Tokyo Decadence

by Ryu Murakami

  “What a room.”

  “I don’t like cleaning.”

  “Have you ever cleaned it?”

  “I do sometimes, when Kiyomi says it’s gone too far, but I don’t like to pick things up and move them around and stuff.”

  “You said she first appeared when you were in high school. All of a sudden, was it?’

  “During the morning address.”

  “Morning address?”

  “Where all the students line up in rows on the athletic field to listen to the headmaster talk? I think it was every Monday, but one day I heard this voice coming from somewhere.”

  I always got into a funny state during events like that, like graduation or orientation or whatever, when all the students had to stand in formation. Everything would start to go far away, and sometimes when it was really bad I’d get dizzy and pass out. My teacher said I must be anemic, but when I went to the hospital for a checkup, they said it wasn’t that and I should see a psychiatrist.

  My parents ran a little grocery store, and there were six of us kids, and nobody had ever been to a psychiatrist before, and it probably would have been expensive, and people would have talked, so I ended up not going.

  “A funny state?”

  “Yeah, I’d start to feel like the scenery was moving—not like on a train or something, but like I was getting smaller, real fast, like whoosh, so, I don’t know, everything would go way far away.”

  And all the students who were lined up in rows in their uniforms would begin to look like trees, like a forest of big trees, or like stone statues in some ruined temple or something, and I’d be really scared that I was going to get stepped on and squashed.

  “And that fear was somehow related to Kiyomi-san?”

  The ventilation in my room isn’t so good, and the man must be hot because he takes off his jacket, and the smell of his cologne mixed with sweat reaches all the way to where I’m sitting on the floor.

  “I don’t know,” I say. Then suddenly I change the subject and tell him I’m a call girl, but he doesn’t seem surprised or anything.

  “So, first you heard her voice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She was talking to you?”

  “She said ‘Hello,’ and I wondered who said that and looked around but couldn’t see anybody that might have spoken to me. I mean, not many people ever do talk to me.”

  “Has it always been like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Not talking to people much.”

  “I say hello and stuff, but that’s about it.”

  “What did Kiyomi-san say to you that time?”

  “You don’t have to say ‘-san,’ you can just call her Kiyomi. She won’t mind. What did she say that time? She told me she’d like to be friends.”

  “And what did you think? Didn’t it seem strange to hear a voice like that?”

  “She explained it all to me.”

  “Who did?”

  “Kiyomi. She explained it all that first time. I’m from Saitama, but Kiyomi was born in Yokohama, and she was the daughter of a man who was a famous, what do you call it, a piano something...”

  “Pianist?”

  “No, the one that makes pianos sound better.”

  “Tuner.”

  “Yeah, that was her father. She says that piano tuners, most of them are people who wanted to be pianists but couldn’t make it, and her father was like that and tried to turn her into a pianist since he couldn’t be one himself, and he made her take these really difficult lessons, and she had a lot of talent and won competitions in middle school and everything, till her piano teacher said she was even more talented at singing and told her she should take voice lessons. And that was the beginning of the whole tragedy.”

  “Tragedy?”

  “Kiyomi was so good that some people said she’d end up being Japan’s greatest soprano, but then she suddenly started getting fat.”

  “Ah, I see. It’s true that to produce a great voice you need to provide a lot of nourishment to every part of the body.”

  “It wasn’t that. She got the soprano disease.”

  “The soprano disease? Is there really such a thing?”

  “Sopranos, when they sing, it makes a special type of vibration? It vibrates in their skull, which can cause problems, and in Kiyomi’s case it affected a part of the brain that made her hormones go crazy.”

  “I see. And that caused her to gain weight.”

  “Right, and I guess she just couldn’t stand it, because she was always really pretty, so she went on this crash diet.”

  “Ah. People don’t realize that if they take the time they can eat normally and lose weight without compromising their health.”

  “Maybe if she’d met someone like you, she wouldn’t have died.”

  “So that’s what happened—she died.”

  “Well, duh. How could she be living inside me if she wasn’t dead?”

  “Why do you suppose she chose you?”

  “She says she tried to talk to a lot of people, but only five answered, and the other four were a homeless guy who slept under an overpass in Shinjuku, an old woman who was deaf, an alcoholic living in a mental hospital, and a six-year-old boy who had a bad heart problem, so I was the only one with any potential.”

  “Potential?”

  “Well, if you’re going to live in someone else’s body, it’s best to have something in common, right? What would there be to talk about with a little boy or an alcoholic or whatever?”

  The man’s staring at me. I tell him I’m getting a little hot, and take off my blouse.

  You want to sleep with him, don’t you? Kiyomi says.

  No. I’m just taking it off because I’m sweating.

  Why not ask him to tell you how to diet, instead of pulling a stunt like this? It wouldn’t hurt you to lose a little weight.

  “You’re speaking with Kiyomi again, aren’t you?”

  “Guess what she said? She thinks I want to have sex with you.”

  “That’s what I thought too.”

  “We can if you want,” I tell him, and start to undo my bra, but he looks away, so I put on a sweatshirt instead.

