Number9dream

by David Mitchell

  “Depends on the instrument. String players, technically including pianists, have the luxury of being able to practice until we get it right, and any mistakes we do make usually get swallowed up by the orchestra. Woodwind, and especially brass, have it tougher. However good you are, one unlucky blast and Bruckner’s celestial ninth gets blasted open with a—well, my last conductor’s metaphor—a shotgun fart. Most trumpet players I know have beta blockers instead of peanut cookies with their morning coffee. Are Yakushima pizza chefs superstitious?”

  “The last time I went to a shrine it was to, uh, decapitate its god.”

  “With a lightning bolt?”

  “I only had a junior-carpenter-set hacksaw.”

  She sees I am serious. “Didn’t the god give you what you wanted?”

  “The god gave me exactly what I wanted.”

  “Which is why you sawed his head off?”

  “Yep.”

  “My, I must be careful about giving you what you want.”

  “Ai Imajo—I, Eiji Miyake, hereby swear I will never saw your head off.”

  “That comes as a relief. But isn’t destroying religious artifacts a juvenile-court-size offense?”

  “I never told anyone until this morning.”

  Ai gives me a look with ninety-nine possible meanings. McDonald’s has an electronic signboard above the door that reports how many seats are vacant—it flits in and out of single figures. Detectors must be built into the seats, I guess. Ai tells me to go upstairs and find a table while she gets in line, and I am too exhausted to argue. McDonald’s stinks of McDonald’s but at least it will disguise the stink of Miyake the unshowered kitchen slave. Upstairs a flock of student nurses smokes, bitches, and shrieks into their cell phones. I add up the money I earned since midnight and I feel a little less tired. It is Europe Week in McDonald’s—a video screen hangs on the wall, and scenes of Rome glide by while soporific music sucks you in. Ai appears at the top of the steps holding the tray, looking around for me. I could wave, but I enjoy looking at her as if I am seeing her for the first time. Black leggings, a sky blue T-shirt under a berry-juice silk shirt, and amber magma earrings. If Ai were a nurse I would break a major bone to get a bed in her ward. “They were out of chocolate shake,” she says, “so I chose banana. I see you have a kinky fetish for nurse uniforms.”

  “They must have, uh, followed me in.”

  Ai sticks the straw through my lid. “In your dreams—anyway, you reek of cheese. Sachiko says a lot of your customers are nurses—they train across the road. That squat gray building across the road is Sensoji Hospital.”

  “I thought it was a prison. Are you only having green tea?”

  “Green tea is all that my meal plan allows until lunch.”

  “Oh—I forgot again. Sorry.”

  “No need to be. Diabetes is a medical condition, not a sin.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Relax, relax; I know. Eat.”

  A mighty river of drones flows below the window—civil servants rushing to get to their desks before their section chief is at his. “Once upon a time,” says Ai, “people used to build Tokyo. But that changed somewhere down the line, and now Tokyo builds people.”

  I let a squirt of shake dissolve on my tongue. “Back to your father: he said if you ignore him and go to Paris, you can forget ever being welcome in Niigata.”

  “So I said he can have it his way.”

  “So you won’t go to Paris?”

  “I am going to Paris. But I am never going back to Niigata.”

  “Does your father mean what he said?”

  “That was a threat aimed at my mother, not me. ‘If you want to be looked after by your own daughter in your old age, you make her stay.’ In fact, he left shortly after to go and play pachinko. My mother broke down in gales of tears, just as he knew she would. She kept asking how I could be so ungrateful. I am thinking: What century is this? You know, there are mountain villages in Niigata that import Filipina wives in wholesale groups, because as soon as the local girls come of age they are on board the fastest shinkansen out of there. The men wonder why.”

  “So you won. You can go to Paris.”

  “In disgrace, but I am going.”

