by Don Lee
“Oh!” Miss Saotome said, then asked, raising her voice over the calamity of weather, “How did you even hear him coming?”
“I, too,” Kenzo shouted, “have never been on a golf course.”
TYPHOON NO. 19 veered to the east on Sunday, never making it to Tokyo, and on Monday morning the sky was a smogless cerulean blue, the air crisp and dry. Kenzo felt alive and buoyant. At the end of their date, he and Miss Saotome had shaken hands, and when he had asked if perhaps they could see each other again, perhaps do something like go to the practice range together, she had said yes. It was too soon to declare triumph, he knew, but everything was going swimmingly. She was almost his girlfriend. He was thinking she would be a wonderful wife, a wonderful mother to Simon. The next time he saw her, he would tell her about Simon. A tide of some sort had turned for him. His life was going to be different. It was, of course, too good to be true.
Inspector Kunichi stopped him in the hallway of the police station and told him to back off Midori Atsuta. She was connected to someone high up who was vouching for her character. She was beyond reproach. There was no reason to question her or anyone at the club any further.
“She’s the key to my case,” Kenzo said.
“What case? What case?” Kunichi said. “It’s a bullshit case. Three months, and you’ve got zilch. There’s no body, no evidence that a crime has even been committed.”
“There’s been a cover-up.”
“You don’t know anything. For all you know, the so-called victim went into hiding voluntarily. Forget about it. She was just another gaijin working illegally as a hostess. Whatever happened to her served her right.”
“I can’t forget about it. The Consular Officer from the American Embassy won’t let me forget about it. Her sister won’t let me forget about it.”
“Fine,” Kunichi said. “But you’re not going to bother Miss Atsuta again.”
“How much did she pay you?”
“What?”
“She bribed you, just like Harper Boyd did.”
Kunichi slammed the base of his palm against Kenzo’s sternum, knocking his wind out and making his chest sting. “You’re an embarrassment to everyone here. You’re a fool.”
Then that evening, as Kenzo trudged home from the train station, he was up the hill from his apartment when he saw, parked in front of the building, a gleaming, piss-yellow, souped-up, custom-bodied Datsun 280Z that he recognized to be Assistant Inspector Iso Yamada’s. Kenzo was pondering all the possible scenarios for Yamada being there—to say he had taken over the case, to inform him of an official reprimand—as Miss Saotome stepped out of the lobby and folded herself into the passenger seat of Yamada’s car, her laughter abruptly muffled when she pulled the door shut.
THIRTEEN
MOE BECAME a groupie. He came to Rendezvous five out of the next eight nights, sometimes with Curly, sometimes alone, but never with Larry—Larry was mysteriously a no-show. Moe always asked for Lisa, and he began bringing a list with him, standards he wanted her to perform: “Melancholy Baby,” “Misty,” “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” “Moon-glow.” Lisa was familiar with most of the songs. They had been on her parents’ playlist, and after she got over her initial stage fright, she found she didn’t mind singing at the club. It was less burdensome than trying to converse with the customers, and, as an audience, they were pushovers.
Moe fawned over Lisa and hogged her time, and when he wasn’t there, other customers started requesting her company, too, which didn’t sit well with the other hostesses, particularly Emi, who was now sometimes left unwanted at the bar for much of the night.
In the women’s restroom one evening, as Emi, Lisa, and Harper Boyd were freshening their makeup, Emi glanced over to her and asked, “What’s that?”
“What?” Lisa looked in the mirror at her face, thinking she had a zit.
“That. What is that?” Emi asked, pointing her eyeliner pencil at her.
“It’s a necklace,” Lisa said.
“Where’d you get it? Did someone give it to you?”
Lisa nodded. “Mojo.” It was what the girls in the club called Moe now, a name more befitting his droopy eyelid and oily face and high-pitched laugh and large bankroll.
