Tokyo Decadence

by Ryu Murakami

  “You really are a dope, aren’t you? I thought you might be, when you came bleating to me about your wife leaving, but this is even worse. I always thought novelists were supposed to be intelligent. I guess you’re the exception that proves the rule.”

  He starts inputting the data even as he continues to grumble.

  “I feel sorry for poor Borges, though,” he says, diddling away at his keyboard.

  “Who’s Borges?”

  “The new supercomputer we got about a month ago. I’m tapping into him.”

  “Why do you feel sorry for it?”

  “Borges can do one billion, six hundred million floating-point operations per second, and we give him this dumb-ass problem. If it’s too stupid, he’ll refuse to have anything to do with it, you know.”

  He looks up at me and grins.

  “So now people are impersonating you,” he says. “That proves how famous you’re getting to be.”

  “I was grinning like that too, until I actually met the woman.”

  “Look. Borges has agreed to run a simulation.”

  “‘Borges.’ You make it sound like a person.”

  “Well, he’s a likable character.”

  “You always used to say that about certain machines—that they were likable.”

  “Some of them are, much more than people. People always have to prove themselves, maintain their pride and all that. It’s a drag. Borges was equipped with self-esteem the day he was born.”

  “Computers can have self-esteem?”

  “Of course.”

  “I thought they didn’t have emotions.”

  “Self-esteem isn’t an emotion. What sort of novelist are you, anyway? Self-esteem is just self-knowledge, a solid understanding of your limitations. It’s living according to your own standards. Am I right or am I right?”

  A host of characters and letters and symbols and numbers fill the computer screen, line by line, and then disappear again. My friend smirks at me.

  “Pretty amazing, eh?” he says.

  “What is?”

  “You don’t see what’s amazing about this? And you’re the one selling books with all those high-tech titles—what a charlatan. Borges is simulating all the possible combinations for each one of your fifty categories. We’re talking about three sets of data with fifty categories each—it would take you a thousand years to do it! How’s your ex-wife, by the way?”

  “She’s fine. I hear from my son once in a while. He says she’s taking swimming lessons and yoga lessons and cookie-baking lessons and going out with a college basketball coach. And yours?”

  “She got remarried, to an executive at a coffee-importing firm, still in his thirties apparently. His first marriage, too. It’s astonishing, if you ask me. I mean, I’m really impressed that my wife could pull off something like that. Me, the only person I put any faith in is Borges. Ah, here’s the result. What’s this? Carp? What does he mean, ‘Carp’?”

  “The Hiroshima Carp. My impersonator and Mutsumi and I are all Carp fans. But that’s not an answer. What’s he trying to say?”

  “You really are thick, aren’t you? You take the girl to a ball game. Sports are pure, they’re simple, but that’s what’s good about them—there’s nothing fishy going on, it’s just throwing and hitting and running. And the phony was a fan of the same team, so whatever pleasant memories she has about him and baseball will be transferred to you. It’s perfect.”

  We’re at Yokohama Stadium for the eighth regular season game between the Whales and the Carp. Mutsumi squealed with delight when I invited her. I’ve been a fan of the Carp since about four years ago, when I participated in a panel discussion with their manager.

  The game’s turning into a pitchers’ duel between Endo for the Whales and Kitabeppu for the Carp. In the bottom of the third, Kato gets a hit off Kitabeppu, then Leon Lee brings him home with a line drive through the gap in right-center.

  The wind is a bit chilly, but the beer tastes great. It tastes that way because I’m sitting thigh to thigh with Mutsumi, who’s wearing tight leather pants, silver sandals, and a satin T-shirt and stuffing her cheeks with popcorn.

  “Mu-chan, why are you a Carp fan? You weren’t born in Hiroshima, were you?”

  “No. But a lot of the young guys on the team are really good-looking, right? Yamane’s good-looking. Takahashi Yoshihiko, of course. Kobayakawa, Kawaguchi, Moriwaki... They’re all so handsome.”

  “Looks are important to you, aren’t they?”

  “They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but it’s not true. The cover is all you get.”

  “But it is true that appearances can be deceptive, surely.”

  “Only if you let yourself be influenced by what other people think. If you trust your own feelings, you can judge anybody by the way they look and never go wrong.”

  Which means what, in the particular case of the impostor and me? I wonder what he looked like. Mutsumi probably never realized what he was really like inside. I wonder if he was a lot better-looking than me...

  Kinugasa’s solo homer in the top of the fifth derails this train of thought. We grab each other’s hands, jump up from our seats, and cheer like mad.

  In the top of the seventh, Takahashi Yoshihiko draws a walk. Takahashi’s been batting third since June, so next up is Yamamoto Koji. No outs, runner on first.

  Some fool behind us in the third-baseline stands yells, “Run, Takahashi!”

  “This is no time to try to steal,” I mutter to Mutsumi.

  “Why not?”

  She likes Takahashi best of all the players.

  “They should let Koji concentrate on batting,” I tell her. “How’s he supposed to do that if Takahashi’s playing cat and mouse with the pitcher and distracting him? Koji’s the cleanup batter—just let him do his job.”

