The White Man and the Pachinko Girl

by Vann Chow

  “Oh my god, you're making me so guilty!” Misa furrowed her brows. “I know I shouldn't have bought it. Should I return it? What excuse should I make up?” She pictured the dreadful saleswoman whom she checked out with, with no sense of humor at the Shibuya 109 department store.

  “No, that's not my point!” Angry that Misa was misunderstanding her intention, she turned towards her and stuffed a takoyaki ball into Misa's mouth, so she would shut up and hear what she had to say.

  “Misa, I am begging you to tell me!” She said. “I mean, look at me! How am I supposed to keep up with the style if I work in Thunderbird? This season is ending, and the sales are on in a few weeks! If you know anything that would help me make a little extra money, I will do it. And I promise I won't tell anyone else. I'll buy you the entire Anna Montague store when I have money! I'll buy you Marc Jacobs handbags. I'll buy you Jimmy Choos. I'll even buy you pajamas from Peach John so you'd wake up every morning in style!”

  “No, you'd never do that!” Misa argued.

  Aiko didn't know what else she could say to lure Misa into spilling her secret. She resorted to shaking her, all the while pouting playfully. Misa's rice triangle almost fell out of her hands.

  “Okay, okay. I'll tell you.” Misa conceded. “But don't tell anyone and don't be shocked! You asked for it.” Aiko nodded zealously in agreement and cocked her head. Misa leaned towards Aiko and whispered sweet poison into her ear.

  27. The Mexican Unit

  At 8:00 AM sharp, Smith stepped into the building of DaiKe Industry.

  He felt that today was a day to try something new – the Arizona barrel cactus he bought recently at a Sunday flea market had sprouted two beautiful bright orange flowers.

  Apart from the quick “ Ohayou Gozaimsu ” at the security guard at the lobby, he also skipped the rows of elevators and went directly for the stairs, after excusing himself with a series of “sumisasen” and “gomenasai” through the thong of DaiKe employees. It stirred a wave of curious glances from both familiar and unfamiliar faces waiting for their turns to ride the elevators. Why? For only the bottom-most caste of the company would take the stairs. And they would generally avoid being seen, coming in either earlier than everyone or much later. A gaijin, a foreigner, with an aura of a successful businessman befitting to be the star of the Alec Baldwin starred Glengary Glenrose, using the stairs? That was the stuff for morning coffee break gossip. – “Who is he?”, “What is he doing?”, “He's jogging up the stairs to stay in shape.”, “Americans are crazy about exercising!”, “He must be a very busy man, to have to make use of the morning minutes like that.” , “That man sure has some stamina.” – The intense yet whispered speculations only subsided when a loud ding declared the arrival of an empty elevator.

  “I don't know anything. I don't know anything.” Arai said apologetically to Smith, his face proved that he was guilty of whatever he was denying. Smith had chased after Tanaka as soon as he spotted him in the corridor, but his target sneaked adeptly into his office. Smith caught Keigo Arai instead, yawning and stretching in front of the window in the coffee room at the end of the hallway, under the belief that no one was watching.

  “I'm only Tanaka-san's assistant. He organized everything, and I, I don't know anything.” Arai added, in his clumsy yet to-the-point English, although its level of credibility could be questioned. “But Tanaka-san had arrived. Let me show you to his office.” And he led the way. Onward, Smith saw a slogan in Japanese from his original standpoint at the end of the hallway hung in the air in striking red paint against the grayish walls. It had not made sense, yet it was not extraordinary. Only until he was directly beside the first printed character, which was stretched at least three times as wide as it ought to have been on the wall to his left, did he know he was in the middle of the the most amazing trick of the eye he had ever seen in his life. All the other words of the slogans were transformed like this based on the most vigorous calculations to maintain the right dimension in a so-called ‘one-point perspective’ by designers. Those in the middle that appeared to be hanging in the air were actually printed, in a much larger font, at the opposite end of the corridor, so that from where he was, they appeared the same size as the others on the side.

