Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  ‘Yes thanks.’

  Royce paid out another ten bucks or so for his can of sugared water. And that, it seems, was that.

  Half an hour passed during which time Royce wasn’t there. Not as far as anyone else in the bar was concerned. The old blokes at their table all got served bowls of noodles. So did the young guys at their table. From the old table came this incredible slurping; from the young table, total silence. Inter-generational styles of noodling.

  The girls tittered to themselves at their end of the bar and got up to pour drinks and light cigarettes for everyone else. But Royce was pretty sure they weren’t – you know – in Betty’s game. It was just that when you were a young girl in Japan you waited on your elders, no matter who they were. Royce had wondered what they were doing in the Bad Bar, and surprised himself with his own conclusion: Japan was a very safe place. That’s some opinion to come to when you’re sitting in a barful of people who won’t speak to you, waiting for the head sherang of the friggin’ Mafia to turn up!

  A plate was put down in front of him. On it was a spike. At the top of the spike was one of the little silver-scaled fish that swam round in the aquarium over there. It was filleted. At the bottom of the spike, on the plate, was the fresh white flesh of the filleted fish.

  Royce looked up into the eye of the barman. ‘Aji,’ said the barman, and walked away.

  Royce was hungry. He’d had a couple of goes, on his walk across town, to feed himself – with only mixed success. He’d bought some bread rolls that’d turned out to be sweet putty, and he’d bought tomatoes because he recognised them, but tomatoes don’t exactly fill your belly to the gunnels. So here was some food: fish fillets – complete with the fish they’d come from.

  ‘Don’t you bring that friggin’ stuff in here!’ roared his belly. ‘You do, and we’ll chuck it straight back out again!’

  ‘Shut up,’ he told his belly. ‘Can’t you see? This is a test.’

  The barman was watching him. So was everyone else in the bar.

  No eating irons. How do you eat this stuff? Of course … He broke off a pair of chopsticks, clamped them parallel in his right hand and used them as a wee shovel. He scooped a load of flesh, brought it up to his mouth and in. Warm, moist, sweet. Not bad. He swallowed, and as he did so, the fish on the spike gave a violent shudder. The fish-frame was alive.

  Royce ate the soft white flesh, watched by its skeletal owner. And all the denizens of the Bad Bar.

  THE TEST IS passed; he’s everybody’s friend. The barman’s called Hiroyuki Seno. He was eighteen and was a kobun. ‘It means little man,’ he wheezed, threatening Royce’s restraints on hilarity. ‘Apprentice.’

  The girls were sisters called Marja and Lisa, which was pretty unJapanese, but it turned out these were stage names. They were professional dancers in Tokyo, out here visiting relatives. Their job was to make sure there was always someone dancing so that people coming into the bar didn’t see an empty floor.

  ‘Best way to make man dance is pretend drunk,’ explained Marja, ‘so he think, “aha, drunk girl, I have way with her!”’

  Some of the Tokyo bars, said Lisa, had a Hall of Fame – if you shout the whole bar you get your name put on this big board of honour above the door. It cost on the average about $US5,000.

  During the day the sisters studied rhythmic gymnastics. As proof they leapt from their barstools and in unison swung one leg, dead straight, above their head and clasped it. There they stood, two perfect vertical lines.

  It was a shrewd move to do it together, because it split your focus and they were two-footed again, with their dresses brushed down, before your sight homed in.

  ‘Royce-kun,’ said Marja, a few sociable minutes later, ‘why you greet people with Reinkoto?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a greeting I learnt form a guy in a balaclava and ski pole. Why?’

  They giggled. ‘It mean raincoat.’

  MARJA IS SUMMONED to the table of the elders. She returns with a message for Royce. He is to join the elders, as the guest of a Mr Sano. He makes his tremulous way, across dusty tatami matting, to the table. ‘Here goes, fish! We’re going to find you,’ he whispers. His throat is thick and aches for a moment.

  He reaches the table. A long, almost translucent hand beckons him to the other end. Mr Sano. Royce sits cross-legged – which is a bugger of a thing to do, even when you’re fit – beside him. The elders are all smoking and using their empty noodle bowls as ashtrays.

