Tokyo

by Nicholas Hogg

  “Looks like good refuge, nothing to fall on you.”

  “The ground liquefied. Vibrated to mud then reset. A football team might break through the crust.”

  We climbed out of the car. A public toilet, sunk and tilted on its foundations, was roped off. On the baize grass a father and daughter flew a kite.

  “They’re safe,” said Yamada, before glancing at my size ten shoes. “Well, a heavy gaijin might fall through, but us Japanese will be okay.”

  He smiled, scrunched up his face. “Just kidding.”

  I studied the rows of apartments that lined the flyover. Breeze-block grey. Meshed and frosted glass for tiny windows. Hundreds of identi-flats stacked twenty floors high.

  “Company accommodation,” confirmed Yamada. “Part of the wage packet.”

  I saw each room in a flash. As if I could click open the building like a fridge door and note its contents, strip lights in poky rooms, flickering TV screens.

  “Stop working,” said Yamada. “Take a break.”

  “If you’re observing me then you’re working too.”

  “Sou desu ne,” he agreed, shaking his head.

  In the car boot, next to a stack of books including Skinner, Hamilton and Jung, alongside various Japanese titles with their original sleeves covered in brown paper, was a bag of golf clubs and a black leather case.

  “I’m okay on the green.” I inspected a putter. “But watch your head when I’m driving.”

  “No golf today.”

  He clicked open the case and pulled out a large brown envelope. We walked into the middle of the football pitch where Yamada studied the blue sky and I watched for cracks to appear in the earth and swallow us whole. Finally he opened the flap and carefully slipped out a sheet of white paper folded into a series of triangles.

  “Last year I came third.”

  It was an intricately folded plane. Gently, he inspected the glider for any flaws, explaining that the national championships were next month, and that his latest design had already beaten the previous Japan record. “Here.” He reached into his pocket and gave me an old fashioned stopwatch.

  He crouched, closed the plane into an arrow, and placed it between his thumb and forefinger. “Ready?”

  I held up the timer.

  Then he uncoiled, launching the missile to a height of fifty metres before the wings flared open. The stillness of the day, the white plane looping in slow wide circles. It was a work of art. Yamada followed its course, one hand hooding his eyes against the glare, and the other hand raised, hovering, like a poised conductor. When the glider came to rest in a graceful landing on the soft grass, I clicked the stopwatch.

  “Twenty five seconds.”

  “Exactly?”

  “Point two.”

  Yamada squatted and inspected his plane.

  “Is that good?”

  He studied the folds for any damage. “Three seconds off the world record.” He held the plane by its nose and brought the wings level with his eyes. “Outdoor times don’t qualify.”

  I watched him lost in the dynamics of his design, jealous he had a pastime beyond academia, language.

  “You try.”

  I folded back the wings and launched the plane. Again, we watched it bank in slow, wide circles, following like parents of a child on a first bike ride. Proud, palms out to catch a fall.

  After a few more launches Yamada noted the adjustments he needed to make and we walked over to a vending machine for a canned coffee.

  “What simple joy.” I snapped open my tin. “I loved making planes as a kid, but nothing that advanced.”

  “Two years ago I was on a project that dropped gliders from space and tracked them falling to earth.”

  “That’s a serious hobby.”

  “We all need Zen. Especially us. We spend so much time studying others, and ourselves, that we need an activity beyond conscious thought.”

  “I started dance classes this year.”

  Yamada laughed. “That’s far more difficult than folding paper.”

  “Salsa and tango.”

  “Sugoi,” he praised. “No time for theorising while following steps.”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m terrible. I ruined so many ladies’ shoes. But you’re right, a focus on body is vital. Zen.”

  In California, I’d run. Almost every day. Driving out to nature reserves and national parks with maps of trails that petered off into rockfalls of shale. Trails through narrow canyons where the rattlesnakes shook their hollow bones like maracas.

