by Don Lee
“Somewhere is Lisa’s fingerprints?” Kenzo asked.
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“No police arrest one time?”
“Not that I know of.”
“She have birthmark? Scar?”
“Not really.”
“Tattoo?”
“No, not that I know of.”
“Did she have money?”
“What do you mean, money?”
“Did she have many savings?”
“No, she was as broke as I am. Worse. College loans.”
“Maybe your father give her money?”
“No.”
“Maybe she have family money?”
Susan Countryman paused, as if to think about it. “No.”
“No inherit money?”
“No,” Susan Countryman said. “Look, you’re getting awfully personal here.”
Yamada and Kunichi were both right and wrong: the key question was the money—what was Lisa Countryman doing for money?—but she had no reason to go underground, even if she had been working illegally, because no one had been looking for her, the Immigration Bureau had not been seeking her.
He called her landlord, Teiji Takagi, and had him meet Kenzo at the furnished studio apartment that she had rented from him. Unfortunately, a new tenant had moved in, and the crime scene, if a crime had been committed here, had already been compromised. It was useless to look for fingerprints or forensics in the apartment, which was even smaller than Kenzo’s, just one room, but more modern and with a great location in Nishi-Azabu. Takagi conceded that the rent was outrageously high, but said his transient tenants thought it was an agreeable trade-off, since he didn’t require them to pay him key money.
Takagi didn’t know much about Lisa at all, it turned out—where she was working, with whom she was acquainted, if she had a boyfriend.
“Did she pay her rent by cash?” Kenzo asked.
“Of course. What, you think I’d take a check?”
Japan was a cash culture. No one used personal checks. The crime rate was so low, people could keep and carry bundles of ten-thousand-yen bills without fear. “Did she have a phone?” He thought he could get her phone records from NTT, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone.
“No,” Takagi said. “I told her I’d help her set one up, but she said it’d be a waste, she didn’t have anyone she wanted to talk to.”
“That’s a strange thing to say.”
“I thought so, too.”
“She was a loner, then?”
“I guess. I didn’t see her too often, only when I got her rent, a couple of times on the stairs. Oh, once I came to fix her toilet. She never had any company.”
“But you talked to her enough times to recognize her voice.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“And you’re sure it was her on the phone on June 18th, when she said she was going to Hong Kong.”
“Yeah, pretty sure.”
“But it’s possible it could have been someone else?”
“I don’t think so,” Takagi said. Then he reconsidered. “Well, I guess it’s possible. There was something odd about that phone call.”
“Yes?”
“She spoke to me in English.”
“So?”
“Her Japanese was pretty decent. She always spoke to me in Japanese before.”
Who was it that might have called Takagi, then? Who had tried to make it look like Lisa Countryman had left Tokyo, and why?
Kenzo canvassed her apartment building, first going to her downstairs neighbor. The soundproofing was more than adequate, evidently, for the man said he had never been cognizant of any noises from Lisa’s apartment, and couldn’t say, even, what sort of hours she had kept. Her other neighbors and the local shopkeepers, though they recognized her, were equally unaware of Lisa’s movements and appearance. She was quiet and nice and always alone, they said. She blended in. Despite being a gaijin, she had faded into the background. She had become a ghost.
He kept trying to follow the money. He stopped by all the banks and post offices near Nishi-Azabu and Meguro, particularly those on the way to the subway, asking if Lisa had had a savings account. One woman at a bank thought she remembered a gaijin who resembled Lisa cashing traveler’s checks in April.
“She was with a kokujin,” the woman whispered. A Negro.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, but Kenzo doubted her. If what she was saying were true, other people would have mentioned it, everyone would have remembered. It would have been very noticeable, an interracial gaijin couple, especially a black man with a white woman.
Kenzo dropped in on Rocket America in Shimbashi and talked to the director, Seiji Waru, who immediately denied that Lisa Countryman had ever worked there.
“You told the woman at the embassy, Mrs. Fujiwara, that she quit after two weeks.”
“She must have misheard me. We were in the process of obtaining a Certificate of Eligibility for her, but she decided before the application was completed that she didn’t want the job. As you know, it would have been illegal for her to have done any work for us without the proper paperwork.”
