Lenny had said nothing in response to the young rifleman. When the army came to him with a problem they needed fixing, he first let them speak. Watched for lies rather than listened. Carl Rogers with a bar stool replacing the couch, whisky instead of water.
“This kid’s like, ‘All that bullshit about the coke and the whores. What the fuck. Three beers and I’m unconscious. Never. I’ve been drinking since I was in High School and three beers never blacked me. Even when I was drinking Crazy Horse.’”
Intrigued by Lenny’s self-proclaimed skills at reading physical cues, I’d once given him a facial recognition test, a series of photos to decipher which subject was faking a smile and which was genuine. He’d scored twenty out of twenty.
“The kid’s already done a tour in Iraq. Tells me about his ass twitching in a helicopter dropping like a stone, that he was more scared walking into that bathroom.”
Lenny had watched his hands. How the kid wiped his brow, the sweat marks on the cuffs of his grey hoodie, the Duke basketball logo, childish. A coat of arms no help to him here.
“Thing is, I ain’t got the sway I used to have. But I’d heard a couple of stories about the extortion, and once I worked out where the girls were hanging out it didn’t take long to speak to the men running the racket.”
“Had he done anything?”
Lenny laughed. “The kid? Nothing apart from a shot of rohypnol. The blood was the kind of shit you get at a joke shop. Thing is, these finance guys who ain’t got the balls the soldiers have wake up and empty their bank accounts. They got kids and wives. What, they’re gonna go home and say, ‘Honey I took a prostitute to a love hotel, got wasted, and woke up with blood all over the walls.’”
I changed the subject, asked him about his life, his health. “76 days dry.” He pointed to a calendar on the wall, the dates crossed out with a marker pen. “And I’m running a fucking bar. I should get a medal.”
“A new liver.”
“I can get you a Filipino one if you ever need it.”
He smiled, and I presumed he was joking. Then again he was the kind of guy that could arrange a black market organ deal.
“How’s your Japanese coming along?”
“I can read about ten kanji. And most of those are to do with food. My grammar is fucked up all over the place. But I can sit and drink sake with a yakuza boss, tell him jokes till he pisses his pants.”
Lenny talked about his divorce, his new wife, and that I was too old to be single. I reminded him I had a daughter and was about to ask the Kozue favour when a muscle-bound Serbian came in with a Japanese girl. Lenny shook his hand and punched his shoulder. The motherfucker welcome. I shuffled along the counter and drank my beer while Lenny laughed and joked with the couple.
Then a strange pause. As if a flaw in relativity. When I caught my face in the mirror behind the bar, only halfway down my pint and already feeling light headed, I was practically time travelling. Connecting the past and the present. The feeling, a recollection, that sitting here five years ago I’d looked into the mirror and seen myself at this very moment.
I drained my glass, told Lenny I was heading out.
“Already?”
“It’s a school night.”
I’d hate for Mazzy to wake and find me gone. I put on my jacket and opened the door.
“Come see me at the weekend,” Lenny called. “ You came in here for something, I know you did.”
**
Mazzy carried home books and files, piled them on the living room table, and bought a pair of speakers for her laptop. Like a liberating army parachuting in from the sky, she spread her territory from her bedroom to the rest of apartment in rapid drops of possessions.
She freed me from a locked self. A personality ruled by the despot of work and singledom. I felt younger, connected. Not only with my daughter, but the groups I was measuring. What had been nodes in a circuit board were again sentient beings, people. Though my freedom came with certain conditions. I was still the president of my own country, my apartment, but the occupying forces dictated when and where I was allowed this expression.
After a day analysing reams of data, trying to dislodge the night with Lenny from my thoughts, I came back to thumping music and two of Mazzy’s new friends flopped across the sofa, a box of ravaged doughnuts on the counter.
First I was introduced to Legolas, a tall and gangly Swedish boy, who was polite enough to put down his hood and shake my hand. And then her latest ‘best friend,’ Larissa, a sassy girl with a row of multi-coloured braces across teeth that already looked perfect.
“My mom bought your book.”
“Tell her thank you.”
“She doesn’t agree with a lot of it, though.”
“Oh, well.”
“But she read it.”
Mazzy asked what I was doing, which translated to, Get out dad, we were having fun till you turned up.
“You can have the living room,” I told her. “I’ve things to be getting on with.”
“Do you a have a Swedish sample group?” asked the elongated boy. “Like, we’re so similar. I mean. Robots.”
“Tell him about largum,” said Larissa, Mazzy sighing because it meant I’d gatecrash a minute or two longer.
“If you go to someone’s house for coffee in Sweden, and they ask how much sugar do you want, everyone just says, ‘Largum.’ The usual. But like, what’s the usual? Everything is largum. How many potatoes. Largum. How much gravy?”
“Largum,” said Larissa.
“Largum,” he shrugged.
I finally got a word in, explained that countries with large middle classes showed a strict obedience to the norm, like Japan, and that the most effective groups demonstrated a subconscious consensus. I was about to expand when Mazzy told Legolas he could just read my book. I grabbed a copy off the shelf and handed it over. He looked at the cover, said, “Cool,” and then fanned the pages as if he were hoping to find a flip cartoon in one of the corners before putting it down on the sofa and asking me if it was on Kindle.
