Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play

by Danny Wallace

  But what was it?

  And then there it was again…

  A blood-curdling scream from a room somewhere far away. Followed by a thump. And then a series of thumps. Like a toddler backflipping through a hallway. And then, totally without warning of any kind whatsoever, a hidden door was flung open and out leapt a small female ninja.

  I realize I may sound mental at this moment, but I promise you it’s true: out leapt a tiny ninja.

  The ninja landed softly on the floor beside me, and crouched for just a moment, summing up in one split second the dangers the room held. But it didn’t hold any dangers. It held a Danny. A rather confused and reasonably scared one. As odd as it may seem, I was very annoyed with myself. I’d only been in Tokyo a matter of hours, and already I’d let a ninja get me. Why had I come to Japan? Of course I was going to be got by a ninja!

  There was another scream, and the ninja shot straight up, undertaking a number of rigorous hand movements and shouting various statements in Japanese, before turning to me, fixing me with the eyes of a killer and shouting, “ARE YOU READY FOR NINJA TRAINING?”

  I looked at the ninja. And then at the receptionist. The receptionist looked at me.

  “And then will I get food?” I asked.

  The receptionist closed her eyes and nodded. I looked back at the ninja. She raised her eyebrows.

  “I am ready,” I said.

  Like pirates, sharks, monkeys and ghosts, ninjas will never not be exciting. It was part of the reason why suddenly having a Japanese kid in school was so thrilling. Akira Matsui was our pathway to this mysterious and hidden culture. You can imagine our disappointment, then, when it turned out he neither knew any ninja magic, owned any ninja swords, nor even seemed to know what a ninja was. Michael Amodio and I put this down to a special ninja code of silence, and would often throw things at the back of his head to see if he would react with lightning speed. But he never did. He just turned around, looking hurt and confused. It was a shame, because the 1980s really was the decade of the ninja. The petrol station me and Michael used to stop at on the way home from swimming to buy packets of Revels and look at the videos bore testament to that.

  These videos were brilliant. They were clearly pirated (which made them all the more exciting—pirate ninjas!), with photocopied sleeves and battered covers, but when we were able to get our hands on one, high production values weren’t our concern. There was The Nine Deaths of the Ninja, of course, as well as American Ninja and American Ninja 2: The Confrontation, but Michael and I both found these simplistic portrayals of ninja culture too broad and Westernized in their scope. Plus, they didn’t use nunchuks anywhere near enough. There were nun-chuks galore in Enter the Ninja, which was also better because it ended with a freeze frame of the main character winking at the camera, which is a technique that I have now decided is how every film should end. Then you had Revenge of the Ninja, and Ninja Resurrection. Mafia Versus Ninja (imagine!), Zombie Versus Ninja (imagine!!!), Chinese Super Ninja, Phantom Diamond Ninja, and Ninja Kids, which was critically acclaimed, but rubbish.

  Now, something tells me that very few of the classics listed above may have stood the test of time. But the unerring fact—the one thing these grainy, badly edited films showed us—was the absolute and unwavering dedication the simple ninja has to his training. They needed stealth, cunning, ruthlessness. Steely-eyed determination. They needed to be able to leap off speedboats, flying hundreds of feet in the air, to land on airplanes. They had to have complete mastery of their intuition. They had to feel their enemy’s moves before their enemy had even thought about moving. It was training that went back thousands of years, treated with utter respect and reverence by all those who knew its dark and astounding secrets, and it was training that I now found myself undertaking in a small antechamber of a cave-like Tokyo building. And the only thing that took away from it? The fact that just above her authentic ninja-style shoes, I could clearly see that my ninja was wearing a pair of Garfield socks.

  I was still ever-so-slightly confused as the ninja turned to me, suddenly, and said, “Now we begin the training!”

  She slapped me on the shoulder.

  “You must always have awareness of your surrounding!”

  I looked around the small room to show I was making myself aware of it. I watched as she pressed what looked like it was supposed to be a hidden button.

