Tokyo Decadence

by Ryu Murakami

  “I understand,” was all she said. “Don’t tell me any more. But... This may not be easy for you, but could you stay with me as usual till Monday morning? Then we’ll call it quits.”

  “What happened to you? You look like death warmed over.”

  In the summer of 1971, about six months after moving to Fussa, I went to see Yoko again, and this was the first thing she said. I’d wondered if she might be with some other guy on that Saturday afternoon, but she was alone.

  “It’s hot out there,” she said. “Come on in.”

  The heat was ferocious that day, and I hadn’t slept in more than fifty hours. I hadn’t eaten, either, which probably didn’t help my appearance. Yoko suggested I lie down for a while. Don’t worry, I’m not going to rape you while you’re sleeping, she said, with a smile on her lightly made-up face.

  “Thanks. I think I will. I’m completely wrecked.”

  She nodded and peeled off the bedcover. I stretched out on the bed, and she put a terrycloth blanket over me. As I lay there with my eyes closed, anxiety was making my heartbeat race, and though I’d been awake for two days straight I couldn’t get to sleep. When you alternate uppers and downers for two or three days and don’t eat anything, sometimes your nervous system stages a rebellion. You’re beyond exhaustion but can’t sleep. It’s like dying of malnutrition and not having the energy to eat. But with drugs, since it’s not an exhaustion you’ve come by honestly, there’s also a lot of self-loathing involved. You end up really skidding along the bottom.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Yoko slid onto the bed next to me and peered at my face. “It’s hot as hell, and you’re shivering.”

  Her body was right next to mine, but I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I curl up in her arms? Would I even have the right to do that, after dumping her like I did? And why had I come here in the first place? I didn’t really know.

  During the time we used to spend weekends together, Yoko had never worn any makeup; but that was the only thing about her that had changed. Her clothes, her painting materials, the pictures on the walls, the arrangement of the furniture, a certain fragrance in the air, everything was the same.

  “You look scared.”

  She was hovering over me as she said this. I wanted to open up to someone.

  Yoko, listen. That woman’s a nightmare. I don’t understand why I ever started living with her... What a relief it would be to let it all out, tell her the whole story.

  Kimiko seemed like an innocent child at first, like an angel almost. She was the daughter of a car salesman in Okayama or Hiroshima, somewhere around there, with no brothers or sisters, so she was doted on and spoiled. But she was the sort of person who... How to explain it? If a puppy squealed because someone accidentally stepped on its tail, she’d get tears in her eyes. That’s what she was like. At least, she was like that until about a month after we moved to Fussa. I won’t say she’d been hiding her real personality. Just that up till then she’d only shown one side of it.

  We soon found that we couldn’t get by on my allowance alone, and Kimiko went to work in a club in Hachioji. This was her idea; I didn’t push her to do it. She wasn’t cut out for hostessing, especially in a town like Hachioji, but she made good money—a lot more than my meager allowance.

  The problem for me was that I didn’t know what to do with myself between the early evening, when she left the apartment, and the wee hours of the morning when she returned. I drank or took drugs or watched TV, but nothing was any fun. There were times I’d get all wound up, thinking that right about now some drunken businessman was putting his arm around her shoulder, or his hand on her thigh. Plain old jealousy, I guess, but it felt like more than that. After a while, one of her customers started coming on strong to her. He was the son of a rich shopkeeper or something, a playboy type who had four Doberman pinschers. Kimiko disliked this guy so much that she broke down crying one night and said she wanted to quit. I didn’t know what to say and was unable to make any decisions. All I knew was that I had zero inclination to get a job. I had no idea what I was meant to do in life, or even what I wanted to do, but that didn’t stop me from ruling out work. Taking even a part-time job would have felt like a copout. I know how selfish and irresponsible that sounds, but it’s the way I felt. It might have been okay if I could’ve just relaxed and swigged beers or whatever, indifferent to the fact that she was working, but I couldn’t do that either. I was beginning to realize, as I’d never realized before, what an utterly useless person I was.

