Harajuku Sunday

by S. Michael Choi

  "So Ritchie, our meeting today is in many ways completely unnecessary, but I wanted there to be open and honest communication. I don't want you to feel that you aren't a part of the process."

  "Okay."

  "If you're feeling uncomfortable about certain developments, I do want you to know that your rights and prerogative are respected, and nobody is being allowed to just make claims that are accepted without due consideration for your assessment about things."

  "Sir, is this about the police cars in my neighborhood a few days ago?"

  Fannet raises an eyebrow, keeping his cards very close.

  "You saw police cars?"

  "Japanese police vehicles right in front of my apartment."

  "But nothing happened, right? Nobody's booked you or accused you for anything."

  "I don't need even blue lights."

  Fannet continues to look me in the eye. Maybe just because I don't really have any aces up my sleeve, I accept the gambit.

  "Look, Mr. Fannet, let's skip the bluffing: I live in Kita-Shinjuku. To get there, I need to pass through Shinjuku Station. I stop into the station bookstore almost every week. The bookstore owner will back me up. I mean, go get the station camera if you don't believe me, because she's not saying that I actually approached her, is she?"

  Fannet looks out the window. His heaps and heaps of papers on his desk each topped by dark binders. The New York accent now seem to intensify ever so slightly.

  "Ritchie, there are relationships involved which bring their own agendas… "

  "But you need to rely on actual evidence. If I run into Dominique by complete coincidence and I don't touch a hair on her head, then how does that all add up to bringing the cavalry out?"

  A slightly mollifiying voice: "You may have heard that a Chinese national has been arrested…"

  "So I've heard. But if he pulled out a knife out on somebody, of course he needs to be charged on those charges."

  Fannet nods his head. "Look here, there's no need to worry. Anyway, we understand Mr. Le is of foreign citizenship, so we can't really comment on the situation. We are in full communication with the Chinese embassy about the situation…"

  I look Fannet in the eye as he launches into his bureaucratic newspeak and there is a definite unspoken message in the way his eyes don't leave my face. Do not associate with Shan, for if you do so, you do so at your own peril. Do not cross us; we are on the hunt. Our conversation resumes, and Fannet stonewalls as before, but for my part, and I believe I am not calculating in doing so, merely one individual backed up in a corner, I believe I communicate in return that I will not be a patsy for unfounded charges and that even if I am not wealthy or infinitely connected, I am not helpless, there is not nobody back home who would back me up. I will not be subject to charges and false accusations, and I get this out.

  "So what happened, dude? I heard Shan went psycho at Soren's party and pulled out a knife, people were terrified and running out of the place. I've always said that dude is bad news."

  It's Herrera who's the first to get to me, and though he's gleeful and laughing and demanding to know What Happened, I make him tell me about his night first, that wild party of Latinos who filled up an entire limousine, laughing and calling out and waving taken-off t-shirts at the uptight Japanese populace. "Well, we hit up Vanilla and we totally partied out all day. Good times. Now as for Shan? He really pull out a knife?"

  "Dude, I don't know anything about Shan. From what I saw, I thought he was already gone. If he did pull a knife out, though, I agree he does need to go to jail. That's totally uncool—you can't do that."

  Herrera cocks his eyebrow. "And you know Soren's completely disappeared."

  "Disappeared? Like he's missing? I just saw him a week ago!"

  "Well you're one of the few. He left a message on his voicemail saying he needed to take a little vacation, and then later, it was just changed to saying he needs to focus on work and thanks everyone for turning out. People tried to call his company but the operator won't let them through, and you know, you can't just bother somebody at work for personal life stuff. So nobody can reach him."

  "Wow that's weird," I say, thinking it so. "How about the girl? Any news on Dominique?"

  Herrera almost looks scared. "Nothing, man. You know her father's the senior trade commissioner for US-Japan relations? He's a big shot in the Republican Party, some guy who's going to actually run the whole thing one day. And Dominique's a psycho girl. Basically if she came up to you putting a gun to her own head, crying she's going to kill herself, you're the one who's going to end up shot somehow, god knows how."

