Tokyo

by Nicholas Hogg

  He was there when the firemen arrived. The wooden house incandescent, burning like a hole in the dark. Beams crumbling like blackened matchsticks, the melting glass. Above the sparks and shooting flames, in the luminous folds of smoke, he saw his grandmother. Young and pale, the virgin bride, rising from the ash with a gown of stars.

  二十

  THE SUNDAY AFTER our tennis match I took Mazzy to Hibiya park and sat in the manicured square, a favourite sun-trap bordered with rosebushes. Towers of finance soared above the surrounding maple trees, whose crimson, star-shaped leaves, would fall to our feet and be studied.

  We ate croissants and drank coffee, watching gangs of crows shoo stray cats off the benches and prepare a seat for their meal rifled from the bins. The crows stood on the metal rim and yanked out cans and bento boxes, throwing down remains to the birds waiting on the path, hopping and skipping with excitement. Rather than fighting and bickering like scavengers, they worked together. For any packaging that proved difficult to open, a crow would stand on the lid as the others tugged and ripped the plastic apart. One lively pair seemed to be playing a game with a newspaper, taking it in turns to jump on the pages while the other crow pulled along their passenger. Then abruptly they got bored and tore the stories into shreds, feathering the lawn with a failing Euro and bankrupt states, the bullet-ridden body of a lynched dictator. Occasionally they glanced around to see who might be watching, eyes blinking like a gun scope.

  “Crows are going to take over the world,” said Mazzy, pulling out her sketch book.

  I told her about an experiment at Oxford University, the crow that bent a length of wire and hooked food from the end of a boiling tube.

  “Lots of animals use stuff. Monkeys crack nuts with rocks.”

  “They don’t adapt the rock. The crow visualised the tool, and then created it.”

  “I want a pet crow.”

  Mazzy was shading a beak, circling an eye, leaving a sliver of page bare for the glint of light that always finds the crow pupil. One bird hopped away from the smorgasbord of trash littering the gardens. It stared at us sat on the bench, cocked its head.

  “What are you thinking, handsome?”

  She sketched, the scratch of pencil in the windless quiet. That and the cawing crows, the birds in the treetops calling to the birds in the park.

  “Do you want to see a film later?”

  She turned the pad, put her finger to a pencil line and smudged out a feather.

  “That’s a nice touch.”

  With both hands she held the picture before her.

  “You have an audience.”

  Crows on the branches seemed to be passing judgement on her rendering too, and Mazzy held her pad towards the tree. They shifted on their perch and cawed.

  “Glad you like it.”

  “Film later?”

  “I’m meeting Larissa in Omotesando.”

  “Larissa?”

  “From school.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  I shrugged. Tried to hide a feeling of being slighted.

  “She’s cool. Her mom’s Japanese and her dad’s from Brooklyn.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Hang out. Stuff.”

  I walked with her to Ginza station. I felt like the dawdling geek making the most of his time with a cooler kid. Only here a fortnight and she already had her own life.

  “Call if you get lost.”

  “I can already ask for directions. Hibiya koen wa doko desu ka?”

  “Your pronunciation’s better than mine.”

  Her phone buzzed and she looked at the screen. “Later, dad.” Then she jogged down the station steps and left me wondering which direction to walk.

  I backtracked and took a stroll around the Imperial Palace. Usually the open space was a relief from claustrophobic Tokyo, but today it felt cold and empty so I went back into Ginza and hovered around the department stores. After a weak cappuccino in a smoky café I headed towards a curry shop beneath an archway of the Yamanote line. A jazz soundtrack accompanied by the rumble of passing trains scored the restaurant scene of single men tucking into cheap food. I ate and thought of nothing, just the sauce on the spoon, occasionally looking up to watch shadows pass by on the opaque window.

  Then I zipped up my coat and walked outside.

