The White Man and the Pachinko Girl

by Vann Chow

  Misa took the paper and put it away without looking. She had an idea of who this lady might be and what kind of organization she belonged to. Still, she appreciated Smith's sensitivity of not talking about the obvious.

  33. Understand Me

  “Let me walk you home,” Smith said. “Your brother is waiting for you.”

  “I am an embarrassment, ne ?” She asked.

  Smith took a deep breath before answering. It gave him a moment to think of a proper response. “You’re a nice girl, with so much potential.”

  “For what?” Misa asked. “You mean I am pretty? You think I am pretty, ne ? I have no other potential, I know that.”

  That made Smith red in the face. Of course, Misa was a very pretty young woman, but it would just seem wrong to answer yes at the moment. “What you’re doing...this is not the only thing you could do; you should know that. You’re so still so young.”

  “I can’t do what I am doing when I am old, you know?” She smiled.

  “That’s your sense of humor?” Smith heaved his shoulders and sat himself next to Misa.

  “Your parents will be so upset to know that you are not protecting your own body. I would be if you’re my child.” Smith thought they didn’t have to speak in riddles anymore. “I am. I am upset about what you’re doing.”

  “ Nerunerunerune? ” Misa noticed the pack of candy in his suit’s pocket.

  “Oh, this,” he pulled it out and brought it up to Misa’s eyes. “You want it? You can have it.”

  “What would other people think if they see an Ojisan giving a pack of candy to a teenage girl in the middle of the park, and this late at night?” Misa said.

  Embarrassed, he retracted his arm and cradled the pack of candy in his hands, twisting its plastic packaging.

  “I just...” He couldn’t find words to explain his innocent intention. “If you want me to leave you alone, I can.” Smith was not very good at parenting, he now noticed. How many times do you need to be a dad to master the necessary skill?

  “I know what you’re trying to tell me. I really know it. And I appreciate it.”

  “You do?” Smith asked in disbelief. He forged on. “There’s a passage in the Bible. It says your body doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to your parents. And for them, you have to take good care of yourself to repay their love.”

  “I like you,” Misa said, and she leaned her head on his shoulder. It was broad and warm. The warmth. It made her felt safe. She had always liked leaning on men’s shoulders.

  Smith sat there motionless, unsure how to carry himself. He mumbled on about the Bible. God was the only thing that could save him now, for Misa had grabbed his hand and wrapped his arm around her waist. He squirmed away instinctively.

  “I am not trying to...” Smith pulled his head away from Misa so he could extract himself from this impossible situation. Clearly, Misa had misunderstood. “You’re treating me like I am one of these men.”

  “Don’t you want to be?”

  “No! Misa,” he hissed and struggled further futilely. One could argue how hard it was for a man of his strength to unwrap his arm around a tiny Japanese girl. Yet it was more difficult than he thought. She was adamant in keeping his arm right where it rested, his hand rested against her lower abdomen under her hand. He felt the ruffles of her skirt, draped over her falling and rising abdomen. A new sensation.

  “I like this,” she said. “Please don’t move.”

  He tried one more time, peeling his hand off her. It only made it worse. She had dug her nails into his palm to keep his hand where it was.

  “Misa, hey, Misa, no,” she was now kissing him on his right cheek. He felt her breath closing in on his ear.

  “Misa, I am a very old man.” Smith lamented.

  “I am not asking you to be my boyfriend.”

  “This is wrong.”

  “What if I want it, and you know that somewhere deep within your heart, you want it just as much as I do.” Misa purred in his ears.

  “I am too old for you,” he repeated. And he cleared his throat. What kind of reflexive mechanism was this? That’s all thousand years of evolution could offer him right now? Men are weak animals, he cursed Darwin. “I am three times your age.”

  “That’s why you need to understand women...again.” That was her reply.

  It stumped Smith.

