too much.” He grinned at the girl and took a sip from his coffee, feigning nonchalance. “It's your turn to tell me more about yourself. I don't even know how old you are!”
So eager was he to learn more about her, he had forgotten to keep up with his superficial motive of wanting to learn Japanese. It was just a matter of logistics. They would get around to it, he told himself and beat down the habitual urge of a businessman of staying to the point.
“I am Misa Hayami,” She said, smiling, and pulled her shoulders closer to herself as she spoke, a habit of shyness as if she was being interviewed. What charming creature she was, Smith thought. “I'm eighteen. I work as a waitress, here and there, in Ikebukuro. Hmm...” Her eyes turned into slits as she smiled nervously.
“Go on,” Smith said, with an encouraging smile in return. He had already heard about the lack of public speaking or discussion training in Japanese schools and witnessed the damaging effects of it at his workplace.
“I have a younger brother,” she said. “and we live together in Tokyo.” Misa squirmed uncomfortably at the thought of her brother.
“Tatsu,” Smith said.
She nodded.
“What kind of people does he hang out with?”
“I don't know.”
“I have my theory. Would you like to know how I have found him?” Smith said.
“There's no need...”
“You know I've gone to the police afterward, and Andy – I think you remembered him, he's my col
league – gave them your name, as correspondent of the victim because we have no idea how to identify your brother, or that he is even your brother.”
“The police has explained that to me already.” She got up to bow at him as she said. “ Hondo ni sumimasen. I will compensate for your trouble.”
“No, don't say that. That's not why I mentioned it. I just wanted to bring that up to see if you need any help or anything.”
“ Mo nani mo irimasen . I don't need anything else... hondo ni, it's true.”
Smith dragged her back to her seat. He felt embarrassed for making Misa bow at him. Instinctively he scanned the room hoping that no one was watching them, and there was not.
“You're not from Tokyo, are you?” Smith asked, to change the subject.
“No, no.” she reverted to smiling. “I moved here after junior high ended. From Ebetsu.”
“Is that in Hokkaido?” Apart from his Japanese, his geography of Japan could use some help.
“Yes, yes! That's right.” And his wild guess had been a good one. Misa seemed sufficiently impressed that he knew which one of the four major islands she came from. “It's very small, and at the same time very big... I honestly don't know what to say about myself.”
“Sure you know.”
“My English is so bad.”
“It's great! It's better than a lot of people I know,” he said. “Just try, like I did.”
“...but I don't like to talk about myself.” she insisted.
That was the point he decided to drop the subject. Not everyone was an egomaniac like him. Just to imagine that there were people out there who did not want to talk about themselves, or just talk, that would have been just pure madness for him before he had arrived in Japan. Growing up in a big family, studying in a competitive university program and then getting a job at a big corporation meant you fought hard for your air time, always. The mentality, of course, made some major adjustment recently. He had been converted, silently, one pachinko marble at a time, into an INTP of the Myers-Briggs test, an introverted thinker.
“ O-kotowari shimasu. Sorry, I can't do that. That's the first phrase you should learn.” And she drove the message home by writing it down on a napkin for him.
“ Demo nihongo ni dekiru, no? But you can do it in Japanese, right?” Smith marshaled in all his sentence making power to create this one.
They smiled at each other.
18. The Apartment in Shiodome
A couple of days ago.
The floor rattled in the familiar dull, low hum. Tanaka untied his leather shoes at the threshold and scanned the apartment for any sign of life. Stillness – his mental filter had sieved out the background noises and vibrations that were inherent to the place. Great.
Under the street lamp that filtered into the apartment by the Shiodome train platforms, he shifted to the refrigerator under stealth, an art he had mastered by years of training in his business, and opened the door to the freezer. From his pocket, he took out his wool gloves and wriggled his hands in them. Eyes on his target, he extracted a sealed zip-loc bag from underneath the frozen TV-dinner stashed near a similar zip-loc filled with frozen cream spinach carefully, in order not to leave too many marks. The bag of old spinach had been there since the beginning, he mused. One day he would throw it away, he swore.
'2000-01', '2004-06', 'Katja M.', 'E0286XL', 'Comp' pas'...Tanaka scanned the scribbles on the side of the tapes. They were labeled, and some unlabeled, in a haphazard way, for they were not from a single collector, but from centuries of all the directors and producers that had utilized this place. A porno scrap yard, this was. It held all the footages that were too racy, too violent, too inartistic, too sloppy but too expensively produced or in strange ways too interesting to be condemned to the forgive-all fire bin. He himself had never had one that required such level of after-product care. However, the customers' tastes had changed in the time since he had retired. They had wanted more – more girls, more celebrities, more ethnicity, more gadgets, more varieties of tricks, more depths in plots, more outdoor scenes, more emotions. He felt he was not up to the job anymore.
