by Susan Barker
The doctor understands some English and cracks up at the word ‘porn’, clutching at his overhang of belly. ‘Beautiful, Mary, just like Basho.’
I smile and nudge a ceramic dish of sweets closer to him. Though they are of the boiled variety he takes a handful and crunches them like popcorn. The doctor has a near-insatiable appetite, which he blames on the spirit of a starving Meiji-era peasant he encountered as a child. He says the spirit put a curse on him, so that at every meal he is compelled to eat with the might of ten men.
‘Nao,’ Murakami-san says, leaning his silvery head towards us, ‘look at that television over there. Now, don’t you agree that my Stephanie is far superior to any of those models?’
The TV shows a model striding down the runway, flaxen hair streaming. A caption scrolls along the bottom of the screen, deconstructing her into the following components: Gretel. Swedish. 18. Aquarius. Volleyball.
‘Absolutely! Stephanie and Mary are far more beautiful!’ Dr Nishikogi thunders. ‘These models, pah! Anorexic, every last one of them. Not like Stephanie here – see how curvy she is? Yes, our girls are far more beautiful. And Mary is very clever too. Have you heard her haiku?’
Stephanie and I exchange furtive winces, to show that we don’t buy any of this.
‘Let’s play a drinking game!’ Stephanie suggests.
Drinking games are the secret money-spinners of this establishment. We play drinking games with cards, dice, ice cubes and beer mats, and sometimes more complicated games involving the phonetic alphabet and obscene hand gestures. The losing salaryman has to knock back his drink and buy the next round. Drinking games never fail to liven things up, getting the salarymen really sluiced and spending extortionate amounts on liquor. The down side is that I often end up getting drunk myself. Lately when I go to get more drinks I water my own whisky right down and charge them full price for it.
‘Great idea!’ I say. ‘Let’s play Queen of Hearts!’
There is a rumble of enthusiasm and Stephanie dashes to the bar to get a pack of cards. We shuffle our chairs closer round the table. Murakami-san’s eyes brighten in anticipation of debauched mayhem. It never happens. The only sure-fire outcome is that he will be completely fleeced.
I top up our drinks and Stephanie deals the cards.
I dream about this place a lot. I dream of sloshing whisky into glasses, the hiss and click of a Zippo lighter. I have come to resent the invasion of my subconscious; it’s like doing an unpaid shift in my sleep. I had a horrible dream recently, about one of our patrons, Fujimoto-san. In the dream I was sitting with him, listening to his golfing anecdotes, when his teeth began to fall out. Tapered pebbles of pearl grey hit the varnished wood of the table. I was alarmed but carried on as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening, listening as his words grew thick and incomprehensible. Then he turned to me with a knowing, toothless grin. I jerked bolt upright at that, my heart thrumming in the darkness. Sometimes I wake with dim memories of being kissed by clients, of letting hands roam where they shouldn’t, of being aroused by them. But dreams are often without rhyme or reason; it’s just the brain chewing over the events of the day. I’m no expert on dream analysis, but I’m sure it doesn’t mean I latently crave any of this.
When I leave Osaka my dreams will teem with foreign landscapes. Vast skies of obscene blue, tortuous valleys and ramshackle villages. Rickety train journeys to bustling cities, dense with heat and people. Sometimes I don’t know what agonizes me more, the itch to take off or leaving Yuji. It mystifies me, his lack of desire to travel. If I stay in one place for too long the world begins to narrow, like the sky viewed through a straw.
2
WATANABE
I can see you all from way up on high. You’re like amoebae slithering over the surface of a slide, oblivious of the eyes that tunnel down upon you. From here I am privy to your secret yearnings as you strain for the sublime, ache in the search for meaning, gnash your teeth in boredom and frustration. I can see the sushi slurry mulching through that client’s small intestine; his blood, rushing loin-bound through arteries and capillaries as he talks to Katya, aroused by the scent of her perfume and her husky Ukrainian accent. I can see the tiny alveoli of Katya’s lungs deflate as she heaves a sigh of boredom. I can see the beer gurgling through the pipes, the laser skimming over the surface of that CD, the electrical impulses generating sound waves that oscillate at the frequency of Chris de Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’.
