by S. J. Parks
He began again conspiratorially, but setting up this gift of confidence was beyond the wooden delivery of the translator.
‘This quiet passion of mine is for a very small, beautifully formed historical building. One of the most important forms of architecture.’
The interpreter stood vacantly waiting to catch the next ball to be thrown, like a dog at play.
‘I suggest this is the Japanese teahouse. It offers us a way of living and is more than just a shed.’
Mochizuki started as the interpreter used the word shed. He had specifically not used the word koya when he had intended to convey a sense of shelter and protection.
He could not let him go on and somewhat uncomfortably he tapped the interpreter on the forearm and graciously suggested he might take over and have a go at speaking directly in English himself. He spoke it well enough.
‘A Japanese teahouse is found within the Japanese garden. This positioning in the landscape is important because before you reach the sanctuary of this building you must take a rough path towards it. A building should always be a sanctuary; if it is merely a shelter for daily activities we reduce our lives to merely this limited toil. We must be aware as we approach our sanctuary that we do so. It must be in full consciousness. The teahouse is a fine example of such mindfulness in architecture.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, it is important that the approach route is uneven, maybe a difficult path. You must not be sure of your step and so you must concentrate on the way. This is the Buddhist way, ne,’ he said for confirmation.
‘It is constructed according to the old concept of miegakure. The path is always crossing back on you so you cannot see where you are going to end up. It doesn’t give you any perspective of where you are at that time and you must think only of your own spirit at this time. This mirrors our lives.’ He settled his gaze on Naomi.
So Mochizuki the renowned architect was a spiritual man, she thought. The humble subject of the building he had chosen to talk about and the strength of his passion struck her as quaint. So his passions were closer to conservationist than a man ready to indulge in the cheap thrills of speed or the underwhelming narrowness of causes adopted in the absence of anything else, after all. Naomi ate very little of the lamb presented in blackcurrant jus. She was excited by this man, and he had stolen her appetite for anything other than his words.
‘Making this journey to the teahouse. You only know to follow the path. It will take you.’
She was drawn to these words and took them to be his personal philosophy. In speaking as he had done, he had endorsed her own directionless wanderings that had begun on leaving London and she found, in his dry delivery, she had a thirst to quench.
He gestured again to his colleague, the redundant interpreter, and then sat down, bowing as he did so, and, as he caught her eye, she smiled uncomfortably as if she were the butterfly that he had pinned on a collector’s mat; as if he already knew too much about her. She felt transparent. Her hand went back to the necklace at her throat.
The interpreter dropped his head towards the architect and after conferring was handed the speech to continue reading on his own.
He cited Tadao Ando, Fumihiko Maki, Louis Kahn, Álvaro Siza and the responsibilities that these international architects had carried. These familiar names settled in her mind as a profound reminder of what she had left behind; how much she missed representatives of what had inspired her reading. And now she sat before a globally respected architect who reduced the skills of these men, whose work she admired, to craftsman. He had humbly compared his skill to a potter at a wheel, drawing a fabric between his hands, though he sculpted cities.
At the end of the talk, Sam, in conclusion, rose to announce their appreciation and to thank him for coming.
Once Sam had finished, Naomi saw Miho leave her seat, smiling conspiratorially at her, to go talk to Mochizuki.
Mochizuki noticed Miho’s smile for Naomi and gently inclined his head in her direction.
As the pair left the room together Naomi couldn’t understand why she was so reluctant to see him leave.
In the brighter lights of the anteroom, Miho took a sip from her glass and tried unsuccessfully to extract an American cigarette from its soft pouch.
He came to her rescue and lit one for each of them.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘Great. I had no idea that was what you were going to cover.’
‘No. I changed my mind, which was okay, but it gave the translator a headache.’ Mochizuki felt he had humiliated the man and regretted it.
‘He was getting it wrong.’
‘Right.’ Even her exhaled smoke was drawn towards him.
‘Even monkeys fall from trees,’ he said, excusing the interpreter.
