Tokyo Decadence

by Ryu Murakami

  “Not Mieko. I never told her about the cameras. She didn’t even know the videos existed.”

  “I’m confused. Start at the beginning.”

  “Right now I’m holding auditions for my new film, and yesterday a young talent manager took me aside and said, ‘Sensei, I met a man who claims he’s seen a sex tape with you in it.” He said he didn’t believe the guy but thought I should know that somebody was going around saying that. I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about at first, but I had a bad feeling about it, and when I got back to my hotel suite and looked, sure enough there was a tape missing. I had five tapes that I kept in a locked cabinet with glass doors, and now there are only four. The lock wasn’t broken, but somebody stole that tape.”

  “She must have known about it and taken it when you weren’t looking.”

  “That’s not possible. Mieko wouldn’t have the nerve to do something like that. Besides, I had taken all the tapes to my office in Minami Aoyama right after recording them. I edited and transferred them to VHS there, then destroyed the original Hi8s. I didn’t bring the VHS tapes to the hotel until well after Mieko and I split up. And she was never even in the Minami Aoyama office.”

  “Wait. You edited your own sex tapes?”

  “I did feel a little weird about it, but that’s beside the point right now.”

  “Did you ask this talent manager about the man who claimed he saw it?”

  “He said he happened to meet the guy at a ramen stand near the entrance to Aoyama Cemetery. He went there with one of his actresses late last Thursday night, and they were talking about me, and the guy overheard them and joined in the conversation.”

  “Did you get a description?”

  “About thirty, skinny, dressed like a taxi driver.”

  “That’s not much to go on.”

  “He was wearing a black beret too. Like the kind the Basques in Spain wear? Look, I really need your help. There’s no one else I can ask.”

  “I’m pretty busy right now,” I tell him.

  Which is true enough, and, besides, even if the video leaks out and goes on sale, all he’ll have to do is say there may be a resemblance but it isn’t him, and stick to that denial like glue. A minor scandal might erupt, but people would forget all about it soon enough. If the woman were a famous actress it might be a different story, but that’s not the case. I’m about to explain all this to him and let him down easy, when, in a shaky voice, he says:

  “Please. I’m begging you. It’s Mieko. Do you understand? It’s me and Mieko having sex. You know what I went through because of her! I won’t be able to handle it if people see that tape. Also, listen...”

  “What?”

  “There’s something else I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know all those master tapes you have of Cuban music?”

  “What about ’em?”

  “I’d like to use some of that music in the new film.”

  Pushover that I am, I soon agree. Cuban musicians are supported by the state and highly trained, and in spite of their poverty and the inferior quality of the recording facilities there, they continue to create extraordinary new music while faithfully preserving the traditional. I’ve always wanted to do whatever I can to help them. Sakurai’s films are shown at theaters all over Japan, and the videos do well too, so it would mean excellent exposure for Cuban music. Not to mention the royalties that would go directly into the musicians’ pockets.

  I realized recently that what I really enjoy in life is making people I’m fond of happy. If it will make Sakurai and some Cuban musician friends happy, I guess staking out a ramen stall in the middle of the night isn’t so much to ask.

  I’m at the entrance to Aoyama Cemetery, parked across from the ramen place. I’ve brought a member of my staff with me. He’s a twenty-six-year-old marketing guy named Sakaki who owes his job to connections, like me, and was captain of his kickboxing team in both high school and university. Naturally I haven’t explained the full story; all he knows is that we’re looking for a man with a videotape that doesn’t belong to him.

  Playing at low volume on the car stereo is a cassette by the Cuban singer Xiomara Laugart. The car is a ’95 Corolla. Neither Sakaki nor I would normally be caught dead in a Corolla, but as he explained when he showed up in the car, which he’d borrowed from a friend, “We can’t use a vehicle that stands out or we’ll arouse suspicion.” Sakaki is a fan of Ed McBain. He’s also a special-ops freak, and though there are plenty of streetlights in the vicinity, he’s wearing a bulky pair of Israeli army-surplus night-vision goggles. A ’95 Corolla is unobtrusive enough, but a guy sitting in the driver’s seat with binoculars strapped to his head doesn’t exactly blend in.