Emi set down her eyeliner and lifted the necklace’s pendant from Lisa’s chest. It was a single pearl framed by a gold heart. She slipped her hand underneath Lisa’s hair, rotated the chain, and examined the necklace’s clasp. “This is a Mikimoto,” she said. “Do you realize how expensive this is? At least a hundred thousand yen. Mojo gives you this after a week?”
Lisa nodded sheepishly.
“I’ve never gotten a gift like this so quickly,” Emi said. “Never.”
“His company probably gets them in bulk,” Lisa said, feebly trying to make her feel better. She didn’t know what company that might be. Midori was evasive about who Mojo, Curly, and Larry were, not even willing to tell Lisa how long they had been customers.
Emi grabbed her eyeliner pencil and her lipstick and chucked them into her makeup pouch. “Your singing isn’t really so hot. These men don’t know anything. You do these little tricks with your voice to impress them, and they fall all over you, just because you’re a gaijin. You’re not even that pretty. You’re overweight, and you’ve got no tits. Look at these,” she said, and squeezed her breasts. “These are tits.” She seized Lisa’s hands and clutched them to her breasts. “These are real tits. They’re natural, big, and they’re shaped perfectly. Do you agree or not agree?”
“I, um, agree.”
“You can have your Mojo. I don’t care. I’m immune to your insults.”
She huffed out of the bathroom, and Harper laughed. “You’re good at making friends, aren’t you?”
She lit up a cigarette, and Lisa bummed one from her pack. She had taken up smoking lately. Japanese men smoked incessantly, and if you didn’t smoke yourself, the stink and haze in the club was intolerable.
“You get a lot of gifts like these, I bet,” Lisa said.
“I’ve gotten a few trinkets in my day,” Harper told her. “But as far as my objectives go, it’s chump change.”
“What are your objectives?”
“I’m looking for investors.”
Harper pulled out a small photo album from her purse. The photographs were of a cluster of dilapidated bungalows on a beautiful white-sand beach with postcard-turquoise water. It was in Belize, Harper said, a sleepy resort she had visited as a kid. Her plan was to buy the property and develop the adjoining land. She wanted to add tennis courts and a stable of horses, but she wasn’t greedy. She just wanted a nice little place, exclusive, classy, that she could run herself with a small staff. She had already done a good part of the legwork on the development—water rights, beach access, construction costs, indemnification, corporate liability. She simply needed to raise about a quarter of a million dollars in cash.
“Have you gotten anyone interested?” Lisa asked.
“I’ve got a few hooks in the water,” Harper said. “What about you? What’s your game?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you trying to accomplish here?”
“I’m doing fieldwork for my Ph.D.”
“Yeah, sure,” Harper said. “You might get other people to buy that, but not me. You’ve got something else going on. You’re not a partier, you’re not a gold digger like me. You sure as hell aren’t doing any research that I can see. What are you doing in Tokyo?”
“I told you.”
“Come on.”
“I interview people. I transcribe. I write. I’m taking Japanese classes. I go to the library.”
“What else? What do you do for fun? You only went dancing with me that one time.”
Lisa had to think. “I walk.”
“Say what?”
“I like to take walks. I like to go to parks.”
Unbeknownst to most tourists, there were over seven thousand parks in Tokyo. Lisa’s current favorite was the garden of
what used to be Prince Asaka’s house, now the Teien Art Museum in Meguro. It was there, a few days later, among the landscaped grounds, that she saw Larry again.
He was sitting on a wooden bench, wearing a trim dark blue suit and reading a newspaper. He didn’t look up as she approached and passed him, and she kept going a few meters, then turned back and sat next to him on the bench. “Well,” she said in Japanese, “if it isn’t Silent Larry.”
He raised his head, slowly turned to her, and, after a beat, smiled. “If it isn’t Sarah Vaughan,” he replied in English.
“Ah, what do you know, he speaks.”
“I’m actually quite capable of speech.”
“And he even sounds like a native English speaker. A nisei?”
“Sansei.”
“So what was that night at the club about? Hardly saying boo. Was that part of the charade?” she asked.