She knew Mochizuki would never use the man’s services again, not because he was no good but because he, Mochizuki, would feel embarrassed at having shown him up and would feel bad about it. He was clearly brooding over it. Miho had wanted, on behalf of Naomi, to ask him if they needed any help in the office but he was not in a good place to consider such a request. She needed to divert him from his preoccupation with the interpreter.
‘I thought I might just see Kazuko this evening.’ Kazuko had, in fact, told her the chances of her turning up were less than slim.
‘Well, she’s pretty tired after the conference.’
‘Say hi to her for me.’
‘I will. I will do that.’
Sam came up, placing his hand on Miho’s bare back, just above folds of turquoise silk; it was understood to be supportive rather than proprietorial. They flipped to English when Sam offered,
‘We are heading out for the afterparty. Will you come with us?’ His smile was generous.
Mochizuki was gracious. ‘I am going to head back. I have quite a bit of work still to do on Guam Stage Three,’ he confessed, knowing Sam understood the timelines on the Guam project.
‘That’s too bad. Sounds like you need some more lackeys. Maybe you could think of something Naomi might be able to do for you?’
‘Yes, there’s a consideration,’ Mochizuki said weakly, by nature readily obliged to accommodate a request but really less than inclined to do so on this project. ‘I will give that some thought,’ he said honestly. After saying his goodbyes, he left them to look for the interpreter with whom he had agreed to share a cab.
Miho jabbed Sam in the stomach.
‘Good, Sam. Good.’
Mochizuki found the man under interrogation from Caroline but managed to draw him away while stealing a last glance at the opinionated girl he had been asked to consider.
Naomi was talking to Josh as he left.
‘So do we take it,’ Josh quizzed, when Mochizuki was out of earshot, ‘that we will have to cut our way through a concrete jungle of a city where all the roads lead us nowhere and the paths take us in a circuitous route around the building before we can find the lobby door to the office.
Sam caught his riff as he approached. ‘Sounds like London planning to me, buddy.’ Then he laughed generously.
Chapter 32
On their return to the dining room Caroline rose to give a vote of thanks; she wore the trendy shoulder pads of an American football player as she toasted Sam for another legendary party; an unctuous speech leavened only by the fact that she mentioned herself as often as she did him. The chef bought a cake and cheering marked the close of the celebrations.
The assembly milled around the tables for a while smoking and helping themselves to after-dinner drinks and Hershey’s chocolates – a special request from Sam.
Josh turned to Naomi. ‘A bunch of Buddhist crap,’ he complained, treading with inadvertent carelessness on the inspiration she had received.
Naomi wanted to leave. ‘Where’s Sam?’
‘He hasn’t done Roppongi for a while. I’ll find a taxi cab.’
As they left the hotel, Sam touched the sleeve of the MC and gave him leave to continue serving the other guests on his account.
Four of them
took a waiting cab, with Sam in the front seat.
‘Great to see you, Miho,’ Josh charmed.
Naomi rested her head on the white, lace antimacassar as Sam pulled a bottle from under his lapels and undid the top buttons on his shirt, turning to offer the bottle.
‘God,’ she said, ‘what is the point of stealing your own booze?’
‘It isn’t my booze. It isn’t my party.’
‘Oh, really. Well, whose birthday were we celebrating back there then?’
‘It happened to be my birthday on the same night as the party.’
‘That was not how the invitation read,’ Naomi told him.
‘You’re right. I invited you to my celebration.’
‘So whose booze, whose party?’
‘I’m putting the bill for tonight on the company expense account. Berridge is out of town and he’s not going to ask to look at the guest list, for Christ’s sake. You were all my valued clients this evening. If we hadn’t gone over the top, he’d be asking questions. The bill has to be large enough to be plausible. Why else would we eat at the Imperial with an international guest speaker?’
Josh whistled appreciably at the nerve of the man.
‘What gives you licence?’ Naomi objected.
‘Equity warrants,’ Sam shot back in veritas.
