Tokyo

by Nicholas Hogg

  It was no surprise when I was dragged off the barstool. I made sure he came to the floor with me, punching, scratching and gouging all the way down. If this were England his friends would’ve been kicking at me like a dog. But this was Japan, where the valour of the samurai lives on in salarymen and students, the cheated boyfriends. We scrabbled one on one, left to brawl before a ring of his mates. Only when I levered enough space from his grip to start swinging my elbow did the barman hurdle the counter and break us up. I could hear Kozue shouting as I was garrotted to my feet.

  When the barman thrust the Japanese-English dictionary into my hand it felt like a visa I could brandish at the blocked doorway.

  Finally I was beyond the melee, bundled from a fire exit. My neck burned, sliced where my collar had cut the skin. And Kozue was with me, clutching my hand and apologising.

  “It’s my fault,” I told her, skittering down the metal staircase.

  But after a day and night together she’d run away with me, not him. And whatever it was that we were doing, it was a palpable rush.

  However, my booming heart stopped when he leant over the rails and barked her name, roaring at the night like an ogre in a tower, the fair maiden freed by the dashing prince. Though I doubt he saw things this way.

  We didn’t run. The three of us stood on the forecourt of a derelict garage in a dim lit back street, behind the air-conditioning units of a pachinko parlour blowing out stale cigarette smoke. Neon signs from poky izakayas melted onto the surface of oily puddles. It was the kind of film noir scene where the good guy lies slumped with a knife in his side, blood thinning in the rain.

  But who was the good guy?

  They spoke low, measured sentences, punctuated by curses and insults. If I’d had my bag I would’ve walked away there and then. This was nothing to do with me. That was what I kept telling myself. Even though it was all to do with me, and her, and him.

  He was twitchy, right in her face. I stood between them, my fist clenched. They argued some more, and I understood little. I said a few things in Japanese, that I didn’t know about any of this. Then we all shoved each other and he just left, storming back to the bar. When Kozue said, “Let’s go,” I needed no encouragement.

  She drove back to her apartment. I walked in behind her, straight to my bag. Kozue grabbed the handle. “You can stay here, this is my home, not his.”

  I wasn’t waiting for him to roll up with a carload of friends, and I told her this. She shook her head. “He is not my husband. We are not together. I am I. He is he, and you are you.”

  The list of pronouns was infallible, but I still called her a liar.

  “You never even asked if I had a boyfriend.”

  I pulled my bag from her grip and walked out the door, a gesture of leaving that I had to follow through with, even though I didn’t want to go.

  I hiked towards the glow of Hiroshima, emotionally and physically shattered. Just as I’d decided to unroll my sleeping mat in a bamboo thicket, headlights swung my shadow across the verge.

  **

  Tokyo has a history of bad dreams. Most of the minor tremors, the rattling windows and tinkling pots, the creaking walls and opening doors, occur at night. The city stirs like a child or cat twitching in its sleep, and the tectonic plates gently rock the hard earned slumber of the metropolis without commotion, before it closes its eyes again.

  On arrival at Redwood Towers I was shown around by the concierge, a man as obsequious as he was bureaucratic, and handed a welcome DVD which included details on the laundry service, garbage disposal, and a short clip of a scale model of the building wobbling on a quake simulator. After a lab coat presenter switches off the machine, he explains how the architecture has been designed to sway and shift on the seismic energy, and that any movement, particularly on the upper floors, was nothing to be concerned about.

  I still recall my first quake. Like a presence in an empty room. I was sitting in an old wooden house on a trip to Tokyo. I called out because it was a flimsy build and usually when the walls shivered it was because someone was walking up the staircase. But no one answered. And then the CDs flopped against one another and the plates in the sink tinkled musically and the chair I was sitting on inched across the floor. It was the swinging lampshade that confirmed the tremor, and my cowardice, when confronted by the whim of a molten planet patched together with the odds and ends of broken stars.

  When the tremor shook my apartment, Mazzy was in her room, tapping away on her iPad.

