by Susan Barker
Yuji lunged at the keypad from behind me, punching numbers at random to mis-select another J-Pop song instead.
I turned back, mock-aghast. ‘That’s 100 yen you just wasted,’ I said.
‘A hundred yen?’
‘Yep, 100 yen. Gone.’
‘Then, let me buy you a drink.’
I woke the next morning and saw he’d left his digital watch on my nightstand. Opaque plastic with the Nike logo swooshing across its face. And there was other evidence too: an empty bottle of Stolichyna, Marlboro stubs in the ashtray, carpet-burn on my back. Had I given him my phone number? Even if I hadn’t he knew where to find me. But then a whole week of nothing passed. Another week and I told myself not to take it personally. Mariko agreed: ‘He did the same thing to Tanya. Forget about him. And keep his stupid watch.’ Then one night three weeks later, I left the changing room after work and saw him sprawled in the lounge. I’d had a tough shift. Mascara was panda-smudged round my eyes, and my throat was hoarse from smoking. Why should I care if he thinks I look like shit? I thought.
I eyed him with all the composure I could afford. ‘Come to see your mother?’
‘Yeah. And you. Been a while, hasn’t it? I’m sorry I haven’t been in contact – my boss packed me off to Okinawa, and I didn’t have your phone number . . . You ever been to Okinawa?’
I shook my head.
‘You should go, really. Sandy beaches, laid-back pace of life . . .’
What did I care about Okinawa?
‘I have your watch if you want it back,’ I said.
What happened later that evening was predictable. What happened the evening after that wasn’t. He came back. I walked towards him after my shift, wary of the eyebrows arching behind my back. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, genuinely confused. His failure to disappear for another three weeks or so felt like a breach of etiquette. But then he came back the night after that, and the night after that. And before long it stopped occurring to me to wonder why.
It’s chilly, but the duvet stays scrunched up at the foot of the futon. Yuji is wrapped tightly around me, his arms covering mine, his leg drawn over my thigh. I’d had him down as a back-turner, so it surprised me after the first time, when he’d clung to me like this. The darkness is thinning out. Soon the mailboxes in the lobby will begin to clatter, one after the other, as the papers are delivered. I feel the rise and fall of Yuji’s chest against my back, a rhythm soothing and familiar.
‘Yuji.’
There’s no reply, but I think he’s listening.
‘Yamagawa-san wants me to meet his daughter.’
‘Hmmm . . .’
‘I really hated dancing with him, Yuji.’
No reply. He’s probably too tired to speak.
I hear the back gate creak and close my eyes.
Mama-san forces us to do kyaku-hiki once a week; more, if business has been slow. She scans her computer database for the phone numbers of patrons who’ve been lax on the attendance front and prints them out. Then we call them, using our feminine wiles to tempt and cajole them back into customer loyalty. Mama-san knows which clients have ‘special relationships’ with which hostesses, and she allocates the names and phone numbers accordingly. Commission is made for every client lured away from our rival hostess bars. After I had been at The Sayonara Bar for a couple of weeks Mama-san summoned me into work early. ‘Come in at five today,’ she’d said. ‘You can sit with Katya and listen to her until you understand what you have to do.’
I didn’t know much about Katya back then. While most of the other hostesses seemed keen to forge an intimacy with new hostesses early on, Katya treated me with polite detachment. When I arrived that afternoon, she was already sitting beneath the bar spotlights, winding the phone cord round her fingers as she squealed into the receiver.
‘Mr Kobayashi! It’s been weeks since I’ve seen you. Aren’t you going to drop by and say hello?’ Katya paused to let the receiver transmit his garbled strains. ‘Don’t be silly!’ she chided. ‘I am wearing the charm bracelet right now. I wear it all the time.’ Her voice grew husky. ‘I never take it off, not even in the shower . . .’
I clocked her bare wrists and wondered how she’d explain them if her client showed up. I sat down on the bar stool next to her as she said goodbye and hung up. She crossed the kanji for Mr Kobayashi’s name off her list.
‘He’ll come,’ she said. ‘You can get away with all kinds of crap over the phone. It’s easier to lie when you’re not face to face.’