  34. Documentary

  Ryuuji Tanaka pulled his black corduroy pants down around his legs and sat himself on the toilet seat. The metal buckle of his leather belt swayed back and forth against the ceramic toilet bowl, making rhythmical clanging noise. Outside, white noise filled his study. He had just watched another tape to the end.

  Some of the tapes did it for him. This was one of them.

  Without any editing, the raw materials of a pornography production could appear to be an interrupter collection of takes and re-takes. One was constantly in tension between reality and acting. The arousal effect was, in contrast to common perception, multiples of that of the final edited release – a highly commercialized Voyager experience for the general audience that was cut to exactly two hours and fifteen minutes with minimal time to waste on subtle human emotions that flitted through the actors and actresses minds on and off set.

  “Nnmmh...” A short grunt. And it was over. Tanaka sat with his bare, shivering legs motionlessly on the toilet. Waiting for the erection to subdue.

  The videotape machine produced a loud click when the tape, labeled 'Étourdir', or ‘Surprise’ in English, hit the end. With his own panting calmed, he could hear nothing but the chirps of crickets outside the study’s window that slipped through the gap between the bathroom door and its frame.

  Sergey Ribery was a genius. A genius and a crook. A true artist but also a very sick man. He died a gruesome death, and perhaps he deserved to die in that way. – The Shintoism faith Tanaka subscribed to did not allow such thoughts, but who was he to uphold the ethical standard of society? Tanaka was as deeply ensnared as Sergey Ribery was in the dark world of the unspeakable.

  'Étourdir' was renamed and released as ‘The Beginning of An End’ commercially to the wider, but less discerning public who just wanted to see some actions and a lot of tits. It turned out to be nothing like the world had ever seen before despite its commonplace title. Many men and boys alike who bought the DVD drawn by the fame of its famous French director were disappointed by the confusing storyline of the story and the obvious lack of flesh-flashing and violent intercourse.

  But among fans of his work – Ribery has become a cult icon ever since his death. His works became priced possessions in the same league of Picasso to art collectors for pornography connoisseurs and everyone who worked in the industry that knew what they were doing. – ‘Étourdir' satisfied a different kind of fetish, one that was there since the beginning of time that no filmmakers had ever managed to fulfill, one that, if in close inspection, Tanaka had discovered from years of observing others, everyone was a little bit into the fetish over absurdity.

  When the people had finally realized that they had a strong, hidden appetite for Absurdity, everyone wanted more of it. That was the birth of a whole new genre. Ribery, a reject of the mainstream French movie-making industry, arrived to new freedom in Japan, was allowed all luxury of resources beyond what any director could imagine. And with the baggage of the common man off his shoulders, he created a masterpiece. Against conventional filming methods, he and his crew went all over Japan, looking for subjects for his extraordinary physio-psycho experiment.

  He produced many films in his twenty years in Japan, but only ‘Étourdir' had attained the status of one of the most discussed pornographic films in Japanese history. Third-rated movie studios, local DVD stores with a special interest section and the dark side of the internet, this were the places it shined. And the success was a result of his chanced encounter with Misa Hayami. The film they made together was his best and his last.

  No one knew what exactly transpired the day he died,
except Tanaka. His version of it, given that he was not present at the scene of his death was not one that the police would easily believe. And so Tanaka kept what he knew to himself until he could prove it one day in a way every man could understand.

  He was, however, less interested in helping law-enforcement find the killer of Sergey Ribery, and more interested in what led to the killing, a drawn-out physio-psycho experiment that Ribery had started himself. And his death, unfortunately for her, was not the end of her story. This was where Tanaka came in. He had made it his crusade to put an end to “The Beginning of the End”.

  Tanaka heard keys jingling from behind the door to his shared apartment with Damien.

  His mind cleared as fast as it was clouded. – Must stow away all evidence, he said to himself. Swiftly he cleaned himself up and turned off the video tape player.