  “Oh no!” she said, and a second or two later a small section of the floor fell away in front of me, with all the excitement and special-effects wizardry of a peanut. She widened her eyes dramatically and looked very worried indeed. “What we do now?”

  I had a think. We could always step over it, I thought. It was, after all, quite a small gap. But surely that wasn’t the way of the ninja; that was just the way of the sensible.

  “Quickly! WHAT WE DO?”

  “Well, we mustn’t rush into anything,” I said, quite calmly, given what was fast becoming quite a high-pressure situation.

  “Quickly!” said the ninja, again. She seemed annoyed. Luckily, I spotted something.

  “I notice that there’s another button there,” I said. “We could try pressing that?”

  “Ah!” said the ninja, impressed. “Very good!”

  I felt quite proud. I was finally thinking like a ninja. She pressed the button and, sure enough, a small platform appeared from the wall, allowing us to step over the terrifying two-foot drop which had opened up before us. I was pleased I had passed the first stage of what was bound to be a rigorous and punishing period of training. The ninja clapped her hands together.

  “So now you eat!” she said.

  Maybe this was a test. Maybe this was supposed to relax me, and I was about to be jumped by dozens of furious ninjas. I tensed slightly as we stooped under a low ceiling to get out of a tunnel and into… well… into a restaurant. A ninja-themed restaurant. Which, if we’re all going to be honest about this, is possibly the best theme any restaurant could ever have.

  “Wow…” I said. Dim spotlights lit separated sections, where I could just about make out small groups of people sitting on the floor, being served by all manner of smiling ninjas. Now, this was what I wanted. Quality food in an authentic cave-like setting. Perhaps I should tell Simon about this, I thought. Perhaps it would make an interesting direction for the Toby Carvery, Colwick, to take. But the ninja had whet my appetite for far more than food…

  “And what about my training?” I asked.

  It couldn’t be over yet!

  “Yes! Training over! Food now!”

  “My training’s over?”

  “All! Over! Yes!”

  “It didn’t seem like much training…” I said. And it didn’t. All I’d done was press a small button. If that’s all the modern ninja needs these days, it’s remarkable you don’t see more of them working in lifts.

  “You eat now!” said the ninja, opening a small door for me into a private bamboo booth, and gesturing that I should take my shoes off and sit.

  “So am I now a ninja?” I asked. “Seeing as I sailed through my training?”

  The ninja looked at me, a little sadly. She didn’t say anything for a bit, and I took off my shoes as she thought about what to say. She had a small pad and pencil with her now, and to be honest, she just looked like a waitress all dressed up.

  Then she just shrugged and said, “Okay.”

  Despite the disappointment of my training coming to an end, I was pleased to be able to sit and watch the ninjas in their natural environment. It was my first night in Tokyo, and this was precisely the way I had imagined it. And tomorrow, I would get up bright and early and attack the task at hand: finding Akira Matsui. Bob would be meeting me at Shinjuku station for what he thought would be a day of sightseeing and tourism. I would work out how to break the news to him later on.

  I ordered some saki and some noodles from a ninja with a Swatch on, and laid out all the evidence I had before me. It was an intriguing set of clues.

  The postcard
s. A picture of Akira. The email from his dad. The directions to Yamanashi.

  The picture of Akira brought back the most memories. It was taken on the day we celebrated his twelfth birthday. His parents had taken us to see a steam train, and we’d gone on a short journey through the Leicestershire countryside. His mum had stopped off at McDonald’s earlier that morning and whipped out some lukewarm Big Macs—which in those days seemed so impossibly big and mountainous that no human being could ever eat a whole one. We all did, that day. We were becoming men.

  It was interesting to think about how much we’d all changed since then. I wondered what Akira would look like now. He’d be bigger, of course, but would he wear glasses? What kind of clothes would he wear? What was his style? Would I recognize him? And then something rather odd hit me. I wasn’t sure if I would. We hadn’t made plans. I was surprising him.

