by S. J. Parks
‘So you are really tired?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Naomi was still unused to the title. ‘You have too many jobs?’ she suggested sympathetically.
Still half asleep, Maybelline attempted to sit up.
‘Do you work long hours?
She nodded.
‘At night?’
‘In a hostess bar, ma’am.’ The girl looked shattered.
Naomi’s sympathy evaporated and she left her to her to come round. These bars had come to represent the blind hedonism she found so vacant in Josh.
Josh told her the hostesses were not what she assumed, but waitresses, assigned to a given party for the evening. On his nights out she had a tendency to default to the idea that Josh was hanging out with prostitutes as she lay alone under the taunting of the dance of city lights; by midnight she had him languishing in an opium den. She really resented the office-bonding sessions in hostess clubs, when so many of his hours seemed to belong to the company anyway. One night she drifted asleep and woke and dozed and woke and dozed as she expected him back. When, finally, the sweet perfume of alcohol arrived like a third person in their room, she turned away to register her objection. She listened as he lost the contest with his clothes and dropped beside her fully dressed. They lay in silence. A single word was enough to trigger recriminations and he had been drawn before. Eventually, she had to speak first.
‘Was it a hostess bar?’
She turned towards his inert body, looking for signs of life, hoping to bring him to the first step on a podium where he would stand crowned the cruellest man on earth, at which point she could dissolve in restorative tears. He made no attempt to hide the slur in his voice, as if conversation with him would seem useless to her, though the strategy risked an exaggerated assessment of the ruinous amount of alcohol he had consumed. To her frustration he fell asleep before he could even comfort her with the promise of a discussion. This pattern in their lives became more frequent.
Sam had invited Josh to join what he called Poet’s Corner, as if his single membership to the gym – imaginatively named ‘Do Sports’ – were to an Ivy League club befitting the Rhodes scholar he was. Sam had saved himself a month’s fees for signing a friend but had readily owned up to the incentive, though his pay in dollars meant he never counted the cost of money.
‘Only reason for asking you along,’ Sam had pointed out. ‘Nothing to do with good company.’ He’d smiled.
So Josh had invested in a pair of running shoes, which had involved a trip to Ikebukero, where he and Naomi had spent a good part of Saturday morning finding a pair large enough.
Josh pulled his gym towel out of his briefcase and hung it round his neck in an unconscious copycat of Sam. The men chose adjacent running machines and set them in motion with a jogging pace. Sam winked.
‘So good to feel the plastic under your feet again like that green grass of home.’
‘And that reconditioned city air in your lungs.’
Josh had an eye on Sam’s monitor but couldn’t quite see the display. When Sam upped his speed, Josh jabbed at the pace of his own tread, to keep time. They talked deals within the confines of their confidentiality agreements and mostly exaggerated their contact with those higher up the food chain who they regarded as heavies; dusting themselves by association, with the power and influence of the personalities from their respective global banks. Sam’s height gave him an advantage on the running machine but Josh had a shorter but determined stride. Sweat built up on the complimentary T-shirt Josh had received on joining.
‘You’ll come to my party?’ Sam asked, after giving him the date. ‘A close group‘ll be there.’
‘And every woman you ever slept with?’
‘Is that apart from Naomi?’ Sam taunted.
‘You dare,’ Josh threw at him confidently.
Sam flashed his white teeth.
‘How long is it with Miho now? A three-week record?’
Outside the locker room Sam handed Josh an isotonic drink branded Pocari Sweat as they headed for the shower.
‘How is she doing?’ Sam yelled over the cubicle, referring to Naomi.
‘She’s okay. So-so.’
‘Tell her she can design my cabin in Montana any time.’
‘Not her specialism. She doesn’t have a portfolio in Yankee Red Wood. But we have to find her a job before we both go insane.’
They rejoined one another, skirted in towels, hair wet like a couple of skunks.
‘Okay, so we have to find her a job.’
‘We most definitely do.’
