by Ryu Murakami
He tried to disguise his nervousness by getting right to the point and keeping things as businesslike as possible.
‘I was hoping to talk with you a little more and was wondering if you could find the time. Yoshikawa, the other producer, won’t be joining us, so perhaps it might be best to meet during the day. I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea.’
‘I’d be delighted!’
‘When would be good for you?’
‘Whenever you like. I’m not working daytimes now, so . . .’
‘How about the day after tomorrow, then – Thursday, about one p.m.?’
‘Perfect!’
He specified a café in one of the high-rise hotels in Akasaka.
After hanging up the phone Aoyama sank back on the sofa, feeling like a balloon in a warm blue sky. Minutes later, as he was blissfully absorbing his fourth glass of cognac, Yoshikawa called.
‘Sorry to disturb you this late in the evening, but something happened that’s kind of weighing on my mind.’
‘No problem,’ Aoyama said. His own voice sounded embarrassingly giddy, as if he’d been inhaling helium.
‘Look, it’s not that I was suspicious or anything, but after you left I telephoned Victor. Maybe it’s no big deal – just some sort of mistake, probably – but there’s no producer named Shibata in the domestic music division.’
Aoyama’s brandy-soaked brain couldn’t make any sense of this at first. Victor? Shibata?
‘Or rather,’ said Yoshikawa, ‘not any more, there isn’t. A producer named Shibata Hiroshi used to work there, but he died a year and a half ago.’
5
Aoyama arrived at the hotel a full forty minutes early. The café was on the first floor, off the lobby. He’d phoned the day before to reserve a table for one o’clock, as well as a window-side table in a restaurant on the top floor at one-thirty. He had agonised a bit, wondering if a restaurant on the top floor of a high-rise hotel wasn’t a bit tacky, if it wouldn’t be in better taste to take her for sushi or sukiyaki in the Japanese restaurant in the basement, or to go out to a chic bistro in the town, for example, or a trattoria, or a French restaurant. All day yesterday and all this morning in the office he’d got exactly zero work done. He’d seemed so dazed and distracted, in fact, that several members of his staff had showed concern, asking if he was feeling all right, or if he hadn’t better see a doctor.
The café was jammed with the lunch crowd, and he had to stand with the mob near the entrance and wait for his table. He surveyed the lobby to make sure Yamasaki Asami hadn’t arrived already. Or, more precisely, to make sure she wasn’t watching him stand there like an idiot, fidgeting nervously and checking his watch every few seconds.
‘Listen,’ Yoshikawa had said on the phone the night before last. ‘I know you’re pretty far gone, but try to keep your feet on the ground. Don’t let her set the pace, whatever you do. We don’t know anything for certain about this girl, but I can’t shake the feeling that something’s wrong here. I’m not saying she was intentionally lying, but, come on, there’s something strange about naming a guy who died a year and a half ago as your mentor. He died of a heart problem, apparently, but if he really was her mentor, how could she not know that?’
Aoyama couldn’t fathom why Yoshikawa would be suspicious of someone simply because her mentor at a record company had died. What would make him pounce on some trivial detail like that? Why was he being so closed-minded?
An impartial observer might have seen that, in fact, Aoyama was the one whose mind was closed. But he himself was already incapable of being impartial, and it hadn’t been only because of the cognac. He’d replied to Yoshikawa’s concerns rather testily, insisting that she’d simply mistaken the man’s name, and that in any case the question of whether or not she had a mentor or manager or whatever simply wasn’t of any importance.
‘Yeah, well, anyway,’ Yoshikawa had said before hanging up. ‘Just watch what you’re doing, all right?’
Aoyama was shown to a table next to the floor-to-ceiling windows and ordered iced tea. The café was well heated, and the sunlight through the windows was intense. What with that and the anticipation, he was soon perspiring beneath his shirt and jacket, and his throat was chalk-dry. He glanced around at the other tables, most of which were occupied by large and small groups of middle-aged women: old classmates reuniting, friends from some sports circle or culture club, tourists from the provinces. Every last one of these women seemed to be gabbling at the same time, and the clamour was astonishing. A few scattered tables were occupied by sales-rep types, salarymen out making the rounds of their corporate clients. They all had the body language and wore the suits of men for whom the two-thousand-yen lunch special was exactly right.
