by S. J. Parks
In the following days the strain on Hana and Jess’s friendship was kept in check because their lives seemed to run in tandem; small resentments had begun to chaff and Jess had taken a couple of days off from the club while the Australians were in town.
She worked shifts without Jess; Emiko was cold and offhand, and Hana found other girls were singled out for better treatment.
It wasn’t until two days later,when Jess reappeared at Shimo’s, that Emiko erupted. She called them aside and picking at the rip in her jeans told them that a sum of money had gone missing from the office.
‘Both of you were in the club out of hours that day. And I found you in the office. I have been given until the end of the month to return what has been taken.’ Emiko spat this news out and it came as a shock that she directed it to Hana.
Hana was appalled at what was being implied; surely Emiko didn’t think she could have taken the cash.
‘It must be returned,’ Emiko urged pointedly.
‘The beer delivery boy was in the office just before us,’ Jess protested.
Emiko’s response was a strangled question. ‘Why after so many years of deliveries does this man suddenly turn thief?’
Hana was both wounded and furious.
‘It won’t come to anything,’ Jess assured her when they were alone. ‘They can’t get the police involved down there.’
Hana readily believed this but the thought of the authorities scared her; Tachi’s friend had been weird enough.
‘Don’t dwell on it,’ Jess consoled.
However Hana couldn’t help but detect an unsettling flippancy, as if the problem had nothing to do with her.
It was raining so hard a sheet of water clung to the window as the thin roof took a pommelling. A July monsoon had hung about and hit in August.
Hana dressed for work. Jess must still be at class. She sensed that the rhythm they usually shared was about to change. She pulled on the grimy light cord. In the gloom of the small mirror, she painted the surprised little Japanese bows that Emiko wore, then infilled her lips in red. Consoled that while the reflection might be an inconvenient truth, she could at least see to cover up the odd blemish that had appeared in protest of her thin diet. At least Tom wasn’t here to see it. They had all gone to the Rio, he’d told her, and she very much hoped that Sadie wasn’t stepping into her jeans. He was a bit of a broken bird really, but there were plenty of women who would love to help him mend. She paused, spot stick in hand, and listened to a heavy step on the stairs.
Jess came in drenched, and immediately fell back on the twin bed and groaned.
‘Christ, when are we moving to that split-level apartment in Hiroo Garden Hills? A beautiful open space on the thirty-first floor. Panoramic views from here to Sydney? Fields of soft, white sofas and a bathroom the size of Manhattan?’
Best not to offer encouragement, Hana thought, though they might be under the roof of a voyeur.
‘When I was in Shinjuku the other day, I took a good walk up and down the capsule hotel. Looked like a giant stacked Laundromat but there was a communal bathroom and every bubble had a TV. What would you say to a move?’ As expected, Jess instantly laughed it off. Her tone changed. ‘This man bumped into me. He was all crumpled. A crumpled human really. Smelt of alcohol. He had a battered newspaper; it must have been from the train seat. He kept bowing an apology. A man without no home, no job. Just kept apologizing.’
‘My guess is a capsule hotel is our next base. He sounds our type of guy.’
‘What if the Australian shag last week turned out to have been the first son of a mobile-phone dynast?’
‘Dream on, kitten.’
Feigning trebled exhaustion Jess slunk off to the bathroom, leaving a pool at the door.
‘You make a very good impression of someone I really couldn’t even like,’ Jess let slip as she passed.
‘Aren’t you coming? We’re going to be late.’
Jess’s head reappeared. ‘You are going to be late.’
Hana looked at her questioningly and for the avoidance of doubt Jess added, ‘I’m not going back.’
So she would have to go in alone, to wipe the dew drips from the hot held tumblers and listen again and again to the karaoke wailings. Jess had always made it an easier prospect.
‘Emiko will think you took the money if you don’t come back,’ she threatened.
Chapter 30
Hana was at a table at the back of the café, looking out over the yellow sky and heavy summer rain. She ate at Ziggy’s as often as she did at the homestay. The air-con was more efficient, and the meals worked out only a little more expensive. She was picking her way through a large bowl of ramen soup, when Miho, catching Hana as she ate without appetite, teased, ‘You don’t like my cooking?’
She lifted the lid on an old cake stand and returned with a brownie to console her. ‘Complimentary.’
‘Jess is leaving sometime soon. I suppose I should be leaving too.’ She hadn’t told Miho about the theft; it reflected badly on them and Hana valued the respect of her new friend.
‘I heard this.’
‘She says we should leave Tokyo. I can’t go now. But I don’t know anyone else here, really’. She was so much more able to cope than she’d felt at the start but it would be tough without Jess.
‘How about, you know me. You stay here in Japan or you leave for home and you come back? In a few weeks, or months or years?’
‘I guess I have to get back for term time.’ Hana had already toyed with extending her stay.
‘So you decide to head back to London. Jess travelled without you before.’
‘Jess will go, whatever I choose to do.’
‘It’ll look like she took the money, right?’
Of course Miho knew; she should have confided in her.
The two-toed builder had come down from scaling bamboo scaffolding on the construction site opposite. Still in his helmet, he ordered coffee.