Sam’s company was unknowingly paying for the whole evening and it would be passed off as client entertainment. The evening would be unlikely to be deemed personal as it was of a scale that was too large for anyone to try and pass off. Anyone but Sam. He was high now on euphoria and other things too.
It was after midnight; the streetlights illuminated the yellow haze of the city night. It never got any darker than this. The taxi slowed as a cordon of policemen took random checks; a baton motioned them to stop. The car came to a halt and the driver wound down his window to speak briefly to the slight, uniformed figure. He hung his head inside the car with a cold mask strapped from ear to ear.
‘Sanitary wear,’ Josh sniggered, hanging over the bottle to hide it.
The policeman took one look at the gaijin in the back seat and summarily waved them on. They were held up only momentarily; the assumption that they were Americans was as good as diplomatic plates, giving them licence to be treated differently, as privileged outsiders. Naomi had not done any drugs that night and was lagging behind Josh and Sam. She thought back to the architect; she had found his perspective on life so completely different.
At the stoplights, the sound of a saxophone reached their ears from under the expressway. A repetitive strain swung its way towards them that to her ear was slower and more melancholy than it should have been.
‘It’s so sad, practising under the arches.’
‘The limitations of living in a six-mat tatami room with paper-thin walls,’ Josh offered derisively. ‘He’d be beaten if his neighbours had to listen to that.’
As they sped past Naomi pictured the lone figure sheltering under the concrete underpass, listening to the echo under the bridge of his own notes, looking for pearls in the mud flats, looking for his soul in the music. Josh was wrong.
‘So where are we going, maestro? I vote for the Ink Stick,’ Sam said, settling on a favourite haunt.
‘Okay. Okay, but not yet. We first have to go to Lennon’s tonight,’ Josh drawled, as if it was time for a little more European nostalgia.
Sam overruled him.’Lennon’s after.’
As they got out of the taxi in Roppongi, the drone of the sleepless expressway thirty feet above their heads stole their voices. A dirty night, of a grey favoured by Zen monks, had settled on the shabby line of buildings marshalled to follow the stanchions of the overhead road. It was interrupted by a narrow pink tiled tower, covered in neon signs pretending intimacy on immediate acquaintance. They made for the underground bar forced into hiding beneath a faceless building, cowering under superstructure of the roadway.
‘This elegant building –’ Josh gesticulated, as if he were getting off on himself ‘– this building is worth more than the Empire State.’
‘Not true,’ Sam countered. ‘Only the plot, not the real estate.’
‘This property bubble—’
Not this time,’ Sam said, interrupting Josh. ‘This time is different.’ And Josh gave up.
Naomi watched the boys drink and dance and shout into one another’s faces. She knew then she was not just tired, she was tired of this life.
Miho suggested since it was hours since they had eaten that they stop at small noodle shop that appeared like a weed in the cracks between the high rise.
A planner’s requiem, Naomi thought, not just sober but too out of kilter to join them.
Miho, nurturing their friendship, leant close, bringing a piece of gyoza delicately balanced between her chopsticks to Naomi’s lips.
She ate without losing too much of the pale, limpid dumpling. As tired as a child, she held Josh’s arm.
‘Let’s go home. Please let’s go home,’ she whispered, but she knew it was Sam’s night and Josh would inevitably follow him. Josh was so in thrall to the American she believed he would pull Sam out of the fallen rubble before her, if made to choose.
The Beatles tribute band was in an old apartment building on the side of a parking lot. An impossibly small elevator took them to the seventh floor.
‘What we don’t need now …’ Naomi suggested
‘… is an earthquake.’
‘What a way to go.’ Josh hugged her.
’It’s been a good night,’ Sam objected.
‘“It’s been a hard day’s night and I been working like a dog”,’ Sam and Josh sang as they emerged, at the top of their voices, in clashing accompaniment with the four Beatle-wannabes, haircuts circa 1960, on official vocals. The singers wore perma-smiles and stroked guitars without strings, to the recorded backing, the whole act older than the port at the Imperial hotel.
