Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  ‘Why would anyone want to buy a European hi-fi product at twice the price of an even better Japanese product, anyway?’ grumbled Mr Omochi. He had clearly thrown in the towel. ‘The product will never sell, so it doesn’t matter what we agree. Certainly, it won’t sell if our distributors won’t earn anything on it.’ He looked apologetically at Mr Hanada and then at me. ‘Translate, Atashi-san.’

  ‘Mr Nobel,’ I began, my heart beating faster as I leafed through the notes I had taken during my expeditions to Akihabara, ‘the competitor product you referred to sells nowhere near its recommended retail price. To be specific, in two out of five shops in Tokyo’s main electronics district last week it was offered for sale at’ – I made some quick calculations – ‘about 80 percent of that price and, in the three other shops, at somewhere between two-thirds and one-half of that price. Anyway, this argues for a one-third reduction of the import price of this last item under discussion.’

  I had seen my chance and taken it and now awaited the consequences. Both parties, I thought, were aware that what I had said was not what Mr Omochi had said, and the room of a dozen or so bored, tired people suddenly took on a subtle charge: now a dozen or so reinvigorated business people sat forward, arms and elbows on the boardroom table, looking expectantly at each other. The MSS delegation conferred in a huddle around Mr Nobel.

  Mr Hanada asked me to translate what I had said.

  I did so.

  Mr Fujimoto looked at me as though seeing me for the first time.

  The Yumimoto delegation held its breath.

  Mr Nobel resumed his place at the table and said to Mr Omochi, ‘Okay. We’ll agree to your price but, if this is acceptable to you, for a three-year contract, as opposed to the standard five.’

  Mr Omochi indicated that it was, and the afternoon concluded with expressions of mutual satisfaction and instructions for our guests to be in their hotel lobby at seven o’clock that evening, when we would pick them up for dinner. We walked them to the lift and bowed as they entered it; they bowed in response and stayed bowed until the lift doors closed – and then the lift doors opened again.

  ‘God damn it!’ I heard Mr Nobel exclaim under his breath.

  ‘It’s this one,’ said Mr Johnson helpfully.

  We exchanged a mix of bows, nods and smiles until the lift doors closed for the second time.

  I returned to my desk, exhausted and not a little elated. I considered that I had executed my duties well, and had even made a contribution to the negotiations. From hushed conversations and covert glances in my direction, I believed that I was being lauded for all aspects of my professionalism that day. I sought relief and some privacy in the ladies’ loos and sat there a while, drained but happy. For the first time in that confined space, I nodded off, waking up with a start to see that it was nearly six o’clock. I splashed water on my face and, refreshed, sat at my desk again, waiting to be summoned to the dinner. The summons never came. The office clock ticked past seven and the office emptied. I went home with my sense of achievement tempered by a feeling of apprehension and foreboding.

  *

  ‘Atashi-san!’ Mr Omochi stood in front of my desk the following morning and bellowed, ‘Follow me into my office, immediately!’ I stood and bowed and had to practically run after him, Mr Saito immediately behind me and all eyes on us, with no attempt by my colleagues to disguise their excitement at this most public of ignominies.

  ‘Explain your behaviour!’ Mr Omochi stood behind his desk, blocking the light from the windows so that I could see him only in silhouette and had to guess at his facial expression. To my consternation, Mr Mizuka, whom I had glimpsed only once since my second day at Yumimoto, stood by the side of the desk. Mr Saito stood behind me.

  ‘Omochi-san,’ I bowed, ‘please forgive me. No one had mentioned the dinner to me. I waited to be picked up from my desk by’ – I couldn’t say Saito-san – ‘someone, but no one ever came, and I didn’t know what restaurant to go to.’ I was bewildered to see Yumimoto’s head of personnel attend my reprimand and could only think, my offence being so slight, that his presence was a coincidence.

