by S. J. Parks
‘You want we walk round mount Fuji on Wednesday?’ Jess suggested. ‘There’s a swan-shaped ferry.’ Hana was unmoved and she persevered. ‘Or we’ll ride the pedalos; they’re shaped like little cygnets.’ It was all too much and Hana longed for home.
Chapter 26
Ed finally made contact, in his chosen Helvetica font. He and his colleagues had a trip planned to the club. He would see her there on Wednesday. Hana longed to talk of Broadway Market, Columbia Road, of Sunday lunch in suburbia, of all the coded references of home with someone who had seen what she had seen.
‘Let’s see.’ Jess potted the nail varnish brush and stretched for the phone, back to the old routine since she’s started back at the club. ‘Wednesday? We don’t work Wednesday,’ she observed unhelpfully.
Later, when they asked Emiko if they could swap their night, she was difficult about it but did agree to an extra shift, late on Wednesday of the following week.
‘We have a singer Wednesday night,’ Emiko reminded them as they left.
The crowd was different that night, fewer regulars among business trippers. The music was languid and the lights dimmer. Jess saw him first.
She leant across to Hana conspiratorially. ‘Eyes left.’ Jess was a game-hunter since the Australians she had been seeing had left town.
Hana followed her sight line across the club. He was in a thin, grey, summer suit lending him years that he had yet to struggle through.
Diluted with sake, and on the way to becoming too liquid to stand alone, Hana remembered that feeling of drowning in drink. It was the loneliest place on earth. Poor guy. She shifted the strap on her black evening dress before making her way over. She passed him unnoticed. Since the flight her dress code had changed.
It was early but his sentences already failed to find firm ground. Would he recognize her or remember her ? He was surrounded by a group of Japanese men . She had watched these business-bonding sessions, where they became anesthetized in drink with the intention of floating a raft across the cultural gulf between them. They paddled ineptly across inhibitions that still lay submerged, as if silent terracotta warriors in a dam.
He was probably out with his Japanese clients and colleagues from his law firm. He’d told her his Japanese was shakier that it should have been, because he had missed the firm’s language induction course So that would leave him floundering in a sound system that, didn’t include him. Tonight he appeared to be subject to the excesses of an initiation ceremony. The older man, was it his boss, who swung a flask in front his eyes like a toddler yet to learn the requisite distance for attracting attention?
Hana returned from her flypast to confer with Jess.
‘Can’t be him, in that state?’ She knew it was.
‘Yup. Ed. The diluted version?’ Jess suggested. ‘They don’t hold their drink well here. An ancient preference for green tea over beer. But what’s his excuse?’
‘So he’s gone native?’ Hana couldn’t give him many marks out of ten.
She could see him being persuaded to have another glass. Ed’s ears were pink and his assent at this stage looked irrelevant.
Though it looked hopeless – what the hell – she would go over anyway. Sooner the better. He was at least still upright. As Emiko was tetchy that night she waited till she was busy directing the barman moving the microphone for the act.
Jess made for the banquette with her new arrivals and winked.
She walked over towards him but the act, Peach Blossom Nikki, on high heels and muscular legs had so caught his attention that she rerouted before she got there.
He seemed so engrossed in the petite singer as she tested the mic that she went back to leaning on the bar to watch him watching the act. The toned and coquettish body of Peach Blossom Nikki began to sing, wrapping a leg around the stand, falling to her knees provocatively, her happi coat falling open to reveal a dash of red underwear.
Jess sidled up to Hana. ‘Very convincing, girl.’ Jess toyed innocently with Hana’s diamante strap and focused less innocently on Ed.
‘Enormous feet.’
‘It’s a different place tonight.’ Hana scanned the people and felt suddenly out of her depth and here was her American roommate, younger and completely relaxed.
Once the act had finished all she wanted was to say hello but she reached Ed at the same time as Peach Blossom Nikki, who was now more demurely dressed in a thin silken kimono. Encouraged by his boss, Peach Blossom Nikki took the stool beside Ed leaving her, awkwardly, to clear away the glasses. Hana pushed the empties around and hung about.