She spoke stilted English with an East European inflection, like a Bond villainess. I asked her where she was from and she said, ‘The Ukraine.’ When I told Katya her English was really good she shrugged and began to explain how to keep client phone calls down to under three minutes. It was weeks before Katya told me about herself.
Katya’s mother is English. She moved to the Odessa with Katya’s father when she was eighteen. I love the sound of that place: Odessa. It has the coarse glamour of frozen vodka and fur hats. Katya says her mother was unhappy in the Ukraine, driven near mad from loneliness. She had no one to speak English to, only Katya and a husband prone to long stretches of absenteeism. She eventually fled back to the UK when Katya was twelve.
‘Your mother just left you behind?’ I asked. ‘Did you ever see her again?’
Katya didn’t lift her eyes from the wineglass she was polishing. ‘Never.’
‘Do you want to see her again?’
‘Not really.’
I could relate to that. Our backgrounds, both of us being shunned by our mothers, have a lot to do with why Katya and I get on. My mum has barely been in contact since she left for Spain. I haven’t even bothered to tell her I am in Japan. What difference would it make? Katya had it much worse than I did, though.
She had to leave school at seventeen to work as a supermarket checkout girl but was far too ambitious to accept this dreary fate. After two years of bar-code-scanning monotony Katya found an ad in a local newspaper recruiting girls to work in Japan. It didn’t matter if you couldn’t speak Japanese, the ad said, and you could earn the equivalent of a year’s wages in a month. A fortnight later Katya and two other Ukrainian girls arrived at Kansai International Airport. She says it was rough at first, she didn’t know a word of Japanese and worked for a shady yakuza-run hostess bar. I am not sure how exactly, but she broke free after a few months. She doesn’t talk about it, but if I ever complain about blistered heels or arrogant clients, Katya will say: ‘Quit whinging. You don’t know how good we have it here!’
Katya wanted to know what I did before I came to Japan. I told her I’d studied Japanese Literature. That I’d come to Japan after splitting up with my boyfriend. He’d cheated on me with my friend. ‘Histrionics are not my style,’ I told Katya, wishing this were true. ‘I went and got my passport renewed instead.’
When I got to Osaka I spent three days tramping through the alleys and arcades of the entertainment districts, gnawed at by loneliness, the straps of my backpack gouging my shoulders. Though my Japanese was pretty good, most places didn’t want to risk employing someone with only a tourist visa and turned me away. By day I would haul myself from bar to bar, and at night I returned to the youth hostel where I was staying. I’d play a few lack-lustre rounds of Gin Rummy with the Australians in my dorm, before succumbing to abject despair in the non-privacy of my bunk.
Then I found The Sayonara Bar, on the sixth floor of a building crammed with a labyrinth of bars and private members’ clubs. Mama-san eyed me carefully and said, ‘I could probably organize some alien registration for you, get them to put down you’re an English teacher or suchlike.’ I said: ‘Where from? The Department of Immigration?’ Mama-san just looked at me and laughed. I started as a hostess that same evening.
5
WATANABE
As far as I know, I am the sole citizen of hyperspace. It may take several millennia for the mammalian brain to evolve the transcendental capacity that I have. I suspect there are extraterrest
rial civilizations with minds as advanced as my own, but here in the primitive annals of Earth I am the sole figure of enlightenment. You might think me an outlandish liar. A freak of nature. But allow me to remind you: nothing happens in contradiction to nature. Only in contradiction to what we know of it.
Viewed through ordinary three-dimensional eyes, nothing remarkable can be said of this hostess bar. A weaselly pack of bankers sits in the lounge, the smoke from their cigars drifting in lazy Brownian motion towards the air vents. Hostesses slink panther-like between tables, bearing trays loaded with drinks and seaweed-flavoured delicacies. There is the usual animated chatter; the usual lies and banalities. As I stand upon this stepladder, wiping the dusty slats of the air vent, no one pays me much attention. Why should they? My baseball cap and ketchup-smeared apron hardly signify the deity of hyperspace that I am. Drained by my tedious surroundings, I begin to covet the sensory symphony, both beautiful and profound, that is the fourth dimension.
I lower my damp cloth into the bucket of water and, with a dextrous mental twitch, reach into the deepest catacombs of the human mind. In ontological warp speed the universe deconstructs before my eyes.
