A Guide to Berlin

by Gail Jones

  ‘I was a goth Lolita – I wore only black outfits. I didn’t carry fluffy toys like the kawaii girls did, and I didn’t join clubs or giggle or make peace signs in front of cameras. I considered myself an intellectual and wanted a darker style. Aunt Keiko was dismayed, but nothing she said or did dissuaded me. I remember the first time I appeared in my costume, she staggered back as if I had pushed her. She was very conservative, more a typical Japanese lady in her early forties, single, but with a good income, I think. She didn’t understand me, or why I might change from a bookish, timid niece to this Manga-style creature.

  ‘When I finished high school I was admitted to university to study English. It helped that I was clever – my academic success protected me. I discovered later that Aunt Keiko never told my parents. She never once mentioned my transformation. She was deeply ashamed of what I had become.

  ‘I’m not really sure what happened to me. I was not unhappy, just seeking something different. It was months before I told my aunt I had left university. I had found work as a “rental sister”. Do you know hikikomori? These are young people, mostly male, who have withdrawn from the world and live entirely in their bedrooms at home. They lock themselves away, they don’t get jobs, they don’t want to be outside in the real world, or meeting with others. This is a very big problem in Japan. People say it is a kind of Japanese sickness. Hikikomori. Yukio will tell you more about this.’

  Mitsuko again wanted his smile before she continued. Yukio flashed her a sign of approval. The others knew immediately that she was speaking of how they had met.

  ‘I was employed by an agency. Hikikomori agency. Parents paid the agency to find ways to get their sons back into the world. For many we were what you call in English “the last resort”: the parents had tried pets, Shinto priests, bribes, threats.

  ‘I was a very good rental sister – I had a high success rate. The fact that I dressed as a goth Lolita helped, I think. I often began by slipping a photograph of myself beneath the doors to the hikikomori bedrooms, then notes, then gradually I began to speak softly at the door, so softly I could hear the young man drawing closer on the other side. Sometimes it took weeks before the hikikomori spoke in return, or sent a little piece of paper back under the door. I was patient and persistent. I was careful and smart. The guys knew I wasn’t just some cute good girl who would normalise or disrespect them.

  ‘I moved into a tiny rented room in Aoyama district, and Aunt Keiko finally had to tell my parents what had happened. They arrived one day to find me sleeping – the rental sister job was mostly nocturnal, as hikikomori are – and I made them tea and sat them down and explained what I was doing. I was not wearing my costume or my black make-up, so I didn’t scare them away. I explained I was taking time away from my studies, supporting myself as a “counsellor” to disturbed youth, and that I would be staying in Tokyo. My mother wept then kissed me and my father said calmly and softly that I must find my own path. There was no big fuss and no persuading. I write to my parents – the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper – every week. We are still very close. They have met Yukio and like him. They are my perfect, ordinary parents.

  ‘With my salary I began amassing a collection of books. Other young women bought clothes or went away on group trips. I wanted to keep up my English studies, and I suppose I always knew that I would return to university. At a second-hand bookstore in Jinbōchō I discovered the works of Vladimir Nabokov. Of course, it was the title Lolita that at first attracted me. It was hard to believe that something I thought Japanese had derived from a Russian man living in America. I felt stupid not knowing. But I remember that I wasn’t really interested in the Lolita girl Dolores Haze, and Humbert’s obsessions, to be honest, weren’t a surprise to me. We have salarymen in Tokyo a lot like Humbert Humbert, the “panting maniac”. It was the writing and the image patterns, it was the unusual vocabulary, it was the peculiar, vivid way he knew about secret inner lives.

  ‘When I first began, I could not read Nabokov without a Japanese translation and a dictionary: he is a difficult writer, even for English speakers, I think? But the work was also a wonderful challenge. I felt that as a goth Lolita I should know this book, and slowly developed my skills and moved on to the others. I love the stories most of all. They are all so sad and beautiful. Characters sob a lot. Characters are often Russian men and insecure and have very troubled souls.

