Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Oh, come on. I’ll never have the opportunity or courage to do this again.”

  “No.”

  “Just three more places from the list.”

  “No.”

  “Two, then. Just two.”

  Kenzo considered it. Weirdly, he thought he would feel safer and less embarrassed going to these establishments with Miss Saotome, and he knew he wouldn’t have this opportunity again, either. “Only places where we can watch. No touching,” he said. “I don’t want to be touched.”

  RED NEW ART was an IC, an “Image Club,” or imekura, where there was a choice of fantasy rooms, including a fake office in which salarymen could indulge in sekuharu—sexual harassment—with office ladies, coming up to the pretend OLs from behind as they stood at mimeograph machines and pressing against their buttocks and squeezing their breasts. Red New Art did not allow shakuhachi or penetration of any sort—just one-way male-to-female molestation. Most of the rooms featured rori-kon—Lolita complex—girls who dressed in schoolgirl outfits. There was a whole industry built around rori-kon, including the sale of girls’ used underpants in vending machines on the street, but the fixation, as long as it remained within limits, didn’t necessarily carry negative connotations in Japan. It wasn’t considered pedophilia. It was considered almost normal.

  At the Red New Art, they had a classroom where schoolgirls wrote characters on a blackboard, waiting for “teachers” to walk in and rip their panties down (for an extra charge, the panties could be taken home as souvenirs). The train room, however, was by far the most popular. It was designed for closet chikan—gropers—simulating a commuter train with benches, strap handles dangling from rods, and a soundtrack of train noises.

  Kenzo and Miss Saotome stood to the side and watched several men eyeing four schoolgirls who stood hanging on to the straps, oblivious. Everyone, including Kenzo and Miss Saotome, soon fell into the rhythm of the soundtrack, unconsciously swaying with the clacking of the train as it rolled over the track seams. Slowly, surreptitiously, the men crept closer to the girls until they were beside them, and then they flicked their hands out for a quick grab of ass cheek. The girls gasped and spun around, and the men—staring off in opposite directions—pretended to be innocent bystanders. A few minutes passed, and it began all over again.

  “You know what I used to do?” Miss Saotome said as they walked out of the room. “Whenever I rode a train during rush hour, I carried a safety pin in case I needed to defend myself.”

  What was extraordinary about the image club was how quiet and well-behaved the men were. Miss Saotome decided this was too tame; they needed to go to a real strip bar.

  Mona Lisa Honey was an NT, a “Nude Theater,” or nudo gekijo. Kenzo and Miss Saotome sat in the back, and she began ordering mizuwari after mizuwari, whiskey and water, complaining to him that there was hardly any alcohol in the drinks. Kenzo nodded, wondering how much the final bill would be. She had told him she would not charge him for her tour-guide services tonight, but he had to pick up all the expenses.

  The preliminary shows were pretty straightforward. Women dressed as stewardesses and nurses dancing and stripping onstage. One woman with an aloha skirt, shorts, and Day-Glo green lipstick came out with a surfboard and pretended to ride waves, windmilling her arms to keep her balance, which made her breasts spin very impressively in contrapuntal circles. Kenzo realized that it was the first time he had ever seen a live naked woman other than his wife, Yumiko, but oddly there wasn’t much sensual about the experience. Was it because they were sitting so far back? Or was it the lighting, so dark where they were, so bright on the stage, creating a surreal divide?

  There were no Christian notions of sin in Japan. Like everyone else, Kenzo was not prudish. He viewed sex as a natural bodily function. He didn’t find any of this immoral. Yet, nor did he find it titillating. He felt nothing.

  The waitresses were walking around the room with wicker baskets, and men raised their hands and were given shiny chrome implements.

  “What are those?” Kenzo asked.

  “They’re renting magnifying glasses,” Miss Saotome said.

  “What for?”

  “Just watch.”

  This time the four strippers who stepped onto the stage were all Asian gaijin. They looked to be Thai and Filipina, maybe Korean. Apparently they were the main attraction. They did the regular bump-and-grind and disrobed, but then they sat on the edge of the stage, leaned back, lifted their legs, and spread their knees apart. One by one, blue-suited salarymen came up to the women with their magnifying glasses for a scrupulous examination of their genitalia.

