Tokyo

by Nicholas Hogg

  “You be careful somewhere like that.”

  “It’s just a hostess bar, right?”

  “They’re money traps run by gangsters.”

  “Is this one dodgy?”

  “Come on, man. They all are. The girls sit around pouring drinks and clapping when some old fart sings out of tune. It’s a merry dance to get the guy in bed and for the girl to get paid without feeling like a whore.”

  I waffled something about geishas and tradition, and Lenny laughed. “Call it what you want. Oldest profession in the world.”

  “I’ll sit in the club and have a drink. What could be simpler?”

  Lenny blew a pink bubble with his gum, and then burst it like a firecracker. “You need to put down fifty grand just to get a conversation.”

  I shrugged. Faked the fact that hostess bars did make me nervous.

  “All I’m saying is don’t march in asking questions. Be subtle. And I know that place does extras, if you know what I mean.”

  Lenny swivelled in his chair and drew up the blinds, a multi-coloured light show of the busy junction. Midnight, and it was filled with revellers heading out or tottering into the station, swaying home drunk on the last train or ready to down shots of tequila and party till dawn. Pimps waited by the crossing, petitioned the men into bars and massage parlours. At the police box officers leaned on broom handle truncheons, watching the scene with bored indifference.

  “I’ve truly seen a lot of shit,” said Lenny. “Growing up in Chicago, brother shot. Two years in the army fighting motherfuckers at boot camp before I even get to Kuwait. But nothing freakier than here.”

  Traffic flowed, taxis, cars and bikes, boys on souped-up mopeds weaving between the pedestrians.

  “Some people get spooked by the crowds, a rush hour train. You know what gives me the stone cold shits?”

  We watched the lights change, the bodies pour across the road.

  “An empty street.”

  **

  Mazzy had got into the habit of patrolling the apartment with the Gamma Scout, taking readings in different rooms and recording them on her iPad.

  “Is this for your information?” I asked. “Or your mom’s?”

  “Everybody’s,” she snapped.

  We were fumbling through our morning routine, eating toast and talking to each other across the hallway.

  “I put a daily reading on Facebook.”

  She walked into the kitchen, balancing her screen like a waiter with a tray.

  “Are we glowing?”

  “I don’t know why it doesn’t bother you.”

  When I told her that the background radiation of London or LA exceeded Tokyo she said, “Whatever,” and went back to her desk.

  I ironed my shirt, tried, and failed, not to think about The Island, the phone call.

  Then I went into Mazzy’s room and apologised.

  “I have to go, dad.”

  She was brushing her hair in the mirror.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It was good of your mum to mail it over.” I sat on the end of the bed, explained to her that there would always be competition for her attention between us, her parents.

  She stopped brushing and stared at me as if I’d just told her the Earth was flat. “Dad, you left mom and went back to England.”

  “It wasn’t as simple as that.”

  “I have to go to school.”

  She had a grip in her teeth, twisting a braid between her fingers.

  “I got pretty good at doing your hair when you were younger.”

  She sighed, smiled. “What about the photo at Uncle Gavin’s? It looks like a plant growing out of my head.”

  “There was a bit of trial and error, that’s true.”

  She fixed her hair and turned. “Don’t you have to go to uni?”

  “Sure,” I stood up and passed Mazzy her bag. “I could meet you in Shibuya if you want a coffee later?”

  “I’m going to karaoke after school.”

  “With Larissa?”

  “And some others. All the kids go here. It’s not like a bar, you know.”

  I told her I understood, that I’d see her later.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I replied, not sure if her ‘Okay?’ was checking for my permission, or asking after my emotional well-being.

  I walked out with Mazzy and gave her a big hug when we parted ways at the station. Then I sat on the platform, waiting for a carriage not jammed with faces pressed against the windows. While I sat on a plastic seat, watching the anonymous lives swallowed by the sliding doors of the next few trains, I was overwhelmed by memory.