His thoughts were interrupted by his found. – 'Étourdir', he had spotted it. He recognized the handwriting and the no-nonsense title in French on it. Satisfied, he stashed that tape into the front pocket of his jacket and quickly replaced everything.
“One day,” He whispered under his breath, his eyes staring straight through the metal freezer's door, “you all will tell such a great story.” and he locked the door behind him.
***
Tanaka mounted the video tape into its cartridge and shoved it into the VHS recorder in his study at home. The raw video played automatically.
Then he settled on his usual spot on the couch, lit a freshly rolled cigarette and sucked on it.
There it was, this was how it all started, in the dessert afternoon streets of an unnamed small town.
A figure was seen trotting down the street leisurely after a quick exchange with the cameraman. He had a mop of black, unkempt long hair that cried negligence. When he walked, one got the impression that his dirty white canvas sneakers were too big for him, and any moment now he would trip. It was strange that the figure's sloppy gait should bother Tanaka as much as what he suspected would happen next. From the movie, one could see that the cameraman stayed behind and did not follow until the figure ahead of him rounded a corner. The picture slowly caught up to the figure, who again disappeared between the gap of stone walls that lined two adjacent but disjointed wooden houses, right behind where the lamp post stood. The cameraman made a left towards the other side of the street swiftly. And when he settled, the view was now covered by a blurry patch of gray stones in close quarter, leaving just a small gap on the right, focused at the point where the figure had just vanished.
Twenty seconds passed, and nothing happened. The pair was waiting in a lair for something.
Tanaka took another drag from his cigarette and exhaled in a succession of small puffs. His eyes peeled to the screen of the television.
Then the camera was spun around and zoomed in on a figure crossing a busy traffic street from a small distant away. As the cameraman pressed the shutter softly, the figure's outline hardened, and the exposure was corrected. Hardly did Tanaka see her face the focus was already switched somewhere else. The cameraman swept his camera from the ground up, scanning her white feet stacked in the heeled sandals, to her pearly white calves and up her thighs. The continuum was stopped by the hem of her tightly worn mini-skirt that chaffed the contact points on her thighs pinkish red. She looked left, then right, ahead – at which point the camera swung away in a rustle of fabric rubbing against each other – then resumed slowly to position to see the girl looking right again, before completing her crossing. Three large paper bags from clothing stores dangled from her hands. They swung beside her body with inertia.
The cameraman shrunk back, as the girl turned right into the deserted street so he would not be spotted. One could hear the heartbeats of the man, throbbing violently as she strutted down the street of no return, headed towards the direction of the hidden man.
A brief moment of regrettable disappointment flitted across Tanaka's mind, as the girl clogged pass to an anticlimactic turnout. The men stayed in place, and the girl did not spot the creature hidden in his shadowy lair. Nothing happened.
Then the lens zeroed in on the girl.
Behind the lamppost, the first man lunged towards her from behind, slipped his hands under her mini-skirt and in one swift motion, yanked her underwear almost down to her knees. It was light pink with frilly lace ruffles. Her knees turned inward towards each other protectively, and she clutched the underwear before it fell. With her forward momentum curbed by the physical restraint around her thighs, the girl struggled to keep her balance.
A small yellow bird that had been perched somewhere on the branch of a nearby tree stopped its cheery chirping dived towards the man at the shock of the sudden movement below.<
br />
Excitement swelled in Tanaka's chest. He had crushed his cigarette between his fingers without noticing.
The perpetrator had sprinted away ahead. The frazzled girl's gaze followed the assailant who became smaller and smaller as he faded into the distance. Desperation on her face was chased away quickly away by helplessness – no chance of catching him.
She pulled up her underwear as fast as she could. The camera panned out. The girl looked nervously around her. – Was she searching for someone to help, or making sure that no one had witnessed her ultimate embarrassment? – She did not even have the time to yelp.
The shopping bags on her hand went crashing down her side. Her knees gave way. She squatted in the midst of the heap of clothes that had fallen out. And in this spot she stayed for a good minute, cocking her head up in despair, expressionless, shell-shocked.
Then she spotted the cameraman coming her way, who had the nerves to walk out from behind the stone wall. Her eyes looked straight into the camera. It scared Tanaka to have been spotted. He had to remind himself consciously that despite the first-person perspective the movie was filmed in, none of this was actually his misdoing.
The cameraman extended his free hand towards her. Instinctively she took his hand, without an ounce of suspicion, and struggled back on her feet with his support, completely mistaking his gesture as the gallantry that was innate to every man in Japan – so they said.
Then senses began to hit her. Her mouth fell open. Speechless. Surprised. Unsure how to act. She swallowed hard. Her eyes dashing between his face and the lens. From the corner of the screen, Tanaka noticed that she had taken a step back in defense, her back coming up against the stone wall.
“What's your name?” He asked.
“Uh...” Her hesitation didn't last long. One's name was one of those things that could not be stolen from oneself, regardless of the tragedy. “I'm called Misa Hayami.”