  “How do you know Kiyomi was pretty? You can’t see her, can you?”

  “She said she was, and I trust her. I believe everything she says. I mean, it would wear me out if I didn’t, right? Since we’re always together. We argue sometimes, but deep down inside we trust each other.”

  “All right. Thank you for sharing about Kiyomi. Now I’d like to hear about you.”

  “Me? What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little... unusual? To have a stranger living inside you?”

  “Do you wish it would happen to you?”

  The man laughs and says, “No, I’m happy as I am.” Then he asks if I’ve got anything to drink, which I haven’t. “Why don’t we get some wine?” he says, and hands me a ten-thousand-yen bill. “The liquor stores are probably closed by now, but if you go to that pub they might sell you a bottle.”

  I put the money in my wallet and go back to the pub down the street where we met up, and while I’m looking for the waitress, a kid of only about sixteen or seventeen comes up and puts his arms around me and bites my earlobe. “Come have a drink with us,” he says, and he’s really cute, like a guy in a Coca-Cola commercial or something, so we go back to his table, and as I’m getting felt up and drinking beer I start to want it real bad. It’s the Coca-Cola boy I want but he isn’t paying me any attention now, and I end up going to a hotel with an older guy who has teeth that point every which way.

  It’s three a.m. when I leave the hotel, and I decide to get the nutritionist a present because I feel bad about what I did, so I stop in a twenty-four hour supermarket and buy him some socks and a penlight with a
picture of Mickey Mouse on it.

  But my room is dark when I get there, and the man is gone. Men never come to my room, so suddenly I feel really lonesome and crouch down and sniff the sofa where he was sitting. I can just barely make out his smell, and then Kiyomi starts getting on my case again.

  You’re such an idiot, she says. He was an interesting person. Leaving him sitting here and going off with someone else—not even a dog would do something like that.

  What makes you think he’s so interesting?

  He’s an intellectual, and a gentleman. You saw how he behaved when you tried to seduce him.

  I bet he’s married.

  What has that got to do with it?

  He probably has a lovely wife and wouldn’t want anything to do with a pig like me.

  A lot of married men buy you for sex.

  Yeah, but you don’t understand. A customer once told me what it’s like. He said that after he calls in for a woman, while he’s waiting for her to arrive, he starts imagining that maybe she’ll be really good looking, even though he knows it isn’t likely. And then somebody like me shows up, right? And he’s like, Well, what did I expect?

  I’m afraid you’ve lost me again.

  There’s something else you said before, though, that makes me mad. What did you mean by that crack about dogs? You said not even a dog would do that. What kind of thing is that to say?

  I had dogs all my life, so I know what I’m talking about. Bitches never have sex unless they’re in heat.

  What sort of dog did you have?

  Dogs understood me a lot better than you do. Which just underlines the fact that you’re dumber than they are.

  You probably had a pedigree dog, right? With papers and everything?

  Of course.

  Was it a dog with long hair?

  Some of them had long hair, yes.

  Like the dogs dukes and duchesses and people like that in foreign countries have?

  Everyone in my family liked dogs, and we each had certain preferences. Mother liked big dogs with long hair, so she always had a Great Pyrenees. I preferred small, intelligent dogs like German shorthaired pointers and wire fox terriers.

  I never heard of any of those before. I knew you’d have a dog with papers, though, and sure enough I was right.

  You performed fellatio on that man, didn’t you. In the hotel.

  You were watching? Well, didn’t you ever do that?

  It’s not the sort of thing decent people talk about.

  You must have done it for the guy you really loved. What was he like? I bet he was tall. Did you know any baseball players?

  I knew a hockey player.

  Was he famous?

  He was in the Olympics twice. First as a player and then as coach.

  Guys like that must be really smart too, huh?

  He emigrated to Canada and now works as a lawyer for a Japanese company there.

  Did you ever blow him?

  Not being a slut like you, I’d rather not talk about such things. That’s not what’s important anyway. What’s important is making the most of the time you have with someone you love. Right?

  I don’t know. Nothing like that ever happened to me. You were friends with artists and people like that too, weren’t you? Poets or whatever?

  Yes, I was, but I don’t really want to talk about it.

  Like a poet who won prizes and stuff?

  He was quite famous, but we weren’t destined to be happy together.

  He had a wife and kids, but he loved you anyway, didn’t he?

  We once decided to end it all in each other’s arms. He loved his son too much for us to make a life together. We chose Spain as the place to die. Spain is a country that accepts death, that recognizes that life can be enhanced by the proximity of death, so that’s where he took me. But early one morning I decided I couldn’t let him go through with it, and I slipped out of the hotel in Barcelona alone to go to Majorca. I don’t imagine this would mean anything to someone like you, but in Barcelona there’s a pavement mosaic designed by Miró. As I walked across that mosaic a fine, mistlike rain was falling, and I felt so lonely I really did want to die, and yet so enriched by this experience that it helped me to go on living. Can you understand how I felt?