‘Hi,’ Hana overheard him begin.
Her enhanced breasts lifted on a breathless lilt and it was clear she did not speak English. Ridiculously Ed offered a hand-shake and a wavering smile; so manners were his first line of defense when feeling awkward? Alcohol hadn’t cured him of self-consciousness then; Hana could see his colleagues were laughing at him behind their beers.
‘Bonjour,’ Nikki trilled and chatted to him in French.
Hana’s schoolgirl French was poor and didn’t pick up the Marseilles dockside accent. She saw him lean precariously towards Peach Blossom Nikki, who was urging him to take a closer look at the tattoo on her ankle: a hummingbird dipping its long beak into an exotic flower. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Hana was firmly against interrupting them but couldn’t draw away.
‘It’s a hibiscus,’ he said. Hana grabbed an ashtray.
‘Non,’ Nikki said with conviction.
‘It is a hibiscus.’ Ed, as if searching for someone to give confirmation, looked up. She was at his elbow, with a tray of sticky glasses and a blossoming ashtray of stubs.
‘You. It’s you?’ It seemed that finding her in evening dress was a pleasant surprise. He started to get up but obviously had second thoughts.
‘A hibiscus?’ Nikki lisped for his attention.
He sought Hana’s expert opinion.
So she peered at the smooth ankle emerging from the sparkling shoes,
‘It is,’ Hana confirmed.
Peach Blossom Nikki crossed her legs with exaggerated delicacy, turning the full blast of her captivated attention on Ed, clearly the wisest man in the world.
Keen not to compete for his attentions, mumbling that it was good to see him. Hana left them.
It was a shame; she would have liked to talk to him, but he was far gone.
‘Hey, don’t go,’ she heard him call after her weakly.
He would have no recollection of his text message by now and she doubted that he knew her as the girl from the flight. She left him studying Nikki’s ankle and, through the sake, heard him say, ‘Peach blossom, pretty.’
Hana knew then he had no idea he was talking to a transvestite.
Halfway across the room, she glanced back to see him head to head with the giggling performer, his mouth so close he was touching her hair. His colleague interrupted him.
Ed slipped from his stool and headed off in the direction of the gents.
Pretty quickly his colleagues, Nobu-san, Kato and Watanabe-san, joined him.
‘You like Peach Blossom Nikki, Ed-san?’ Nobu asked him, as Ed unzipped his fly.
‘Cute woman. Spent a lot of time in Europe. Been to Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris. All the major cities. Very competent French. I happen to have studied it.’
Nobu-san looked at him squarely. ‘Peach Blossom Nikki speaks many languages, Ed-san.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Also English.’
Ed’s eyebrows rose on a wave of gullible disbelief.
‘And,’ Nobu-san said with barely contained mirth, ‘not so very much woman.’
His colleagues began to titter and hold their shaking foreheads, and Ed began to feel the butt of something between a sick joke and a schoolboy prank.
He felt like a man who had bought a car only to drive it away as the suspension gave in. His judgment had dissolved in a large volume of alcohol that he didn’t particularly like. He nursed a newly developed – b
ut what would turn out to be a lifelong – dislike for sake. And through a thick fog in his understanding he knew that he had missed the chance to connect with Hana. Suddenly sobered he walked back into the stale air of the bar and took no interest in the new singer crooning at the mic.
Hana was helping Emiko fill some small Imari dishes with rice crackers, while the next act performed.
‘Quite a dancer,’ Hana observed.
‘The pole dancer Nikki? She started out a merchant seaman,’ Emiko explained. ‘She was making the plastic shoes in Kobe but left her hometown in 95 after the Kobe earthquake. Used to sing on the cruise ships. Etahin. You know? Village people?’ Hana roughly understood. She could ask for an explanation later.
Getting ready to leave at the end of the shift she combed the bar one last time for empties. She found Jess beside the karaoke, with a glass in each hand, swigging whisky dregs, after a night of too many complimentary cocktails.
