The White Man and the Pachinko Girl

by Vann Chow

  “...brother.” Andy finished up the sentence. “That's a tough guy for you. He didn't want my help, like, at all. Although that was difficult 'cause I was driving him and his sister home, as much as he didn't like it. He has to use a crutch. The broken ribs won't heal completely for another two months at least, the doctor said.”

  “Did he tell you why he was beaten?” Smith asked, putting his hands on his waist.

  “Beaten!” Aileen exclaimed, raising her eyebrows in surprise, indicating suspicion over the kind of company they kept.

  “Pskkk! He didn't even want to talk to me. Though for all it's worth, he also wasn't talking to his own sister. They probably had a fight. Siblings, they do that.”

  Aileen nodded approvingly, her stare fixated on the surface of the water glass in her hand as if she heard the only true statement in all of what he said tonight.

  “He looked like a good-for-nothing anyway. I saw him...” Smith wanted to say Pachinko parlors, but he was not ready to share his depressing past-time with his date yet. “You know, in Ikebukuro. I've seen him around.”

  “It's none of my business who he is or what he does with his time. All I care is that Misa is happy again.”

  “You've slept with her?” Smith was compelled to ask.

  Aileen gasped. The flow of logic in men offended her some time.

  “Would I have stuck around if I did?” Andy half-joked. “Pardon, my directness.” He excused himself to Aileen. “We are just-friends.”

  To that, Smith wasn't sure he should be relieved or insulted for being lied to.

  “She's a little girl,” Smith said protectively. “I, uh, knowing you, who could guarantee anything?” He added, with an unapologetic shrug, for having asked such an incriminating question at Andy.

  “Well, I have you to thank you for our friendship,” Andy said with relish and clasped his palms together in front of his chest in a gesture of expressing thankfulness in Thai culture. He rocked his closed palms back and forth as he spoke. “After we came back from the Ikebukuro precinct, I called to check how she was doing. We ended up talking for hours. I called the next few days again, and we talked some more. It just took off. I have a feeling it might, uh,” Andy turned to look at Aileen, confirmed from the look in her eyes that he would never stand a chance, then returned his gaze to Smith, “turn into something.”

  “Turn into something?” Smith repeated after him in brooding anger. Feeling too distressed to explain his emotion and too busy to hide it, he padded his chest pocket and said, “My keys. Give them to me before I forget.”

  25. Sunday

  Another rare leisurely Sunday.

  Smith folded the current issue of International Harold Tribute neatly and slipped it on top of the other tributes underneath the hyacinth weave coffee table. Tiny bristles of fibers had broken off here and there from wear, prickling the back of his hand. This reminded him that, while the quantity and quality of the furnishing he had for the prison of an apartment were no comparison to what Andy had so deliberately showcased to Aileen yesterday, the hyacinth weave coffee table was one of his few pride and joys in life in Japan. It was one of his few personal touches of furniture not provided for and permanently fixed to the apartment when he arrived. It cost nearly nothing and looked, completely out of place with the other unsympathetic white particleboard furniture his company's real estate management managed to squeeze in between the textured plaster walls in matching white. Yet, the purchase decision was solely his. He was for a short while ashamed that he wanted to regain his independence. By making rash consumption choices that satisfied neither of Debbie's top two criteria – branded and expensive. Since he was the higher earner of the two, in the back of his mind, he always had the notion that he was only delegating the household consumption decisions to her, as she was as opinionated about everything around the house as a theater stage manager. How could he have felt, all of a sudden, that she had been stifling his aesthetic taste and creative impulses all along from the supporting role? The more time he spent looking at the table, however, the more he was convinced that it was the right choice made in the right frame of mind. The innocent wicker table had taught him an important lesson in life.