  I’d come all this way in the vague hope of possibly recognizing a man I once went to school with. A man I hadn’t seen in twenty years. A man about whom all I knew was that he would have black hair and brown eyes.

  And—at the risk of sounding politically incorrect—that’s not really much to go on when you’re in Japan. I’d basically narrowed it down to half the population.

  “Sir?”

  I looked up to see a ninja smiling down at me. He’d noticed that I was simply staring at a picture of a small boy.

  “Your son?”

  It was unlikely.

  “An old friend,” I said, before, inexplicably: “Do you know him? He’s a man.”

  I held it up, to prove one, if not the other.

  “No,” said the ninja, placing my noodles in front of me. It turned out that this ninja was a Master Ninja.

  “A Master Ninja? What does that mean?”

  “I am expert in ancient Ninja magic!” he said, very mysteriously. “I show you!”

  He got out a pack of cards with classic cars on the back and I realized pretty quickly this magic probably wasn’t all that ancient.

  “You are in Japan on holiday?”

  “Sort of,” I told the Master Ninja. “I’m here to find this guy.”

  I pointed at Akira’s picture again.

  “You know him well?” asked the ninja, shuffling the cards.

  “Not really. Not anymore.”

  “When do you meet him?”

  “I hope tomorrow.”

  “You hope? You don’t know?”

  He was joking, but actually, he was right.

  “Akira doesn’t really know I’m here. In Japan.”

  The Master Ninja considered this.

  “A long way for hope,” he said. “But it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive disenchanted.”

  It was a remarkable statement. So remarkable I had to pause for a second and write it on my napkin.

  “Are you really a Master Ninja?” I asked.

  “Yes!” said the Master Ninja. “But also, I am a student.”

  “Oh.”

  “Now for ancient magic!” he said, importantly. “Pick a card…”

  I left the ninja restaurant full of hope and enthusiasm. Especially when moments after wandering out of its door, thinking that my night of ninjas was over, I heard a shrill scream somewhere behind me and turned to see the same tiny ninja who had welcomed me to the restaurant now kneeling in the middle of the pavement and unraveling a giant scroll which read “THANK YOU FOR COMING!” I waved at the ninja, and the ninja waved at me, and a middle-aged European couple in baseball caps stared at me like I’d just shouted out that I was going to stamp on some dogs.

  “Ninjas,” I gently explained, and wandered off.

  Later, as a Cedric I’d flagged down on the streets pulled in to my fun-size hotel, I considered the Master Ninja’s words. He’d been right. It’s better to go through life with optimism than be beaten before you even get where you’re supposed to be going. It hit home.

  Jetlag had sidled up on me and when I eventually managed to get my key in the door I was ready for bed. I wandered into reception and immediately knocked the small plastic Buddha off its shelf again. It bounced about on the floor, noisily. Upstairs, I could hear a muffled laugh. I think it was the Dutch bloke.

  I tiptoed upstairs and fell to my mattress, exhausted.

  * * *

  This was it! I thought, the very second my eyes opened. This was Akira Day! The plan? Wash. Breakfast. And then Shinjuku station, where I would meet Bob and break the news that today would be a day of excitement and friendship and adventure!

  First stop—the shower.

  I opened the door of my very small, very basic room an optimistic man. I was revitalized and excited. I grabbed my towel and a toothbrush and walked upstairs, once again having to squeeze past some people on their way out, and found my way to the shower.

  I looked at it. Somehow, the designers—if, indeed, there had been any—had managed to make the shower even smaller than the toilet cubicle of the day before. But no fear! Today I had no backpack to trap me. I stepped gingerly into the cubicle and turned the water on. Now, imagine standing in an upright coffin while someone three inches away fires an erratic but powerful hosepipe off in your face. This was fast becoming my Japanese shower experience. I tried to reach again for the taps, but such was the pressure of the water I had to lean down while doing it, meaning my head soon smacked against the wall and, as I rose in shock, thwacked the back of it on the shower head.

