by Susan Barker
‘Ah! That’s more like it, Sato-san!’ Murakami-san said, beaming with staunch approval. ‘How about we give the food a miss and move straight on! What do you say?’
And what did I say, my sweet? I said nothing. Smiling grimly instead, I turned my back and walked away.
4
MARY
Tonight Yuji turns up just after one, hair hanging in his eyes, jeans sliding down his hips. The only salaryman left in the lounge sips neat gin; he’s sunken into the sofa cushions, heartbroken and dazed. Despondently he lifts his feet so Stephanie can vacuum beneath them.
Yuji strolls behind the bar. ‘Jesus, he looks like he’s lost everything, twice over,’ he murmurs.
I am kneeling on the floor, restocking the fridge with Asahi and Budweiser, but I know who he means. ‘That guy is going through a really nasty divorce at the moment.’ I raise my voice over the clink clink of beer bottles.
Yuji shakes his head, like the salaryman has disgraced his team or something. ‘He needs to pull himself together. Be a man about it.’
I close the fridge and haul myself upright. Yuji kicks aside the empty beer crate that sits between us. He grins, his teeth white against bronzed skin, more handsome than I care to admit. How does he stay so preternaturally healthy? So resilient to the regime of Marlboros, amphetamines and junk food?
‘Save the advice for yourself,’ I say. ‘Don’t think it won’t happen to you one day.’
‘Divorce is nothing that a trip to a strip joint can’t cure,’ Yuji jokes.
‘Such maturity,’ I marvel. ‘Such wisdom.’
Yuji’s grin broadens. His sense of compassion may leave much to be desired, but that smile of his is beyond reproach. I slide my hands inside his jacket, over the cotton of his T-shirt, down to his waist, skimming beneath the waistband of his jeans. I move closer, breathing in cigarettes and citrus shower gel, and that other indefinable something he always carries about with him.
‘Mary . . . You know my mother’s probably watching us on her TV.’
The tiny camera above the bar has its red blinking eye on us. I smile at the thought of it.
‘It’s gone one – she’ll be too tanked-up on vodka to care.’
Something flickers across Yuji’s face. Irritation? A wry smile chases it out. ‘Listen, Mary, how long are you gonna be exactly?’
Outside, the rain is barely perceptible, filling the pavements of Shinsaibashi like a blotchy rash. The bar fronts are awash with neon and customers bellowing into mobile phones, Korean hiphop and reggae filtering out from behind them. At the taxi rank a long queue wobbles; Uniqlo-clone college students, droopy-headed salarymen sleep-queuing, two curfew-violating schoolgirls collapsing against each other, helpless with braying laughter. Yuji strides ahead, pulling me by the hand. Katya’s heels click their come-hither click alongside me, the sleeve of her faux-fur coat silky friction against my arm.
‘Your pulse is twenty beats per minute, sir. You’re practically a dead man! Come inside. We’ll get one of our nurses to revive you.’ A girl in an undersized nurse’s uniform stands, hand on hip, in a red-lit doorway, a syringe tucked into her suspender belt, a toy stethoscope hooked round her neck. She wags her finger at the salarymen she has just flagged down, their faces cleaved by grins of carnal delight.
‘Someone should tell Florence Nightingale she has to plug that thing in her ears,’ Katya nit-picks in English.
‘Oh, I’m sure the men don’t mind.’ I answer in Japanese, so Yuji doesn’t feel excluded.
‘The men don’t mind what?’ Yuji asks.
My Japanese vocabulary doesn’t stretch to stethoscope, probably never will. ‘That nurse,’ I say.
‘Oh, her . . . I know her. They didn’t mind her pistol-whipping them back when she was a cowgirl at Hiday’s either . . . OK, left here . . . This is the place.’
The Under Lounge is a lush, velvet-lined womb. Helmut Lang-swathed space cadets smoke clove cigarettes and waft expensive perfume about the bar. The DJ resides in the basement below, techno thudding through the floorboards like a subterranean heartbeat. I’m keen to go down and check it out, but Yuji leads us to a wrought-iron, double helix of a spiral staircase. The bouncer stationed at the top nods at Yuji and unhooks a gold rope to allow us through to the VIP area, a mezzanine overlooking the main bar space. The so-called VIPs are gathered around low, curvy tables, lit by trembling candles. Yuji homes in on the sofa where Kenji, Shingo and this much older guy sit. The older guy stands and engages Yuji in an affectionate bout of backslapping and handshaking. ‘Yuji, you rascal, we thought you’d stood us up!’
