Tokyo

by Nicholas Hogg

  After the photo we walked around Hiroshima. I thought the hollow sensation was a feeling in my chest, but Kozue told me that sections of the city had been built on a river delta, and that if you lifted certain manhole covers you could look down onto the marsh below.

  She worked two hostess jobs, and I was to meet her at midnight. I spent an hour in a fast-food place before I walked into a military apparel shop and bought a flick knife with a serrated blade.

  Well, this was the fantasy I created while waiting. That I searched Hiroshima until I met the boyfriend, the man who’d held her delicate jaw in his hands, right in front of me, just to prove he could break it like glass.

  Not that I needed to add a sense of drama, a duel with knives in a dead end street. Because truth writes its own narrative, is stranger than fiction.

  **

  Mazzy was over her jet-lag, sleeping a regular pattern, and even listening to her Japanese language CDs. School had invigorated her relationship with Japan, her father. She met up with Michiko and ate tempura, twice ventured out on her own, confident, she said, in the swirling crowds and circuit board map of the Metro. She caught the train to Harajuku, came back with new clothes and photos of Meiji shrine. I greeted her as if she were an intrepid explorer returning from the Amazon.

  “You were the one who told mom it was the safest country in the world.”

  “Perhaps I was exaggerating.”

  “Earthquakes and tsunamis. Radiation. Yeah, just a little.”

  Photos had appeared from the first journalists who ventured into the Fukushima exclusion zone. Buildings ripped up by the wash of a wave, ghost foundations where houses had vanished. The ubiquitous boat on a roof, boat on a bridge. Boat run aground outside a supermarket. Beyond the reach of the brimming sea, but glowing with fallout from the broken reactors, lay the abandoned towns. The living rooms paused with cups of tea and opened newspapers: reports of a community sports day, petty crime and local politics, a discount coupon for a new shrimp restaurant.

  We know time has passed because a bowl of rice has a coat of mould, the neat gardens astray with green. In a shopping arcade grass shoots up from the steps of an escalator. How quickly the earth reclaims its space from our feeble endeavours. Whether it be a quake shivered wave or a windblown seed.

  The lead image was an escaped pig, fast asleep in the mess of a shop it had pillaged. No subtext was needed. It was a pig in a sweet shop.

  I had an invitation from an NGO affiliated with the university to visit reconstruction efforts on the edge of the safe zone. Yamada explained how sports halls sheltering the refugees had been carefully organised, and such was the precision that street layouts had been taped onto the wooden floors, meaning that families huddled under sleeping bags were most likely previous neighbours. However, the close-knit spirit of these defiant fishing towns meant the families who left, the concerned parents worried about caesium in the playground, strontium in the sandpit and plutonium in the air conditioning, were being shunned for abandoning their community.

  Natural catastrophes weren’t my only concern.

  I knew what Mazzy didn’t know about the sects and cults. How an individual could drop from society and reinvent the world through a warped doctrine. Or perhaps more worrying, the loners who don’t find the groups, the otaku who construct a life from manga and computer games, pornography. An altogether darker reality from the kitsch and cute public face of a very private country.

  “Don’t get nonchalant about your well-being,” I told her more than once. “It’s far safer than walking around London or LA, but the crazies here are better hidden.”

  “You told me never to use the word crazy.”

  “Crazies, is different. A noun, not a label.”

  She tutted, not unlike her father, before plugging in her headphones and walking out.

  A minute later there was a knock at the door. No one ever knocked. If it was reception they rang or buzzed. And Mazzy knew the door was open. Unsettled, I got up and looked through the spyhole, half expecting it to be the young man wandering the lobby from the day before.

  It was the obsequious concierge clutching a delivery.

  “We have received a delivery for Monroe san.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You have identification?”

  “You know it’s me.”

  “Ah, sorry. Yes. Do you have ID card? Passport?”

  He made the outline of a card with his thumb and forefinger, balancing the package between his elbows rather than simply passing it over.

  “You’ve seen my passport. A dozen times.”

  “For identification reason.”

  I’d dealt with him on a regular basis, signed documents and printed forms with my hanko, a carved wooden stamp, specifically for the world of officialdom. But each time it was as if we’d never met. I looked at the package in his grip, pictured us wrestling to the floor and only prizing it from his lifeless hands.

  I asked him to wait a moment, “Chotto matte kudasai,” continuing with our ridiculous game of him insisting on speaking to me in English, even when I replied in Japanese.

  I grabbed my passport and gave it to him.

  “Thank you so muchee.” He checked the photo and the information page, bowed far too deeply for the transaction of a parcel, and backed away.

  I took the box inside and set it on the table. I hadn’t ordered anything, but there was my name on the label. With a knife I slit the tape and pulled out the bubble wrapped contents. A bright orange device, a hybrid design between a TV remote and a ray gun. I peeled off the cellophane and read the attached bumph.

  The Gamma-Scout is a general purpose survey meter that measures alpha, beta, gamma and x-ray radiation. It has proven to be useful in the medical, nuclear, mining, metal scrap and foundry industries. It is also used by first responders, police, customs and border control, hobbyists, rock hounds and in personal or home survival kits. The Gamma-Scout sets a new standard in portable geiger counter performance and functionality.

