by Rachel Cohn
“People give those cookie tins as omiyage. Do you know about the gift-giving thing here?”
I nodded. “I met my Japanese grandmother for the first time yesterday, and I had to give her a box of chocolates, which she basically said sucked.”
“How rude,” said Imogen.
“She wasn’t very nice,” I admitted.
“Hafu angst?”
“That. And being a racist bitch.”
Imogen laughed. “Ouch. You need major carbs to compensate.” We passed an array of stalls selling Belgian chocolates, German sweets, and then French pastries. “The yogashi are the Western-style confections like cakes and pastries. Some of the biggest names from all over the world have stalls here, like Ladurée from France and Wittamer from Belgium. I love going to the depachika for treats. It can be like a cheat weekend trip to Paris or Brussels.”
“What do the Ex-Brats have when they eat here?”
“Hard to say because the Ex-Brats rotation changes all the time. I’m the only girl in our class who has been at ICS-Tokyo for more than five years. People are always moving away. Of the current crew, I never take Ntombi or Jhanvi here. They’re always on a diet. So lame. When Arabella was here, we’d come to eat in the Din Tai Fung restaurant one level down. They make these dumplings with purple yams or sweet red bean paste that are just sick they’re so delicious.”
Yams sounded great. I found a food stall I liked and picked out a grilled yam and some fried tempura for lunch. I didn’t need Imogen to help me translate. I just pointed at the items I wanted, the counter worker smiled and packaged everything, then showed me a calculator with the amount I owed. I placed my Amex card on the tray the worker handed me, relieved to have had my morning 7-Eleven experience so I was able to observe the proper paying etiquette in front of Imogen. She bought an egg salad sandwich, which was packaged so beautifully you’d think it was jewelry from Tiffany’s. It was in a cardboard box that had a flower print on its sides and was wrapped in tight, clear plastic at the top so you could see the sandwich inside. The sandwich had the crusts removed and was cut into two square pieces standing upright in the box, with pieces of perfectly cut fruit arrayed on the side.
“Where do we eat?” I asked Imogen. I saw no tables for sitting and actually enjoying our lunch.
Imogen navigated us to an elevator. She said, “When in need of open space in Tokyo, go up.” We got out at the top floor and stepped onto an open-air rooftop that looked like a park, with a green lawn, paths, and trees, and diners eating their takeout meals on benches or picnicking on the lawn.
“I officially love Tokyo,” I said. Itadakimasu! Let’s eat.
“Do you like cats?” Imogen asked me after we’d finished eating.
Seriously? Was my day that started off with an earthquake really this great?
“I only love cats like I love ramen and snow days and watching Gilmore Girls on endless repeat. While eating cake.”
“I knew I liked you. Want to go to a cat café? None of the Ex-Brats ever want to go to the cat cafés with me.”
“I’m so your girl. Let’s do it!”
Imogen led us back to the subway in the basement level. I was giddy with excitement. I was having what felt like my first awesome day since before the Beast.
“How do you like your dad so far?” Imogen asked me.
“He works all the time.”
“Typical. Did you find out if he’s yakuza?”
What a strange question. “Why would you say that?”
She shrugged. “If he’s in the hotel business, he’s probably yakked. Or the businesspeople he associates with are.”
I was offended. I hardly knew Kenji Takahara, and maybe he was a deadbeat dad who’d only shown up in my life a few days ago . . . but he wasn’t a mobster. He wore beautiful suits, and he went to Andover and then to Georgetown. “He’s not yakked,” I declared.
“If you say so,” she said.
When we got out of the subway, we walked in circles through throngs of shoppers and hipsters, trying to find the cat café, with no luck. “This new place just opened up, so I’m not sure exactly where it is,” Imogen explained. Finally, she flagged down a policeman on the street and showed him her phone with an address on it. His face lit up. “Nya, nya!” To my confused face, Imogen translated. “Meow, meow!” He then escorted us to a building where the elevator was located in an alley. We never would have found the entrance on our own. He pointed up and then displayed seven fingers.
