It seemed like Mirai hadn’t told anybody what sort of work I do. I held on to a strap to keep from falling over under the weight of an old guy pressed up against me, and as I did so, the faces of Sylvia and other clients came to mind.
This is my last month standing here, folks. Next week I’ll have a closing-down sale, so all services are half price.
Naoki’s company was on the sixth floor of a multi-purpose office building. Inside were tall stacks of metal film reel containers, and boxes of pamphlets and leaflets pressed up against them, as if to keep them from falling over.
‘Good morning!’ Naoki called out through gaps in the stacks as he strode into the office, and behind a partition pasted over with notices a voice called out, ‘Ihara, is that you?’ It was an older woman’s voice, slightly panicky.
‘Good morning!’ Naoki said again, and peeked behind the partition. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. I hadn’t known Naoki’s last name up till then – Ihara.
‘Nothing really. They say we can get an interview with Woody Allen,’ the hidden voice said, almost screaming it out.
‘Are you kidding? Where?’ Naoki motioned to me to come over.
‘In Munich.’
‘Munich? When?’
‘Next week. Are you free then? Momochi can’t make it, and Satoko and Mitchan will be in San Francisco . . . What should we do?’
Naoki listened to her, then pulled me by the hand and pushed me behind the partition. There were four desks there, all piled high with papers. At the furthest desk sat a middle-aged woman wearing a pair of gaudy glasses. She was the head of the company.
‘This is my cousin,’ Naoki said. ‘I brought him over to help paste labels for the invitations to the preview.’
Since he introduced me, I gave a little bow of greeting. In spite of her appearance, the woman’s smile was warm and friendly. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘That’s great. What’s your name?’ ‘Satoru,’ I replied, then quickly added ‘Kokubo’. The woman owner and Naoki continued their conversation. There was no one else in the little office.
Sipping the coffee she’d made for me, I sat down at a desk near the entrance and, following Naoki’s directions, started pasting on address labels. It was for the film London Dogs, with Jude Law, a favourite of my customers these days. Behind the partition the intense conversation between the two of them went on, constantly interrupted by incoming phone calls.
‘Momochi’s in charge of this, right? I heard he was turned down for an exclusive interview in New York, though . . .’
‘He got in touch with the agent many times, but they’ve already started the next film.’
‘I see . . . I’d still like to get an interview with the director, though,’ the woman owner said.
‘I know what you mean. Momochi asked me to get Cut to let us put an article in their next issue, the special on New York. It’d be great to get an interview with the director. But why Munich?’
‘They’re premiering in Europe this month, so he went to Munich for that and stayed for a holiday.’
‘How much do you think we could get to cover it?’
‘Well, we’d need a writer and a photographer, but if possible I’d like to get by without an interpreter.’
‘I’ve got someone in mind. You remember Hanawa, who we brought for the MIFED film festival? His English is pretty good . . .’
As he spoke with the woman president of the company Naoki briskly handled the incoming calls, sometimes answering in fluent English. I wanted to see what sort of expression he had when he spoke English, so I peeked over the partition. He was leaning back in his chair, didn’t look tense at all, and when he saw me he motioned with his hand for me to Get back to work!
To tell the truth, Naoki looked pretty cool. For the first time in my life I even thought I might want to wear a tie. I wonder – have Mirai and Koto and Ryosuke ever seen Naoki like this? I remember how they said Ryosuke got Naoki’s fortune read by the fortune teller next door. It was something absurd about fighting with the world – it made me laugh when I heard it – but when I see him working here he really is – unlike me – battling with a huge world out there.
They had all sorts of small errands to do. I had to move, since they needed the space to lay out some materials, and then they sent me to the post office to mail some things, so it was past two-thirty by the time I finished pasting all the labels.
Naoki said he’d buy me lunch and took me to a nearby ramen shop. When I told him, honestly, that I’d been impressed, he was clearly flattered and said, ‘I’ve liked films since I was a kid, and it’s great to be able to earn a living at a job I enjoy so much.
