Lost Girls and Love Hotels

by Catherine Hanrahan

  Sometimes I end up in Shimokitazawa. Wander the narrow little streets around the station. Go from secondhand clothing shop to café to secondhand clothing shop. The Japanese in Shimokitazawa are a bit looser than the rest of the Tokyoites. The men in straw hats and Hawaiian shirts. Girls in dreadlocks and clothes from India. Smelling of incense and escape. I stay until I’m wired on coffee and the jazz clubs open up. Blow half a week’s wages on the table charge and ten-buck beers. Sway a little to the whine of the saxophone.

  Other days, it’s out into the suburbs, to the rent-a-dog park, where I pay thirty bucks to lead around a confused-looked beagle for two hours. Watch housewives freak out when their rent-a-dog assumes the pooping posture. They lay out a neat square of paper towels on the grass and then wipe the poor beast’s bum with wet-naps. The whole surreal spectacle of it inevitably leads me to the nearest bar. After a few glasses, I start to concoct drunken schemes to liberate the rent-a-dogs. Balaclava and ninja slippers. Wire clippers and Milk Bones. Dogs following me around the city, like a weak-livered Moses.

  Today I’m in Jimbocho, the book district. The shops overflow with words—there are comic-book stores, cookbook stores, shops with musty ancient tomes, others with hardcore porn proudly displayed, unabashedly browsed. The pedestrians in Jimbocho seem uniformly beige as they wind through the narrow streets, pausing at the little tables set up outside the storefronts, looking for stories, waiting to be colored in like paint-by-numbers.

  I find a shop that sells English books, ride the phone booth–sized elevator up six floors, and lose myself in the stacks. And there is Kazu. Crouched down in the classics section, his head turned at an awkward angle, reading the spines. His shoes are shiny. His feet small. Through the neatly pressed white linen of his shirt, I can see the faint purple outline of his tattoos, the bulge and twitch of the muscle that runs down his side. Something about his body, the brutal bulk of his neck, his legs, emanates violence. But his movements, the way he runs his hands over the books—slowly, as though he might wake them—is delicate, almost girlish.

  He’s in my territory, surrounded by English. I feel emboldened, and walk over to him, stand so close that his knee nearly brushes my shin.

  “Remember me?” I ask, conjuring up the words from my throat. They come out perfectly, a rough pull to them, a challenge in the tone.

  Kazu looks up the length of me, takes his time, lingers for a moment at my mouth, my eyes. Time bends for me, lets me feel a tiny fissure in my chest. Opening. A place to crawl into and rest. I want to fuck him right here, with Henry James and Jane Austen watching.

  “She never told me your name.” Kazu stands, brushes some invisible dust from his pant legs. “Honestly speaking, she never told me her name.”

  “I’m Margaret.”

  “Ashita Kazuyuki. Please call me Kazu.”

  “You speak English well.”

  “Iya, iya. Just I’m studying. More to learn.”

  “And you read.”

  “If time is okay.”

  Two high school boys in high-collared military-style uniforms appear at the end of the aisle. They take one look at us, a blue-haired gaijin and a gangster, turn on their heels and walk away quickly.

  “What do you look for?” Kazu asks. His cheeks are two perfect circles of red.

  What do I look for? Calm. Home. Good coffee. Happiness. Oral sex. Oblivion.

  “Fiction,” I say. “Something dark.”

  “Can I suggest?”

  “Please.”

  “Abe Kobo no Woman and Sand.”

  “Woman and Sand?”

  “Story is a man is prisoner in the sand hole with the woman. He is digging every day by force. Digging, digging. He must dig or the hole will fill up. He tries to escape and can’t escape. Hates the woman, then loves the woman.”

  “So what happens?”

  “He can escape, but finally he stays in the sand hole. Digging.”

  “He stays for love?” I moan.

  “No, for digging.”

  I hear the buzz of the fluorescent lights. Is it louder than normal? For some reason, in Japan, I always expect things to happen like they do in cartoons, for giant red hearts to erupt from people’s chests, for connect-the-dot lines to appear in the air when lovers’ eyes meet. I could swear that Kazu is reading my mind. A smile creeps onto his face. “I would like to introduce you to a good sushi shop.” He says words quickly, like the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun. “The shop is near to here.”