  In an effort to hold on to what has been, I experimented with my nostalgia, creating a trance like state by meditating on previous events. I could experience a near complete jump of consciousness to a virtual world. A form of mental time travel until I was afraid that opening my eyes would reveal the room, the landscape or the person, that I’d tricked myself into recreating.

  Images of Kozue had appeared more visceral than women I was dating in England. If I thought of her, she was there. A physical presence. Sitting on a hotel chair and rolling up a stocking. Zipping her skirt and smoothing out the creases. My brain had become frighteningly adept at recreating the original scene.

  Mazzy too.

  If I catch a whiff of bleach, or hear the echo of a voice along a tiled hallway, I can stand again in the delivery room and feel the weight of her in my arms. All the cold knowledge of cells and genes undone by the gurgling miracle.

  By god, the thought is that startling I could drop her if I’m not careful. I need to focus on the here and now, and let her body flutter away.

  二十一

  THE POLICE ARRESTED Koji outside the carbonised shell of his grandmother’s house, and then released him on bail pending charges of arson. With the last of his father’s inheritance he rented a cheap apartment in Tokyo, and on his first night in the bare room he sat and wrote out a list of names. The Leader. His high school PE teacher. The detective who smirked when he told them about his grandmother’s ghost.

  Often he walked the entertainment districts, Roppongi and Kabuki-cho. Sometimes he followed foreign women home, but no further than their apartment doors. Once his money ran out he worked for a shipping company in Nishi-Nippori. He signed forms and checked boxes. He walked through warehouses stacked with sea containers. The reek of salt and fish. Vacant, rotting days. Offset by the buzz of imported pornography.

  One morning he caught a train over to the old group house, the boarded up windows and Keep Out signs. He walked across the overgrown garden and peered through the letterbox. A litter of post in the empty hallway, a pile of grubby sheets. The thought of her walking, drifting the corridors in her white yukata. Koji, the chosen one, a step behind.

  He found out she was dead in an email. Etsuko had decided that Koji should know she died in a bed surrounded by her true family. She also told him how they saw a white cat in the hospital car park.

  Koji felt nothing at the news. Perhaps a mild disappointment, his calculated justice not realised.

  That night he hired a Bulgarian stripper to undress in a windowless brothel.

  He began to budget his salary around paying for sex. He could forget himself with the foreign prostitutes. In a basement parlour with a pale skinned whore he was the master of his paltry existence. The naked women who took him from his own body, the despicable flesh and blood of his father.

  Still, it was never enough. And there was ambition in his fetish, his soma. He saved his wages and bought a ticket to Los Angeles for no other reason than this was where the inflated models fucked and contorted on his pixel screen.

  He felt small arriving in the USA. A boy in a man’s world. Then along the sun bleached boardwalks he saw the peroxide women. He took photos. He went to strip c
lubs. He watched the Americans slip dollar bills into stocking tops and did the same. In the afternoons he learned to speak English at a language school. He was obsessive about grammar, and twice changed teacher when he noted colloquialisms that weren’t in his dictionary.

  He was also obsessive about paying for women to visit his hotel. Pale and blonde. Then the escort agencies refused to send out girls to his room, and two men arrived at his door instead of the woman he’d requested. One of them tied him to a chair while the other stole money from his suitcase. Then they whipped him with a plug flex.

  He flew back to Tokyo, the open wounds seeping through his shirt and staining the seat cover.

  Within months he’d saved his wages and travelled back to Los Angeles. Again calling on the services of the escort agencies. He had fantasies about torturing the pimps. Scenes from bad action films where they begged him for mercy. But they never returned. Whatever happened between Koji and the rented women.

  Then there was an accident. The girl left a trail of blood across the sheets, on the shower curtain and out onto the motel landing. Like a thread of wool to find the way home. Koji had shut the door behind her, taken off his belt and fixed it to the light fitting. When he kicked away the chair the ceiling collapsed and left him on the floor covered in plaster.

  That same night he boarded the plane for Tokyo, and sat beside her.

  She was too precious for this world.