  When I look back on it now, the decision I finally came to seems like the worst one possible. I decided I’d escort her to and from Hachioji every night. I figured it was the least I could do for this woman who’d vowed to stick with me forever. But the only thing that came of this brilliant move was that we wasted more money on train fares. Things just got worse. Late one night when I went to pick her up, I watched her fail in an attempt to fend off the playboy’s insistent invitation to carry on partying elsewhere. He bundled her into a taxi, and I was left standing there alone. I stared at the closed door of the club and wondered how many nineteen-year-olds in the world had ever sunk this low. Everything I touched had turned to shit. Each failure was more proof of my uselessness. Not even drugs were fun any more, so the stuff I bought in Fussa—mostly weed, cocaine, and smack—I’d sell in Tokyo or trade for acid, DMT, or mescaline in Yokosuka. None of this generated much cash, of course, and my sense of weakness and worthlessness only increased. Give up. I felt as if someone was continually whispering this in my ear. You don’t have anything to offer, just give up. Giving up would probably have made things a lot easier, but I wasn’t even sure what it involved. I guessed it must mean accepting things you didn’t want. Well, I didn’t want to work, I didn’t want to force her to work, and I didn’t want, for example, to do drugs with black servicemen and their girlfriends and listen and dance to soul music while she was off somewhere hostessing. But I guess the thing I didn’t want most was to get a job; that one was absolutely out of the question. Besides, Kimiko had always told me, from the very beginning, that there was no need for me to work. Don’t laugh. She was convinced I had some special, untapped sort of talent that would eventually reveal itself. “I’ll just work in the meantime,” she’d tell me. That’s partly why I painted like mad for a while. I’d drop her off at the club, return to the apartment, and work on my art until it was time to pick her up. But the paintings were beyond bad. Damn, I’d think, the stuff I did when I was four was better than this, and I’d start remembering my childhood. My father was an art teacher, and he tried to show me how to draw and paint from the time I was a little kid. Up until my rebel-against-the-patriarch stage, I used to really enjoy doing artwork with him, and I was thrilled when he praised what I’d done. But sometime in my mid-teens it began to occur to me that by painting I was only submitting to the old man’s value system, so I quit. My sole purpose in attending The Art School now was to stay unemployed. Rightly or wrongly, I looked down my nose at painting. But while Kimiko was hostessing in Hachioji, I was dabbling away with watercolors, using materials she’d bought me, and remembering how I used to sit beside my father on a bench by the river, sketching a church on the opposite side. Those sketches had been pretty good, it seemed to me. But the paintings I did while waiting for her to finish work looked like the worst pieces of crap that had ever soiled creation. When I finally admitted this to myself, I got so depressed that I started shooting a little heroin. We had more marijuana and LSD and cocaine and speed and sleeping tablets in the apartment than we knew what to do with, but my mood called for heroin. Heroin is the drug of drugs, truly the queen of drugs, which is why it’s so addictive, but you can avoid getting hooked if you’re careful. Your body doesn’t come to rely on it until you’ve injected it every day, gradually increasing the dose, for, like, two or three months. Something like that. I’d be on it for a week, then take a couple of days off. That’s how I worked it.
I had to marvel at what a slippery bastard I was: I didn’t even have the will to become a proper junkie. I would do my modest, discreet little shots and then reminisce about my childhood. Rock bottom, is what it was. I’d remember my early teens and think: everything I had back then, it’s all gone. And then I’d think, well, I never had anything back then either. And all the while I’d be sitting there by myself with a stupid heroin grin on my face.

  Kimiko, for her part, began to change after working awhile at the club. Or maybe “change” isn’t the word; I suppose it was just her true nature coming to the fore. She started using larger quantities of drugs, which she counterbalanced with prodigious amounts of booze. Hard drugs do more damage to the liver than even alcohol, and before you know it your insides aren’t working the way they should, which only makes you more susceptible to alcoholism.