  Later, it seems to no small part Soren's over-reaction to things, or perhaps what is really a not unsignalled premeditated life decision to withdraw from the social scene and get serious about work, has its part in exacerbating events as they unfold. When I first met him, he was in some sort of disgrace. My entry into his life inspires one last run in the sun, but he had always been planning to buckle down. It just had to happen this way. He abruptly departs from the social scene, which throws certain comments and tones of voice of especially the last six months in new perspective, turning what might be a private affair into some important, secretive Big Thing that becomes the primary subject matter for all young Tokyo. I don't even in good faith hold the end of our friendship against him, as it was grounded in a superficiality and spontaneity that would have eventually doomed it if not that year, then quite possibly the next. But if Soren doesn't go completely hermit, if he doesn't completely undergo a 180 degree reversal from life-of-the-party to far-off-seen individual, if Soren just throws a small dinner party or something just to show his face, maybe people are far less likely to get excited, maybe people won't be saying things like "did you hear about the murder?" "Isn't it true there's some crazy stalker Chinese guy who's targeting all Americans?" "Have you heard of some twisted sex game going on in Roppongi Hills and the girl nailed three guys? I think that guy Ritchie is involved…"

  Unfortunately for Shan, he's picked the worst possible time for flashing a knife at an American girl. Only nine months prior, an American girl by the name of Dolores Blair who worked at a hostess bar was killed by her old boyfriend from back home, her body discovered in an alley by trash collectors the next day. The resulting uproar was covered in the international press, especially before it turned out the killer wasn’t Japanese. So, Dominique on arrival at the embassy that night, we are months later to discover, is not saying, "Oh, I hung out with this lowlife Chinese dude and he pulled a knife on me," but crying and repeating hysterically "This is another Blair, This is another Blair, This is another Blair, he's trying to kill me, he's trying to kill me, he's trying to kill me, somebody protect me from the crazy stalker, oh my god I’m going to die" in her statements to the embassy security staff surrounded by three layers of locked doors. Lurid news coverage carried by the foreign press had been putting pressure on Japan for six months to reform its "soapland" culture, and no matter what the local police do, they find themselves under criticism, making them a bit more jumpy and sensitive to foreign demands than usual. And third, but I feel real, the suicide of Blair's killer, the weird army drop-out social-recluse who nobody knew quite well, has left a strange feeling of a lack of resolution, a sort of challenge to our collective foreigner's society. We want our criminals to grovel on the stand, begging for mercy and striving their hardest for one sweet more moment of life, only to be ruthlessly punished by the collective judgment of the community. This gives you closure: this makes you say, it's true--criminals are all cowards in the end, this lets you sleep comfortably at night. But for Blair's killer to kill himself too? Somehow this lacks closure. Somehow everything is just unresolved and unpunished.

  "So, Oh My God, What the Hell Happened at the Party?"

  By the fourth time I go over the story, I'm beginning to slightly feel the absurdity of the situation, but this time, it's a big crowd, the first really general audience since Soren's birthday, a random encounter on
the street that turns out to be running into a bunch of people out for Italian food. All eyes are on me.

  "So there's this Chinese dude, Shan, right? Apparently he pulled out a knife out on Dominique after some kind of argument. But it must have happened a few days after the party."

  The girl who first queries me gets a sort of puzzled look.

  "But what happened to Soren? Why did he suddenly disappear? Is he even still in Japan?"

  "So I hear. Still going to work everyday, not like it's hard since it's all in the same building. But I think he just decided that he's had enough of partying."

  "Wow, that's so sudden. Weird. Really weird."

