by Don Lee
“No.”
“Perhaps you need a hobby,” Miss Saotome said. “Do you have any hobbies?”
“No.” This was not entirely true. He did not have any current hobbies, but over the years he had made dozens of attempts to acquire one, hundreds of hours spent in bunka or culture centers, taking one class after another: golf, drawing, painting, piano, guitar, tennis, cooking, rock climbing, wine appreciation, ballroom dancing.
“I’ll try to think of something suitable for you,” Miss Saotome said.
IT WAS amazing that gaijin could not smell themselves, the batakusai—butter stink—they emanated from eating so much dairy. The odor overwhelmed Kenzo as he stepped through the security door of the American Embassy in Toranomon. The Marine guard, a massively built, pink-faced jarhead who was the offending source, handed him a visitor’s pass, and Kenzo hurried off to the Consular Section, trying to suck in fresh air. Only there wasn’t any fresh air in the nine-story building, just recycled air conditioning, which made his skin prickle and itch.
A Mrs. Fujiwara greeted him at the American Citizens Services desk, and then he was led into an interior office and introduced to Tom Hurley, a young bureaucrat who didn’t know any Japanese and who looked too dumb and pretty to do anyone any good. What was he? An ainoko—a half-breed? Hawaiian? A surfer, no doubt.
There was some initial confusion. Hurley kept speaking to Mrs. Fujiwara and waiting for her to interpret his remarks into Japanese for Kenzo, until finally Kenzo explained that his English was proficient enough to make out what Hurley was saying. The three of them had a little chuckle over the misunderstanding, although Kenzo remained puzzled. He was certain that he had dealt with Mrs. Fujiwara several times before, and she should have remembered him, saving them the embarrassment.
Tom Hurley had called the Metropolitan Police Department about a missing American girl named Lisa Countryman. “There doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary,” Hurley said. “In all likelihood she simply decided to skip out of town. But we checked with all the airlines, and she wasn’t on any of the flights to Hong Kong that week—or to anywhere else.”
“Maybe she depart later or take ferry, or maybe ship freight. You said you call Immigration?”
“They found a record of entry at Narita on March 13, but no record of departure for her.”
Kenzo wasn’t surprised. The departure cards collected at ports weren’t usually inputted onto the Immigration Bureau’s computer systems for quite a while. He had become familiar with the workings of the Immigration Bureau of late. “She was on ninety-days tourist visa?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Time make sense, yes? She leave Japan almost exact time visa expire. She is require to leave.”
“Well, not everyone does what they’re required to, do they?” Hurley told him.
The Japanese—the vast majority of them—did, Kenzo thought, but not Americans. Gaijin always tried to skirt the rules, and Americans were the worst, believing they were above Japanese laws. “You think Lisa Countryman still in Japan? You think something happen to her?”
“No, nothing like that,” Hurley said. “I’m sure she took off to Hong Kong. I just wish we had some confirmation. I’d like to square everything away and close the file.”
“You know young people. They come and go with freedom. Maybe confirmation never be possible.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Hurley said.
They rose and shook hands and bowed.
“There doesn’t seem to be a case here, does there?” Hurley said.
“No,” Kenzo said happily. “I do not think so.”
HE WAS an Assistant Inspector in Criminal Investigations, but he got all the cases that no one else wanted, all the shit cases involving foreigners—petty thefts and drunk-and-disorderlies and runarounds like this one involving Lisa Countryman, who would unquestionably turn up safe and sound somewhere in a few months, another globe-trotting American white-girl slut in search of sex and adventure with no regard to anyone else—he got these cases because he had spent three years in America and his English was fluent, absolutely flawless. Or so he believed.
From age eleven to fourteen, Kenzo had lived in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1953, his father, a chemistry professor, had taken his wife and young son with him to Washington University on an extended research fellowship, and Kenzo’s years there had been the most miserable of his life. The American schoolkids had teased him mercilessly about his broken English and his slanty-eyed dogeater tapehead Jap looks. “We dropped the bomb on you,” they had gloated. Moreover, his parents had not gotten along. Something had happened—a secret they never revealed to Kenzo—but in St. Louis, his mother had mysteriously disappeared for two months, and Kenzo always suspected she had left his father for another research fellow, Stewart Lavallee, carried away by some half-baked notion of romance and passion until she came to her senses and returned to them.
