Tokyo

by Nicholas Hogg

  “Let’s bet, then.”

  “Hold your horses.”

  I first wanted her to see my office and the lab. She made the loser L sign with her thumb and index finger, and we both laughed when I grabbed her hand and pressed it on her own forehead.

  “Bully.”

  We wrestled, like how we used to when she was a little girl, before we broke away, embarrassed, remembering that she was now a young woman and I was the visiting professor at an esteemed university.

  I signed her in at the reception and we went through to the lab, a basement hall fitted out to challenge and test various international groups working together. Early numbers backed up my hypothesis that the Japanese would out-perform other nations when group consensus must form rapidly and sub-consciously.

  “There are cameras, there, there, and there.”

  I pointed to the corners of the room, the lenses set in pods like plastic swallow nests.

  “Creepy.”

  “You’ve not lived in London enough. More cameras than people.”

  “That’s fucked.”

  “Mazzy.”

  “You know that’s the right word.”

  “Well.”

  I explained how we’d assembled teams of Japanese, Russians, Chinese, Turkish and Spanish, and set them time pressure tasks with completion rewards, and then recorded our observations of group adaptability and co-operation.

  “I’m hoping to use the research in a paper on Japanese community structures and social harmony.”

  “Hmm.”

  She was either sceptical or bored. I took her up to my office on the top floor, a white walled corridor shared with visiting academics from around the world. When we got to my office she snooped around like a cat might sniff an unfamiliar room, before picking up the picture of the two of us at Yosemite.

  “Haven’t you got a more recent photo?”

  “It’s a great picture.”

  “I do look cute.”

  “You remember the trip?”

  “Didn’t we see a wolf?”

  “A coyote.”

  She put down the picture and asked where Fuji was. I pointed at haze over the western ranges, and she hooded her eyes and scanned in disappointment.

  “Come up again on a clear day.”

  “School’s gonna be hectic.” She looked again at the Yosemite photo. “Let’s play tennis, dad.”

  We went down to the courts and I stretched and did a few jumping jacks to get the blood flowing. Mazzy was serving into the mesh fencing, reaching and snapping at the lobbed balls. She looked to have gained extra power from somewhere.

  When she turned, and saw me flapping out another jumping jack, she laughed.

  “Is that a dance?”

  “A victory dance.”

  “For what? Making it onto the court.”

  The goading worked. “Right. Are you ready?” I was wound up and we hadn’t even hit a ball.

  Mazzy won the coin toss and let me serve, forgetting that no matter how much slower I was around the court than her, I could still put an ace past her flailing racquet.

  “That’s what the jumping jacks were for,” I said, watching the ball whack into the fence as I took the first game.

  “I have to get you cocky so you don’t concentrate.”

  “Let’s see this new serve.”

  She drummed the ball from the court to her palm, pressed it against the strings then stretched and lobbed, before hitting a curving serve that veered beyond my swishing racquet.

  “Oh, oh. Dad.”

  “‘Oh, oh,’ what? I’m glad my money on your lessons is paying off.”

  I knew what to expect with her next serve, but the bounce and leap, combined with the banana swing and length, meant that I parried a floating return she dismissed with a clinical smash.

  “It’s gonna be a quick game.”

  “Don’t count your chickens.”

  She took the game. And the next, breaking my serve with a whipped forehand that kicked off the astroturf. For a year she’d been quicker around the court, but now she was smarter too, and knew how to get me running. I spent the following games sliding around like a drunken skater before it came down to set point.

  “You want a time out?”

  I was wheezing like a geriatric, and the gristle of cartilage in my knee was clicking with each step.

  “I’ll take the time out when I take the set.”

  “Whatever.”

  I had one surge of adrenaline left for a big serve, and put an ace in the corner.

  “Now the comeback.”

  “Of the century if you win this.”

  “You choked last time.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  I was tempted to wind her up, start a nagging doubt. This was my chance to needle her into mistakes. My competitive streak in conflict with paternal encouragement.

  “I’m not going to let you win, you know.”

  Her racquet-twirling crouch, poised, on her toes.

  “Just to be kind.”

  “Serve,” she shouted, before I heard an exasperated, “Fuck,” under her breath.

  Whatever the result, more damage would be done by handing her the victory. I took a breath and lobbed the ball. Beyond the arc of flight from hand to racquet, I sensed a figure watching from a bench beside the court, and I hit the serve late. The ball sat up for Mazzy to lash down the line, beyond my clumsy dive.

  “Game, set, match. Ms Mazzy Sanderson.”

  Mazzy hurdled the net.

  “I was put off.”

  “Erm, by what?” Mazzy looked around the empty courts.

  “That guy was watching us. Well, you.”

  “What guy?”

  I pointed towards the bench.

  “Who?”

  The seat was empty.

  “Excuses. Face it. I beat you, fair and square.”

  “I swear there was someone there.”

  With a camera. Or perhaps just a phone.

  “Don’t be such a bad loser.”

  I must have imagined the watcher, hallucinated a disclaimer to the point which had ended my reign as family tennis champion.

  “I’m a good father. I let you win to encourage you.”

