The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

by Liam Pieper

  With the cash I had in my wallet, I could just about cover the tick or the rent, but not both. I had a little wiggle room on my credit card, but I was going to have to throw myself on the mercy of either my friends, telling them I’d lost the rent, or my dealer, hoping he’d take a kneecap as collateral.

  I trudged over to my computer to check my bank account and found that it was dependably empty. I bit my lip and swore, closing the browser, which opened up the window beneath it, in which my friend Simone had sent me a Facebook message, asking how I was doing.

  ‘Only so-so.’

  ‘Girl trouble?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  We got to chatting and she told me how she was planning a spontaneous trip to Japan to visit a friend of hers from primary school. She was looking for flights and had found a budget airline that was offering a two-for-one deal.

  ‘You know what would be crazy? Why don’t you come? Why don’t you just drop it all and come to Japan?’

  I considered Simone’s proposal for a while, watching the blinking green Facebook chat dot, that cheeky little will-o’-the-wisp. Why don’t you just drop it all and come to Japan? It didn’t sound crazy at all.

  17

  It seemed as though my time in Melbourne was up. I kept a low profile in the weeks leading up to my flight, cognisant of the fact that my star-crossed drug baron was waiting for me in the wings. When I ran into friends they would do double takes and look surprised, telling me that they’d heard I’d killed myself or been murdered or left town or something, and that they certainly hadn’t expected to see me again. Few of them lamented my absence; the city seemed to have reached critical mass when it came to tolerating my bullshit. I’d lied to, ripped off or cheated on nearly everyone I’d ever met, and I was finally out of options. Most people would take me at face value, and with a little effort I could make hunger look like passion, desperation like confidence – at least for a while. But it had all caught up with me.

  The night before my flight, I was sitting quietly at a bar, avoiding my housemates, who were starting to ask awkward questions about the missing rent. A strange woman came up and tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Are you Liam Pieper?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. ‘Have we met?’ She smiled back, picked up my whisky and threw it in my face. ‘I know all about you, you fucking dirtbag. I know who you are.’  Then she turned on her heel and walked out.

  ‘Thanks for reading!’ I called out cheerfully, although I was thinking, Well, that makes one of us.

  The two-for-one hadn’t worked out, so I’d booked the cheapest flight on a budget airline, and it arrived in Tokyo well after midnight. Simone would meet me in uptown Tokyo in a week’s time, but until then I was on my own. Standing at the airport, waiting for my backpack to roll off the conveyor belt, I listened to the burble of Japanese all around me, realised I couldn’t understand a word of it, and suddenly felt immensely, overwhelmingly alone. After a fruitless attempt at getting a taxi, I took a room in a hotel next to the airport. I bought a beer from a vending machine in the hallway and used it to wash down two Valium. Everything will seem better in the morning, I told myself as I dozed off.

  Everything did look better the next day, with the sunrise slowly warming the hotel restaurant where I lingered over a breakfast of miso and rice, a healthy, spartan meal that seemed symbolic of a new chapter in my life. I walked out to greet Japan with a gentle optimism stirring in my belly.

  It was a crisp autumn morning, the sun was breaking low over the horizon, and in the distance I could see the skyscrapers of Tokyo rising from the plains. I was shivering with cold and excitement; just a few kilometres away were the bright lights, the high tech and high fashion, the weirdness, the robots and Neon Genesis and Miyazaki and samurai castles and beautiful women and stylish gentlemen and sushi and sake, and a million things I’d loved from afar. This was where I would start my life again.

  Hoisting my backpack, I stopped on my way out the door to buy a snack from the vending machine. Something in the machine glitched and it spat out two chocolate bars instead of one. It’s an omen! I told myself, unwrapping my lucky chocolate and heading out the door.

  The bus to Tokyo was a kilometre away from the hotel gate, back towards the airport. I eschewed the courtesy shuttle in favour of walking across the sparsely scrubbed grassland and feeling the crisp air in my lungs. It’s a new day! I thought. Full of promise and adventure! I went another 30 metres before I stepped on a long-dead rat hidden in the grass. It liquefied under my shoe and a murder of crows rose up from where they had been picking at its guts. The world exploded into a fury of feathers and cawing and I screeched and flailed through the miasma of angry birds, spitting distressed wails and lucky chocolate.

