by Don Lee
“How long you in Japan?” Chitoshi asked her, with Hiro looking on.
“Six weeks,” she told him.
“Ah. You like Japan?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You have boyfriend?” Hiro chimed in.
“No, not at the moment.”
“You have ever Japanese boyfriend?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“You no like Japanese boy?”
“It’s not that—”
“You maybe have Japanese boyfriend someday?”
“Sure, I don’t see why not.”
“Subarashi!” they said. Wonderful!
There were three more groups of men that night, each hardly distinguishable from the next.
“That wasn’t too bad,” Lisa said to Rebecca at the end of the night, although she was exhausted. Her face hurt from smiling so much, and her mind was fried from trying to think of things to say.
“Oh, you had it easy. These guys were cupcakes,” Rebecca said. “Consider your cherry still intact.”
The next night, Naoko, the thirtyish mama-san, or proprietress, handed out the weekly payroll, giving each of them an envelope of cash. All told, Lisa had made almost twenty-five thousand yen the night before, or a hundred dollars for five hours of work, based on an hourly wage, tips, and a commission on drinks and snacks sold. In the future, Naoko told her, she would also get a bonus for shimei—specific requests by returning customers for her company.
Lisa hadn’t known you could make so much money in these clubs, and she needed the money. She had funded this trip to Tokyo with yet another college loan that she had no hope of ever repaying, and she was already up to her neck in credit-card debt. True to Seiji Waru’s prediction, it had been too late to find another teaching job, and, without a visa, she’d had no luck landing more conventional forms of employment. She had nearly tapped out her savings, right at the moment when her expenses had increased dramatically, having moved out of the gaijin house and into Teiji Takagi’s outrageously expensive furnished studio in Nishi-Azabu.
After looking for two weeks, she had been ready to accept almost any job, but never imagined she’d end up working in a hostess club. She had been doing some side research on the sex industry for her dissertation, making lists of places and dropping by random establishments without an appointment, hoping to interview the female workers. No one had been particularly receptive to her, and she was afraid she would have to give up soon and go home empty-handed, having failed, even, to gather any useful fieldwork. By the time she had walked into Musky Club in Roppongi, she had been at the end of her tether. “Excuse me,” she had said to Naoko in her most polite Japanese. “Could I talk to you for a few moments?”
“Turn around,” Naoko said.
Lisa assumed she was being peremptorily kicked out of the club, and she began to walk out. “Where are you going?” Naoko said. “I just want to look at you. Spin around for me.”
Lisa did. “But I just want to—”
“You’re a little chunky,” Naoko said, “but you’ll do.”
“Pardon?”
“Your Japanese isn’t bad, but don’t use it with the customers. This is known as a gaijin girl club. Men come here to meet gaijin girls, understand? It’s part of the fantasy. Just act like a dumb American, and you’ll do fine.”
SHE FOUND herself praying. It was strange. She didn’t think of herself as at all religious, although she had been a regular churchgoer as a child. Wherever they had been stationed, whatever port of call, her parents, Richard and Lenore, had become active in the Baptist church community on the naval base: Subic Bay, Pearl, San Diego, Naples, Portsmouth, Norfolk. God had not drawn Lisa to church, but singing had. Her parents had been musicians. Her father had played guitar, her mother the piano and organ. They had billed themselves as Pea Coat and Lenny, a semi-professional lounge act specializing in ballads and torch songs, and Lisa had loved watching and listening to them sing. Her best childhood memories were of them performing in NCO clubs and church choirs.
On Sundays, she began going to Tokyo Union Church on Omotesando-dori. She would attend the morning service and sing with the rest of the congregation—not an entirely satisfying experience, since there was no band, no solos, just restrained Protestant hymnals. Afterward, she would stroll to Yoyogi Park and witness the strange spectacle of hundreds of Japanese youngsters dancing on the closed-off street. In groups of four to ten, they generally cleaved to Ziggy Stardust or Elvis, platform shoes and eye shadow and red-tinted spiked hair, or leather jackets and hoop skirts and ducktails. Blaring music from portable sound systems, they enacted highly choreographed routines of the shuffle or the twist with an utter lack of irony—dour, really, never acknowledging the half-bemused, half-astonished crowd.