  It's here and events similar to these that I begin to get my first lessons in what really defines a human being. I watch, unreacting but burning in cynicism, as people who have drunk deeply at Soren's parties, girls who have fluttered about him cooing and tossing their hair, guys who have knocked beersteins with him and called him "mate," now deprived of the free and flowing alcohol, the apartment open at all hours of the day and night, are the quickest to turn on the missing party-boy, competing to see who could come up with the cleverest put-downs on the absent figure. Old Soren would have been all over the scene like a starving bulldog on a meaty bone, ripping out the one-liners and setting up the one-two kills of anyone stupid enough to challenge the existing order. But instead, radiating out of the Hills Residence is just…silence. So it's fashionable now to go on the offensive, secure in the knowledge there won't be payback.

  "Hey do you guys remember when he crashed his brand new car just two miles out of the showroom? Talk about a dork, can't even drive straight."

  "Yeah I heard he was telling everybody he was sleeping with Shannon, but she says it was him who tried to hit on her when he was drunk, and it wasn't even sexy, just annoying."

  "And jeez wasn't it weird how he kept that Chinese dude around, like stuffed in his closet just for when he needed him…"

  "Yeah, like some below-the-stairs retard cousin he's pull out when he wanted to offend people. I can totally see that dude pulling a knife on somebody." And then the conversation turns to all sorts of stories from the era before I knew him; weird moments everyone now begins to recall. “So Soren's father had contributed great sums to a school and Soren went to a banquet they threw as a representative. Shan is there as one of the beneficiaries of the scholarships that are funded by the donated cash, dressed up and wheeled out for the night to explain in awkward English how grateful they are for the support. At the dinner table, the two hit it off.”

  "No way, you guys got it all wrong. It's three a.m. on a late Friday night, and Soren has just slept with some flaky little Paris Hilton-wannabe who has starred in a number of low-budget Hollywood flicks and has come to Tokyo in some misguided belief that if she's at least somebody in Hollywood, in Tokyo she's a goddess from the heavens. The girl is passed-out drunk, completely zonked-out high on cocaine, and barely coherent if awoken. When Soren orders some Chinese food and the delivery boy arrives, the possibility of a ridiculously amusing prank occurs to him. For 50000 yen cash, the delivery boy is convinced to undress and spend the night in that bed. When the starlet awakes the next morning, what she discovers is that her vaguely-remembered night of a handsome young finance playboy was apparently in reality involved a barely-literate Chinese food delivery boy and of course she's so mortified and so terrified Soren will tell everyone that now she's his slave. And that delivery boy is Shan!”

  The most likely story is just the simplest. Shan and Soren just met. It could have been on the street, in some park, or some random casual acquaintance. Soren did have kind of a thing for China; I sometimes saw him with a study book practicing the strange-sounding language. And you might wonder what could a buck-toothed Chinese Waseda scholarship boy from a literally stench-ridden village have in common with a spoiled American playboy? But that was exactly it: they were entirely compatible. When Soren went just a little too far, when he had some girl ready to be completely outraged at who he was, he could always bring Shan out of whatever little box he stored him in, and be like, "Look, this is the alternative. Do you notice the complete lack of desire to please or attract women? The 100% lack of fashion sense or taste in music, ability in clever conversation? Be grateful you're in the company of a guy who at least opens doors for you!" And that would be usually enough; that would shut up most girls.

  So maybe it might be said Shan is outside his league. He's hanging out with people a bit more socially sophisticated than him. He's a first generation Chinese guy studying science at a prestigious Japanese university trying to handle an American girl most guys would have trouble trying to keep on an even keel. You can't skip generations like that--it's you who goes to the West on a scholarship, your son who goes to medical school, and the third generation, the Americanized generation, that finally dates American girls, smokes pot, and complains cleverly about society. Maybe Shan is just trying to skip ahead too much time too quickly. In any case, one day we hear about the police finally coming for him, formal charges have been filed by the U.S. Embassy. Another day my cell phone rings, and it’s some new girl demanding to know the latest news. And I’m like, “Not entirely sure, but I’ll do my best to update; something’s just so strange about the whole thing...”