  Seeping the rest of his typical Sunday cup of green tea, Smith relished in water hyacinth's story to glory, a fascinating tale of human's ingenuity. Grew, harvested, processed and woven by hardworking fellows from Indonesia, water hyacinth that now so commonly used for weaving furniture sold all around the world was a native plant to South America. It had been introduced many years ago by the Dutch to the previous East Indies simply for their beautiful flowers that were light purple, painted in the center with a drop of yellow by God. The climate in the East Indies was so much alike that of its motherland that the floating plant started to conquer the tropical country's many lakes, bays, lagoons and even reservoirs. They grew in mats, sometimes covering miles of water, depleting oxygen for fishes and other creatures in no time, destroying not only the fishnets of local fishermen but also their livelihood altogether. The determined started to weed out the hyacinth. Meanwhile, export for rattan furniture took off, and someone had the clever idea to try weaving the roots of this dried pest of all water plants like rattan. And boy, were they successful. The alternative texture and leaner fibers gave the hyacinth products smoother, less rigid frames, and customers all over the world embraced it. Then the fishermen were no longer fishermen, and they no longer anguished over their living. A new exciting page of Indonesia’s economy was hence written.

  If a foreign plant that was once considered a major nuisance to Indonesia could flourish, so could he.

  Between the new, happy him and the old, depressing him, there stood in the way only his lack of imagination.

  Smith ran his hand along the side of the coffee table as if bewitched by the table's resilient personality.

  An unbearable, tingly sensation paralyzed his legs – for the entire morning, he had been sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the table. His body finally alerted him to switch posture. He leaned against the wall right behind him for support as he tried to pry himself apart. His toes retracted in pain as if they were heads of turtles being prodded by naughty children that were his fingers. Only with utmost valiance, he managed to straighten his legs out before him. Resting, he supported himself partially on the wall and partially with his two elbows pinned on the floor, his gaze wander aimlessly around the house, searching for something to occupy his time while his waited for his legs to come back to life.

  He noticed the two set of keys lying on top of his bedside table. The lie.

  Yesterday he had concocted the story of the forgotten keys in order to check on Andy that evening. Only now did he realize that in his urgency to thwart a potential breach of the age of consent, he had completely forgotten his gentlemanly manners. No thanks were said, no future date was planned, not even a polite promise of call-backs was mentioned. He must immediately make a call to his dinner date to atone for his lack of tact.

  Once his legs stopped torturing him, Smith reached for the phone and called Aileen's number. Before he left the car yesterday, she insisted on typing her number directly into the directory on Smith's cell phone. That turned out to be a good call, for otherwise, he would have to admit to the fact that his initially passing interest for Aileen had gotten the piece of napkin with her contact details on it vanished into thin air.

  The phone rang on, however, without being picked up.

  The wait conjured from his memory another similar event. Tanaka had stood him up yesterday for their shooting appointment. Feeling obligated, he had wandered in and around the museum for some hours expecting that Tanaka would show up eventually, explaining his lateness as “habitual”. That would be an excuse he was willing to accept for an artist. While the incidence had resulted in his first visit to an art exhibition in Japan and finally taking advantage of his expat assignment to explore the much coveted city of modern art that everyone else told him he should do, he was
nonetheless disappointed. He wondered whether anything unpleasant had happened to Tanaka. Japanese are one of the most punctual people he had ever worked with. They could, he imagined, put the Germans to shame in their high expectation for timeliness. And for a man like Tanaka, who had pleaded him twice with his thought-provoking speeches, he would be the last person not to take a commitment to heart.

  “ Masaka... darnit. I forget about it again. Always take the contact details, Carson Smith,” he reminded himself as he rolled his eyes. “Now we won't know until tomorrow.”

  Eleven more hours to kill with this dreadful thought in the back of his mind. He sighed internally.

  What about some games of Pachinko?

  Doctor Shinozaki adjusted the tails of his lab coat once more. While he was normally not a man to be concerned over the tails of one's lab coat, he was deciding between leaving the tails hanging on the side of the chair, or to be tucked neatly under him. He squinted annoyingly at Tanaka, who had asked him to wear the coat. There was no practical reason for a psychologist to wear the uniform over his suit, but the whiteness and the rigid shape of the garment were conventional signs of authority in a medical field. It worked much like a suit in business settings. Most people would automatically associate positive attributes to a person if he or she was in a uniform, and would only revert their opinions about him or her when signs of his or her inability were displayed clearly. Being fully aware of the influence the subtlety affects people around him, however, was not the same thing as allowing it to persist.