And then Lisa discovered something quite wonderful in her own neighborhood. In Nishi-Azabu, beside the Fuji Building, there was a Zen temple, Chokoku-ji, and once a week, the monks let laypeople meditate inside. There were three buildings at the temple: the Hon-do, the main hall; the Kannon-do, which housed a forty-foot wooden statue of the Buddhist goddess of mercy; and the Zen-do, which was the actual meditation hall.
On a Monday evening, Lisa showed up at the reception area of the Hon-do and put her shoes on the rack. She knelt on a cushion and wrote down her name and address in a guest book on a low table, then dropped a one-hundred-yen coin into the small offertory box. She was led by a monk to another room, where she was asked to remove her socks and belt and any other articles of clothing that might be constricting. Several other visitors were doing stretching exercises, and Lisa, the only gaijin, imitated their movements. Then they were all taken into a tatami room and told to line up in front of a row of black round cushions, whereupon a monk instructed them on the proper zazen seating position, eyelids half-closed, breathing through the nose.
Finally they were brought into a cavernous tatami room in the Zen-do, in which a number of monks were already meditating. Along with the other visitors, Lisa sat on the cushions facing the wall, and tried to settle into zazen. The point was for the mind to go blank, but the task seemed impossible. All sorts of thoughts flitted in and out of her head, the most mundane thoughts, laundry to do, a boy she had liked in high school, the hostages in Iran. What did they do all day long? Were they allowed to roam around at all, or were they bound in a room, forced to sit like this, made to suffer the tyranny of their solitude? She was so uncomfortable. Her knees were in severe, scintillating pain. Slowly, her breath quieted, and remarkably the pain became less noticeable, her body warm, atingle, irradiated from the center of her body to her limbs. But instead of thinking of nothing, she began thinking of Kannon, the goddess of mercy in the other building, and she prayed to her.
She prayed to be delivered from her aloneness. She felt herself choke up and start to cry. Ridiculous. Why was she crying? Why was she feeling sorry for herself? She had promised herself she wouldn’t. She couldn’t stop. Sobbing, she prayed. She prayed to be led somewhere, to something. She prayed for someone to save her.
OMAR JOHNSON, the Public Affairs officer who had given her the tour in Yokohama, was waiting for Lisa outside her apartment that night. He had flowers for her.
“I wanted to apologize,” he said. “I didn’t mean to insult you. I really didn’t.”
He was dressed in a button-down shirt and pressed jeans. He had gone to the address she had written down on her visitor form, the gaijin house in Meguro, and had waited all day for Takagi to show up to find out where she had moved.
She had been thinking about Omar, had felt bad about the way she had treated him. She smelled the flowers. Yellow roses. They were heavenly.
“Can I take you out to dinner?” Omar asked her.
She took his hand. “I don’t need to be courted,” she said, and led him up the stairs to her apartment.
IT GOT worse, much worse, at Musky Club. Apparently she had begun the job during an unusual lull of gentility, and now the customers reverted to the rude, crude
, lewd, and lascivious behavior that was their norm, behavior that was tacitly condoned at Musky Club. As a trio of customers concluded one night, this was not a first- or even second-rate club: the décor was cheap, the girls were not very pretty, they didn’t dress well, and they were old—kurisumasu keeki. In Japan, they called unmarried women who were over twenty-five Christmas cakes, because they were no longer fresh.
“It’s a reflection of Naoko’s lack of class,” one man said.
“Yes, she might be Korean,” the second man said.
“She might even be burakumin,” the third man said, referring to a caste of people who were, although pure Japanese, outcasts, delegated the most menial, onerous jobs.
“You know, her voice is so low, I wonder if she’s even a woman!”
This elicited peals of laughter.