  Mr Sano is a venerable, clear-eyed pygmy; a Mafioso saint who uses the power of Bad for good. ‘Thanks for seeing me, Mr Sano,’ says Royce quietly, ‘I am looking for Mini …’

  ‘I am twin,’ says Mr Sano, ‘identical twin.’

  Royce blinked in confusion; ‘No, sorry, not twin, Mini …’

  ‘My twin brother, he born first.’

  What the hell was this? There was no proof yet that Mr Sano/Minikui was bad, but he sure as hell was weird! ‘I was told that …’

  ‘In Japan senior son inherit all. Other, nothing.’

  ‘Eh?’ Royce momentarily puts his own quest for justice aside; ‘But, hell, you were his twin bother, isn’t that a bit harsh?’

  ‘No. Japanese way. My brother, he not here. You know why?’

  Royce didn’t know. What he did now know was he was gonna have to go at Mr Sano/Minikui’s pace, not his own.

  ‘Not here because cannot afford. No money.’

  ‘He spent the inheritance?’

  ‘Never get inheritance. I get inheritance.’

  The only name for Royce’s state was ‘dumbfusion’.

  ‘Because in womb, second son to arrive is above brother. Senior son. I on top, I inherit. My brother – nothing.

  ‘Gosh, that’s a bit … couldn’t you have … you were twins after all.’

  ‘No. In Japan no one equal. Everyone above, below everyone else. If above brother, go to better school, have better job. This Japanese way. My brother – porter.’

  Whether he meant porter or pauper was unclear – but the point was made anyway. The others around the table looked languorously on; maybe there was something in the baccy. Royce’s groin was beginning to warm. He realised there was a brazier under the table.

  ‘Many centuries ago Japan meet people of West,’ intoned the rather unlovable Mr Sano, ‘Portuguese, Engrish. Japan soon have great hate for West. Expel all. First shogun – Hideyoshi – throw Christian in volcano; three hunnerd thousand. Japan turn from West. Hai!’ And his narrow little eyes burst into roundness as they stared into Royce’s from a few short nose-lengths away. ‘But Japan still have hate. Have hate but no enemy. Instead, must hate inside Japan. So, come social crass – every person have person below to hate. Except bottom crass. They unhuman – Hinin. Every crass hate Hinin. Ah.’

  And ‘aahs’ come back to him from around the table because – apart from Hai! – it’s the only bloody thing they’ve understood.

  ‘Ha! But what happen next is great paradox! People see that Hinin is at bottom – holding up all other social crass. Hinin is base of sociar crass! So, much respect come to Hinin. You understand? Without Hinin, no social crass.’

  ‘Um, yeah.’ Royce squirmed and sat more upright; feeling a lot like you did when Beatrice Ellen Ann hit you with an unexpected question. ‘The Hinins give everyone else in the food chain someone to hate.’

  ‘Good. Then you understand paradox also of Yakusa. For Yakusa people have much hate and much respect. Because Yakusa and Hinin, same.’ He leaned back on his haunches and smiled.

  ‘Mr Sano … Minikui … I’ve lost a fish,’ Royce said slowly. ‘A tuna, 716 pounds. It was stolen from flight 207, Air New Zealand, this morning. It was stolen at Narita Airport after I’d brought it all the way from Westport. I was told that only some people in this bar could help me.’

  Mr Sano nodded slowly. He stood up, stretched – cat-like – and sloped to the bar. The young table nodded deferentially as he passed. He leaned over the bar and spoke into Hiroyuki’s small pink
ear.

  He returned, sat again, knees under the cloth of the table – and never said another bleeding word to Royce.

  Royce sat there, embarrassed, out of place. Then Hiroyuki called him. ‘Royce-kun, come here, pliss.’ Well, at least it was a way of getting out of this social impasse. He stood up, nodded, and the elders at the table nodded back.

  Why was he kun? – all the others were san.

  At the bar was a plate of fish. Dark red fish. At least it was cooked this time. And dead.

  ‘Tuna,’ said Hiroyuki. ‘Cooked in butter with soy sauce, grated ginger and grated radish.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Royce. (Still no eating irons.) ‘From Mr Sano?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I ask what he said when he came over?’

  ‘He ordered that for you,’ said Hiroyuki. ‘In spirit of Owada Dogen.’