  I boarded the bus to Tokyo and sat scraping rat off my shoe. Never mind the omens, I thought. This is Japan. They have robots here.

  I was utterly smitten with Japan – its music, its cartoons, its history, its food, its sexual hang-ups, so different from and yet complementary to my own. For a month, I had the time of my life. Simone flew from Melbourne to meet me and we drank and ate our way across old Tokyo. We bluffed entrance into a musicians-only jazz bar and then when they called us up to play, I begged off with a broken arm while Simone sang.

  After she went back home, I got a room in a wooden and rice-papered boarding house in the suburbs and settled down to live there for a while. If I met travellers in the common room I would tell them I was writing a novel, which I honestly planned to do but I’d yet to start it because most of the time I was stumbling drunk. Occasionally I would write a haiku about drinking, but that’s as far as my work went.

  My pattern for years had been to drink throughout the day, spacing it out with little bumps of coke so I could function. However, attitudes to illegal drugs in Japan are far less laissez-faire than in Australia; they attract serious penalties and the people who deal in them are serious gangsters. I couldn’t score the kind of drugs I fancied without interacting with some fairly intense career-criminal yakuza types, and I was far too delicate a creature for that. When fingers start getting cut off, that’s when I make polite excuses and inch towards the door.

  With no access to coke or any other uppers, I just drank heavily. To borrow from my father’s old Zen books or, indeed, my new home, I was all yin and no yang.

  I’d start with warm sake at breakfast, then retire to my room with a couple of large cans of Asahi and fuck about with a pen and pad until it was time to go to the pub. Nights, I would sit at the bar and chat in broken English with salarymen winding down after work. They were good bar companions. The drinking culture among Japanese professionals is unique, and wonderful. When you go out with your workmates, which you are expected to often, it’s perfectly acceptable to make an arse of yourself. You can slam a bunch of shots, hit on your colleagues, throw up on your shoes and take a swing at your boss, and as long as you turn up to work the next day with your tie and briefcase, nothing is made of it. The lack of ramifications appealed to me, and even if the only Japanese I knew was ‘Kanpai!’, that was enough to keep my new friends happy and buying me drinks.

  After a stretch in Tokyo, I took a bus up north to Nagano, where a new friend, Fuyuki, had invited me to stay with his family, luring me with the promise of visiting a snow-monkey sanctuary nearby. Fuyuki was a professional snowboarder who’d grown up in the mountains of Nagano and spent his formative years around the buzz of the 1998 Winter Olympics. His name is written in kanji with two characters, ‘Winter’ and ‘Tree’, and there was never someone so appropriately named. He had the sparse, chill manner of a snowboarder, complemented by a soothing vagueness. You could picture him standing on a mountain, arms spread to the sky, wind whistling through his fingers, his mind empty and serene.

  His English was terrible, as bad as my Japanese. We communicated via a tiny translation robot he carried with him. When he wanted to say something more complex than a few words, he would punch the sentence
into the machine, which would then spit out the phrase. ‘Hey, Liam,’ Fuyuki would say, then turn to the machine, which would demand, ‘Let’s go flirt some girls.’ One night when he, Simone and I were hanging out in his apartment in Tokyo, he fell asleep and started snoring. Simone and I kept talking in quiet voices until, suddenly, Fuyuki let out an earth-shattering fart. His eyes opened and darted around the room and he fumbled for his pocket translator. ‘Did I,’ the robot asked us, as Fuyuki looked shamefacedly at the floor, ‘just rip my fart?’