‘By the way,’ he went on, ‘what do you plan to do with your life?’
The sudden question threw me, and a bite of seafood fried rice stuck in my throat. This might have been the first time since junior high that someone asked me what I wanted to do in the future. I was beyond yelling out I want to be a pilot! Or a doctor!
‘Me?’
‘You must have some idea, right? You’re working at a bar, so maybe you want to open your own place someday?’
‘My own place?’
I was silent after that, and Naoki looked like he was struggling with whether he should say anything more. He was staring straight at me.
‘What?’ I asked him.
‘Uh – nothing,’ he said, awkwardly. It seemed for a second that he might be wondering whether he should ask me what I do to earn a living. Mirai probably didn’t tell them because she figured they weren’t the type of people to approve of what I do.
‘What? What is it?’ This was bothering me and I asked Naoki again, as he slurped up his tan-tan men noodles. Again he said, ‘It’s nothing,’ but then immediately raised his head and looked right into my eyes.
‘Are you – by any chance . . .’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘Did you run away from home?’
‘What?’
‘I figured you’d run away from home, and that’s why you sleep at different places. I don’t know why you ran away, but I do think you should give your folks a call. Parents get worried, you know. If it’s . . . hard for you to call yourself, I could call for you.’
I looked at Naoki, slurping his noodles, and thought how usually we act like friends together, but he is, after all, a twenty-eight-year-old fart. But while part of me was mocking him, I admit I also felt like I should thank him for being willing to do something like that for me. It was a weird feeling. It seems like before I even realised it, I’ve become a card-carrying member of their Let’s-Play-Friends game.
Anyhow, I told him I hadn’t run away, and Naoki just said, ‘Is that right?’ and drained back the thick soup in his bowl.
On the way back to his office maybe he still suspected I was a runaway ’cause he started telling me how he’d run away from home himself when he was fifteen.
‘So even a person like you runs away from home?’ I said.
‘What does that mean?’ Naoki laughed.
He ran away in the winter, just after he turned fifteen. He was planning to hitchhike, but his fussiness and the cold winter wind made him give up on standing beside the road. Instead, he took a train headed towards Yatsugatake.
‘Why did you run away?’ I asked.
‘Why? I was fifteen, come on.’
‘That’s a reason? That doesn’t explain anything.’
‘Really? I thought it would.’
Naoki told me if I was finished pasting labels I could leave, but somehow I found it hard to and tagged along back to the company. I helped with filing and making copies until about six p.m., when Naoki’s senior colleague, Momochi, came back.
I went home that night feeling sort of energetic after working, and just as I got home Ryosuke was setting out for his part-time job. ‘You going to work tonight?’ he asked me. ‘I’ll give you a lift to Shinjuku.’ I told him to wait and phoned Makoto’s home, but he said he didn’t have any speed on him. ‘I’m goin
g to take the night off,’ I told Ryosuke, who was tugging on his shoes at the entrance.
Apparently Ryosuke was going to stop by Kiwako’s place after work. As I saw him off I asked, ‘Are things going okay with her?’ and he said, all carefree, ‘Not bad.’
‘Not bad? You’re still on the fence about her, I’m betting,’ I laughed.
‘Don’t be so sarcastic.’
‘But it’s the truth.’
‘I hate that word.’
‘What word?’
‘Truth. I don’t feel any truth in it.’
With this, Ryosuke set out happily for his part-time job. The other day when Koto asked him, ‘When you’re with Kiwako do you guys ever talk about Umezaki?’ Ryosuke calmly replied, ‘We do. Actually, when I’m with her, that’s all we ever talk about.’ I don’t know why I suddenly remembered that.
Koto was apparently out on a date with Tomohiko Maruyama, and Mirai wasn’t back yet. As I sat on the living-room sofa I realised for the first time that I was all by myself.