  ‘After I rescued Yukio – you have guessed he was a hikikomori? – my life completely changed. He had money he made through selling stories online – he will tell you about this – and we began to live and travel together. I ceased being a goth Lolita; somehow it didn’t seem necessary anymore. Somehow I lost interest. First we went to Hagi, so Yukio could meet my family and see our pottery. We went together to the old kilns, which pock the hillsides like caves, and to the pottery museum and the ruins of the old castle. And then we stood by the ocean, and tasted the tang of salt in the air. I told Yukio my theories about the curious scent that is history, and the way objects carry time, and my belief that powdered green tea spiralling in a pale Hagi cup is for me the supreme image of all possible images. I had never told anyone these things before. Yukio listened, and understood.

  ‘And then – this is a true story – one day we were standing facing the sea together and a butterfly appeared. It must have been windswept across the waves. It came speeding towards us, a patch of bright orange, and flew past; and just as quickly, it was gone, it disappeared from the field of our vision. It was a sign, we both agreed. It was a moment we have talked of often, when we both turned and peered into the distance, with the wind and the waves crashing behind us, looking to check that what we saw was a real thing, a true orange butterfly, and not a figment or an illusion that we had conjured together. High brown fritillary – Fabriciana adippe – I think that’s what it was.’

  ‘The butterfly?’ asked Victor.

  ‘Yes, the butterfly. High brown fritillary. But this one was orange.’

  ‘You can google it,’ added Yukio.

  They were quiet now. There was a gleam, a polish, that surrounded them all, Cass thought. Light from the crossed lamps collected them in a primitive and artful arrangement. The storyteller against death. The retrieval of a few lucky images from the semi-darkness of the past. There was no irony here, no superior whatever to the presence of others. She thought at this unlikely moment of Karl’s massive hands gently but firmly on Marco’s shoulders, the blue veins prominent and bulging, the sausage fingers pressing down, the fan of each hand seeming to command the jerking body beneath it to halt and recover.

  Mitsuko looked pleased with herself. She was absentmindedly fiddling with the imitation pansies in her pink hair, relaxed and newly social now that her telling was done. She plucked one, reshaped the petals in finicky pulling actions, then placed it back in its jumble. They were all watching as she performed what might have been, in its elegant simplicity, a Zen ceremony dedicated to the worship of cherry blossoms. The hovering silence that followed was like that of a sleeping household, all at rest, all self-enclosed, all comfortably dreaming their own dreams.

  7

  After Mitsuko’s speech, they decided they were irrevocably committed, and that each remaining story should swiftly follow. It was Marco who suggested it, speaking as if a social experiment was taking place. Each would consent, following Victor and Mitsuko’s example, to revelation. Earlier, rather than later, so that none would suffer a relative advantage or disadvantage of knowing. It was an acceleration, he said, of the usual processes of friendship; it was a narrative artifice to which they might all pledge their mysteries.

  Gino snorted. ‘Pledge our mysteries? Jesus, this sounds like the church.’

  Marco was unperturbed. ‘Why does “mysteries” make you anxious? Why not pretend for the duration that we are all mysterious to each other?’

  ‘I like scepticism,’ he responded, ‘though I am flagrantly superstitious.’

  They were staring at each othe
r in a fraternal challenge. Victor was delighting in their argument and hoping for more; Mitsuko and Yukio were both uncomfortably silent.

  ‘Fine. Let us hear of your scepticism and superstition.’

  ‘No mysteries.’

  ‘No mysteries. Not a single one. We shall abolish all mysteries.’

  Now they were smiling at each other. Something in their shared past had resurfaced to trouble and interrupt the present. Marco was calm and obstinate; Gino was worried, perhaps, about what he might be called upon to reveal.

  ‘Say no more than you wish.’

  ‘Certo, Marco; certo, professore!’

