Lost Girls and Love Hotels (5 page)

T
he sushi shop is down a lantern-lined alleyway, tucked away from the main street. An oasis in a desert of neon. I feel like a trespasser going through the curtained entrance. The
sushiya-san
, a middle-aged man with Popeye forearms, jumps a little when he sees me, jumps a little more when he sees Kazu. They exchange a trill of words, do the requisite deep-bowing contest, and the man disappears into the back.

The room is sleek and minimal—pale wood and paper screens—everything highlighting the absence of decoration. We are the only customers. I feel like I clash with the room, that I’m at once overdressed and underdressed, shabby, awkward. Foreign. I turn to Kazu. “You know, I’ve lived in Japan for three months and I’ve never been to a love hotel.” A lie, but a convenient one.

He calls out to the
sushiya-san
. Turns to me. “Takeout
ne
?”

Behind the wide, five-pronged intersection in Shibuya, steps away from the hoards of shopping teenagers and somnolent commuters, lies Love Hotel Hill, where exploitation and promiscuity are cute and charming. The hotels, with their Disneyesque exteriors, their names like Belle Chateau and Hotel Shindarella, advertise the rates on backlit signs all along the street—the three-hour screw and a shower is euphemized as a “rest,” while the all-night fuckfest is a “stay.” These are places where discretion is assured by the absence of human staff, where salarymen take their teenage girlfriends, housewives meet their English teachers for extra instruction, where teenage couples lose their virginity in elaborately themed rooms. Kazu seems to have a favorite hotel. He goes straight for it.

We choose our room from a machine displaying photos. Everything is automatic in these places. No front desk. No prying eyes of other humans. Just an empty lobby and a machine. No embarrassing credit card charges. Cash only, and only after the fact, through a vacuum chute in the room. Trust and deceit. Passion and mechanical efficiency. The wonderful yin and yang of the love hotel.

Kazu and I scan the photos of the rooms. There are around three dozen of them. Most look just like regular hotel rooms, except for the row of theme rooms on the fourth floor.

“Do you like swimming?” Kazu asks. “This room has a small pool.”

“I like fucking.”

“You are very honestly speaking girl.”

“I like the Outer Space Room,” I say, pointing to the photo of the space pod bed. I’m an alien. I’d like to feel weightless.

“Ii na!
Good choice.” He pushes a button, and a trail of tiny lights on the floor lead us to our room, to our little pod, unlocked and waiting for us.

Kazu insists on taking a bath before we get down to business.

“I’m sorry,” he says, fanning himself with his hands. “I’m dirty.”

He runs the bath and fusses over me, pointing out the features of the room. The television, the vending machine offering beer, green tea, and novelty condoms.

“Are you hungry?” he asks. “We can order food. Japanese noodle? Pizza? Please tell me.” I like the way he says pizza—
peeza
.

“We have sushi, Kazu.”

While he bathes, I get naked and watch the news. The dead girl’s face appears behind the stiff, somber newscaster who trills a flurry of strange words, hardly moving his lips. The screen flickers, making it seem as if the dead girl is winking at me, her queer grin stretching back into a conspiratorial smile.

I fiddle with the music. There are one hundred and
twenty-two channels. I scan through the Japanese pop, hip-hop, rock, Euro-beat, Indian sitar, Swiss yodeling, finally settling on some U2 covers sung in Mandarin.

Kazu appears, accompanied by a whoosh of steam. The dead girl is still there—the news clip seems to go on forever—mocking us. Kazu goes to the TV and bangs at two or three buttons until the screen goes black. He stands there in his short white bathrobe and slippers.

He turns and looks at me, sitting cross-legged on the bed. Naked. Suddenly I feel undressed. Feel the atmosphere against my skin.

His face changes suddenly, from shyness through reticence to something almost cold. He smiles. I’m hot. I lie back on the bed, cross my legs, stretch my arms over my head to the silver padded headboard.

“Maybe I’m a bad man,
ne
? How do you know?” He crawls onto the bed, over me, and pushes my legs apart with his knee. His hand goes to my neck, touching me lightly, surveying me. “How do you know?”