‘Kohi, onegaishimasu.’
‘Well, Emiko thought I took it.’
Miho knew that Emiko did not believe this. She took a filter jug from the warmer.
‘You know Emiko is to lose her job too. Guam-san is not a great guy. I know it’s not Jess, not Emiko, and not you.’ Miho swung her greying, bobbed hair. ‘You know I can’t pay anyone else to work here with me right now. I wish I could.’
‘I’d be good for washing up but I’d take a few misorders. Thanks, Miho.’
The gingko brownie was good. Hana was pretty much resigned to losing her job and her reputation with it, but it was best she spoke with Emiko soon. Returning her plate to the counter, she promised Miho she would be back.
Hana went straight over to Shimo’s where Mr Guam and three other men were playing cards, their deck dusted with hours of cigarette ash. It was a surprise to see Tako sitting among them. In this crowd it seemed he had no pressing need to acknowledge her – recently returned from a spot of sex tourism perhaps? She hung back. From under the table a small shaven-haired boy playing a computer game looked up. He had Emiko’s eyes. Guam-san peered over his cards through rimless specs, sitting too tightly on his large shaved head. She nodded at him deferentially and then blurted, ‘Do you need us on Tuesday?’
The assembly didn’t move. She was to them no more than an object floating in their Kirin beer and then Guam spoke without looking up.
‘Later you know.’
Offered nothing more, she left as the group returned to their cards and the task of building smoke rings on the air.
The following day, while painting her toes, Hana paused to read Natsu Dragneel, one of Tako’s manga back copies placed under her feet. She heard the landlady calling insistently from the lobby. It took her time to realize that it was her own name repeated over and over. She moved carefully, walking on her heels to the top of the flight of stairs.
‘A man is here.’ She jabbed. ‘For you.’ Noru wiped her hands on her apron with barely veiled disgust.
Could
it be Ed? Hana wondered. Sobered up and following through on his promise.
‘A man.’ As if he was no mere stranger to Hana.
One of Guam’s card players looked up at her between the banisters. He was thin and small and if she had ever met a yakuza, this was as close to the cartoon cliché to be unnerving. Why he came unannounced she couldn’t imagine and it made her feel ill at ease. Her discomfort came to rest on the small pieces of tissue that were crammed between each of her bare toes.
‘Guam San says you come on Tuesday like usual.’ As soon as the broken English was delivered he left.
Hana’s relief was tempered by the question of how he knew how to find her. Did Noru know her son was hanging out with the very people she objected to visiting her respectable lodgings? Though Tako had never been to the hostess bar.
Noru lost no time in relaying the house rules. She thundered through the swing doors from her private rooms and circled Hana in a rattling invective, largely self-addressed and in quite unintelligible Japanese. This tirade escorted her all the way back through the door and deep into the uncharted depths of the house. It was as if a small electrical storm had been unleashed. There were times, like this, when a weak hold on the language was an advantage. While Noru crackled in disbelief that Hana knew this sort of man, she would surely come to realize that it was an unelicited. He had turned up uninvited. If she lost the room then securing the job was no consolation. Back upstairs she ripped the separators from her toes and, with too little regard for the wet polish, smudged it. She lay on her bed and, once the immediate frustration had subsided, she wondered how comfortable she felt knowing the man knew where to find her. So Tako the mummy’s boy knew them all?
Just then Jess walked in from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, rubbing her wet hair and seemingly unaware of the landlady’s rantings.
‘Your turn. Water’s hot.’
‘Guam sent a gool over to say to turn up on Tuesday as usual.’
‘So we have still our jobs?’ Jess was nonchalant.
‘Well, he didn’t say that specifically. But I think that’s what it means.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well, he was talking to me. And I assume he meant us both.’
Jess unleashed Medusa from the towel.
‘And you couldn’t ask about me?’
‘You said you weren’t going back.’
‘The girl formerly known as a friend,’ Jess jabbed at her.
‘Well, the homestay San …’
‘I am so not delighted with you.’ Jess turned her back, to look out of the ugly high window to the east, where reams of aggressive utility cabling appeared to hold the building opposite in place.
‘Noru went into a rage as if I had dragged down her reputation. Like her house was where men turn up off the street to talk to half-dressed women. Delay him? And let her think I wanted anything to do with him.’
After contemplating the windowless building, Jess swung round as quickly as her mood change.
‘Okay, friend.’ Hana was preparing for a tantrum when Jess started to sing a vampy number and pulled provocatively at her towel threatening to expose herself to the street, suddenly a half-dressed stripper. She flung herself on the bed and the tension was broken.
‘You know it’s okay. It’s fine as we are leaving anyway.’ Jess lifted the towel and waved it around her head triumphantly. ‘We don’t need the job and we won’t need the room. We are sitting on a live earthquake zone. How many reasons do we need to pack our bags and wave goodbye? Hello, Narita Airport.’
What would it matter if she cut short her stay and left a little early? Hana could see the paddy fields from the air shrinking as their departing plane climbed and with it the receding chance of everything she had come to find in Japan; she was waving goodbye to a small individual lost in the context of her own history. It would be as if she were leaving a part of herself behind.