  “This is interesting.” He stopped to admire the print in close quarter. “What does it actually say?” Smith asked Arai, but he appeared not to have heard him nor did he slow down. Smith made a mental note that despite the very modest, and probably original office layout on this floor when it was built, as opposed to the completely renovated open offices on his floor, the artists that resided here managed to create a new dimension for themselves.

  “I am terribly sorry,” Tanaka said as soon as he saw Smith at the office's threshold. He stole glances at Arai and seemed to have gotten the information he wanted. Arai had kept his mouth shout, as usual. “I was caught up in some personal business and couldn't make our appointment. And it appears that we didn't get each other's contact.”

  “Don't worry about it. I have a part in this.” Smith pulled out a business card from the inside pocket of his suit and offered it to Tanaka, who fumbled in the small, tiered document stand without finding his own. He tore a piece of yellow post-it and wrote his numbers on it.

  “I am still open next Saturday. Same place same time?” Smith suggested, sticking the piece of post-it on his palm.

  Tanaka stared vacantly into the space for a second, then returned his gaze to Smith and asked, “Have you seen the Gokokuji Temple in Ikebukuro?”

  “I don't believe so.” Smith tried to locate anything he had seen that could be passed as the temple in his mind in the district but came up empty.

  “It's a beautiful temple. I think it would be the perfect backdrop for the commercials.”

  “Sure.” Smith reminded himself to look up the temple's history online in the next free moment.

  “It's a very quiet place. Relatively new but survived a lot. Many young Japanese go pray there.” Tanaka suggested, sowing an unsuspecting seed into Smith's head. "If you have a friend, bring him or her along."

  Smith only nodded.

  During lunchtime in the canteen, Smith saw Andy walking with his head down, a single apple rocked from one rim to the other on the tray he was holding. He walked like a puppet without the puppeteer, and shot straight towards the empty tables, completely forgetting to check out.

  “The food's sponsored, not free,” Smith called out after him next to the cashier. “I'll pay for his. I think he just has an apple. Ringo. ” He held up his company's electronic paying card and pointed at Andy. The cashier squinted, turned around to look at who he was pointing at, then squinted back at him before she typed the new amount into her cash register, upset at Smith for repenting the sins of others. Smith swiped his card quickly to get away from the sour cashier lady and walked over to Andy, who now stood hunched over his tray, with his mouth opened. The bags under his eyes told of exhaustion.

  “Cut down on the office drinking. It's showing.” Smith jested, only to notice that Andy did not smile. The most unusual. As they walked towards an empty table, Smith stayed close on Andy's side, ready to prop the man up in case he should faint and fall any moment. “What's going on?” he asked.

  Andy uttered some nonsense about plants, as he gazed over the artificial garden on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling windows. He picked up his apple and started to nibble on it. Only after he had gnawed the apple to its core did he become slightly more cheerful.

  “Six thirty meeting with the Americans.”

  “Geeze. Tell them to wake up early.” Smith knew he was merely suggesting the impossible. He had fought on the other side of the battle when he was working for the American office. “What's this all about? One of those extracurricular things again?” The only international project Andy had, had belonged to his section. Whatever meeting with the Americans Smith was not invited to could only be accounted for by Andy's superior Japanese. He was summoned as a translator to
seat in meetings he had no business in more often than he would like. Being the only few on DaiKe's payroll that was truly bi-lingual, he might never be released back to his natural habitat for being so indispensable, Smith thought.

  “I'm not supposed to tell you. But at your level, you're gonna know soon enough. Maybe you already do.”

  Smith cocked his head sideways, a look that pressed Andy to skip right to the chase.

  “Some people from Nomura came up with this idea,” Andy leaned closer to Smith, “to do away with the Mexican unit.”

  “What're they gonna do about it?” Smith remembered reading about a huge personnel cut in the Mexican factories some time ago. He was under the impression that the human resource restructuring had made them leaner and more sustainable. “Sell it?”