  She was stopped by a bank. A woman in a kimono, checking her hair and smoothing her silk in the mirrored glass. She wore the print of a flying crane, a feathery scarf. Rouged cheeks and a delicate, pale neck. I stared at her reflection while she rummaged in her handbag. After she found the lipstick, she looked up and saw me. Against the white of her powdered face, her eyes were nearly black. For one jolting second I thought it was her, before she shuffled away, carefully lifting up her precious hem.

  **

  The sky was electric, bright after the dark restaurant. A blaze of bulbs and headlights, the beacon of Tokyo Tower.

  Again, there was no one on the street until the taxi rounded the corner. Kozue instructed the driver to take us back to the hotel, and then took my hand and pressed it between her palms. I asked her how long she was staying, but she ignored my question and lightly ran her nails along the inside of my forearm.

  An express lift whisked us from the lobby. The corner room jutted over the twinkling city. Warning lights on taller buildings, helicopters buzzing like fireflies. Kozue switched off the lamp and left the curtains open. When we stripped our skin was the flicker of neon, pale bodies in the acetylene tremor.

  There was a fatalistic vigour to sex. A fear that we could disintegrate if we let ourselves subside, that the world was not enough beyond our desperation. She pulled my hair and bit my chest, warned me not to come until she clamped her legs around the small of my back and bound her orgasm into mine.

  Flopped together and faint, we slept. I woke up to find her standing at the window. Naked and glowing, as if a projection of the city. I said her name and she shut the curtains and came back to bed, laying on her back and closing her eyes. Her hair spread upon the pillow like a black star.

  The questions I wanted to ask seemed infantile, words that would ruin the aesthetic. The fantasy I’d conjured would be destroyed by the fact. So I slept again, merged the unchecked truth with dream.

  She woke me at dawn by kissing my stomach. Tickled by her long, silky hair. I ran my palm along her jawline, and she took my thumb deep into her mouth, curling her tongue around my knuckles before grabbing my wrist and pulling my hand away.

  “Do something for me.”

  She wanted me to kneel on the floor.

  “Like you did in my apartment.”

  I knelt on the floor and pulled her hips against my mouth, circling her wetness before pushing inside. Kissing, kissing. She dug her nails in the base of my skull when she came, hard, forcing her pelvis against my face. Her thighs trembled and tightened before she broke away and collapsed onto the carpet. After she caught her breath we climbed onto the bed and she straddled me, slowly, clutching my wrists and holding them above my head. She leant down and kissed me, bit my lip. Then she gyrated her hips, a quickening rhythm. I arched from the sheets, a muscle-taut shudder when we came again, locked together.

  We lay like twins in a womb, lit by the pulse of Tokyo pressing through the curtain. She brushed her lips along my shoulder, my chest. I felt weightless. Either that or dead. Gloriously dead, because this woman could bring me back to life. She already had.

  “In my apartment,” she said. “When you knelt on the floor. That was first time I’d come.”

  “Ever?”

  “Well, with a man.”

  Perhaps she was lying. Pandering to my fragile masculinity.

  “You like women?”

  She shrugged.“A month ago I went to see a therapist. A sex therapist. I t
hought there might be something biologically wrong. Some medical reason I’d never had an orgasm.”

  I had both male and female friends who specialised in sex therapy. All wanting a career in a strand of behaviour, they had their own quirks and foibles, and I was therefore sceptical of any professional in the field.

  “She was in her forties, silver in her hair. There was a family picture on her desk, two boys and her husband on a beach. She was serious, but not cold. She told me that it was nothing that couldn’t be fixed, and that although our minds are weaker than our bodies, thoughts can be changed, released.”

  Kozue shifted onto her elbow so she could see my face, that I was listening.

  “Then she said I was very beautiful. That I had something that men would always want to take away, or destroy, and that because I already knew this I’d never let my barrier down, my defences.”

  “You did to me.”

  “In the bar. You looked at me like the rest of the world didn’t exist.”

  “It didn’t.”

  That sheen of hair, her lucent skin. She was right. Outside the room there was nothing.