For a moment, I imagine that the dead girl spent her last “rest” in a room like this. No, I tell myself. The body. How would they get the body out? I think of the elevator. Kazu’s lips are on my chin, tracing my jawline. The elevators don’t stop at other floors. They are always yours alone. His robe is open and he’s on me. The best way to warm up a person with hypothermia is skin-against-skin contact. I know this. From somewhere. There must be video cameras. In the halls. The empty halls. In the lobby. The unpeopled lobby. If there weren’t cameras, it would be dangerous. Privacy is
an illusion—it’s a door that looks like a part of a wall, behind which a middle-aged man sits and watches monitors, collects thousand-yen notes that the customers send down the vacuum chutes to pay. Privacy is always better as an idea than a reality—if we weren’t being watched, excitement would ebb, panic would slide in. If we weren’t being watched, what good would life be?

I put my hand on Kazu’s neck, nestle my fingers into the depression at the base of his skull, pull him closer, and raise my hips against his. The bed is like an egg, split in two, the top suspended from the ceiling and lined with silvery mirrors that give distorted, wavy reflections. Kazu pins my arms back. Fear is in the room, like white noise.

Be careful
, my inner voice says quietly.

Immortality is not an option
, I answer back.

“It’s your eyes,” I tell Kazu. There is something almost feminine about them. I take the kind saucers of black-brown as a sign. This one’s not going to hurt me. Not this one. Not Kazu. I keep looking at his eyes—trying to reduce the lingering fear to nothing. We’re lying under the sheets, legs knotted together. I glow white next to him.

“Nani?”

“I know you’re not bad from your eyes.”

“Ehhh? Just black eyes. Japanese eyes. No meaning.”

“Can you hand me my smokes?”

“Bad for health,” he says, making a clucking sound with his tongue. “
Anata deshiou
—you have strange eyes.”

“Round ones. Come on. They’re on the bedside table. Hand me my lighter too.”

He reaches over, plucks a Marlboro from the pack, puts it in my mouth, and flicks the lighter. Smoke curls up, hovers blue against the mirrored egg. I look down at my body. Skinny and white. Somewhere between boyish and pretty. I do not look after my pubic hair. I’ve always worn my puffy untrimmed bush with an absurd sense of pride, a big fuck-you to sexual mores and aesthetic salons.

Kazu takes the cigarette out of my hand and crushes it in the ashtray. “Ninety minutes. Sleeping time.”

“I should go,” I say. I’ve had sex with innumerable guys, but I’ve never slept with one. The intimacy of it seems inappropriate. Like giving a waiter a good-bye hug.

“You are tired,” Kazu says. He brushes my bangs off my forehead. “Please.”

A little argument rages in my head. My head feels heavy on the pillow. Kazu assumes the fetal position. My little voice says:
Do not spoon him. Leave now.
I turn to crawl out of the bed, but stop. Find a compromise. I lie on my side, my back against his like a mirror. The warmth of it. Sleep yanking at me. My little voice chiding me drowsily.

When I wake up, Kazu is getting dressed.

“Time,” he says. His movements are sharp and precise. “Better to leave by separate ways.”

“Okay.” I’m searching for something to say, but my vocabulary has been reduced to pathetic clichés.
Will you call me? Can I see you again? Is everything okay?
I imagine that I’m a doll—the kind who chirps recorded phrases when you pull the cord on her back. I’m the vulnerable
postcoital girl doll. Pull my string.

Kazu picks up his gold rings and slips them on his fingers one by one, grabs his mobile phone. “Your number. Please teach me,” he says.

I tell him the number. He kisses me softly, on my forehead, and leaves. As he walks out, his gait changes. I can’t decide whether he loosens or stiffens, but the gentleness retreats.

I breathe a little. Lie back and look at myself in the mirror, my hair splayed out like a halo on the pillow, my body compartmentalized by the various mirrors. I feel like I must be looking at someone else—that the breast here, knee there, square of white skin, outline of ribs, the foot that looks lifeless and rubbery—these parts can’t be me, can’t be put together into the somebody that I was this morning.

W
hen I get to the bar, Ines is already there, already half-cut, flirting with Jiro, who looks scared like a cornered animal. I haven’t showered, and the heat of the room enlivens my just-been-fucked musk. I take a deep inhale. Ines gives me an up-and-down look as I enter. “You’ve been deflowered.”

