Tokyo

by Nicholas Hogg

  Until her father neared Roppongi the pursuit was fun. Then there were women in doorways. Chinese women, Mazzy guessed, in leather boots and quilted ski jackets, beckoning men downstairs to a basement brothel. They petitioned the night owls, “Massage ikaga desu ka?” and stared at her when she walked past. She’d been entertaining the thought that her father was on a date, and that she might spy on their rendezvous, and how that would be enough for her to go home feeling satisfied, rather than guilty, for following him.

  Now she feared that she’d watch him descend one of these staircases. What then? But he walked past the prostitutes and took the backstreet that looped by the Hard Rock Cafe onto Roppongi dori. She might have followed him further, but two men eating kebabs called out to her.

  “Hello darling,” said one man, spilling salad down his shirt.

  “Please, marriage,” said the other.

  It was dark, and two shadows were shouting at her.

  She turned and headed home. Fear and shame. The thought that she wasn’t ready for the world, and that she needed to do something about it.

  二十四

  KOJI DIDN’T FOLLOW her father. He already knew where he was going. He’d followed him before, all the way to the door of a hostess club. Another foreign pig crushing a Japanese flower.

  Koji watched him turn up the hill towards Roppongi, and then he stepped from the doorway so he could see the reception, the concierge. Forever on guard. Koji had noted his shifts, that he hadn’t taken a day off in three weeks. Company man. No movement unless it was decreed in the company guidebook. Koji knew where he lived, had seen his one room apartment. In this dutiful employee he saw his old, pathetic self. A man who only acted on the will of another.

  Now Koji was the auteur of his own fate.

  And hers.

  He was waiting for the concierge to leave the counter. He knew he had menial tasks to complete, taking out the garbage or checking the laundry. Koji planned to walk through the empty foyer and up the staircase, all the way to her apartment.

  Then she threw open the fire exit doors and jogged down the driveway, zipping up her jacket.

  Koji ducked behind the gate and waited for her to go by. Then he followed. His stomach cartwheeling. The three of them heading towards the Roppongi neon. Koji wanted her to know what he did about her father. That he paid for sex. That he left his daughter alone to haunt the rooms of puppet women.

  There were no saints.

  She could see her father, and Koji could see her. They went past restaurants and bars, tables lit with candles and hollow chatter. Waxen faces, melting. Your life is what you remember. Koji could recall every second of his existence since the flight from Los Angeles.

  She was on the dark street behind Roppongi dori, near the pool hall, when two foreign men shouted across the road. Leered and cat-called. Scared, she turned and walked away, hurrying back to the apartment, as Koji reached into his pocket for the sharp metal.

  二十五

  I WALKED INTO The Island, two hours after the vision of Kozue in the bath.

  “Konbanwa, Ben san.”

  I hadn’t even told the Japanese doorman my name, and he knew who I was.

  “Dozo,” he waved me towards the cloakroom. Once again, his ghost touch slipping the jacket from my shoulders.

  Then the mama-san appeared, as if materialised from a haze of cigarette smoke. She wore a navy blue dress covered in sequins, and her glittered attire matched the sparkle of her smile.

  I looked around the club for Mayumi. Before I could request her the mama-san had called two other women from the counter. Akemi, the champagne pourer from my last visit, and another woman called Kaori, a buxom and flouncy hostess, who immediately led us over to a table, her breast tactically pressed against my arm.

  When I got the menu, and again read the extravagant price of the drinks, I asked Akemi to call over the mama-san.

  “Daijobu?” asked Kaori.

  “Mayumi, mitai,” said Akemi, sitting back, making little attempt to hide a feeling of rejection.

  The mama-san came over, and asked if everything was to my liking. Of course, I’d shown my cards, the reason I was here. In protracted Japanese she explained that Mayumi was unavailable but ‘probably’ available if I wanted to sing karaoke with her in the private room.

  “Kaori and Akemi can join you until she’s free.”