  “You were almost glowing, a phantom.”

  “No.” Kozue shook her head. “I’m real.”

  She pinched my arm.

  “Ouch.”

  “See.”

  She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. “The therapist said she needed to check there wasn’t a physiological problem, and that I had to take my clothes off and lay on the bed. I did as she asked. The therapist went into her cupboard and put on a latex glove. She asked questions about any discomfort or pain during sex. I told her there was just a coldness, and she apologised and said she had to look more closely.”

  Then Kozue told me about her orgasm. How the therapist slipped her hands across her labia, talking, insisting that she was the director of her own body, the one who decided whether the man deserved her.

  “And I came, right on her hand. I grabbed her wrist and held her fingers inside me.”

  **

  Two women fighting is the kanji for jealousy, shito. One woman has a bow and arrow, the other a rock. The kanji for tree is a picture of a tree. A forest is three trees. Although the strokes and marks of the writing system came easily to my studious mind, my conversational Japanese was too formal to ring up a hostess club in Hiroshima and ask after a woman who’d worked there five years ago. And it hardly seemed the appropriate favour to be asking Yamada.

  Still, I wanted to know where she was. I had to know. The woman on the street in Ginza jarred my being. For that brief second I thought it was Kozue, it was as if a train had rattled down the track of my spine.

  One man who could help me was a guy from Chicago named Lenny Brick. He owned an attic bar on a Roppongi backstreet, and though I hadn’t been in since my return, I’d walked past to see if he’d survived the post-earthquake exodus when gaijin had abandoned the country like rats from a sinking ship. The restaurants, clubs and import shops that relied on the homesick foreigner had sunk with the economy. However, The Shotgun, his ramshackle blues bar, was still afloat.

  Lenny was a morning man, meaning he’d still be awake when the sun came up. Frazzled by a night serving drinks and smoking Marlboro Red. To get him in a good mood, and sober, I needed to pay him a visit during working hours. And that meant after midnight.

  The evening I decided to drop by The Shotgun I sat in the living room waiting for Mazzy to go to bed. Now she was in the swing of school and study, she came home, ate, tweeted and Skyped her mother, before crashing out to wake at seven and do it all over again the next day.

  Flicking through TV channels, skimming past inane panel shows and cardboard newscasters, I had one eye on her bedroom and one eye on the screen. When I was sure she was asleep I pushed her door ajar. She was curled around her journal, iPhone on the pillow.

  I put my shoes on and slipped out.

  I felt guilty sneaking out of the apartment, but not irresponsible. After all, Mazzy was nearly sixteen, and would scoff at my mollycoddling if she knew I was worried about leaving her alone for a couple of hours.

  There is a particular smell in Roppongi. An odour of stale nights accumulated in the alleys and the drains. Beer seeps through bodies and into the sewers, embedding the memory of an evening into brickwork and concrete, a record of events where the neurones have failed, deleted through shame or chemical abuse. Even on a sunlit afternoon, walking between one of the gleaming new shopping cathedrals, you might catch the whiff of an illicit encounter in a shadowed doorway, see a hunch-backed crone mopping the steps of a bar, rinsing ashtrays or drying beer towels. There is the feeling of seeing a stage stripped and bare.

  Then the sun sets and the lights shine, and the meretricious glamour returns and deceives. In the painted face of an average girl is a beautiful woman, and the gaudily dressed gangster is stylish and charming. Alcohol is the potion, the spell to fairyland.

  The last time I frequented The Shotgun I was a borderline drunk. An American AA manifesto would have me down as a chronic case, but an English group would laugh and say I was basically teetotal. Still, I’d outgrown the barfly, and had no desire to sit in a dingy room and trade stories that would be lost in a fog of tobacco and alcohol. I wonder if the history students of the future will find our belief in God more baffling than smoking in public places.