‘I’ll invite the architect on Saturday. But he’s a big deal and may take some persuading.’
Chapter 28
Shimokitazawa, 2012
Hana and Jess ambled past the tattered apprentice monk at the station, begging in the quiet of early morning. So futile; so sixth century. At the vending machine, Hana managed to persuade Jess not to get him a can of beer, which was her idea of a joke. Lately Jess had begun to talk of leaving. Perhaps she had made enough money, or had caught her own fever of introspection. But Jess was one of those people who needed to be in perpetual motion and wore novelty like a new coat. Hana had come to depend on her and could never see herself working at the club without her. But since the night Jess went missing, they had been more distant with one another. The extra night that week had tired them both.
Jess turned from the monk suddenly. ‘I’m gonna leave the bar. We’ve pissed off Emiko.’
‘We? We have?’
‘Okay, so she prefers you because … you kinda look Japanese.’
Hana was unimpressed. She wanted to earn appreciation. And she did not regard herself as particularly favoured right now. She was too tired to protest.
They sat over an American coffee at Ziggy’s. Jess chose from a line of sugar in Kilner jars. What was it, Jess wondered, that Hana’s mother had done? They drank in silence.
Miho seemed worn, her linen apron crumpled, as she collected their cups. Today she looked her age.
Hana leaned towards her. ‘No joy at the Municipal offices, Miho.’
Miho stacked busily and Jess was in a hurry to help her.
Tachi’s day off was how Jess referred to Hana’s visit that day. She could trivialize it because it didn’t mean anything to her. It didn’t mean anything to Miho.
‘You never met my mother here? Some time back? Naomi?’ she asked, with an urgency she had not intended. Jess gulped her coffee her elbows planted firmly and watched Hana watching Miho.
‘People come. People go. I didn’t always run a café.’ Miho was tired and wistful and today her defenses were down. Finally she sat down with them like she used to at the beginning.
Hana drew from Miho’s strong, guarded reaction, expectantly. ‘Naomi. She was called Naomi,’ she persisted.
She caught Jess and Miho exchanging glances.
Miho looked down, weighing a damp cloth in her hand, scanning her face, her almond eyes. What was it she was weighing up?
She locked eyes for a moment until Miho broke it.
‘No,’ Miho said eventually. ‘I don’t think I remember.’
Miho’s reaction was inexplicably strained.
‘You’re like my son: a half-and-half westerner,’ Miho deflected quietly.
Hana felt half of something and half of nothing and pulled at her low-cut evening dress, her nervous little habit.
‘Did you find the teahouse yet?’ Miho asked, getting up to wipe the tables down.
Hana shook her head. It was early morning; she had been up a long time and she was feeling entirely misaligned. She was even ready for the thin mattresses at the lodgings.
She rose, about to pay, then suddenly remembered, ‘My purse. I left my purse.’
Her cash and credit cards were at the bar. Miho waved away her concern.
‘Go. Go on back. You can settle with me later.’
As the girls left the morning heat was beginning to pulse as the day tuned up.<
br />
‘See you,’ Miho’s thin voice followed them.
At Shimo’s the wet floors glistened in the daylight of the open delivery hatches. Under such exposure the wry geisha print of the fisherman’s wife was shabby. Hana saw where, for luck or virility, many hands had touched the most searching of the imposing sea creature’s tentacles and the paper had rubbed away. A shout from a delivery guy alerted them and Hana and Jess were pinned back against the sea creature to make way for the hurtling beer-crate trolley. No one was around and they combed the bar and dining areas before searching near the mic and karaoke screen for the missing purse. Hana scanned the bar one last time before she made her way to the office to find the surly punch-permed man in grey overalls. Before he left he dropped the delivery note on the desk and, without acknowledging them, hurried away to the next errand.