“Once more for old times,” I say with a toss of my hair. There’s an empty glass waiting for me. I fill it from the big bottle of Kirin, and marvel at the beauty of Sunday evening drinks. They are the same—the feeling is the same—in every country I’ve drunk in. Sunday evenings are a time when we savor each moment, turn our backs defiantly to the white crest of Monday’s looming tsunami. “I don’t think I was ever truly flowered. How could you tell?”

“Your makeup looks like shit. Who was it?”

“Kazu. Your shady tattooed boy.” I know that Ines
won’t care. She is scrupulous when it comes to nonattachment. A bedroom Buddhist. For her, desire—at least the complicated emotional kind—is the root of all suffering.

“Kazu?”

“You know.”

“Is he the bald gangster or the gangster with the tight perm?”

“The bald one.”

The memory clicks in. She smiles. Nods. “Oh him. He’s lovely. It’s not always true what they say about Japanese men, now is it?”

“An exception to every rule, I suppose.” I try to look nonchalant. Hide my giddy smile behind the glass of beer.

“Fucking hell. You’re not falling for him.”

“Come on.”

“Keep your cynicism intact, sweetie.”

The first few gulps of beer are working on me. A low-grade euphoria mixed with who-gives-a-shit. “I like to stay on the low end of emotional experience,” I say. “That way rock bottom is close to home.”

The door opens, and a gust of wind sends bar menus fluttering in the air. Adam sneaks up behind Ines and cups her tits. She doesn’t move. Takes a gulp of beer. “I’m giving you a nanosecond.”

Adam’s arms go into the air in mock surrender. Adam is wearing the same Chelsea football jersey he always wears. He smells like a wet ashtray and cologne. He only drinks beer and smokes dope, but he looks like a heroin addict. Grayish skin and sunken cheeks. Sad little bald patch sneak
ing up on him from the back. Chronically broke. Always avoiding the police. Lecherous as hell. He’s the only Western male in Tokyo that I’ll hang out with, the kind of guy whose luck is far overdue to run out. He, Ines, and I are like three impending head-on collisions running parallel.

“You telling me you’re out of my league is it?”

“Out of your species, Adam.” Ines pats the empty bar stool next to hers. “But do sit down and buy us a drink.”

“Well ladies, it’s your lucky day. Got me a job.” Adam plunks down on the stool and smacks his hands on the bar. “Jiro my man. Set me up.”

Jiro cocks his head to one side. Slowly polishes a wine glass.

“Gin and tonic IV for me and a bottle a’ piss for my lady friends. Chop-chop!”

Jiro stops polishing the glass and stares at Adam.

Ines sighs.
“Jinu toniku o hitotsu to biru ippon.”
She turns to Adam. “How long have you been in Tokyo, and you can’t order a fucking drink in Japanese?”

“I know the language of love,” he coos, flashing his gnarled yellow teeth at us. He raises his chin to me. “Marge. All right?”

Jiro puts the drinks down and tops off our beer. “The language of love is rarely understood by bartenders,” I say and raise my glass to Adam. “Who the hell would hire you anyway?” Adam is of dubious visa status in Japan. He cobbles together a living by making runs to Thailand, smuggling in hash and fake designer shit. After three or four
entry stamps to Japan, when the Japanese immigration officers start to cop on to him, he throws his passport in a washing machine in Bangkok, takes the soggy mess to the English Embassy, and has it replaced with a brand-new one.

“Watch the language. You’re speaking to a man of the cloth now,” Adam says, yellowy fingers pressed together in prayer.

“Cheese cloth,” says Ines.

“That’s right. I’m a minister at New Otani Wedding chapel. Six services every Sunday. Five grand an
I-do
.”

Japanese girls love the spectacle of the Western wedding. The meringue-like dresses, the wedding march, the quaint little chapel, the fake minister. Any balding white-skinned male will do.

“Inherited the job from a mate of mine—he got deported for drunk and disorderly. Called me from the airport this morning and told me ‘Get ye to the altar.’ Give me a week and I’ll be shagging bridesmaids left, right, and center. I love this bloody country.”

Ines reaches over, takes the giant plastic toy mallet that’s hanging on the wall, and plonks Adam over the head with it. Her way of saying “congratulations.” Jiro screws up his face to stifle a laugh. Then, like a parent’s bellowing voice disrupting a coven of noisy children, a small earthquake shakes the room, knocking the framed photo of John Lennon to the floor. For a moment, the four of us are silent. Eyes dart to eyes. Waiting. The moment is framed. The earth stops moving. Adam rubs his head and mumbles, “
Bloody hell
.”