  Kazu is a careful driver. He keeps both hands on the wheel and ignores his mobile phone that rings and bleeps and blips. The car smells new. Kazu smells like apples. I bite my fingernails and wonder where we’re going.

  I haven’t been in a car since the night I arrived in Tokyo. A cab from the airport. In the plane, I took a sleeping pill, washed it down with three glasses of white wine, a beer, and two cognacs. Eight hours later, I woke up to the final-descent announcement, swollen feet, and a voice inside my head. The voice said, You are such a fuckup.

  The voice is the smart me. The me that I’ve pushed farther and farther back into my head, the me that I’ve ignored, abused, neglected, subdued with pills, shushed with booze, violated with bad sex with worse men. The voice is pissed off. It wakes up before me, lies in wait, pounces on me in the rough space between sleep and waking, when I’m vulnerable.

  You are nothing.

  I was wedged in the middle seat between an old Japanese couple. It was two hours into the flight before I realized they were together, that I was separating them. The old woman huddled next to the window like a cornered animal. Her husband pounding whiskey in the aisle seat. They hadn’t asked me to switch seats, had hardly spoken to one another. In retrospect, I remembered sad little glances that passed between them, over me. I felt a soft twinge of embarrassment, a tiny whoosh of compassion, then I quickly switched to anger. They were scared of me, scared to try to communicate with me. They were socially awkward, isolationist island people with a fear of everything different, and damned if I was moving for them. I wasn’t sure whom I hated more, them or me.

  You’ll just wander from place to place, hoping the next plan will work out.

  The plane lurched and bumped as it descended. The old lady tossed her hand across my lap and grabbed her husband’s arm. He shot her a look. Embarrassment. Gave me a little series of tiny head-bows and pushed his wife’s arm back.

  The wandering will last but the hope won’t.

  The old man stared out the window as the plane breached the cloud cover. Tokyo appeared as a constellation of lights below us.

  It’s getting late.

  The wings of the plane seesawed as the lights coalesced into a blinding neon blur. The old lady grabbed her armrests.

  Wake up!

  The plane was almost down. I was almost in Japan. I could start anew, couldn’t I? I put my hand over the woman’s. Squeezed. She flipped her hand over and squeezed back. The wheels touched down. Bump. Bump. The woman sucked in her breath. I closed my eyes. The voice shut up.

  “Kazu, where are we going?”

  “Ginza,” he says. “Very good shop. Good sushi.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Food and communication, ne?” He looks over at me, squints. “Nervous?”

  “Not really.”

  “Good. Never worry. Just eating. Talking. No funny business.”

  I laugh at his earnest expression, the way his eyes dart from the road to me to the road to me.

  “What? No hanky-panky either?”

  “Sushi,” he says. “Beer if you want.”

  I smile at him. Cross and recross my legs.

  Kazu looks over at me. “What is hanky-panky?”

  “It’s like sex, but not quite.”

  “Oh! Hanky-panky. Okay. My baby does hanky-panky. Always I wondered. What is the hanky-panky? Sex but less, ne? I understand.”

  We’re stopped at the huge intersection at Ginza—land of the ten-dollar cup of tea, the thousand-dollar-a-bo
ttle hostess bar, a never-never-land where everyone pretends the bubble never burst, where salarymen still brag that the United States is Japan’s farm and Italy is its shopping mall. Through the tinted windows of Kazu’s car, Ginza looks a little tired, slumping a little under the pressure of false promises.

  Kazu drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “Do you want hanky-panky?” he asks.

  The sushi shop is down a lantern-lined alleyway, tucked away from the main street. An oasis in a desert of neon. I feel like a trespasser going through the curtained entrance. The sushiya-san, a middle-aged man with Popeye forearms, jumps a little when he sees me, jumps a little more when he sees Kazu. They exchange a trill of words, do the requisite deep-bowing contest, and the man disappears into the back.

  The room is sleek and minimal—pale wood and paper screens—everything highlighting the absence of decoration. We are the only customers. I feel like I clash with the room, that I’m at once overdressed and underdressed, shabby, awkward. Foreign. I turn to Kazu. “You know, I’ve lived in Japan for three months and I’ve never been to a love hotel.” A lie, but a convenient one.