  “Dad?”

  She felt the judder a second before I did, and ran into the kitchen.

  “Don’t panic.”

  “I feel sea sick.”

  The walls creaked and shifted. As if the whole building were flexing in the breeze.

  “It’ll be over in moment.”

  “Dad.”

  Mazzy grabbed my arm tight, and hugged me.

  I never thought I’d be glad to feel an earthquake, but when she found comfort in her father I was happy that one tectonic plate was bumping another.

  Finally the vibrations stopped, and once the bricks and mortar had settled Mazzy let go and put on a brave face.

  “I’ve had worse in LA.”

  “Don’t tempt fate.”

  “Fate, said the scientist.”

  She marched back to her room and I asked if she was okay.

  “Cool. I’m gonna tweet it.”

  I stood in the middle of the kitchen, certain the apartment was still moving.

  Yamada had thought the Tohoku quake was The One, the catastrophic subduction of the Pacific and Eurasian plates that Tokyoites are quietly and stoically expecting.

  “I was on the top floor of Building 8 at the Komaba campus,” he told me. “On the very first jolt the tower actually jumped. No warning tremor or vibrating desk, just a boom of force.”

  Roof tiles loosed from the ceiling and shattered on the floor. Yamada saw his department head crying beneath a table. Computers rocked then dropped. Screens exploded. Everything shunted from left to right, drawers shot open and ejected themselves from filing cabinets. The block swayed back and forth for minutes, and Yamada had felt like a cricket clinging to a reed.

  “And this was hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre. We filed downstairs into the lobby. We were supposed to go to the evacuation zone, but some of us stayed and watched the TV in the canteen. The terrible silence when we saw the helicopter above the wave.”

  I was still thinking of Yamada when I sat back at my desk. Even the squeak of my wheelie chair made me nervous. “Shall we get a coffee?” I called to Mazzy.

  “From the cafe?”

  “Sure.”

  I wanted to be on the street, outside. I put my shoes on and stood by the door. When Mazzy dipped back into her room for her phone I stepped onto the landing.

  I had no reason to be shocked by a man standing there, but I was spooked by the quake and it was rare to see any of my neighbours. It was the measured way he turned and studied me, his immaculate suit and polished shoes. Not a strand of his thick black hair out of place. He simply nodded once and took the staircase instead of waiting for the lift.

  Then a flashback. Something familiar.

  That cauterised gaze.

  I thought of the Pana-Wave ranks on Gotaishi mountain. Masquerading as a journalist, I’d been escorted through the bandaged trees by lab coated peons. In a clearing covered with sheets, I was beckoned to sit before Chiho and her retinue of followers. Their hanging faces, incredulous at my questions. Glaring through Cheshire cat smiles as I challenged her cod philosophy. She was the wrinkled Buddha, commanding the crowd with a glance or a word, her absolute faith in delusion.

  Admittedly, I too had been one of the intrigued. But after a second doomsday passed without UFOs or catastrophe, the press lost interest, along with numerous Pana-Wave members despite Chiho
’s claims that the earth had been saved at her command.

  I concluded my research with a well-received paper on ‘How prophets reign over a kingdom of unprovable truth,’ and continued reading her updates, long, rambling messages about the spaceship they were constructing and how Japan would sink to the bottom of the sea. With fascination and horror, I followed the group’s decline. The preparation of a launch pad, the failed alien visit when dozens of spaceships crashed into the Pacific. And the police investigation of a runaway girl who vanished from the group, and then seemingly the world, as if benevolent aliens really had beamed her up.

  Nearly ten years since I caught the old woman’s stare, her black eyes cutting like obsidian. Yet she remained in my psyche, beyond her death, and Pana-Wave’s ultimate disbandment.

  I called into the apartment and asked Mazzy why she needed her phone every second of the day. Then I opened the staircase door and listened for his footsteps. Nothing. I peered from the window down to the entrance. He never did emerge.