“No.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Bad mood.”
“Oh,” Lisa said. “I see. But you’re in a better mood now?”
“Not really. But I’ll fake it for you.”
“That’s very kind,” she said. She glanced at his hands as he folded the newspaper. She had noticed at the club that he wore a ring, but it was on his right hand, not his left. “Are you going to keep faking your name, too, Larry?”
He looked at her a moment, deciding. “David Saito,” he said. “But we can keep that between us, can’t we?”
“If you insist.”
“And you?” he said. “Your real name’s Lisa?”
Some girls used pseudonyms. “Yes. What are you doing here in the middle of the day, David? Don’t you have a job?”
“I’m playing hooky. I had a meeting nearby and decided to take the afternoon off.”
“Where do you work?”
“The US Embassy.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m an Economic Officer.”
“Are you high up?” she asked, thinking it might be helpful to know someone in the embassy.
“You’re not going to ask me to fix your visa, are you?”
“Mojo and Curly are economists, too?”
David laughed. “Something along those lines. You call him Mojo?”
“You’re not going to tell me their real names?”
“They’re politicians. Good enough?”
“Good enough.”
“You have a terrific voice,” he said. “I take it you’ve sung professionally.”
“No, I’m really not that good. I just do these little tricks.”
“How long have you been at the club?”
“Less than a month.”
“As part of your Ph.D. research, I think I remember.”
“Sort of,” Lisa told him. “It’s true that from an anthropological viewpoint, it’s been a fascinating place to work, a world unto itself—the whole interplay of gendered roles. I’ve been taking copious notes.”
“I better watch what I say around you. What conclusions have you reached?”
“Well, the more I’m there, the more clarity I see in the way it functions. When I first started, I dismissed everything as sexist and misogynistic, and I was always on the verge of throwing drinks in people’s faces. But now that I’ve learned more about Japan, I know that was too reductive of an approach. I’m finding some parallels to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic—you know, Phenomenology of Spirit—although certainly I could, like Frantz Fanon, question its relevance in this post-colonial context.”
She was babbling, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself. She was nervous, and felt compelled to impress him. She kept talking, throwing in as many esoteric theories and highfalutin phrases as possible. She had never had the audience of such an elegant, good-looking man before, and the wonderful thing was that he seemed interested in her, tolerating the nonsense she was spouting, asking her questions, asking her to continue. She began to relax and enjoy herself. He had a way of making her feel more assured, more intelligent, more attractive than she really was.
After half an hour—the best half hour she had ever spent with a man—he had to go. “It was nice seeing you again, Lisa,” he said, standing up.
She was disappointed he was leaving. “Will you be coming back to the club sometime?”
“I’d like to,” he said, “but it’s up to Mojo to invite me.” He began walking away.
“David,” she called to him.
He stopped and turned.
“You’re married, aren’t you?” she said.
“Yes, I am,” he said.
SHE FOUND herself looking for him, but he didn’t return to the club the next week, nor did he revisit the Teien garden, through which she strolled every afternoon. She asked Mojo if he had seen his friend Larry lately, and he curtly said no, clamming up. Had they had a falling-out? she wondered.
“Why don’t you bring him around again to the club?” she said. “I thought he was very funny.”
Mojo didn’t question how she could have possibly thought Larry funny, when he hadn’t said a thing during his one visit to the club. By this point, she knew Mojo would do pretty much anything she asked, anything to make her happy, and sure enough, a few nights later, as she was singing “In the Dark,” she saw David Saito entering Rendezvous with Mojo.
She joined the men in a booth. This time, David was almost voluble, and the three of them settled into a nice rapport—quite a hostessing feat, since Lisa had to ensure that Mojo would not become jealous while still being attentive to David.
