“Play it cool. Shit, the way Asian women are she might be thirty fucking five for all you know.”
Yuki was looking at me through the window, waving. She wasn’t thirty five. I thanked Lenny and hung up. Back in the shop she asked if I was okay, and I feigned the beginnings of a stomach problem, the excuse that would put me to bed early, alone.
三十五
“NO WAY, GIRLS. Off the bus.”
The road manager was English, a veteran of wayward bands and global tours. He took one look at the two of them sitting at the table, the flawless skin and train track braces, and then asked the Japanese driver why the fuck he was letting jail bait groupies on board.
Larissa played the interview card, the lie they’d hatched while waiting, how they needed to question the band for their college newspaper.
The manager laughed. “You are fucking kidding.”
“It’s a project.”
“Let’s go.”
Larissa pleaded, smiled and pouted. Did the thing with her eyes that she practised in the mirror.
“Off.”
He shooed them across the tarmac like scolded cats. As far as the gate that led from the stage door to the car park.
“Shit.” Mazzy looked at Larissa, hoping for a plan. Something.
“Here they come.”
The band came ambling towards the coach. Roadies carrying guitar cases, a security guard keeping the last of the groupies at arm’s length. When Larissa saw two Japanese women climb up the coach steps and walk on board she shouted, “Fuck your music.”
The lead singer turned around. “Don’t hate me, gorgeous.”
“Kiss me an apology.”
“Larissa.”
He was drunk and red faced, a towel dangling around his neck. He took one step off the bus before the road manager had a piece of his shirt and yanked him back as if he were a dog on a lead. “You get soup three times a day in Japanese nick.”
“Bye bye, ladies.” The singer drunkenly waved. “Come back next birthday.” He blew a kiss as the door hissed shut.
Mazzy and Larissa watched the bus pull away, the wheeled party with their idols slipping into the Yokohama dark.
“Fuck.”
Larissa took her jacket back from Mazzy and zipped it to her chin. The other women who’d been waiting had already left.
“Look how late it is.” Mazzy held up her phone.
“So what?” said Larissa. “We’ll stay in a love hotel.”
“A love hotel.”
“They don’t have receptionists. You just walk in and pick a room from a vending machine.”
“Have you stayed in one before?”
“Fucking manager,” said Larissa. “What was his problem?”
Mazzy looked around the empty lot. There was a security guard closing a shuttered garage, locking doors for the night.
Beyond that was a park, a Japanese man sitting on a bench, alone.
三十六
KOJI WALKED BEHIND them into Yokohama. It was cold, and neither of them were wearing winter clothes. He was near enough to see that. When he got too close, and he could hear them talking and smell her perfume, he felt dizzy.
No stars but the neon glare.
No moon.
When they stopped at the Freshness Burger he walked straight past, crossed the road, and doubled back and stood in a phone box where he could see into the restaurant. They ordered and sat at a booth seat by the window. She had a chicken burger and a paper cup of Coke. She tied her hair back to eat, licked her fingers.
Koji saw it as one would a dream. Too fantastic.
And, predictably, the dream turned into nightmare when two American boys got out of a taxi and went inside and took the seat beside hers. The boy with a cap on back to front who said something and made her laugh. The dark haired one with sideburns shaved to a point and a single gold hoop earring.
He ripped off a chunk of doughnut and threw it at his friend. It bounced off his chest and landed on the table.
Mazzy laughed. They all did.
The taller one revealed a shaven head when he took off his cap. He slyly pulled a bottle of vodka from his jacket and handed it over to the friend who poured it into their drinks.
Larissa pouted and laughed with her wide mouth and bright braces.
Mazzy smiled at the man who looked like a pirate.
The one with the crew cut passed Larissa the bottle and she waited for the server to look away before she took a big gulp. Then she passed it to Mazzy who paused and looked again at the dark haired man who said something and shrugged his shoulders.
Then she drank. And then the boys drank, and the girls ate their food and laughed and Koji could see the decision that they’d leave the Freshness Burger together had already been made.
All the way to the door of the nightclub, Koji followed.
He saw the one with the earring put his hand on the small of Mazzy’s back when they went down the steps through the entrance. He waited beside a bicycle parking rack. A police car drove past and he walked around the block and stood again in the same spot watching the queue descend towards the dull bass that pulsed from the basement.
After a while he went into a 7-11 and bought an energy drink. He drank it in one go and then walked back to the club. Before he crossed the road he took the knife from his jacket and palmed it into his sock. Then he went down the steps to the ticket kiosk. Two bouncers, one Japanese, and one a gaijin who patted him down, watched him through the doors into the bar area.
Koji stood in the humid dark. Silhouettes of dancers cut with lights.
He was hot in his jacket. Pushed and nudged by staggering drunks and flailing arms. Then he saw the boy with the cap, walking around the edge of the dance floor with two bottles of beer in each hand. The waiting girls at a table.
They toasted. They drank, luminous teeth in the ultraviolet. Purple skin and flashing laughter.