“Maybe she’s a man! Like the tennis player, Renee Richards! Maybe she’s had a sex change operation!”
And then their evaluative attention turned to Lisa. They were aware she spoke some Japanese, but that didn’t stop them from openly assessing her attributes in front of her.
“Nice face, but hardly any tits,” the first man said.
“Yes, it’s true,” the second man said. “I need a magnifying glass to find her tits.”
“She’s big-boned, almost fat,” the third man said. “And she has a wide ass, don’t you think?”
“And pudgy arms.”
“Although her torso is slender. Legs are adequate.”
“Paradoxically she has a skinny person’s neck and wrists and ankles.”
“I like her eyes.”
“But her nose is too broad and flat.”
“Almost like a black person’s, wouldn’t you say?”
“Lips, too. Negroid lips.”
“She looks old. She said she’s twenty-two? Are you sure she’s not lying?”
“What do you make of her overall facial structure? Surprisingly delicate.”
“Hm, nothing is quite in proportion.”
“I see what you mean. She’s misshapen.”
“Her tits are a real tragedy. As you said, they’re almost non-existent.”
“Do you think it might be the blouse? Maybe there’s something underneath there, after all. It seems impossible to be so flat-chested.”
This sort of objectification was degrading enough—particularly since much of it was erroneous—but the customers could be more infuriating, asking Lisa direct questions: How tall was she? What color was her pubic hair? How wide was her vagina? Two fingers, three? Did she have big nipples? Were they pink or brown? Did she fart a lot? There was a rumor that some women had an orgasm when they urinated. Had that ever happened to her?
In the course of these conversations, Lisa picked up all kinds of words: oppai—breast; omanko—vagina; ososo—the residual drops of urine on a woman after she peed. Japanese men seemed quite fond of the scatological. Once, when Lisa returned from the restroom, a customer asked, “Fukimashitaka?” Did you wipe?
How many boyfriends had she had? they asked. Did she sleep with all of them? Any of them Japanese? Japanese men were not as large as gaijin men, that was true, they said, but they were harder, they lasted longer, they could go all night, many times a night.
“How big is your penis, Hayashi?”
“Fifty centimeters.”
“Fifty! You’re tiny. Mine’s as long as my arm.”
“Mine’s as long as my leg.”
“Mine’s so long, it could be used as a jump rope. I have to tie it in a series of knots in order to walk, or else it drags on the ground.”
And then the pawing would begin. A hand casually resting on her knee, patting her thigh, creeping up. An arm casually stretched across the back of the booth, around her shoulders, the hand creeping down. Lisa would push and swat their hands away. “Dame,” she would say, stop that, which would only make the men laugh and try again several minutes later.
The other girls at the club taught her tactics to occupy the men, like getting them to pose for Polaroids (for which the girls received a commission). A waiter would snap the photos and then hand them over with a flashlight for the men to inspect. Mindless drinking games were also a favorite distraction. There was the Yamanote Line game, in which everyone clapped in 4/4 time and took turns trying to name the twenty-nine stops on the train loop in the correct order: Mejiro, clap, clap, Ikebukuro, clap, clap, Otsuka, clap, clap. There was the Pin Pon Pan game, in which the first person shouted, “Pin,” and pointed at someone across the table, who had to bellow, “Pon,” and point at someone else, who had to retort, “Pan,” and point at someone else, whose neighbors had to raise their arms and yell, “Woo!” Sophomoric. If all else failed, they played rock, paper, scissors, jan-ken-pon, with the loser having to chug a drink.
Fortunately Lisa had the tolerance of a Marine. She could get drunk if she felt like it, but she could just as easily drink and drink and stay sober, although it was hard to do the job sober. Other girls coped with medicinal supplements. Speed was big, as was coke. Lisa would walk into the ladies’ room and find Rebecca Silo snorting a line from the lid of the toilet tank. “You wanna line?” she would giggle. Later, after work, Rebecca and her friends would take the edge off with poppers of amyl nitrite and go dancing at Juan Juan, the hot new disco across the hall whose mammoth sound system was making Naoko crazy.