  My apology made Mr Omochi apoplectic, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly as he grew wilder with rage. Only after some seconds did he manage to splutter, ‘Restaurant? Restaurant! You weren’t wanted at the restaurant.’ He stood on tiptoe and punched the air with both fists. ‘The restaurant was for employees of rank, of distinction, to bond with their counterparts over saké – we didn’t need you for that, thank you very much!’

  Suddenly exhausted, Mr Omochi gripped the back of his chair and looked from Mr Saito to Mr Mizuka, whose eyes had never left me and who said, as if on cue, ‘Atashi-san, at worst, your action has been one of attempted sabotage; at the very least, it’s an act of gross insubordination. How dare you imply that Omochi-san did not have the facts that you displayed at his fingertips and how did you know he was not just about to make the very point that you made? How could you have forgotten your place among the assembled company and assume the role of negotiator? By what right did you consider it appropriate to lead your superiors down a negotiating path with no clear signal from them that it was the path they wanted to follow? What has Omochi-san ever done to you for you to reciprocate with such a humiliation? What has the Yumitomo Corporation ever done to you to merit such treachery?’

  Mr Omochi swivelled his chair around and fell into it. His back to Mr Saito and me, he said, looking at Mr Mizuka to his left and then out over the city, ‘Atashi-san likes photocopying. She’s good at that. It’s what she’ll do. Atashi-san, you will photocopy; every day, the department will give you things to photocopy that you will file. And your job will be to photocopy, to ensure you get noticed by one of our employees, to marry him and to make him very happy so that when he comes home after a long day at Yumimoto he has a warm dinner and a warmer bed waiting for him. There, that’s your job and, if you don’t like it, look’ – and he waved his arm over the city – ‘there are lots of other jobs out there and lots of salarymen waiting for you to make them happy. Look,’ he insisted. ‘Look!’

  In involuntary accordance with the irrepressible instinct to execute a senior’s command without contemplation, I stepped forward and looked. The city, seen from a vantage point of considerable elevation, was a lattice of horizontals crossing from left to right and back, of verticals screaming vertiginously down and of perpendiculars streaming to a distant endpoint to obliterate us all. In this vista of aerial and linear perspectives, we travel and toil, ride lifts and escalators up and down, journey in trains and cars here and there and beetle from home to conveyance to work and back. It was a picture, seen from the great height of Mr Omochi’s double-glazed office window, of a silent metropolis in which all hope was expunged and the individual obliterated. We share neither the common purpose of ants nor the individualist grace and vacillations of butterflies. We teem in this city that dehumanises us and reduces us to our basic mechanistic, mineral selves, to non-identities that function according to biology, custom and physical limitations. I looked up and my faint reflection looked back at me sternly. I stood legs apart on the city and resolute, with little intention of allowing myself to be permanently subjugated.

  I became the office pariah, the Icarus who had overreached and come crashing down to earth from the 44th floor but who had lived to repent of her hubris. Fubuki grew busier than ever and had less time for me. I hadn’t had to tell her how the day of the MSS meeting had gone for me; she’d found out easily enough. Mr Saito threw me what crumbs of work he could that Mr Omochi would not find out about, while Mr Omochi himself was as good as his word, giving me photocopying to do and seemingly indifferent as to when I completed it, and yet anything but indifferent as to my dress, remarking daily on whether what I was wearing was ‘man-catcher’ material: the shorter the skirt, the better. Clearly, as far as he was concerned, I was as good as gone – whether to make a Yumitomo salaryman a good wife or to find employment elsewhere, he didn’
t care. Ironically, my new status of outcast made the former more unlikely: it would take a brave employee to befriend me publicly.

  Sharon

  I experienced a period of contentment that little had prepared me for. My friends were happy around me. My colleagues and customers were satisfied with me. I was a good listener, I was efficient, I was attentive. I enjoyed giving more than receiving. I discovered my virtuous cycle of happiness, a merry wheel of pleasing others while retaining my own cheerful disposition, a wheel that little could dent or buckle until Sebastian spoke, one Monday evening, his voice hesitant, emanating from the tousled blue bed sheets we lay recovering under, to announce that he would soon be leaving for Japan.