  “The Mexican unit had its third quarter net loss doubled.” Andy shook his head as he explained their financial plight. “A hundred and thirty-five million fucking dollars.”

  “Damn!” Smith nearly choked on the slice of fatty, stringy beef he had just put in his mouth. He took a sip of water from the glass and looked nervously around him. No one was looking back. “So what's the big idea from Nomura?” He asked quietly.

  “Wesley & Sons,” Andy said, not looking at him.

  “How the hell do they come up with this?” Smith jerked his head back in disbelief, not for its business sense, but for the fact that his arch rivalry's company was brought into rescuing his. Andy simply shrugged. He was now playing with the seeds of his apple. “How are they gonna make this work? I mean, they're not all idiots over there.” Smith asked, keeping check of his voice level.

  “That's where all the contention began.” Andy finally managed to crack one of the seeds open between his fingers. He looked vacantly at the space ahead and said, “There was no interest during the public offering. In the end, Nomura found Wesley and told them, look, the two of you are in equally deep shit. – They were also making a couple hundred million of losses in the third quarter. In May their shares were still trading at 14 dollars, and now they'd be happy to be worth half of it. – We'll marry the two of you so we get a handsome 20% commission from both ends. But they're smarter than that. Wesley wanted the entire Linox business.”

  “Everything?” Smith asked.

  “Everything,” Andy confirmed. “Down to the last chair.”

  “But not the people, obviously.”

  “You get the drift.”

  “How much are they paying?”

  “I am not at liberty to tell you, am I?” Andy replied. “All I can tell you right now is that it's going be a big deal.”

  “Well, you and I won't have jobs to go back to when this is over!” Smith blurted. He looked directly into the mid-day sun hanging happily above them. “Of course, it's a big deal.”

  Linox was the general name of all the business units in North and South America. It was a combination of the word ‘Linked’ and ‘Inox’ as in ‘Inox Steel’, which was the trade name for Stainless Steel. While Smith was planning his next strategy for the new business unit with the Americans, the Japanese were thinking of selling them off entirely. Was this the reason why the rest of the team had been so unmotivated lately? It almost hurt him to realized that the off-hand attitude from Mr. Mura on all of his recent product ideas, including expanding the Ferro-Alloy product lines to Ferromolybdenum sheets and powder, to support the construction industry in budding South American countries whose sales performance Smith was willing to bet his own buck into, and together with the sloppy monthly survey analyses, all these might be a simple rouse to keep him from making any major long-term decision.

  “How long has this been going on?” Smith asked.

  “I don't know. Today was my first attendance.” Andy started to clean up the mess he had made on the table playing with the apple seeds. “But I've seen proposals from Nomura from as far back as a year ago.”

  Smith rolled his eyes. He was after all the director of the new business unit. That used to mean something back home. He was suddenly infuriated and lost all his appetite. The feeling that he had deluded himself to be important and a controller of his own fate, as Pinocchio had been deluded to believe he was a boy, had sent his heart diving, ready to be gobbled up by any passing whale.

  “Offer the Mexs to someone else,” Smith suggested. “Offer it up to the public. Or make an independent spin-off out of it.”

  “No,” Andy said curtly. “They would have done it if it could be solved like this.”

  “Anything you can do about it?” Smith tried, helplessly. “Anything we can do about it?”

  “Like make a hundred forty million before the deal, redeem the Mexican units back and split the last five million between the two of us?” Andy pretended to think about the possibility with his arms crossed in front of his chest. “No. I don't think so.”

  Smith was calculating in his head how many first prizes he had to win at the Pachinko parlor to make up for the amount. He concluded that the calculation was not worth going through.

  “Start loving the Gyu-don ,” Andy said as he raised from his chair to take his food tray to the collecting belt near the entrance of the kitchen. Gyu-don, that was the name of Smith's bowl of teriyaki beef with onions and raw eggs. “You might have to eat more of that.”