‘Nightcap?’ She raised a toast.
‘You coming?’ Hana was keen to go and nudged Jess towards the exit, leaving her Thai silk clutch on the bar.
Now early dawn, the neon arrow flashed intermittent pink across the stairwell. Jess slowed up and burst out laughing.
‘Bit of a lack of judgment from the lawyer.’
Hana pushed her. He had been too far gone to feel embarrassed. But if he made contact again, what would be the point? Her legs were heavy as she climbed. And she wondered how much longer she could keep this up.
‘He was set up,’ she defended him.
‘Bit of a hopeless case.’
But she rallied. ‘I still have his number. He’s got to sober up sometime.’
As the girls’ voices charted the basement steps, Emiko found Hana’s blue purse and called after her from the exit. It had been a long night. Their voices drifted off and she slipped the purse into the lapel of her kimono for safety.
Chapter 27
Tokyo, 1989
Josh was pacing the line of the garden doors. Behind him, in the overgrown, almost tropical, boundary line, loomed the rusty letters on the Tokyo Electric Power Company sign.
‘You didn’t go to the interview?’
Naomi wasn’t sure she could explain.
‘Why not?’ he persisted.
‘I just couldn’t go.’ She would never be able to tell him that it would have taken her another step along a plank towards becoming deeply immersed in a life that did not belong to her. Towards someone she was not. And she dare not tell him she was already halfway over the threatened drop. He wouldn’t understand. He didn’t seem to suffer from any moments of self-doubt or from the inability to take control of himself and do what he knew he ought do but could not. On the other hand, when he did loose control, it was apocalyptic and they would party until she found the hedonism almost more difficult to take. It seemed then that his will was something even he had to endure.
She watched as his blood pressure rose. And this was his secret weapon. Self-control that was so strong it extended its grip over her.
‘That’s a shame.’ His voice was hollow.
‘I know you’re disappointed. You don’t have to tell me you are.’
It was okay for him, she thought; he had a title role, he had colleagues, he had respect and he was needed. He had something to do which he valued.
‘I have no reason to be here. I have no reason to be,’ she said finally.
He must have read the desperation in her voice and so put aside any exasperation. When he approached her it was not caution but gentleness, and he held her for a long time with quiet tenderness.
‘I understand.’ He held her still.
She wanted, then, to believe that he might really understand, though they both knew that he he would not.
Days later Naomi decided she would catalogue, on rolls of Fuji film, the Harajuku dancers and the ankle-socked girls dressed as cartoon characters parading around Yoyogi. At the weekends she and Josh would stroll across the kinetic city braving the digital assaults on their attention from the electronic hawkers. Together they traded the sights as if they shared one pair of eyes, and when she took the photos it was as a record for them both.
Now settled in the house, Naomi devoted some time to organizing their evenings of Japanese culture, of traditional theatre and dance. The list of couples they could call on was short and often began with the Sawdays, a couple from Josh’s office. Evie had given Naomi a contact for an English voiceover commercial and she would occasionally spend a whole afternoon travelling to a studio for four second’s output. It paid very little and was so infrequent it amounted to nothing. Older than Naomi, Evie was expecting her first baby and had become obsessed with parts of the body that Naomi had never heard of.
On nights out during the performance interval, Evie would feed them information on the latest pregnancy development, despite strong evidence that two out of the four of them found it as informative as Japanese Kabuki without subtitles.
‘They induce with seaweed. Great bunches of it placed … inside.’ Evie would run on about the critical benefits of Vitamin E and the use of Chinese herbs. She would pass round a small black-and-white Polaroid of an alien growth, leaving Naomi thankful that the limitations of photography did not extend to technicolor scans. Statistics on the changing circumference of the baby’s head accompanied the show and tell.
Evie, as an expat, was a member of the American club and had picked up all sorts of advice. ‘I can tell you –’ she touched Naomi’s hand and continued in loud confidence ‘– where to buy a quality bassinet.’ She nodded to imply ‘when the time comes’, as Naomi identified a lifestyle she was particularly keen to avoid.