  For a few days? A week? ‘Have a nice time,’ I mumbled.

  Sebastian placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘You haven’t understood. I’m leaving. I’m relocating. I’m going to live in Tokyo.’ He raised himself on one elbow and looked down at me. ‘Say something.’

  I could think of only two things. The first was that I might have fallen in love with Sebastian and that it had taken the prospect of his leaving me for me to realise it. The second was that he had said I and not we and that my dismissal was implicit in that I. Maybe the invitation for me to join him in Japan was to come. My bubble of joy was punctured. I felt rejected, dejected, desperate to hear him wonder aloud whether I might like to live in Tokyo. I thought I would. I decided there and then that I would.

  ‘Say something.’ Sebastian blew a hair from my face. He sighed and sought to explain. ‘It’s a promotion. I’m going to manage the derivatives desk in the Tokyo office. Three years, probably.’

  ‘I am going to Tokyo, not we are going?’ My voice was small.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Sebastian opened his mouth as though to say something more, but then decided against it. He appeared embarrassed. He sat up and held the sheets to his chin and looked cautiously at me over them. ‘I leave next week.’

  I wondered if he’d had the vanity to choose sheets that so precisely matched his eye colour intentionally. I made an effort to speak. ‘That explains it. I thought your flat was looking a bit tidy. Well, bare. You’ve packed some things away.’

  ‘You’re not too upset?’

  ‘Upset at what? That you tell me now and not before, not when we got here? Or that after three years of a relationship, you’re happy for it to end just like that?’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ He tried to make light of it. ‘It’s hardly been a relationship. More like, you know, just a bit of fun. A diversion. For us both. Hasn’t it? Sorry.’ He held his hands up. ‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

  ‘What did you mean?’ I could only just hear my voice.

  ‘Did you really think –’ He tried again. ‘We’re not really compatible, are we? I mean, we have a great time together and everything, when we see each other –’

  I raised my hand to stop him. I didn’t want to hear it.

  Sebastian was right. He was intelligent and intellectual and I wasn’t. He was better travelled, better read and more interested and informed than I could ever hope to be. He had self-knowledge and a degree of self-possession that I envied. I wasn’t so stupid, though, that I couldn’t understand what he, perhaps, could only feel, or couldn’t bring himself to tell me. That the effort of his completing me wasn’t worth it. The reward, simply, would be poor compensation for the bother. If I couldn’t love myself – if there was nothing to love – I could hardly blame him for not loving me. He must have, all this time we’d been seeing each other, been seeing me for what I was: nothing.

  To my surprise and, I think, Sebastian’s, we found ourselves hugging each other and then weeping and kissing, as he tried to comfort me and I, perhaps, to persuade him of his mistake, to remind him of what he would be leaving behind and might miss. Our imminent separation added a spice to our lovemaking, a quality whereby we were simultaneously with a familiar and a stranger, an excitement and yet an underlying sadness that accompanies the most intimate of exchanges when it’s undertaken without consequence.

  Mie

  I met Margaret one weekend in Setagaya Park, where we ate ice-cream while sitting on a park bench and watching children play. ‘Have you noticed,’ she remarked, ‘that until a certain age, children don’t play with each other but among each other. I must admit, I don’t see the point of them.’

  ‘That’s a strange thing for a teacher to say.’

  ‘True!’ Margaret laughed. ‘Well, until they’re teenagers. Anyway, what’s plan B?’

  I had to admit that I didn’t have one.

  ‘You could write to Ursula.’

  I didn’t like that idea.

  ‘Okay, so you can either try to get a job in England from here or try to secure accommodation there and then look for a job once you get there. Or you can try both and see which happens first.’

  I admired Margaret for her pragmatism, her ability to distil a situation down to its essential, component parts and to act accordingly; and I told her as much.

  Margaret’s response to praise was to ignore it. ‘What you need is a course of action. I get all the expat English language newspapers and magazines with job offers from back home, so I’ll bring some to you next weekend.’