  Luckily he was there to protect her. To watch over her. He wondered if he might be some kind of guardian, assigned to her care. Redeemed.

  二十二

  I TRIED TO look younger. I shaved and bought designer clothes, a pot of styling wax. When I got back from university Mazzy was still at karaoke with her friends, and I went into my room and slipped on my new shirt. I stuck a handful of wax in my hair and sucked in my stomach, checking my profile in the mirror.

  Perhaps Lenny was right. The simulation was an archive. Part of the memory with Kozue was bound in the self I was then. Not now. From the moment I’d seen her in Hiroshima I’d warped from the ashamed father, the self regulated logician, to a bewitched man attracted to a mystery woman.

  When Mazzy came home I quickly pushed my door to and towelled the wax from my hair, pulled off my new shirt and called back a hello.

  “Can we eat nabe again?” she shouted from the hallway.

  “Good idea.”

  “I’m starving.”

  I was glad she wanted to spend time with me, that I had distraction from the jittery stage fright thinking about a trip to the hostess club.

  While Mazzy got changed I counted my spare cash. Sixty grand. Equivalent to five hundred quid with the steroidal yen against the weakling pound. Still, it might not be enough.

  “Do I need my purse, dad?”

  “Don’t be silly.” I pulled another credit card from the drawer and slipped it into my wallet.

  We jumped on the train to Ginza and walked the wide avenue, ogling price tags in the flagship stores. Here, the Tokyo rich paraded their wealth. The ostentatious bags dangled as signs of a superior solvency, a class marker. The perfect accompaniment to the money show was a super car rally touring the streets. Engines revved and backfired, and the shoppers came out of luxury department stores to photograph spoilers and chrome.

  After watching the cars and crowds I took Mazzy to a nabe restaurant where patrons sat around a circular, copper counter, and dipped strips of meat into simmering water.

  “This is so cool,” said Mazzy. “Cooking your own food.”

  Just as I’d hoped, the dining style matched her strident independence. We dunked vegetables, pork and beef, before draping them in sesame sauce.

  “Do you remember grilling your own fish in Greece? You wouldn’t eat one unless you could do it yourself.”

  “We had a barbecue on that sandbank.”

  “That was great holiday.”

  “Corfu?”

  “And that day we went snorkelling.”

  “God. You want to remember that?”

  I’d trodden on a sea urchin, the black spines snapping off in my sole. In utter agony, I’d collapsed on a rock and wondered how the hell we were going to get back to the hotel. Then my nine year old daughter lifted up my foot and calmly removed the poisonous spines, one by one with her delicate fingers, as if she were a journeyman medic field dressing a wounded soldier.

  “I was thinking more of that shoal we swam into.”

  Taking her into the sea, and not being terrified of the consequences, was cognitive therapy towards reducing my constant anxiety about her safety. Mazzy was fearless, and had no memory of her near drowning. She was a natural in the water, like her mother, but for years I avoided taking her anywhere near a beach. Then we put on masks and flippers and snorkelled the turquoise bays, hovered in the rays of subaquatic sun.

  And here she was in Tokyo, young and thriving. Her own woman.

  Once we left the nabe restaurant and decided to head back, it was Mazzy who flagged down the cab and asked for the apartment, instructing the driver how to get us home.

  **

  I walked up to Roppongi after midnight, the two beers I drank engendering a false bravado. Still, I needed another hit before walking into a hostess club and had a shot in Wall Street, a narrow, rowdy bar, filled with a mix of expats and locals, from the loud-mouth traders with foreign banks to the drunken students leftover from happy hour. I sat at the counter and looked around the room, imagined them a clientèle banished from the light of day. Then I ordered a double whisky, downed it, and left.

  I stepped off the main drag and followed Lenny’s sketched map around the back streets, turning the crude drawing in my hand to follow his directions. I walked past a gang of mangy cats, two Thai transsexuals who giggled and pouted, before I came to the building that housed The Island. A thin block with a bar on each floor. Some of the clubs had pictures of the hostesses who worked there, profiles of doe-eyed girls with dyed hair and bright make up. The plastic sign for The Island was a silver palm tree and a bikinied woman leaning against the trunk.