  I light a JPS and say what I am thinking. “You are the toughest person I know, Ai.” She shakes her head, unconvinced. “The gap between how other people see you and how you see yourself is . . . a mystery, for me. I think you are tough. I think I am as tough as your shake—which is nine parts pig lard, incidentally. I desperately want my parents to be proud of me. Real strength is not needing the approval of other people all the time.” On a Roman balcony one slanting evening a girl puts sunflowers in a terra-cotta jar. She sees the cameraman, scowls, pouts, flicks her hair, and vanishes. Ai dangles her tea bag in and out of the hot water. “I honestly think they would have been happier if I had done a two-year course in applied cosmetics at a women’s college, married the family dentist’s son, and spawned a hive of babies. Music. You eat it, but it eats you, too.” I swallow hash-brown-and-fries cud. “Cheer up. Compared to the Miyakes, your family are the Von Trapps in The Sound of Music.” Ai spins her tea bag. “Von Tropps.”

  A little girl with gaps in her teeth comes up to our table and looks at Ai through enormous glasses. “Where do babies come from before they get into mommies’ tummies?”

  “You know what a stork is? The big white birds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Storks bring the babies to the mommies.”

  The kid looks dubious. “So where do the storks get the babies, then?”

  “Paris,” I tell her, which forces a smile out of Ai.

  “Where’s Paris?”

  “There.” I point at the video screen. The girl’s father appears at the top of the stairs carrying a tray of bright food and a baby mounted in a back harness, and calls his daughter over with an apologetic nod at us. He must be a fine father. Ai looks at me in a strange way. I see her face as a very old woman, and also as a very little girl. Slow seconds come and go. I have never looked at anyone this long, this close up, in silence, since my who-blinks-last-wins games with Anju. If this were a movie and not McDonald’s we would kiss. I think. Maybe this is more intimate than kissing. Loyalty, grief, good news, bad days. “Okay,” I finally say, and Ai does not say “okay what?” She rubs her thumbnail over a McTeriyakiburger scratch card. “Look. I won a baby robot turkey lunch box. Must be a good omen. Will you let me buy you a new baseball cap?”

  “This one was a present from Anju,” I reply before I change my mind.

  Ai frowns. “Who?”

  “My twin sister.”

  Ai’s frown deepens. “You said you were an only child.”

  No going back now. “I want to untell the only lie I told you last week. I have a whole load of other stuff to tell you too: my grandfather contacted me—thanks to the personal ad you suggested—and my stepmother and half-sister met me. More of an ambush than a meeting, really. I also figured that trying to find someone who obviously doesn’t want to meet me, even if he is my father, will only make me miserable, so I quit . . . what is it?” Ai is frying with exasperation. “That is so you of you, Miyake!” I try to understand. “What is?” Ai knocks on her forehead with her knuckles. “Okay, okay. Start with your twin sister. Then do the stepmother. Go.”

  I float back to Shooting Star around noon buoyant as a light particle. Ai has classes for the rest of today, but she is coming around to my capsule tomorrow—Wednesday; I have to stop to remember which day I am on. I am thinking about Ai about ninety times an hour. It was funny when we said goodbye at Shinjuku—we got hopelessly lost because I was following her while she was following me. The walk from Kita Senju Station is pleasant today—shrubs, autumn trees, kids in strollers— today they defeat the ugliness of Tokyo. “Good morning, Eiji-kun,” says Machiko pleasantly, “you reek of cheese.” She is watching a Takeshi Kitano movie set in Okinawa. I ask her if it is worth watching. “He can be a good directo
r, but he gives himself the coolest roles. Only good actors dare take on uncool roles.” Machiko shows me her vacation photos and gives me a picture I like of an orange orchard vanishing up a rain-hazed hillside. We talk about Nero’s for a while. Machiko has this gift of making me feel I am interesting—and I nearly tell her about Ai but I am afraid I would sound slushy, and besides, there still is not much to tell, so I climb up to my capsule.

  “Eiji-kun! I forgot to give you this. The mailman brought it this morning.” I turn around, and go back down for the package—one of those padded envelopes, the smallest size they come in. The addressee is Mr. Fujin Yoda—who?—living in Hakodate up in Hokkaido. An INCORRECTLY ADDRESSED message has been stamped on the front. On the back is my name and address, printed under SENDER on a stick-on label. “Anything wrong?” asks Machiko.