  Three months on, she started vomiting blood. She wouldn’t listen to anything I said, and I didn’t know what to do. Finally I called her family home, and her mother came to Tokyo and put her in a hospital. Her mother was a slender lady typical of her age, who always wore a kimono. She told me in no uncertain terms that she considered me incompetent, inadequate, and irresponsible. I felt the same way and had no reply for her. Kimiko soon checked herself out of the hospital. When her mother found her shooting up a mixture of coke and speed in our apartment, she left in tears, without a word to either of us, and headed back to Okayama or wherever it was. Slurring her words in that cokehead way, Kimiko turned to me and said, “You’ll never leave me, will you? You’ve got something special, you know.” She repeated this, or words to this effect, several times, with a big smile on her face. A big, goofy, childlike smile, as if she were having the time of her life.

  I now realize she’s been testing me. She has an irrational but deep-rooted fear that sooner or later I’m going to abandon her. However outrageous her behavior, I always put up with it, which temporarily reassures her, but only temporarily. I can’t say she never gets violent with me, but violence isn’t a big issue. We have drugs in the apartment, so if she were the sort to grab a kitchen knife and start screaming and bouncing off the walls, I would have bolted long ago. She must sense that; her intuition about such things is uncanny. Words are her main weapon, and she uses them to cut straight to your heart. “At this rate I’m bound to go insane, don’t you think?... If I happened to spend the night with some other man, you’d understand that I did it for you, wouldn’t you?... From the time I was in grade school I always knew I’d end up as a hooker.” There’s no way to fight back against talk like that. At some point she started hinting that she might hurt herself. She bought not one but two exacto knives at the neighborhood stationer’s. She shaves the nape of her neck with a straight razor, right in front of me, or cleans her fingernails with an ice pick. I never hit her, of course; in fact, until recently I never even argued with her or yelled at her. Which wasn’t about kindness so much as just not wanting to get caught up in her craziness, I guess, but it meant I did whatever she asked. You’ll see me to the club, won’t you? And you’ll be waiting for me when I get off, right? Suddenly I’m dying for a pizza—would you mind making a run to Nicola’s? I did just as she said, always. One night she intentionally went missing, and I combed the neighborhood calling her name, searching for her till dawn.

  About a month ago I got really angry with her for the first time. It was over something stupid, like most lovers’ quarrels are. We were in a shop in Fussa that sold Indian and Middle Eastern arts and crafts, and she found a dress from India with lots of tiny round mirrors sewn into the material. She said she just had to have that dress. We were both in that raw-nerved, coming-down-from-coke-and-crank state. I asked where she thought she was going to get the money, and in a loud voice, right there in the store, she said, “Go to Yokosuka and sell some heroin. Now. I’ve got to have this dress. If there’s no other way to get the cash, I’ll sell my body, but I must have this dress.” That’s the first time I ever yelled at her. “Do whatever the fuck you want!” I shouted. She didn’t bat an eyelash, just turned and marched out of the shop, and I didn’t go after her. I went straight back to the apartment and waited—and waited. Around noon the next day she breezed in, wearing the Indian dress and smiling. “I really did sell myself,” she said. I didn’t believe her at first, but she told me the whole story in vivid detail. I thought I was going to burst into tears, I really did. It was agony. She had a matchbook from the love hotel as evidence, and since she hadn’t had enough money to buy the dress, I was forced accept the fact that she really had done it.