The desk lay in the collected clutter of redundant coffee makers, shelved laptops, and reams of antiquated carbon paper and beneath old film posters for Spirited Away, Jameso Bondo in hiragana script, and Norwegian Wood. An ancient fridge blinked. Jess scanned a row of old plastic files and Hana shuffled through a dusty stack of music CDs beside a broken stereo system. Eventually, bookending the shelf above the desk, Jess found the blue, silk purse.
Emiko walked in wearing ripped jeans, and carrying a cup of instant soup. She was alarmed to find anyone in her space and confronted them in a tone sharper than they thought she was capable of using. ‘What are you doing in my office?’ Emiko looked at Hana. ‘Leave my office. You don’t go in the office.’
Hana explained they had only come for her mislaid purse, which she brandished in proof. ‘I got it. Thanks.’
Emiko’s long, white nails fingered the desk papers as if she were cataloguing these along with her recall of events.
Jess broke across her stony calculations. ‘Thanks for finding it.’
Emiko glared at Hana and she left with her purse and the strongest sense she has lost face with Emiko.
They left quickly. ‘We’ll see you later,’ Jess called back, catching her arm through Hana’s.
Outside the homestay a line of ill-regarded potted plants suffered in the heat. Back in the room Hana was unable to sleep. She worked out that GMT London would have Tom out with their friends, probably at the Rio watching a movie. She missed those evenings when she would cook for them and she had built a hard-earned reputation for amazing food, spending hours on culinary efforts, which they ate through in less than half the time it had taken her to prepare it.
She sent him an open message: ‘Thinking of you.’
It really meant: Are you thinking of me? Remember me; it’s me.
It was still early, early morning and her eyes were heavy, but she plugged into her music and leafed through the Japanese Language and People Course Book at her bedside.
‘You can’t study now,’ Jess threw out unhelpfully. ‘Your father must definitely be Japanese. Conscientious student.’
‘What?’ Hana took out her earphone and threw aside her book.
Jess sat in a cross-legged pose. She had recently taken up yoga and was erratically working through moves she followed on screen, often at the most inappropriate times of day. Her chosen branch of yoga seemed not to demand silence as an important key to concentration. She was determined to find a subject sure to distract Hana. She was in her talking mood.
Miho’s warning not to reveal stuff about Naomi had carried some weight with Jess, and she’d said nothing.
‘So how do you plan to find him?’ It was with such little caution that Jess trod on her dreams.
‘This is as good as it is going to get in terms of my search for any heritage. Cultural immersion.’
And if he hadn’t died … Jess took her pose up to an ill-based shoulder stand, which, buckling under the slim support of the bed base, added to the feet marks on the wall that registered her earlier attempts.
‘Is that what you call the nightclub? Cultural immersion? Don’t you want to know the truth?’
The phrase that Tom had been so taken with came back to Hana: ‘The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.’
‘There’s no one to ask,’ Hana said. ‘So I suppose I will never know.’
Miho had sworn her to secrecy for a reason, Jess told herself. Should she tell regardless? On reflection, Miho in kindness had fed Jess without payment plenty of times. If she thought it best to stay quiet, maybe it was best. Another conversation with Miho first perhaps? But the man Miho had mentioned? Taking a circuitous route to the solution, Jess pushed Hana further.
‘You are so in denial about this and yet here we are living in the same area as Naomi did. It is almost as if you can’t bear to admit you would like to find him, when in fact you are here to find him.’
Hana stopped the music without responding.
‘So you quit that easily?’
‘You have to help me, Jess.’
‘So we DNA-check millions of people in the absence of any other information? We advertise for an old man who shagged a girl one night over twenty years ago.’
‘Jess! It’s not … Don’t. How nice are you?’
Jess’s cynicism was so very strong that at times it felt as though there were three people in the friendship. And the third person was often an unwelcome addition.
‘You know Naomi would have been so disappointed with me. Working in a hostess club with some shmucky American.’
‘Me?’
‘You.’
‘How do you know that she would’ve disapproved?’
The grubby octopus crossed Hana’s mind, a tentacle in every orifice.