The iced tea arrived, and Aoyama drained half of it in two swallows, thinking: Talk business over two-thousand-yen specials day after day, and you end up coming across like a two-thousand-yen special – nothing fancy, but then again nothing tragic either. This idle train of thought was abruptly derailed when Yamasaki Asami appeared at the entrance to the café. The instant he saw her, his heart grabbed him by the throat and he realised that the entire list of things he wanted to say – a list he’d gone over several times – had been completely erased from his memory banks. What’s wrong with me? he had to wonder once again. Forty-two-year-old men don’t act like this. Yamasaki Asami scanned the room, and when she finally spotted him she beamed and hurried towards his table, threading her way through the waiters and waitresses who bustled back and forth, balancing their trays. Her hair was tied back, as it had been at the audition, and she was dressed in an outfit that managed to be neither flashy nor drab – navy-blue dress, vivid orange scarf, suede jacket and matching pumps, black stockings. This, he thought, was one woman who really understood how best to complement her own beauty. And of course it was clear, from her sense of fashion, that she knew very well how extraordinary her own beauty was.
‘Sorry! I’m afraid I’m a little late.’
She sat down across the table from him. The sunlight through the lace curtains both illuminated and veiled her profile. She’d been gorgeous under the bleak fluorescent lights in that meeting room, but in this light, thought Aoyama . . .
She was ten times as beautiful.
‘Not at all. I got here much too early. My office is near by.’
He found, to his chagrin, that he couldn’t look directly at her and didn’t know what to do with his eyes. He felt like a high-school kid, and thought how embarrassed he’d be if Shige were to see him like this. When he tried to focus on that lovely and vaguely melancholy face of hers, it felt as if his heart and stomach were getting all tangled up together. At last he resigned himself to the occasional fleeting glance. If he completely avoided meeting her gaze she might wonder about his character, or even take him for some sort of pervert.
After ordering a lemonade, she tilted her head to one side and smiled.
‘I’m really glad to see you again,’ she said.
Possibly because she’d hurried for fear of being late, her cheeks were somewhat flushed, and he remembered thinking at the audition that her soul seemed to lie just below the surface of her skin. When she smiled, it was as if you were looking directly at a happy soul. Aoyama decided to peer into her eyes for just a moment each time he began to say something, then look away, but he had to remind himself not to let his gaze dance all over the place. He rested his chin on his left hand, trying to remember if he’d ever been this stiff with tension before. It was exhausting, but exhilarating.
‘Please just relax,’ he said, thinking, You’re the one who needs to relax, buster. ‘It’s not as if I have anything in particular I want to grill you about.’
She nodded and said ‘all right’ in that voice of hers. That warm, limpid, liquid voice that seemed to curl around his nerve endings.
‘I thought we’d have lunch and just, well, chat about this and that. There’s a restaurant on the top floor here that I thought might do, but
they specialise in steak and so on – are you OK with meat dishes?’
‘I like every kind of food.’
Aoyama’s palms were moist with perspiration. He was surreptitiously wiping them on his trousers when something very strange occurred. A young man in a wheelchair had entered the café, accompanied by an older woman who was probably his mother. They were laughing about something. Still smiling, the youth turned his head slightly, and his eyes widened as they locked on Yamasaki Asami. The smile froze, the blood drained from his face, and he made as if to rise up from his wheelchair. Seeing his distress, the woman leaned over and asked him, presumably, what was wrong, but he merely shook his head. Averting his gaze and hunching his shoulders as if cowering, he wheeled himself on towards the far end of the room. There was no change whatsoever in Yamasaki Asami’s expression as she watched this peculiar little scene play out.
