Tokyo Decadence

by Ryu Murakami

  “To tell the truth,” he said, “I’ve never actually tried making a whole batch like this before. I made five or six joints a couple of times and sold ’em to assholes with long hair, like you. Where do assholes like you hang out?”

  A rock café I went to a lot was nearby, but I wasn’t sure I should tell him about it. People there would gladly pay a thousand yen per stick, but they were dope connoisseurs, and once they found out it was fake I’d never be able to go there again. And since no one would buy this stuff more than once, the only sensible thing to do was to go for a big sale. I was to get twenty percent of whatever we took in, but I wasn’t happy with that and asked him to make it forty. For forty percent I’d take him to a place full of hippies and introduce him around. We finally agreed on thirty-five. But now we’d need two or three real joints.

  “What for?” Tatsumi asked.

  I told him I wanted to sell at least four hundred sticks. “If we sell small amounts to people and they don’t get high, they’ll tell everyone, and there goes the market. We want to sell to dealers, so we’ll need samples.”

  Clever boy, Tatsumi said, patting my cheek. We went to a small, grubby disco where GIs from the base in Yokota and sailors from Greece and Turkey hung out, bought three genuine joints, then went back to my rock café to wait for the dealers to arrive. Inside, a Pink Floyd record was playing at ear-splitting volume.

  “I can’t take this!” Tatsumi shouted in my ear. “Fuck this place!”

  Nine o’clock in the evening was too early for the dealers to appear anyway, so we decided to kill time at a movie. The Last Picture Show was playing at an all-night theater down the street. Tatsumi balked at first, saying he didn’t like movies with foreigners in ’em, but halfway through the film he was stifling sobs.

  “Never saw a movie like that before,” he said, at the diner where we stopped for a couple of beers before returning to the rock café. “You always watch things like that?”

  Not really, I said.

  “So, what did ya think of it?”

  I said it made me realize that there are lonely people even in America.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The sailors in my hometown all acted so cocky, I told him—great big guys, always smiling, always looking like they’re having fun, so I used to think all Americans were rich and happy.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Tatsumi said. He sat with his head bowed. “I guess there must be guys like that over there too, though—guys who fall for way older women.”

  He said nothing else for a while but sat brooding over his beer.

  Tatsumi was no drinker, and after three beers his legs were wobbly. We went back to the rock café, where the Doors were now rattling the walls, and I introduced him to a group of three dealers out of Yokosuka, telling them he was a yakuza who’d just arrived from Okinawa. Between them they bought nearly three hundred joints.

  “Nee-chan, meet Yazaki. Don’t mind the long hair, this kid’s got some brains on him.”

  We’d gone home by taxi. The lights were out in my apartment, but in Tatsumi’s the woman he called Nee-chan was sitting there in a slip, eating instant ramen. Easily old enough to be his mother, or mine, she wasn’t wearing a bra and hadn’t shaved her armpits recently. She said nothing, not even to acknowledge me, but as I watched this heavily made-up woman calmly slurping her noodles, a lighted cigarette in one hand, I felt as if I understood why Tatsumi had teared up at The Last Picture Show. Timothy Bottoms, living in a small town in the Midwest or wherever, chooses a lonely married woman about twice his age as his partner for sex. In the final scene he decides to leave town and starts to drive off in his pickup truck but then makes a U-turn and goes back to her place. That tired older woman was a symbol of America—an America that had lost something it once had.

  “Look how much we made, Nee-chan, me and him.”

  Tatsumi took a roll of ten-thousand-yen bills from the pocket of his gaudy trousers and put it down in front of her. She set her ramen bowl aside and began counting the bills, wearing the same non-expression she’d worn while inhaling her noodles.

  “Where have you been?” Nakano said when I walked into our apartment. “Everybody was worried about you.”

  He was the only one still up and was in the kitchen in undershorts and a shirt, drinking Suntory’s cheapest whiskey.