  “The gregarious hermit.” That’s what Lydia had called me. “You have an ego in a room of people, have to be the centre of attention, love being the centre of attention. Then the next day you shudder at a voice. Head to the hills and start running for your life.”

  She bought me a pair of trainers with a GPS pod that slotted into the sole so she could join me on my runs, a virtual jogging partner. Microchips that tracked calories burned and steps taken. I never took it from the packaging. Never needed a screen or a number to tell me how far I’d run or what energy I’d used. Fatigue and sweat were the measure of toil and effort. A bounding mind when my body was finished.

  But after the day at the beach, the wave, I lost the ability to switch off, and would run the dusty creaks thinking of rushing water, Mazzy.

  “You’re right,” I said to Yamada. “I should keep dancing.”

  **

  People danced. Did we? I can see her dancing and laughing, but this could be imagined.

  Her name was Kozue. She told me that the kanji reads Beauty dies young. She was a hostess, but it wasn’t a hostess bar, and I wasn’t the kind of man who went to them. Besides, for each drink I bought her she bought me one back. I have no idea what we talked about, and the room filled with happy faces.

  One man I saw made me think I should be a writer, a skinny guy on his own in the corner, probably English, inventing his own evening between the lines of an exercise book. An evening that he could fold away whenever he wanted. I had no choice. It was the evening that could fold me away.

  Finally the bar quietened, just stragglers hunched over empty glasses. It was still light outside and I asked Kozue what time the sun set.

  “That’s the sun rising.”

  I wondered if I’d ever sleep again. At some point the barman had changed into a barwoman. “This not hotel,” she warned, seeing my backpack.

  We walked deserted streets. Objects blurred as though refracted through water. The office blocks fuzzed and wobbled as if Hiroshima had been submerged by melting icecaps and we were a mile under the sea. I wasn’t afraid that my sight had gone, only that I’d stumble and be left on the kerb while Kozue swam away like a mermaid.

  But we made it to her car, a blue jeep that complemented her turquoise dress. On the drive home she ran every red light. No traffic to stop for in a flooded city.

  She lived on the top floor of an apartment set back in the mountains. I followed her swaying hips up a concrete staircase, that satin dress. With a coffee my focus returned, and I wondered if I’d tricked myself into how stunning she was, that the glare of day would reveal flaws, imperfection. I studied her heart-shaped face in the rising sun. The radiance of her skin, dawn flaring in the dark of her pupils. And her black, voluminous hair, spilling over her shoulders when she released it from the braid.

  I woke up on the floor, with Kozue curled on the sofa. After I fell unconscious she must have draped a duvet over me and placed a cushion under my head.

  I listened to her soft breath in the quiet room. She slept with the peace of a storybook maiden, and I walked around her apartment picking up things to check they were real. That I was. A pair of chrome chopsticks in a velvet case. Tea cups and earrings, a pot-pourri of cosmetics and creams. Her dress, hanging from the back of her bedroom door. I looked at the painting
s on her wall. Mountains and rivers. Plaintive, wintered scenes. I swore I’d seen figures in the pictures before closing my eyes, men and women running and dancing, hunting in a forest. But I couldn’t find them now, as if they’d climbed out of the frames during our sleep.

  Kozue woke to the sound of me placing a glass of water on the coffee table.

  “Ohayo.”

  Delicately, she put the glass to her lips before leaning forward and kissing me softly on the cheek. Neither of us were surprised to find ourselves together. With a silky black gown clinging to her body she walked over to the stereo, slid a record from a sleeve and placed it on the turntable. “Do you know this?”

  A hiss and crackle, before the haunting bars of Terence Trent D’Arby’s Sign Your Name cut my soul from my body. I hovered just below the ceiling. Hearing a song I obsessively listened to as a student while wondering about women and love, I actually felt sick with the force of being alive. I had to run outside because I thought I’d vomit. But nothing. My stomach would flutter like this for weeks, months, every time I thought of her.