Mike Sawday had, since an early age, spent more time conversing with numbers than talking to people and any social jitters he had he hid behind a long, lank, fringe of hair. Evie’s long-held faith was, that, over time, she could affect a change in him and on this basis she had readily taken him on as a husband. With the pregnancy, a satisfaction had becalmed Mike; behind glasses that covered half his face, he resembled the kid who, at the opening of school speech day, knew that all the major prizes would be for him.
Evie had organized all aspects of Mike’s life where he was least capable, thereby seamlessly taking over from his mother. She held him in traces that gave her license to steer their lives where she chose and left him to focus on his numerate strengths, which were quite special, as Evie, a little too often, reminded them.
Naomi’s appetite for theatre and numerous recommendations fitted Evie’s desire to build on Mike’s cultural education and so she was happy that Naomi chose their programme of events. It surprised her that Josh had patience for these strange dramatic offerings.
One night Naomi had persuaded them to see the Bunraku puppet masters. In the womb-like darkness of the second act, Naomi had not been able to take her eyes off the boxy brocade silks of the life-sized dolls, so stiff that they could stand on their own, as their puppet masters moved nimble-limbed across the stage in their black two-toed socks. It was both dance and mime, accompanied by the shrieking calls of an ancient ritual and mesmerizing shakuhachi flutes. The shadowy masters of the life-sized jointed figures crept beside their anima and dictated the fates of every character.
‘Why are we doing this?’ Josh asked her that evening as they left the small Noh festival theatre.
‘The more we get to see, we can work out where it is we are living.’
It was as relevant to him as seaweed advice for pregnant men.
‘And that time we went to the Kabuki theatre,’ Josh moaned. ‘A full four hours of tortured screaming is hard to nominate a cultural classic.’
‘You left before the end,’ she reminded him, although even she had to admit it hadn’t been easy.
When Evie said she was finding it difficult to remain sitting for a long time in the later weeks of her pregnancy, the intervals between their evenings out together grew, and without anything else in common they lost the habit of seeing one
another.
Josh’s enthusiasm for Naomi’s role as arts ambassador swung quickly from high culture to the more familiar concerts. And when bands from home were visiting they would go to Yoyogi with Sam, an American who Josh had met on a banking transaction, and whoever Sam’s latest girl happened to be. And then she brought Miho along and it was even better.
One morning Josh was at the ironing board, toast in hand.
‘I can’t walk into the office with these creases,’ he protested.
These exchanges began with small but well-fingered grievances, thrown like polished beads of gravel that they had carried in their pockets for some time. They came to regard these sessions as a form of pressure release, preferable to the seismic eruption that would follow if they allowed them to build up without being given vent.
‘We need some help in the house.’ He was keen too that, without a job, Naomi did not feel that her life was limited to housekeeper. While the sentiment weighed in her favour, his proposal was clumsy and made her feel worse.
One morning Naomi was addressing an envelope to a postcode where her parents had downsized. Her father had been ill for a few years and her mother had been reduced to caring, to games of bridge and to dog-breeding, in no special order of importance. She knew, sadly, that, as a result, they were never likely to visit. They had never been in support of her move to Tokyo, had tried to dissuade her from giving up her architectural course and they had never warmed to Josh. And so Naomi’s letters often inflated the positives of Tokyo in order to reassure her mother, without wanting to add to her worries.
On paper, her life was close to perfect. Turning over the ready-gummed airmail, signal stripes marching importantly round the flimsy edge, she down put the ink pen, once one of her father’s, to listen for the breathless wheeze of a vacuum cleaner that had been grazing two bedrooms on the first floor since the start of Maybelline’s – her Thai help’s – arrival some hours before. She took the stairs slowly, following the sound of the machine, to the tiled bathroom floor where Maybelline was lying, apparently asleep. She called her name firmly, to be sure she hadn’t died in service, but it was only when the hoover was silenced and Naomi had given her a gentle shake that she stirred. The guilty party smiled and opened her eyes.