Tokyo Decadence

by Ryu Murakami

  “Stop right there. This is the part I don’t get. Why didn’t you hit the woman too? Why did you destroy the television set instead?”

  Sakuma Kyoko was crawling around in the living room in pink pajamas with her mouth open, making a hiccuping sound in her throat.

  That’s when I heard the voice.

  Run, Takahashi!

  The program Pro Baseball News was on TV. They were showing highlights of a preseason game between the Carp and the Braves. Kobayakawa got a hit and Takahashi Yoshihiko was rounding third. That’s when the voice yelled out, and when I heard it I understood everything. I understood why people make fun of me and push me around. It’s because I’m fat and slow and stupid. Back in the Stone Age we were hunters, but people like me were too clumsy to catch any game, so everybody bullied us and shunned us. The Stone Age went on for thousands and thousands of years, so we’ve still got those memories inside. They say we’re all equal now, but it’s not true. Those memories are why people like Ma and me always get picked on.

  Takahashi looked so beautiful running, it gave me goose bumps. Takahashi, Carl Lewis, John McEnroe, people like that, it makes you feel good just to watch them run. That’s because they’re the ones who used to supply us all with meat. It’s that memory that makes us happy. I ignored Sakuma Kyoko crawling over the floor trying to escape and smashed the television set. I felt like I was smashing the whole world.

  “But why the television? Do you still refuse to explain?”

  Maybe I’m the only one who can understand it. I wonder who it was, though, shouting “Run, Takahashi!” It sounded like a woman’s voice. Sakuma Kyoko was in no condition to shout anything. Maybe it was a spectator at the baseball game on TV. Or maybe it was me, for all I know. But why a woman’s voice? Maybe I’m more confused than I realize...

  Whenever I Sit at a Bar

  Drinking Like This

  Whenever I sit at a bar drinking like this, I’m reminded what a sacred profession bartending is. The bartender, with the mirrored shelves of many-colored bottles behind him, moves methodically about in his stained-glass vestibule, like a priest performing a rite. Pouring the libations into various glasses, he listens with a reverent, sympathetic smile as the congregants recite their woes.

  At the far end of the bar is a pair of unattractive “women of a certain age,” with coarse skin and too much makeup. They’re very drunk—or maybe only pretending to be. Their dialogue alternates between whispers and squeals. “Another?” the bartender inquires, beaming his smile in their direction.

  Next to them is an obviously newlywed couple. I imagine they’ve just held the wedding reception at this hotel, and will spend a night here before leaving on their honeymoon. Neither of them is talking much. The groom takes tiny sips at a glass of house whiskey and water, and the bride is drinking in her surroundings as the ice in her Mai Tai melts, turning it a cloudy orange. “Shall I bring you something to nibble on?” the bartender suggests, sweeping his smile their way.

  Alongside the newlyweds is a lone American in a dark suit with a bottle of Schlitz before him. Foreigners always order beer, having been warned by the guidebooks about the prices in hotel bars. Next to the American a young woman and a much older man are downing champagne cocktails and all but necking. Beside them is a pair of the sort of half-assed rich guys you find in any hotel bar. And next to them is me. An empty stool and me.

  She’s late. I’m drinking by myself, not talking to anyone, and I can’t really tell how drunk I am. I wonder how many I’ve had. “Shall I fix you another?” the bartender asks, and I nod. Bourbon splashes into a straight glass. “Still busy as ever?” he says as he pours. Well, at least the location work is over, I tell him. Now it’s just a matter of editing the film.

  I work for a television production company. For the past couple of years I’ve been directing documentaries, mostly overseas, but before that I worked on musical variety shows.

  The bartender never rests. He arranges the glasses in neat rows, chills the champagne and white wine, chips rocks out of a block of ice, replaces ashtrays, serves up plates of sausages or oysters. It’s probably safe to say that everyone sitting here is looking for some kind of sin tonight. The circumstances are different for each, of course, but everyone has the same general destination in mind. No one gets drunk in order to raise their moral standards. The bartender is a different sort of priest.

  An unpleasant task lies ahead of me tonight. Maybe I should try to have a laugh or two while I still can. Maybe I’ll share a little joke with the nice bartender. For the past six months or so I’ve been documenting slums. Calcutta, Manila, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Bogotá... When you’re there you begin to wonder if the whole world isn’t a slum, if slum life isn’t the normal state of affairs for human beings. I heard a lot of good jokes in those places. A dead baby was floating in the sewer in Calcutta, and an Indian fellow I knew said something hilarious. What was it again? Ah, well, never mind. It’s about a dead baby, after all—if I didn’t tell it just right...

  “Sorry!”

  Here she is. I haven’t seen this woman, this ex-mistress of mine, for a long time. She looks incredible. Why is it that the moment you’ve distanced yourself from a woman and stopped sleeping with her, she’s suddenly even more beautiful than before?

  “The streets were so jammed!”