  Gracias. Lydia.

  I looked again at the outer packaging and realised the addressee was only Mazzy, ‘Courtesy of Ben Monroe,’ as if I were a body indifferent to radiation. I was tempted to bin the bloody thing rather than have a paranoia contraption lying around, but Lydia would no doubt be asking after its safe arrival.

  I was still reading the instructions when Mazzy came back from her run, perspiring, breathing hard.

  “Shoes.”

  “They’re not dirty.”

  She had one foot on the polished wooden hallway.

  “It’s bad karma.”

  “You don’t believe in karma.”

  “Something like that.”

  She backtracked and unlaced, saw the opened box. “What’s the present?”

  “From your mother.”

  Mazzy knelt down by the coffee table and picked up the Gamma-Scout, punching buttons and turning it over in her hand.

  I read, “The Gamma-Scout geiger counter has a large digital screen that can display the radiation detected as dose rate or in pulses – total count or per second. There is also a logarithmic bar chart to quickly visualize the magnitude of the measured dose rate. Additional visual indicators show if monthly or annual dose thresholds have been exceeded.”

  “Holy crap, mom.” Mazzy aimed at me and pretended to shoot. “Have you got some batteries?”

  “No, luckily.”

  “We might be glowing and not even know it.”

  “Breathing LA smog is far more lethal than a hyped Tokyo fallout.”

  “Still, it’s nice of her to send it over.”

  Nice? A Trojan fucking horse, that’s what it was. Lydia was on the other side of the Pacific, yet here she was in the room, chiding the father of her only daughter for not taking proper care of her darling.

  **

&nb
sp; I met Kozue in Hiroshima at midnight. She wore a loose, black dress, with a swooping cut that revealed her pale shoulders. We sat at the counter in an okonomiyaki restaurant, watching chefs chop, dice, and fry pancakes on a greasy skillet. I ate everything that we ordered, concentrating on the food with a steely determination.

  Then we walked into the slick, humid air. From machine cool to musty dark. When a rabble of boys skateboarded past I thrust out a defensive elbow, catching a floppy-haired teen who swerved too close. Kozue gripped my hand that bit harder. Finally I asked more about what she did, who she was. What was her relationship with the man who’d garotted me from the barstool.

  “Why are you talking about something that has gone?”

  She was annoyed by my dumb rhetoric, a hint of anger.

  “Yesterday is hardly ancient history.”

  “Do you know the name of the soldier in photo?”

  The GI in the trench, the relentless moment.

  “No idea.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Right now?”

  She held out her palms in exasperation. “Where else is now?”

  “Walking with you.”

  “So?”

  We left the busy shopping street and I followed Kozue into a small park alongside the river. We stood by a rail and looked into the pond at the foot of a miniature waterfall. Fat koi bumped and nudged one another, gaped at the air.

  I had a thousand questions about hostessing, the fine line between selling a body by the hour and a once revered art form. Instead I put my hand on the small of her back, leaned over and kissed her neck.

  We walked into the basement lobby of a love hotel and chose a room from the illuminated display. A sunken bath, mirrors. A huge, circular bed, and plush carpets that sank with each footstep.

  I looped my hands around her waist and pulled her tight, grabbing her hips.

  She looked past my shoulder to the bathroom, and told me to wait. She shut the door and locked it. I heard running water. Steam seeped out from around the frame, and when finally she opened the door again she was naked, her hair pinned up.

  Then she stepped forward and unbuttoned my shirt, hanging it carefully on the rail before undoing my belt. I slipped off my clothes and she took my hand, leading us into the bath.

  I had two texts from her the following month. And one phone call, the day after the night in the hotel. After I’d been fired back to Tokyo on the bullet train. In the morning she’d asked me if I knew what I’d done. I said I was confused. Even though I knew full well what she meant, because my body was thrumming. I’d woken up as if I hadn’t recognised my own skin, before she kissed me on the cheek and vanished out of the door, apologising.

  My concentration was shot. I had to delay my trip to the Pana-Wave camp in Gotaishi Mountain, wholly unprepared for the scoop meeting with Chiho in her mobile headquarters. It was an academic coup, raw data from a sect leader at the height of her nefarious powers.

  But another woman was calling.

  Commuting to work, standing in the shower or lying in bed. I spoke her name, felt the shape of it in my mouth, the weight of her on my tongue. I could barely see beyond her face, the slender fingers, her hands pressed against mine. Each thought was a superficial front to reality. My world was not a packed train to an office. Not a screen filled with data on cult members in fear of electromagnetic waves, the Earth flipping its poles.

  The recurring image of her looking back into her apartment, seeing the care and precision in which she applied her make up.

  How she walked in the hotel corridor, the poise of her steps, the black dress slipping down her pale arms, and the thin gold chain around her wrist.