  十三

  WHEN THE EARTHQUAKE struck Koji was in the coffee shop outside her apartment. Waiting. Then inside her apartment. He wanted to assure her that the tremor had been caused by the great catfish that lives beneath the city, and that when it thrashes its tail, Tokyo shudders. He wanted to explain that the stone pillar at Kashima shrine goes to the centre of the world, and that as long as it holds down the catfish’s head, she was safe.

  Instead her father had seen him.

  Studied him.

  As if he knew something.

  Nothing.

  He knew more about his daughter than he did. He was the one who watched her home from school. The one who followed her around the shopping arcades.

  It didn’t matter that her father was incapable of looking after her, because he’d taken care of women before.

  Despite what The Leader believed.

  In a room with white sheets hung over the windows, white sheets draped over the chairs, they had told him to leave. The Leader had been wheeled into the room wearing her white yukata. She told Koji that it wasn’t her decision, nor any other individual passing judgement.

  It had spoken.

  It, the ethereal consensus.

  Koji had acted as an individual, she accused. Not as part of the group. He’d driven to Mount Fuji with one of the new recruits, a student drop-out from a fishing village in Hokkaido. She was a girl with tracks of scars along her wrists. She wouldn’t eat for days. Together, they’d walked into The Aokigahara Sea of Trees. The suicide forest. In the damp undergrowth, where mushrooms sprouted in the mossy dells, and the lava bed floor was strewn with fallen trunks, they looked for bodies. Koji told her that if she died here she’d be taken into the soul of the mountain and live forever.

  He showed her the green bones of a man who’d taken an overdose. Or cut his wrist. Who could tell. The body had been there a long time, outlasted by the remains of a silk tie. She asked Koji if the man was free, and Koji said he was. Then she walked along the dark path in front of him, a delicate girl, weak, treading feebly. The trail was littered with fist-size lumps of volcanic rock.

  She was free.

  That was what Koji told The Leader.

  When she told him to leave, it felt like death. Or how the world was before he met her, the withered old lady who’d found him on a park bench a week after his grandmother’s funeral. She’d sat down and began whispering to herself. Another senile pensioner wandering the streets, thought Koji. He ignored her, finished his bento and went back to his office. The next day he went to the park as usual, feeding stray cats slivers of fish, shooing away the crows. Again, she appeared and sat down beside him. This time she said, “Konnichiwa,” and he caught her eyes. Lit points of black in a white face. Sparkling dark. As if she’d trapped the soul of a high school girl in her decaying body.

  She told him that it didn’t matter he had no family, or that he was the last one, because a new family was waiting for him.

  十四

  DAWN ON HIROSHIMA docks. A security guard knocked on the jeep windscreen. Kozue had fallen asleep with her dress around her waist, and the elderly official stared at her breasts. She lifted the straps onto her shoulders, and parked outside the ferry gates.

  After Kozue had picked me up from the bamboo thicket we’d driven down to the seafront, hugged, kissed and slept. Unsure of whose life I’d walked into, and the man I’d upset by doing so, I told Kozue I was going to Shikoku to see Phil, and that I’d be back in a couple of days.

  “I need to breathe,” I told her. “Think.”

  It was simply a pause from my hitch-hike to Tokyo. I could talk myself back to reality. Well, that was the neat logic.

  “Don’t lie to me,” she’d warned. “Say nothing, or tell the truth if you’re running away.”

  Rather than the ferry pulling away from the port, the port seemed to pull away from the ferry, breaking off the hull and floating the tide. Kozue stood by her jeep and watched. She waved, just once. Beneath the overcast morning, sky and sea were the same shade of mercury. I went inside and bought a rice ball wrapped in seaweed, took one bite, and threw the rest over the rail.

  Trams rattled streets below the ramparts of a reproduction castle. Phil was still at work, and I fell asleep in a park where schoolboys pinged baseballs into the tops of trees, flushing pigeons from the boughs.