For a long time Hana had read Jess’s need to leave more clearly than she had understood her own reasons for staying.
‘I think you should come back with me to Tohoku and join the volunteers,’ Jess told her. ‘Look, I think you’ll find it very rewarding.’
‘I am not coming with you, Jess.’ Hana knew she was just not up to it. Tokyo was the start of the journey and she would take it in steps.
At first Jess tried to persuade her. They had lived well together; they would travel well together. ‘How about Australia?’ she suggested. It was a lightbulb moment and she was not entirely serious.
‘I am not coming with you, Jess. I can’t.’
‘I’m still not buying that.’ The mane of her wet hair fell over her damp shoulders.
All Jess was asking for was a time delay and she began to enumerate why it was appropriate for them to leave. The thick humidity of summer could be avoided and a short delay would hinder nothing. They could come back when the rains had gone or get jobs in the mountains of Hokkaido and ski.
‘Powder snow. Best in the world.’
‘If I go anywhere I have to get back to London.’
Jess tried the guilt trip, telling her she was the best friend she’d ever had.
Hana guessed she might just qualify, as Jess was the kind of traveller who might just be a misfit at home. Still, she did not waiver.
However, shortly after her outburst it looked as though Jess might get her way when Noru made clear that the following week they would have to go and find new accommodation.
Chapter 31
Zodiac Snake: charming, gregarious, introverted and smart
Tokyo Imperial Hotel, 3 June 1989
It was a hot humid Saturday evening in late June. Francis Fukuyama, the American academic, had just proclaimed it was the end of history, as the cold war between the US and USSR had thawed. Tokyo had become the most expensive place on earth while the economy in Japan grew faster than bamboo. That night the city had lost none of its closeness and the aniline-yellow day had given way to sodium streetlights.
Naomi leant back in the taxi. The lace antimacassar behind Josh’s head recalled a dignified Dutch Old Master and, despite his youth, he appeared to be growing into his role as international banker. It was only last March he had waited for her at the college steps, calling from the back of a London black cab. Though they had been an item for the whole of her first year, it was unusual for him to collect her. He had slid towards her on a bend in the road and excitedly explained that the bank was to send him to Tokyo and that he wanted her to come too. She had always found his enthusiasms infectious. He was asking a lot. Postponing her qualification and moving to a country where she knew no one but him. His persuasion carried the force of a man used to getting his own way; perhaps this dominance might relax a little if they settled down together, she had thought then. She didn’t need to work out the implications if she turned him down. And then he had surprised her. ‘We’ll get you into a white kimono for richer for poorer.’ It was way too early but flattering nonetheless. He had not mentioned it again in all their time in Tokyo.
The taxi came to a standstill outside the hotel. It stood on the site of what had once been a remarkable Frank Lloyd Wright building. Her door opened automatically in that trick that Tokyo taxis had. She stepped out and pulled at the straight skirt of lilac silk she had chosen for the evening, growing in height with Josh’s glance of approval. So far she had found Japan to be a compromise, and where the hotel masterpiece had been an unremarkable tower block now stood.
In the entrance lobby they were greeted by two kimono-clad women like porcelain dolls bowing in heavy embroidered silks. It was the first time that she and Josh had been back to the hotel where they had spent nearly a month when they first arrived. Revisiting it brought back the cloying luxury and those first steps, charting her way across the strangeness of the city. That early shaky independence seemed to have faltered. Across the lobby Josh caught the eye of a colleague and excused himself to catch him at the lifts. Naomi watched him talking as the elevators behind t
hem open and shut as if in response to the overheard conversation: the strength of the Yen; the legal challenges that might allow a Listing; the last hike on the Nikkei. Every sector had its vocabulary and it was as clear as Japanese to her, so she turned towards the restrooms to kill time.
She knew this face, but strangely enough, it was, at first glance, unfamiliar to her, rather like meeting a friend unexpectedly in the wrong context. And so she did not register its pinched discomfort.
Naomi brushed beneath the short hair at the nape of her neck, which had a tendency to form telltale knots. As she dressed for the evening Josh had come on to her and they had made love and had run late. It seemed the entire female contingent at Sam’s party had congregated at the mirror to preen. A chin came to rest on her shoulder and a familiar voice murmured, ‘You are beautiful. I hope you enjoy it.’
Miho. The pleasure in seeing her felt as good as a coffee rush. Her gamine haircut and open face suggested someone at ease. Naomi envied her this.
‘You feel like tonight?’ Naomi was a little flat.
Miho’s dark eyes shone. ‘We can always go back to my place?’ The offer was intended to confuse as Miho had never invited Naomi back to the studio, though they often hung out together. Miho had been seeing Sam for a while since Josh and Naomi had first introduced them. From her clutch bag she took a key ring attached to a flip-lid lighter and waved a set of keys triumphantly in front of Naomi. ‘To Sam’s apartment.’
‘Commitment.’
‘Going good. Very good,’ she beamed. She would not tempt fate and accepting the present served her better than once the disappointments had.
Miho’s contentment was infectious.
Naomi searched for her ‘raspberry burst’ blusher but Miho pulled it from her hand and pushed her towards the door.