by WD Clarke
—Write?
—I’m a speech writer.
—He’s a speech writer.
—Who for?
—The Tories.
—Are they like our Tories?
—No one is like your Tories. Not that they don’t try….
—So what’s he doing here?
—Trying to get Amē.
—Get her?
—Get her to marry him. Sleep with him. Whatever. The former, I suspect, but I’m sure the latter would suffice, in a pinch.
—How do you know?
—I guess I don’t. She’s always trolling for something better. Job-wise, I mean.
—Yeah.
—But something’s fishy.
—How d’you know?
—I’ve met him. He stares. And stares. And not exactly at me.
—You tell her what’s what?
—You don’t tell her what’s what. Not Amē.
—True enough. Fair Enough.
—Not exactly. But then, she’s her father’s daughter.
—I’ll say. Where is she today, anyway?
The two men, Tim and Julian, the first a Canuck from Edmonton and the other an Englishman from Worcester, are standing in the shallow end of a swimming pool in suburban Tokyo, waiting their turn to do a length. There are six people ahead of them, two of whom seem to be resting and socializing, so it will only be a little while now. Not that they mind terribly, because they are both somewhat inebriated. Tim’s current concern is that Amē, the girl he lives with, soon won’t be.
—Oh, she’s working. But they’re doing lunch at Monk’s Foods. Again.
—Brown Rice and Bebop jazz?
—Exactly.
—The place where you two started?
—Precisely. Mind you, it’s across from where she works.
—You’ve met this guy how many… ?
—Once. Briefly. He’s staying in a suite at the Akasaka Prince.
—Uh-oh.
—We had $20 pancakes there with him.
—A good or a bad thing?
—Well the cakes were a reasonable facsimile of the real McCoy.
—And … what’s that phrase you use again?—when you either don’t know or don’t want to know someone’s name?
—Or you’re too lazy to say it? Cos that’s its most common usage….
—Yeah, so, what d’you call him?
—Buddy Whatsisface.
—And Buddy Whatsisface, how was he?
—A number of adjectives come to mind.
—An unreasonable facsimile?
—That wasn’t what I was thinking. But yes.
—What were you thinking?
—It’s our turn to do a length.
—Besides that. What adjectives? Gimme one.
—Well, to be blunt about it, scabrous.
—How so?
—You know when you’re a kid and you fall and you get a scab and you obsess over it? It still hurts and it itches and it’s fascinatingly ugly and it’s a part of you, and you can’t leave it alone?
—You pick at it.
—Completely. Anyhow, he told us a story, just a stupid, pointless macho shithead anecdote, really. But, like an inane, catchy pop song, I can’t get it out of my mind. Neither can Amē, and that’s what worries me.
—What?
—It’s our turn to do a length.
—No, what? Tell me.
—Let’s do a length.
—So dad wants to know if you’ve got all the Japanese women after you.
—Course he does. Tell him that. Tell him: course he does, daddy-o.
—You do? Do you?
—Who’s got time for that? C’mon. G’won.
Vic Turnbull and his brother Piotr enter The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea in fashionable Shibuya, which can be reached by taking the southbound, counterclockwise train from Shinjuku station via the circumnavigating Yamanote Line. Piotr is taking Vic on a pub crawl, and this is their fourth stop. Piotr lives and works here, and now goes by, for the sake of convenience, simply ‘Pete’. This means he gets called Pee-tahh-san by his Japanese associates, and Pee-tah Tu-roonn-bu-ru-san by acquaintances. Vic still calls him by his nickname, ‘Oater’.
—Women, man, Vic says, grabbing Piotr by the shoulder and giving him a little shake. Women!
Piotr, a three-year expat, had majored in Music and Asian Studies at Berkeley and had initially come to Tokyo to further his musical education. He’d managed to apprentice himself to one of Japan’s National Treasures on the Samisen. The National Treasure, a beautiful half-Chinese, half-Japanese grandmother named Imae, had gladly taken him on, and Piotr had found an English Conversation job to make enough money to survive. He had become adept at the many levels of unspoken formality with which the Japanese supplement their own complexly stratified spoken language, and so had become quite popular with both his students and his employer. Now, a mere three years later, he has a lot less time for his avocation than he would like, as he manages a whole chain of English Conversation schools for a woman named Arata. Arata’s husband made his fortune in women’s cosmetics, and she calls her schools Ki-su [‘Kiss’] Conversation, after a line of beautifiers peddled by his company.
—Women? Christ, who’s got time for that? Piotr says, his hand betraying a slight tremor, as he points to an advertisement taped to the window of the café: an overlarge, shocking pink pair of lipstick lips superimposed onto the cheek of what appeared to be an affable California surfer-type.
—Huh? That yours? Vic says.
—Yep.
—You’re responsible for that?
Piotr nods. —Arata likes to keep things in-house, he says. Keeps costs down. Like the model: he’s a conversation teacher, works for us right here in Shibuya.
Piotr looks out the window of the café, across the asterisk-like intersection of streets, across the thousands of hurrying pedestrians, each anxious to beat the short-lived crossing signal.