  An hour later, limbs stiff and kidney aching, I met Phil and caught the tram back to his place. He knew I’d messed up the moment he saw my face. His girlfriend knew, too. Ayumi had moved into his apartment and turned it from a hovel to a home. She made tea and smiled. But in their little house I was a straggly dog come in from the rain. When I confessed the story of Hiroshima I felt like I’d shaken my dirty pelt across their spotless living room. They both guessed what I didn’t want to think, that Kozue was some kind of yakuza girl.

  “She paints,” I said, as if that were enough to prove she wasn’t mob affiliated.

  After a night on their floor, all of us essentially in the same room with only a paper screen dividing us, the two of them did the thing that proper people do and went to work, while I tramped around Matsuyama.

  I hiked up to the castle and patrolled the sun-bleached watchtowers. Eyeing the town through the slits, I imagined myself an archer loosing arrows at marauding invaders, tipping out pots of boiling tar and launching spears down the slopes. First the attackers were raging barbarians, all spit and snarl with feral beards, falling from ladders and the ends of swords, stumbling before rolling bales of flaming hay. But then the enemy had a face, the boyfriend. My arrows thudded into his chest, two between his ribs, the third and final through his neck. The princess saved, Kozue and the castle intact.

  I was done for. Well and truly.

  And so would he be if I went back to Hiroshima.

  How beautiful the drab toil of a commute, work, and then returning to the one you love, had suddenly become. Phil and Ayumi woke, showered, dressed in clothes they had laid out the night before, and cooked extra rice for breakfast so they could take a boxed lunch to the office. At the end of the day they came home to each other and watched films, usually dramas or thrillers about other people’s perils and mistakes.

  I trudged back to the city and sat in a restaurant where the meal is free if you can eat 1.3 kg of curry and rice in twenty minutes.

  I ate less than half and paid full-price.

  Outside the midday sun hammered at the empty streets. Everyone was working. I walked into a phone box and rang the number Kozue had written on a utility bill, but got the answer machine. I put the phone down and left my hand on the receiver. Trams shook themselves along grooves in the road. Downtown glared, reflected off shop front windows. It was touching forty degrees in the shade, and the towers wobbled and shimmered as if the city was melting into a pool of glass and slag.

  I picked up the phone and dialled. This
time I left a message saying I’d be in Hiroshima that night.

  For the first hour I hitch-hiked from the wrong junction, waiting on the slip road back to Matsuyama. Not that things got any better when I stood in the right spot.

  After a few minutes at the entrance to the toll bridge a couple pulled over and asked if I was going to Hiroshima.

  “Hai, hai,” I answered. “Hiroshima ni ikimasu.” I got in the back-seat hoping for a quiet ride across the channel.

  They were Japanese Jehovah’s Witnesses. In broken English, while watching my face in the rear-view mirror, they told me to offer my soul to God and pray for redemption.

  The Seto-Ohashi road bridge is the longest in the world.

  On the outskirts of Hiroshima I called Kozue, again. Still the answer machine. It was nine o’clock and I guessed she was already pouring drinks. I left a message that I’d wait for her beneath the fountain outside the Matsuya department store.

  After a long night nervous of every shadow, she pulled up in her jeep as the sun rose. Her hair was tied back and she was a little drunk. We kissed. She tasted of rum. We said very little. Neither of us had slept, and I refused to go back to her apartment. We agreed to meet at midday, and for the next six hours I slept in the torpedo-sized chamber of a capsule hotel.

  Then I woke, showered, and walked into Hiroshima.

  Kozue had tickets for an exhibition of the photographer Robert Capa, and we met in front of the art museum. We walked in holding hands, and then separated inside the gallery, drawn from picture to picture at a different pace. There were fuzzy prints of the D-Day landings, the contentious image of the dying militiaman, either his arms flung back at the force of a bullet, or the director’s command.

  One photo we stood before together.

  Vietnam. A soldier lies on his back in a shallow trench, and you know that above his head metal is searching for flesh. But this GI has found the eye of the storm. With the last of a cigarette pinched between his lips, he folds his arms and gazes into sky, beyond treetops and cloud, beyond war. Until he puts out his cigarette and sits up, nothing can touch him.