As she began to swing back in I pulled myself to my knees and prepared to get a hold of her legs, but she swung in faster than expected and her knees crashed into and sheered off my shoulder. I was set to topple but, having reached a low apex, she came in on me again. This time she struck me from behind with her heel and painfully righted me.
I grabbed her waist as best I could.
‘Get off!’ she yelled. ‘You’ll kill—’ ‘Fucking stay still!’
Mami kneed me squarely in the face with both legs. I felt as though I had been struck by a shovel. My eyes smarted and watery blood wet my face and neck. Though I tried to keep a hold of her, my body gave out beneath me in segments like a building dynamited from the first floor up. I slumped, hands protecting my face.
Somewhere behind all this, in the recesses, someone knocked on a door. But my only concern was for Mami, swinging in her noose. Looking up through a film of tears I saw the aluminium bar bounce above her and dislodge. She seemed unable to break her fall. She fell silently and without emotion, like a crash-test dummy. Her body thudded and bounced on the tatami. The bar struck her left thigh and she let out nothing more than an irritated grunt. I tried to scramble to her, blood splashing onto my T-shirt, but she knocked the bar off her leg and, with increasing speed, loosened and removed the noose around her neck. Without looking at me she untied her feet, stood up shakily and crossed to a pile of clothes to dress.
‘Coming,’ she yelled in response to another sharp rap on the front door. She pulled on a pair of jeans and slipped into high heels, gripped her hair back, tied it off with a band and took a deep breath.
‘Stay here,’ she said.
I listened to her run towards the front door, her footsteps softening, then finally flopped onto my back. My face and chest were covered in blood, my nose felt hideously swollen, my head throbbed and I was thirsty. I heard three voices apologising profusely. Then came the sound of the front door closing and, though I kept on listening, nothing more. No one was left.
Mami returned to the apartment fifteen minutes later, by which time I had somewhat recovered. I had dabbed at my nose with toilet paper, gulped down a few glasses of apple juice and dropped my bloody T-shirt into a sink full of hot soapy water. As a replacement, I had found and put on a business shirt which I guessed to be her father’s. She appeared out of nowhere.
‘I had to see the manager of the hotel. I feel like a naughty schoolgirl.’
Wanting to convey my displeasure I stared at the floor.
Mami frowned. ‘Okay, I’m sorry for kneeing—’ she began, before shaking her head. ‘You still haven’t figured it out, have you?’
‘What?’
‘What I was doing.’
‘I have.’
‘What then?’
‘Killing yourself.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Then what?’
‘Come with me,’ she said.
I followed her back to the Japanese-style room. A section of the tatami was splattered red with blood.
‘You see the photos on the walls in here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, they’re all by Araki Nobuyoshi.’
‘So?’
‘So stop being snooty and listen. Women go to him and he takes their photograph. At least, I think that’s how it works. He sleeps with a lot of them, too, from what I gather. But afterwards he takes great photographs. I like the fact women go to him. That’s my point. He doesn’t tie up moaning models. Well, maybe he does. But he also ties up women who have decided to be tied up. The government arrests him for obscenity and the feminists get upset, call him a misogynist, but if women go to him, aren’t they only doing as they please? Isn’t there a perverse liberation in choosing to be ‘obscene’? In choosing to be vulnerable? There’s such beauty in some of these photos.’
‘What does this have to do with you hanging yourself?’
Mami rolled her eyes and pointed to a large camera on a tripod tucked in a corner of the room. I had failed to notice it. Suddenly I understood.
‘The thing in your hand,’ I said. ‘It was a remote?’
‘I tried to keep hold of it. In fact, that’s why I only got one hand up under the noose. But my body wouldn’t allow it. It requisitioned the free hand, threw it up the rope. Were it not for that we’d have photos.’
‘Maybe you could’ve mailed one to Nobu-what’s-his-face,’ I said nastily, sinking down against the wall.
‘Maybe.’
‘Assuming you lived.’