‘Someone you know?’ Aoyama ventured.
She shook her head and shrugged, apparently just as mystified as he was. The kid must have mistaken her for someone else, Aoyama thought, or maybe he was just having some sort of attack.
He still knew nothing about Yamasaki Asami. But he wasn’t going to allow an odd little incident like this – or Yoshikawa’s paranoid ravings, for that matter – to burst his bubble.
‘I never knew beef could be so delicious!’
At the restaurant, Aoyama had ordered a starter of pigeon pâté, Kobe chateaubriand steak and a half-bottle of red Burgundy. Yamasaki Asami sipped quietly at her wine and responded to his questions in a refreshingly open and natural way. She also ate every last morsel of food she was served. Aoyama, who’d loosened up a little with the wine, liked everything about her. The way she talked, the things she talked about, the way she sipped her wine and handled her fork and knife. He didn’t think he’d ever met a woman of whom that was true before.
‘This is such a treat!’ she said. ‘And you really just wanted to chat?’
‘Sure.’
‘Lucky me!’
‘I’m just happy if you’re enjoying yourself.’
‘How could I not be?’ she said. ‘Do you come here often?’
‘I wouldn’t say often. Once in a while. Compared to other places I find it . . . I guess the word would be “genuine”.’
‘Genuine?’
‘Most restaurants of this sort are known for the view, or for their interior design, or their location, and the quality of the food is secondary. But this place isn’t like that. Here the atmosphere is designed to enhance the food. They pride themselves on serving the finest meat dishes, and they want you to be as comfortable as possible while enjoying them.’
‘It is a nice atmosphere,’ she said. ‘I suppose only people of the best quality come here.’
‘Best quality?’
‘People with, well, status.’
‘Rich people, you mean?’
‘Yes, people with money, and power.’
‘Hmm. Well, I don’t think of myself as being anything special because I eat in this restaurant. And not all wealthy people are what I would call “quality”, believe me.’
‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘But then again, I wouldn’t really know. My father was just a salaryman, and we were just an average middle-class family. We’d spend the day together at one of the big department stores on weekends, and sometimes we’d take trips, but when we ate out it was always at a soba shop or a family restaurant. I guess I grew up believing that places like this – the sorts of restaurants I’d see in magazines – were only for the elite.’
‘I don’t think that’s true any more, if it ever was. Japan has, in an unlikely way, become a wealthy country, and in Tokyo almost anyone can enjoy the best cuisine from all over the world, but . . . It may sound funny for me to say after stuffing myself with a meal like this, but the truth is that we Japanese are more suited to places like soba shops. The food here is fantastic, there’s no denying that, but I always feel slightly out of place in this kind of environment.’
She looked down at her plate and smiled.
‘I hope this won’t sound rude,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’ve never met anyone who says the sorts of things you do.’
‘No?’
‘I’ve had, well, only a little experience in the entertainment industry, but the people I’ve met . . . I can’t describe what I mean very well, but everyone seems so . . . arrogant?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m the one who’s got it all wrong. Let me just say, though, that I’ve never met anyone like you either, Yamasaki-san.’
‘Really? In what sense?’
‘Most young women who aspire to the entertainment industry are fairly blasé about eating in places like this, for example. Once they’ve spent a few years with the title “aspiring actress”, a lot of these women get pretty hardened without even realising it. They acquire a certain, I don’t know, sordidness about them. They seem to take it for granted that men will line up to lavish gifts upon them and treat them to expensive meals. My work is mainly documentaries and PR films, but even I see plenty of that hardened, grasping type of young women.’
‘I see. Human nature is frightening, isn’t it?’
‘But you’re not like that at all,’ he said. ‘You’re very . . . very real.’
She smiled shyly and looked down at the table.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
It was the first time in ages that Aoyama had shared a deeply satisfying meal with a lady. Yamasaki Asami was even freer of affectation than he’d dared to imagine. And what she said to him as they were leaving the restaurant left him feeling ecstatic.
