Last Stop Tokyo

by James Buckler

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘You can’t be so dismissive, Alex. This is my career. I have to believe in it to be successful.’

  ‘I prefer these,’ he said, and pointed to two small photographs standing on the bookshelf. They were bright arrangements of flowers in a desert landscape. A spray of snow willows against dark, volcanic sand and a bowl of camellias in a bone-white dune. They were both overhung by skies rippled with rags of cloud.

  ‘You like them?’ Naoko asked.

  ‘Much more than the other one.’

  For a moment, she looked embarrassed. ‘They’re mine. I took them when I was at art school.’

  Alex stood and looked closer. ‘You never told me you were a photographer. They’re really good.’

  ‘I studied photography. That was my ambition when I was young. But then one thing or another got in the way so I settled for working at the gallery.’

  ‘Don’t you still want to try to make your own work instead of selling everyone else’s?’

  Naoko stood up and looked at them over his shoulder. ‘I wish it was that easy,’ she said. ‘Come on. I’m going to take a shower. If you ask nicely you can wash my back.’

  Naoko lay face down on the bed. Alex traced a finger over the ink lines of the tattoo that covered her hips and flank. Two golden peacocks fighting in a forest of bamboo. The tattoo started inside her thigh and ran up across her torso to cover one side of her ribcage. The colour was unfinished in places, with only the black outlines complete. It was minutely detailed with intricate patterns and vivid reds and purples that faded into one another. Alex found something new in it each time he looked. He felt the soft down of her skin beneath his fingertips.

  ‘I’ve never liked tattoos,’ he said, ‘but I like yours. It’s unique.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘The first time I met you, I never imagined that you had something like this. I was amazed the first time I saw you undressed.’

  Naoko’s voice was full of sleep. ‘Sometimes I wish I had just got a heart or a butterfly. Something simple.’

  ‘That would be too obvious. I don’t think that would suit you at all. I was told that tattoos are uncommon in Japan. They’re seen as antisocial.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘But you went ahead and got the biggest, craziest design I’ve ever seen.’

  Naoko smiled at him. ‘But only you get to see it. I don’t show my body to anyone else, so no one knows it’s there.’

  ‘Really? You’ve never shown it to anyone?’

  ‘Just you.’

  ‘So it looks like you have secrets, too?’

  Naoko laughed sarcastically. ‘I suppose so,’ she said.

  ‘Are you ever going to get it finished?’

  ‘I don’t think so. If you knew how painful it was, you wouldn’t ask. It was done the old-fashioned way, with a sharpened bamboo point instead of an electric needle. It hurt like hell.’

  Alex squeezed her body beneath his hands. ‘What’s wrong? Can’t you handle a little pain?’ he said.

  Naoko shook him away and turned over. ‘You wouldn’t know. You’ve never had a tattoo.’

  Alex reached up and patted his shoulder. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I have this.’

  The skin across his shoulder and back was smooth and stretched over the bones where it had been burnt, almost to the point of melting. The scars had a pale red sheen from the skin grafts running down the left side of his back and the inside of his arm, from shoulder to wrist.

  ‘This was painful enough.’

  ‘It was the first thing I noticed about you,’ Naoko said. ‘I saw it through your shirt on the night we met. I think it looks masculine. Like you’ve been through the wringer.’

  ‘I think I went through it a couple of times.’

  ‘That must have been a terrible experience,’ she said, and lifted herself on to one elbow. She leaned across and delicately kissed the scar tissue on his shoulder blade where the grafts were heaviest.

  Alex drifted away for a second, as if remembering. When his focus returned he tried his hardest to look unfazed. ‘Put it this way, I’d prefer not to do it again if I can help it. It was pretty bad.’

  ‘Bad enough to run away from?’

  He turned to her, his expression full of serious intent. ‘You like to let your imagination go wild, don’t you?’

  She could see it was foolish to insist. She bent down and held his face in her hands. ‘Let me kiss your eye,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it heals all things.’