  “Nanda-ro,” Kenzo said.

  Miss Saotome looked as unsettled as he was.

  The MC appeared and bellowed on the microphone, asking if anyone in the audience was man enough to fuck these beautiful women. Did anyone have the balls?

  After much cajoling, four very drunk men were pushed up onto the stage. The women—whose expressions were utterly vacant—pulled down the men’s pants, and the MC ridiculed the size of their penises. The women performed shakuhachi, and the MC ridiculed the men for not being able to get it up. One man, sweating, shut his eyes and covered his ears with his hands, concentrating with all his might to induce an erection. Another slunk off the stage, flaccid, a failure. The two others were only partially aroused but fumbled to gain entry, anyway. A replacement, a pinch hitter, emerged and unzipped his trousers. Though short and thin and wan, he had an enormous cock that required no encouragement from the stripper. “Can you believe this?” the MC roared. “Where did this horse come from?”

  The man knelt between the legs of the stripper and inserted his penis, making the woman wince, and then started whanging away at her mercilessly.

  “I have to go,” Miss Saotome said suddenly. “I have to go.”

  Jumping up, she knocked over their table, tipping their drinks and peanuts and oshibori to the floor, and ran out of the club. Kenzo, after quickly settling their bill, followed her out to the street. “What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked her.

  One hand on a telephone pole, she leaned over to the gutter and retched.

  “You’ve had too much to drink,” he said.

  She vomited again, heaving, then wiped her mouth with a handkerchief. “That was disgusting. Sick.”

  “It’s okay,” Kenzo said. “I can’t drink, either.”

  “No, the show. It was horrible.”

  Kenzo was confused. “But you must be used to such things.”

  “What?” she said.

  “In your line of work.”

  “What are you talking about? In what line of work?”

  “You’re a prostitute.”

  “What?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “You’re not a prostitute?”

  “Of course not!”

  “But your namecard.”

  “I’m a romance consultant. A matchmaker. I arrange dates, marriages. I’m a female nakodo.” A go-between.

  “Oh,” Kenzo said.

  “How could you be so stupid?” She slapped his arm.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Baka ja naino,” she said. “How could you think I was a prostitute?”

  “Then how did you know about these businesses?”

  She dug into her pocket, took out a little black book, and tossed it at him, bouncing it off his chest. He picked it up. The Tokyo City Sex Guide. “You can get it at practically any bookstore, you idiot! Every place on your list is in there. How come you’re so clueless? You should know these things.”

  “What about the noises?”

  “What noises?”

  “The noises from your apartment. Sex noises.”

  She slapped his arm again. “Those are from the woman next door to me! She’s a stewardess. One week a month when she’s back in town, her fiancé comes over.”

  “Oh.”

  “I
thought you were kind of cute in a blundering, neurotic way, but you’re an idiot! A moron!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She yanked off her wig and pitched it into his face. “Iikagen ni shite-yo!” she said—Leave me alone!—and sprinted down the street.

  The Tokyo City Sex Guide turned out to be very informative. One important fact was that almost all of these clubs admitted only Japanese men and hardly ever employed white gaijin women. It was a waste of time, then, to visit anyplace on the lists other than hostess clubs, the one business which did hire gaijin, preferably blondes with blue eyes. These hostesses were not necessarily prostitutes, Kenzo noted attentively.

  The mama-sans were no more cooperative than anyone else, however, saying they had never seen anyone resembling Lisa Countryman in her photo. He went to a dozen hostess clubs in Roppongi and Akasaka before a mama-san finally said she thought she recognized her.

  “Was she looking for a job?” Kenzo asked.

  “No. She interviewed me. She asked me all sorts of questions.”

  “What kinds of questions?”

  “About my background, how I got into the business. Pretty nosy,” the mama-san said. “She wanted to know what I thought about the roles of men and women in Japanese society, stuff like that. She said she was doing research.”

  “Research? For what?”