  Fuyuki had given me directions to his house in Hakuba Goryu in the Japanese Alps outside Nagano, instructions that looked good on paper but less solid as my bus slowly wound through a dark mountain path, snowflakes tapping on the window. I got off the bus at the stop Fuyuki had written down, to find I was standing in a pitch-black night on a nameless country road in a sparsely populated province. The driver had been reluctant to let me out, trying to communicate in mime that I would freeze to death and be eaten by bears, but I’d convinced him to open the hydraulic doors so I could step out into the blast of frigid air. As he drove off, the tail-lights disappearing around a bend in the road, I realised there were no other lights nearby. I was a long way from anywhere, and my warmest garment was the thin jumper on my back. It started to snow and I began to think that this was how I would go out, freezing to death on a Japanese mountainside. It felt foolish but somehow appropriate. I just wished I had some booze. I’d started walking with the idea of finding a vending machine with some whisky in it when Fuyuki pulled up alongside me in a BMW four-wheel drive.

  As he drove me up the mountain, it dawned on me that when Fuyuki had invited me to stay ‘on his mountain’, it wasn’t just his shitty English. Fuyuki owned the mountain. I thought I’d be sleeping on his couch, or a futon at best, but he rolled up in front of a magnificent Swiss-style chalet.

  ‘This is your house,’ Fuyuki told me through his robot. Fuyuki’s mother owned a great deal of property around the mountain, including a ski resort next door. They gave me a three-bedroom chalet to crash in, winter clothes to get around in, and the keys to the BMW in case I wanted to go for a spin.

  Mrs Fuyuki was a self-possessed, silver-haired lady, who that first night cooked me a dinner of sukiyaki, thin strips of beef that you boil and eat out of a communal pot while you get a sophisticated sake buzz on. At the table she apologised profusely that she couldn’t find Australian beef at the markets, and so had settled for Kobe wagyu. After dinner, she loaned me a kimono and showed me the onsen on the back porch of my chalet and told me to use it whenever I felt like it. The onsen worked like an infinity pool powered by a natural hot spring. It bubbled up through the mountain and into the marble tub before draining off and cascading down the mountain in a steaming rivulet. Mrs Fuyuki told me to stay as long as I liked. So I did.

  I spent my days hiking with Fuyuki and spent my nights in the hot tub. Every so often Fuyuki’s mum would appear to offer me a cold beer, but apart from that I was alone. I stopped drinking in the daytime so I could explore the surrounding villages in Fuyuki’s car without ploughing down the mountainside. It wasn’t that I was averse to drink-driving – for a long time it had been my sport and pastime – but I recognised that I wasn’t used to driving in Japan, on a rocky alpine path, in a blizzard, while full of Sapporo. Soon it became too much of a chore to drive through the snow to buy alcohol, so I cut back in the evenings too. Slowly, I stopped drinking altogether.

  One night I sat in the steaming water, the only light that of the moon bouncing off the mountains, and, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I relaxed. I watched as snowflakes caught by the rising steam were whipped out into the black valley below and dropped away into darkness. The whole world was still. In the perfect silence I could still hear the snow, a soft sneaky hiss as each crystal fell into the drifts. I was listening to that sound, warm and safe, my mind emptied out, when suddenly my conscience came barrelling back to me.

  Alone on the mountain, and sober, long-dormant corners of my mind came to life, synapses sparking and creaky grey matter hauling long-gone memories out of storage, and I realised to my dismay that my life wasn’t going so well. With nothing to dull my resurgent conscience, I was, in fact, profoundly sad.

  I was also a little shocked. I’d forgotten I could feel much at all. Suddenly I found that I had a conscience and that it was as tender as a baby kangaroo out of its pouch: larval, wormlike and twitching. Trauma that I’d laughed off years ago clambered to the front of my mind and refused to be dislodged. Long-lost regrets crowded in from the back of my mind, fighting for real estate.

  I could feel the guilt and anger and sadness that I’d been hanging on to for years turn up to the party, with friends. I was surprised to find that not only did I regret most of the choices I’d made since I was old enough to ride a pushbike, but that I was host to other, pedestrian remorse as well. I missed my ex-girlfriends, my cats, my friends who’d died over the years, through drugs or in cars or by their own hand. Most unnerving to me, I missed my family, the whole dope-stank, beat-down, traumatised bunch. I missed my brothers, living and dead, with the full ferocity of a clear mind. I missed my folks and their well-meaning, spectacularly misguided life advice cribbed from yoga books and Sartre. Sure, much of it was bat-shit crazy, ungrounded by God or man, and impracticable outside of a kibbutz, but it, or at least the intention behind it, nourished us as kids, and I sure could have used some of it that night on the mountain.