  Gino shrank back into himself, implicitly conceding. The idea of their contest was intriguing to the others. Cass thought of Mitsuko’s tale – she had never heard of Hagi, or Lolita girls, or hikikomori – there was so much to discover behind each face in the room. But already she too was apprehensive, worried in advance at what she might be able to say, or not say. This was a pact of strangers and carried the danger of capricious misunderstanding. Perhaps, being the newest recruit and a kind of visitor, they might not expect her to offer up a story.

  ‘Alles gut,’ said Victor. ‘Save me from being the only two-bit putz who spilt his guts at chez Oblomov …’ This was for Gino’s benefit.

  So it was resolved to continue in the spirit of sympathetic listening, and to enjoy the drinking, and the conversation, and the temporary community. Cass expected Marco to renew his dinner invitation, but after Mitsuko’s talk they all dispersed into the dark, and she watched as he turned and walked away in the opposite direction, just as he had done after they left the Pergamon Museum. It occurred to her that having witnessed his shame, further intimacy might no longer be possible. This evening Marco had been distant and formal, not unfriendly, but simply removed. There was a moment in which they had accidentally touched, each studiously winding their scarves in the vestibule, and she saw a brief flush overtake him, and the shade of an idea, perhaps an invitation, begin to form, before he turned away and shrugged silently into his overcoat.

  Yukio’s speak-memory, entwined with Mitsuko’s, took place the next night. It was perhaps inevitable that they should wish to be paired. Yukio frowned in concentration. They saw a seriousness in him now, less visible in the couple, as though Mitsuko absorbed an aspect of his character he might only express when he spoke as one.

  ‘My English is not so good as Mitsuko. But I will try.

  ‘When I think about this story, my story, and Mitsuko’s Hagi story, I think we are made for each other and we needed to meet. But now, my story.’

  Yukio sat on the floor, cross-legged. He closed his eyes for a second, and then he began.

  ‘In 1995 there was a gas attack in the Tokyo subway, somewhere near Kasumigaseki station. Sarin gas is very deadly – one tiny drop can kill a man. Psychos left sarin in plastic bags in the subway, and broke the bags open using the ends of umbrellas.’

  Yukio glanced at Victor. ‘Ferrule,’ he said carefully, making sure to pronounce the ‘l’ as best he could.

  ‘Ferrule of the umbrella. It sounds a crazy idea, but that’s how they did it. With umbrellas to break open the plastic bags. Many people died, I don’t know how many. And very many were sick, and are still sick today. Some are blind, forever. Some cannot move. I watched Kasumigaseki station on Japan TV. The same pictures on TV, again and again. There was Takaheshi, the stationmaster, lying on the ground dead, with a spoon in his mouth. This is a horrible image. Dead with a spoon in his mouth. They said his name, Takaheshi, Takaheshi, and I had never seen a real dead man, with a real name, on television before. A Japanese man.

  ‘And many others coughing and crying, and one man …’ – here he consulted Mitsuko for vocabulary – ‘… foaming in the mouth. Lying on the ground. No breathing at all. I was very, very scared. I was ten years old then and everyone at school talked all day about the sarin gas attack. There were many very bad stories. We lived in Waseda, a long way from the station. But it was my city, it was my subway.

  ‘I had very bad dreams. I was afraid of the subway. I was afraid of men with umbrellas. In Japan we have typhoons and earthquakes and nuclear and tsunami, but then, just a boy, I was afraid of the city. Sometimes in my dream I was a long way in the north, Sapporo, in the snow, in the mountains of Hokkaido, and there was a typhoon in my dream, spinning and spinning, like cartoon or like manga. But this was not as scary as the sarin attack in the subway.

  ‘I have an older brother, Ichiro, five years older than me. He was excited by the attack. He teased me because he knew that I was afraid. I hated my brother. He is now a salaryman for a big company – Nikon, you have heard of it – and we don’t talk to each other. My father is also a salaryman for Nikon, and early I knew that I was not like them. My father is a hard man and very strict. He was hard on Ichiro too, but Ichiro had girlfriends – very handsome, my brother Ichiro – and magazines about women. He was popular, he was confident, he was very good at IT. I was just the kid brother who was afraid of Tokyo.