They moved back to Japan, but the damage was irreparable. His parents didn’t speak to each other for weeks at a time. The tension was often more than Kenzo could bear, halting whenever he heard the slightest noise. He waited for an argument, waited for one of them, his mother, his father, to leave for good, for them to separate, divorce, yet they never did. They aged quickly—they looked so old—and both died prematurely at sixty-two and fifty-nine.
Reentering the Japanese educational system in Kobe, Kenzo had been ridiculed more than he had been in America. He now spoke Japanese like a gaijin. He had difficulty catching up in school, despite attending juku, cram school. He wasn’t at all dumb, but he wasn’t book-smart with all the rote memorization required for the college entrance exams, so after high school, he went straight into the police academy in Tokyo, and he advanced steadily from Patrolman to Sergeant to Assistant Inspector. Ironically, his English got him the elite assignment to Criminal Investigations and transferred to Azabu-sho, where so many foreigners resided and congregated, but soon afterward his career stalled, other detectives continually promoted ahead of him. He didn’t know exactly why—maybe his divorce, his childless state. The final indignity had come this past April, when his section chief, Inspector Shiro Kunichi, had asked him to move to a window desk, relegating him to madogiwazoku, one of the “window people.”
In Criminal Investigations, as in most Japanese offices, your status determined where you sat in the room. The OLs, or office ladies, were closest to the door. The detectives were in the center around gray metal desks that were bunched together—the farther from the door, the higher the rank—with the section chief at the head of the room. But there was a tributary to this flow, a shameful eddy into which those who were being bumped off the promotion ladder settled. These lost souls were condemned to dishonorable idleness near the windows, so isolated they could stare outside all day long if they wished.
Kunichi had moved Kenzo aside to make room for a new Assistant Inspector, Iso Yamada, a slick, cocky, good-looking college kid who was an intolerable show-off. He instantly became everyone’s best friend, the section’s favorite son. Kenzo despised him. He despised his witty repartee and his goofy imitations and his stupid jokes. Kenzo couldn’t tell a joke to save his life—not that he hadn’t tried to learn. He had gone to joke school, ten sessions with a bunch of hapless salarymen who glumly recited mimeographed jokes as if delivering eulogies.
Kenzo didn’t have a sense of humor—he knew this. His wife, Yumiko, had continually reminded him of the deficiency. His other failing was alcohol, or his inability to drink it. He had the flushing response, which afflicted half of the Japanese population in various degrees of severity, due to a missing enzyme. Kenzo’s flushing response was aggravated by allergens. One or two small glasses of beer, and his face would flame beet-red, his heart would palpitate, he’d sweat, he’d become nauseous, his head would pound, his skin would bump into hives, and his lips and throat would swell. One time at a bar with a group of detectives, while trying to tell a joke from his joke-school repertoire, Kenzo had vomited
on himself—a lush stew of soybeans and fried eel and rice—and then, aghast, knowing this would happen but unable to stop it, he had turned and thrown up on Inspector Kunichi’s lap.
Thereafter he would limit himself to a few sips and just pretend to be drunk, but the other detectives could easily tell he was faking it, and gradually he was no longer invited out with them. Getting drunk together was essential to building a bond of friendship and obligation. The Japanese were yasashi, wet. They stuck to one another in tribes like wet, glutinous rice. They were warm, gentle, emotional, whereas Westerners were dry and hard and individualistic, like their rice, which fell apart into solitary grains. Why would anyone choose to be like that? Kenzo always wondered.
Yet Yumiko had chafed at the strictures of Japanese society, and she had said Kenzo epitomized all that was wrong with the country, calling him a humorless, passionless, sexist wimp. She loved America and its supposed ideals, and immediately after their divorce she immigrated to Los Angeles in pursuit of them. Equality. Independence. Individualism. A load of crap, Kenzo thought. If the American Dream was so wonderful, why was there so much crime in the US, and drugs, and racism, and divorce? Everything was corrupt, the people self-centered, lazy, mean, nihirisuto, nihilistic. Kenzo often thought how lonely it would be to be an American, and he was terrified of such a fate. He longed to be wet again, part of the tribe. He didn’t want to be different. He wanted, more than anything, to be accepted as heibon—normal.