  She reached out with the tip of her tongue and Alex felt it run across his eyelid.

  ‘Does that feel better?’ she asked.

  He felt the weight of her body on his, the slightness of her, the tautness of the muscles across her slender back.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and smiled up at her. ‘Much better.’

  Later, while she was sleeping, Alex got up and stood at the balcony doors, watching the night. Clouds had gathered over the city and swirled like paint mixed in water, obscuring the buildings in the skyscraper district. Below lay a square of waste ground where an old house had stood, only the foundations still visible in the moonlight. He remembered how they had watched from her window as a demolition crew had dismantled the building piece by piece and taken it away. He’d been amazed that a building could be turned into an empty space so quickly. Efficiency was the Japanese way, Naoko had told him, and he’d laughed and said that destroying things was a skill westerners would never be beaten at.

  He turned to watch her now, lying on her side, the faint streetlights drawing patterns on her skin as she slept. He quietly made his way into the kitchen and filled a glass with water, sipping it as he wandered from the kitchen into the living room, walking on the balls of his feet so as not to disturb her. He idly flicked through a magazine on the coffee table and then picked up one of her framed still-life photographs from the bookshelf and held it up to the light creeping in through the curtains. Even though he knew nothing about art, he could see that she had talent. The flower arrangements and the landscapes they were set in were striking. To be so gifted but unable to use that gift must be such a bitter pill to swallow. He held the frame closer to the soft blue beam to see it better.

  On the reverse of the frame, Alex noticed the corner of a folded piece of paper protruding from the wooden back that sealed the photograph inside. It appeared to have been pressed inside the frame for safekeeping.

  He loosened the clips that held the photograph in place and removed the panel. Lifting it away, he saw that he was right: there was a printed sheet of paper folded behind the image. He lifted it out carefully and held it up to the light. There were rows of intricate Japanese characters printed in dense, vertical lines of text. It looked like an official document, with some kind of seal at the head of the paper and a series of stamps in red and black ink along one edge. He could see Naoko’s signature at the foot of the page but, apart from that, the only section he was able to read was a date: 27 March 2004. So it was a ten-year-old sheet of paper. But he still had no idea why it was hidden inside a photo frame.

  He laid the document back inside the frame and sealed it shut. As he turned to replace it on the bookshelf, he noticed the back of the frame was covered in a pattern of skin whorls and palm lines, printed in a thick, dark impasto. The pattern was dry and crusted on to the delicate wooden grain and it flaked away in patches as his fingers ran across the surface. Alex lifted his fingertip to his nose and breathed in gently. Immediately, he could smell the rich, iron scent of blood.

  He lifted the frame up to the light to see better. There were patches of dark, bloody palm- and fingerprints dried on to the backing, like the sinister hand painting of a child. The explanation must be innocent, he thought. Any other possibility was too crazy to consider. He placed the photograph back on the bookshelf and went into the bedroom. He looked down at Naoko, still sleeping soundly beneath the white cotton she
ets. His eyes ran along the length of her arm and down to her hand, lying at her side, turned palm up. Near the centre of it, he could make out a small, round wound. It had dried and scabbed over but was still painful-looking, deep and angry like a vicious stigmata. He wondered how he hadn’t noticed it before.

  Naoko stirred gently as he watched her, and then lay still. It was 5 a.m. and the dawn was beginning to break outside. Her boss, Mr Kimura, would be arriving soon and Alex knew he needed to get going. Now he knew Naoko was no different from anyone else. Everybody has something to hide, after all, he thought. He considered waking her for a moment, but then changed his mind.

  The sun was up when he left the station at Koenji. The early-morning flights were passing overhead, and he could hear their engines whine as they made the descent to Haneda. The streets had been washed clean in the night and there was a sharp citrus smell on the breeze. Groups of workmen were hanging strings of electric lights in the trees along the roadside and the shopfronts were all decorated for the start another festival.