  I nodded, and wondered what kind of billing would come up on my credit card statement for the ‘Extras.’

  The ladies escorted me through the club area towards the rear. I took surreptitious glances as we walked, scanning the tables. The only face I caught eyes with was the Japanese man I’d seen with the blonde Russians. He was leant back in the seat, twirling a coin along his fingers like a magician, seemingly bored, or angered, by the woman beside him.

  Mayumi.

  I’d requested his hostess. Great. My second visit here and I was annoying the resident mobster.

  I looked away from his cold stare and pushed open the door to our lounge, a low lit den of a room, with a large leather sofa, a karaoke screen in the corner and two microphones on the coffee table.

  Kaori sang first, a Japanese number about sun and love. Either she was drunk, or quite possibly on cocaine, as she had that hyperactivity and jerky concentration that blockading the dopamine transmitter inevitably causes. While she pranced and wailed, Akemi slipped her hand around my waist.

  This was not what I’d come for. Each time I asked about Mayumi, I was told, “Soon,” and encouraged to order another round of drinks. After a melody of Japanese pop and a Beatles favourite, which I’d only sung so Kaori didn’t caterwaul again, the ladies abruptly stood. Mayumi was at the door with another woman, Yuki, a feline beauty who seemed barely old enough to be working as a hostess.

  Mayumi was all smiles, as was Yuki, the two of them taking a seat either side of me. I ordered what I hoped would be my last ever round of drinks at this money pit, and tipsily sang Light My Fire, the karaoke standard I’d once crooned for Kozue in Hiroshima.

  I was applauded, and certainly expected to be if I was financing my own fan base. Then I sat down and got on with the business of finding out if Mayumi knew anything or not.

  “After you left, I remembered her.” She lit a cigarette, took a breath and blew out a stream of violet smoke, with no hurry to tell me anything in a room that charged by the hour. “And I realised that Yuki and her had been good friends.”

  I looked over to Yuki. Her blue contacts glowed. Despite her youth she already seemed to have the guile of an experienced companion.

  “Is she still a hostess?”

  Yuki smiled, shook her head. “Even if you finish working, you’re always a hostess.”

  Mayumi laughed, agreed. “What man doesn’t need his ego massaged.”

  They giggled together, and then supposed too that I was one of these men, and quickly replaced their hands on my knees.

  We drank and sang some more. Before I had to order another refill I tried for details on Kozue, and asked Yuki if they kept in touch.

  “I think I have her number.” She sipped her champagne. “In my old phone.”

  “But we can’t give out numbers,” said Mayumi.

  “Sou desu ne,” agreed Yuki.

  “Not in here, anyway.”

  The women looked to each other, the telepathy of hostessing. Yuki said, “You can have my number though, and maybe we can meet. Outside The Island.”

  Progress. I thought. Yuki took an eye-liner pencil from her purse, wrote her number on the back of a receipt and tucked it into my shirt pocket. “I like yakitori if you want to take me somewhere.”

  Mayumi sang one more song, an unexpectedly moving enka number about a woman who falls in love with a kamikaze pilot. Then I made a move to pay my bill. Once again I walked past the surly Japanese patron at the corner table. Unne
rvingly, he watched me through the smoke. Like a man who knew the last thought in my head as I dropped off to sleep each night.

  While the mama-san totted up my bill, I asked Mayumi about her friend.

  “Who?”

  “The Japanese guy you were sitting with.”

  “Oh, just a regular, that’s all.” She shrugged her shoulders, passed off my question. I didn’t need Lenny’s body language skills to know he was more than that.

  When I looked up from signing the receipt, Yuki was sliding on to the chair beside him. She nodded and poured his drink, and then leant over to light his cigarette.

  二十六

  THE MORNING AFTER Mazzy followed her father into Roppongi she checked his room as if she were his mother, not his daughter. His clothes piled on the floor. Notes and coins scattered across his desk. He woke up and caught her peeking in, and she quickly said she’d make him breakfast.