Not like I was digging into things or anything, but as I like to do, I went into the girls’ room and started opening the dresser and desk drawers. Just like I’d heard, all of Koto’s possessions were stuffed in three small cardboard boxes neatly placed next to the bed. On the walls were several framed illustrations of Mirai’s. The other day she’d photographed me to help with her drawings, and took photos of my chin and ears, back and thighs, finally even snapping photos of my bum.
I opened the wardrobe and pulled out a stack of boxes. One of them had winter jumpers that Mirai had been wearing until not long ago, and when I pulled out one white jumper to get a closer look something fell out. It seemed like a video tape. It was inside a plastic bag from a convenience store, and was taped tightly shut. I had to see what was inside so I careful unpeeled the tape, and discovered an ordinary 120-minute Sony video. Porn? I wondered. I went back to the living room right away and inserted the tape into the tape deck.
The tape, surprisingly, had parts that were blurred out. But it wasn’t porn, just an ordinary film. I watched it for a while – what film it was I had no idea – and then it abruptly switched to another film. Then another scene came on, this one, too, showing a girl getting raped. I fast-forwarded and found yet another rape scene. Seemed that she’d spliced together a bunch of rape scenes from different films.
‘God, what awful taste,’ I muttered and switched off the tape. Was this also something to help with her illustrations? I wondered, and as I watched the blank TV screen a chill shot up my spine. I suddenly felt like a terrible smell was drifting out to the living room from those illustrations of Mirai’s hanging on the wall. And that smell was, without a doubt, semen. That strong odour that sticks to your thighs and belly and chest, that you wash and wash and can’t get rid of.
Back when I was just starting out trolling for customers at the park and I hadn’t yet got the hang of things, I used to lie next to the customers for a while once we were done. I can’t believe I used to do that. My clients used to talk about all kinds of things. Mostly it was bragging about how popular they used to be when they were young. But one of them told me about a murder that took place in a village in France a long time ago. I can’t remember the guy’s face, but for some reason I remember every detail of the story he told me.
A long time ago there was a young boy named Pierre in a remote village in France. There were five people in his family: his wimpy father, his evil mother, a younger sister, and an infant brother. Pierre used to talk to the cabbages in the fields, even debate with them at times, sometimes beating them with a cane or umbrella. But he loved his faint-hearted father deeply.
Pierre’s mother looked down on her husband. You’re a good-for-nothing, spineless wimp, she told him, treating him little better than a donkey. Pierre’s mean younger sister took her mother’s side. Pierre couldn’t stand to watch how his father was mistreated by his wife and daughter.
His father worked hard every single day, and Pierre helped him out as best he could. His father doted on his baby son. His wife and daughter might overwork him, but his father just kept on, never complaining, all for the sake of his beloved baby son. And Pierre, too, naturally loved his baby brother from the bottom of his heart.
The tragedy took place one day when Pierre’s father was gone out to work. In order to free his father from this living hell, Pierre killed his mother as she was cooking porridge on the stove. He stabbed her in the neck and head. His sister tried to run away but he killed her in the garden. His sister, clutching some lace she had been knitting, was repeatedly stabbed in the face and neck. Then, after Pierre went back into the house, he stabbed his baby brother, in his cradle, in the back.
Pierre was on the run for some time, but was finally caught. When asked by the prosecutor why he would kill his beloved baby brother, Pierre, drained of all spirit, replied, ‘I was afraid that if I had just killed my mother and sister and had spared my brother, even if my father was afraid of my actions, when I was executed for what I’d done for him he would have been full of regret. So I killed my beloved brother as well. That way my father would be happy to see me die, wouldn’t be sad at my death at all, and could live a happier life than before.’
I have no idea why, right after I saw Mirai’s video tape, I recalled this story. But I just couldn’t shake the mental image of Pierre that I’d created.
Next to Mirai’s bed was a photo of her, her arms around Mariné Mama, beaming at the camera, with a couple of gay guys around her. There was one night, I recall, when Mirai and I were out drinking and she’d had so much she couldn’t stand up. One of the gay guys and I propped her up, muttering what a pain in the bum she was, but she just yelled out, in high spirits, that we should all go to one more bar!