‘They are all the same slanty-eyed Beatle,’ Sam observed with substance-induced originality.
Miho was used to rising above his comments and remained unresponsive. She often treated him with a superior indulgence, ignoring any childish behaviour. One of the reasons they got on was that she had never once questioned anything he did, no matter how objectionable he became. She was his unconditional woman.
Miho and Sam got up and danced themselves into a sweat for a few songs, then drifted back to the table to pull Naomi and Josh on to the dance floor. Naomi went through the motions but their hedonism tasted like the alcohol at this hour: sour. After they had worn themselves out in wild, exaggerated enthusiasm, they took the bench – ranks of labelled bottles of scotch promised a journey she did not want to take.
Josh called for a whisky glass from a psychedelic shirt that was the bartender. Balking at the order the barman eventually offered them a bottle, refusing to sell separate shots by pulling glasses off the shelf and shaking his head. Bottles of Scotch ambered the wall, all tagged with client’s names.
Naomi waited it out, expecting a familiar end to the evening. She had near choked on their self-indulgence and couldn’t take any more.
‘I’m not buying a whole bloody bottle,’ Sam remonstrated, throwing a hopeful punch across the bar. He hated being treated like an idiot. His unbridled existence caught and undesirably snagged.
‘You are if you want to drink whisky here,’ Josh reasoned with him.
‘I want a drink. I don’t want to take a bottle.’
Miho sat back, coolly downing the last of a long drink, watching the westerner’s inhibitions float away on alcohol. Often they give rein to such indiscretions but they seldom got physically abusive – too often defeated by incapacity first. She lit a cigarette, and seemed keen not to involve herself with the hovering bartender who might look to her for support.
‘The boys are behaving badly.’ Naomi took Miho by the hand. ‘Let’s dance.’
Miho followed her onto the dance floor.
‘He was Korean,’ Miho said, referring to the ba
r man nonchalantly as they danced. ‘Like you. Me. We are all aliens.’
‘Foreigners,’ Naomi corrected her but the word settled on her like a judgement and she wondered how much of the sentence she had to run and how long she would be condemned to this sense of no-man’s land.
Sam had become irrational. Miho watched him from the vantage point of her stool.
‘It’s Jack Kerouac.’
Naomi was blank.
‘You’re not up on your American idols,’ Miho scolded.
They heard Sam shout: ‘I’m not going to pay for a full bottle. I won’t be back to this shithole to drink my whisky.’
Even Sam turns ugly after booze, Naomi observed to herself.
To appease Sam, Josh bought him the bottle and concluded helpfully, ‘He’s not coming back to this shithole.’
Sam happily made every effort to drink it, as he and Josh twisted in time, with one another and the bar for support, shouting to the beat.
This was the regular pattern of ‘Josh at play’, reduced to a small boy and unaware he was lost. Naomi took him by the arm.
‘Take me back, Josh,’ she said, gentle towards him.
He cupped her cheek in his hand sweetly ‘Okay, baby.’ He said,
And she loved him all over again.
As they left, he swiped the Scotch bottle he’d bought to take with him, ignoring the misplaced assumption on the part of the barman that it would be labelled and placed back on the shelf.
Convention had it that he should be the one bringing her home but so often he was in her care, unsteady from a night of excess, with her doing the leading.
She wondered how long she could keep pace with him chasing his empty desires.
Chapter 33
Shimokitazawa, 2012
Hana left a message with Tom. His calls had become less frequent in the last week or so and he hadn’t filled in the gaps. She suspected Sadie had finally conquered him. Earlier on this would have bothered her more but a new independence had settled on her. Everyone was ‘system down’ on her at once; Jess too had become signal erratic and only hopscotch reliable. Tako had disappeared for a while and they guessed he might now have a girlfriend. She decided to go alone to walk at the temple where Ukai’s memorial had been held. Miho, she was sure, knew something of Naomi that she would or could not tell. So she would find the answer herself.