Jiro does a little hop and shifts from his frozen pose, and, like a toy whose batteries have been replaced, begins to skuttle around, righting overturned bottles, picking up the menus fanned across the floor. He ticks his tongue as if to scold Mother Nature, grabs his broom, and cleans up John Lennon. His composure is betrayed only by a small blot of sweat, visible when he lifts his arm to straighten Ringo.

Ines gazes into her cleavage as if she’s dropped something down there. “If you think of them like amusement park rides, they’re almost fun.”

“Tits?” I ask. I’m still confused. I still don’t trust the walls and ceiling to stay where they are. Jiro has the bar back to normal at least—grubby but neat.

“Earthquakes. I actually quite like them now.” She sighs, rests her elbows on the bar, her chin on the bridge of her hands, and winks at Jiro. “And tits too, I suppose.”

“Big one coming
ne
?” Jiro says.

Ines lights two smokes and hands Jiro one. “Promises, promises.”

“Fucking nutters we are—staying here.” Adam’s still rubbing his head. I’ve been hit by the plastic mallet a dozen times. It doesn’t hurt. “Earthquakes. Typhoons. Fucking squat toilets.”

I give Adam a little pout. “You just said you love Japan.”

“Hey you should be agreeing with me, you two. Word is white girls are disappearing.” He nods his head slowly. Meaningfully.

“White
girl
Adam. Just one.” I’m on that drunk edge.
I’ll either get belligerent or lovey-dovey. It’ll happen soon.

“White slavery if you ask me. Yakuza.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Belligerent it is.

“Then there’s that nutter going around on a shopping bike, braining
gaijin
birds with a baseball bat.”

I sigh. Adam is ruining my buzz. “You’re making that up,” I say.

Adam holds his palm up. “Swear it’s the truth. Nearly killed an Aussie girl in Yoyogi Park.”

Ines claps her hands. “What we need right now is a little smokey-smoke. Adam? Will you indulge us?”

“Bloody hell. Do you know how hard it is to get this stuff?”

“Of course we do, darling. Shall we retire to the lounge?” Ines already has Adam off his stool and halfway out the door, her hands on his back, pushing him along.

Adam turns back. “Brought it back from Bangkok.” Raises his eyebrows and lowers his voice. “
Internally
.”

“Oh God,” I say, pulling the sliding glass door shut. “Did you have to mention that?”

“Does it matter?”

The street is wet from a shower we missed. The slick black of the road reflecting the neon. Sidewalks buzzing with people who have somewhere to go. People with neat little lives. Paper shopping bags sheathed in plastic by attentive shop girls swing from every hand. A few moments ago, the underpinnings of the world were shifting, calling us down. I see two girls on mobile phones looking around for
one another. Rising on their tippy-toes, chins high. Their eyes meet and they scurry toward each other. For a few moments, they stand face to face, fingers interlaced, still communicating through their tiny silver cells.

“No,” I say. Doesn’t matter.

We go around the building to a garbage-strewn alleyway and crouch by the wall. I look up at the building, which is tiled dusty-rose—eight stories tall, dotted with curtained windows, a gulag of one-room clubs with cute names. A scrawny cat with no tail slinks by, eyeing us. Adam pulls a chunk of hash from his pocket and holds the lighter to it.

“Do you ever feel like you’re in a cartoon? In Japan I mean?” I’m having a
moment
.

“Fucking hell. We haven’t even smoked yet.” He returns to his work, arranging the little black beads on the rolling paper. “Cartoon! What the—”

“All the time,” Ines answers. “What will I draw for myself tomorrow. Hmmm. Maybe an Israeli with rippling abs and a bad attitude.”

“Maybe it’s already drawn. The next frame. Maybe we’re already drawn.”

Adam puts the joint in his mouth and talks around it. “Alright Marge, I’m going to have to ask you to shut your gob. Freakin’ me out already.”

Somewhere water is dripping like a metronome. We smoke the joint. Our chests puff up. We speak in squeaky voices, trying to keep the smoke in. Above us, the sky is squeezing out the last remnants of day, navy blue turning black and blacker second by second. My body becomes a
network of subtle sensations, tingling and buzzing. I cut and paste the feelings from part to part, enjoying the control. Paranoia is lurking there. I keep it back by staring at Adam’s nose. Adam stares at Ines’s chest. Ines stares at her shoes.