As I sat next to her bed, gazing at the photo, I wondered if there was something I could do for her. And then realised right away that there wasn’t. Honestly, I didn’t think there was anything I could do for anybody.
I went back to the living room and was taking Mirai’s video tape out of the deck but I pushed the button for the other video deck by mistake. There are two decks side by side, one Naoki’s, the other Mirai’s. The tape that came out of the other deck was the one Koto and I had watched the other day, The Pink Panther.
I don’t know where the idea came from, but by the time I realised what I was doing, I’d recorded the scene of the animated pink panther dancing onto Mirai’s rape scene video.
I rewound it and played it again. Instead of the rape scenes there was the pink panther prancing around, the same scene over and over. Sometimes, though, as soon as the panther’s dance finished, for an instant there’d be a woman’s contorted face on the screen.
4.3
Last night I went to the park for the first time in a long while. It rained in the evening, and it was warm and muggy, so business was good. In the morning I was going to take the first train, but going back home to Chitose Karasuyama seemed like too much trouble, so I stayed over at a sauna in Kabukicho. I went into the dry sauna three times, for seven minutes each, scrubbed myself well twice with a scrub cloth, took a cold bath, then went to the nap room to sleep.
A guy sleeping in the corner of the nap room woke me up with his snoring, and I left the sauna before noon, went to a Lotteria and ordered a shrimp burger. The films were about to start at the nearby cinemas and the place was packed with moviegoers trying to fill their stomachs before the show began. There was an empty seat at the counter so I went over there, tray in hand, and sat down. Next to me were two older men, munching on teriyaki burgers and complaining how they gave them heartburn the rest of the day.
The piped-in music in the place was loud and I could only catch snatches of their conversation. For some reason, though, the guy in the cloth cap next to me came through loud and clear when he said, ‘You know, my wife passed away two years ago.’ He went on, deprecatingly, saying, ‘Now that I’m by myself the house seems so big. And since I’m at home all day, it se
ems even bigger.’
‘I wonder about that,’ the other guy said. ‘Seems to me you’re living it up, Mr Takashina. Look at me – it’s me and my wife together all day long. If I don’t get out sometimes and stroll around Shinjuku I feel like I’m going to suffocate.’
Curious, I turned to look at this man in the cloth cap, Mr Takashina, seated next to me. Crazy long eyebrows, a worn-out old cap, salt-and-pepper sideburns. Liver spots on his cheeks.
‘Since the end of last year I started delivering newspapers,’ the one called Takashina said. If I concentrated really hard, I could make out what the two of them were saying.
‘Delivering newspapers?’
‘Yeah. I wake up early anyway, and the newspaper shop’s right next door, so I asked the manager and he has me deliver to thirty houses every morning.’
‘Thirty?’
‘It only takes twenty to thirty minutes, but it makes me feel good the rest of the day.’
‘Isn’t it cold in the winter?’
‘When there’s snow on the ground I tell them I’m afraid of falling and take the day off.’
Half listening to the two men’s conversation, I finished my shrimp burger and fries. I stood up to leave but they stood up at the same instant, so I sat down in a nearby chair and watched them as they left.
The two men exchanged a few words outside the shop and then went their separate ways. I left the shop and, without much thought, started following Takashina, the one who delivered newspapers.
Gazing up at the marquees along the row of cinemas in Kabukicho, Takashina made one circuit of the square. I stood in the middle of the square and watched him as he made one complete round. I suddenly realised that the place was filled with men his age, walking alone, out to see a film in the morning.
Takashina finally settled on Hannibal. I lined up behind him as he bought a ticket and followed him inside the cinema. It was still lit up and he walked to the front, to the back again, then the front, unable to decide where to sit. I stood by the door, watching him trying to decide, until he picked out a seat in the very front row, so close he could almost touch the screen if he stretched out his legs.
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