  “Please.”

  I put my arm around her, admitted defeat.

  “The student beats the sensei.”

  “Okay, okay,” I agreed, and then pathetically claimed back some kudos by saying that victory was mine too, as it was a triumph for my DNA.

  “Dad, that is so desperate. You were whupped.”

  She was right. I picked up my tracksuit top and limped off the court, while she positively skipped ahead.

  十七

  KOJI FIRST MET his new family on the top floor of an apartment block in Nishi-Azabu. It seemed like any other singles party for young professionals. A mix of guests standing around with drinks and chatting. Koji couldn’t see the old woman in the room, and he nearly walked straight back out of the door, but a girl with a red birthmark spilling across her left cheek put a glass of apple juice into his hand.

  “I’m Etsuko.”

  Koji introduced himself. Stuttering, he commented on the swanky apartment, the views of Roppongi Hills and Aomori Cemetery.

  “You haven’t been to a meeting before, have you?”

  Koji said he didn’t know why he was there.

  “Wait till later,” said Etsuko, sipping at her juice. “Chiho will explain.”

  For twenty minutes Koji hovered around the buffet, looked from the windows and avoided conversation. Then Chiho walked into the room wearing a white kimono. The guests wowed at her lambent appearance, and even Koji found himself politely applauding too.

  There was a tatami mat in the front window facing the ceme
tery, and Chiho took her place on a large cushion next to three candles burning on the coffee table. Etsuko motioned Koji to sit with the group, and when the lights were turned down Chiho glowed like an effigy.

  She sat with her eyes closed for a long time. Koji wanted to leave, but his way to the door was blocked by rows of folded legs. Partly, he wanted to escape because he recognised something of his grandmother in this curious old woman. The way she perched herself on a cushion above the audience. The shock of white hair.

  Yet here he was.

  Nowhere else to go.

  He stared at her, as did the others in the room. He waited, perhaps an hour. When he finally decided to stand up and walk out, she opened her eyes. Those piercing black stones. Her body motionless, as if only her pupils were living.

  Koji was fixed in her gaze. He sat down, afraid. Chiho took a loud, exaggerated breath, and then let out a long, mournful hum. A sustained note of grief. Koji felt the reverberations in his sternum as she repeated the sound over and over, shuddering the room like a seismic tremor, as if her body had to expel the force before she was shaken apart.

  Very clearly, Koji saw his grandmother at the kitchen stove, lifting udon from the pot, wreathed in steam.

  Then a gasp from the audience, people shifting to see out of the window.

  “Look, look,” shrilled Etsuko, pointing beyond Koji’s shoulder. “In the cemetery.”

  Koji knelt to get a better view.

  “A light.”

  Yes. There was a light. Koji could see it too. A white ball rising above the treetops, lifting into the dark.

  Chiho didn’t turn to watch. She sang again, a thrumming note that fixed the family, her children. As if the line of song were an umbilical cord.

  There would be speeches and prophecies. Rituals and pledges. Punishment for the transgressors. Orders to which Koji would feel no guilt in executing. Commands from the group, for the group. Not an individual.

  十八

  I FORGOT WHO I was, sitting in the air-conditioned taxi, new clothes and shoes that pinched. The white-gloved driver was silent, never registering my presence. More computer graphic than any actual life, my character was driven through the Tokyo circuitry as if I were just code in the city’s teeming programme.

  It was the night after Kozue had replied to my picture of the bay, a buzzed text instructing me to meet her at a Shinjuku hotel.

  I got out of the cab and nodded to the bowing doorman, before sitting awkwardly on a leather cube chair in the reception. It was a five star hotel, orchids and a fountain. Legions of staff in pressed uniforms. I was preparing to tell Kozue that she was cold, leaving me to worry about where she’d vanished. I was ready to be angry and curt, dismiss her advances.

  Until she walked across the polished floor of the lobby, tall and commanding in a tight black skirt and shimmering blouse. Stunning. Her clicking heels forcing heads to turn and stare.

  I kissed her on the cheek, lightly.

  “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

  “I’ve been running a lot.”

  “In this heat?”

  “Along the river at night, when the air has cooled.”

  “We should eat, early.”

  A doorman flagged down another taxi and we slid onto the back-seat. In very formal Japanese she instructed the driver where to go.

  Then she grabbed my hand and locked her fingers through mine, gripping. I was never short of things to say on a date, not that I’d even use this word to describe the encounter, but I didn’t want to spoil the sensation with clumsy jokes.

  “You knew I was going to come and see you, didn’t you?”

  I couldn’t find the restaurant again if my life depended on it. Perhaps it doesn’t exist now. It’s possible that it never did, considering the way things have worked out.

  From what I recall, the taxi stopped beneath one of a thousand concrete sections of Tokyo’s elevated highways. Not a door or paper lantern in sight. I looked around, saw empty lots and abandoned office blocks.

  Kozue took ten thousand yen from her wallet and gave it to the white-gloved driver. He took the note and scanned the shadows, nervous, confused at the final destination of an elegantly dressed couple in a deserted back street.