Mami crossed the room and picked up the remote control. She held it aloft as evidence, then tossed it to where I sat.
‘You owe me one hell of an apology,’ I said. But even requesting this I knew it was pointless.
‘Pure madness!’
‘Why?’
‘You almost killed me.’
‘I didn’t string you up. You strung you up.’
‘Yes, but the whole thing was safe so long as I didn’t rattle that chair.’
‘Which you did—the moment you thought someone was coming.’
‘To get down.’
‘You’re telling me you never planned to kill yourself?’
‘Of course not. I wanted to see the photo. To do that, I had to survive it. It was a private experiment.’
‘Then you should have left me out of it.’
‘I should have,’ Mami said, surprising me. ‘But it was too tempting to see if you’d come. Let’s go for a walk. I want to show you something.’
‘Not today.’
‘Yes today.’
I collected painkillers for my headache and a few tissues for my nose. My health insurance had expired months earlier so there was little I could do but self-medicate. I followed Mami to the door where she spun unexpectedly.
‘By the way, you can’t come back here.’
‘Why not?’
‘The manager.’
‘The hotel manager?’
Mami nodded. ‘I promised him you’d never enter the building again and in return he promised not to tell my father about you.’
‘What have I done?’
‘Apparently you abused a maid. Something had her on strings. They’re furious. I saved you. You don’t understand how hard it is to get my father’s employees to lie to him. Or even just omit sections of the truth. If my father found out about half the things I do, like the noose, he’d lock me up.’
‘He should.’
Mami, oddly dressed down in jeans and a T-shirt, led me from the hotel to the Imperial Palace East Garden, a five-minute walk. We crossed a murky green moat, then passed beneath a tall wooden gate, inspecting a guard house which had once housed a hundred armed guards. From here the road into the garden was steep. Mami walked up each incline without difficulty, countering my belief she was unfit, and all the while refusing to tell me where we were going, what she wanted to show me. We crossed a number of open, perfectly manicured lawns to a large stone structure reminiscent of a wartime bunker.
‘This is part of the castle tower from the 1630s,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure it was the tallest castle in Japan.’
‘A history tour?’
Mami pointed back towards her hotel.
‘No. I look out over the thing every day. Eventually I started asking questions, bought a book which I’m still reading, one chapter a year—The Complete History of Japan. Do you like history?’
‘Not much, no.’
Mami laughed. ‘There’s that honesty again. Most people would have said yes to that question. It sounds better. But I’m like you. I find it hard to stick at history books. I only bought the one I have because I wanted to learn about this garden. That and because history books are good procrastination. I never feel like I’m wasting time reading The Complete History of Japan.’
‘Just what exactly do you put off doing?’
‘Study.’
‘You’re at university?’
‘No.’
‘Then what?’
/>
‘I’m between school and university.’
‘Which means?’
‘Which means I attend private classes.’
‘For what?’
‘Application tests.’
‘To?’
‘Universities. Well, one. Tokyo University.’
‘And how long have you been doing this?’
‘Two years. I could get in with a little help from my father but I don’t want to, not just yet. Since there’s no rush for me to get my degree or enter the workforce I can take my time with it, enjoy it. Quite a few people do that, take a year or more to get into university. I figure why not three? This is the rest of my life we’re talking about and I’m quite happy to put it off. I do as little as possible most days. I’m not a bit like the Crown Princess Masako, depressed because she had to give up her diplomatic career and befuddled by the pointlessness of royal life. I don’t understand her at all, her nostalgia for work. You’d hope at least royals could do nothing in this world without being made to feel inadequate.’
We walked on in silence, occasionally stopping to inspect plants or signboards, and when we came to the exit it appeared to be roughly opposite the entrance. A bored guard, resplendent in his palace uniform, asked for the tags issued upon entry. Mami handed them over with an automatic smile and we were waved through.