Imogen said, “Seventh floor, I guess.” She bowed to the Japanese policeman as we got into the elevator. He bowed at us and returned to the street. When the door closed, she added, “God, I love Japanese law and order. I can’t imagine a cop in London helping us find a cat café like that.”
The elevator doors opened directly onto the cat café. There was a machine that dispensed slippers, and shoe cubbies where street shoes should be placed, along with a long list of rules in mangled English: Please not loud voice. No feed cats, pay extra to feed treat to cats. Have super funs time!
“Purr-fection,” Imogen cooed as soon as we entered the cat room. A swarm of kittens played and napped on the benches and cat trees located throughout the room.
I hesitated at the door. I loved the sight of the furballs and their sweet whisker faces, but the vibe was weird and off. The cats all had short legs disproportionate to their size, like they’d been manufactured that way to look cuter, and they had little interest in playing. The room had upholstered benches lining the walls for seating, and was centered by a giant cat tree—bigger than the others—where the cats climbed and found perches. Cat toys were littered across the floor and in baskets so customers could play with the cats. I picked up a mouse on a string—Huff’s favorite play toy—and tried to get some tabby kitties lounging on the high perches to engage with me. A few swatted but quickly lost interest, like they were too bored and tired from so many tourists coming to play with them. I paid extra to feed them some treats, but the cats just ate and then moved on, disinterested, fickle.
“Can we go now?” I asked Imogen after we’d been there for about ten minutes.
“We just got here.” She was sitting on a window bench looking out over the street, surrounded by piles of furballs licking, playing, and scampering around her.
“I thought this would be cool, but honestly, it’s creeping me out. I’m ready to leave now.”
Imogen said, “So go. I’m staying.”
“Then how do I get home?”
“Be a big girl. If you don’t feel comfortable taking the subway by yourself yet, just take a cab.”
“I don’t speak Japanese.”
“Just tell the driver ‘Tak-Luxxe’ and show him the address on your phone. He’ll know.”
She looked as irritated with me as I felt with her. But she also had a kitten crawling across her shoulder and she couldn’t resist giggling. She sneezed. “I’m so allergic to these little jerks, but I don’t even care!”
She also didn’t seem worried that she was leaving me to maneuver this new, strange city on my own.
In the cab ride back to Tak-Luxxe, I googled yakuza on my phone. Imogen Kato didn’t know what she was talking about. Yakuza weren’t men like Kenji. Yakuza were gangsters, gamblers, and murderers. Yakuza had full-body tattoos, and they cut off the tops of pinky fingers of members as punishment for failure. They weren’t businessmen who owned posh hotel properties.
When I returned to Tak-Luxxe, it was time for my hair appointment at the Destiny Club beauty salon, Utsukushii. I sat in the salon chair facing a mirror while the hairdresser, a Japanese lady named Tamao, inspected me. “You have very pretty face,” Tamao said, fiddling with the length of my hair. Then she leaned in to my ear and whispered, “You look like Daddy! Very attractive. Don’t tell him I said that.”
I tried not to laugh. I said, “Maybe cut an inch off but otherwise keep it long, please. I don’t like it too short.”
“Two inches. Once your hair is smoother,
it will look longer, so it’s better to take more off now.” I looked skeptically at Tamao in the mirror. Wasn’t I supposed
to be the boss of this decision? “You’ll see,” Tamao assured me.
An assistant came to Tamao with a rolling cart filled with hair-cutting supplies and some bottles with words in Japanese. I assumed this was the deep conditioner treatment I was getting. “Come with me for a hair wash first,” the assistant said.
After the assistant had washed my hair, she raised my head up from the sink. I asked, “Shouldn’t I get the conditioner first?” My wet hair was impossible to brush without conditioner. The assistant shook her head and said, “She will do it,” gesturing to Tamao.
“Conditioner after cut,” said Tamao, and led me back to the salon chair. She began brushing my hair, not nearly gently enough for my taste.
“Ow!” I cried out.