  His room was in a guesthouse in the backstreets behind the railway crossing. It was a low-rise suburb, outside of the Yamanote line, where all the upmarket addresses grouped together. There was no traffic, just corner after corner of narrow streets, the buildings all pushed up against one another. Drying poles with laundry were suspended from every balcony, and mattresses hung from the windowsills, airing in the sunlight.

  The guesthouse was on five levels, with ten bedrooms and a communal kitchen and bathroom. The landlady lived in a cottage at the end of the garden and came in each day to clean. She was a widow from Kyushu and spoke no English, except to ask for the rent money on the first of each month. Alex saw the other tenants only occasionally, in the kitchen or when he passed them on the stairs. Some were permanent and others just passing through. There were two Russian girls, Village of the Damned blondes, who were hostessing. Others did bar work. But, for most, the fall-back position was teaching in the language schools. ‘Specialist in Humanities’, their visas said. None of them were specialists in anything, Alex guessed; otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. He opened the front door and climbed the steps to the fifth floor, where the rooms were built into the eaves of the house. He unlocked his door and let himself in.

  His room was small and bare, with wooden walls and a window covered by a bamboo blind. There was a tatami floor and an old teak dresser and a smell of warmth and cheap incense. Dust motes floated in the slatted light. When he unrolled his futon mattress and spread out his bedding it took up three quarters of the floor space. Old postcards were pinned to the walls beside a faded map of the Japanese islands, the seams held together by tape, left by unknown tenants who had lived there before him. Alex had stayed there since his first night in the country and, although he had thought about finding somewhere more permanent, the plan had never become a reality. It was just as well. In his experience, it seemed an invitation to misfortune to put down roots.

  He took off his clothes and lay down and tried to sleep, but his mind was too restless. He lay on his back and thought about the night, about Hiro and the bar in Kabukicho, about Naoko. There was a weightless sensation in his stomach, like wheels lifting off a track. Alex had promised himself he would avoid all personal entanglements in Japan, especially the ones that gave him this feeling of impending danger. With Naoko, he could definitely sense obstacles fast approaching around unseen corners. But when he pictured her face, that crooked smile, he knew his promises to himself were pointless.

  He pushed the thought away and turned over, pulling the sheet up over his head. There were only three hours until he was due back at work.

  3

  ALEX KNEW HE must be dreaming. He was shivering, his jaws rattling against each other inside his aching skull. He could feel the hardness of the frozen tarmac beneath him where he lay; his hands were like ice but his back was burning, a relentless, piercing sensation like a constant scald. He could see the spectral silhouettes of trees above him, the snow flurrying down through the tangle of darkened branches. He tried to move, to push himself up on to one elbow, but his body refused to obey.

  Voices around him, phasing over each other in tones of panic. A face appeared above him, unfamiliar and terrifying in its demeanour. Blue emergency lights strobed in the darkness, reflecting back from a high-visibility jacket as the face leaned in and searched inside Alex’s eyes for signs of life.

  That was when he remembered the car, remembered driving through the junction and the look Patrick had flashed him from the passenger seat. The look of horror as they collided with their inevitable fate. He wondered where Patrick was now. He tried to turn his head to see if he could spot him among the crowd of paramedics and onlookers that had gathered above him, but his neck was encased in some kind of padded restraint, nylon straps binding it across his forehead. Maybe he should call out to him, Alex thought, but his tongue seemed to have swollen horribly inside his blood-filled mouth. He kept hoping that Patrick would appear in his eyeline, smiling, just so he knew that he was safe and unharmed.

  The thought of injury brought his focus back to the searing pain down one side of his spine. The flesh felt like it had been flayed from his body, ripped from the bones as if flensed by the blade of a butcher’s knife.

  More faces crowded above him. More voices.

  ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘He still has a pulse.’

  ‘Can he hear us?’

  ‘No idea. His back looks like a bomb went off behind him.’

  ‘He’s full of shrapnel from the other vehicle. It impacted straight through the driver’s side door. All that metal folded in and practically minced him. He must be in agony.’