I float in the realm of the Unified Field theory and Platonic forms. I could educate mankind, scatter beams of light where scientists and philosophers grope in darkness. Humanity has spawned thousands of religions and not one has hit the truth jackpot. I am no tambourine-shaking God-botherer though I have found Him. So allow me to enlighten you: God is the next phase of human evolution. And I have residency of his mind.
There was a time when I was as enslaved as the rest of humankind. Although it pains me to do so, I will describe my former life in the three-dimensional universe. My name is Ichiro Watanabe; most people call me Watanabe. My father told me at an early age I was destined for a life of high achieving. From the day I waddled into elementary school to the final day of my university-entrance exams, I sold my life-blood in the pursuit of academic excellence. After-school clubs were shunned in favour of hours studying at a private cram school. Home offered no reprieve – in fact, in the privacy of my bedroom my masochism was able to flourish. I toiled deep into the night under my self-devised study regime, joylessly committing to memory facts I was indifferent to: the laws of thermodynamics, photosynthesis, Japan’s annual export of car parts. I would persevere with demoniac drive until a glance at my clock would reveal it to be 4 a.m. I would be exhilarated by the knowledge that my classmates were now entombed in the deeper stages of the sleep cycle. I felt triumphant, like I was pole-vaulting over those lazy sleeping bastards to scholastic brilliance.
I loathed myself, chastised myself and told myself that I needed to study harder. I sustained only one friendship during my high-school days: with Tetsuya, an ardent ping-pong player with a speech impediment. My eyesight became diminished by myopia and my spine ravaged by a curvature brought on by hours hunched over my books. I got the grades I needed to get into Kyoto University. But I flunked the interview. My father hacked into the interviewer’s files, to find the panel had described me as ‘severely introverted’. My father, a town hall official in our putrid suburb of Osaka, had whitened and convulsed. ‘Ichiro Watanabe,’ he had roared, fists clenched, drawing himself up to his full 160 centimetres, ‘you freak! Your grandfather went to Kyoto University, I went to Kyoto University . . . Damn it, if I have to march in there and bribe every last member of the political-science faculty myself, you are going to Kyoto University!’
My father’s nepotism proved successful. At Kyoto University I joined the crème de la crème of the Japanese education system. My fellow nerds and I rejoiced. Gone were the boisterous extroverts who mocked our feeble batting on the baseball pitch and slacked off during cleaning duty, leaving us to scrub lavatory bowls and clap blackboard dusters. Kyoto University marked the beginning of our trajectory to power and revenge. The waking hell of high school behind us, we rubbed our palms and cackled like Lex Luther, knowing world domination would soon be ours.
My self-image also underwent a paradigm shift. I realized that my scrawny torso and legs weren’t a social disaster after all. A glance at some fashion magazines informed me that my malnourished androgyny was quite hip. I switched to contact lenses and got a jagged, asymmetrical haircut. Girls who before had paid the high-school Watanabe the same attention as they would carpet lint now began to smile at me. The first girl I took back to my student dorm was an Archaeology student called Aiko, who wore thick tortoiseshell glasses. Yukie came next, then Yukiko with the slender calves that hooked over my shoulders. Sometimes while they slept I would watch them in disbelief, gently prod them to make sure they were real.
It was during my second semester that I beg
an to transcend the ordinary world. My terror was on the scale of awakening one day to find the Earth’s tectonic plates have shifted to form a continent-long sneer into the crust of the planet. The most ludicrous things began to happen to me, things that I couldn’t reveal to a soul. Not to the girls I invited back for clammy trysts beneath my dormitory sheets. Nor to Tetsuya, who, like myself, had undergone metamorphosis and had swapped the ping-pong paddle for a bass guitar, and was now fronting a band called The Eunuchs. I knew the futility of explanation.
From nowhere a strange fatigue came and seeped into my life. My appetite diminished to a memory. The only thing I could ingest without being wrenched by a brutal riptide of nausea were vitamin C tablets. I began to have murky, distorted dreams that lodged in my waking consciousness like a steak knife. It was as though something had come undone in my mind, as though aliens were probing me while I slept, snipping away at the cords that anchored me to reality. Then one morning I awoke and the doubt that had been so quietly incubating exploded into something I could no longer ignore.