“Sorry,” said Tamao. “Hafu hair is very difficult.”
Ignorance, also very difficult, I thought. I asked, “Do you have a magazine?” I didn’t feel like talking to this lady anymore.
Tamao brought me a stack of American, British, and Japanese fashion magazines. “You will look like the girls in these pictures when we are finished!”
I hadn’t asked to look like any of the girls in those pictures, but it felt too late to turn back now. I pretended to read a magazine, just so Tamao would stop talking to me. After she trimmed my hair, she applied the deep conditioner to it, which was a really weird, smelly goop that required me to sit with a cap over my head for an hour. I was about to put my earbuds in to listen to music while I waited, but an aesthetician approached my seat, pushing a rolling cart of beauty gadgets. “Face now,” she told me.
The aesthetician gently tipped my head back, gave my forehead and cheeks a really nice massage that in no way indicated what was going to happen next, and then started plucking my eyebrows. “Hey, I didn’t ask for this!” I protested.
“Mrs. Noriko Takahara request this service for you,” she said. What the hell? But it was too late to demand the aesthetician stop, because then my eyebrows would look uneven.
“Just don’t do thin eyebrows, please,” I said, resigned but not wanting a pencil eyebrow look.
The aesthetician said, “Of course not. Just a little tweeze to shape. There, done! Would you like anything waxed?”
“No!” I said, horrified.
The aesthetician shrugged and walked away. I looked in the mirror. My formerly bushy eyebrows had been plucked and shaped into a more defined arch. They actually looked damn good. I hoped my hair would look as shiny as Kim Takahara’s after they took the cap off.
When the timer went off to end the deep conditioning treatment, I assumed my hair would be rinsed, but instead Tamao brought me back to the chair at her station. She brushed and then started blow-drying my hair. When she’d finished, my hair was completely straight, and lustrous, just like Kim Takahara’s. I did look like a girl in a magazine. “How do you like?” Tamao asked me proudly.
“It’s nice.” It would take some getting used to. I observed myself in the mirror and nearly didn’t recognize the sophisticated girl with straight hair and admittedly amazing eyebrows looking back at me. “I mean, my hair’s just going to be wiry again after I wash it, but I like it for now.”
It was good to know if I ever wanted this smooth look again, all I had to do was go to the Tak-Luxxe salon to get it, but I wouldn’t want this style all the time. I didn’t look like me. Reg was going to fall out of his chair laughing next time he saw me on FaceTime.
Tamao said, “No, this straightening lasts a long time, at least three months. Then you come back to us for touch-up.”
“WHAT?” My blood boiled. “How come no one told me this was semi-permanent?”
“I thought you knew. That’s what Japanese hair treatment means. Why do you look upset? Your hair is beautiful.”
Tamao was not being insincere. The workers in the salon who’d been sneakily watching the boss’s not-so-secret-anymore daughter the whole time I was in there were looking at me now with approval. “Lovely!” said Tamao’s assistant as she ushered another client to the sink.
The client said, “I want her hair!”
I looked in the mirror. I knew I had moved to a different country to start a new life, but this new girl in the mirror was a stranger staring back at me.
“I protest!” I said to Kenji that night at dinner. We were seated inside the Destiny Club restaurant called Fantasy League, a sports bar on fifty that was decorated like the ultimate man cave, with wood-paneled walls, a beer bar in the center of the room, and TV screens hovering in every available space showing different sports games being played throughout the world: baseball, American football, soccer, golf, and cricket. “When your sister booked the hair appointment for me, she didn’t also mention it was for a semi-permanent hair treatment. I thought I was just going to get, like, some fancy cut and blowout.”
Kenji was more focused on his American-style hamburger with cheese melted down the sides than on my outrage over my new hair. “When I was at Georgetown, there was a sports bar on M Street that made delicious burgers. I modeled this restaurant and the menu here on it. We didn’t add Fantasy League to the plans for the new building until after my father passed, though. He didn’t like American burgers, so they were never on the menu at Tak-Luxxe. He was a snob for Japanese beef.”