Kenji and Shingo stand too, all labels and designer stubble. The older guy is impeccably attired, his shirt crisp and the crease in his trousers knife-edge.
‘Yamagawa-san, this is Mary. Mary, Yamagawa-san.’
‘Wow, Yuji! Fine piece of eye candy you’ve got there.’
‘Erm, she can understand Japanese. She studied it at university.’
Kenji and Shingo laugh. Yamagawa’s grin stretches to breaking point. Isn’t Yuji going to introduce Katya? Unperturbed, Katya unclasps her handbag and looks for her cigarettes.
‘Beauty and intellect, eh? Why are you knocking about with an old shit-for-brains like Yuji?’
I smile and shrug. ‘I ask myself the same thing.’
Yamagawa-san laughs uproariously. ‘That makes us even. I often ask myself what the scoundrel’s still doing in my employment.’
We sit on the sofa opposite them. A waiter glides over and takes our drinks orders in automated solemnity, before gliding off again. Yamagawa-san begins lecturing the boys, his earthy Kansai dialect gargled through a throatful of catarrh. I listen, catching only fragments of his spiel – high-flown stuff about samurai loyalty and ethics. What relevance this has to three motorcycle couriers is beyond me.
‘Oh, how he adores the sound of his own voice,’ Katya whispers.
‘His accent is so strong,’ I say, ‘I only understand every other word.’
‘It’s boring as hell. But look at the boys. So well behaved!’
We share an indulgent smile. Katya tells me about a junk shop she discovered in Kyoto that sells dirt-cheap old kimonos. She knows I like to cut up kimono fabric and make my own stuff: skirts, shift dresses, handbags. I’m a shitty seamstress, though, my creations wonky-hemmed and full of rents. Yuji says the clattering of the sewing machine makes his head hurt, makes him think of sweatshops packed with illegal immigrants. ‘You look like a gypsy,’ he jokes, whenever he sees me dressed in my own couture.
Sometimes I think Katya would make a more fitting girlfriend for Yuji. Katya with her shampoo-ad sensuality and steely veneer of glamour; her never-chipped nail polish and designer shoes. But I’ve never detected any sexual frisson between them. On the rare occasions the three of us end up in a bar together, they direct their comments to me, never to each other. I’ll return from the toilet to find them smoking in silence, conversation suspended in my absence. I don’t know whether to be flattered or unnerved, whether their silence is one of mutual indifference or complicity. I remember lying on the sofa with Yuji one afternoon, drowsing in front of a Hanshin Tigers game, my dress hitched up round my waist. ‘Katya’s really pretty, isn’t she?’ I said, trying for a light and breezy, unjealous tone. Yuji yawned and replied: ‘What? Katya? Yeah, I suppose . . . if you like your women made of ice.’ Then he drew his hand up between my thighs and said: ‘I’m getting tired of all this baseball, aren’t you?’
Yamagawa-san sounds like the background drone of a radio tuned into a tedious evangelical broadcast. Yuji, Kenji and Shingo listen raptly, hhmming in the right places. Shame they can’t understand English. They’d find what Katya is saying far more fascinating. She is telling me about a client at The Sayonara Bar who paid her 30,000 yen to walk on a glass coffee-table in a skirt as he lay underneath.
‘Tsuru-san?’
‘Yes, Tsuru-san.’
‘The Tsuru-san? The company chairman who always does Johnny
B. Goode on karaoke?’
‘The one and only.’
‘You’re joking! And you let him look up your skirt? Katya, please tell me you were wearing something underneath!’
‘Five minutes was all he wanted. The easiest 30,000 yen I have ever made. He offered me 40,000 extra if I peed on him.’
‘You peed on him?’
‘I drank two litres of Evian from the minibar, then we sat on the hotel bed and watched the news on cable until I was ready.’
I bristle with incredulity and furtive awe. ‘Katya, you are full of shit.’
‘I am not.’ Then, smiling, she says, ‘Well . . . maybe a little.’