  “Baby, I am home!” Damien said as he squeezed himself and the bags of purchases he was carrying into the hallway of their apartment so he could close the door behind him. His spirit seemed high, undoubtedly stoked by spending a lot of money. “What mischief have you been up to while I am gone?”

  And Tanaka’s mind clouded as soon as it was cleared. – Caught. Must confess to something. Something trivial.

  “ Je vous demande pardon. I am sorry, baby.” He grabbed the shopping bags from Damien to put them aside and sat him on the couch.

  “Oh, this feels naughty!” Anxious of what Tanaka was going to say or do. Suddenly, he smelled a whiff of something rotten, of bad eggs, and his enthusiasm went out like air in a popped balloon. His boyfriend had been playing with himself while he was away. One does not need to watch videos of hidden cameras around the house to know this.

  “ Non. I lied. I promised to go with you to see my mother this weekend but I can’t. Something has come up at work.”

  “You gave me a scare! Pas de probleme, mon chéri! ” Damien rolled his eyes. There was always something whenever Tanaka was due to visit his mother. He cupped Tanaka’s cheeks with two hands and kissed him softly on his lips. Tanaka had always imagined how they would look like from a third person’s perspective whenever Damien would treat him like a fizzy, cuddly stuffed animal, with him being the older man in physique and more matured one in spirit between the two of them. This was certainly not something to be witnessed by his own faint-heated mother. But despite his mild reluctance to Damien’s habitual need for expressing and receiving affections through obscure and awkward physical contact, it was a great tell-tale signal that Tanaka still had him by the balls, so to speak. Damien was eating up his fake confession like a hungry dog.

  “You’re too cute. Saying sorry to me for these things. True, we haven’t seen her for ages since you came out.” Out of the closet, he meant. Damien still remembered what an awful episode it was. To tell a Japanese mother that his son was homosexual was as big a shock as if her son had died. The intermittent contact between them did not make it appear less so. “But she’s your mother, not mine. It’s your call.”

  “I am going film the new corporate commercial.” Tanaka detached Damien’s palms from his unshaven face and placed them on his lap. “It’s going to be seen by millions of people across Japan.”

  “ C’est excellent! ”

  “We’ll film it this Saturday at the Gokokuji Temple. Some fresh greens in the background. The stillness of the temple. Lots of sunlight. A businessman and a teenage girl...”

  “Hmm...beautiful. I can imagine it already.” Damien closed his eyes and let his photographer vision take over.

  “Are there going to be somebody famous?”

  “No,” Tanaka replied curtly. “Let me cook our dinner.” And he walked off to the kitchen, ending the conversation there.

  Nobody famous. Just Misa Hayami, the unwilling one-time actress in the quickly-turned classic “The Beginning of the End” in the underworld of Absurdity-Fetish pornography. A relatively ‘small’ genre of hundreds of thousands of devotees within Japan and more in Russia, Western and Eastern Europe.

  Absurdity is a difficult concept to explain. It is the quality or state of being ridiculous and unreasonable. That could be any number of things in the context of pornography, and your imagination is the limit.

  He was suddenly overcome by guilt. Was it right to do what he was about to do? Was his plan, one that was drawn up the day the police announced that Ribery died and had never been shared with anyone, flawed in ethical terms? The repercussions of his actions were going to be huge. Would he be able to withstand the consequences? Would Misa?

  He pitied Misa.

  He often did. It's almost customary to feel this way whenever he thought of this project, but it never stopped him from proceeding.

  Imagery of media frenzied themselves over him, and the protagonists of his documentary overshone other ethical considerations. Fame and approval. Like any living, breathing man, he longed for them underneath the surface of doing a good deed and living complacently. No man would give up the chances that he was given.

  The concept for his documentary was great, and the material was there. It was going to make a lot of noise with what he had already. And by a stroke of luck, Misa materialize herself in front of him. The project suddenly became more than just vapors in the air. The work had picked up real momentum, and nothing could stop it now, Tanaka thought.

  Every man had his brighter and darker sides.