  “So, Chief, all we know about the perp is that he wears a black beret?”

  Sakaki is dressed like a SWAT team member, all in black. He showed me his weapons earlier. Mace, stun gun, combat knife, a little leather sap packed with sand, brass knuckles, and even nunchuks.

  “Berets are pretty rare these days,” I tell him. “Not even street artists wear them any more. And the guy is not a ‘perp.’”

  “He’s not?”

  “No. But no further questions.”

  “Understood. Spetsnaz operatives, for example, are never privy to the full details of their mission. Many died in the swamps on the border of Hungary without ever knowing why they were there.”

  Sakaki reveres Spetsnaz but, incongruously enough, he’s also a major germophobe. He has a particular horror of cockroaches. Once, after claiming to have spotted one in the coffee-break room, he asked me to authorize the purchase of five hundred roach motels, which he placed strategically throughout our offices.

  We’ve been staking out the ramen stall since shortly after nightfall, when it opened. Now it’s past midnight, and still no beret sightings.

  “Are we absolutely certain the perp is a taxi driver?”

  “Not absolutely, but taxi drivers make up about ninety percent of the clientele here. And he’s not a perp.”

  “He was here on a Thursday night, correct? This is still Wednesday night. Or Thursday morning, technically.”

  “I looked into how the major taxi companies schedule drivers’ shifts. The hours are pretty regular. For an independent cab, that might not hold true, of course, but the man is supposed to be about thirty years old, and there aren’t any independent cabbies that young.”

  “Right, but say he picked up an employee of NHK who was escorting a bar girl all the way home to someplace like Ohmiya or Yokosuka, using those prepaid vouchers NHK gives them. He wouldn’t have time to eat ramen. Fuji TV gives out those vouchers too, so...”

  Sakaki is a bit of a compulsive talker, and partly because he’s getting on my nerves, I send him out to do a little reconnaissance. The street stall is busy. There’s a steady queue of seven or eight men waiting to order, and from their clothing you can tell that most of them are taxi drivers. They don’t talk much, intent as they are on taking delivery of a steaming bowl and slurping up their noodles. None of the men are thirtyish. I’d say their ages range from late thirties to late fifties. More than two dozen taxis are parked on the wide, tree-lined avenue that intersects this narrower street, but not all of them are there for the ramen, of course. Some of the drivers stand near their cabs in small groups, smoking and chatting and laughing, and some are catching a nap in their reclined driver’s seats. You can’t see the faces of the nappers from here, so I tell Sakaki to check them out. He wants to take his weapons with him, but I squash that idea, and as he’s about to step outside I make him remove the night-vision goggles as well. He holds on to them, though, stuffing them under his sweater.

  “It’s important to get a close look, Chief. You know why? Because the perp may have stashed the beret in a pocket, or elsewhere on his person. Do you remember Private
Kelly in the old TV show Combat!? He always carried his beret rolled up and tucked under his shoulder strap.”

  Sakaki goes off to scrutinize the ramen eaters first. He makes a bizarre sight as he creeps around studying their faces. You’d think someone would yell at him—“What the fuck are you lookin’ at?”—but thanks to his weird getup and odd behavior, nobody wants anything to do with him. Any right-minded person would take one look at the guy, with his bulging black sweater, black woolen ski mask, black fatigue pants, and black combat boots, not to mention his skulking manner and unnerving gaze, and assume he was some sort of deviant.

  Next he heads toward the avenue, moving like a cross between a cat and a crab, and reattaches the goggles as he approaches the row of taxis. He peers into each cab for a considerable amount of time before moving on to the next. The tree-lined road has no streetlights, and as he works his way down the row of cars he melts into the darkness.