  “For a book.”

  The next day, Kenzo called Susan Countryman from the police station. “Your sister is writer, maybe journalist?” he asked.

  “No, she’s a graduate student. Why?”

  “What kind graduate student?”

  “Anthropology.”

  “She study in Virginia?”

  “California. Berkeley.”

  “Why you not tell me this before?”

  “Why you not ask me this before?” she said.

  He hung up and got the main number for the University of California, Berkeley. From the switchboard operator he was transferred to the registrar, then the graduate dean’s office, then the chair of the anthropology department in Kreber Hall, who said, “Well, I can’t say I was all too keen on her dissertation subject. I mean, women’s studies—it seems like so much fashion. And contemporary Japan? To tell you the truth, I’ve always resisted the idea of ethnography qualifying as real anthropology. What did you say has happened to her?”

  Kenzo returned to the hostess clubs on the list. He didn’t know what to think about Lisa Countryman anymore. She was not looking for a job at a hostess club (or as a prostitute), after all? She was doing fieldwork for her Ph.D. in anthropology? In any event, he was about to give up. He was getting nowhere with the mama-sans and hostesses and tencho. No one in this business would give him the time of day. Then, finally, as he was leaving a club called the Bogart Den one night, he saw, coming out of the restroom, an attractive blonde with extraordinary legs, a blonde Kenzo was sure he had met before. It was the blonde who had winked at him in the Shimbashi office of Rocket America.

  TEN

  RIGHT AWAY, Lisa could tell that Rendezvous in Ginza was different. Unlike Musky Club, which allowed anyone to walk in off the street as long as he could pay the entrance fee, Rendezvous was members-only and had the application procedures of a country club—stringent and exclusive. An existing member had to formally recommend the applicant, who was then asked to provide three references who could attest to his character. If admitted, he was required to pay a hefty initiation, including a wildly exorbitant fee for a bottle of liquor to be kept at the club (botoru-kipu, or bottle-keep), which was marked with a numbered tag and shelved neatly on an illuminated display behind the bar.

  These clients weren’t your usual salarymen. They were politicians, ambassadors, famous actors, art dealers, shipping tycoons, scions of society. They were presidents and top executives from major corporations, brokerage firms, and pharmaceutical companies who thought nothing of writing off thousands of dollars for a single night on their expense accounts. In return, they expected and were given the best.

  The club was posh, intimate, and elegant. A hand-etched glass partition at the entrance, eight velvet booths, chandeliers, a grand piano, silver Tiffany ashtrays, gold-plated fixtures in the marble restrooms. Instead of a karaoke machine, Rendezvous had a full-time pianist on hand, as well as three tuxedoed waiters, the chifu, or chief, who prepared the snacks and drinks, the tencho, and the mama-san, Midori, who presided over a rotation of twelve hostesses, all of whom were pretty, young, and educated.

  Midori was a petite woman in her late thirties. She exuded a dignified beauty, with each gesture intimating a wealth of manners and poise, and she demanded that her hostesses project a similar nobility.

  After Harper Boyd had brought her to the club to be interviewed, Lisa was informed of Midori’s very specific rules of etiquette. She couldn’t smoke or eat in front of the customers. In general, she couldn’t masticate. She was forbidden from biting her fingernails and chewing gum and gnawing on swizzle sticks. Any kind of slouching was a no-no. She had to sit up straight, couldn’t put her elbows on the table, her hands in her pockets, or cross her legs more than was absolutely necessary. Expelling anything from the nose or mouth, much less exposing the insides of those cavities, was strictly verboten. If she had to blow her nose, she was to go to the restroom. If she laughed, she was to cover her mouth with her hand, but not touch it, her pinky raised slightly. When she bowed, she was to keep both palms flat against her thighs and lower her eyes, and when she held a glass or a cup, she was to use both hands, the left underneath, the right around the side.