“Let’s get some maccha ice cream,” suggested Larissa.
The team agreed. Within minutes they had shipped out, a cursory, “Later, dad,” from Mazzy as she pulled the door shut.
I walked over to the box of doughnuts, took a half-eaten French vanilla and ate it while looking out of the window at the apartment block opposite, every balcony empty, blinds drawn.
I wrote the book because of Kozue. Not because I wanted to forget her, but to direct my energy into something else before I had a meltdown.
No. That’s not entirely true, either. I wanted to understand what she’d told me the last time I saw her in Inakoshira Park.
We’d sat on a bench in dying sunlight. Shrilling cicadas vibrated the air with a deafening song. Not that I could blame the insects for singing so loudly, only airborne for a few days after years beneath the soil.
I spoke to Kozue about my research, the cult lives I studied. The young, intelligent professionals who left careers and families to wear white and predict Doomsday. She listened, nodded, and said I should study the yakuza.
“Your life is the group. Everything you do is for others. The individual is swallowed by this huge creature, and whatever this creature does, this monster, you’re part of it.”
She played with the sleeve of her top, twisted it through her fingers. “I was the high school archery champion.” She held out her arms, proud with an invisible bow. “On horseback.”
I asked if she still practised, and she loosed an imaginary arrow at a crow swooping across the lake.
“I’m busy with other things.”
I sat and watched her, waited. I felt I was a close to history, truth. For a month we’d been meeting in hotels and onsens, erasing thought with body. Sex, not biography.
She pushed her hair behind her ears, that p
ale neck. “I’m from a rich family. Well, was. Old money. A proud father.” She paused, looked for the cicadas shrilling in the trees. “Ruined.”
I thought she was going to tell me more. A story that I did and didn’t want to hear. I imagined blackmail and extortion, the indentured daughter in the seedy club. But nothing. When the setting sun filtered through the leaves, she warned that the mosquitoes would start biting. “Let’s go on the lake.”
Legend has it that Inakoshira lake is cursed, and that lovers who dare to row its surface are doomed.
Neither of us were superstitious. And perhaps only one of us was a lover.
We drifted in the final streaks of daylight. The bump of the oarlocks. The golden droplets pearling on the blade. Kozue trailed her fingers, and then took off her shoes and dipped her feet. I studied her features. In the lengthening shadows was the foreboding that I’d never see them again. Her noble, yet feminine nose. Those high, feline cheekbones. Her laser stare offset by the warmth of her sumptuous mouth. Then her white toes, luminescent in the dark water.
Remnants of the day flared through the trees, and the lake blazed. We were floating on the corona of the sun. When a tower block hid the gloaming I rowed into the one remaining sunbeam, before that too was swallowed by the shade.
We lay down in the boat and kissed. What joy to feel like a traveller in my own life, with perhaps even the promise of hers. I looked at the first stars, bright in a patch of unfettered sky. There was no barrier between us and the rest of the universe, as if we could row along the Milky Way and watch the galaxies eddy in our wake.
Then reality arrived, sudden and unwelcome. Chimes sounded that the park was closing, and we paddled back to the moorings.
I told her not to go.
I told her she could tell me anything.
But the shore broke the spell. An odd, disturbing moment. After tying up the boat we were walking around the lake when a crow swooped from the dark and picked a sparkly grip from Kozue’s hair.
“Did it scratch you?”
She watched the crow fly into the trees, the flash of silver in a talon. “Is that a good omen,” she wondered. “Or a bad one?”
**
Rumour has it that Tokyo is too small for its population, and that if everyone came out of their apartments at the same time, the city would burst. Jammed onto a rush hour train, or marching along the morning pavement with the ranks of commuters, one may feel this is true. Yet the crowds have a measured step. Give me the record breaking footfall passing through Shinjuku station rather than the mania of Oxford Circus on a Saturday afternoon.
A contentious chapter in Gangs, Groups and Belonging pontificates on the survival of the obedient gene, where I argue that those who transgress in a society propelled by adherence to strict social and moral codes would be marginalised, and therefore less likely to pass on a rebellious trait.
Yamada was a key proponent of this theory, as it supported his negative angle on the unthinking masses, and how Japan was shrinking into economic and cultural oblivion. Without defeat in 1945, he argued, and the financial and military advantages of the Marshal plan keeping their historically wronged neighbours at bay, Japan would be fodder for China and Russia. He’d nearly been chased out of the faculty following a TV appearance. Unfairly edited, as he’d concluded his attack on blind conformity was driven by his patriotism, his sound bite riled the political right into action. Two days later he found an empty petrol can on his car seat, a red, rising sun, crudely painted over the label.
When we met for a bowl of ramen at lunch, he asked how my welcome lecture was coming along. “Not too many jokes, I hope.”
I nearly spat out my soup. I’d clean forgotten about the presentation.
“I bet you’re going to tell the Japanese audience how great they are.”
I pinched a gyoza parcel between my chopsticks and dipped it in chilli oil. “I’m going to talk about building a dam.”