  Sounds romantic. I’d like to have an experience like that someday. I know I never will, though. Like tonight at the hotel, I really wanted to spend the night there because I was so sleepy, and besides, when it’s that late the price for all night is the same as a couple of hours. But after the man got his rocks off he said, “How low can a guy sink,” and put his underwear on right away and pointed at his dick and said, “It’s this fucker’s fault, that’s whose fault it is,” and left ahead of me without even saying goodbye, and it would have been weird to stay there all by myself, right?

  Kiyomi seems kind of disgusted and doesn’t say anything. I leave the lights off and shine the penlight I bought all over the room and keep talking to Kiyomi until I notice a note he left on the table.

  “Thanks for everything. I waited an hour, but now I have to go. The phone rang a couple of times, but naturally I didn’t answer. I’d like to see you again, if you’re interested. Please call me.”

  There’s a telephone number, and I dive for the phone and dial it, but it’s just a tape with a voice saying, Thank you for calling the Something Something International Something Center, our offices are closed for the day, yadda yadda yadda, and at the end of the tape it says to eat lots of protein and complex carbohydrates and to keep fat to a minimum, so sure enough it’s a nutrition place, and the voice on the tape is so nice that I listen to the whole thing twelve times.

  At four a.m. my office calls to say they need me to go see a customer at one of the highrise hotels in West Shinjuku. Maybe it’s because of hearing that tape, but I’m feeling really good and wash my face and put on some cologne and foundation and eye shadow and lipstick and even paint my nails, and get into the suit my mother bought me without telling my father when I graduated from high school.

  I always get suspicious looks at hotels, but this time since I’m dressed so nice the bellboy smiles at me in the lobby, and the customer, who’s a jewelry dealer from Kyushu in his thirties, doesn’t send me away. He’s very drunk and pays me up front and then tries to stick it in me from behind but can’t get it up, and as I’m sucking on it he falls asleep.

  Are you going to call that nutritionist? Kiyomi asks me.

  I tell her I haven’t made my mind up yet.

  You’re lying. You want to see him again.

  Well, you’re the one who said he’s such an interesting person, and I was really rude to him, so... Look, Kiyomi, that was a bad thing I did last night, but just now all I did was give the guy a little head, and I got forty thousand yen, so I’m thinking of buying the nutritionist a real present, not just socks or a penlight but like a necktie or something, to apologize.

  So you are planning to see him.

  Well, why not?

  People will find out about us.

  But he already knows, and besides, he didn’t make a big deal about it, did he? He’s not like any of the others.

  Kiyomi doesn’t have a comeback for that.

  I wait till Monday to call him, and it makes me realize how having something to look forward to can really spice up your life. As soon as I wake up I open the curtains and see what a fine day it is. I’m not the type of person who usually notices things like that, I just sort of go along without paying much attention, but since I’ve got a man to call, and not a man who has to pay me but one who’s interested in me as a person, I not only notice the weather but tidy the place up and do the laundry and cook some real spaghetti, not the microwave kind. I listen to guitar music on FM while I eat but with the telephone on my mind the whole time.

  I always have liked the telephone, but
since I don’t really have anybody to talk to I end up calling telephone services a lot. Even listening to a voice on tape is better than no voice at all. I’ve listened to all kinds of things. Once I saw a magazine that listed all the telephone services, and there were about five hundred in Tokyo alone. The hardest ones to call are where you hear messages from famous actors or singers, because they’re always busy, but you can call Nagano and hear birds singing, and in Nikko there was one that taught you how to make mummy dumplings, and I heard the sound of waves in Okinawa, and I used to listen to the Weekend Freeway Report a lot, and there was one place where you could hear a man and a woman doing it, and the toymaker Bandai had a fun one with the voices of Transformers, and I used to phone a medical center even though I wasn’t sick, just to hear that gentle voice on the tape saying, “Get well soon.” But my number one very favorite was the simplest one of all, the weather forecast, which sometimes I’d listen to dozens of times a night, and since I liked to hear about the weather in towns that were far away, my phone bill was super expensive for a while.

  Finally I go ahead and punch out the number. He remembers me right away.

  “I’m sorry about the other night,” I tell him. “An emergency came up while I was in the pub.”

  Liar! says Kiyomi, but I hardly even notice, which is funny because normally I’m startled when she starts talking out of the blue. You were fellating a man with bad teeth.

  “Not at all, don’t mention it. I blame myself for intruding on you like that.”

  I can hardly say anything except Ah and Oh and Uh-huh and so on, but Kiyomi on the other hand is talking nonstop now, and naturally I’m trying just to listen to what the nutritionist is saying, because it’s confusing to listen to two people at the same time.

  I didn’t think you were this stupid. You know I’m psychic. I said the man was interesting, but that was only a first impression. I’m tuning in to him right now, and listen: he’s a horrible person. I know it’s impossible for you to understand this, but trust me. He’s a very bad man. Just think for a moment. Why would someone who owns his own business be interested in a woman like you? This is the most evil-minded person you’ve ever met, a man who’d think nothing of killing somebody.