  He calls out to the sushiya-san. Turns to me. “Takeout ne?”

  Behind the wide, five-pronged intersection in Shibuya, steps away from the hoards of shopping teenagers and somnolent commuters, lies Love Hotel Hill, where exploitation and promiscuity are cute and charming. The hotels, with their Disneyesque exteriors, their names like Belle Chateau and Hotel Shindarella, advertise the rates on backlit signs all along the street—the three-hour screw and a shower is euphemized as a “rest,” while the all-night fuckfest is a “stay.” These are places where discretion is assured by the absence of human staff, where salarymen take their teenage girlfriends, housewives meet their English teachers for extra instruction, where teenage couples lose their virginity in elaborately themed rooms. Kazu seems to have a favorite hotel. He goes straight for it.

  We choose our room from a machine displaying photos. Everything is automatic in these places. No front desk. No prying eyes of other humans. Just an empty lobby and a machine. No embarrassing credit card charges. Cash only, and only after the fact, through a vacuum chute in the room. Trust and deceit. Passion and mechanical efficiency. The wonderful yin and yang of the love hotel.

  Kazu and I scan the photos of the rooms. There are around three dozen of them. Most look just like regular hotel rooms, except for the row of theme rooms on the fourth floor.

  “Do you like swimming?” Kazu asks. “This room has a small pool.”

  “I like fucking.”

  “You are very honestly speaking girl.”

  “I like the Outer Space Room,” I say, pointing to the photo of the space pod bed. I’m an alien. I’d like to feel weightless.

  “Ii na! Good choice.” He pushes a button, and a trail of tiny lights on the floor lead us to our room, to our little pod, unlocked and waiting for us.

  Kazu insists on taking a bath before we get down to business.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, fanning himself with his hands. “I’m dirty.”

  He runs the bath and fusses over me, pointing out the features of the room. The television, the vending machine offering beer, green tea, and novelty condoms.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks. “We can order food. Japanese noodle? Pizza? Please tell me.” I like the way he says pizza—peeza.

  “We have sushi, Kazu.”

  While he bathes, I get naked and watch the news. The dead girl’s face appears behind the stiff, somber newscaster who trills a flurry of strange words, hardly moving his lips. The screen flickers, making it seem as if the dead girl is winking at me, her queer grin stretching back into a conspiratorial smile.

  I fiddle with the music. There are one hundred and twenty-two channels. I scan through the Japanese pop, hip-hop, rock, Euro-beat, Indian sitar, Swiss yodeling, finally settling on some U2 covers sung in Mandarin.

  Kazu appears, accompanied by a whoosh of steam. The dead girl is still there—the news clip seems to go on forever—mocking us. Kazu goes to the TV and bangs at two or three buttons until the screen goes black. He stands there in his short white bathrobe and slippers.

  He turns and looks at me, sitting cross-legged on the bed. Naked. Suddenly I feel undressed. Feel the atmosphere against my skin.

  His face changes suddenly, from shyness through reticence to something almost cold. He smiles. I’m hot. I lie back on the bed, cross my legs, stretch my arms over my head to the silver padded headboard.

  “Maybe I’m a bad man, ne? How do you know?” He crawls onto the bed, over me, and pushes my legs apart with his knee. His hand goes to my neck, touching me lightly, surveying me. “How do you know?”

  For a moment, I imagine that the dead girl spent her last “rest” in a room like this. No, I tell myself. The body. How would they get the body out? I think of the elevator. Kazu’s lips are on my chin, tracing my jawline. The elevators don’t stop at other floors. They are always yours alone. His robe is open and he’s on me. The best way to warm up a person with hypothermia is skin-against-skin contact. I know this. From somewhere. There must be video cameras. In the halls. The empty halls. In the lobby. The unpeopled lobby. If there weren’t cameras, it would be dangerous. Privacy is an illusion—it’s a door that looks like a part of a wall, behind which a middle-aged man sits and watches monitors, collects thousand-yen notes that the customers send down the vacuum chutes to pay. Privacy is always better as an idea than a reality—if we weren’t being watched, excitement would ebb, panic would slide in. If we weren’t being watched, what good would life be?