—He teaches in that building over there. Plays jazz on weekends over in Kichijoji. And teaches Yoga. I tried a class or two, but don’t have the time. Australian. Real nice guy. Now he’s got all the women going abso-lute-ly….
Vic is only half paying attention; he’s scanning the room, which is a mixed bag of Japanese and foreign couples, uniformly dressed in black, a monoculture of hipness—Piotr too, with his black jeans, black turtleneck and sports coat. Vic finds it all a bit unnerving, but it’s nothing new: Vic has never felt at ease in his own skin, or in the various skins that conformity has always forced upon him. At college, for example, he’d joined Kappa Iota Delta, a fraternity that didn’t seem too far above his station, one whose sensibilities and conventions signified ‘New-Money-Aspirational’. That is, while certainly elitist, the frat’s world-view was also reasonably meritocratic and pragmatic. Above all, though, Vic had found there a culture of rabid jocularity, and it spoke to him, not in spite of his athletic ineptitude, but because of it. It was something that touched the soul of each and every would-be pledge: the boys of Kappa lived for team sports. No one at Kappa was any good themselves, but everyone was ardent. They loved sports, played sports, and above all watched sports and talked sports. It was a recipe for easy-going togetherness, and Vic liked that. Even ‘rush week’, the initiation, had been ‘friendly’ and ‘fun’, just a series of innumerable drinking games alternating with goofy contests that were designed to get you to ‘laugh at yourself’, along with everyone else. Vic found that he had made a wise choice, on the whole, for it had given him a leg up in more ways than one. But today, as he looks over the café’s sophisticates, he only thinks of his frat nick-name, ‘Frumple’. Vic glances from the clientele to himself, and back to the clientele. He knows he could never carry it off, that kind of thing.
Two tables to the left, what appears to be a Scandinavian couple affect a posture of world-class boredom, their eyes assiduously ignoring each other, each as focused on existential nothingness as Narcissus upon his own refl
ection. On the immediate right, a reclining young Japanese man practices blowing smoke rings for his applauding girlfriend, who has perfect posture and wears a facial expression of acute gratitude. Directly to the front, a set of whiskey-swilling quadruplets scowl over a game of poker. One attempts to fill another’s glass, just as the other reaches to take a drink, and the whiskey pours wastefully onto the table.
—So anyway, Vic says, interrupting his brother and changing the subject abruptly, as if a submerged thought he’d been previously obsessing over has just resurfaced. I’m sitting beside this guy on the plane over from Seattle. A Canadian.
—We’ve got a number of them at Ki-su. Friendly, obedient, eager-to-please—for the most part. Malleable.
—Well this one was a bit of a wacko. Wacko, but not unlikable.
—What was there to like?
—The usual, I dunno, not all that much really. He was funny, upbeat. You know.
—A bit cynical, but in a good way?
—Yeah, but even though his sense of humour was kinda….
—Off the wall?
—I mean way off, but … he was still … personable….
—Regular.
—Down to earth.
—A Can-Do kinda guy.
—Well … yeah, essentially, yeah.
The waitress comes to take their order. She has her hair dyed blonde and is dressed like Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Her friendly attempts at English conversation are politely dismissed by the efficient, business-like fluency of Piotr’s Japanese. He orders coffee for his brother and has a half-full bottle of Suntory Whiskey—Reserve—brought over for himself.
The whiskey bottle has the name Peter written onto it with a red grease pencil. Puzzled, Vic stares for a moment at the bottle, then at his brother.
—Hey, Piotr says, you like the decor?
The café is done up in an admixture of Japanese right-wing nationalist paraphernalia and American Graffiti motifs.
—Wait a minute, Vic says. You a regular here?
Piotr smiles. —If they like you they let you have your own bottle. Same price, but there’s something to be said for it.
—Like what?
Piotr raises an eyebrow. —You know, the owner was one of my first students. He’s the one behind the bar in the samurai get-up. Owns the gallery next door too, does a Warhol-ish kinda thing himself. Claims to have met Andy a few days after Yukio Mishima died. Said it changed his life, his whole outlook. He was one of the faithful few at the barricades when Mishima committed seppuku, but like I said, he’s since shifted, from Tragic to Comic slash Ironic.
—Huh, what?
—Nothing. Nevermind.
—You use those a lot, those slashes? They proper English?
—Useful English. Business English. Our English, American English, at any rate. It’s what they want to learn here, and it’s why we don’t generally hire Brits. Too anal for the most part, about that kind of thing. The ones you can understand, the ones who elocute well, I mean.
The drinks arrive, delivered by a young man whose getup suggests Jerry Lee Lewis as a Bowling champion. Vic returns to the bee in his bonnet.
—So this guy, this Canadian, he kept telling me to call him Kid.
Piotr pretends to be not at all interested in what his brother is saying, knowing all-too-well how much he dislikes being ignored.
—Uh-huh, he says.
—Listen. He had this … obsession. That’s what you’d have to call it.
—A niceness obsession.
—Not really. It’s stupid—I mean, it’s really stupid. But….
—Or is it compulsion?
—No. Listen.
—Cos the two often go together, in my experience.
