After the hostess finished the song she was applauded and returned to her sharply dressed customer. She sat down slightly apart from him, and he reached out and grabbed her arm, drunkenly pulling her closer before running his hands through her blonde hair with more disdain than admiration. He then leaned over and whispered something in her ear, before calling over the mama-san who took them through a mirrored door to another room.
“You want to go to a karaoke booth?” asked Mayumi, hooking her hand around the inside of my thigh. “Akemi can come as well.”
Akemi nodded, smiled. “I can dance for you.”
I leaned over and grabbed my glass as if it were a life ring. I thought about the photo of Richard Feynman in Las Vegas, surrounded by feathered showgirls. The brilliant physicist indulging his testosterone. Then I drank, balancing the dichotomy between brain and body.
“Next time,” I said, totting up my bill. I calculated that I was one drink away from sixty thousand yen, and moved to make sure I left the club with a lead on Kozue if I was going to spend over five hundred quid.
Casually, or so I believed, I asked Mayumi how long she’d been working here. She ummed and ahhed, before guessing about a year.
I nodded, feigned my buzz of hearing potential information. I drank again, and instead of devising some wily discourse, I clumsily asked if she knew Kozue.
“Kozue,” she repeated, raising her eyebrows and lighting a cigarette. “Girls come and go.”
“Tall,” I said. “From Hiroshima.”
There was a flash of recognition, the mask briefly pulled aside before she returned to hostessing.
I’d driven into a dead end, and she was watching me slowly reverse out. “I used to go to a club in Hiroshima,” I lied. “She worked there, and I heard she came here.”
Mayumi nodded. She told Akemi to pour me a drink.
“Perhaps you know her?”
“Hundreds of girls have worked here,” she said. “I don’t know them all.” She shrugged her shoulders and took a deep inhale of her cigarette.
Akemi poured the last few drops of flat champagne into my glass. I drank, watched a man paw a girl’s knee across the room, and then checked my watch and abruptly told them it was time for me to leave.
After a chorus of, “So soon,” and, “Why don’t we have another bottle of champagne,” I was shown to the bar where I settled my bill, fifty eight thousand yen, including the most expensive bowl of peanuts I’ve ever eaten.
The women escorted me to the cloakroom and stood in the lobby while we waited for the lift. As the doors pinged open Mayumi said, “Next time you come, maybe I’ll remember more about Kozue.”
Then I stepped into the lift. Both women bowing and waving as the doors closed, any machinations from Mayumi well hidden behind a wide, lipstick smile.
Descending to the ground floor, I imagined Kozue working the room, pouring drinks and nodding, bored, slipping away on visions of hills and frosted trees, painting the moon on an autumn lake.
**
It was 5am when I left The Island, but the neon still burned against the cold. I saw a whole street filled with bulbs and void of people. SANYO. FUJI. KONICA. COKE. Dazzling brands in the after world. How rare to have Tokyo to oneself. For the briefest second I had the fear that Lenny had, that I was the last man alive walking the abandoned city.
Then I turned onto Roppongi dori. There were girls going home from clubs and bars, smudges of make-up and balancing heels. Pimps shuffled in doorways, stamped their feet and rubbed their hands, hoping to lure drunken stragglers from the winter chill to a subterranean warmth. Flesh and sex, empty wallets.
I was prey. The lone white man at the end of the night. I brushed off grubby deals on blowjobs and massage, a discount involving two Brazilian girls. I’d almost run the gauntlet when a Nigerian began a different kind of pitch.
“I see you,” he said. “You’re a smart guy, I know. But you think too much. Take a rest, brother.”
I broke my stare and looked over. Parallel scars across his cheeks, a thin moustache that moved as if a separate entity to the rest of his face.
“You know what I know. The universe expanding. Rock and ice. Bits of dust. Dead planets. You too, brother. We made of stars, but we cold and lonely. Strange, no? Strange, yes. Because we don’t need to be shivering, brother. And we both know where we’re never cold.”
I tried to ignore him, but turned to his nodding, smiling face.
“A pussy, brother. All the heat of the sun between a woman’s legs. We spend nine months trying to get out of it, realise the world is a cold, cold mother, and then spend the rest of our life trying to get back in.”
He grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. “A good fuck, brother. Whether you pay for it or not. Because time stops, and the universe is no bigger than your dick.”
I swore at him and crossed over the road.
“I see you,” he shouted. “Dust, brother. You’re no better than me.”
I walked a little more briskly, and then jogged.
**
“Did you have insomnia or something?”
Mazzy slopped across the kitchen in her slippers and swung open the fridge door.
“Insomnia?”
“This morning,” she said. “Like 5am or something. I heard you walking around.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Which is the low fat again?” She was holding up two cartons, thankfully more interested in which milk was low calorie, and not what her father had been up to the night before.
“The one with the cow on.”
She sat down at the table and poured out a bowl of granola. “You don’t look like you did.”
“Look like what?”
“You slept.”
“A few hours.”
Mazzy crunched a mouthful of berries and nuts, and then reached over the table for the coffee.
“Were you drinking?”
“What?”