It hardly matters. Katya lies so beautifully that I still half believe her. She takes a Marlboro and strikes a match on a slim box with the sayonara bar printed on the side. A fleeting shadow of concentration crosses her face as she holds the flame up to the cigarette. Yuji’s hand descends on my knee. A swift, proprietorial squeeze and then it is gone, as though it had never strayed. But Katya notices as she exhales, a Cupid’s-bow smile framing her crooked teeth.
It’s 3 a.m. and the dance floor is strobe-lit chaos, stewing in its own infernal heat. We watch tonight’s consolidated clique of humanity; saucer-eyed in a sea of limbs, jerking as if conducted by manic puppeteers. Soon the seismic thud thud thud proves too hard to resist and we weave our way onto the dance floor. I dance self-consciously at first, but after a while I get into it, decorum swept away with my inhibitions. Katya is more constrained; she dances practically on the spot. Shimmying, I call it. I think it might be the way they dance in Ukrainian discos, but always forget to ask. Though Yuji is only sitting upstairs I miss him. I miss his broad-shouldered self-assurance, his hand on my knee. I can’t think of a single person I would admit this to.
Dancing sober quickly becomes as boring as waiting for a bus. Katya and I go and sit with our vodka-tonics on two of the primary-coloured beanbags strewn about the chill-out room. The music here aims to sedate and only a few girls dance, slow and introspectively. The smell of weed, enticingly pungent, drifts from a group of boys with fluorescent dreadlocks.
I tuck my legs beneath me, and say to Katya: ‘If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?’
It’s a question asked for conversation’s sake but Katya hmmms and pretends to give it some serious reflection. ‘The seventh floor of the Hankyu department store.’
‘I’m offering you anywhere in the world. Back to the Ukraine . . . China . . . Sri Lanka . . . anywhere.’
‘I once found a Christian Dior dress marked down eighty per cent in the Hankyu, I’ll have you know.’
‘The Hankyu department store is three train stops away. Where’s your sense of adventure?’
‘I came to Japan, didn’t I?’ Katya protests.
‘You’ve been here almost three years. Aren’t you bored of it by now?’
‘Bored? Never!’
‘Well, you can’t stay here for ever. You must have something planned.’
‘Maybe I’ll make a pilgrimage to a Tibetan mountain top. Fly to Florida to swim with the dolphins. Find a filthy-rich salaryman to marry. Fuck knows.’
I laugh. Best not to pursue this line of conversation if it makes Katya so tetchy.
Her hand brushes the nape of my neck as she lifts a handful of my hair and says: ‘You should have your hair like that girl over there. It would really suit you.’
Before long Yuji appears, escorting Yamagawa-san on a tour of the club. They pause for a moment in the doorway, Yuji the taller by an inch or two.
‘Yamagawa-san is way too old to be here,’ I whisper to Katya.
Ageist, I know, but upstairs in the world of plush sofas and candle-lit sophistication, Yamagawa-san belonged. Down here among the nubile, fashion-obsessed youths, he’s a blaring impostor. As they make their way over I haul myself up off the beanbag, then lend a hand to Katya.
‘We thought you were dancing. We were searching for you in the other room,’ Yuji says, touching my shoulder.
He smiles and the rest of the room vaporizes out of existence. I tell myself to get a grip.
‘We got tired,’ Katya says.
She twirls the ice cubes in her vodka-tonic with her straw. I realize that this is the first time she’s spoken to Yuji tonight.
‘Yeah, I am about ready to go home,’ I say, hoping Yuji will be sensitive to the fact I worked an eight-hour shift before coming out.
Instead he says: ‘Mary, Yamagawa-san was telling me earlier that he wants to dance. I said you’d dance with him. You don’t mind, do you?’
What! Does Yuji think that I work for him as well as his mother? I shoot him a sharp look that should leave him in no doubt as to whether I mind or not. His eyes flash back impatience.
‘Of course I don’t mind!’
Smiling warmly, I hand Yuji my vodka-tonic and take his boss by the hand.
The music has downsized to drums, bass and genderless vocals spun from helium. Two girls sway like sunflowers with over-long stems. One of the dreadlocks brigade whacks at an imaginary drum-kit in hopeful approximation of dancing. Everyone else lolls about, brains frazzled martyrs to hedonism. With a crinkly smile Yamagawa-san puts his arms round me. I remind myself that everyone in the room is far too wasted to pay us any attention, that Yuji will be grateful I indulged his boss’s eccentric whim.