  Directly in front of him, stood the director himself. He had picked a silver and blue striped silk tie and a white shirt – the by-the-book look that spelled trust and elicited confidence, for a plebeian. It would not work on him, Dr. Shinzaki smirked.

  At the moment, Tanaka winded the knob of his tripod and looked into the eyepiece of his video camera. He considered for a moment, then he pulled the chair facing the doctor an inch to the right.

  “ Kyouju (Professor), could you sit over here in this chair while I adjust the angle?” he asked the doctor, who appeared not to have heard him. He blinked steadily at him, yet not moving an inch of his body. Tanaka recognized that look. He had worked with many self-important actors and actresses in his career and if he gained anything from those experience, was learning to be immune to such behaviors. After all, they were co-dependent in every film he made. He knew it, and they knew it, too. Nothing good ever came out of animosity.

  What bothered Tanaka was the fact that because this documentary involved a very sensitive topic, the only people who knew about it was doctor Shinozaki, who would provide his professional analyses, and his boyfriend. He did not have an assistant to do angle confirmation, lighting and sound checks for him. Given the lack of a crew, he would have to rely on his instinct and experience to compensate it.

  He decided to shift his own chair another inch to the right, making sure that the camera had a full view of the doctor. The original idea was to show a side view of himself, out of focus but still recognizable, interviewing Tanaka, who would be in focus, to create a sense of conversation, emphasizing the project as a result of thorough investigation and research on his part. Sort of like 20/20. Certainly, if the positioning was wrong, he could always edit the film and add a shadow on the side to highlight his presence.

  Having thought it through, Tanaka emerged from behind the eyepiece once again, convincing himself that his request for Doctor Shinozaki to help was so out of line it ought to be ignored. After all, Dr. Shinozaki was one of the most famous psychologists in the world on abuse psychology. Many Japanese television stations pay him hefty sums to appear on their programs. His willingness to participate in Tanaka's low-budget documentary that might never make it out of the projector in his apartment was more than condescending to him. Renewed with a sense of gratefulness, Tanaka reminded himself to behave.

  “ Kyouju , when I press the button, the machine will start recording. This light over here will turn red, and I will start asking you the list of questions. You can deliver your response as naturally as possible. And I would like to see a little bit of compassion from you to the girl...”

  “Do you think that this is the first time I've recorded anything?” Doctor Shinozaki snapped, he grabbed the script off Tanaka's hand and threw it on the desk behind him. The papers had cut into Tanaka's thumb and made him bleed, but he decided to hide it. He would tolerate anything as long as Doctor Shinozaki delivered up to standard.

  26. A Beautiful Bracelet

  15:30. Misa slipped into her street clothes once again and said goodbye to the other girls in the locker room. The slow Monday morning shift at Thunderbird ended uneventfully. Once again in her two inch tall black leather clogs from Miho Matsuda , she dashed to the closest convenient store alone before the others could invite her to tea time and bought herself the usual salmon o nigiri rice triangle. It rung up two hundred forty yen. The same amount for the last 16 weeks. That was her way of tracking prices in Tokyo, and it comforted her to know that it had remained the same for another week. If only she knew economics, Misa Hayami could credit herself with the S a-mon Onigiri Index as a reliable inflation index across Japan much like the Big Mac Index did for international exchange rates.

  Misa sauntered into the edge of Minami Ikebukuro Park and found an empty bench to sit down underneath an old Mongolian oak tree. The owner of the nearest flower stall nodded politely at her. She bowed back at a deeper angle at the kind old man from whom she had once bought a pot of pink cosmo flowers, native to Mexico, he had explained. The park was much busier than before now the Yamada electronic store had opened shop right opposite to the entrance of the park. It bothered her that the commercial activities were slowly encroaching on the park. Stalls selling beautiful imported flowers from Mexico, Australia or Netherlands she could not find fault of. Boisterous shoppers and loud hawking salesmen she could not stand.