I watch as Katya purrs up against an elderly client, lets the chiffon of her translucent blouse caress his skin, tormenting him. ‘Playing golf must keep you really fit, Mr Suzuki. Your triceps must be in splendid condition.’ I can see fierce tides of frustration swell within him. He is a sociopath and wants to snap her neck. Fortunately for society, he is too cowardly to obey these vicious impulses. Katya purrs on, oblivious. Mary is also watching Katya. Jealousy curdles within her stomach and she convinces herself she could never stoop to Katya’s vulgar sycophancy. I watch as urea filters through her kidneys; she has to empty her bladder but is waiting for a lull in the conversation with her salaryman. Ah . . . there she goes.
Katya and Mary . . . I just need to be in the same room with them to know the thoughts that whirl through their minds and the secrets their bodies keep. Lately Mary has been agonizing over her boyfriend’s sexual demands; he asks her to remain perfectly still during sex, as though she were a corpse and he a necrophiliac. And Katya hasn’t had a period since she was eleven; she thinks the flow has been stemmed by the years spent training to be a gymnast back in the Ukraine, but the truth is she has an ovarian cyst. I can see it, clinging inoffensively to her ovary, like a pearl.
Nothing shocks me any more – not the thousands of diseases I see festering in the flesh, not the crazed, perverted thoughts I see lurking in the minds of ordinary people. By now I’ve seen it all.
‘Watanabe, could you make up a couple of pepperoni pizzas for the Mitsubishi men? They’re back again tonight. I hope they don’t stay until four a.m. this time!’
It’s Mariko. I nod and instantly see that Mariko is having an affair with the chairman of the Ministry of Fisheries, who came here last week. It is not with detached indifference that I observe the pitifully barren personal lives of the hostesses. During my time as the chef at The Sayonara Bar, a fondness has germinated for each hostess. I intend to concoct a subtle plan to get Katya to see a doctor (though sometimes even doctors can miss the ailments that I see).
This is the paradox of the position of enlightenment that I find myself in. I have the wisdom to alleviate every ill in society, and yet I am powerless. There are paths of elucidation, but they require the abandonment of every prejudice your senses have taught you; the suspension of every belief threading your existence into neat, comprehensible bundles. Even a deranged wino, discovering new worlds as he forages through the city bins, might think me insane.
Sirens resound across Japan, alerting the nation to a nuclear attack. A group of wealthy, apocalypse-fearing friends climb down a 100-metre shaft to their secret underground nuclear bunker. Just as the ten-inch lead door slams behind them the sirens stop and the Japanese public are informed that it has all been a false alarm. Paroxysms of relief flood the nation.
The bunker assemblage, however, have no idea that the all clear has been given. ‘There will be nuclear fallout and then a nuclear winter,’ frets the chief apocalypse-phobic. ‘We should wait at least three years before we resurface!’
Unfortunately, during the three years their fear of the surface escalates and when the time comes to emerge they are too scared to leave. Before long the electricity generator breaks, so they have to live in darkness. Then the food supplies are exhausted, so they have to dig for earthworms and grubs.
Generations later, the descendants of the bunker pioneers are still living in the permanently dark underground lair. They dig tunnels to expand their underworld and become adept at farming grubs (an exceptional source of protein). They enhance their world in many ways, but an ancestral legacy of surface terror has been instilled within their community. There is a road directly above them and they often hear the rumbling of an overhead heavy-goods vehicle. They believe this rumbling to be the footsteps of one of the fire-breathing dragons that came to inherit the earth. The lair-dwellers are not dissatisfied with the dank squalor of their world of tunnels. They have an aphorism that slips from their lips in times of doubt: ‘A man tired of Tunnel World is tired of life itself, for in Tunnel World there is all life has to afford.’
One day, while digging himself his own private lair a young man penetrates the original shaft that leads to the surface. ‘How odd!’ he thinks. ‘A vertical tunnel! How can this be when in Tunnel World only horizontal tunnels are permitted?’ Curious, he climbs up the shaft and into a sewer. He pops open a manhole cover, to be confronted with a roaring Japanese metropolis.
The escaped lair-dweller’s mind detonates with astonishment. Eyes encountering light for the first time scald and blister. Machines of inconceivable colours zoom over the surface, his nasal cavities are flooded with petrol fumes and the succulent aroma of hotdogs wafting from a nearby stand. His eardrums shudder with the chaotic din of city life. He longs for the womblike sanctuary of Tunnel World. ‘Deliver me from hell!’ he cries, his sanity in shreds. ‘What are these strange creatures that charge to and fro?’ Horrified, he realizes that the strange creatures and the lair-dwellers are one and the same.