All night long, the beat seeped into Musky Club, the bass pounding relentlessly, shaking the walls. “We Are Family,” “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough,” “Call Me,” “Heartbreaker.” The noise, the vibration, was killing her business, Naoko said. It was driving away her customers. She had complained to the disco’s owners, who told her she needed better soundproofing. Incensed, Naoko took her frustrations out on the girls, making them call clients during the day at their offices, begging them to come to the club that night, saying there was going to be a “party” (every night, of course, was a party). Naoko also instituted a new dohan rule. A dohan was an arranged outside date, usually for dinner at a fancy restaurant, after which the girl was to bring the customer back to the club. Sex wasn’t supposed to be involved, but the possibility of sex, the potential for sex, the obligation of sex, ratcheted up considerably with each dohan, with each tip and gift. Naoko insisted the girls go on at least one dohan per week.
One customer in particular, a construction executive, took a liking to Lisa and kept asking her for a dohan. He became increasingly aggressive, his hands patting and probing, trying to cop a feel. One night he pretended to be reaching for the ashtray and brushed his palm against Lisa’s breast. She slapped his hand and said, “Yamete-yo.” Don’t.
But Naoko happened to be walking by their table at that moment, and she swooped down upon them. “Don’t be rude,” she told Lisa. She grabbed the man’s hand and planted it on Lisa’s left breast. “In Japan, it’s considered a compliment.”
Both Lisa and the man were so shocked, they stared dumbly at Naoko, the man’s fingers laid stiffly over Lisa’s breast.
“No, it’s not,” Lisa said at last, removing the man’s hand.
Naoko reached down and flung his hand back upon her breast. “Yes, it is.”
Lisa stood up, squared up to Naoko, and said, “Fuck”—she threw a glassful of water in her face—“you.”
“You’re fired!” Naoko sputtered, leaking water from her mouth.
Lisa gathered her things, and as she walked out of the club, Naoko said to her, “You fucking gaijin, you think you can do anything you want. You think you own us. I hate gaijin.”
At the elevator, Lisa pressed the DOWN button and put on her coat. “Good Girls Don’t” by the Knack was blasting from Juan Juan. This is getting old, Lisa thought. It was the second job she had gotten herself fired from in three weeks.
The elevator doors opened, and Lisa looked down at ten beautifully lacquered red toenails in strap high heels, from which rose a pair of statuesque legs. “Well, well, if it isn’t our juvenile delinquent,” the legs said.
It was Harper Boyd, the blonde from Rocket America. She was headed into Juan Juan. “You were working in Musky Club? That dump?” she asked. “Are you stupid or just unlucky?”
“I can’t tell anymore,” Lisa said.
“Were you really the one who vandalized the school?”
“The school was vandalized?”
“Come on.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lisa smirked.
Harper Boyd puffed out a short laugh. “There’s more going on there than I thought,” she said. She hooked her arm inside Lisa’s and led her toward Juan Juan. “It’s against my nature, but I’m going to help you,” she said, just before they entered the roar of the disco.
EIGHT
THE END of August, Julia phoned and said she had a surprise for Tom, what was he doing that day? Nothing, he said, and she told him to pack a bathing suit, she would pick him up in twenty minutes at the usual corner—they had a corner now in Akasaka, a few blocks away from the Grew House.
It was, for once, a nice day—humid, but sunny—and as they sped southwest on the expressway, Tom thought Julia was taking him to the beach—the first time he’d get to see the ocean since arriving in Japan. Instead, they wound up in Yokohama, and Julia got lost in the port city, making turn after wrong turn in an industrial section.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked.
“Just wait.”
Tom was beginning to feel carsick from the frequent and unexpected lefts and rights, until Julia skidded to a stop, backed up the car, spun forward into an alleyway, and announced, “We’re here.” Just before they dipped into an underground parking garage, he glimpsed a gargantuan warehouse with a sign that said “Island Blue.”