  “We all talked things over today,” he said. “Kato’s mother got sick again, and he wants to go back. Let’s face it, we can’t be a band anyway, living like this. Shimada says he’s going to take a job as a roadie for some group he knows, and Yamaguchi said he wants to go to a jazz guitar school, and me, well, I haven’t decided what to do yet, but I’m tired of this. Maybe it is pathetic to give up after two months but c’est la vie, man, we could do this for a year and not get anywhere. So, anyway, three weeks from now, on Sunday, we’re going to give a little concert in the park. How about it? Shimada says he can borrow some drums. You’ll join in, right? It might be the last time we ever play together. There’s this little outdoor stage in a corner of Inokashira Park where they put on concerts, mostly by folk groups, every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. I happened to meet the guy who produces it and asked him if we could play and he said ‘Sure,’ just like that.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I got hold of some money, so tomorrow I’m going to look for a place of my own. But I’ll definitely come watch you play.”

  I found an apartment easily enough, not too far away, and was able to move my few belongings in a taxi. It was a tiny room, just four and a half mats, and I had enough cash left over to buy a stereo. My lifestyle didn’t change much: I still bought old novels and poetry collections at used-book stores and read them in rock or jazz cafés. When I ran out of money, I’d look for a hydrangea bush, make some dummy joints, and sell them in Akasaka or Roppongi. I avoided Shinjuku, but once bumped into the dealers from Yokosuka at a disco somewhere. Apparently they hadn’t even realized the product wasn’t real, though. It wasn’t very good stuff, was all they said.

  That Sunday, the little outdoor stage in the park was infested with folksingers and trios who did one grindingly boring song after another. About thirty people sat around listening, and the applause ranged from restrained to nonexistent. When Nakano and the others began to play, an elderly couple who’d been feeding bread to the pigeons got up and left, plugging their ears. And after doing only two John Mayall pieces, the drumless blues quartet retired forever. All four seemed to enjoy themselves, though, and when their abbreviated set was over they sat on the side of the stage sipping soft drinks and laughing at the folkies that followed them. Nakano spotted me and beckoned me over, but I just waved and shook my head. I wanted to take a walk around the pond. A few minutes later I was sitting on a bench near the hydrangea bushes Tatsumi and I had trimmed. The rainy season was over, and the blossoms were withering away. Looking at those fading flowers, remembering the muggy night we’d crouched there picking the leaves, I felt a sudden loathing for that movie, The Last Picture Show. I’d never forgive it for making a guy like Tatsumi cry.

  I decided I wanted to see him and went to the old apartment building.

  “Nee-chan’s here, but come on in.”

  The woman was getting ready to go to work. She was wearing a red lamé dress and a lot of makeup, and was painting her toenails. The air was so thick with the smell of nail polish, it was hard to breathe. Tatsumi was toasting hydrangea leaves in a frying pan. The woman glanced at me but offered no greeting. I sat there silently watching her apply the red polish to every last nail.

  Historia de un Amor

  The first time I saw her she was eating an hors d’oeuvre and weeping. This was at a fairly well-known Italian restaurant in the city. I’d been a waiter there for about three months, having been recommended by a friend of my father’s, though there’s not much of a story behind that. It wasn’t
as if I dreamed of becoming a capocuoco, or making a name for myself as a headwaiter, or anything like that. I was enrolled in a no-name little private college and just wanted some extra cash to spend as I chose. First I’d taken a part-time job at a nightclub, but then my father found out and informed me that no son of his was going to work in some den of vice, and that if I insisted on getting a job it had to be at a proper restaurant, where I could acquire some discipline and life training. Discipline and training were not things I aspired to, but I decided to play along. If I put up a fuss, he might’ve demanded that I quit school and get a full-time job, and goodbye allowance. Is life really something that requires training, though? And what about “discipline”? The only thing that comes to mind when I hear the word are those loony monks who stand under waterfalls in the middle of winter until their lips turn purple. I don’t think of myself as particularly brainy, but I know this much: anybody who’d feel good about getting pounded by a freezing waterfall is an idiot. There’s no benefit whatsoever in enduring shit like that.