‘She was very straightforward. Uncomplicated. She would never have found herself in this position. Simple pleasures, simple interests, and she was really very self-sufficient in an uncompromised way.’
Jess wanted to know more. Miho’s words revisited her. Whose life was it that this careful Englishwoman was responsible for?
‘Did she go with guys?’
‘Yes, but she never married.’
Jess bowed to the inevitable. ‘You have to ask Miho …’ she enunciated; her look gave her away.
So Miho knew more; Hana had thought as much.
With the caution of one only recently released, Jess continued slowly. ‘You have to ask her … about the … you have to ask Miho about—’ Jess changed her mind midsentence ‘—the … teahouse.’
Hana was underwhelmed. ‘I did.’
‘Ask her again. Ask her where it is and we will go together. I think she knows.’ And to Hana’s dissolving skepticism she added, ‘I’m not going to work tomorrow. We could go then.’
Eventually Hana slept and across her dreams she travelled again to a sultry day in the East End of London. She stood with familiar faces in the crowd, but, this time, Tom was absent. Miho was there, mouthing a voiceless chant. It was a busy Brick Lane market day; a Buddhist monk in saffron robes passed through the parting crowds, cycling a rickshaw. And, again, as he retreated, it was possible to see that the passenger curled up in a fetal position and sleeping soundly on a bench across the back of the rickshaw was Naomi. Hana tried to call after her but could only motion to catch her attention. Emiko stood in her way and scolded her wordlessly. Before she could pursue her the world splintered and she woke with her eyes still firmly closed.
The sun had reached above the low buildings across the road and a bright glare warmed her lids. When she opened her eyes, Jess was sitting very close.
‘I’m not going into classes today and I am not going to the club.’
‘I think you should.’ There was the incident with Emiko to consider.
An acrid smell of burnt toast in the air.
‘If you become unreliable Emiko will give me the worst clients. Less money … if she takes against—’
‘She did already. Let’s go rescue the house from Tako’s breakfast. He would
starve if he had to feed himself.’ Hunger won over her reluctance, though the bread remained barely a foodstuff.
‘I’ll have rice.’ Hana kicked the wedge from under their door and they headed downstairs.
Chapter 29
Contact with Tom had been irregular but Hana knew he was working hard towards his deadline. She would send a gift when she had seen something he would really appreciate, like a book on tattoo art: embroidered backs of yakuza painted with fish and water lilies, geisha and bright-eyed dragons. Perhaps their beady eyes could spy on him and send word.
Leaving the house she saw Tako looming large in the doorway, his dangling mourning jacket blocking the last of the sun. She held back, not keen to engage with him. He had limited his clumsy attempts to befriend the girls but was still keen to demonstrate his command of English despite not being given any encouragement. His attention was caught by something very interesting in the kiwi vine running riot over the doorway. He appeared to focus on a wasp dipping, like a humming bird, into the side of a bruised and rotten fruit. It must be sweeter, she thought. The decay was sweeter. He went on and on surveying the wasp until she just had to get past him.
‘Konbanwa.’ He batted the drunken wasp with a sleeve and started on a particularly warm overture. ‘Dance festival tonight?’ An alarming smile grew across his face. The Obon festival was in August. The festival to honour the dead. Would she go with him?
Hana was keen to remain polite and not to annoy him. She usually relied on Jess to be the one to deal with him, and she had to find the right words to refuse him.
‘I won’t come with you.’ It was easier than she guessed. ‘But thanks for letting me know it’s on’
The streets were busy and a group of men, carrying a shrine on broad shoulders, passed by in the street to the beat of taiko drums. She wandered alone through the food vendors’ calls and lilting flute music. Across in the square, traditional dancers moved slowly to choreographed fans. She bought the tattoo dragon book and a bamboo leaf of street food, which she ate in the dark beneath cherry trees strung with lights. Under the cover of darkness she knew she could have not been followed and she recognized a new pleasure in being alone in a crowd.