  Smith snorted at his remark. The issue was he might not be able to have more ‘qu-dong’, or whatever the atrocious bowl of unsatisfying, stringy ball of meat was called, even if he wanted. His contract belonged to the Linox Holdings, so did Andy's. The boy, however, had nothing to worry about. He would be signed back into DaiKe before one could learn to say “Donburi”. But for him, he would be the last person to kneel and beg for a job at Gregory Wesley's feet. Certainly at fifty-five, one had a few more options than staying in the labour market, but one had more concerns, too, for leaving.

  A million question surrounded the topic of early retirement clouded his mind for the rest of the working day. He asked Cheryl, his secretary, to look some answers up for him in an email before he left the office at eight.

  28. Gift

  “Misa, Misa, look at me.” The man turned her head towards him. He had his clammy fingers clasped around Misa's cheeks. Misa opened her eyes reluctantly and looked at him.

  “Are you feeling good?” Though he asked, he was not waiting for a response. “I bought you something.” And he released his grab around her face to free up his hands.

  Misa closed her eyes again. Her head rolled to the side in comfort.

  “Look, Misa-chan, look.” He prodded her naked waist with it. She knew the sensation. The cold, hard object Masao-san meant could only be one thing. Why did men think that this would be what women want? Fighting hard against the fatigue that usually washed over her after an orgasm, she propped herself up with a pillow against the bedframe behind her and took a look the gift Masao-san had bought her.

  “Oh!” She said, seeing the object finally. “What is it?” It was a pink paper gift box with round corners, not what she had expected. On it, a single white flower was printed on the middle flap. She reached out to grab it in her hands and examined it carefully.

  Masao sat down on the bed in front of her and covered his manhood with a corner of the quilted blanket that had been draped over Misa's legs. The muscles of his arms quivered and his bulging belly rose up and down as he tried to catch his breath from the recent exertion.

  “Open it.” Masao nodded at Misa with a smile. It spread wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. She could count them one by one – it had made the forty-three-year-old warm and genial despite his unattractive appearance.

  Misa adjusted herself upright. Even though she was completely naked and, was smeared with a drying layer of body fluids that would send her running for the shower in other circumstances, she observed the customary politeness when receiving presents. Carefully, she lifted the flap with the white flower print and the other flaps spring outwards at the same time to reveal the box's content. They were a pair of beige
pearl earrings dangling on a silver chain. On the chain, two intricately tied, small butterfly bows sat on top of each one of the pearls.

  “Wa! Ureshiiiii !” Misa took out the earrings out and detached them from the cardboard that was used to hold them in place. She slid the hooks of the earrings through each of her earlobes instantly with her skillful fingers.

  “You're beautiful, do you know?” Masao said, taking Misa, now completely naked with a single pair of earrings, into view. “Wear them all the time from now on,” he said. Before Misa could utter a “yes”, or “ hai ” in Japanese, he had started to caress her breasts again. Her “ hai ” dissolved into a soft moan.

  29. I Am Your Friend

  “ Sumimasen ,” Smith said to the waitress that was passing by his seat. She didn't notice him.

  “ Sumimasen! ” He stood up and called after her a second time. His thighs rammed directly into the bottom of the metal tray that was fitted to the bottom of his Pachinko machine and dislodged it. The metal balls in the tray clattered loudly over the unsynchronized electronic music that had been turned to the machine's loudest setting. It was the noise they made that had the waitress turning around.

  “ Nani ga tetsuda shimasho ka?” How can she help, she asked, sauntering back over to Smith, who was cradling the detached metal tray in his arms precariously. The balls rolled from one side to another as if they were on a wakeboard in a churning ocean.

  “ Misa Hayami-san wa, gogo ni, ki te imasu ka? ” With his attention partially devoted not to overturn his tray, he formulated his question in Japanese with difficulty. He had meant to ask whether Misa had arrived to work yet.