  ‘Who?’

  Marja and Lisa have gathered beside him.

  ‘A man who fight the rich to help the poor, many years ago,’ says Marja.

  ‘Today the Yakusa keep the old way – the way of Owada Dogen,’ says Lisa.

  Marja and Lisa take up chopsticks, partition the fish with the points, lift portions to his mouth. Holy hobs, they’re gonna feed him!

  Mortified, he chews through the feeding. Reality, he miserably conjectures, was making life bloody hard for itself – here he was, in an under-sized town two hours inland from Tokyo, asking a band of infamous criminals to restore justice, and when he begs the return of his fish they buy him a tuna steak. And how could this Mr bloody Sano espouse the spirit of Owada what’s-his-name, anyway? What – rob the rich to help the poor? Bullshit. He robbed his poor fucking twin brother to make himself rich!

  ‘Mr Sano no more keeps the old ways of the Yakusa than I do,’ he muttered.

  ‘Collect,’ said Marja.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You are collect – Mr Sano no more Yakusa than you.’

  So he still hadn’t met Minikui.

  They had him helplessly pinioned backwards in the way that dentists do. He sought solace from his humiliation and loss by concentrating on those moments when one firm thigh or another, beneath a short fluffy hem, leaned into his knee during the feeding process.

  ‘What’s the difference between san and kun?’ he asked between mouthfuls.

  ‘San, man,’ said Lisa.

  ‘Kun, boy,’ said Marja.

  ‘You, kun,’ they said together.

  Great. I’m sorry, fish, he thought, a boy’s been sent on a man’s errand.

  Then even the compensation of fantasising over gymnasts who can put their legs behind their ears was disrupted by the dork in the black goggles. He started talking for the first time. About another bloody festival, of all things! Is that all these people do?

  ‘Today is a very big festival,’ drones the dork. ‘This is Dondoyaki, the festival for Daruma – the god of the Last Year.’ So far the dork’s English has been as good as the scared lady’s on the train. ‘Daruma has only one eyeball. If the goals you had set yourself in the last year have come to fruition, you can paint in the other eyeball and Daruma can see you. If not, you burn him. You burn him on a bonfire called a yahoya. We have Dondoyaki in my village tonight. I will take you there.’

  Royce was teetering emotionally, flaccid in the brain, quaverous at the mouth. The energies of ten years of rugby and ego were weakening – sucked at by the conger eels of uncertainty, battened onto by the deep-sea tentacles of inadequacy. He has so far failed his fish at every juncture – betrayed it with the profundity of an adulterous lover. But he must try again, he must make amends.

  ‘Look, thanks a lot, mate-san,’ he said wearily, ‘but I’ve got to get back to Tokyo. There’s things to do there I had hoped to do here.’ He was reeling already at the hopelessness of it all – the unknown train-stops, the unattainable taxis, the ‘Don’t knows’ of twenty-million inscrutable domestic aliens. ‘Oh the pity of it,’ some dark part of his brain murmured. To go back was a retreat – but so was to stay here. He had been unworthy of this journey – the unscrupulous Betty would have honoured his poor fish far more greatly. Hell, he had never even made it to the market. And the only tuna he’d seen in Japan, he’d bloodywell eaten!

  ‘Royce-kun,’ said Marja quietly, ‘I think you should not leave just when you meet Minikui-san.’

  Holy shite, the black-goggled dork!

  Minikui, it transpires, was one of the relatives Marja and Lisa had come out to visit; they were cousins.

  Royce palmed him a small narcotic package from Amos.

  MINIKUI HAD GONE to the Gents. Royce’s initial craven joy at finding him had – powered by relief, sake and the enzymes of both raw and cooked fish – transmogrified into outrage.

  ‘You mean he sat there for two hours, knowing it was me? Didn’t he know why I came here?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lisa, ‘all here know what you want.’

  ‘Well why the hell …?’

  Marja put her cool, serious little hand on his wrist. ‘No anger. No impatient. Katana. In Japan a man judged by how far he can be pushed before anger. You have gained much respect. Do not spoil now.’

  ‘But I’ve got to find my fish!’ hissed Royce, without a great deal of katanga.