All at once I am flooded with omniscient comprehension. The hostess bar clientele become my own private anatomy lesson as they explode before me, resplendent with viscera and brains. The air is illuminated with mental activity. Thoughts flicker like fireflies, spark and flare like pyrotechnics in a jam jar. Electrical impulses accelerate along nerve fibres, synapses relaying bodily commands. Nothing escapes unseen in the realm of hyperspace. I could tell you the quantum fluctuation of every molecule in this bucket of water, the spin velocity of every electron. But why waste our time? Your underdeveloped minds cannot possibly process this information. Let me tell you some other things instead.
A row of salarymen lines the bar. The one in the navy suit is called Mr Yamashita. Mr Yamashita is an exports manager at Yasuka electronics. He has a gluten allergy and subsists on a macrobiotic diet. Digestive enzymes bombard the remnants of the green-bean salad he ate for lunch. His interests include amateur ornithology and ordering size 11 heels from an internet company catering for female impersonators. Mr Yamashita is currently sitting in the clutches of resident praying mantis Katya Kischel. Her blue eyes widen in a mimicry of sincerity. ‘I’m working seven shifts a week now, I’m so desperate to raise money so my brother can have his life-saving kidney transplant.’ Back in the Ukraine, Katya has five pig-farming brothers, the only physical defects among them being syphilis and mild schizophrenia. Mr Yamashita, the sentimental fool, is moved by this fabricated plight and intends to make Katya a generous donation. In the dark, cancerous recesses of her soul, Katya purrs. She nibbles a pistachio nut, a fragment of which gets caught between a premolar and incisor. She eases it out with her tongue and swallows. It free falls down her oesophagus to land in a corrosive pool of stomach bile.
There is a ripple in the fabric of space-time. Mary dashes into the bar. Beautiful Mary, with her pale, sapphire eyes and hair spun from gold. Her heart trills with anxiety as she scans the room for Mama-san, her tongue spring-loaded with apologies for her lateness. Mary’s psyche is besieged by problems at the moment as she frets over an overdue rent cheque and the demands of her vile, necrophiliac boyfriend. Yet she finds the time to pause by my stepladder and smile up at me. The soft flesh of her lips pulled taut, her beauty soars to its zenith. For a moment there is nothing else. Nothing but an infinity of smiling Marys, swirling through hyperspace.
‘Hello, Watanabe,’ she says.
Smile back at her! I urge myself. Say hello!
But I am sadly bereft of vocal cords. With a lustrous shimmer of golden hair Mary walks away. She disappears into the changing room, a path of molecular insurrection blazing behind her.
Yesterday was my nineteenth birthday. My parents of the lower dimensional realm sent me a card adorned with a picture of a fluffy kitten. They also enclosed a photograph of themselves, standing to attention in the shade of a persimmon tree, boring into me with their unsmiling eyes. The photograph was unnecessary as I still remember what they look like. My father also wrote that he expected me to be fully engrossed in my studies by now and in the top one per cent of my class. If he knew how his son marked the new evolutionary phase of mankind, my grades would quickly wither into insignificance. It saddens me that he judges me by criteria my higher dimensional excursions have long rendered irrelevant.
I placed my birthday card on the mantelpiece. The kitten made me uneasy. It seemed to stalk me with its pathetically foetal eyes. I could bear only a few minutes of this before I was compelled to tear the card into many pieces and flush it down the toilet. I yanked hard on the lever several times so it would be flushed deep into the bowels of the Osaka sewage system. I then sank to my knees, trembling, ashamed of my ingratitude.
During my formative years, my father laboured to toughen me up. He knew how cruel the world could be and prepared me for it as best he could. My first brush with brutality came when I was in the fourth grade. I was taking a short cut home from school through the wooded area behind the playing fields when Michio and Kazuo Kaku, twin brothers notorious for their pre-pubescent savagery, dashed out from behind a thicket and began to belt me with their satchels. I was more shocked than hurt. Owing to the absence of books, the satchels lacked real clout. Once they had had their fun with the satchels, Michio, the smaller of the two, began to remove his jacket.
‘C’mon, freak boy,’ he taunted. ‘Show us what you’ve got! I’ll even let you get the first punch in.’