  Jammed? I nearly tell her. Try the bazaar in Calcutta if you want to see jammed. Strange thought to have at a time like this. Maybe I am getting drunk after all.

  “It’s been so long. I wish I had more time but I’ve got to get home early tonight because my mother’s coming. You look great.”

  I don’t feel great. And now I feel even less so. I wasn’t getting my hopes up too much, but I was half wondering if she and I might not rekindle the old flame for one evening. I could use some warmth tonight. That’s life, though. You don’t have to live in a slum to know that things don’t always work out the way you’d like them to.

  “Would you explain it all to me again?” she says. “I didn’t quite get it on the phone.”

  She works at one of those boutiques on the backstreets of Aoyama. The type of woman who assumes that being tall and pretty gives her certain privileges. Her name’s Kiyomi. They call her Kimi, and that’s what I called her in bed. She declines a glass of my Wild Turkey and orders the Brandy Alexander she always used to drink.

  “Well?”

  I don’t feel much like talking about it. What I’d like to do is rattle off a series of slum jokes, laugh like mad, drink till our tongues go numb, shower together, and play games with a bottle of vegetable oil.

  “Well, the thing is, a certain woman is taking me to court.”

  “So you said. Your wife?”

  “No. My wife’ll probably be taking me to court too, but she’ll have to wait in line.”

  “You have so many women, after all.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Not now.”

  “Anyway, this woman, she’s suing me for damages.”

  “Damages? What does that mean? Is she young?”

  “No. Average.”

  “Mid-twenties?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Oh. Average.”

  “Average, right? Anyway, her lawyer says we were in a common-law marriage type of relationship.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “She claims I tied her down, restricted her freedom.”

  “I don’t get it. I mean, she chose to get involved with you, didn’t she? Knowing you had a wife and children?”

  “That sort of rational argument doesn’t work with her.”

  “Are yakuza involved?”

  “No, no, she’s perfectly straight and narrow. Average. So, anyway, my lawyer says—see, she and I always met here, in this hotel—so he says if she was the only one
I ever had relations with here during all that time, then that could lend credence to her claim that it was an exclusive and binding relationship.”

  “I don’t really understand.”

  “So my lawyer says that if there was even one other woman I was intimate with in this hotel, even one I paid for or whatever, then I could claim all my rendezvous here were only, you know, recreational types of things.”

  “Forget it!”

  I can feel the blood drain from my face. Why is she so quick on the uptake all of a sudden?

  “Wait. Hear me out.”

  “You want me to testify for you, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but, look, there’s one thing I have to tell you in advance. We’re talking about a legal trial here. I can’t offer you any compensation.”

  “You bastard! Compensation? Think what you’re asking me to do! I’m not even married yet! I... What would I tell my mother? My mother’s still working, after years of cooking dinner for us every night! What do you take me for? You don’t care about anyone’s feelings but your own!”

  And damn me if she doesn’t start crying. Her mascara runs down her cheeks, and black tears drop onto the marble countertop. The American in the dark suit shoots me a reproachful glance, while the half-assed rich guys are talking about membership at the Yomiuri Country Club, pretending not to notice us. There’s a saying that two things you can’t get the best of are a crying child and... something else, but I bet neither one is as bad as a woman in tears. Picasso had a work called Weeping Woman, but no Bawling Baby... Wait. Picasso? What’s Picasso got to do with anything? If I don’t convince Kiyomi to help me out I’m going to have to devote the remaining forty-odd years of my life to making alimony payments. I remember an old man in Calcutta just sitting silently by the side of the road. Suddenly I envy him. I envy everyone who isn’t me right now.

  “Don’t cry. Listen, I know it’s a lot to ask, but, look, right now I’m—”

  “A lot to ask? It’s not a lot to ask, it’s outrageous, is what it is! Who ever heard of such a thing?”

  I wonder how many times I’ve seen this woman cry. She cried when I told her it was over. We were in a French restaurant in Roppongi. Between sobs she shouted at me—“You’re the most horrible man on earth! When you die you’ll go straight to hell!”—so loudly that the waiter nearly dropped his tray. She ate her dinner, though, even as the tears trickled down her face. When the special pigeon dish arrived, she cut off the stream of abuse just long enough to say, “This is delicious!” Tall, pretty young women are tough to the core, and they know how to keep you off balance. What am I going to do? Maybe I should try bursting into tears myself.

  “Kiyomi, you... You’re the only one who can help me.”

  She stops sobbing. I don’t know if this last line of mine has struck a chord or if she’s just weary of the waterworks, but maybe I’m onto something. I’ve got to feel her out carefully.

  “I know how selfish I am,” I tell her. “I know I’ve got a lot of faults. But I’m having a really hard time right now. My father back home is crippled with rheumatism, and what with that and my little sister’s miscarriage, my poor mother’s going neurotic on us, and—”

  “What? Your sister had a miscarriage?”

  She always used to like it when I told her how much she looked like my little sister.

  “Yeah. After six years of marriage, she finally gets pregnant, and...”