  I keep my wits about me and say, “Nothing.” Something is wrong, however—I didn’t mail it. Up in my capsule a shredded tea towel temporarily puts the mysterious package out of my mind—Cat, purely out of spite, because she slept alone last night. I hope she stops shredding before she starts on my shirts. I shower, tidy up the scraps of clawed cloth, and thrash out a Howlin’ Wolf version of “All You Need Is Love” on my guitar. I should be dropping with tiredness, but I am immune to sleep. Then I remember the package. I must be more tired than I think. I slit the package open. Inside is a computer disk wrapped in a letter. I twist some ice from the ice tray into a glass and fill it with water. I love the sound the cubes make as fissures shoot through.

  Tokyo, October 1

  The name I went by was Kozue Yamaya. I was a freelance investigator. However unlikely or brutal this account of the last nine years of my life appears, I ask you to read it until the end. In your hands is my final testament. I shall ask you to be my legal executor.

  Endings are simple, but every beginning is made by the beginning before. The one I shall choose is a night in the rainy season nine years ago. In those days my name was Makino Matani. She was a housewife with a two-year-old son, and married to the owner of a financial services company. She was a recent graduate in business studies from a respectable women’s college in Kobe. Every New Year she exchanged greetings cards with her ex-classmates who were married to dentists, judges, and civil servants. An ordinary life. The rainy season came. I remember those last moments perfectly—my son was playing with a plastic train set, and I was cleaning the rainy-season mold in the shower cubicle. I could hear the television reporting flash floods and landslides.

  The doorbell rang. I answered it, and three men barged in the door and snapped the chain my husband had trained me to use. They demanded to know where my husband was hiding. I demanded to know who they were. One slapped me hard enough to dislodge a tooth. “Your husband’s case officers,” he snarled, “and we ask the questions.” He and another searched the house while the third watched me try to reassure my screaming son. He threatened to maim my son if I didn’t tell him where my husband was. I called my husband at work and discovered he had phoned in sick that morning. I called my husband’s cell phone and discovered the number had been disconnected. I called his pager—dead. I was nearly hysterical by now—the thug poured me a shot of my husband’s whiskey, but I couldn’t swallow it. My son watched with big scared eyes. The two other thugs returned with a box of my husband’s personal effects and all of my jewelry. Then the bad news really began. I learned that my husband had run up debts of over fifty million yen with a yakuza-backed credit organization. Our life insurance policy had been doctored to name this organization as sole beneficiary in the event of his suicide. The house and contents were their property if my husband defaulted on repayments. “And that,” said the most violent of the three, “includes you.” My son was taken into the next room. I was told I was now responsible for my husband’s debts. I was then beaten and raped. Photographs were taken “to guarantee my obedience.” I had to endure this torment in silence, for the sake of my son. If I failed to obey their orders, the photographs would be sent to every name in my address book.

  A month later I was living in a single windowless room in a buraku area of Osaka. I was indentured to a brothel, and I was not allowed to leave the building or have any contact with the outside world, beyond sex with my customers. You may doubt that sexual enslavement is practiced in twenty-first-century Japan. Your ignorance is enviable, but your disbelief is precisely why such enslavement can prosper unchecked. It happens; it happened to me. I myself would have doubted “respectable” women could be forced into the sex industry, but the owners are masters of control. I was dispossessed of every item from my old life that could have reminded me who I was—except my son. I was allowed to keep my son—this prevented me from escaping by suicide. My customers not only knew about my imprisonment, they derived pleasure from it, and would have been implicated in the crime had it become public. The final wall between me and the real world was perhaps the strongest: a phenomenon psychologists label “hostage syndrome”—the conviction that my fate was deserved and that no “crime” was being perpetrated. After all, I was a prostitute. What right did I have to bring shame to my old friends or even to my mother by appealing for help? Better that they carry on believing I had disappeared overseas with my bankrupt husband. Six other women, three with babies younger than my son, shared my floor. The man who raped me was our pimp—it was him we had to beg for food, medicine, even diapers for our children. He also supplied narcotics, in careful quantities. He administered them personally to ensure we couldn’t overdose. False names were given to us, and we adopted them to hide behind. In time our old lives became detached from what we had become. All of us dreamed of killing our owner at some vague point in the future after our escape, but the more we dreamed, the weaker our will to shape our own reality became. We were required to take care of one another’s children while their mothers were working. The pimp told us that after we had worked off the amounts the defaulting members of our families had embezzled we would be free to go, so the harder we worked to please our customers, the quicker we would be out of there. In autumn, a girl who had been working in the brothel for two years was released. So we thought.