  ‘Look at the colour of him.’

  ‘Iris dilation minimal.’

  ‘Can you give him something? For the pain, I mean. I have ketamine in my kit.’

  ‘Has he taken anything already? The other one’s as high as a kite.’

  ‘If they’re junkies, I can’t risk it.’

  ‘He was driving an expensive car.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he’s clean.’

  ‘Look in his pockets.’

  ‘Wait. I’ve found something. Two small bags. Some kind of powder. I don’t know what, but it’s not legal.’

  ‘He’s got a spoon and a hypo in here as well.’

  ‘That’s you fucked, son. No meds for you. You’re going to have to do this by gritting your teeth.’

  ‘No iris dilation.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s unresponsive. He’s going.’

  ‘Shit. Okay. Let’s move him. Quickly.’

  The pain was immense. Overpowering in its relentlessness. Alex desperately needed relief. There was nothing else in the world he wanted more. He began to see more faces as he was raised up on the stretcher and lifted towards the ambulance. He looked for Patrick, searched desperately for a glimpse of his face, but in the crowd around him he could see only strangers.

  4

  IN THE MORNING, Naoko took the metro back to Asakusa. She bought green tea and rice balls from the grocery beneath the apartment and carried them into the bedroom. There was a thick, earthy smell of stale alcohol in the room so she pulled the curtain back and opened the window. She left the breakfast tray beside the bed so it was there when Hiro woke up and went out to the balcony.

  Hiro’s mother was called Yukiko. She was sitting on a low wooden chair in the sun. Naoko poured her a cup of green tea and sat down beside her. Yukiko thanked her and took the cup and blew on it gently. She was listening to old show tunes on the radio and singing along under her breath. Yukiko was starting to look old now. Her hair was grey and cut short and she was wearing a thick cotton housecoat, despite the humidity. Her face was deeply lined, probably from all the smiling, Naoko thought. She should have been depressed more often. She definitely had reason to be. There was a wire cage hanging from the wooden rafter above the balcony. A songbird stood on a perch inside, busy and proud, with a yell
ow head and a puffed-out grey chest.

  ‘When did you buy yourself a bird?’ Naoko asked.

  ‘Hiro bought it for me. To keep me company.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  Yukiko laughed at the thought. ‘Why would you give a bird a name?’ she said.

  They heard Hiro come out of the bedroom. His eyes were red and bloodshot. He had a bathrobe draped around his shoulders and an old-style pair of house slippers on his feet. He yawned deeply when the fresh air hit his lungs and bent down and kissed the top of his mother’s head.

  ‘What happened last night?’ he asked.

  Naoko gazed up at him from her chair. ‘You were drunk, as usual, so we brought you here to sleep it off.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Alex and I. You don’t remember?’

  Hiro leaned against the balcony railing. ‘Refresh my memory,’ he said.

  Naoko could see he was playing dumb. She had known him far too long to fall for his tricks. ‘Your memory is just fine,’ she said. ‘It’s your liver you should worry about.’

  ‘What did you do after you left me?’

  ‘Nothing much. We just said goodbye and went our separate ways. You have your friend to thank for getting you here.’

  ‘He’s a true gentleman. That’s what the girls in the bar were saying about him. And handsome as well. The feeling was mutual, from what I can remember.’

  Naoko sipped her tea, refusing to take the bait. ‘I see your memory’s coming back now,’ she said.

  ‘It’s starting to.’ Hiro ran a hand through his hair. It was messy from sleeping. ‘I’m going to take a shower,’ he said.

  Naoko carried the dishes to the kitchen and started to rinse them. A framed photograph hung on the wall above the sink. It was an old picture of their coming-of-age ceremony, the colours faded by the sun. Naoko was wearing a brightly patterned kimono and zori sandals; Hiro was uncomfortable in a new suit. They both looked serious and innocent. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  Hiro came in from the bathroom and opened the fridge. He took out an apple and started to peel it with a knife. The peel unfurled in a single strand.