  By the following Sunday, however, there had been a development, one that was to change everything for me and make Margaret’s offer of assistance redundant. I had been at my desk one evening, having just finished filing the photocopies of European car brochures, when my desk telephone rang. It rang so rarely that I was surprised; I looked at it thinking it might stop ringing, as though the caller would realise that they had dialled a wrong number. Eventually, I picked it up and pressed the receiver to my ear.

  ‘Moshi moshi.’

  ‘Hello. Is this Miss Atashi?’ The English voice with an American twang – or was it the other way around? – was familiar but I couldn’t quite place it.

  ‘Yes, this is Miss Atashi speaking.’

  ‘Hello! It’s Adam Johnson here. How are you? Do you remember me?’

  ‘Mr Johnson! Of course! How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  ‘Say, we were very disappointed that you didn’t join us at the restaurant when we were over. Sorry, that wasn’t meant to sound… you know – it’s just that we missed you there. I guess we’d have all drunk a lot less saké if you had been there! You did a great job, by the way.’ Mr Johnson paused as though unsure how to continue, and I realised that I was gripping the receiver with one hand and the telephone cord with the other as if to never let him go. ‘Oh, I hope I’m not bothering you in any way. Is this a good time for you to talk? I’m not keeping you from going home at all?’

  I looked around the office. Mr Saito and Fubuki were either in a meeting or had gone home for the day, and there was no one within earshot; not that it mattered, I supposed, if I was overheard speaking English. ‘Yes. No, not at all. Please go on, Mr Johnson.’

  ‘Well,’ Mr Johnson cleared his throat. ‘Forgive me for being so direct. I was extremely impressed by your language skills. I mean, I have been doing business in Japan for a long time and, well, I have never met anyone who was as comfortable and as capable in both languages – er, Japanese and English – as you are.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s the truth,’ proceeded Mr Johnson. ‘Now, we’ve had an opening come up in our bank in London, in our Japan team, and I wondered if, er, you know, you might know of anyone, you know, someone you might have studied with, for example, or a good friend, anyway, someone who would welcome a full-time employment contract in the UK –’

  ‘Mr Johnson.’

  ‘– someone who would be prepared to relocate – for excellent compensation, of course –’

  ‘Mr Johnson.’

  ‘Yes?’ Mr Johnson belatedly allowed me to interrupt him.

  ‘I know such a person.’

  ‘You do? Excellent! I’m back in
Tokyo in three weeks’ time when I would like to interview – that person. If I let you know where I’m staying, perhaps you could book a meeting room at the hotel for me?’

  ‘Of course, Mr Johnson.’

  ‘Call me Adam, please, and, er, while I have you on the phone, could I ask one more favour of you? Would you happen to have Miss Mori’s telephone number?’

  ‘Miss Mori? Fubuki Mori?’ I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, Fubuki. Would you happen to have her number? I must have left her business card at the restaurant.’

  I was astounded. So Fubuki had been pulled into the dinner in my place – or was it that it had never been intended that I go? Had she been there as company for Mrs Boonstra or as eye candy for the men? Fubuki spoke no English, but maybe Mr Johnson spoke some Japanese. My mind reeled with possibilities. Well, I would let him have her number, willingly, so she could have her nights in Tokyo with her American while I, if things panned out as I started hoping they might, could face a lifetime in London with, theoretically, my choice of Englishman.

  Long after Mr Johnson and I had said our goodbyes, I sat there, at my desk in a dark and empty office, holding the telephone handset in one hand and the telephone cord in the other, thinking that this telephone cord was connected to telephone wires that, just as I had one day dreamed, had come to form my lifeline, my release from servility and orthodoxy, my path to self-realisation.

  *

  I said nothing to my parents and to my friends until I had met Mr Johnson, when he had, to my surprise, conducted a proper, formal interview, and I had received a written job offer and, with the assistance of my new employer, my work visa.