  Anyway. This restaurant was located in trendy Aoyama and got written up in a lot of hip magazines, but the food wasn’t any good. I never met the owner, but from what I hear he’s a dubious character who made a fortune importing software and knew nothing about Italian cuisine but decided that opening a ristorante would not only be sexy but good tax strategy. The head chef was a super-serious dude. He claimed to have been “three years in Milano and five in Firenze,” but I’m willing to bet he spent most of those years washing dishes and scrubbing floors. You’d peek into the kitchen and he’d be glaring at a pot of boiling pasta with fierce, bloodshot eyes. It made me wonder if overly serious people just weren’t cut out for Italian food. After closing time we usually got to help ourselves to some of the fare, and the spaghetti for example was always strangely elaborate, with lots of unusual items mixed in, but if you ask me it was no match for the straightforward taste of a plate of Napolitan at Denny’s.

  Still, despite the food being bad and the prices pretty outrageous, we had a full house almost every night. Of course, all I was interested in was getting paid, so it was no skin off my nose if people wanted to fork out big yen for a lousy meal. My only goal was to save enough money to travel abroad. I had a particular destination in mind.

  The woman was sitting at a corner table in the rear, and most of the other customers didn’t notice her quietly weeping as she ate her carpaccio. Crying customers are rare but not unheard of. Usually it’s because their partner is breaking up with them over dinner. Do people think if they do this at an expensive restaurant it’ll somehow make it less painful? Or is it just about choosing somewhere fancy for the grand finale? Sometimes it’s the man who’s crying and sometimes it’s the woman, but only women keep eating while they weep; a man won’t even touch his soup.

  We were trained to pretend not to notice when customers were dealing with personal issues, but I soon realized that this woman wasn’t upset because she was being dumped but because the man she was with was busting her chops. I judged her age to be late twenties or early thirties. She was wearing a smart cream-colored suit and a Hermes scarf. She was no knockout, but I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way: she had reasonably attractive “office lady”–type looks. Nobody likes to watch people break down, so we waiters were pretty good at pretending not to notice, but unless you’re wearing earplugs you can’t help overhearing things.

  Basically, the man was an asshole. He was about forty, a salaryman with no distinguishing characteristics whatever. His face, his necktie, his suit, his belt—everything about him might as well have been emblazoned with the words run of the mill. I took a dislike to the guy the minute he walked in. Believe it or not, whenever people came through the door we were supposed to greet them with “Buona sera!” How ludicrous is that—Japanese staffers greeting Japanese customers in Italian. If any actual Italians heard us they’d probably laugh their asses off, but that’s what we were told to do, so I always joined in. Customers with any self-respect replied in Japanese—“Konban wa.” But of course there were always the dopes who came back at you with a solemn “Buona sera.” Usually they were regular customers, or people who wanted to come across as regulars. Being a frequent patron of a restaurant with crummy food, or even wanting to be taken for one, is a sure sign of stupidity. This guy opted for “Buona sera,” which immediately put him in the stupid category. The woman was all right, though. She just nodded and said, “Konban wa.”

  The two of them clinked glasses of white wine together, and everything seemed normal enough at first. But the man was like the prototype of the mouse that turns into a rat after a couple of drinks, and he gradually started coming out with a series of snide remarks. From what I overheard while pretending to ignore them, they both worked at a travel agency and were part of a team responsible for devising a new spring tour campaign. The campaign was to target office ladies and students, so the team was made up mostly of female employees. The woman was apparently the team leader, and the man was attached as a sort of adviser.

  “I didn’t even want to be involved in the first place,” he was saying, “but the section chief wanted me on the team, so what choice did I have? You have to do what he tells you, right? And here’s what he says to me: he says, ‘Maybe working with all those ladies will rejuvenate you a little.’ I mean, I have to hear crap like that from a superior who’s two years my junior? To me there’s nothing worse than people getting above themselves. You know what I’m saying?”