“A metaphor.”
“No. Dam building.”
I crunched garlic and mince and chewed slowly, stoking my train of thought.
“The existence of a group soul,” I said, rather dramatically, name dropping South African naturalist Eugene Marais and his colony of white ants, the evidence for a communal psyche, as well as the pioneering research on cricket teams by Doctor Jain Burdett, before I began the anecdote about Japanese schoolchildren building a dam on a summer camp I worked as an English teacher.
“Without any instructions, the kids leapt off the bus and ran to play in the stream that cut through the picnic area. The braver, more daring boys and girls splashed into the water, while the rest of the group began collecting rocks. Big, small, flat and pointed. Some rocks needed two people to carry them down the bank, others were passed along a chain of hands. Each and every child was an integral part of the construction. Within ten minutes of harmonious labour, the stream had been turned into a pool. This metre high feat of impromptu engineering, completed without any arguments or accidents, filled me with joy.”
Yamada lifted the last of his noodles to his mouth. Then he picked up the bowl and drank the remaining soup.
“That’s just the introduction,” I added. “Then I’ll talk social evolution, Bill Hamilton, what he might have theorised if he’d sat and recorded people in Tokyo station, not Waterloo.”
Yamada was quiet, teasing any nonsense out of me. He put his bowl down. “Japan is the glass half full, ne?”
I copied his ramen drinking technique by picking up the bowl and tipping pork soup into my stomach.
“And Britain is half empty?”
Perhaps he was right. Simple, clear wisdom, as usual.
However, he didn’t know that one variable to my shining optimism was the possibility of seeing Kozue again. I hadn’t heard from her since that night in Inakoshira Park, since I’d flown back to England and failed to pass off my infatuation as a holiday romance. The giddy thought that I could speak with her once more, that I could make the ghost of this beautiful woman seemingly reappear, had me entranced.
**
The Shotgun was busy, bouncing with a crackly bluegrass number that had drinkers tapping feet and raising voices. Lenny had another guy serving, and once I bought a beer he came over with a drink and sat with me at a window table.
“Is that iced tea?”
“Tannin is good for you.”
I sipped my Asahi, resisting the urge to down the glass.
“Pitch it, man. What you looking me up for? You’re too old and wise to be fucking about in dive bars?”
“Easy on the old part.”
“Shit,” he laughed. “I’d lived a hundred lives by the time I was thirty, and I’m forty fucking five next year.”
We chinked glasses to our forties, and I asked if he remembered Kozue.
“I remember you talking about her like she was some princess. You got no photos?”
“I wouldn’t show you if I had.”
“You know what. I think you constructed this dream woman in your lab. Like that 80s film, Weird Science, where they get Kelly LeBrock to appear in her bra and panties.”
I shook my head. Told him that Kozue had vanished, and how I’d tried to get in touch with her again but had no luck.
“You’re still pining for her?”
“Not exactly pining.”
Lenny slurped tea through a bendy straw, like a kid finishing a milkshake. “Never good to hunt old flames. People change. Maybe you had some obsession.”
“I did.”
“And if you see her again now, wrinkles, grey hair.”
“No, no. She’ll age gracefully.”
“I’m talking about you, motherfucker.”
I took another gulp of beer. Then I explained that she’d worked at a club in Hiroshima, and wondered if he could ring them up and get some information.
&nbs
p; “A hostess club giving out numbers of their girls?” He shook his head. “I have to think about the angle on this.”
He took an ice cube from his glass and crunched it loudly. Then he nodded. “I got it. Follow me.”
We went up the narrow staircase to a little office he kept above the bar. On the wall behind his desk were pictures of him with his kids, two daughters on his shoulders, the absent wife. Framed over the door was a shot of him in a baseball uniform holding aloft a golden, oversized trophy.
“You should hang that in the bar.”
“And remind myself what a fucking mess I’ve degenerated into. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
He picked up the phone and sat down. He got the club number from the operator and then pre-dialled a number that would block his own. “I don’t want some gangster turning up here because you’ve been dicking around with his woman.”
“It’s not like that.”
“You don’t know shit.”
I sat on the corner of the desk, watched and listened. His whole body transformed when he spoke Japanese. Most of the fluent speaking foreigners I know have this power to mirror the body language needed to empower the syntax. They can bend and bow at the right moment, act out the deferential employee or thankful guest. Lenny became the swaggering, senior male, dropping his voice to a croaky bass. I heard him say Kozue a couple of times, and when he got no joy he snapped as if chastising an underling, before nodding to me and putting the phone down without so much as a thank you to the person he’d spoken with.
“I want a fucking Oscar or something.”
“They told you.”
“If I was still smoking I’d light a cigar. I made out I owned a club here, dropped a couple of names, and bam.”
“And?”
“He thinks she might have left, but she was here.”
“Tokyo?”
He nodded. “Last he knew she was working for The Island.” Lenny rubbed his thumb across his fingers. “Hope you got some yen to walk in there with.”
That train was rattling along my spine.
Lenny whipped out a drawer from his desk. “Fuck I could light one up.” He rummaged around and found a pack of chewing gum and stuffed two strips into his mouth.
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