  Maybe fifteen minutes pass before he reemerges. He’s frantically waving his arms and beckoning with both hands—a deviant doing calisthenics. If a policeman were to come along right now, he’d almost certainly be taken into custody. I get out of the car and walk toward him. He leads me down the row of taxis, stops next to one of them, and hands me the goggles.

  “Put these on and have a look, Chief.”

  I don’t need them to see inside the cab, but I don the goggles anyway, if only to keep him quiet. Everything looks green and staticky through the lenses, but a dark beret is clearly visible on the front passenger seat.

  “There are some vending machines not far from here,” Sakaki says. “Maybe he—”

  And at that moment a low, hoarse voice breaks the silence behind us.

  “What’s going on here?”

  I rip off the goggles and turn to see a tall, thin, long-limbed figure. It’s too dark to see his face.

  “Nothing, really,” I tell him. “We were just walking along here, and I happened to notice that black beret on the seat. You don’t see many berets nowadays. My father was a painter and always wore one just like that. Brings back memories.”

  A fairly lame story, but it’s meant to keep him from sensing a confrontation.

  He opens the cab door, retrieves the beret, and puts it on, almost as though modeling it for us. Sakaki has his right hand in the pocket of his battle fatigues. He’s probably got a weapon in there. The mace, maybe, or the stun gun.

  “Here, take it,” the tall guy says, and tosses the beret to me. “You can wear it and think about your old man.”

  Strange guy. He casually gives his headgear to a perfect stranger. On the surface it’s a friendly gesture, but there’s something disturbingly flat about his manner. I can see him saying, “Here, take this,” as he tosses his last few yen to a hobo, and I can see him saying the same thing in the same tone of voice as he plants a knife in somebody’s chest.

  “Thanks, but I don’t need one,” I tell him, handing it back, and his voice drops to an even lower register as he asks why not.

  “My father’s dead. The memory’s painful.”

  Oh, sorry, he says, and takes the beret. A car drives past, and for a second the headlights illuminate his face. Long bangs cover his forehead, but it’s plain that he’s well under thirty. Mid-twenties at most. His skin is clear and smooth, and his single-fold eyelids are two long, dark creases. Most girls, I imagine, would choose him over Sakaki, at least.

  “I have a question for you,” I say, as he’s about to get into his taxi. He turns to look at me, the beret pulled low over his eyebrows. “It’s about a video belonging to the film director Sakurai Yoichi.”

  His reaction to this is palpable. He looks like someone who’s suddenly heard the name of a dead friend or relative.

  “You cops?”

  “No.”

  “Syndicate guys, then?”

  “Nothing like that. I’m a friend of Sakurai’s, and I want to get that tape back. Do you know where it is now?”

  He says nothing for a moment. Then, in a barely audible voice:

  “I have it.”

  I’m astonished at the quality of the video—far superior to that of any porno tape I’ve ever seen. Sakurai is about to have sex with Akagawa Mieko in the bedroom of his suite, with all the lights switched on. He seems to have employed at least two cameras. There are both wide shots and closeups, and thanks to his professional editing, the two perspectives are expertly interwoven. Whether it was because he knew where the cameras were positioned or because of his editing afterwards, you catch only glimpses of Sakurai’s face; Akagawa Mieko is clearly the star of the show.

  The tall guy has told me he’ll return the tape on condition that we watch it together at his apartment first. I have no desire to see it—who wants to watch a close friend having sex?—and said as much, but for some reason the kid insisted, in that oddly affectless way, and I felt it best not to argue.

  I rode in the taxi, and Sakaki followed us to Kami-Itabashi. We went past a block of cheap pubs and parked in front of this old two-story wood-and-mortar apartment building. The kid led us up the stairs to his shabby one-room apartment, where a young woman in jeans and a sweatshirt lay curled up in blankets on the floor. She looked alarmed when she saw Sakaki and me, and scooted, blankets and all, into the far corner. He introduced her as his girlfriend, and told her not to worry.

  “These guys are friends of Sakurai Yoichi,” he explained. “They’re cool. I’m going to give them back the video.”