This exit led us onto a wide old bridge. It was a solid, sturdy mass of stone jutting from the perimeter wall and crossing the moat, dividing it cleanly in two. We moved to the left and peered down. In the water below heavy carp flapped along stone walls, churning the edges white. Some of these giant fish were a dull grey, others orange. Mami rested her arms on the railing. Unlike the tourists surrounding us she had no interest in the water. She looked diagonally across the moat towards a high wall on the Tokyo side.
‘I jumped off that once,’ she said. ‘That’s what I wanted to show you.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I did.’
I looked at her carefully, at her lips, searching for evidence of a smile. But there was not a trace of a curve there. She stared at the wall. Made of solid stone blocks, it ran from the city side of the bridge out into the distance.
‘You’re crazy, but not that crazy,’ I said. ‘That must be at least ten metres high.’
‘I promise you, I did.’
‘Why the—?’
‘Because of a feeling.’
‘A feeling? What sort of feeling could make you do that?’
Mami glanced across icily. ‘What feeling? The same feeling that clogs my throat, makes my heart thud and sucks my lungs flat. That’s what sort of feeling.’
‘I’ve never had it.’
‘When I get that feeling, I cry,’ Mami said. ‘I lock myself inside and I cry. Weeks pass with me just crying. I don’t go to my classes and I hardly eat. And when crying does nothing to stop it, I do something crazy. The craziest thing I can think of.’
Though sincere, I had the sense Mami was delighting in all this, like a child picking at a scab to keep a prized wound. I tried to picture her running and leaping from the wall but could not see it. For starters, there were three guards at the far end of the bridge. Had the water been deep enough for her to survive, and had she been able to climb back up, they would surely have arrested her.
‘Were you arrested?’
‘I did it late at night. I chose a dark spot without guards, somewhere I could get a good run up, then I walked away and practised my jump.’
Mami found a rubber band in her pocket and wound it around two fingers. ‘I was scared because I knew I was going to do it, that I had to do it. Once the idea was in my head as a way to feel better, it wasn’t my choice anymore.’ She flicked the rubber band. It shot from her hand and, losing momentum, fell to the water. Carp surfaced from the deep green, their ugly mouths gulping.
‘After that I jumped,’ she said. ‘I was lucky. Overstep and I would’ve tumbled down. Jump too early and I wouldn’t have made it. It’s steep but nowhere near vertical.’
I dabbed at my nose with a tissue. ‘Did you touch the bottom?’
Mami smiled. ‘That’s a secret.’
‘How did you climb back up?’
‘I’m not telling.’
‘Because you don’t know!’
‘No. I know,’ she said. ‘I know because I did it. If you want to know, you do it.’
The Rainy Season
A week after Mami’s make-believe suicide, Harry asked for another loan. His second request was far more substantial than his first—100,000 yen.
‘I thought you had money,’ I said, feeling yet more sweat leak onto my slippery face.
‘I do. I still have most of the first transfer, but I haven’t been able to finalise the second. The Japanese bank I’m dealing with keeps wanting to charge a fortune. It’s a lot of money to move. I want to get it right.’
‘I see.’
‘My grandmother left it to me about five years ago,’ Harry went on, as if to justify his worrying. ‘I wasn’t going to use it. But as soon as I landed here I knew.’
‘Knew what?’
‘Knew there was no point in slumming it. With a little capital, Japan’s ripe. I’m only staying in Nakamura’s as long as I have to.’
We crossed the road outside the convenience store and sat on an old staircase. We had taken to using this staircase for eating. Harry peeled back the plastic wrapping on his bento box, then lifted the transparent lid.
‘Shit,’ he said, putting the meal aside. ‘It’s hot. They really microwaved it, huh?’
‘You complained that it wasn’t hot enough last time.’
‘I didn’t know they’d understand.’
I laughed, feeling a stabbing pain in my bandaged nose. ‘When do you need this money by?’
‘Today, if possible. I have the chance to buy toilet seats. They’re fully heated and they’re cheap, which is exactly what I want. Once I have them the pressure’s off. I can get in touch with the guy I know in Ohio—the builder.’