  From the balcony I found the grainy outline of Hiroshima through the clouds. In fear of falling, I gripped the rail so hard I could see the whites of my knuckles. When I looked back into her room she was putting on make up in the mirror, painting her face with all the focus of an artist before a dappled landscape.

  Of course, the pictures on the wall were hers.

  There was nothing more to be done.

  I went inside and we kissed. A honeyed sweetness to her lips. I undid her gown and let it fall from her shoulders. She stood in the sunlight, completely at ease with her nakedness. Softly I kissed her neck and her breasts before kneeling on the wooden floor.

  I wish I could recall more about our first conversations, but I have little memory of what we actually spoke about.

  I know we drove out to the beach in her blue jeep, and that I sang Light My Fire when she asked if I liked karaoke. Then passing a hotel I thought I’d misunderstood everything. She pointed and said, “I use these rooms with my clients.”

  A prostitute? I knew hostesses who did more than serve drinks and giggle to make lonely salarymen feel wanted. But she wasn’t a woman who sold her body by the hour. She told me the hotel was where she worked a second job, dressing brides and arranging hair on wedding mornings. Was I relieved, or somehow disappointed? The fact is I didn’t care if she was a prostitute.

  At the beach we followed a path beneath cliffs and overhanging trees that grew from solid rock. I took her hand as we walked around a small bay. Clouds swelled, primed to rupture. But it wasn’t fear of rain that made us turn back.

  Sitting, perched over us like a gargoyle, was a cat. The scrawniest, ugliest cat I’ve ever seen. Hissing and spitting with bared fangs and spiked hackles, as if some creature drowned by the sea and then spat ashore to claw my eyes out. We backed away, and then fled to the jeep, glad to be chased by the falling rain, and not the cat.

  Kozue accelerated from the storm and drove to the mouth of a river. First we sat, dangling our legs over the harbour wall. Then she laid down with her head in my lap. I trailed my fingers over her bare shoulders, through her glossy hair. When I slid my hand up her dress she closed her eyes and gripped my wrist.

  By the time we came up for air the sun was setting as though the clouds were on fire.

  **

  On the drive back from the park with Yamada, we slipped into a relaxed silence. In Japan one can sit in a meeting and say nothing following a question. Better to consider the thought than fill the void with waffle.

  But I’m not Japanese.

  “You’re right about a hobby,” I began. “I’ve been buried in work, books and words. All mind. Watching the human subject, the rat in a box, not a kindred spirit, soul, however you want to define a self.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you use the word soul.”

  “Consciousness.”

  “Defined by a god?”

  “If I use soul?”

  Yamada turned down the concerto for a discussion, a confession.

  I said, “This is embarrassing, but when I got to university I still believed in God. Not a god. God. Our Heavenly Father, all that business. I never took the bible seriously, but I had some vague image of a man with a white beard hovering around the ether.”

  “A God without a church, a doctrine?”

  “I suppose so. But He was there. I was sure of it. I saw messages in leaves blown by the wind. A white horse in a field. I prayed. Crazy.”

  “Not crazy,” said Yamada. “Human.”

  “Then I read books, travelled. Revelations from science and knowledge, that our bones are made of blown up stars. I understood atoms and time. How the dragon legend came from a dinosaur skeleton. One mystery had been solved, but the stark cold truth was terrifying. A blankness.”

  “But still the mystery of people.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  Yamada nodded. Then he said nothing. We drove for half an hour in silence, up and down the elevated highways, past concrete rivers and faceless towers.

  I thought of Kozue and her slender fingers, how she liked to press her palm against mine.

  I was still thinking of her when Yamada began a careful speech on Christianity and guilt, theorising that Japanese soldiers were capable of such cruelty during the war because they had no supernatural judgement of their actions. No watching overlord.

  “Apart from their commanding officer. Ready with a gun should they disobey.”

  He nodded to himself, continued with the theme as he drove, contradicting himself when he talked of a divine Emperor.

  But I was too distracted for a riposte.

  I pictured her on the bed, reaching over to grab a hairbrush. The cat-like arch to her back.