Just then, a tall, attractive blond woman entered the school, and Waru stiffened. His eyes flickered toward her, as if to signal her, then came back to rest on Kenzo nervously.
“I’m interested in a ticket to New York,” the woman said in English.
“No airplane here,” Waru said.
“This isn’t a travel agency?” she asked.
“No. Sorry.”
But instead of leaving, the woman walked farther into the office. “What the heck is this place, then?”
“School,” Waru said, startled. “This is school.”
“It sure looks like a travel agency. Are you trying to run some sort of scam or something?” she said. She had extraordinarily long, beautiful legs.
“Go away, please,” Waru said, standing up.
“Excuse me?”
“Go away. Busy.”
“Why, I never,” the woman said. “With manners like that, the way you treat people, it’s a wonder your office hasn’t been vandalized.” As she turned to leave, she smiled and winked at Kenzo.
THIS TIME, during his lunch hour, Kenzo followed Simon to Harajuku, trailing the boy as he took the subway and train by himself. Once he got to Omotesando-dori, Simon went straight to Shakey’s Pizza, where he devoured a large pepperoni, washing it down with multiple Coca-Colas. When he finished eating, he stepped outside to the street, dug two one-hundred-yen coins out of his pocket, dropped them into a vending machine, yanked the lever for a pack of Seven Star, tore off the cellophane wrapper, and lit a cigarette. Kenzo was mortified. He was only thirteen! But Kenzo was a bit reassured when Simon began to cough and grimace. After a few more distasteful tokes, he squashed the cigarette out with his sneaker. It looked like he was merely experimenting—a youthful rite of passage that he could now put behind him.
His next stop was the Oriental Bazaar, a store for tourists, filled with antiques, lacquerware, happi coats, and other omiyage. A boring store for kids. Simon left quickly and walked down the block to his true destination, every boy’s true destination in Harajuku, Kiddy Land, a five-story toy mecca. With delight, Simon roamed through the cramped aisles, touching everything, the action figure dolls, the games, the little cars and spaceships. He was having enormous fun, Kenzo could tell. He was just a boy, after all, and Kenzo felt a surge of paternal affection toward him. Simon picked up a toy car, a spiffy red convertible, and put it in his right pants pocket. He lifted a tiny yellow dump truck and inserted it into his left pants pocket. As he turned around, something fell out of his waistband and clattered to the floor. It was a miniature katana sword, most certainly from the Oriental Bazaar. Without the slightest bit of panic, Simon retrieved the sword and stuffed it back under his shirt. Kenzo watched him in horror. His son was a juvenile delinquent.
HE DECIDED to backtrack. Once again, he sifted through the
box of Lisa’s possessions that Takagi had collected. Nothing very helpful. He carefully read the telegrams from Susan Countryman. Why had Lisa been avoiding her sister? He listened to the cassette tapes. Second-rate enka. Odd that she had liked such traditional Japanese music. He flipped through the handful of books. Very heady stuff. Man and His Symbols, Jung. The Will to Power, Nietzsche. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud. There were notations in the margins in barely decipherable handwriting, a tiny, cramped chicken scratch: “And this led to selective breeding how?” “Why, you dirty old perv.”
He went down to MPD headquarters and interviewed the American purse thief again, but he was useless, a stoner who couldn’t distinguish any of the women he had robbed, there had been so many.
Kenzo signed out the thief’s duffel bags from the evidence room and laid out all the unclaimed items on a table. The thief hadn’t kept any of the purses or briefcases or totes, had simply dumped the contents into his duffel bags, so everything was jumbled together. Kenzo was looking for an address book, an organizer, an appointment calendar, a diary or journal, something that would point to Lisa’s acquaintances and assignations. He spent a good hour sorting through the articles, along with the wallets and keys and compacts and hairbrushes and birth control pills, and then he found something—a tiny, spiral-bound, dog-eared notebook with a distinctive, nearly illegible chicken scratch.