  My “release” came sooner, because over the following New Year my resilience exhausted itself and I suffered a nervous breakdown. The customers complained to the pimp that I was no longer trying. The pimp talked to me for a while. He could be gentle when he chose. It was one of his weapons. He said he had talked to my creditors and that I would be transferred with my son to another branch that night. We drank gin and tonic to celebrate.

  I awoke wrapped in a blanket in a black, airless place. My head was groggy and drugged. My son was not with me. I was still in my brothel nightshirt. For a terrible moment I thought I had been buried alive, but groping around, I realized I was in the trunk of a stationary car. I found a jack, and finally forced an exit. I was in a garage. I saw the pimp’s reflection in the side mirror and froze. He was asleep. Then I saw his nose was missing. Someone had put a gun to his nostrils and pulled the trigger. There was no sign of my son. I ran—but before I had got out of the garage my senses began to return. I was lost, penniless, believed to have vanished by anyone who remembered me. My former owners would jump to the conclusion that I had been taken as a spoil of war. I hesitated—but I ran back, groped inside the pimp’s jacket for his wallet. I found a travel bag strapped around his groin. The bag contained a pile of ten-thousand-yen notes inches thick. I had never seen so much money. When I found my way out of the garage I found myself in the vast Osaka central hospital, the only place in the city where a woman with a sick-as-death complexion in nightclothes could blend into the background.

  I do not have time to tell you much about the years that followed. I lived for a year in women’s refuges, cheap hotels. My bank accounts were in false names. The meaning of my life had become the search for my son. My ex-husband was now a ghost I never thought of. I hired a private detective to investigate the yakuza branch that had imprisoned me. The investigator r
eturned my advance one week later—he was warned away. Out of sympathy and guilt, he ended up hiring me as a secretary-accountant. This was a smart business decision, because three quarters of his customers were women wanting their husbands tailed to fatten divorce settlements. They preferred discussing the sordid details with another woman. As with gynecology, so for marital infidelity. They recommended our agency to their friends, and business thrived. I began accompanying my boss on fieldwork. Women are virtually invisible, even to the most paranoid of men. (Furthermore, I discovered that the brothel organization had deleted every computer reference to me and my son. I enjoy the privileges of being a nonexistent woman.) My life in the brothel had hardened as well as scarred me. After three years my boss offered me a partnership, and when his cancer finally killed him I took over the business. All this time, I was hunting for the roots of the organization that had killed Makino Matani and her son, and created Kozue Yamaya. It is nameless and many-headed. It has no name. Its membership is in excess of six thousand. I swung introductions to its leaders, even invitations to the weddings of their children. I entered its employ as a freelance researcher. My status as a semi-insider gave me greater access to its secrets, and deflected suspicion.

  My son was murdered in order to sell his organs to extremely rich, desperate parents of the elite in Japan. The home market is most lucrative, because the parents will pay for pure, home-grown stock, but the export market to Eastern Asia, North America, and Russia is also significant. This fate is shared by the children and eventually the women enslaved in the brothels. The disk I have enclosed in this package contains the names, digital images, and personal histories of the men who head this organization; the law enforcers who protect them; the surgeons who carry out the work; the politicians who blanket the operation; the businessmen who launder the money; the men and customs officers who freeze and smuggle the organs.