by Claire North
Would it be fair to say that Japan is racist?
Perhaps fairer to say that Japan is not used to black women, and definitely not women of mixed race, even ones who carry a forged British passport and a large quantity of unfavourably converted yen. No one’s really racist any more, just as no one’s really sexist. They’ve just got their view about things, you see.
I forced myself to stay awake as long as I could, buying a few supplies, lifting the occasional wallet, searching for food that would be gentle on the stomach. Sushi was a safe start, if you ordered wisely. Stone fish, pickled plums, jellyfish, unagi – these all took a little more building up to. No point trying to walk anywhere in Tokyo, the city was too big. Take the train, find a district within which you’re willing to walk, Asakusa or Ueno, where the older styles and skills still survived beneath the skyscrapers; the fish market at Tsukiji. Outside a pink bar in Shinjuku a man approached me, grinning widely, and exclaimed in English, “You hostess?”
I shook my head, and he nodded fervently, adding, “You hostess? You very beautiful.”
His teeth were perfectly white, his hair was in full retreat from his forehead, though he could not have been a day over thirty. From the door of the bar, a woman with blonde hair down to her hips, a freckle-spotted tan and an Australian accent emerged, took the customer by the arm and guided him back indoors with a cry of, “So sorry, so sorry, she’s just a visitor, more sake?”
He said something I couldn’t hear, and she laughed dutifully, and afterwards came out for a cigarette and said, “It’s a decent life really. Most of the men just want company, to talk. If you’re white and interested, it’s even better. It doesn’t get to sex unless you want it to, and you can make them pay, but I don’t need to. Champagne, gifts, tips – in four months I’ll have earned enough to buy a house back home.”
She offered me a cigarette, and I shook my head.
“You thinking of joining? You’d be unusual, but this is Shinjuku. You can be disgusting as a decomposing rhino and someone will want to fuck you, because you’re unusually disgusting. But you’re very beautiful, I think.”
“Get many salarymen?”
“Lots. Most of them are married but, like I said, it’s just talk. Lonely men who like to talk with someone… else.”
Out of interest, I said, “Have you got Perfection?”
She laughed. “Sure. I used to. Everyone in this city wants to be perfect. I did okay too, won like, six months discounted membership at some really swanky gym downtown, the perfect gym you know, to get the perfect body. But it got access to my bank accounts or something, or maybe my loyalty cards, you know like I don’t even know how it did it but I must have ticked a box or something, and at thirty thousand points it started telling me to quit smoking and drink less, and I was like, fuck that, and at forty thousand points it started sending me stuff from agencies that it said better matched my character profile than my current work – I mean, fuck? Like, a fucking app telling me what to fucking do with my life? Anyway, after that I started to lose points like a space invader. ‘Perfection lies within you,’ it said. I deleted the fucking thing when I got back to ten thousand points, but you know what? My friend, who fixes computers and shit, says there’s still, like, stuff on my phone tracking me, I mean, like, Perfection has still got all that access because I can’t like, just stop it, what the fuck.”
Permissions that the Facebook Messenger app requests when downloaded to your phone:
• Allows the app to change the state of network connectivity.
• Allows the app to call phone numbers without your intervention.
• Allows the app to send SMS messages.
• Allows the app to record audio with microphone. This permission allows the app to record audio at any time without your confirmation.
• Allows the app to take pictures and videos with the camera. This permission allows the app to use the camera at any time without your confirmation.
• Allows the app to read your phone’s call log, including data about incoming and outgoing calls. This permission allows apps to save your call-log data.
• Allows the app to read data about your contacts stored on your phone, including the frequency with which you’ve called, emailed, or communicated in other ways with specific individuals.
• Allows the app to read personal-profile information stored on your device, such as your name and contact information. This means the app can identify you and may send your profile information to others.
• Allows the app to get a list of accounts known by the phone. This may include any accounts created by applications you have installed.
Perfection had almost exactly the same permissions, with one difference:
• Allows the app to monitor internet history and keystrokes.
I considered for a moment the power of this tool, and saw bank accounts and passwords, online shops and credit cards, maps and travel patterns, blackmail and bribery roll before my eyes.
I wondered what I could do with that knowledge, being a thief.
Then I chided myself for narrow thinking, and asked instead: what could I do with that knowledge, being a god?
Chapter 37
A week of investigation.
Why had Byron14 sent me to Japan?
Prometheus, owner of Perfection. Subsidiary offices: Mumbai, Shanghai, Dubai, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Paris, Hamburg, New York, Seattle, Mexico City, Caracas, Santiago, Grenville (tax purposes?), Geneva (absolutely tax purposes) and Tokyo.
The Tokyo office was registered to a building in Yamanote. I walked by it twice, counting twenty-eight floors to the top of its sheer glass and concrete sides, before going in search of a business suit.
Out of curiosity, I lay on my belly in my hotel room and poked on a laptop at Prometheus. Dragging data off the net was slow, but not impossible. Like a huge number of companies across the world, the majority of Prometheus’ value was owned by a holding company, a multi-fingered corporation whose sole purpose was to own other things. At the top was Rafe Pereyra-Conroy. I recognised his face: he’d worn black in Dubai, and smiled at the royal family, and as I walked away from the robbery he’d been in the lobby, screaming down a mobile phone.