I’d had a shower, but the vinegary champagne was seeping from my pores.
“I thought it would help me sleep.”
“Help you smell.”
She poured her coffee and spooned in the sugar. I knew she was studying me so avoided her eyes and read the paper.
I met Yamada in the canteen that afternoon. I was definitely hungover, and perhaps he too smelled the alcohol, because he suggested we visit his local bathhouse in Ikegami.
“The water is black, volcanic. Straight from earth’s core.”
A soul rejuvenating sento, washed clean by a spring heated in the broken mantle. It was the perfect tonic to a night out. After a stressful research session watching Russians argue with each other about the most efficient way to cut fifty equilateral triangles in under two minutes, I jammed onto the Yamanote line towards Shinagawa. Whatever aggrandised vision I had of myself, on a rush hour train I was just another commuter bumping through the city. Oblivious to the life beside me, the heat of an unknown body pressed upon my flesh. Yet close enough to feel a heartbeat, a pulse, more intimate than a bad day with an indifferent lover.
By the time I got to Ikegami I was more than ready for a soak and a scrub, to resurrect myself from a Japanese bath. I met Yamada at the station and we walked along suburban back streets to a rather unremarkable looking entrance at the bottom of an apartment block.
“Wait till you see the water,” said Yamada, slipping off his shoes and placing them in a wooden locker. “Even the most luxurious spa doesn’t have the atmosphere of a community bathhouse.”
I parted the door curtain and paid the mama-san. We went through to the changing rooms where naked men sat cooling after their scalding baths.
The moment one enters a sento, time begins to drip. Old and wrinkled bodies wobbled from the steam room to sit on plastic stools, washing and scrubbing before dipping that tentative l
ittle toe. The rhythm of sloshing water poured over heads lathered with soap, echoed about the tiles. A wall divided the male and female section of a bathhouse, and as we washed I could hear women and children chatting on the other side.
“Kimochi,” said Yamada, pouring water over his shoulders.
It did feel good, the only focus our unfettered bodies.
Yamada looked around the sento, the unadorned. “Skinship, ne.”
Skinship, the Japanese term for bonding through communal nakedness, the belief that nudity with your neighbours strengthens local relationships. Watching these private rituals of cleansing unveiled, and noting the absolute lack of shyness in a culture that is notoriously shy, there was a definite fuinki, an atmosphere of collective bathers rather than individuals. While many English still shudder at the thought of being naked in front of friends or family, the apes we have descended from still bathe in groups. Famously the monkey troupes of northern Japan sit in heated pools while snow settles on their heads in icy crowns. Like the cats who decided to stay cats, the monkeys knew well enough not to climb from the water and start wearing clothes.
After scrubbing with soap and a pumice stone, a dip in the simmering jacuzzi, Yamada stepped into the black depths of the volcanic bath.
I put my hand in the oily darkness, watched my fingers vanish. Yamada submerged up to his neck, eyes closed. I followed him into the molten water, each white limb consumed by the dark sump. Then I sat and melted, lost the day and its petty dramas.
I nearly fainted climbing out, but a dousing of cold water brought me round and we sat on a bench in the changing room, my whole body thudding like a giant heart.
“We forget the skin is an organ.” Yamada lowered his mouth to the drinking fountain.
I floated into my clothes, adrift on a post-bath haze, and the jazz muzak, a plaintive saxophone that reverberated around the wooden panels.
We ambled back to Yamada’s along the quiet streets, a full moon with a munificent face floating above the city as if observing its own creation. Silver tiles on a temple roof, power lines looped from pole to pole like spider silk. We passed a cat sitting on a wall, basking in the lunar splendour as if an acolyte called to worship. The whole scene was a fanciful sketch, but here it was in perfect vision. The moon a master artist, and us the fortuitous subjects.
Only when we left the residential streets and came onto the busy road towards Omori, did we need to begin a conversation.
“How’s Mazzy settling in?”
“She loves it.”
Yamada nodded, smiled. “The gaijin honeymoon period.”
“Mine has never ended.”
“Happily married to Japan?”
Perhaps it was the surging afterglow of a volcanic bath. But I did, briefly, entertain the far-fetched idea of finding Kozue and falling in love again. That I lived in a house like Yamada’s. No, that in fact I lived in Yamada’s house, and Mazzy would come and stay and look after our children and fall for Kozue, like I had. And in this fairy tale vision of our shining future the full moon gleamed like mercury every blessed night.
**
I thought the cleansing sento had washed away the base desire, and that the walk back along the quiet streets had revealed the moonlit fantasy.
“Next time you come, maybe I’ll remember more about Kozue.”
However, Mayumi’s words had followed me from The Island. That week at university, either in meetings with my assistants, or setting tasks for our guinea pigs, or when I was at home chatting with Mazzy, the world was enough. Content in my progress, both professional and paternal.
Then I’d get on the train and think of Kozue. The need to find out had become a fever, a sickness that only she could cure.