  I rang her from Tokyo four or five times. No answer. I was desperate, I acknowledged that much. Yes, I’d jumped the dulled state following the divorce, losing Mazzy, but if I were the psychiatrist analysing my self from a separate couch I’d note the mania and hysteria. Remind the client he was a father in his thirties, responsible and logical. Not a hitch-hiking Romeo with the ignorant and virile force of youth.

  Yet Kozue ran my thoughts. Whatever suspicions I had about who she was or what she did for a living were quashed by a storm of hormones clouding judgement. Beyond a classic beauty, her almost regal manner, and that gleaming, jet-black hair, was someone who zoomed in on my very self.

  For three weeks I neither sent nor received a text. When I dared wonder what had happened my outcomes ranged from feeling like a stalker to imagining her murdered by the jealous boyfriend. Or gangster. Whoever he was, or whoever I imagined him to be, depending on my mood.

  I rang her again. No answer. No idea what to do with myself, how to think. My office walls closing in.

  It was a dazzling afternoon, and I skipped work and rode my bike along the bay, following the power lines that stretch fission from the nuclear plants in Chiba and Fukushima to the energy devouring metropolis.

  The sea flickered and rippled, lapped against the wharf in a magnesium strobe. Couples strolled and old men fished, carefully baiting hooks and casting into the bright water. I cycled till dusk, hoping to ride out my infatuation. Eventually I stopped at a convenience store and bought a flavourless tuna sandwich. I sat on a bench outside a golf range and joylessly ate.

  I took a picture of the bay with my phone, and sent it to Kozue.

  Following my text into the sky, I imagined the scene bouncing off a satellite and appearing in her hand. Her screen would be silent. No sound of the planes that banked and climbed, the boats that motored and barely left a wake. Although I could hear the thwack of golf balls struck in the driving range, the after-swooshed whip of air and whistling flight, there was no thud on the green. Just an infinite climb. Satellites pinged in the dark of space, an orbit looped with dimpled spheres, my unanswered texts.

  I put my phone on the bench and waited. I watched the screen until the sun went down and the pleasure boats glowed and cruised the harbour like luminous beetles.

  十五

  KOJI HAD A name. Her name. A wonderment when he typed her into a search engine and deleted the billions.

  She posted pictures of the meals she ate. She wrote to her new friends, her mother in California. She posted pictures of herself, too. In his room she was ever-present. Hovered on a screen from his desktop.

  Koji rented an apartment in a block due for demolition. Most of the other residents had moved out, and he was one of the last occupants on the floor. Ride the empty lift. Wander the halls. Returning each night to the sodium lobby where he met his reflection in the black glass. Another self leaving as he entered.

  In the evenings he wiped and mopped his tiny kitchen. Cupboards full of bleach and spray. He talked to his grandmother when he cleaned, telling her about his day, complimenting her on food he ate as a child. He scrubbed and scoured because she was watching, expecting. He was a good boy when he did his chores. When he beat the futons and swept the tatami.

  No matter how hard Koji cleaned his apartment, the cockroaches skittered across the work surface. These were the hours he wished he was ash. Sitting in the dark while the beetles ran.

  Then she’d post something on-line, a comment or photo. A plan.

  And save him from himself.

  十六

  MAZZY HAD BEEN hassling me for a game of tennis since her arrival, and after her first week at school I took her up to the university to show her my office and play on the student courts.

  “So this is where you experiment on people?”

  “Conduct research.”

  “Experiment.”

  “Documenting the existence of national behaviour types in group performance under duress.”

  “Frankenstein.”

  More often than not I was losing these little exchanges. However, each time she got the better of me I felt a little prouder.

  “This is just
the halls, right?”

  She was looking through the gates of the less than impressive back entrance to the campus. Walking distance from the glitz, noise and mania of Shibuya, the aged buildings hardly reflect the highest level of academia and education in the nation. Perhaps Mazzy was expecting the architectural grandeur of Cambridge or Oxford, or at least a Disneyesque attempt at history like Harvard or Princeton. Instead she got a shabby campus with a dirt baseball pitch and run-down buildings, as if giant cardboard boxes had been haphazardly dropped from the sky.

  “I have one of the new offices,” I began, watching her eyes rove across the dilapidated science labs. “They have another site, and whatever the state of the classrooms, the teaching is the best in the country.”

  “Sure, dad.”

  “I can see Fuji from my window on a clear day.”

  It was a moment I knew would be communicated to her mother, a sisterhood that I was forever excluded, the dork trying to befriend the It girls. Fashion, social media, sex, swimming and music, I was always the hanger-on.

  “Where are the courts, dad?”

  Except in tennis.

  It was a sport we all excelled at, but here, and for once, I had the alpha male role confirmed. Although I do wonder if I’d played Lydia when we were both twenty one, without my eight year advantage of youth, whether she’d have got the better of me. Last time I stepped onto a court with Mazzy she’d run me close, a 6-4 set that she could’ve taken if she’d held her serve.

  “Astroturf isn’t your surface.”

  “What? Your days are numbered, dad. Gonna pound you into the court.”

  “No chance.”

  “Okay, if I win I get to go to the Kasabian concert in Yokohama.”

  “Doesn’t matter, you’re not going.”