HE NEVER heard from Yumiko, didn’t know what had become of her, until this past May. He saw a woman who looked exactly like her—older, sure, but a dead ringer—in the window of Charleston & Sons, a restaurant in Roppongi down the alley from Tony Roma’s. Dressed nicely, she was having coffee with several gaijin women, shopping bags at their feet.
Kenzo checked with the Immigration Bureau. Was it really possible that Yumiko had returned to Japan? Was she visiting, or had she come back for good? It wasn’t easy finding out, because she had changed her last name. She was no longer using Kenzo’s name, Ota, nor her maiden name, Tanizaki. She was using an American name, Marabelli. According to Immigration, Yumiko Marabelli was an American citizen from Atlanta, Georgia, and she had been issued a one-year work visa under the category of Legal/Accounting Services. She put in three days a week as an accountant, a CPA, for IBM. She was married to Doug Marabelli, who had a one-year work visa under the category of Investor/Business Manager. He was a development director for Procter & Gamble. Appended to Yumiko and Doug Marabelli’s applications was one for Simon Marabelli, who had been issued a one-year dependent visa under the category of Unmarried Minor Child.
But Simon Marabelli was not, as expected, a haafu, Kenzo saw as he stood outside the Marabellis’ mansion in Higashi-Azabu one day. He looked to be full-blooded Japanese, about thirteen years old. Doug Marabelli was not the father. After verifying Simon’s birthday, Kenzo had a very good idea who the father might be.
Simon was born seven and a half months after Yumiko had left for the United States, almost nine months to the day after Kenzo and Yumiko had last made love, on his final night in their house, a terrible, shameful night during which he had begged and tormented her into having sex with him. Unless she had had an affair—and he was certain she had not, for he would have surely known about it—Simon was his son.
The resemblance was really uncanny. Simon had the same narrow, long face, the same high forehead, the same widely spaced eyes. He was already relatively tall, like Kenzo, and he had Kenzo’s lanky limbs. He was the spitting image of his father, except for one rather large, glaring difference. Kenzo had always been rail-thin, as was Yumiko, but Simon was fat. Roly-poly, flesh-bobbling fat. Trundling, waddling fat. Wheezing, heaving, lard-ass fat. American fat. What had they been feeding him over there in Atlanta, Georgia? Kenzo could only imagine. Mounded, gelatinous meals, like chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, white biscuit gravy. Kenzo had a complex about fat people, developed during his years in Missouri. He was afraid of fat people. He was also afraid of loud people, and uneducated people, and black people.
Simon needed discipline, the kind of discipline only a father could provide. Obviously Doug Marabelli—with his laid-back inattention, his bland, corporate American good looks, his colonial fetish for Oriental women—was worthless as a role model. Simon needed Kenzo to teach him about self-control, courage, strength, denial, all the things that he would require to protect himself from being taunted and bullied and outcast. This was why Yumiko had brought him to Tokyo. Kenzo was sure of it. This was why she had chosen Higashi-Azabu, just blocks from the police station, for them to live. She wanted Simon to find the proper direction for his life, learn where he came from, who he was. She wanted Simon to meet his father and get to know him.
Of course, she had yet to contact Kenzo, and he could understand her trepidation. It was monumental, what faced her, informing Kenzo that he had a son, and who knew what she had told Simon up to this point, or Doug Marabelli, for that matter. Yet Kenzo was surprisingly calm about the situation. He felt a certain inevitability that everything would come together, that there was no reason to force things.
So he stood across the street from the Marabellis’ mansion only two or three times a week during lunch, and only two or three times a week after work, and only every other Saturday and Sunday, and only for five or ten minutes at a time, a mere flyby, very casual, nothing obsessive, just to see if by chance he could catch them coming or—even better—going, and if by chance he did, he would follow them.