I resolved to make one last trip to The Island. If nothing came of it I’d end my search for a woman I’d only met a handful of times. This was the logical course of action. I sat with my notebook and wrote down the pros and cons of the quest. Positives included my own closure, or falling in love again when I’d pretty much given up on the idea. The cons were disrupting an exalted memory, upsetting Mazzy, or pushing into what might be a settled life for Kozue. Perhaps I’d discover a terrible truth that I was somehow responsible for or could do nothing to help.
I was still jotting down my thoughts when Mazzy came in late, tired.
“Do you have to watch TV so loud?”
There was a sumo basho on that I was barely following.
“And a good evening to you?”
I snapped shut my notebook. When she tried to shrug off her backpack it caught on her sleeve, and she wriggled violently before swearing and unzipping her coat to let it all drop to the hallway floor.
“Fuck.”
“Mazzy.”
She kicked off her shoes and came into the lounge.
“I’m guessing a bad day?” I switched off the TV and asked her what was wrong.
“Nothing.”
“Yes there is.”
“Shoot me if I go to Baskin Robbins again.”
“The ice cream place?”
She shook her head. Her skin looked puffy, hair greasy. Although I guessed she was pre-menstrual, I certainly wasn’t going to mention my observation. Once a month her mother was capable of murder, and Mazzy had inherited this hormonally powered rage that no words or actions could quell.
“All I wanted was nuts instead of hundreds and thousands. How hard is that?”
“A nut problem?”
“It’s not funny. You should be studying this shit.” She swung open the fridge door and grabbed the block of cheese and cut off a slice. “If I knew how to say it in Japanese, I would have.”
“Say what?”
“That genocide can only happen when people like her follow orders.”
I told her to sit down and talk to me properly. Once she’d filled a bowl with nachos and grated cheese and microwaved it all into a yellow coagulation topped with salsa and a dollop of sour cream, she slouched on the sofa. Legs dangled over the arm, she lifted handfuls of goop to her mouth between telling the story of how she wanted an ice cream sundae slightly different to the menu, and that despite the box of nuts next to the server’s hand any variation from the standard order was, “Muri.”
“Impossible.”
“All she had to do was sprinkle some fucking nuts on the top.”
Instead of explaining that an unswerving compliance to rules, whether social codes or the stipulations of chain restaurants, delivered trains on time and cheap ice cream, I said, “That is fucked.”
Mazzy laughed, and then told me off for swearing before complaining that eating an entire bowl of nachos had made her feel sick.
And just as I would’ve done with her mother, I told her I’d run a bath.
She said, “Thanks, dad,” and checked her buzzing phone. “Mom says, ‘Hi’.”
“That’s funny.”
“Funny?”
“I was just thinking of her.”
“Weird.” She glanced up, a look I thought was a question.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing what?”
I cut short the exchange. Lydia was in the apartment enough already. Whether it was her voice beamed along a fibre optic cable, or her authority in the daily radiation count and what foods to avoid, she was here.
I went into the bathroom and set the temperature, sitting on the edge of the tub and watching water gush from the faucet.
“Bubbles, dad,” shouted Mazzy. “I want a proper bath.”
I poured in the soap and stirred with my hand. My heart thumping at the vision. Terrified to see her, right there. Kozue. Wet and gleaming. That dark, swirling hair, floating around her like the serpents of Medusa.
二十三
MAZZY WOKE UP needing the bathroom. Mouth dry from a bowl of salted chips, the dull ache of sleepi
ng with a full bladder.
What was the time?
She felt around for her phone, couldn’t find it. Then she got out of bed and stepped into the hallway. Her father was in the lavatory, his bedroom door ajar. Laid on his desk was a brand new shirt, his wallet, and a spread of ten thousand yen bills. Mazzy noted the opened pot of styling wax on the dresser just before she heard the latch. Although she had no reason to dart back into her room, she did, waiting behind her door in breath-held silence, listening.
Each of her father’s actions had that deliberate effort to be quiet, and in this effort each sound was all the more conspicuous. She barely heard his bedroom door close. In a flash she was under her covers, feigning sleep.
Five minutes later she listened to her own door brush across the carpet. She remembered pretending to be asleep when she was little, when her father would sit in her room and watch her. She’d tell him that she was okay, that there weren’t any monsters in her closet.
Again, still, he was checking she was in bed.
On hearing the front door click shut, she threw back the covers and pulled on her jeans. She grabbed a hat and a coat and jumped into her shoes, and went out onto the landing. The elevator was descending to the ground floor. Before she hit the call button she imagined the horror if he forgot something and she was standing there when he stepped out. She skipped down the stairwell and bumped open the fire exit, in case the concierge was still on duty.
She watched her father turn from the driveway, then followed him onto the street. If he got in a taxi, she decided, she wasn’t hailing the car behind and uttering the clichéd words. That was beyond curiosity. Insane.
But he didn’t. He walked briskly towards the Azabu crossing, under the elevated highway, and up the hill. Mazzy followed from the opposite side of the road, daring herself to get closer. The streets were quiet, but not empty. A wedding party gathered outside a restaurant, friends posed for pictures with the bride. And of course there were the drunken salarymen in crumpled suits swinging cheap briefcases, there always were.
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