‘I’d like to ask a favour of you,’ she said. ‘It may seem awfully brazen, but . . . I’ve been struggling on my own for so long, and I don’t really have anyone to talk to and ask for advice. No one mature and trustworthy, at least. I have that mentor at Victor, but the truth is I’ve never even had direct contact with him, only through a friend of mine. I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would be if I could talk things over with someone like you from time to time. I know how busy you must be, and of course I mean only when you have time to spare, and naturally a soba shop or a family restaurant, anywhere at all would be fine, or even over the telephone . . .’
As they waited for the elevator, Aoyama handed her his business card, with the telephone number of his office. She smiled and clasped the card to her heart, as if cradling it. Gazing through the big windows of the elevator hall, Aoyama felt as if he could spread his arms and sail out over the streets of Tokyo.
‘I was amazed,’ he told Yoshikawa over the telephone as soon as he got back to his office. He was aware of a lingering tension raising the pitch of his voice. ‘You just don’t find young women like that these days.’
Aoyama recounted the salient points of his conversation with Yamasaki Asami. It seemed as if every word had been engraved in his memory.
‘She’s so modest and sweet and uncomplicated. Which means, I suppose, that she’s not really suited to being an actress, but . . . There’s just something very real and solid about her.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Yoshikawa said in a rather cold tone of voice. ‘Well, I have to be a wet blanket, but you know where I stand on this. Something doesn’t seem right about this woman. You didn’t tell her the real purpose of the audition, did you?’
‘Of course not,’ Aoyama said with some asperity. Yoshikawa didn’t understand, but then Yoshikawa hadn’t shared a lunch with her. Maybe he was just envious. Aoyama had exceeded both their expectations, after all, by finding what looked to be the ideal woman.
‘I found out a little more about this Shibata character at Victor,’ Yoshikawa said, and Aoyama groaned inwardly. ‘He produced a number of hits in the seventies. Fairly well respected in the industry, but there was always a lot of talk about his womanising. Granted, there’s nothing unusual about a record producer taking on singers or actresses as protégées, or privately handling their management for them, or, l
et’s face it, privately handling their bodies once in a while. But it seems that once Shibata lost most of his power in the industry – especially during the last few years of his career – he used the mentor thing exclusively for the purpose of getting laid. Apparently to the point that it caused serious trouble for Victor. Of course, there are creeps like that at any record company, but . . . Did you ask her about this guy at all?’
‘Of course I did,’ Aoyama said angrily. ‘Yoshikawa, listen. She only had contact with Shibata through an acquaintance of hers. She never even met him.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Look. If Shibata was such a womaniser, he probably had a little black book full of protégées and potential protégées, right?’
‘Good chance.’
‘So he probably just never got around to calling her. Which would explain why she didn’t know he was dead, and why no one else at the company would know about her.’
Yoshikawa’s ‘hmph’ was somewhere between a grunt and a scornful laugh. Aoyama was seething. He’d been particularly offended by that ‘privately handling their bodies’ crack. Just to picture some arrogant, bloated, middle-aged record producer putting his arm around Yamasaki Asami’s shoulder, whispering ‘Unnerstand?’ or ‘That’s a good girl’, had twisted his stomach into a knot.
‘There’s something else, too,’ Yoshikawa said in the same cool-to-cold tone. ‘Her family in Suginami? They aren’t there any more. Moved away two years ago. I had a girl in my office try to contact them – same as we would for any finalist – and they’re gone.’
‘People move house all the time,’ Aoyama spat. Why was Yoshikawa investigating every little thing?
‘True. But the landlord didn’t even know where they’d moved to. Normally you leave a forwarding address, right? For mail and whatnot?’
‘They must’ve had their reasons.’
‘No doubt.’ Spoken with a tinge of sarcasm.
‘Yoshikawa, I appreciate your concern, but I’ve already made up my mind. To tell you the truth, I’m not the least bit interested in any of the other women, and I couldn’t care less about the film.’