Koji sat on a low round stool. He watched the dancers, an army of step and sway. When the next song started there was a cheer, and Mazzy and Larissa and the two men leapt into the ring, perfectly in time with the automated routine. Everyone in the club knew the moves.
He wondered who would notice. If he walked into the centre of the dance floor and folded onto his own blade. The blood running out like a ribbon.
Then the song stopped and the girls linked arms and ran giggling to the ladies.
He bent down and pulled the knife from his sock. He thumbed it open and walked between the dancers. Towards the men. Staccato in the strobe. He was one step from their table, one act from the end, when a drunken student crashed into him and clutched at his shoulders for balance. Koji slung him to the floor, and was set upon by his friends.
三十七
I WOKE IN the dead of night, soaked with sweat and tangled in the sheets. Yuki was curled on the other futon, fast asleep. I stood up and slid back the paper screen. A great, snow-muffled silence held the landscape, as if the mountains had been preserved in formaldehyde. I wanted to push open Mazzy’s door, just to check she was safe. That she was okay. But I was in a rented room with a rented woman, company I was charged for by the hour. I picked up my phone and scrolled to her number. Then I thought about how angry she’d be if I woke her at this hour, cursing her nosey father.
I looked at Yuki, head on the pillow. Like a nun in prayer, palms pressed together under her chin.
No innocent dreamer. She was the elfin child from a fable of lies. The changeling nymph, beckoning the traveller through a darkened wood to the poisoned well.
I wanted the morning and its resolutions.
An end.
三十八
“I FEEL WEIRD.”
Larissa was sitting on the toilet, Mazzy leant against the cubicle door.
“Do you have any water?”
�
��What?” Larissa unrolled the paper. “We lucked out meeting these guys.”
“My hands are freezing. Feel.” Mazzy held out her hands to Larissa.
“Why are your hands cold?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
Larissa pulled up her leggings and stood. “Just dance some more.”
They looked in the mirror. A Japanese girl came in and redrew her eyebrows with a pencil. Larissa opened her bag and brushed on another coat of lip gloss. She blew a kiss at Mazzy’s reflection, and then vomited into the sink.
When they came out of the ladies room bouncers were throwing dancers to the floor. Glasses broke and tables turned. The kid with the cap was now hatless and bloody nosed, crawling between people’s legs as if he were looking for a dropped key. The Japanese bouncer was trading punches with the earring pirate, the crack of bone on bone lost in decibels of music and screaming women. When the strobe light flickered it seemed like newsreel from the last century. In one frame the American was a champion pugilist, in the next he was gone, erased by the dark.
Mazzy grabbed Larissa and pulled her towards the exit, up the steps and back into the cold night.
三十九
EVERY FEW STEPS, Koji spat. Stringy globs of red. His tongue found the cut on the inside of his mouth, the tang of blood.
He looked left and right. The dark sea front. Landmark Tower like a pagan monolith. He guessed they would head into town, lights and people. He was walking and watching. He was sure the evening wasn’t over, and when he saw them going down a ramp towards the reception of a love hotel he was certain he was blessed.
The room-vending machine was veiled by a curtain. He could hear them talking about paying and he heard the automatic entrance door click open and then click shut. He pulled back the curtain and noted the illuminated menu of available rooms. He pushed at the entrance door but it was heavy and made of steel. One room on the third floor was still lit. He waited. When the light switched out he walked back up the ramp and around to the rear of the hotel where he squatted between a dumpster and a minivan. He smelled petrol. Rotting food. He watched cockroaches skitter around his feet until he could bear it no more and climbed onto the dumpster and pulled himself up onto the first floor balcony. And then the second and the third.
四十
IN THE MORNING, when Yuki climbed into my futon and pressed her warm body against my back, I immediately got up and dressed. We went downstairs for breakfast in the hotel yukatas, my imaginary stomach bug miraculously improved. The dining area looked onto emerald pine, the frost on the leaves like a dust of icing. Starched white tablecloths blazed with sunlight, and each place was set with a multitude of breakfast paraphernalia. We took our seats and elderly women in kimonos ferried us trays of steaming bowls. Rice and miso soup. Grilled fish and seaweed. A raw egg. Pickles and pulses. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but it seemed of the utmost importance that I finished my food. That I could earn the right to demand an address, Kozue.
On the next table was a foreigner. Scandinavian. Maybe Norwegian. In stilted Japanese he told his partner, a woman twenty years younger than his greying sixty, to order more tea. She dutifully did, calling over the scurrying waitress.
We caught eyes, once. He looked at Yuki, and then at me. Smirking, as if together we shared some victory of age over youth.
Yuki poured my tea, and I noticed she’d taken out her contacts. For the first time I saw the true colour of her iris, a pale, sandy brown. Much lighter than most Japanese.
I reached across and took the pot from her hand, and poured out her cup. She said thank you, and drank with her head down.
She seemed deflated, lost. I’d done nothing untoward. But after breakfast, when I walked out of the hotel room with Kozue’s address scrawled on a menu, I felt like I’d stolen something.
**
Finally, I was going to see Kozue.