‘Do you come here often?’ I ask as we shuffle back and forth.
‘Rarely, and when I do I stay upstairs. But Yuji wanted to know where his pretty English girlfriend had got to, so I thought I’d stretch my legs.’
My wrists rest lightly on Yamagawa-san’s shoulders; his broad hands span my waist. Up close his face is fissured and grainy-textured, his eyebrows threaded with grey. His aftershave smells like Old Spice, reminding me of pipe-smoking uncles and bygone family gatherings.
‘Your Japanese is excellent for a foreigner, Mary.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Do you take lessons over here?’
‘I pick up a lot from working as a hostess.’
Yamagawa-san beams. ‘Splendid. And how do you like Japan?’
Truth is, I don’t know how I like Japan. I have a scattered appreciation. I like the bowing shop assistants and being serenaded in the night by cicada song. On the other hand, I don’t like the elementary-school kids trailing me around Izumiya, commenting on what I put into my shopping basket: ‘Look! Americans eat Japanese sushi too’ and ‘Foreigners use tampons!’ That, I can live without.
‘I like the contrast between old Japan and new – y’know, sumo and kyogen, and, er . . . bullet trains and anime.’
The answer lacks my usual aplomb. I sound like I am feeding random words into a Japanese-sentence generator.
‘Kyogen, eh? What a cultured young lady you are! Y’know, my daughter loves kyogen.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. The two of you should meet up. I can get tickets so you can go and see a kyogen play together.’
‘I would love that.’ I really would. I don’t have many female Japanese friends.
‘I must warn you, though, she will probably bother you for English-conversation practice.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind one bit. I can give you my phone number . . . I’m free most afternoons.’
‘Perfect. My daughter is a student so she is also free most afternoons . . . and mornings and evenings.’ He chuckles.
I smile and our gazes lock. His eyes are packed with tiny red fuses, and have an oddly narcotic glaze. His jaw judders, reinforcing my suspicions. It throws me, the contradiction of thoughtful father and yakuza coke-head. At my waist his fingers move, brushing the inch of bare skin between my skirt and top. Alarmed, I look over his shoulder, to signal my unease to Yuji. But I only see Katya curled up on a large orange beanbag, her dark hair veiling her sleeping face. Yuji must have wandered off somewhere. Typical.
It was mid-October, the tail end of the rainy season, when Yuji walked into The Sayonara Bar. He was wear
ing jeans and a hooded sweater, DKNY or something, and his face was set in a fiercely handsome scowl. I had been working there for only seven days and thought he was a client. Ignoring everyone, he strode straight into Mama-san’s office. Then, five minutes later, he was out again. Gone without a backwards glance. ‘Who was that?’ I asked the nearest person. The nearest person was an American hostess who obviously bore a grudge against Yuji because she said: ‘That arrogant fucker is Mama-san’s little boy.’
After work that night, sheets of rain crashed down on my cheap umbrella as I made my way to the taxi rank. Enough rain to drown yourself in, I thought. Teeth chattering, I found my mind stuck on the slant of his shoulders, the way his features fell in the proportions equivalent to perfection.
I did some background research and found out about his gangster connections, that his arms and shoulders swarmed with tattoos. Among the Sayonara Bar hostesses the jury was out. Opinions ranged from ‘he’s a good kid – good to his mother’ to ‘Yuji treats women like disposable chopsticks: use them once, then throw them away’.
It was a fortnight before I saw him again. I was in a bar in Namba, pressing buttons on the jukebox to make the CD sleeves flip round, when a voice behind me said: ‘Hey, new girl. Put “Tokyo Boyz” on and I swear I will have my mother fire you and pack you off back to England before the jukebox finishes playing your song.’
He was wearing a leather jacket this time. Up close, the impact of his face was a thousand-fold.
‘Really? I wasn’t going to put “Tokyo Boyz” on, but you’ve just reminded me how much I love them.’
He grinned at this. So you don’t scowl all the time, I thought.
I turned back to the jukebox. ‘What is it now?’ I jagged my finger across the glass. ‘F-17 . . . F-17 . . .’ I made to type in the code.