They discussed tattoos, of all things. That weekend, the biggest, rowdiest festival of the year, Sanja Matsuri, would be taking place in Asakusa, and one of the real spectacles of the festival was seeing the body tattoos of the yakuza, most of whom would only be wearing white loincloths. Any other time, the tattoos were kept hidden. Besides yubitsume—the custom of slicing off one’s pinky finger to atone for an indiscretion—tattoos were the most telling signs of yakuza membership. They often sheathed the entire body, covering all the skin up to the neck, wrists, and ankles with elaborate murals of tigers, dragons, plants, mountains, abstract whorls, angry seas. Some public baths and hotels still banned anyone who bore them.
“First, black ring on arm each time crime,” Mojo said to Lisa, explaining the origin of the tattoos.
“Then they became a test of mettle,” David said. “A back tattoo can take over a hundred hours to complete. It’s very painful.”
“Yubitsume come from samurai,” Mojo said. “Katana—you know katana?”
“Yes. The long samurai sword,” Lisa said. Mojo and David were speaking Japanese to each other, but English to her, and she was expected to speak English to them.
“Katana you hold small finger most hard,” Mojo said, gripping an imaginary sword in the air with his pinky and thumb. “Finger next, finger next.” He curled his ring finger, then his middle finger. “Last finger,” he said, wiggling his index finger, “do nothing. Most soft.”
“If you lost part of your pinky through yubitsume,” David said, “you became a weaker swordsman and were more dependent on your master to protect you—akin to a Hegelian master-slave dialectic,” and he and Lisa shared a clandestine smile.
“You see man here sometime?” Mojo asked. “White suit? He is Takahashi-gumi.”
Lisa knew whom he meant. The man had a punch perm and always wore the same outfit: white suit, black shirt, pink tie. A senior boss in the Takahashi syndicate, he came to the club infrequently. Lisa had never talked to him. He always requested one of the Japanese girls, and would even take Emi over Harper and Lisa. Apparently he hated gaijin.
Mojo told Lisa about the oyabun-kobun—father-child—relationships in the yakuza. When a new member was inducted, he promised undying fidelity and obedience to the boss. In return, he was rewarded with the comfort and protection of belonging to a family, to a cohesive whole with a clear purpose and an unambiguous hierarchy. This was the fundamental tenet of Japanese society, Mojo said. Loyalt
y. Didn’t Lisa think loyalty was important?
Lisa nodded, momentarily bewildered, mishearing his pronunciation of “loyalty” as “royalty.”
It was the basis of the Japanese economic system, Mojo said, becoming more impassioned. It explained the structure of alliances between governmental bodies and private corporations—the zoku, or tribes, of special interests, the keiretsu, or networks, of suppliers and customers. It was all about loyalty.
Here, he switched to Japanese and spoke to David directly: “Without loyalty, there is no order, only confusion. This is something Americans cannot seem to understand. When you ask us to open up our markets, you are asking us to undermine our domestic order.”
“But your protectionism is at the expense of efficiency, of lower prices,” David said.
“We’ve had this discussion many times.”
“It’s a discussion worth continuing—for both sides. As a favor to me, I hope we can continue the discussion.”
Mojo shook his head and said, “I sometimes ask myself, When is it asking a favor, and when is it coercion? I wonder about these things sometimes, David. Many things. For instance, about your loyalties.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are Japanese,” Mojo said. “You may be a sansei, but you’ll always be Japanese. Where are your loyalties? Are you someone I can trust?”
“Of course.”
“How do I know that?”
David set down his drink and smiled at Lisa. “Could you let us talk for a few minutes?” he asked.
She left them alone. She went to the women’s bathroom and smoked a cigarette, then stepped behind the bar, poured herself a club soda, and took a seat on a stool. Theirs was obviously a complicated relationship, she thought. What was it that David needed from Mojo? What favor? She caught a whiff of a terrible, tart smell. She turned around. Behind her stood Tony Somers, spruced up in a three-piece suit but still oozing his awful cologne.
“I knew you’d end up in a place like this,” he said.
“What are you doing here?” It was extremely rare for Rendezvous to have any gaijin guests.