  “But it’s Yoshihiko. I want him to run. I love watching him run.”

  Takahashi takes a big lead, and Endo stalls, throwing to first any number of times. Yamamoto waits, steps out of the box, waits some more. Over a minute passes before Endo throws the second pitch, and Yamamoto’s getting so impatient by this time that he lunges at a bad one and grounds to short for a double play.

  “See? Takahashi blew a perfectly good chance by fiddling around out there on first. Endo’s incredible today—we’re not going to get that many runners.”

  Both Endo and Kitabeppu are pitching brilliantly, and the game goes to extra innings.

  It’s the top of the tenth. Takahashi’s up first. He takes a big cut at the first pitch, a forkball, and misses, and then, on the second pitch, lays a beautiful bunt down the third-base line.

  Nobody out, man on first again. This time Takahashi doesn’t take such a big lead, but Yamamoto goes down swinging at Endo’s forkball. Nagashima gets just a piece of a fastball and fouls out to third.

  Next up is Kobayakawa. He’s my favorite player. But no sooner does he step into the batter’s box than Takahashi starts taking a huge lead again.

  “Look at that jerk! Now he’s making it hard for Kobayakawa to hit.”

  It happens just as I’m grumbling this. A voice several decibels louder than any of the others around us begins to shout.

  “Run, Takahashi!”

  It’s a man’s voice. When Mutsumi hears it, her face twitches. The guy who shouted is standing on his seat several rows behind us. Mutsumi turns toward him, looking alarmed. She stiffens and gives a little cry.

  If I’m a hamburger steak at Denny’s, the impostor is veal filet en croûte at Maxim’s. We’re both meat of the same species, but in terms of appearance and taste there’s just no comparison. As if walking in her sleep, Mutsumi stands up and drifts toward the filet.

  She called me three days later.

  “I’m sorry about what happened, but, see, it turns out he’s in love with me, and
he always was, and that’s why when he heard I was a fan of yours he said he was you, just to try to get my attention, and he says the reason he called other girls to his table was that he liked me so much it was embarrassing, so he tried to pretend he didn’t care, and of course he never went to bed with them or anything, but anyway after the manager called you up, he was in a real fix, and since the receipts were in your name he couldn’t put them on his expense account, but now he’s paid it all back, and he says he’s really sorry he caused you so much trouble, and he told me to ask if you’d like to go out to dinner with us sometime so he can apologize. What do you think?”

  It All Started Just About

  A Year and A Half Ago

  It all started just about a year and a half ago. I was a trucker, hauling mostly shipments of clothing. Our office was in Komazawa, but I was drinking with the boss one night when he said he wanted to show me a place that was a little out of the ordinary and took me to a gay bar in Roppongi. The hosts were all named after vegetables: Tomato-chan, Cabbage-chan, Pumpy-chan (for Pumpkin), Celery-chan, like that. We went in with a group of cabaret hostesses, and Tomato-chan sat at our table and entertained us with his sparkling wit. He was in the seat next to mine.

  “Hi! I’m Tomato, at your service.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. Then I felt his arm.

  “You’ve got quite a set of muscles there,” I said.

  “Muscles? Ee-yew. Don’t say that.”

  He acted embarrassed, but he really did have a hell of a build on him. I know because I boxed in high school, and I’ve seen all sorts of physiques. Tomato-chan’s muscles were lean and supple, perfect for a boxer.

  “How old are you?”

  “My! You should never ask a gay person his age. Don’t you know that?”

  “Come on. How old?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Ever thought about boxing? I know a guy who runs a gym in Itabashi. I could introduce you.”

  Tomato-chan got serious for a minute and quietly asked me the address and phone number of the gym. I wrote them down on the back of a coaster, and when I handed it to him he looked at me and said:

  “You know, you’d make a great gay.”

  I’d never even been around gay guys before, and at the time I didn’t really think much one way or the other about what he said.

  A year ago my wife moved out of our apartment. If she’d found someone else, believe me, I would’ve murdered them both, but that didn’t seem to be the case. All she said was: “You’ve got things all wrong. What a fool you are.” I didn’t understand what she meant, so one time I went to her new apartment and sort of forced my way in and tried to get an explanation.

  “Look at you,” she said. “You drive that big truck around for ten hours a day, then you come home moaning and groaning, you don’t even try to talk to me, just plop down in your lounge chair, drink a quart of beer, eat a bowl and a half of rice, chomp on the pickles, then fart and burp, and when we make love it’s just flup flup flup about five times and it’s over, and you call yourself a man? Don’t you see how ridiculous you are? You’ve got things all wrong.”

  I asked her what if I tried to do something about the farts and burps and the flup flup, but it was no go. And I still didn’t understand what it was I had all wrong.

  Our daughter was in the third year of middle school. She stayed with me after the separation. I don’t know which of us she takes after, me or my wife, but she’s a levelheaded little thing.

  Cheeky too. She was in the kitchen dicing carrots or cleaning up or something when she said:

  “I can understand how Mom feels, though.”

  “What do you mean, you understand?”

  “Well, Daddy, you’re not exactly humble, are you?”

  “What do I have to be humble about?”