‘Ohio?’
‘Ohio’s dying not to feel the cold, unlike Hawaii. I’ll need this money for a week. After that I’ll repay you 125,000 yen plus a complete set of porn novels, since this is no small favour.’
At that moment it began to rain in earnest, first with a few heavy drops and then as a vertical torrent. The sky above Tokyo had been working itself up to this release. Depthless cloud, hanging thick and low, had blotted out all blue, and occasional hesitant drizzle had only driven the humidity higher, until the city felt set to burst.
Without giving it any further thought—as if this rain were a sign—I decided to take a risk. After all, how could it hurt? I had no reason to distrust Harry. He had repaid my first loan and was serious about money. If worst came to worst I would only lose $1000. People everywhere put far more on the line.
‘It’s yours for a week,’ I said, water beginning to seep through my clothing.
‘You don’t mind lending it?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Great. I’ll pay you back 125,000 yen in seven days.’
I shook Harry’s hand distractedly. With the rain in my eyes and mouth as I looked up into the grey-white sky, my clothes sodden, I did not care about money. The weather had commandeered all reason. I grinned happily at the forces involved.
‘How about that,’ I heard Harry say beside me, voice a whisper.
‘How about that,’ I agreed.
My euphoria was short-lived. Humid Tokyo quickly irritated me. The liberal splashing of hot pink onto everything from computers to anti-constipation ads, the lack of consensus on which side of the footpath to walk, the drunken businessmen who fell asleep on crowded trains and let their bodyweight rest on those around them, the use of phones on pushbikes and the fearsome, iridescent lights which tumbled up and down wall-sized ads or burst from nowhere like silent explosions, all infuriated me. I wanted to switch the city off.
Harry went ahead and bought his t
oilet seats. The stack of cardboard boxes sat in his room, awaiting a next move. I was waiting, too. Rather than pay me back Harry had let the deadline slip, and I was beginning to get the uneasy sense there never would be any money.
‘We have to celebrate,’ he said, early one evening.
All I wanted was my 125,000 yen, but I thought it best to placate him. ‘Celebrate what?’
‘The toilet seats.’
We had wandered from the hostel down towards the fish markets where an older Japan—or traces of it—still lingered. Instead of immaculate department stores with well-groomed staff there were only stalls. Various fish—some packaged, some freshly sliced, others swimming—were on offer. Short, vaguely rural types with overalls and gumboots busied themselves inside and around the different shops, pulling in the bright canopies which extended into the narrow street or hefting up sloshing polystyrene crates. Children ran about waiting for their parents to finish up. At one table, a frowning old man speared eels through the head with a metal spike before slicing their writhing bodies into manageable slabs.
‘Celebrate how?’ I asked.
‘A snack bar.’
I stared along the stark, small buildings above the stalls, all one room wide, many aluminium and rusted out like the hostel. A nearby two-stroke motor pained my ears. It would, I knew, be a blessing to leave the markets and exchange them for the curve of a female body, for the softness of a female face, even if this femininity came at a price and was a thinly veiled fraud.
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘How about that.’
We walked on. It was almost dark, the sky lit by planes. I decided not to take Harry all the way into the city. It was too far. There was a place nearby—nothing special, but satisfactory. If he wanted more he was on his own.
‘By the way,’ Harry said, ‘do you have my watch?’
‘Shit, I completely forgot about that.’
‘But you have it?’
‘No, I lost it.’
‘When?’
‘It fell off when I was running to Mami’s hotel. Sorry.’ I contemplated offering to replace it but on account of the outstanding debt said nothing more.
I led Harry into a small building roughly the shape of a cigarette lighter. We waited for the lift to descend and stepped in. I pressed a pink button and we clunked up to a pink floor. There was hardly room to stand, so cramped was this atrium. Harry pulled open a door with ‘Casanova’s’ written on it in a fancy, flowing script I found difficult to read.
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