“Ever heard that Japanese fairy tale about the fisherman and the turtle?” Ines asks. A light rain starts to fall, and we line up—backs pressed against the wall—sheltered under a small overhang.

“So this young fisherman saves a turtle who’s stuck in the mud and the turtle takes him under the sea to this fantastic castle. Pure A-list fish party. Fishy drugs and fishy martinis—”

“Mermaids?” Adam asks.

“Sure. Mermaids. Mermen. Everything. Naive little fisherboy thinks he’s died and gone to heaven. He parties hard, like all night, all the next day. Mr. Turtle is all ‘Stay as long as you want. Enjoy! Enjoy!’ So he does, you know. He hides out. Who wants to gut fish when you can fuck an octopus? So he’s looking for the loo one night and he comes upon this room where he can see his old life, his village and his family. And yeah, of-fucking-course he gets nostalgic and pathetic and tells Mr. Turtle, ‘I gotta go.’

“And being the consummate host, Turtle-san gives the fisherboy a gift. A gold box that he tells him never to open.
Zenzen akimasu
. Never.

“Fisherboy says his good-byes, goes to the surface, and starts walking to his village. Everything’s as dull as ever. And he’s walking and walking and thinking
Hmmm, where’s my house?
”

Adam has a little coughing fit, waves his hand around a bit. “Right, right—the turtle like slaughtered his family and torched his house?”

Ines slaps Adam’s head. “Anyway, fisher-dork sits down under a big tree. He’s used to floating around. His feet are sore, you know? He takes out the box and he can’t resist—so he opens it. But there’s nothing in it but a mirror. Takes him a minute to figure out it’s him he’s looking at—he’s an old man, ancient, almost dead.”

I stare at a tangled pile of abandoned bicycles. Wordless for a minute or so. The dripping is coming from both sides now, hollow and resonant. The alley feels like a cave.

Ines stands up, smoothes her hair down. “We should go dancing.”

“I’m gonna go home,” I say. I pray that I won’t have to put up a fight. That I’ll be allowed to find sleep.

Ines is stoned. Her accent—the nonspecific European snootiness of it—has softened. She almost sounds Canadian. “Don’t walk,” she says, pushing a ten-thousand yen note in my hand. “Anyway, I know you will. Freak. Who walks when there are cabs?”

I give Adam a peck on the cheek. He looks little brotherly with his wide red eyes, his hood pulled over his head, scraps of hair peeking out. He holds his hand against his cheek where I’ve kissed it and waves as I go.

After a few blocks, Aoyama Street is strangely deserted. It’s like walking in an elaborate movie set. Tokyo nobody. Postapocalyptic in a calming sort of way. Pedestrian walkways crisscross above me, like shadowy arms. The street-
lights go through the motions. A convenience store glows like something alive amid the concrete.

Under the cover of night, in the absence of people, Aoyama Street seems as perfectly composed as a contemplation garden. My private garden of stone, glass, and water. Mine alone to wander through. The rain-slicked streets are mine. The darkened buildings, like sleeping giants; the vacuum of silence left after the occasional car swooshes by. Mine.

I wonder what Kazu is doing.

The rain picks up. Urging me home. I tilt my head back, let it drop, heavy like a bowling ball. The raindrops look like mercury, appearing out of the inky screen, hitting my face.

I want to reach up into the weird quiet of the night, tear a strip off the black sky and wrap it around me.

Behind me, like a counterpoint to the pitter-patter of the rain, I hear the squeak of a bicycle. My ears tune into it—the whir of the wheels, water spitting up from the back tire. The slick lubricant of adrenaline guiding me, I turn abruptly at the corner, cross on the red light.

If you scream on a deserted Tokyo street, on a Sunday, in English, do you really make a sound?

The bicycle is behind me. Beside me. There’s a shout—
Ki o tsukete!
—a pause for mental translation. Then relief. It’s a cop.

Ki o tsukete
.

Be careful.

Or literally: Take care of your feelings.

The cop smiles as he passes. Pedals away until I can no longer see his figure—just the neon stripe on the back of his jacket—until the street ahead swallows the neon stripe and I’m alone again. Panic coiled in my belly next to relief.