HE DIDN’T understand the notebook at first. It took him quite some time just to unravel the handwriting, and when he did, the words didn’t make sense to him. It seemed to be a list of English phrases: Red New Art, DX Night, Ten Carat Gold, Wild West Wow, Splash Poodle, Private Cat, 21 Cup, Mona Lisa Honey, Jungle Hot. There were almost a hundred more phrases, each with a two-letter code beside it in parentheses: PS, IC, SL, NP, SM, NT, PR.
Kenzo thought it was a list of mangled English phrases that gaijin called Japlish or Engrish, yet Lisa’s additional comments next to some entries confused him further: “transvaluation,” “hegemonic instead of ideological,” “fetishization,” “cultural narcissism,” “gender power differential,” “capitalistic phallicism.” There were also occa-sional references to Marcuse, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes—whoever they were. It was all gibberish to Kenzo.
Two days later, he was stuck on his morning train commute between Koenji and Nakano. It ended up to be a fifty-three-minute delay, caused by a suicide at Okubo Station. A twenty-six-year-old woman who worked as an elevator operator at Isetan department store had leapt in front of an inbound train, becoming the 652nd jumper of the year.
Kenzo didn’t have anything to read on the train, and he was sneaking peeks at the magazine held by the salaryman sitting next to him—an issue of Frank, a sleazy, bad imitation of Fancy. As the salaryman flipped to a back page, Kenzo saw an ad for Wild West Wow. Of course. How could he have been so stupid? The notebook wasn’t a list of Japlish. It was a list of businesses in what was sometimes euphemistically referred to as mizu shobai, the water trade, and sometimes more directly referred to as shasei sangyo, the ejaculation industry.
That afternoon, Kenzo went to Kabukicho, the red-light district in Shinjuku. Wild West Wow was in an eight-story corner building stacked with bars, discos, and nightclubs. The place was empty. Kenzo should have known it would be at two in the afternoon. The tencho, the manager, was the only person there, and he wasn’t talkative.
“Have you seen this gaijin woman?” Kenzo asked, showing him Lisa Countryman’s photo.
“No.”
“You could at least pretend to look.”
He didn’t pretend to look.
“What time do the girls who work here come in?”
“Don’t bother coming back,” the tencho said. “They won’t talk to you.”
He was right: they wouldn’t talk to Kenzo. The girls and the rest of the staff denied ever having laid eyes on Lisa, and it was clear they would have lied to him if they had. He would never get anywhere identifying himself as a cop.
He killed some time eating dinner at a soba restaurant, and afterward played pachinko for an hour. When he came back out to the street, Kabukicho had been transformed. Now that it was evening, everything was alive, cacophonous, ablaze in neon. The alleyways were crowded with men, many of them already drunk, and touts directed a steady banter at them from doorways, promising beautiful young girls.
The entrance fee for Splash Poodle was five thousand yen before eight p.m., eight thousand yen after. It bought you one drink and thirty minutes of “play time” with a “splash girl” chosen for you. However, for an additional three thousand yen, you could pick your own splash girl from the Polaroids tacked to the wall just inside the entrance. Kenzo carefully examined each Polaroid, taking so much time, one of the doormen said, “Come on already. You’re not picking a wife.”
Kenzo finally selected one of the younger splash girls, a wide-eyed girl who looked naïve and malleable, someone he might be able to get to talk.
He was led to a small curved booth and was immediately attended to by a waitress, who set down a dish of peanuts on the table and gave him an oshibori—a wet towel—to refresh himself. She asked him what he wanted to drink.
“Coca-Cola,” he said.
“Coca-Cola? You get one drink for free, you know.”
“Okay, a rum and Coke,” he said. It was too troublesome to explain that he couldn’t drink alcohol.
The booths were lined in rows with unusually high seatbacks, so he couldn’t get a view of the other patrons. It was too dark, anyway. He could barely see his hand in front of his face. The waitress used a penlight pointed at the floor to guide her way back to his table with his rum and Coke. Kenzo could hear things, though. Soft murmurs and wisps of conversation. And there were smells: cigarettes and perfume and something else, something sharp and acidic. Disinfectant?