—Will you just listen, Jesus!
—There is effective medication for the very condition you’re describing. DSM-iii-r(1987) describes, and prescribes for it, perfectly.
—Christ, I haven’t even described it yet, will you let me describe it? At least?
—Would you say that your anger is a … problem in your … intimate relationships?
—Oater, I’m gonna pummel you and then I’m gonna start in on your pal Kurosawa over there. You hear me?
—Try starting your sentences with ‘I feel’.
—You are a dead man, Oater. D-e-d, dead. A. Dead. Man. You.
—Tell me about your mother. Were you close?
—This is a promise I’m making now.
—No, please, really, just kidding, haha. Say haha, Vic, we be friends here. Like brothers be we.
—Haha. We are brothers. For the moment anyway. As for the future, who knows, who can—?
—Tell? O-K, Tell me about your little aeroplane friend, I really want to know, really. Really really.
—Will you be serious for a minute?
—Sure. Scout’s honour.
Piotr does the Scout salute, straightens his tie, adjusts his seating position so that he is, if still dishevelled, somewhat erect, and swallows the last of his whiskey.
—He pisses into rivers, said Vic.
—I don’t get it.
—What’s to not get? He pisses—into rivers.
—Rivers, he pisses into. Into rivers he pisses. He, into rivers … Hey, we could use this in our schools!
—I think that about covers the various permutations.
—Don’t misunderestimate the value of rote learning, Vic.
—Very funny stuff.
—No, I just don’t get it, Vic. No matter how I rearrange it, I just don’t get it.
—He pisses into rivers.
—Now I get it.
—He….
—I got it. I got it.
—No you didn’t. Don’t patronize me!
—You’re right, sorry. I guess I really don’t get it.
—He whips it….
—Spare me, please? I do in fact have a mental picture, Vic-tor, of that which you have only just now chosen to reveal to me, to myself here. Will you let me describe to you just what, in fact, I do not get? Will you?
—I will.
—I do not get the why here. It is the why that I am not getting. Why he pisses in rivers. Why you mention this, even. Why?
—Think about it. It’s inherently fascinating. Or don’t you think?
—I don’t think, I…. And he tried to lick the last of the whiskey from the inside rim of his glass.
—Yeah. That’s the ticket.
—… drink. And yet….
—Look, Vic says. It’s like this: one day, the guy wakes up, and there’s been this shift in the cosmos, see, in the order of things. The universe presents itself to him thusly.
—Just ‘thus’ will do. We have classes that can Polish you up. You be good Polack soon!
Ignoring this, Vic says: —Then he looks at himself, and what do you know but there’s been another shift, a mirroring of the first one, in the corresponding yet mysterious order of his psyche….
—As above, so below….
—That kind of thing. So there’s these profound, interlinked shiftings, and all of a sudden the guy needs, he needs to, the guy has to, piss into every new river that he comes across, big or small, on foot or in a motorcar, regardless.
—No one says motorcar anymore, Vic. It’s archaic. We steer our students away from such things, generally.
—I said it for effect. Dramatic effect, cos in my opinion the whole thing is fucking strangely dramatic.
—Strangely bordering on stupidly, more like. Not to mention infantile regression.
—No, just think about it for a sec. He sees a river….
—Are you just relating this, reporting what he told you, here, or are you dressing it up just a tad?
—He sees a Goddamn river.
—I see.
—And he has to piss into it. To make his mark.
—Like, like a dog?
—Yup.
—Thanks for sharing, but that’s way too deep for me. I don’t go in f
or the profound or the sublime, as a rule. Depths and Vastnesses and such and so forth. Best to live on the surface.
—You’re not getting me.
—Wait a minute. You, you’re doing this too, now?
—I mean the Kid, the Shawinigan Kid, you’re not getting me. You’re not getting him.
—Shawinigan Kid? That’s what he calls himself?
—That’s what we call him.
—We? Why we? Why do we call him that? And which we?
—People. Cos he asks them to. Us. People like us.
Piotr, who had previously been making an effort to stay more or less vertical, now slumps in his seat, so that only his upper thoracic spine touches the seat back.
—Let’s recap, he says. He pisses into rivers, for no apparent reason. And you call him Kid, or Shawinigan Kid, depending of course upon whether it’s second or third person….
—You little p….
—For no apparent reason.
Vic leaps forward now, and leans across the table so that his nose is almost touching his brother’s.
—That’s just it, you drunken moron! The reason is not apparent. It is not even presented to us as relevant. The Kid doesn’t care why he does it. He doesn’t even care if we care. He just delights in the exalted egoism of the act, luxuriates in the opaque infantility—
—Infantilism.
—Infantility of it all. Like you said yourself, best to live on the surface, right, but don’t answer me, just shut up, don’t even begin to speak here, don’t open your lips, cos I’m gonna enlighten your tiny little world just a wee little bit.
—About a bit of wee wee.
—Did I say shut up?
—You did.
—Will you?
Piotr nods, restraining, but not restraining, a smile.
—The Kid doesn’t know why he does it, but he does it nonetheless. Piotr shrugs his shoulders.