  “And sex,” I thought aloud. “No one watching.”

  Yamada looked across. “God is in bed with you?”

  “Even when you don’t believe, it’s hard to de-program the idea.”

  He thought about this, stroking his Confucian chin. “My mother and father are part of my self, who I am. Of course not ghosts or floating spirits, though definitely a presence. But I don’t think dead ancestors follow their children into a love hotel.”

  **

  A year after the Hiroshima hitch-hike, in a bland hotel on the M25, I told Lydia about Kozue.

  She’d flown Mazzy over to stay with me for a month. She stood and stared from a 6th floor window overlooking a car park, talking logistics, what time I’d make certain phone calls, bedtimes and diet. Then she turned and promoted the new man her in her life. “A good man,” she assured. “Older. Great with Mazzy.”

  I looked at Mazzy asleep on the armchair, curled around a bobbled teddy bear, thumb in her mouth.

  Instead of hating the substitute father, the stranger picking up my daughter and carrying her to bed, I described the colour of Kozue’s jeep, details of sky and sea. The deja vu of waking in her Hiroshima apartment. The deja vu of right there, Lydia, standing in a hotel room as planes roared overhead.

  She’d listened, I think, while I talked.

  Then she said, “How am I supposed to compete with this? We meet on the driveway of a self-induced massacre, hate the sight of each other, and then grudgingly start dating two months later.”

  I told her, “No.”

  I told her I’d die with the memory of us trespassing in the nature reserve, walking the trails naked. The Yellowstone cabin heaped with snow, kissing in a frozen forest. Sex during a squall in her uncle’s beach house, the world beyond the rattling window destroyed by thunder and lightning as we fastened our bodies tighter and tighter together.

  Our daughter.

  But she’d had enough of us, me. The person she had to regress into whenever we met. Mazzy would wake to find her mother gone, back to California aboard on
e of the planes that juddered the hotel room. She cried non-stop for two days, and then forgot her parents when my sister-in-law put a Husky puppy in her arms.

  Lydia had rung, often. Beyond the agreed timetable of transatlantic telephone calls. She was missing Mazzy, the first time she’d been in a different country to her daughter. The first time she’d been entrusted solely into my care. She said I shouldn’t have told her about Kozue, but she understood that I had to redefine my masculinity, to push a new self into a family dynamic from which I was fading.

  “But don’t think I wanted to hear that. I gave you scant details of Per because you can’t handle a reality not on your terms.”

  “Per,” I said, petulantly. “Has he got a Viking longboat in the garage?”

  “Jesus, Ben.”

  I’d rarely asked about her exes, riling her that I was erasing history by not wanting the details of her past lovers.

  I doubt she wanted to know how Kozue drove me to an Italian restaurant where I sat stupefied as the alcohol in my veins turned to glue. The hangover had arrived. My stomach felt like a deflated balloon. I forced down a few bites of pizza, but we had to leave before my body turned itself inside out.

  When I realised I’d forgotten my Japanese dictionary in the bar, I was happy. Not because it meant communication had to be in English, but for a sense of purpose. We could drive back to the bar and pick it up. Maybe have a drink, or two.

  It was as busy as the previous evening, but without the friendly buzz. Or is this all bars when you walk in sober? Tonight the barwoman was the barman, and either he was unimpressed that I was back so soon, or that I was escorting Kozue. I sat at the same stool I’d done the night before, and with my first beer I extinguished all the daylight between my last drink that very morning.

  Then He walked into the bar.

  Even before he’d leant in my face and hissed something in Japanese, I knew he was her boyfriend. I asked Kozue what he’d said, who was he? She shook her head and mumbled something I didn’t catch.

  He seemed to know everyone in the room, greeting the other men with solemn nods. This night I was the only gaijin. The escapade had turned into a trap. Kozue had said nothing about a boyfriend, and a jilted man sat plotting my death, shamed before his peers, while I bought his girlfriend drinks.