At my fucking party stole her fucking jewels do you know what this fucking does for us, do you know how much we’ve just fucking lost?!
Searching in depth for Rafe Pereyra-Conroy, you mostly found his father.
Matheus Pereyra, born in Montevideo, carried by his mother to England aged three years old, grew up in a two-bedroom bungalow in West Acton with a violent stepfather and a mother struggling to survive. Aged sixteen, Matheus left home to start work on the print floor of a Fleet Street journal, hauling reams of paper and gallons of ink into the noisy belly of the machines. There he was “Matty”, and though he hated his English stepfather, he used his surname and became Matty Conroy, one of the lads. He bought a tie and a suit, and every Friday night went down the pub with the journos, learning how to swagger and smoke, until one day someone turned round and said, “Bugger me, Matty, you’re wasted in the print room…” So began Matty Conroy’s journey into the world of media.
“Work, work, work,” he was quoted as saying. “Young people just want everything to drop on their plate, but I know, you have to work, and you have to believe. People tell you you’re too small: you prove you’re bigger than them. They say you’ll never make it: you remember those words and every time you fall down, you remember, you’ll make it, you’ll make it, you’ll make it.”
As a journalist, he was a disaster; as a seller of advertising space and developer of market strategies, he was a genius. Within five years he’d quit the newspaper that first hired him, and aged twenty-six he started his own.
“You know the difference between a tabloid and a newspaper?” he asked. “A tabloid actually gives people stories they’re interested in.”
Aged thirty he controlled 23 per cent of the print media market in the UK; aged thirty-four he
bought his first TV station. When, aged thirty-five, the Royal Ascot Racing Club declined his membership on grounds that he did not conform to their requirements, the two newspapers and four tabloids under his control ran headline stories on the subject, with tag-lines ranging from a moderate “Old-Fashioned and Out of Touch?” through to “The Bigoted Berks of Berkshire”. To his surprise, the ancient white-gloved gentlemen of Ascot, rather than yield to this pressure, dug their heels in deeper.
“Mr Conroy’s campaign of harassment only serves to emphasise the validity of our initial judgement in declining him membership, as is our right,” explained one spokesman in a top hat.
The aristocracy of England had survived revolution, emancipation and war. Time was long, memory faded, but they never changed.
Two years later, Matty Conroy was Matheus Pereyra again, owner of a luxury cruise-ship line, a chain of chicken restaurants, a hire-car company, half a bank, and an island near Nassau. The day his value exceeded £1 billion, a rival newspaper in the UK ran an article pointing out that he paid an estimated 0.7 per cent tax on his fortune. The newspaper was sued for libel, and though the case was dropped – “for reasons of fact” as the editor put it – the lawyers’ fees crippled the paper for years to come, and it ran no more such articles.
The year his daughter, Filipa, was born, a controversy broke out as one of his US TV stations chose fourteen individuals from Washington DC and tagged them as a “Sleeper Homosexual Infiltration Squad”.
“I firmly believe,” explained Matheus, “that the government of the United States of America is being infiltrated by units of liberals and homosexuals wishing to force their atheist agenda on the people of this nation through the top-heavy institution of centralised government.”
When accused of speaking without any evidence, Matheus Pereyra added: “There is evidence – there is evidence, I have seen it. But the government’s repressive bodies make it impossible to share with the world what I know.”
Fifteen months later, his son was born, and Matheus Pereyra acquired American citizenship and a three-thousand-acre plot of land in Colorado from which he could “consider what next to do for the world”.
What he did was buy more stuff, and fill the newspapers and airwaves with celebrity scandals, Hollywood gossip, unconfirmed rumour and domestic bigotry. His control of the airwaves surged, and when he was sixty-one years old, he was found poisoned in his home, the murderer never caught.
Aged eighteen, his son, Rafe Pereyra-Conroy, took control of a company whose net worth was estimated at approximately £3.8 billion. Groomed, confident and assured, Rafe gave a speech in public on the greatness of his father’s legacy, but also the need for a new, conscientious company which strove for the betterment of mankind. His sister, Filipa, three years his senior and nearly through her first degree in biochemistry, stood behind him and a little to the left, and said nothing. I knew her face too; I had met her in Dubai.
All of thought is feedback. Charm falters in the face of hypertension. Are you with the 106? Ten years later, with the company now worth £5.09 billion, work on Perfection began, with Filipa Pereyra-Conroy at its head.
Chapter 38
Discipline.
My Japanese is pretty poor, but my hosts were charming and patient.
Discipline.
Dressed in a lilac summer dress, I started to hang out at the karaoke bar round the corner from Prometheus’ Yamanote office. On the third night, having practised carefully in my room, I sang “Black is the Colour” in front of a floor of extraordinarily drunk executives, one of whom had butchered the song the night before, and who immediately bought me a bottle of champagne and invited me to join their group.
Mr Fukazawa worked in human resources for Prometheus, and after we savaged a duet of “Summertime” together, he put his head on my shoulder and with tears pricking the rims of his eyes proclaimed, “There are no women as wonderful as you in all Japan.”