  There must have been some problem with the water pressure, too, because the effect was like those garden sprinklers you see in American films—very fast, then virtually nothing, then incredibly fast again—and to cope meant not only managing the timing element, but being braced for temperatures which would suddenly soar from the mildly comforting to the impossibly hot. Not just that—but the closeness of the shower head to my own meant that not only was I feeling the full force of Japanese water power, but that every four or five seconds I was blinded and had a mouth full of water. But I was determined not to be beaten by my new aqua-nemesis. I would try and quickly rub my bar of soap wherever I could, timing it so I could have my eyes open while I did so. It was an excellent plan, but the size of the cubicle meant that each time I attempted to use the soap, one of my elbows would connect with a wall and I’d let out a small, involuntary yelp. This happened what felt like nine hundred times. Bruised, blinded and boiling, I stepped out of the cubicle, managing somehow to pull the doorknob off the door and stub my toe on the step.

  I was not built for Japan.

  Downstairs, the Dutchman was eating breakfast. He looked freshly showered, and not in the least bit bruised.

  “Good shower?” he said.

  I decided to go out for breakfast.

  I was standing outside Shinjuku station at ten minutes to nine holding the last remaining breakfast item the little shop nearby had had to offer.

  It didn’t really look all that breakfasty. It didn’t really look like it should exist at all. I’d had to look twice at it, and then a third time to make sure I could actually cope with it. There was a small caption in En glish underneath where the sandwiches had been. To start well and finish is delights! Eat for humans to taste lustful and union! I stared at it for a moment and then decided I was convinced. Which is why for breakfast I was now eating a spaghetti sandwich with a dollop of egg mayonnaise on the top.

  Quite who invented pasta in a bun I’m not sure. Why they’d thought that tomato sauce and egg mayonnaise might be happy bedfellows is even more of a mystery. But I suppose it did taste lustful and union, and of course that’s what humans taste to eat.

  But I had to put all such thoughts aside. Because I had Akira to concentrate on.

  Bob would be turning up here at nine o’clock, when I’d have to break the news of my quest. I figured Bob would be okay with it. He must’ve been up the Tokyo Tower before, and seen the parks and shops and sights. Going to an obscure hospital somewhere in the countryside to meet someone who I hadn’t seen since the late 1980s and was of n
o actual consequence to Bob would probably be a little treat for him.

  I giggled to myself as I munched on my pasta bap. How surprised would Akira be to see me again, after all these years? And then I had a troubling thought. Hospitals are busy places. Busy places full of busy people. Bob could guide me through the Japanese train system and make sure I turned up at the right place—but as he’d said himself, his Japanese was “a bit rubbish.” What if this meant we couldn’t communicate with people? What if this meant that at the crucial moment, when I’d asked Bob to explain to Akira about turning thirty, and finding the Book, and tracking down my friends from my past, what Bob was actually saying was, “To start well and finish is delights! Eat for humans to taste lustful and union!”?

  I needed an insurance policy.

  And then I remembered something Peter had said…

  “What the hell are you wearing?” said Bob, looking slightly concerned.

  “Hello, Bob!” I said, giving him a hug and then stepping back, proudly. “This is my Akira Matsui T-shirt!”

  “Who’s Akira Matsui?” he said. “How old is he?”

  “I went to school with him,” I said. “He’s about twenty-nine.”

  A man on a bike rolled by, staring at my chest as he did so.

  “He looks a little younger than that…”

  “In this picture, he is twelve years old, yes. In fact, this very picture was taken to commemorate the day of his twelfth birthday. I had this made across the road.”

  “But… why?” he said.

  “I’ll tell you,” I said. “But first, let’s get this tour under way.”

  “Okay,” said Bob, clapping his hands together. “So what do you want to see first? There’s Tokyo Tower. The National Museum. The Imperial Palace. The Science Museum is amazing. Or we could check out the Olympic Stadium. Or the National Park for Nature Study…”

  “Well,” I said, cutting him off and trying hard to give the impression that I was considering this very carefully. “What I’d really like to see is Yamanashi University Hospital.”

  And Bob looked a little confused.