One rainy Saturday afternoon, he happened to spot Yumiko and Simon walking out of their apartment building and scurrying up the hill under umbrellas. Simon was carrying a tennis racket and a duffel bag, going to tennis lessons, apparently. There were indoor courts at the posh, members-only Tokyo American Club in Azabudai, near the base of the Tokyo Tower, right next door, in an ironic coincidence, to the Soviet Embassy. At the entrance to the club, Yumiko said goodbye to Simon. She was going shopping, most likely. She had always been something of a clotheshorse, and she had transferred her preoccupation with fashion onto her son, dressing him in a pink Lacoste polo shirt, khaki pants, and Topsiders. It wasn’t a good look for him. The shirt was bursting at the seams. He had breasts, and his nipples were visible. He was perspiring heavily just from the short walk to the club.
Yumiko tugged on the collar of his shirt so it stood upright, kissed him on the cheek, and turned him toward the door. After he entered the lobby, she marched off. A minute later, Simon emerged, checked that his mother was gone, and then, with almost a spring in his step, walked up Gaien-Higashi-dori to the Roppongi Plaza Building, where he took the elevator to Nicola’s, an Italian restaurant on the third floor.
There, Kenzo watched Simon, his poor, neglected boy, raid the buffet table. It was all-you-can-eat at Nicola’s, and he loaded piles of pasta and veal marsala and meatballs and lasagna on his plate. He slurped and chewed, and the look on his face—red sauce smeared around his mouth—was nothing short of ecstasy. It broke Kenzo’s heart.
ALL OF a sudden, Kenzo could hear the people above him in No. 501. He could hear them—very distinctly, unmistakably—fucking. He first noticed them one night at 1:33 a.m., when he was lying on his back on his futon, sweating from the humidity, kept awake by the hums and buzzes and whines of the refrigerator, audible even with his bedroom door closed. There were some soft thuds from the ceiling, innocuous in the beginning, they could have been anything, then they got faster, harder, quite undeniably this was fucking, no-amateurs-allowed, slap-belly, sopped-juiced, eye-white, plunge-and-lunge, arrive-alive fucking, and it kept going, and going—how long could they keep this up? Were they machines? Were they some sort of über-copulators? Finally, he heard a woman moan—uh, uh, uhhhh—and then it stopped. Only to begin again the next morning at seven a.m. on the dot, apparently commencing with the alarm clock. “Are you kidding me?” Kenzo said to the ceiling.
Those weren’t the only noises. Over the next few nights, he could also h
ear footsteps, heels clacking. It seemed that No. 501 had hardwood floors instead of the linoleum and tatami in Kenzo’s apartment. The slightest impact resonated, and there were plenty of them, thumps and smacks and squeaks that sounded like marbles or billiard balls dropping and rolling, bricks being laid, furniture being dragged, lumber being hammered and sawed. What were they doing up there? It was maddening. It was unbearable.
“No one’s ever complained about it before,” Miss Saotome said on the phone.
“I’m very sorry,” he told her, peeved by the difficulty he had had reaching her. Her old number had been disconnected. She had moved to a new house without informing her tenants, it seemed.
“It’s curious to me, because the building is made of concrete,” she said. “You shouldn’t be able to hear anything. Can you hear the person next door to you?”
“No.”
“Only above.”
“Yes.”
“And just footsteps and objects knocking and rolling and such, no stereo or TV, no voices, nothing like that?”
“That’s correct,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” It seemed indelicate to say he heard sex noises.
“I see,” she said. “Mr. Ota, I sense that you are under a great deal of stress. Do you feel you are under stress?”
“Not particularly.”
“I feel you must be. You might not even realize it, how stressed you are. But fortunately there are methods to relieve a man’s stress. As a detective, you must be familiar with some of these methods.”
“Excuse me?”
“Would you like me to arrange something for you?”
“Excuse me?” What was she proposing? A prostitute? Was she insane?
“It would be no trouble for me,” she said.
He hung up the telephone, and within seconds he heard a machine gun firing a fusillade of shots. No, not a machine gun. His upstairs neighbors were ripping apart the floor with a jackhammer. No, it was tap-dancing, no, the flamenco. He was sure of it. He had almost taken a class in the flamenco at the bunka center. Who were these people? He had to find out. He needed to know what they looked like.