  “What a treat.”

  She studied him sitting up in bed, examined his face for details of the previous evening.

  “Okay?”

  “You want French toast?”

  “Perfect.”

  She made him French toast and they sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee. She knew something about him now, but she wasn’t sure what it was. So they ate breakfast and listened to the radio. He only looked up from the paper when there was news about a stabbing in Roppongi, two Belgian men, one in critical condition.

  “The only dodgy place in the country,” he said. “I don’t want you going out there.”

  She was embarrassed by what she knew.

  “Ever.”

  By his warning.

  “Okay.”

  “Even in the daytime.”

  So I don’t catch you there? That’s what she wanted to say. It was all she could think about for the next three days, whether she was on the train to school or daydreaming in class.

  二十七

  THREE NIGHTS AFTER Yuki popped her phone number into my pocket, I took her for a drink beyond the mirrored walls of The Island.

  We met in a smoky izakaya under the arches at Yurakacho, one of the drinking dens burrowed into the brickwork beneath the train line. There were booth seats at the back, where I could sit and see the rest of the bar, who was coming through the door.

  When Yuki did arrive, perfumed and mini-skirted, I was glad the shadows kept the watching eyes from us. Although the Japanese customers barely noticed a man with a woman half his age, I knew that other foreigners would see through my chest with x-ray vision, my hollow heart.

  She sat in the seat by my side rather than across the table, a knee immediately resting against my leg. I began the evening like a social worker, asking concerned questions about her family, how she got into hostessing. When I asked what part of Japan she was from, she said, “All over,” and told me that after catching her mother reading her diary she’d ripped out the pages and burned them.

  And then she left home and ran away to work in a nightclub.

  “Tokyo is the best city in Japan.” She pushed away the mugs of icy beer I’d ordered and asked for a glass of rum and coke.

  I ordered a new drink, along with skewers of chicken parts, and began the pursuit for Kozue, asking Yuki if she’d seen her recently.

  “Hmm, not for a while.”

  Yuki downed her rum and coke, and then ordered another from the passing waiter. As she hadn’t really answered my direct question, I made some idle chit chat about karaoke songs and food. It was tough going, so I brought the conversation back to Kozue. “Do you know if she’s married?”

  Yuki shrugged her shoulders. She grabbed a skewer and pulled off a glazed spring onion with her teeth. Above our heads another train shuttled along the rails, vibrating the light fittings and rippling the beer in my glass.

  “I think she’s retired from hostessing.”

  Her blue contacts had the aquamarine of a swimming pool, and I had to keep myself from thinking that it wasn’t just the lenses that were fake.

  “Do you have her number?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe. I couldn’t find my old phone.”

  I wondered if she’d even met Kozue. A blunt interrogation would get me nowhere, so I told her that her blue contacts suited her, and then asked more about the diary.

  “What exactly did you burn?”

  She smiled, narrowed her eyes, and again became that feline hostess. “Sekkusu.”

  I took a skewer and chewed gristly meat, forcing down a rubbery mouthful before I asked Yuki what I was eating.

  “Chicken skin.”

  I put the half finished skewer back on the plate. Before I snapped at the lack of information, Yuki sensed her moment. “I know where she lives, though.”

  Instead of clumsily jumping on this news, I held back the tingling thought of walking up to Kozue’s house and knocking on the door. I flirted with Yuki. I indulged her vanities, hair and clothes, and after a couple more beers she said we should go somewhere and relax.

  When she ran a hand along my thigh, I knew I had to backtrack from going to a love hotel, and lifted away her palm.

  “You don’t like me,” she sulked. “I want someone to hold.” She finished another rum and coke, and pushed the empty glass across the table.