  My sister has two children and one more on the way. The secret to lying is to convince yourself that what you’re saying is true. If you can’t fool yourself, you can’t fool anyone else. The same thing applies to making TV shows.

  “The poor thing. She must be devastated.”

  “Oh, she’s all right. I talked to her on the phone yesterday. She’s strong, that girl.”

  “She’s just putting on a front. It’s got to be devastating. My brother’s wife had a miscarriage, and I know how hard it was on her.”

  “Actually, we talked about Calcutta. Did I tell you about that trip?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s just hell on earth. Half the population of nearly ten million live in slums, and it’s as if they’ve been completely dehumanized. They rummage through garbage dumps like animals, there’s about one toilet for every hundred people, the streets are soggy with overflowing sewage, there are dead babies in the gutters...”

  “Oh!”

  “Japan’s pretty special, you know. Life isn’t as easy on people in other countries.”

  This is true enough. Whenever I go abroad I’m reminded that Japan is a special case, and that the Japanese are hopelessly spoiled. The prosperity here is due mainly to geopolitical factors, but everyone thinks it’s because we work so hard... All of which is beside the point right now. What I’m trying to accomplish here is a lot higher on my own list of priorities than cleaning up Calcutta.

  “I told my sister about a family I interviewed there. A family of six living in a space about ten meters square. They’ve got only one bed—well, bed, it’s a couple of wooden planks covered with ratty old blankets—and they take turns sleeping on it. The children all go out to beg every morning, and the father works at some construction site twice a week or so, makes about two dollars a day, just enough to eat. But the thing is, they’re happy. Cheerful.”

  “They’re cheerful?”

  “The children’s faces just glow. Infinitely happier than the Japanese kids you see trudging back and forth to ‘cramming schools’ every night.”

  Her cheeks are still stained with the tracks of mascara, but there’s no offer of a finger towel from the bartender. He may be reassuring and sympathetic, but he doesn’t intrude. He’s a symbolic presence, avoiding any direct involvement. A true man of the cloth.

  “You did a lot for me back then, didn’t you.”

  She’s reminiscing now. She orders another nostalgic cocktail.

  “You know,” she says, “when I think back on it, I realize the time I spent with you was the closest I’ll ever come to having a glamorous life.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “That’s what I honestly believe.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “I can’t really do anything, I don’t have any skills. What else can I do but get married?”

  “You might end up marrying someone really rich.”

  “No. I know now.”

  “Know what?”

  “Status, the class system—it’s not like they’ve disappeared. There are lots of men who are both wealthy and attractive. You’re one of them.”

  “Come on.”

  “But men like you don’t choose women like me. They get bright, pretty girls from wealthy families. I know that now.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “I’m afraid so. Look at yourself. It never occurred to you to divorce your wife and marry me, did it? It’s okay, I’m not saying it matters any more, but the truth is, when I was with you, the food I ate and everything, I’m sure I’ll never get anything like that again in my whole life. Caviar, lobster thermidor, globefish—I mean, my parents never had dishes like that. And you took me to Singapore and Cebu Island and all those places, and I know I was kind of upset when we broke up, but... I doubt if I’ll ever have that much fun again.”

  “Listen, as long as you have your health, there are all sorts of things to look forward to.”

  “That may be true for you.”

  “For everyone.”

  “You don’t believe that for a minute. Who was it who used to say that ninety-nine percent of all human beings are slaves?”

  She’s got me there. Back when my marriage was still going smoothly, I took my five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son to an amusement park near our house. Studying the people there, it struck me how everyone inevitably ends up a slave like everyone else. Slave faces, slave
fashions, slave cars, slave speech, slave attitudes—they just keep replicating themselves, endlessly. In Japan people aren’t even aware of it, but in a place like Calcutta the discrimination is so total and so blatant that you can’t kid yourself about where you really stand.

  “All right. You win,” she says, resting her cheek on her fist. “You’re hopeless, aren’t you. Can you guarantee my privacy on this, though? It won’t be in Focus or something?”

  “No way. I’m not that famous. But, look, I really appreciate this.”

  “I want something in return, though.”

  “What? I told you there can’t be any com—”

  “Not money. You know what a big fan I am of Takahashi Yoshihiko. The second baseman for the Carp? My dream right now is to meet him. I’ll testify on one condition: that you introduce me to Yoshihiko.”

  What right have I to refuse any conditions?

  I go to see a colleague in the sports department.

  “Listen, do you know Takahashi Yoshihiko, the baseball player?”

  What on earth am I doing, though? Every night I get telephone calls, alternately pleading and threatening, from the woman who’s taking me to court; the only word I get from my wife is a curt order to send our children’s this, that, and the other to her family home; I’ve got fifty thousand feet of film waiting to be edited; and here I am trying to arrange a meeting with a baseball player. How I envy that beggar in Calcutta, who has only to sit on the street with his hand outstretched to make it through the day. All he needs to do is survive.

  “Not personally. The people at the Hiroshima affiliate cover the Carp. Why?”