  ‘My mother was loving and very worried. She cared for me. But she could see I was going a little crazy. She cooked my favourite pork gyoza, she bought me computer games and manga, but it didn’t help.

  ‘I think now it was maybe my mother’s idea: I was sent to live with her parents in Nagoya, in Aichi Prefecture. My grandparents cared for me too. I liked Nagoya. I wanted to stay there forever, with my Oba and Oji. One day my grandfather taught me to play chess. We sat by the window of his apartment, where the sunlight fell on the chessboard, for many hours. Many times my grandfather let me win. But later I was winning all by myself. I liked the small pieces and thinking about the chess moves. I liked the shape of the board and how it started in full rows and slowly became scattered and then at last became empty. I liked how the small pieces made shadows across the squares of the board, it was a beautiful thing. A simple thing. Most of all I liked the puzzles inside my head, those squares of black and white, and the pieces moving this way, that way, and other pieces disappearing. The pawns, the queen, the knight, the bishop. All the little shadows and small disappearances.

  ‘Mitsuko says this feeling is mono no aware.’

  ‘Sensitivity to things,’ said Mitsuko, ‘the pathos of things. Melancholy, shadows, tiny objects vanishing …’

  ‘When I was fifteen I was sent back to Tokyo. My grandfather became ill and it was too hard for them to keep me. Back in Waseda, I went to school for one more year, then I refused to return. It was easier to stay in my room. I had a fixed world there. I had my own world there. My double-click world. There was a lot to see inside my laptop. I studied and I taught myself. I studied very hard. Everyone thinks otaku …’

  ‘Obsessives,’ Mitsuko chipped in.

  ‘Everyone thinks we just play video games and read manga and waste our life, but double-click was my real education. I was disciplined and serious.

  ‘First I changed my time. I woke up at night-time and went to sleep in daytime. This way I knew there would be hours when everyone was sleeping, and I could make my own room-world in silence. My mother left food outside my door, and I would collect it when I knew everyone was asleep. Sometimes I even went outside, to 7-Eleven, in the middle of the night. I took my father’s money from his wallet and bought snack foods, batteries, sweets, magazines. I didn’t stay out long. The darkness was scary. On the internet I read that Yakuza were hunting young otaku men to kill them for their body organs. Maybe true, maybe not. There are many scary stories on the internet. There had been murders of young men like me in kapsaru hoterus …’

  ‘Capsule hotels,’ Mitsuko said, ‘where you sleep in a stacked room, the size of a coffin.’

  ‘They died, or woke up with a hole and no kidney. So it was better, much safer, in my room at home.

  ‘At first my father would bang on the door and shout. He said there were hospitals for people like me. He said he would not have a hikikomori for a son. He cursed and he threatened. Ichiro, who no longer lived
at home, would sometimes visit to bang on my door for maybe hours. Then he would tire and leave. I had fixed good locks. I knew my father was ashamed and would not tell others what had happened to his second son. I knew he would rather have me hide away than shame him in public. Sometimes my mother passed letters under the door saying she still loved me and begging me to come out. Once, when I went to the bathroom, my father seized me and I hit him. I was ashamed I hit my father, but I still stayed in my room.

  ‘In my room with my double-click, I had my own education. I watched one English film a day, so I learnt English language. Not so good as Mitsuko, of course. I bought Star Wars and watched those movies many times, copying the speech. My favourite film is Blade Runner.’

  Here Yukio closed his eyes and recited with dramatic gravity, as if offering a sonnet: ‘“I’ve … seen things you people wouldn’t believe … Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those … moments … will be lost in time, like tears … in … the rain. Time … to die …”

  ‘There is a whole world of otaku still talking about Blade Runner, forever, like outer space. I studied other things, too: medicine – you will be surprised how much medicine was on the internet, even then – I studied chess moves, geology. I learnt about constellations of the stars. I kept little notebooks of symbols and ideas. I wrote stories about life on other planets.