  After settling the bill, we walked outside and I hailed a taxi to Shibuya. Yuki made one last attempt to get me into a love hotel, saying that she could massage my shoulders if I was stressed, and that she knew ‘special tricks.’ When I said, “Next time,” she abruptly jumped out of the cab and stomped up the hill.

  I quickly paid the driver and caught her up. She said, “If you’re not going to be company, then you have to buy me some.”

  Well aware of the spectacle we were creating, I trailed her clip-clopping heels along the narrow alleys off the main road. I put my hand on her shoulder. I apologised. She stuck out her bottom lip, then took my sleeve and marched us to a pet shop. The window was crowded with toy-sized dogs in plastic pens. Chihuahuas and Dachshunds, yipping and wrestling with cuddly toys.

  “Maybe if I had a pet, a cute dog, I’d be less lonely.”

  I had a feeling where this was going. And so be it, the means to an end. If I wasn’t paying for sex, I was paying for a puppy. I knew the scam, that the puppy I bought would be returned to the shop later, and the refund pocketed by Yuki.

  She tapped on the glass of a chocolate brown poodle. Tongue and tail wagging, it reared up and begged for release. The pet shop worker swiftly read the situation, the gaijin and his rented girl, and sprung the poodle into Yuki’s arms. The dog licked her face and trembled with excitement.

  “How cute. Kawaii. I want her. It is a her?”

  The staff member would’ve snipped it there and then if it had clinched the sale.

  Before whipping out my credit card I pulled Yuki and the puppy aside. “If I buy the dog, next time we meet Kozue.”

  Yuki looked up and studied my face. A serious thought made her appear years beyond her age, not a young woman juggling a poodle.

  “Daijobu,” she said. “I’ll take you, don’t worry.”

  I put Yuki and the dog into a taxi, and then waved them off into the night. I pictured the dog watching the city through the window, dumb, helpless, before the taxi looped back around to the pet shop and it was shut back into its plastic box.

  二十八

  INSTEAD OF REVISING for an exam Mazzy had sung herself hoarse in a Shibuya karaoke box, sharing a peach chu-hai with Larissa that Legolas had ordered, the barman equating height with age and not challenging him for ID.

  Mazzy had drunk before, at a sleepover in San Diego. Watching the harbour lights wobble as if she were standing on the deck of a ship. This time she felt giggly and light-headed, not ready to go home and feed her father information about the evening.

  After parting wi
th Larissa and Legolas at the ticket barrier she wandered the sodium lit parades, the subterranean warrens of bars and restaurants, the record stores and book shops,the Don Quixote store with its rows of sex toys shelved next to teddy bears and Hello Kitty slippers. There and then, she decided to challenge her father on his midnight escapade to Roppongi. What was he up to sneaking out of the house?

  However, her first question would be about that very night in Shibuya.

  About the high-heeled girl jumping from a taxi in stalled traffic, leaving the door wide open.

  How he got out of the very same car.

  Her father.

  Mazzy had stood on the pavement and watched, unsure of what she was witnessing. The giraffe-like gait of him striding between the cars. How he caught the girl and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “What the fuck?”

  She said the words out loud. And meant them. She followed him through the crowds, up the hill past noodle shops and hair salons, before turning onto the back streets. Love hotels, garbage bins from restaurants. She was that close she could hear him talking to her in Japanese.

  She wanted to go up and take his hand off her shoulder. Or she wanted to punch him in the face. She wasn’t sure which.

  She was definitely going to do something when they went into a pet shop. Toy-sized dogs jumped around in plastic boxes in the window. Mazzy hid behind a vending machine and watched the girl take out a puppy and cradle it like a baby. Then she watched her father talk to the girl, and look at the girl. With intensity, threat. It was a look he saved for her when she was in trouble.

  When they came out of the pet shop with the puppy in a carrier, her father looked left and right. Not at his daughter, shrinking into the dark space between two thrumming refrigerators.

  Then the girl got into a taxi, and waved. And her father watched the taxi drive away as if it contained everything he owned.