  “There you go. That’s just what I mean.”

  “What?”

  “Did it ever occur to you that there might be other ways to live your life? You act like driving trucks is the be-all and end-all.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Well, it’s not very fashionable.”

  “Listen, let me tell you something, a man can’t go around worrying about whether or not his job is—”

  “Guys who are full of themselves aren’t even popular in middle school.”

  “Look, I work, don’t I? I hand over the money to your mother, I feed you, I drink my beer. What’s so wrong about that?”

  “It’s all right with me, I’m your daughter. But you and Mom started out as strangers, right? Well? You’ve got to be more considerate with people who aren’t blood relations.”

  I still didn’t really understand. Even my daughter was beyond my comprehension. One day I got up the courage to ask her why she’d stayed with me. This is what she said:

  “Just around that time—when Mom left with her Boston bag?—I saw Kramer vs. Kramer, and it made a big impression on me. I know I’m a lot older than the kid in the movie, but it made me think how much fun it would be to make French toast with my daddy and stuff.”

  Then she giggled.

  Incomprehensible. Incomprehensible, but she does take good care of me. If it weren’t for my daughter... Damn. Just to think about it gives me the willies.

  Then, about six months ago, my company went bust. My boss was a simple, serious sort who thought it was important for us to keep up with the new developments in office automation, and that proved to be our downfall.

  I collected unemployment insurance and applied for jobs at several other trucking companies, but after a couple of weeks I realized my heart wasn’t really in it. What did trucking ever get me? My wife moved out, and my daughter... well, she didn’t respect me. Driving a semi was the only skill I had, though.

  I didn’t tell my daughter what was going on, but she’s quick to figure things out.

  “Did you quit your job?” she asked one night, as she was sprinkling curry powder into a pot. I was watching a ballgame on TV.

  “No, I didn’t quit.”

  “Oh. The company went bankrupt?”

  “Bingo.”

  Rob a man of his job and you rob him of his vitality. It’s really true.

  “So why don’t you just take it easy for a while?”

  She didn’t sound concerned at all.

  “Can’t afford to. You have to go to high school next year, for one thing.”

  “Public schools are cheap. I want to go to public high anyway. And you’ve got a little money saved up, haven’t you?”

  I did have a bit, but I didn’t want to touch it. I was going to send her to junior college with that money.

  “And you’ve got unemployment and everything, right?”

  It was strange. Here my daughter’s coming out with all this cheeky crap and I didn’t even lose my temper. Before, I would have jumped to my feet and turned the table over and told her to shut the hell up, but now I didn’t have it in me. I just let her dish out some curry and went, “Thanks, honey.” She gave me a big grin. I bet what she wanted to say was, “You should’ve told Mom that once in a while.”

  The game on TV was the Giants versus the Carp. Nishimoto was pitching for the Giants and had a three-run lead. I was born in Oji, so I’m a Giants fan down to the hair on my balls. My wife liked the Carp and was a big fan of the pitcher Yamane because he’s from Okayama, where she grew up. My daughter’s a Carp fan too, for the simple reason that a lot of the players are handsome. Anyway, as I was sitting there eating my curry and watching the game, with her beside me cheering for the Carp—going, “Good eye, Yoshihiko!” or “Kobayakawa, time for a home run!”—I realized I was starting to hope the Carp would come from behind and win. And it scared the shit out of me.

  At first I thought I felt that way because of the Giants’ pretty boys, Egawa and Hara, building those bi
g mansions of theirs. My friends and I used to talk about how we couldn’t stand to see these upstarts playing baseball just to pay off a housing loan. But it wasn’t really that. It wasn’t about Egawa or Hara, it was something inside myself. If it made my wife and daughter happy to see the Carp win, then it would make me happy too—that’s what seemed to be at the back of my mind now, and it scared me. It made me wonder what was going to become of me at this rate. I had three servings of curry, which made my daughter glad, and as I was smiling back at her I started to feel like I didn’t know who I was, and tears welled up in my eyes. But then I remembered some old saying about how you should never cry on a full stomach, and I held back the tears for all I was worth.

  It wasn’t that I was following her advice about taking it easy, but I stopped looking for work. That doesn’t mean I started gambling or carousing or anything, mind you. All I did was, every day I’d go to West Shinjuku, where all the skyscrapers are, and walk around. I’d look at the fountains or hang out in bookstores or stroll through the park or spend time in coffee shops. I didn’t want anybody to mistake me for a bum, so every morning I shaved, combed my hair, and put on a clean shirt my daughter had washed and ironed and some nice shoes, which I hadn’t necessarily done even when I was working. By nice shoes I just mean your regular leather shoes, but I had three pairs that were practically new, since I usually wore sandals at work. I went to the bookstore in the NS Building almost every day and stood around reading about things like physiognomy, where they try to advise you about your life according to your facial features. Most of the advice was along the lines of, “If you persevere in your efforts you will surely succeed,” which is bullshit, if you ask me. People who turn to stuff like this have probably already persevered and gotten nowhere.

  I often saw a woman about my age in the bookstore, and one day I surprised myself by going up and talking to her. It made me wonder again what was happening to me.