  Besides, the only part of Japan I ever feel unsafe is Roppongi. Not because of the Japanese, but my fellow foreigners. Occasionally the yakuza will stage a showdown with a hapless traffic cop brave enough, or foolish enough, to enforce a parking ticket on a tinted window. The geeky boy in a blue uniform, face to face with a tanned and buff gangster. Yet the unflinching policeman will absorb any bellowed threats, before a slow, processional drive to another prohibited space for the next performance of muscle flexing.

  When I first ventured onto these seedy streets, the twenty-something in search of adventure and experience, sex, the harrying pimps were Russian or Iranian, cutting profits with the local mobsters for the right to work their pavements. Now the dregs selling blowjobs and cocaine are mostly Nigerian and Ghanian, fighting each other for the remaining scraps of patrons, a customer base shrunk to the well-heeled banker or curious tourist. Gone are the naïve boys from US bases, teens from boondock towns old enough to join the Marines but too young to buy a beer in the country they pledged to die for. When the Twin Towers came down and Bush deployed the GIs to Iraq they were allowed off base for weekend blow-outs. After necking cans of Asahi and Kirin they’d hit the bars and the brothels and, if they were lucky, wake up in Military Prisons, not the hands of the Japanese police. Or the local gangs. Here the MPs, or the cops, held little sway. The go-to man was Lenny, brokering deals between the mobs and the Army.

  And now, hopefully, an agent for my own investigations.

  When I swung open the door he had his back turned and was fiddling with the music volume, a Howlin’ Wolf track. It was early, and there was only a young Japanese couple at the far end of the counter. He still had currency from all over the world pasted onto the walls, along with graffiti he encouraged to be carved into the wooden panelling: names and states, football teams and insults.

  He spun around and saw me. “Motherfucker.”

  “My pleasure.”

  He cracked a wide smile and palm-slapped into a big handshake. “You finally come to put me in the nut house?”

  He poured a beer and sloppily pushed it across the counter. We chinked glasses and drank. Skin sagged around his cheekbones. Scars from wives and wars had merged into wrinkles, but he still had his smile, the gold tooth flashing.

  “I’m surprised you’re still alive.”

  “It’s a daily miracle.”

  Though very different animals, we ultimately shared the hunt for human truth. With Lenny it was a direct show of feelings, a blunt force of animus. My quest was to mea
sure and define what makes us who we are, observe and record. He wore his sub-conscious on his sleeve, perhaps my alter ego, the machismo I was cautious of baring. While I read journals on the nature of aggression, or studied the evidence for attraction through DNA information communicated by scent, Lenny would just as happily fuck or fight.

  “I know I’ve been here too long when you walk back in.”

  His wobbly hands and bloodshot eyes. The signature Hawaiian shirt, unusually for him, ironed and clean. Past the Ray Charles tattoo on his arm was a cluster of nicotine patches.

  “Gimme some news.”

  I told him about my return to England, skimmed across the years, the book and the research, and avoided talk about Mazzy. I didn’t want her presence where I’d obliterated my senses and leered over women half my age. I came here after Kozue had waltzed into my life, and straight back out again. Solace in the piss and vinegar of forgotten bar talk. When I asked Lenny if he still saved soldiers from the yakuza, he shook his head.

  “They hardly let the kids off base. Place is dying. You know what I saw last week? A fucking hobo playing a harmonica outside a shuttered restaurant. ‘This is Tokyo motherfucker.’ That’s what I said to him.”

  “It is quiet.”

  “The quake killed my custom. They got scaredy cat over some radiation cloud and quit.”

  “And the Army doesn’t need your services?”

  “Well, I did have one punk to save a month ago. A new scam. This captain I know brought him over. Kid wakes up in a love hotel, no sign of the girl he took in there. Walks into the toilet and there’s blood up the walls, on his hands, all over his face. His ID is missing, and all he has is a business card and a number. Finds out he’s got accusations that need to be paid off, that he’d ‘done things.’ Comes in here, sits right where you are, begging me he did nothing wrong. He’s like, ‘I swear on my life the bitch drugged me.’”