  A cold drop of rain water fell directly on her head. Misa looked up with a smile when she saw the healthy green oak leaves soaking up the sun happily, and she wiped the wetness away with her sleeve. She noticed that the owner of the stall had put up a string of new decorative red and white lanterns with his business's name in calligraphy between two lampposts to replace the old ones that were damaged by the recent storms. Everything together gave the scene a festive mood, and it cheered Misa up greatly. She enjoyed the little moments in the park alone. The relative serenity, a rarity for one working and living in Tokyo, reminded her of her hometown.

  Her stomach growled. Up until that point, Misa was running on nothing but a bowl of cold kitsune udon noodle soup with a slice of aburaag e bean cur d for breakfast, and her insides felt as tight as a knot. Misa drank the last drop of water from the water bottle that she brought along with her everywhere and started peeling the plastic wrapper off her rice triangle.

  “Misa! That's beautiful!” Aiko had appeared from nowhere and grabbed Misa's hand in admiration. “That's the new Anna Montague bracelet, isn't it?”

  Aiko was a girl the same age as Misa, who worked at the Thunderbird together with her. For reasons unknown to her, Aiko adored Misa's style, and she let it be known, too. It embarrassed the humble Misa greatly to be showered with compliments from one of the most fashionable people Misa had known in her life every time they met. She started avoiding being alone with Aiko all together to keep herself level-headed from all the flattery. It appeared the Aiko had sniffed out her tea time den finally. Misa managed a weak smile at Aiko for her compliment about the new bracelet.

  About five centimeters taller than Misa, Aiko was a lot chubbier than Misa. But she didn't let her weight restrained her clothing choice. Her undying devotion to look exactly like models in the Can Can magazine could be spotted from a mile away. Her obsession clear with the explosion of colors in her typical clothing choice and the complex eye make-up that took an hour to do every morning and another half an hour to patch up in the afternoon during tea time and once more after dinner. She had bleach
ed blonde hair extensions in French braids twisted into a bun in the back of her head since she watched the popular anime Mrs. Loyla set in the Victorian era, and she was a firm believer of pale skin color, unbeknownst to her after Marie Antoinette. These all together gave her an odd sort of beautiful look that one could slowly grow into liking, if one puts her mind into it, as was the case for many Hollywood-worthy looks. Misa had always found it impossible not to be in awe in appreciation of her effort to be modish whenever she looked at her.

  “Where'd you get the money to pay for it, anyway?” Aiko was looking so intently at the assortments of rhinestones that her nose was almost touching Misa's arm.

  “A friend bought it for me,” Misa said, wriggling herself out of her grip. The truth was not far from it. Though she would change the word 'friend' into plural. All her clients had contributed their fair shares.

  “You're not...” Aiko seemed to have come to an idea. She read an article recently from Can Can about a scandal between a politician and a so-called hourly girlfriend. “you're not doing that , are you?” She nudged Misa on the shoulder in curiosity.

  “What? What're you talking about?” Misa pretended not to understand her.

  “C'mon. Don't lie to me.” Aiko leaned herself against the back of the bench chair and uncapped her microwaved lunchbox. The content wafted of deliciousness. “If you tell me, I'd let you have one of the takoyaki .”

  “No, I've nothing to tell you. I teach Japanese when I'm not working in this shitty place.” Misa said, rolled the seaweed paper around the rice cake. She took a bite into the finished onigiri and grew instantly lethargic to the taste of takoyaki instead . Anything was better than pre-made rice triangle sitting in the fridge for god knows how long. “Give one to me. Don't be selfish.” She looked greedily at Aiko's lunch.

  “It was you who're selfish!” Aiko turned away from Misa so she couldn't steal food from her. “You need to tell me how you're making all this money. I mean, the cheapest item in Anna Montague is at least twenty thousand yen! You'll have to teach 40 hours of Japanese on top of this job to make that kind of money!”