I wanted to learn more about his family, but not at this particular moment. Let’s stay on topic, KenjiIGuess. “Like the hair appointment deceit wasn’t bad enough, your mother also told them to pluck my eyebrows. I didn’t realize that’s what was happening until it was too late to stop it.”
Kenji focused on his burger and also on the baseball game playing behind my head. Typical male avoidance. Then he said, “You like the Nationals or Orioles? I loved to go to baseball games when I lived in the Washington area.”
Sigh. Men just didn’t get it. I tugged on a length of my hair. “I didn’t ask for this.”
“It will grow out, eventually. But it looks beautiful.”
“Or do you mean now I look like all the other rich ladies here?”
He put down his burger. Finally! “I never said that, but why would that be a bad thing? Is this hair drama a teenager mood? I was warned about those.”
“Who warned you?”
“Mother.” That witch. Of course she was going to badmouth me as much as possible to Kenji. Like she knew anything about me. I was going to do so well in Tokyo that Mrs. Takahara would choke on her own surprised pride.
I’d show Kenji some teenager moods. “It seems like you work all the time,” I whined. “I bet you work Sundays, too.”
“Usually.”
“Is that why you don’t have a girlfriend?”
Kenji laughed, even though I hadn’t intended to be funny. “How do you know I don’t have a girlfriend?”
“Do you?”
“There was a singer at the Destiny Bar piano bar. Her name was Eden Bechtel. We went out for a few years. She moved back to Texas four months ago.”
“What did she look like? Do you have a picture on your phone?”
“Maybe?” He looked surprised by my curiosity, but he took his phone out and scrolled through his photos. “There’s one.”
He showed me a photo of himself wearing a tuxedo, next to a stunning, statuesque, very tanned blond lady wearing a champagne-colored sequined gown. She was probably in her midthirties. If you put a waitress uniform on her, she actually looked a lot like my mother before the Beast. Kenji had a type.
“She’s pretty. Why’d she leave?”
“She wanted to return home.” He paused. “She wanted different things.” Like a commitment? I wondered. “Mother didn’t approve of her.”
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. His mother didn’t approve of Eden Bechtel, and now she was gone. How long did I have to win him over so he’d let me stay? “Maybe you could take tomorrow off and we could do something together?”
I asked him.
“You want to go somewhere with me?” He looked genuinely surprised. This guy went to Georgetown? He didn’t seem so bright in this moment.
“Yes!”
“Will you stop complaining about your hair if we go somewhere?”
A slight smile pulled at the corners of my mouth. He really had been listening to my hair whine. “Probably.”
“Do you like baseball?”
“I like to play it, but watching it on TV is boring.”
A Japanese businessman wearing a nice suit entered Fantasy League and approached our table. Kenji stood up, and they bowed to each other, then spoke in Japanese. When they finished, Kenji bowed to the man again. Deeply. The guy must have been important. The businessman turned around and left, never once acknowledging me.
“What was that about?” I asked Kenji.
“Business” was all Kenji said.
“How come you didn’t introduce me?” Now that I had proper hair and all.
“That man only cares about money, not about meeting my daughter.” He looked at a baseball interview playing on one of the TV screens. “Hideki Matsui! Great hitter. Japanese outfielder who played for the Yankees.” Classic male subject-changing. Reggie did the same thing when I complained about girls hitting on him at the pool and distracting from our swim practices.
“You like the Yankees?” I asked.
“I like Japanese players who are so outstanding they can play for the Yankees. I was very good at baseball when I was your age. My fantasy was to play in America.” His face looked wistful.
“Really? What position did you play?”
“Shortstop. I had a very strong arm. I wanted to become a professional player, but my parents refused. They thought athletics was not a real job.”
“So you didn’t like being told what to do! See? Get it?” I tugged on a piece of my hair again. (Wow, my hair was so smooth and soft.)
“My parents were right. I wasn’t good enough for pro ball. Maybe Kim was also right.”