  The man was trying to talk in a subdued tone, but his voice reverberated throughout the room. A natural loudmouth. It was as if he was advertising the fact that he normally dined in noisy places—little pubs beneath railroad overpasses, or street stalls or whatever. His suit was easily the cheapest one in the room, and I made myself shudder at the thought that once a man reaches forty or so, the level of his lifestyle is permanently on display for all to see.

  “In any case,” he went on, “let me congratulate you on the success of the Reconsidering Asia campaign. No, no, please, I didn’t have anything to do with it, really. All I did was suggest those bits about Australia and New Zealand, after all. But I did notice that my name was never even mentioned in your project report. No, look, it’s not a problem for me. In fact, it’s probably better if no one knows who came up with that ‘Let’s hug a koala!’ crap. It might have derailed my whole career, for all I know, or even ended it. Ha, ha. I guess you girls were just looking out for me. You probably didn’t want to make things any worse for a forty-year old guy who’s stuck with the meaningless title of ‘senior staff member.’ I’m sure that’s why nobody pointed out that I was the one who came up with that nerdy koala concept, or the ‘New Zealand’s mouth-watering water’ business, for that matter. You were just trying to protect me, right? No, no, really, I get it. But there I was at the big general meeting yesterday, sitting at the table with all you girls, as the team adviser, with the general manager congratulating everyone on a great success, and my name doesn’t even come up once. No, look, it’s fine, I can live with it. What I’m worried about is you.

  “You may not realize it, but if you were to go around thinking you made a success of that project all by yourself, you’d be heading for trouble. Sometimes a person can get so full of themselves that they lose sight of what’s really going on around them. It doesn’t matter about me, nobody’s worried about me. I’m sure I’d have gotten the short end of the stick in any case—after all, here I am in my forties with a title like senior staff member on my business card. All I’m trying to say is that nobody does anything alone in this world. It’s all about cooperation, and not just on an organizational level but heart-to-heart, you see. Once you understand that, that’s when real success, a real career path, is established. So I was ignored—big deal—I’m used to that. But there we all are at the head office, at the all-important general meeting, and I don’t even get a mention in the project report. As if I had nothing to do with a
nything. Well, maybe that’s just as it should be. The project was all about you girls, after all. But there is such a thing as a man’s dignity, you know, and I have to say this was a first for me. I’ve been shafted often enough in my career, but I’ve never been disrespected quite like that before. I mean, it makes me look completely incompetent. With two hundred people looking on, I’m sitting there at the same table with all of you, as a member of the team, and during the whole forty minutes of your report, not to mention the section chief’s remarks, it’s like I don’t even exist. Don’t get me wrong, I understand how it happened, and I’m sure you didn’t mean to be inconsiderate, but, dammit, it’s not as if I’m immune to losing face. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

  What a prick, is what I kept thinking as I listened to all this. The guy went on and on in the same vein until finally she burst into tears. A man with a rotten, twisted personality like that, you know damn well he’d decided from the start to keep jabbing away till he made her cry. The woman was probably pissed off and frustrated at the injustice of it all, but I’m pretty sure what really got to her was sheer embarrassment. I’ve had experience with geezers like that myself. Just having to be with them, inhaling the smell of their cheap hair tonic, you begin to wonder what you did to deserve such punishment. And then, if there are other people around, you start to feel so mortified you just want to curl up and die. Career path, koala concept, short end of the stick, senior staff member, losing face—it was almost impressive how he managed to produce such a string of moldy phrases. Add to that his booming voice, and I might have started sobbing too if I was her. In high school I had a bald-headed old teacher of the same type, and there’s just no way to deal with these people. If you get worked up, you only fall deeper into the trap. Yell at them, and it’s, “How dare you,” and the lecture goes on for twice as long. Punch ’em in the nose, and there are serious repercussions.