  And then, just yesterday, the same sort of thing happened again. This time it was over a toaster. We wanted some toast after smoking meth. Whenever she did crank, I did too, because if I wasn’t on the same level there was no way to keep up with her and no telling what she might do. But yesterday this strategy backfired. The meth was the gooey kind you vaporize in a pipe, which meant it sent you flying within seconds but thirty minutes later you were crashing and had to hit the pipe again. Naturally your tolerance for meth goes up the more you use, but as you repeat the process of getting wired then winding down, you get more and more enervated. She and I spent two whole days doing that and listening to her beloved jazz, and by the end of the second day we were hitting the pipe every three minutes. We also killed five or six bottles of some wine we’d bought from a black serviceman for two dollars a bottle. At some point she started complaining of pain in her arm and shoulder. When your nervous system is fried, the pain passes through your internal organs into your muscles, but what that really is, of course, is your brain and nerves screaming for you to stop. Meanwhile, we listened to a shitload of jazz. She had a collection of more than a hundred jazz records, and we went through most of them. Just imagine smoking meth for dozens of hours straight and listening to everything from Charlie Parker to Cecil Taylor: even a normal person would end up insane. Then—this was about ten hours ago now—we both felt suddenly ravenous, though even if we’d had anything to eat we couldn’t have forced it down. When your stomach and liver feel like they’re covered with rust and wrapped in old rags, you can’t touch food. But she said she wanted some toast, done nice and brown on both sides. She knew the toaster was broken. When I took what was now just a useless metal-and-plastic box from a shelf in the kitchen, she said, “You sap, that thing doesn’t work. Go buy a new one somewhere.” It was three o’clock in the morning. I didn’t get angry and throw it against the wall or anything, just let it drop to the floor with a crash and sat down. Coltrane’s A Love Supreme was playing, and she turned the volume all the way up. I told her to turn it down or the neighbors would complain. She started changing her clothes. I asked her where she was going, and she smiled. “You know what I’m going to do,” she said, and left the apartment. Fuck it, I told myself, let her go. I don’t have to put up with this shit. Let the bitch go. I thought about moving out of the apartment right then and there, but I couldn’t do it. Before dawn I took the first train to Shinjuku and walked around the love hotel district. Stupid, of course—there wasn’t a chance in hell of finding her. You either keep her from leaving, even if it means slugging her, or you give up on her altogether. As I was telling myself this, over and over, I started feeling dizzy. Every step on the pavement sent shock waves through my body, and I had nowhere to go...

  I wanted to tell Yoko all this, but it felt like the wrong thing to do. When I didn’t say anything, she asked me why I’d come to her place. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, I told her. This was the only place I could think of.

  “Nowhere to go,” I mumbled again.

  And Yoko started talking about films.

  “Since you stopped spending weekends here, I’ve been going to see a lot of movies,” she said. “I started reading a lot too. Before, I used to wonder what movies and books were good for, what purpose they served. You know what I mean?”

  Sure, I said. I wasn’t really listening, but just to have her lying besid
e me seemed to make it easier to breathe.

  “I never liked to just absorb something somebody else created. I’m too self-conscious, and too critical, I guess, and it always felt like I was wasting time. But after you went away... well, it started to feel like time was wasting me. Every tick of the second hand was like a needle in my skin. Tick, tick, tick...”

  The phrase “time was wasting me” penetrated my frazzled brain and body like a vibrator. I thought of all the hours I’d spent waiting for Kimiko to return from the club. Yoko had translated that feeling for me.

  “It was hard to just sit around doing nothing—I mean, well, I was lonely—so I started reading novels and going to movies. And that’s when I finally realized what’s so good about films. They’re good for when you feel the way I was feeling. Did you see The Wild Angels?”

  Of course, I said.

  “I liked it even better than Easy Rider. Remember the last scene?”

  Of course, I said again. I was beginning to see what she was getting at. At the end of Wild Angels, Peter Fonda, who plays a character named Blues, a leader of the Hells Angels, is holding a funeral for one of his fallen comrades, and the cops show up. His woman, Nancy Sinatra, says, “We gotta get outta here, Blues. Let’s go.” Blues sprinkles some dirt on the grave and mutters: “There’s nowhere to go.”

  “I love that scene,” Yoko said. “I must’ve been to a hundred movies, but I think that’s my favorite last scene of all. Look. Isn’t it true that nobody has anywhere to go? You’ve got to find something that allows you not to think about going anywhere. Having somewhere to go—for most people that just means having an errand to run. Somebody’s ordering them around. I think that’s true for everybody, from the lowliest grunt to the president. I’ve thought about this ever since you’ve been gone. I don’t know if you’ve got any particular talents or not, but I know you’re a person who needs to live life without running errands. Find something that, when you’re doing it, makes you feel like you don’t have anywhere to go. If you don’t find it, you’ll end up having to go somewhere you don’t want to.”