He passed out in a gentle alcoholic stupor before I could disillusion him of this notion, so instead I lifted the cash contents of his wallet and his security pass, and laid his head gently down on the white leather couches and snuck out before the next rendition of a Bon Jovi number could deface the walls of the bar.
Discipline.
Two doors down from the love hotel on my street, and below a restaurant specialising in grilled fish, a café dedicated entirely to arcade games lured in men and women, young and old. I played Mortal Kombat against a girl with pigtails sticking out either side of her head, and she won, and I said, “Have you got Perfection?”
“Sure!” she replied brightly, pulling her phone from her bag. “But I’m not doing very well.”
“Why not?”
“When I came in here, it registered the local wireless networks and knew where I was, and perfect women don’t come here.”
“That doesn’t seem to stop you.”
She hesitated, looking for a moment guilty. “I dunno,” she said at last. “In seven thousand points I get a free make-over at Peach Princess Parlour, and I just love their products, and I know tonight’s going to set me back on points so I suppose… I dunno… I suppose I’ll have to do better.”
She was hoping to get an internship at Prometheus, the office in Yamanote.
“And what do they do there?”
“They design computer software, you know. I’m good at all that sorta stuff and no one is going to marry me so I gotta look out for myself, you know?”
On the screen, her avatar spat lightning from his fingertips, and my character fell down dead, the screen blaring my defeat.
“One more round?” I asked, manoeuvring my bag closer to hers, the better to steal her mobile phone.
“Okay… one more…”
Discipline.
The day Rafe Pereyra-Conroy flew into Tokyo International Airport to visit the offices of Prometheus, I had already bought a complete itinerary of his trip from a disgruntled driver in Monaco, who felt he hadn’t been given his fair tip.
The guy’s a billionaire, he grumbled. Guys like that shouldn’t get to pay going rate.
I was at the airport when he arrived on his private jet, and I trailed his convoy of three cars through the streets of Tokyo to his top-floor suite in Chiyoda. At the front door of the thirty-storey building, he was met by a woman. Filipa Pereyra-Conroy, older sister, sometime scientist, now head of development on Perfection in all its technical wonder. The newspaper photos had done her no favours; she had been a slightly out-of-focus blob of pixels behind her younger brother.
All thought is feedback.
The world of the super-rich/super-powerful isn’t so large. Sometimes you run into familiar faces, even if they don’t remember you.
As a woman in a sharp suit with a sharp business card and a significant bribe that I presented in both hands with a bow to the manager of the building, I got a tour of the tower where the Pereyra-Conroys stayed.
“My company specialises in luxury housing projects for the developing market in the Middle East. We can learn so much from Japan,” I announced, as he showed me the internal waterways that trickled busily through the atrium of the building, the palm trees growing from great pots of dirt layered over with white pebble, the dry garden on the twenty-first floor – “Mr Ko at 128 is a zen master,” he explained. “He tends to these things.”
“And does Mr Ko ply his trade anywhere else?”
“Of course, ma’am. He’s a gynaecologist and a zen master.”
“Is that a usual combination?”
“I don’t think so. Most of the priesthood come from finance.”
I counted birds taking flight, etched in silver on the walls of the twenty-third floor. If the patterns of bending reeds and lotus flowers, of cherry blossom swept away by the wind and creatures bursting from the water into the sky repeated, I could not see where.
“And how do you get an apartment here?” I asked. “I couldn’t find it listed on the web…”
“No, ma’am!
One must achieve perfection.”
Was this a Buddhist aphorism I didn’t fully comprehend…?
“No, ma’am. Only members of the 106 Club live here.”
I stopped dead in my tracks, and only when he too stopped to look at me askance did I remember to keep smiling, keep walking, be my smile, be my walk, and said casual as anything, “Of course. They are exactly the kind of clientele we cater to.”
I counted doors, windows, floors.
I counted steps.
From these, I counted members of the 106 Club living in this building alone, and was briefly afraid.
A woman in the cramped tailor’s shop round the corner from the apartment.
“It used to be cheap housing, good housing, for people government supports,” she grumbled, examining a tear in a skirt as I leant on her counter and struggled to pull meaning out of her heavily inflected English. “Poor people, hard life. But bosses said no good, pull down, put up big apartments for important people. Much protest, many petitions, but do no good. Minister says big new apartment good: now minister lives there! Protested to police, but police commissioner live there. Say it perfect, perfect place for good people to live in.”
“Where are the poor people now?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Tokyo too expensive for them. Leave city; go somewhere cheap. Hard, hard. Can’t get work in cheap places. Can’t live in expensive ones. No way up.”
She held up the skirt with sudden triumph and declared, “What you think of this?”
I examined the offending garment – not mine – a thing of grey wool woven with a light blue chequer pattern. “It’s all right,” I said with a shrug.
“It skirt of club dancer! She tear it with nail while stripping! She nice girl, very nice girl, wanted to be computer scientist but didn’t get grades. Now she owns club; always tips, sometimes brings sweet buns because I’m widow. Always way, yes? People say must do one thing, but world says must be another.”