Sunlight filtered through the leafy canopy and dappled his lawless face. He handed his jacket to his brother Kazuo, who hastily stepped aside, eyes glinting with blood-lust. I stood there stunned. My spindly pipe-cleaner arms hung limply by my side.
‘C’mon! Are you ready or not?’
Needless to say, I was not. Two minutes later I was face down on the track, curled like a wood-louse in defence mode. I had become one with pain: gut-flaying, lip-swelling, bloody-nosed pain.
Michio booted my unprotected backside a couple more times before announcing to his brother: ‘Right . . . I think that should do it.’
He squatted beside me. I was playing dead at this point, a tactic I had seen endorsed on wildlife documentaries. ‘Faggot,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘We’ll be back for you next month.’
They had begun to retreat down the path, when there came an almighty rustle from the bushes. The foliage parted and out stepped my father. Dusty tears of joy snaked down my face. My father had come! He nodded grimly at the twins and they halted before him. He then withdrew his wallet from the inside pocket of his suit and handed Michio a thousand-yen note. The Kaku twins bowed respectfully to my father before fleeing down the path, feral laughter cackling in their wake.
‘Father?’ I asked, fearful this was some cruel impostor.
His sombre shadow drifted across my face. ‘Get up, Ichiro,’ he ordered. ‘That was abysmal. You have one month to learn how to put up a decent fight. I don’t want to have to watch a rerun of that appalling performance.’
Some fathers pay for piano lessons. Others take their kids fishing. My father was committed to toughening me against the world. Every month until my senior year of high school, through cherry-blossom fall, snowstorm and blazing sunshine, I would be violently skirmished by the Kaku twins, each punch and kick that rained down upon me a fiery testament to paternal love.
Birthdays are nothing but a meaningless vanity. What significance are nineteen years to the great celestial timepiece in the sky? The whole of human civilization, in fact, is nothing more than a fleeting moment of the universe. Why should we exalt birthdays with presents and celebration? Why? Yesterday afternoon I climbed out of my bedsit window and onto the roof of my apartment building, where I sat, sucking on an effervescent vitamin C tablet and gazing upon the brownish haze of sulphur dioxide that swathed the Osaka skyline. I contemplated the millions of people living and working in Osaka. All
12,900,467 of them. I could see the office workers bustling about in those grey, pollution-smeared monstrosities they call skyscrapers. In Osaka City Hall I saw Mayor Takahashi accepting a bribe from a Sumitomo bank official. I saw a yakuza boss in Tennoji discipline a dissident gang member by severing his middle finger with a hacksaw. In the NHK television studios I saw popular talk-show host Yoko Mori snorting cocaine from her vanity mirror seconds before air time. I remained on that roof for several hours. I would have stayed up there longer if Mr Fuji, the landlord of my building, hadn’t brought me out of my trance by dousing my feet with the fire hose.
‘Watanabe. A moment of your time.’
There is a lush metallic clatter as Mama-san deposits a bucket of cutlery on the kitchen counter. My nasal receptors recoil from the stench of lavender talcum powder and canine incontinence. I put down the knife I am using to slice shiitake mushrooms and wipe my hands on my apron. Mama-san fixes me with her harsh, unyielding eyes. Fault lines and fissures score her face where her wrinkle-proofing foundation has cracked. Copious cleavage spills from her low-cut bodice, threatening to break ranks at any moment. As always Mr Bojangles, her tiny chihuahua, is nestled in her arms, moulting white fur over her velvet dress. Sheltered by Mama-san’s formidable bulk, Mr Bojangles peers down his nose at me, haughty as visiting nobility.
‘We have had complaints,’ Mama-san announces brusquely.
Again? What fastidious bastards these salarymen are.
Mama-san extracts a fork from the cutlery bucket and holds it before me. ‘Look at this fork, Watanabe. Now, what is wrong with it?’
The light glints from its slender metal prongs. It looks like a normal, healthy fork to me. I activate the depths of my advanced hyper-mind. In a billionth of a second the barriers of space and logic blast away as my surroundings detonate into a greater reality. The fork breaks down into its component matter and energy. The iron ions vibrate in their loosely knit lattice, like a lazy swarm of gnats. Even at a sub-atomic level everything is in order.