  ‘Fish found after Dondoyaki.’

  Jesus!

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  THE BACKWARDS CLIMB through the darkness down the steep wooden stairway of the Bad Bar evoked sharp memories of that first early-morning descent to the deck of the Aurora. Somehow the smells of spent condoms and fermenting loam exactly replicated the scents of dank river-slime and lurking eels.

  The farewell from the Bad Bar had been a courtly affair, involving more head-bobbing than you got in the average chookhouse. Royce had toasted the elders’ table, the youngers’ table and the bar-dwellers in three separate toasts of sake and had been presented by Hiroyuki with a recipe for tuna cooked in butter with soy sauce, grated ginger and radish. In Japanese.

  Mount Fuji was faintly visible as they groped towards the roadway, its strangely glowing snow sending off shafts of white light, like a colourless aurora.

  The man in the balaclava and ski pole passed them as they hauled up the steep street to Minikui’s car.

  ‘Reinkoto,’ he said.

  ‘Prick,’ said Royce.

  THEY SET OUT – the sisters in the back – in a silver Honda Civic, down spaghetti roads, for the rustic village of Shiwa Kawa. His fish had two more days before it went into Phase Two and dropped $199,000 in value, and here he was, off to a Japanese Guy Fawkes night on the slopes of Mount Fuji.

  Did Minikui have Akshara or was it just coincidence that he murmured at this very moment: ‘Anyone touched by the sparks of the yahoya will have good luck.’?

  ‘Really?’ muttered Royce, embarrassed that his uncharitable thoughts might have been read.

  ‘Ah yes. And I think what you need more than anything right now is good luck.’ And on he drove, up a gradually rising series of cliff-influenced twists and turns.

  A DOT OF brightness in the distance grew into a pyramid of fire, then into a pyre of bamboo. Around it glowed a hundred people, some holding long bamboo fishing rods into the flames, others clutching big white sheets of paper with Japanese writing on. Just about everybody held a small white container of something.

  Ugly-san turned them off the road and they thudded over a field of ex-sunflowers towards the fire, then stopped at the edge of a low cliff beside many other cars and a fire engine, big, red and satisfactorily old-fashioned.

  The fire was set on the rocks of a wide riverbed. The river itself and the big red cliff that loured over its farther bank glimmered distantly in the radiated heat.

  Whether intentional or not, the fire was a model of an incandescent Fuji – a Fuji in eruption with a blast of flame writhing a hundred yards into the black sky. Sparks and pieces of white paper – some of them miraculously un-immolated – roared into the sky and showered downwards again. He was go
nna be bloody unlucky not to get singed by a lucky spark tonight.

  They clambered down the bank in a small avalanche of mud, stones and roots, and somehow the sisters in silly tall shoes did it better than he did. Then they wobbled across the rounded rocks of the riverbank, eyes already drying in the immense heat – and they did that better than he did, too. Rythmically, gymnastically.

  The fire looked like the scaffolding of a pyramid. And hey, some of that bamboo was in tree-trunk form! They sure grew it big over here. Wide branches of tiny black leaves rode the heat and hung in the flame like writing.

  A tremendous bang that demanded all the acquired skills of bar-crossing rectum clenching.

  ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘Bamboo. Air is trapped in the compartments and explodes in the heat. Come and meet my friends,’ Minikui said.

  He meant the fire brigade, raucously smiling guys in black uniforms and white crash hats. Each of them had a magnum of saki and a pillar of plastic cups. The cups were the white things everyone else was clutching; the something in them was saki. Minikui said things to three of them that set them hooting with laughter. In fact, as Royce soon learned, anything set the fire brigade hooting with laughter. They babbled in Japanese, turned to him, bowed in Japanese, then each offered him a plastic cup. He took one. It was filled from three magnums of saki.

  ‘They are here to control the fire. They are also the hospitality officers.’ On cue Royce was offered three baskets of fried squid. Holy kermoley, just think of that – here he was beside a bonfire God knows where in rural Japan, munching squid that may well have come from Westport. Another explosion lost him half a cup of saki. Huge hilarity as his cup was refilled and runneth over.

  The tip of a fishing rod lowered itself out the darkness like a boom. On it was a blob of congealed snot.