The escaped lair-dweller’s mind gradually re-orientates. The initial chemical peel of sunlight subsides to a more tolerable chlorinated sting. ‘I have discovered the reality that exists beyond Tunnel World!’ he exclaims, his chest tightening with joy. ‘I must go back and tell the others.’ Unfortunately his attempts to explain to the lair-dwellers about the world above are met with incredulous laughter. ‘The fire-breathing dragons don’t exist . . . People walk upright . . . The surface world has colours radically different from the seventeen shades of darkness! . . .Yeah . . . Right!’ Their minds unable to assimilate what they have never perceived before, the lair-dwellers remain unconvinced. Psychologically shackled, leaving Tunnel World to investigate for themselves is out of the question. Screw it! This is a waste of time, thinks the escaped lair-dweller. I pity them and wish them freedom but I’m not going to hang around here for a moment longer. After all, a butterfly sprung from its chrysalis is far too busy soaring the stratosphere to worry about the grubs it has left behind.
I, Ichiro Watanabe, am the liberated lair-dweller, and the madness that snatched me from the sleazy prime of my undergraduate days was my ascent into a new reality. But I didn’t have to climb up a 100-metre shaft to reach this new domain. This higher realm is superimposed upon the sphere of human experience. It is tantalizingly close and permeates our every move. Scientists, spiritualists, philosophers and madmen have all hypothesized upon it before. They have called it many things, but the name I deem most appropriate is this: the fourth dimension.
‘Watanabe, how are those pizzas coming along? The Mitsubishi men are getting impatient. They’ve already eaten five bags of cashew nuts and are about to start on the drink mats!’
Mariko shatters my concentration like a juggernaut swerving into plate glass. I see the red blood cells being pumped around her arteries: her haemoglobin seems a touch pallid today. Later I will make her a spinach salad to boost her iron levels.
‘Watanab
e? The pizzas?’
I sniff the kitchen air and catch nothing more than the odour of drain sediment and washing-up detergent. Drat! The pizzas.
‘Watanabeee!’ Mariko wails. She mock-pummels my chest with her fists. ‘How am I going to break the news to the Mitsubishi swine that their pizzas will take another twenty minutes? They’ll flay me alive!’
Her tone is light, but the fourth-dimensional representation of her mind is a Van de Graaff generator of panic and dismay. Mariko suffers abysmal mental anguish from this job. Unlike the other hostesses, she is unable to dislocate her self-worth from the subservient nature of hostessing. I can see the tentacles of resentment knead her psyche.
With a pang of shame at my higher-realm preoccupation, I empty a package of dried squid onto a plate. ‘Please accept my apologies,’ I soberly announce to Mariko. ‘And take them this squid. The pizza will be ready in fifteen minutes.’
I execute a 180-degree bow and she backs out of the kitchen bemused, my fanatical humility soothing her.
I have often pondered upon the spatial position I occupy. I guess you could call me an intermediary between the third and fourth dimension. When I speak of the fourth dimension, I do not speak of time but of the next dimension of space. Think of a two-dimensional universe sketched out upon a sheet of paper. A person looking down on that two-dimensional universe would be able to observe every event in that universe, like an omniscient god. It follows that if you transcend to the fourth dimension you are granted that same panoramic, divine view. And what does this entail? I can penetrate minds. I can perceive the visceral events of any corporeal entity. I can see the sap oozing up through the stem shaft of a three-hundred-year-old oak; cathode rays pinging against a computer monitor. I can see that one of Mariko’s Mitsubishi clients wears a nappy beneath his suit because he loves the caress of its dry-weave fibres.
To propel oneself into the magnificence of fourth-dimensional reality, a sixth sense must be liberated. This portal or capacity for interdimensional travel exists within everyone. There lies a dormant ‘muscle’ inside your mind; if it is found and flexed your perception will explode. But the human race must locate this sixth sense before it can evolve . . . and therein lies our problem. In a universe of absolute darkness a single street light glows. If you are searching for something, where is the only possible place you can search? Answer: Under the street light. Problem: That’s not where it is.