  We stepped out of the car. Once the taxi had turned the corner, it was very quiet. Just the occasional swish of traffic on the highway above.

  “You have the right place?”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  The question was beyond her ability to find a restaurant. And perhaps I didn’t trust her. Still, I followed her into the lobby of a brand new apartment building and waited by the lift. The doors slid open and we stepped inside. Kozue pressed the button to take us down to the basement. When the doors closed I leant over and kissed her on the lips, inhaled a scent that jangled my bones. When the doors opened again the lights went out, leaving us in total darkness.

  Kozue took my hand, and we followed a tiny red point beamed onto the floor. Once my eyes adjusted I made out a figure carrying a small torch, sliding back a paper screen to reveal a large room filled with what looked like giant, luminous chrysalids. Pods of light dotting the darkness, murmurs of hushed conversations, glasses softly clinked together. The shadow led us towards a glow and parted the curtain. Two cushions and a low black table set with copper chopsticks and a large white candle.

  Kozue told me to take off my shoes, and I did, a boy in her company. Sitting on the floor with my legs crossed, in a restaurant where a phantom maître d’ walked a void in utter silence. I jumped when a menu was passed through the diaphanous silk by a veiled waiter.

  “We won’t see anyone else,” said Kozue. “They won’t let us leave at the same time as another couple.”

  I read the menu. Salmon and lobster, cuts of tuna. Kozue asked if she could choose, and I gladly let her order through the curtain to a voice in the dark.

  While she spoke I watched her wide mouth, the sheen of lip gloss. And the delicate swish of her eyebrows, drawn on, of course, but all the more perfect because the arcs were her creation.

  After she passed the menu back she said, “You’re going to ask me what I’ve been doing, why I didn’t call.”

  I was. But the disdain in her tone for needing this information put a stop to the question.

  “I’m thrilled you’re here.”

  “And that’s enough?”

  “It’s a lot.”

  The waiter appeared again, briefly, setting down a tray holding a bottle of sake and two tiny cups. Kozue poured, and I made a toast.

  “To things we can’t see.”

  We drank, the sharp rice wine a jolt. Kozue took my empty cup and poured another. She passed me the sake and asked if I was afraid of the dark.

  “Just what’s in it.”

  I told her about hitch-hiking Shikoku, the woodcutter and the tunnels, walking pitch black roads under mountains. I told her about the kimono salesman too, but not the pearls. How I should have given them to my wife on our wedding day.

  “You know what a tanuki is?”

  “A raccoon.”

  “And a kitsune?”

  “Fox.”

  “Old stories say they can change into humans, take on our form when they want to trick us. People used to believe that a beautiful woman at night, walking alone, was most likely a transformed fox.”

  “Now I’m suspicious.”

  She laughed. “You can check.” She leant before the candle and told me to look at her profile on the curtain. “A fox can be human, but they can’t hide the shadow of their tail.”

  She was very close, stretching on all fours to get the right angle from the flame. I admired her shadow, the curve of her slim hips. Then I looked into her eyes, the brown iris and black pupil, merged.

  “What do you see?”

  Then another voice, the
veiled waiter and a tray of food. The fish arrived, impaled on a stick in the middle of a plate. When Kozue took a piece of flesh from its back, the fin twitched.

  “It moved.”

  “It’s fresh,” she said. “That’s all.”

  I told her I’d eaten snake in China, crocodile in Australia, and that I’d try anything but cat.

  “Good.” She prized off a piece of fish, deftly picking out the bones with her chopsticks. “When the apes climbed down from the trees and started walking, the cats got together and called a meeting. They were about to evolve into a species beyond humans, but they decided to remain as cats and have us wait on them.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “You’re a shape shifting cat.”

  十九

  IT WAS AFTER Koji came back from Mount Fuji without the girl from Hokkaido that he was ejected from the group.

  The old woman had given him life.

  Meaning and belonging.

  Then killed him.

  He was stunned at the city without his family, without orders to act upon. For two days he walked the streets like a simpleton, sitting on steps and watching the traffic, horrified at the thought of being alone.

  Then the rage.

  He booked into a capsule hotel and stockpiled petrol for a week. The morning he transported fuel over to the Tokyo headquarters police had cordoned off the car park and raided the building. Officers in latex gloves carried out bags of clothes and bundles of white sheets. A glass tank filled with a colony of white ants.

  Koji drove straight to the ruin of his grandmother’s house in Kobe. Apart from the removal of her body, almost nothing had been touched. Her empty slippers in the porch. A tea cup on the kitchen table. And moss, growing up the curtains, on the seats of the chairs and the floor cushions. There were mice in her wardrobe, blinking and squirming when he switched on the light.

  He spent the next week washing, cleaning, and killing. Poisoning rodents and insects. He found snake eggs in the garage, sparrows nesting in the loft. Her rotting kimonos. He slept in his car at night, or walked through the moonlit paddies.

  Carefully, he peeled their damp and warped wedding photo from the frame, tore away the half containing his grandfather, and slipped his grandmother into his pocket. Then he took the cans of petrol from his car and poured throughout the rooms, soaking the rotten tatami and flooding the kitchen.