  There were also the issues of makeup and clothes. Before Lisa was allowed to begin working, she was forced to endure several dress rehearsals with Midori, who twice summarily dismissed her, telling her to go home and change. “Who taught you to dress?” Midori asked. “A street hooker?” Lisa was wearing a low-cut pink angora sweater with a black leather skirt and a macramé belt and vinyl go-go boots, all of which she had bought on an earlier shopping expedition with Rebecca Silo. Simple, understated cocktail dresses or suits, Midori said. No sweaters. No wool, cotton, leather, or vinyl. Nothing loud or see-through or with spots or patterns or plaid. No cleavage, no going without a bra. No slits, no sequins. Nothing fluffy or puffy.

  As for makeup, Midori had to give Lisa a full course in cosmetology. She taught her to use astringent to clean her face and then apply, in order: a cold compress to reduce the swelling in her eyes; a water-based moisturizer, always rubbed in upward sweeps; foundation, dotted on, then sponged and blended, making sure there wasn’t a foundation line on her neck; concealer for her freckles and any blemishes and dark circles; a comb for her eyebrows; eye shadow; an eyeliner pencil; an eyelash curler; two coats of mascara; a lip pencil; lipstick; and powdered blush—all to the miraculous effect that she wasn’t wearing any makeup at all.

  “What’s your blood?” Midori asked. “French? Italian?”

  Lisa shrugged. She was cowed, utterly intimidated, by Midori.

  “You have that nice olive complexion, but your hair . . .”

  She sent Lisa to her hairdresser, who instantly rid her of her split ends and Farrah Fawcett wings.

  Now that she was reasonably presentable, the real test, Midori told her, was to see how well she could mix with customers. Mondays were slow nights—a good night for her to start. The club was open from seven to 11:45 p.m., and Lisa was there promptly at six, the first girl to arrive. Harper Boyd and the other hostesses—all Japanese—trickled in closer to six-thirty. They were pleasant enough toward Lisa, but they seemed to maintain a deliberate distance from her.

  “They think of us as novelty hostesses,” Harper told Lisa. “The token gaijin. Amateurs, in their eyes. They’re willing to tolerate us as long as we don’t hang around too long and horn in on the fat cats.”

  Lisa sat with the girls at the bar, waiting for some customers to enter the club, and she learned that this was the most boring part of the job, having to perch primly on the stools, back straight, not a
llowed to do anything—no eating, reading, smoking, gum-chewing, excessive or animated talking—until Midori called upon them, even though the club didn’t really get going until nine o’clock.

  Deep into the evening, Midori at last chose Lisa, who was the sole hostess remaining at the bar, save for Emi. Truth be told, Emi appeared to be a hanger-oner, several years beyond the time she should have retired. She was older than the other girls by far, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and was, in comparison, homely.

  “Emi, Lisa, onegaishimasu,” Midori said when a group of men had been seated at a booth.

  Emi grabbed a box of matches and cheerfully sprang up from the barstool. Lisa stood behind her as Emi asked the group if they could join them, and then the two women nestled between the men in the booth.

  “It’s been so long since your last visit,” Emi said to Mr. Kimura, who was a longtime member. “I’ve missed you so much. Have you forgotten your promise to make me your mistress?”

  “Mistress!” a man said. Kimura’s guests howled, delighted by the mere suggestion. Kimura, the president of a computer company who was entertaining some parts suppliers tonight, was at least seventy-five years old and decrepit. He didn’t seem capable of ambulation, much less sexual activity, extracurricular or otherwise.

  “Yes,” Emi said, “Kimura-san’s prowess is well-known. He’s famous for being able to satisfy six, seven women a night.”

  “Six or seven?” one of the parts suppliers said. “So few?” The others laughed. “I think you’re confusing his reputation with mine. If you want a real man, you should join my harem.”

  “No, I’m devoted to Kimura-san,” Emi said, laying her cheek against the old man’s shoulder.

  A few minutes later, Midori reappeared in the room, having changed into a resplendent kimono. Everyone in the club clapped.

  “Oh, she’s a true bijin,” Mr. Kimura said—a traditional beauty. “She has so much class. That’s why her club is so well-respected.”

  Eventually Midori made her way to their table. “Kimura-san,” she said, “how is your back?”