  After stepping into the lift I took my wallet from my coat and slipped it into my trouser pocket. My heart beat faster. From here in it was possible I could see Kozue.

  The doors opened and a skinny Japanese man with a white shirt and black waistcoat stepped forward and welcomed me into the lobby. In carefully rehearsed English he asked if I could speak Japanese and was noticeably relieved when I answered that I could. He showed me to the cloakroom and deftly took my jacket, before leading me along a walkway that bridged a miniature stream dotted with tropical fish.

  I expected something tawdrier than the lacquered surfaces and low lighting of the main club. A large, curved bar was kept by a tall and dark Caucasian guy, possibly Balkan or Eastern European, and the high-backed, semi-circular booth seats were candlelit as if fanned shells illuminated by a shining pearl.

  “Konbanwa,” welcomed the beehived and sequinned manageress. She spoke in a husky, tobacco drawl. A woman who’d spent most of her life with a cigarette pinched between her lips.

  We exchanged bows, and she beckoned over two women from stools at the counter. Both hostesses seemed entirely constructed of heels and legs, floating smiles and fake eyelashes. Despite the cigarette smoke filling the room, the sweet perfume of my two courtesans emanated, and until we sat down at a table I was briefly lost as to why I was there – the reptilian brain alive and well in the measured academic.

  Mayumi was in her thirties, but had made herself up to be mid twenties. She’d scraped back her shining hair, and wore large gold earrings that dangled over her bare shoulders. Akemi was younger, sporting a short, platinum dyed bob, and large eyes with glittery make up dusted over her cheeks. She wasn’t as confident as Mayumi, and probably a lower rank, such is the organisation of even a hostess bar in Japan, as she took our drink order of three glasses
of sparkling wine, which immediately set me back ten thousand yen.

  The ladies sat either side of me, two sets of naked thighs, skirt hems skilfully adjusted. When the drinks arrived, possibly the worst glass of watered down vinegar I’ve ever tasted, they asked the Japanese standards: Where was I from? How long had I been here? Did I like Japanese food? The women?

  I answered, smiled, told a few unimportant lies and scanned the other hostesses working the room. Mostly Japanese, similarly dolled up and posturing, pouring drinks and resting hands, each and every gesture as if a line from a script. There was a pair of blonde foreigners at the corner table, drinking champagne with a younger Japanese man who dressed and held himself with the manner of entitlement. Either the heir to a wealthy family, or the lineage of a yakuza boss.

  Kozue wasn’t here. And looking around it was hard to imagine her part of the scene.

  “You don’t like Japanese girl?” asked Mayumi in English, put out I wasn’t giving her the attention I was paying for. “You want Russian lady?”

  I told her of course not, and flattered them both with hollow compliments. I ordered another round of drinks, and even smoked a cigarette when offered and lit by Akemi. The more I indulged them, and myself, the sooner I’d earn the right to ask questions about Kozue. To enhance my status as a patron worthy of their time and effort I embellished my earning power, bragged that the strength of the yen had made me rich.

  When the bottle of champagne arrived in a bucket of ice, Akemi’s hand was on my knee and Mayumi’s bare thigh rested against my leg. I insisted on pouring the first drinks from the bottle, getting cheap giggles from the ‘English gentleman’ stereotype. We touched glasses and drank, eye contact lingering, the gestures less subtle now. From the palm on my leg to the footsie under the table. I was getting drunk, but could do little about it as with each sip Akemi would top up my glass. But this did mean I was getting braver about asking after Kozue, and was going to attempt a question when a karaoke mic started the rounds. We endured a tuneless croak from a sweating businessman, still in his crumpled work shirt and cheap suit, no doubt making the most of a company account, before one of the Russian girls stood up and sang a passable version of ‘You’re So Vain.’