  I put my hand on Kazu’s neck, nestle my fingers into the depression at the base of his skull, pull him closer, and raise my hips against his. The bed is like an egg, split in two, the top suspended from the ceiling and lined with silvery mirrors that give distorted, wavy reflections. Kazu pins my arms back. Fear is in the room, like white noise.

  Be careful, my inner voice says quietly.

  Immortality is not an option, I answer back.

  “It’s your eyes,” I tell Kazu. There is something almost feminine about them. I take the kind saucers of black-brown as a sign. This one’s not going to hurt me. Not this one. Not Kazu. I keep looking at his eyes—trying to reduce the lingering fear to nothing. We’re lying under the sheets, legs knotted together. I glow white next to him.

  “Nani?”

  “I know you’re not bad from your eyes.”

  “Ehhh? Just black eyes. Japanese eyes. No meaning.”

  “Can you hand me my smokes?”

  “Bad for health,” he says, making a clucking sound with his tongue. “Anata deshiou—you have strange eyes.”

  “Round ones. Come on. They’re on the bedside table. Hand me my lighter too.”

  He reaches over, plucks a Marlboro from the pack, puts it in my mouth, and flicks the lighter. Smoke curls up, hovers blue against the mirrored egg. I look down at my body. Skinny and white. Somewhere between boyish and pretty. I do not look after my pubic hair. I’ve always worn my puffy untrimmed bush with an absurd sense of pride, a big fuck-you to sexual mores and aesthetic salons.

  Kazu takes the cigarette out of my hand and crushes it in the ashtray. “Ninety minutes. Sleeping time.”

  “I should go,” I say. I’ve had sex with innumerable guys, but I’ve never slept with one. The intimacy of it seems inappropriate. Like giving a waiter a good-bye hug.

  “You are tired,” Kazu says. He brushes my bangs off my forehead. “Please.”

  A little argument rages in my head. My head feels heavy on the pillow. Kazu assumes the fetal position. My little voice says: Do not spoon him. Leave now. I turn to crawl out of the bed, but stop. Find a compromise. I lie on my side, my back against his like a mirror. The warmth of it. Sleep yanking at me. My little voice chiding me drowsily.

  When I wake up, Kazu is getting dressed.

  “Time,” he says. His movements are sharp and precise. “Better to leave by separate ways.”


  “Okay.” I’m searching for something to say, but my vocabulary has been reduced to pathetic clichés. Will you call me? Can I see you again? Is everything okay? I imagine that I’m a doll—the kind who chirps recorded phrases when you pull the cord on her back. I’m the vulnerable postcoital girl doll. Pull my string.

  Kazu picks up his gold rings and slips them on his fingers one by one, grabs his mobile phone. “Your number. Please teach me,” he says.

  I tell him the number. He kisses me softly, on my forehead, and leaves. As he walks out, his gait changes. I can’t decide whether he loosens or stiffens, but the gentleness retreats.

  I breathe a little. Lie back and look at myself in the mirror, my hair splayed out like a halo on the pillow, my body compartmentalized by the various mirrors. I feel like I must be looking at someone else—that the breast here, knee there, square of white skin, outline of ribs, the foot that looks lifeless and rubbery—these parts can’t be me, can’t be put together into the somebody that I was this morning.

  PART TWO

  The Beginning of a New Era

  When I get to the bar, Ines is already there, already half-cut, flirting with Jiro, who looks scared like a cornered animal. I haven’t showered, and the heat of the room enlivens my just-been-fucked musk. I take a deep inhale. Ines gives me an up-and-down look as I enter. “You’ve been deflowered.”

  “Once more for old times,” I say with a toss of my hair. There’s an empty glass waiting for me. I fill it from the big bottle of Kirin, and marvel at the beauty of Sunday evening drinks. They are the same—the feeling is the same—in every country I’ve drunk in. Sunday evenings are a time when we savor each moment, turn our backs defiantly to the white crest of Monday’s looming tsunami. “I don’t think I was ever truly flowered. How could you tell?”

  “Your makeup looks like shit. Who was it?”

  “Kazu. Your shady tattooed boy.” I know that Ines won’t care. She is scrupulous when it comes to nonattachment. A bedroom Buddhist. For her, desire—at least the complicated emotional kind—is the root of all suffering.