  His reassurance did little to put her at ease. She was still eyeing us anxiously and was visibly trembling. The guy asked if we wanted something to drink, and though we declined, he stepped into the little kitchenette and opened the oversize refrigerator. It was spectacularly empty, except for a pale, wilted cabbage and a single canned coffee drink.

  “I’ll go buy something,” he said, which made the woman yelp and violently shake her head.

  I told him we really didn’t need a drink. “I’ll be leaving—with the video—as soon as we’ve watched it.”

  I could hardly allow Sakaki to see the thing, so I sent him down to the car and told him to wait there. And then, in that cold, unheated, unfurnished little room, the show began. The first surprise was that Sakurai had superimposed a fancy title at the beginning: All of Me. Under different circumstances, I might have burst out laughing.

  I haven’t removed my wool coat, but the cold is beginning to seep into my bones. I can see my breath, and I can’t help wondering what sort of life these two have in a place like this. The titles fade, and we hear voices over a dark screen. The audio too has been professionally mixed, and the voices are clear and unmistakable. Akagawa is sobbing and shouting.

  “I’m sorry!”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “I’m so sorry!”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry! Forgive me.”

  “I told you I can’t hear you. Listen, Mieko. You need to shout so loud that all the staff and security guards come running. If you want to be forgiven, you have to yell for it till your throat is raw.”

  “Please forgive me. I can’t, I can’t go on.”

  “Apologize.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Louder.”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “What kind of apology is that? I want to see you plead, with tears and snot and drool dripping from your face.”

  “I’M SO SORRY!”

  Cut to a closeup of the woman. Sweat and tears have made a mess of her makeup, and wet strands of hair cling to her forehead and cheeks. A hand I recognize as Sakurai’s gently pushes the unruly strands back in place, then lifts her chin with two fingers, until she’s looking at the ceiling, and slaps her, hard. Then again, and again. Because her face is wet with tears and perspiration, the slaps make a distinctive sound: splat... splat... splat. After each one she’s forced to shout
an apology. She does so, again and again, so loudly that at times it distorts the audio. Her cheeks get progressively redder, and all sorts of fluids really do start to drip from her face.

  “Do you know why I’m hitting you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say it.”

  “I got—”

  “Louder. And don’t stop crying.”

  “I got hysterical again.”

  “And what did you say when you were hysterical?”

  “That you’re the lowest.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said you’re the lowest type of man!”

  The blows start raining down elsewhere, not just on her cheeks. Particular attention is given to her buttocks, which are now positioned directly in front of the camera. Here a small leather strap makes an appearance, and before long her ass is striped with dozens of purplish marks. Meanwhile, her vagina is on full display, in a cruel closeup, and finally I have to look away. As I do so I notice that the tall guy is smiling, his eyes glued to the screen. Over his white cotton shirt he’s wearing only the taxi company’s thin, standard-issue, navy-blue blazer, but he seems completely unfazed by the temperature in here. On screen, the blows have subsided and the sex begins. It starts with a long fellatio scene and leads finally to a slow-motion shot of Akagawa’s hand stroking Sakurai’s penis, as Billie Holiday’s “All of Me” plays on the soundtrack. The video ends when the song does, on a freeze-frame of her hand, with its red-painted fingernails, gripping his shaft.

  The tall kid rewinds the tape, ejects it from the machine, puts it back in its case, and hands it to me. The title has been professionally printed on the spine: All of Me.

  “All right, then,” I say, getting up to leave, but he stops me, saying, “Wait a minute.” I assume he’s going to ask for money. In the car I have a bundle of ten-thousand-yen notes, which I brought along just in case, but I don’t feel I owe this guy anything. As he left the room, Sakaki the Spetsnaz freak drew me aside and whispered that if things got out of hand I was to signal him by breaking a window. The windows are curtainless, and it would be easy enough to bust the thin glass in an emergency. I’m discreetly patting my pockets to see if I have anything small and hard to throw, when the guy starts quietly speaking.