  “You think? I think everyone just thinks that guy is a psycho.”

  “Shan wanted to play the Game, he wanted to go straight from the rice paddy to being a big city player. A guy like that has got to be intense to begin with, but when he can’t just seem the grasp the strategy of doing absolutely nothing at all...”

  “If you're going to visit him in jail, just don't forget to invite me. I've never been to a jail.”

  And separately: “Shan, you need to understand this. This is far more at stake here than just getting a criminal record. If you're convicted of a felony, you lose your visa, you lose your scholarship, you lose everything you and your parents have been working for for years. Just admit you had a knife, the police will let you off with a warning, and get on with your life already, it's not a serious crime.”

  “Ritchie, I did not pull knife on Dominique ReyFoorve. I did not pull knife on Dominique. She is crazy girl.”

  Yet throughout these strange unsettled three weeks, the biggest engine of my cynicism is one of the smallest girls, Lydia, a little chipmunk-faced girl who comes over to join us, and who I watch literally switch positions in mid-sentence as she realizes which way the wind is blowing after spending a week out of town and being out of the loop. One second she's talking about how cool Soren is for getting a gang in to Vanilla ahead of the crowd; the next, she's agreeing how uncool his parties were, how bored she was all the times she was there.

  IV.

  With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to say what the major contributing factors are to the crisis of that mad, terrible summer. The simple passage of age reveals that youth, burning with passion and dreams for what they will do with their lives, inevitably clash with each other with a terrible force that comes from mere inexperience. But more simply speaking, it is not the wild crazy riots erupting in China on the anniversary of some wartime atrocity nor the “Tokyo prep school scandal” of the donor clashing with the established teacher at Tokyo's top international school that sets the mood for things: rather, it is simply the terrible, oppressive heat.

  That year is a scorcher. In June comes two one hundred degree days; July has a week of them. August never drops below ninety, and then the heat just kept going. September's temperatures are those of a typical summer's July, and there was no cool and refreshing breeze until the very last day of October, Halloween, when the heat finally broke into an autumn that came fully seven weeks late. With this intense, solar radiance pouring into the urban heat island of Tokyo, all reflective surfaces miniature suns, and the humidity and temperature skyrocketing, the almost palpable waves of heat flowing through concrete walls and intervening trees to hold you in its insufferable grasp, meltingly hot, it is no won
der that the situation is fully primed for an explosive cataclysm. Melting melting melting. We are melting into agonizing heat. That inescapable heat—against which weak Japanese air conditioning units can barely keep up—is like a primeval force, a hated enemy that one meets at every corner. You go left, heat. You go right, heat. Every second stretches into agony, sweat pours from every pore, yet the heat is inescapable. Shimmering and simmering and slithering in broad waves, the heat engulfs one; the heat floods one. You can't think straight. One hundred ten degrees and rising, feeling nothing shy of one hundred fifty.

  “Hey boys and girls, do you like to learn English?!”

  There is a kind of male personality, not terribly cool, not terribly smart, but bright enough in its own way to specialize in an intellectual niche of its own, that is attracted to Japan and Japan alone. These kinds of Japanophile boys, and they aren't really fully men, let's be fair, are usually all right to deal with if they have a bit of boyscout in them or an easy-going temperament, but some for whatever reason of personality or background, find themselves caught up in the bizarre uniquely unique mix of Japanese identity such that they become almost a parody of themselves; if they are political without being canny; if they are just macho enough to understand what they aren't but not so macho as to avoid being an English teacher in the first place, well then they turn into a sort of nerdy Japanophile artificially cheerful about teaching middle-school kids English, at worst wearing an American flag bow-tie and perpetual glued-on smile, “English is fun,” “English is easy,” “let's all learn English today,” the famous so-called 'English language monkey' or ‘backpacker punk on a lark’ getting his two thousand a month.