  Psychiatrists call what happened to me the ‘onset of dysphoric syndrome’, alcoholics call it a ‘moment of clarity’, but it felt to me like the end of the party. I began to dwell on what I’d done with my life, and I was surprised that the crushing weight of years of lying to, cheating on or otherwise injuring those I’d met was still very much with me. Regrets that I’d deferred thinking through years ago rose up from the dark and found me, and each felt like trying to pass a gallstone of Catholic guilt.

  It took me a few days to calm down. By the time I did, the mountain had lost its serenity. I lay awake at night, turning over the mistakes I’d made. The sensation was like coming to the end of a pointless, repetitive video game with an underwhelming ending, taking stock of wasted time and looking about the room, wondering what to do next. Most of my thoughts came back to driving down the mountain to buy a bottle of whisky, but I was scared that if I did I would neck the whole thing in the car park and end up crushed in a burning car at the bottom of a gorge, surrounded by snow monkeys hanging out for barbecue. I realised it was time to move on. My false piece of mind was shattered and in the silence my thoughts were deafening. Besides, I’d long since worn out my welcome, although if I hadn’t forced myself to leave I doubt that Mrs Fuyuki would have ever thrown me out. I would probably still be there, soaking in the tub, feeling sorry for myself.

  With the little money I had left I took a bullet train south to meet up with Leigh, an English backpacker I’d met while staying in Tokyo. We spent a couple of days checking out old samurai palaces in Kyoto and the endless concrete of Osaka, and then ended up in Hiroshima. There we wandered around the canals and gardens downtown like kids in a candy store, or more accurately, nerds in Japan. First we checked out a video-game arcade and spent all the cash in our pockets getting our arses kicked by children at giant-fighting-robot games. We tried to chat up some girls, then gave up and went shopping at the freakiest hentai store we could find. I found a copy of the same issue of Bondage Fairies the cops had confiscated all those years ago, which I bought for nostalgia’s sake. Leigh came over as the clerk was ringing up the order and baulked. ‘Fucking hell! If we’d known you cunts would end up this bad, we would have put some women on the ships out to that skanky little rock you live on,’ he said, laughing.

  Towards the end of the day we wandered onto the site of the atomic detonation and checked out the memorial museum. Sombrely, we shuffled past the photos, the piles of melted slag, an exhibition of mutant chitin that had been carved out of the bodies o
f children who had been exposed to the bomb. One exhibit contained the remains of a family melted into a pile of brick. I couldn’t tell where the stone ended and the people began.

  Afterwards we bought a bottle of whisky and sat by the river. We drank in silence, passing the bottle back and forth. I felt a little overwhelmed by everything I’d just seen and I was trying to get my head around the sheer mechanical cruelty that humankind geared itself into.

  ‘People,’ said Leigh, breaking the silence. ‘What a bunch of cunts.’ He passed me the bottle and we watched as a duck trailing her ducklings coasted by near where our feet were on the riverbank.

  The strange thing about Hiroshima was how idyllic the whole place was. It was a city I’d known about ever since I’d learned about the war as a child, and in my mind it was and always would be a smoking, broken metaphor. In reality, though, it was beautiful: green even in the winter, the air crisp and the streets bustling. This place that had been a radioactive wasteland not long ago was resolutely, magnificently alive.

  Following this train of thought, I realised I was a little drunk, and then that I was only a little drunk. It occurred to me that I’d been sober for weeks, utterly bone-dry, and now I’d had a small amount to drink, and it wasn’t a big deal. There was still three quarters of the bottle left, but for the first time in a decade, I didn’t feel as though I had to get through it like a cat afraid of losing its dinner.

  I’d gone to Japan to escape looming consequences, without any real plans beyond maybe drinking myself to death. Somewhere between landing in Tokyo and coming to Hiroshima I’d dried out. Part of the explanation was the solitude and headspace afforded by my unexpected snowy retreat, but really I’d just got away from all my bad habits long enough to find peace of mind. Or, at least, for my mind to start to piece itself together again.