I walked from the lobby into the thin, mountain air. In the car park men shovelled grit onto frozen puddles. Water dripped from the eaves of the hotel roof, and a thread of smoke unravelled from the chimney. I felt for the address in my coat pocket and scanned the map the concierge had drawn. Following his pencilled trail, I crunched along gravel paths that cut between the painted shrines. There was snow on the temple steps, a barefoot monk in a cotton robe. Icicles hung like spikes of glass waiting to impale the tourists who clapped their hands and offered prayers, dropping coins through wooden grates and taking photos of the gods carved into the elaborate columns.
It was very quiet beyond the sightseeing spots, and Nikko was any other rural, shrinking town. A decrepit shopping parade, abandoned restaurants, and shuttered souvenir shops stocked with faded postcards and decorative fans. I passed a ghost hotel with cracked window panes, the Vacancy sign an invite for haunting. Across Japan the negative birthrate was steadily decimating populations of their youth, and fittingly, the only other pedestrian was an ancient woman bent in half by her folded back, shuffling along with a bag of vegetables swinging awkwardly against her leg.
By the petrol station, where the concierge had instructed me to cross the road, a uniformed attendant stood rigidly hoping for traffic. Out of courtesy to his patience I waited for a green signal. I turned into a quiet neighbourhood of traditional family houses with large, neat gardens, thriving with well kept plants and manicured trees, a bounty of glowing tangerines.
My nervous, fraught energy, trembling into optimism.
But when I found that the address was a shop selling pottery, I guessed I’d been played.
Again.
I walked up the path and slid back the wooden door, tinkling a small bell. The display area was unstaffed. Shelves of teapots, cups and plates lined the walls.
“Gaijin.”
A small boy stood in the doorway to the workshop. He wore a heavy knit sweater and blue dungarees covered in clay. Beyond the shock of his black hair I could see a potter’s wheel, rows of plates waiting to be fired.
“Konnichiwa.”
“Mama.”
I heard a chair pushed across a stone floor, footsteps. A woman. “I’ll be through in a moment.”
I reached over to a shelf and picked up a sake jug. When I felt the sloping contours, I knew that it was hers.
She appeared in the doorway, a passing glance before she returned to wiping her hands clean with a towel.
Before she realised who’d walked into her shop.
“Ben.”
I sat in a small conservatory at the back of the house, overlooking a lively stream twinkling with sunlight. There was a roughly hewn easel in the corner, the worn frame splashed with fading colours. Kozue carried in an electric bar heater and turned it towards where I sat on a wooden chair.
“I knew you’d walk in here one day.”
She went out to fetch us coffee and her son came into the room with a toy truck and an ambulance. He gave me the ambulance, and when Kozue came back in I was on the floor pushing it along an imaginary highway.
“Akira likes you.” She put the drinks down on a trestle. “He’s usually shy.” She brushed the hair from his face.
I got off my knees and sat down on the chair. And apologised.
“For what?”
“I shouldn’t have come here.”
She picked up a spoon and dug into the sugar. “Two?”
“You remember?”
“I’m surprised you have any teeth left.” She stirred the coffee and passed over the mug. “How did you find me?”
I explained the club, the contact information I got from Yuki. I didn’t add that she was waiting in a hotel around the corner.
Kozue shook her head. “No one ever leaves.”
I sipped the coffee, said thank you. She’d barely aged. Fine lines around her eyes. Wrinkles from smiling. A calmness to her manner, no longer the restless woman.
I was about t
o apologise, again, for connecting her to a past she’d tried to forget.
“I remember everything,” she said. “That moment in the bar, walking onto the street because I knew you’d follow me. Every single detail.”
I didn’t need to ask if Akira was her son, but I did want to know about his father.
“He’s a good man. From Okinawa.”
“And he’d be okay with me sitting in your house?”
She shrugged. “He’s in a quarry buying clay. He won’t be back for hours. All we’re doing is having coffee, right?”
I nodded, drank. I looked at the bare walls of her workshop, and asked if she still painted.
“I stopped.”
“And started sculpting?”
Akira climbed onto her knee, nuzzling under her arms.
“I’d still be hostessing if I hadn’t created a name worth collecting.”
“I searched for you and nothing came up.”
“I invented a person. A new self. A new name. The space I created from was true, otherwise the art wouldn’t have meant anything.”
She smoothed Akira’s fringe, stroking her son like a cat. She explained how she’d bought her way out of the yakuza, her father’s debts, by selling paintings.
“I used to draw faces when I was girl. Detailed portraits. Then I started hostessing, and the portraits reflected what I thought of people. That essence became something darker. I was drawing faces, but with monsters behind the masks.”
Akira repeated the word monster. She kissed his head, told him he was a good boy.
“Strangely enough, the art world wasn’t so different from hostessing. I could work a room and name my price at a gallery launch.”
I looked out of the window, through the wooden frame of the empty easel. The sun was setting behind jagged peaks, as if shapes cut from black paper.
“I shouldn’t be here.”
“You are. And you were. You got into a car with no idea of where you were going and ended up in my apartment.”
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