  35. Breathe In, Breathe Out

  Smith fell ill that evening and did two things that were unprecedented. He called in sick, and he did not feel guilty about it. He surrendered himself completely to the war between his immune system and the resilient, viral intruders.

  He drifted in and out of consciousness as he lay weakly on his unmade bed for two days, his body buried under the haphazard assortment of blankets, pillows, chair cushions, and newspaper. The thought of going to the doctor, to get a piece of paper to prove his conditions if anything, a vital part of falling ill in a culture so deadly focuses on loyalty and dedication to one’s employer, did not occur to him. He simply lay there, enjoying, if one could go so far as say, the ecstasy of turning off his voluntary response system and letting nature take its course.

  The cellphone buzzed throughout the day, but that did not stir him. Air in, air out, air in, air out. For hours, that was all that he did. Coming down with such the terrible cold was becoming like a vacation.

  Being the obsessive compulsive natural-born problem solver that he was, however, he continued to solve mathematical models and operational problems sprung at him by both the higher-ups and his subordinates in vivid life-like dreams. When he did finally wake up to clarity, he found himself drenched from head to toe in hot sweats.

  He got up to get himself some water and aspirin, and without remembering how, he had collapsed on his bed once again and slept through the night.

  On the third morning, the Saturday, sunlight filtered through the semi-transparent white curtain into his apartment. Part of his unshadowed face heated up from the warmth of the sun so much that it woke him. He stretched himself and found that the sickness had left him without a trace. He fascinated himself over the dancing dust that surrounded the cactus near the window sill. He hadn’t watered it for days, and yet it was standing there its stems green and succulent. And the two orange flowers appeared unchanged as if they bloomed not three days but a few minutes ago. Such was the enigmatic way of Eudicots. Smith was impressed with the wonders of God’s world once again.

  It was a ridiculous anxiety attack that he was having, he realized. Totally out of proportion in comparison to the meetings that he had made throughout his career concerning hundreds of thousands of dollars for DaiKe. What was this feeling?

  He doused his freshly shaven face with ice cold water from the tap and told himself to hold his horses.

  A girl kissed him. And apparently infected him with the flu virus.

  So what?

  As he wiped his face with a dry towel, he wondered whether Misa had felt the same way, not t
he headache and the dizziness, but the nervous tingling feeling all over his body, after kissing him, though he quickly dismissed the thought. Albeit being barely of age, she was a veteran in this arena unlike him. Despite that knowledge, he did hope he served some purpose in her life. A substitute for a fatherly figure? Too Freudian for his liking. A substitute for a boyfriend? That sounds a lot more pleasing. He decided to just go with that conclusion.

  36. A Flu

  The night passed uneasily for Misa. She had flashes of hotness and coldness as she lay on her bedding, twisting and turning through the night. It was perhaps for that reason that she didn’t feel particularly upset about losing her day job at Thunderbird. At least she didn’t have to call in sick.

  A flu. She had caught the flu virus from Masao-san.

  It happens.

  There was more. As she sat on the metro on her way to her Sunday teaching appointment with Smith, she pressed her hand on her left abdomen. After that night with Masao-san, her uterus hurt. There were bloody spots on her pantyliner, which she had to change a lot more frequently than she would like.

  When is it going to heal again? She wondered. She would give it a few day of rest. That’s all.

  Perhaps it was nature’s way of letting her feel something. She hadn’t felt anything for ages. The aching sensation reminded her of the rough sexual intercourse, of those few hours. Otherwise, it would just have been another line on her schedule, nothing more. She wished it would hurt more, then maybe she would quit it all together.

  But it wouldn’t. It always healed, and the experience, whether it had been good or bad, would only get fussier and fussier. Then it would be out of her mind before she knew it. Humans do behave like characters in video games. One life dies, get another one and restart where you last saved. Drink some magic potion from the inventory, vital restored, ready to slash some more monsters. The only thing that changed was the number of credits. It always goes up.