He wondered why Lisa Countryman had been interested in nightclubs such as this one. Had she been that desperate for a job, for money? What else could the notebook have been for? He hardly knew anything about how the sex industry operated. Somehow he had gotten to the age of thirty-eight without ever having stepped into a strip bar. But he assumed the girls at these clubs were prostitutes. He imagined they chatted men up at the tables, and if the men desired, they went to a back room to have sex for an agreed price. And he also knew that Kabukicho was heavily controlled by the yakuza, the Japanese mafia. If Lisa had been working in a place like this, it was very conceivable she had fallen in harm’s way.
His splash girl slid into the booth, carrying more oshibori.
“Wanna another drink?” she asked, not noticing that he hadn’t touched his first one. He couldn’t tell in the darkness if she was the girl in the Polaroid he had picked, couldn’t tell if she was young or old, pretty or ugly. Her Japanese was clipped and accented—foreign. Was she Chinese?
He pulled out the photo of Lisa from his suit pocket. “Let me ask you something. Do you recognize this American woman?” he said, but then realized she couldn’t see. “Do you have a lighter? Or maybe we could ask the waitress if we could borrow her flashlight.”
He felt the girl grab his zipper.
“Nanda-yo?” he asked. What’re you doing?
She fished her hand through the fly of his pants and then his boxer shorts and then located his penis and fished it out.
“Shitsukoi dayo.” Stop that.
She took an oshibori and cleaned his penis, rubbing it very roughly, and, despite himself, he got an instant and insistent erection.
“Kuso, mate, mate.” Damn it, wait, wait.
She began pumping him up and down with her hand.
“Yamero-yo.” Don’t do that.
She dove her head down and took his cock into her mouth.
“Kuso! Iikagen ni-shiro, yariman!” Shit! Leave me alone, you whore!
He pushed her off and stood up and stepped away from the booth while trying to tuck his penis inside his pants. He knocked over the table with his rum and Coke and peanuts and the oshibori, and then he
tripped, falling to the floor. The doorman and the waitress ran over, both pointing their flashlights at him. As people rose from their booths to see what was going on, as his splash girl laughed, Kenzo flopped and wriggled on the floor, desperately trying to zip up his pants.
SEVEN
HER FIRST night at Musky Club, Lisa was paired with another American girl, Rebecca Silo, and told to keep quiet and observe. The first group of men arrived at eight, and after they were seated, given oshibori, and had ordered their drinks, Rebecca and Lisa joined the four men at their table. When everyone had introduced themselves, Kazuo asked Rebecca in tentative English, “Where are you from?”
“I’m from Chicago,” she said, drawing out the middle syllable.
“Ah, Chicago!” Kazuo said, as if this were a wondrous, serendipitous coincidence. Everyone waited for him to follow with a relevant comment about Chicago, but none was forthcoming, and there was an uncomfortable silence.
Chitoshi blinked and sat upright with an idea. He enunciated to Lisa, as though she were the one who couldn’t speak English, “Where—are—you—from?”
“Berkeley,” she said.
“Ah, Berkeley!” the four men said at once.
“San Francisco!” Nobu said.
“Golden Gate Bridge!” Hiro said.
“Cable car!” Kazuo said, and they all chuckled, relieved by this brilliant conversational breakthrough.
“You wanna light?” Rebecca asked Hiro.
He frowned, not understanding. “Excuse?”
She sparked her Bic lighter in the air and nodded at Hiro’s cigarette, which he dangled from his mouth.
“Ah, yes, please,” he said, and she lit his cigarette for him, whereupon the other three men hurriedly tamped out cigarettes from their packs of Seven Star and waited for the same courtesy from the girls, as if this were a special treat, a fabulous and rare luxury they couldn’t let pass unexploited. The same was true with their drinks. The girls poured the men’s drinks, continually keeping their glasses full to the brim with beer from the big bottles. These two touches of sabisu, service, along with the girls’ company and their engagement in halting, stultifying, excruciatingly banal conversation, were what these men—all in their forties and from the same advertising company—were paying an exorbitant amount of money for, and it utterly mystified Lisa.
