“Domo arigato,” said Kit.
The truant brushed away his thanks. “Tourist?”
“Probably more than I realised…”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing,” said Kit. He smiled at the boy. “Your English is very good…”
The boy nodded. In the end, because Kit was unable to face the ruins of Pirate Mary’s, the boy found him a taxi. None of this was put into words. Instead, the boy looked at Kit’s suitcase, looked at the crowds streaming around them, and smiled sympathetically. Putting up an arm, he pulled an empty taxi out of the afternoon traffic as if performing magic and stepped back so the automatic doors could open.
“Green for occupied, red for empty,” said the boy. “Don’t tip.”
Nodding to show he understood, Kit watched the boy wave brightly as the taxi pulled away. It felt really shitty to check he still had a wallet and his watch but Kit checked anyway.
The taxi dropped him outside the Shinjuku branch of Mitsukoshi, next to a bank of ATM machines and a street down from Ryuchi’s Burger Bar. There was a two-star hotel above the bar, run by Ryuchi’s mother and catering mainly to sex tourists too nervous to base themselves in the heart of Kabukicho. Mrs. Keita knew all the local girls and kept an eye on their comings and goings, having once been one herself. On occasion, she would even call their pimps if customers got ugly or things looked like they were getting out of hand.
“Konban wa,” Kit said, reaching the top of the stairs.
Mrs. Keita glanced up from her paper and Kit caught the moment she recognised him. Very carefully, Mrs. Keita folded her copy of the Asahi Evening News, although she’d quite obviously finished it, right down to doodling little squares across the sports section at the back.
“Can I help you?”
It wasn’t the reply Kit had been expecting.
“It’s Kit Nouveau,” he said. “Ryuchi’s friend.”
The woman nodded.
“I need a room,” said Kit, “for a week, maybe more. Until…” He expected her to say something about Pirate Mary’s. At the very least to mention Yoshi, but the woman remained silent.
“A room,” repeated Kit.
“Very difficult,” she said, consulting her ledger. “Unfortunately we’re fully booked.” She made a pretence of studying the ledger to make sure, shifting her bulk onto her elbows as she pored over its pages. “Sadly,” she said, “they’re all taken. You could try…”
She recommended a love hotel at the edge of the Golden Gai shopping mall, once site of Kabukicho’s most notorious maze of nomiya bars, jazz clubs, and pigeons permanently drunk on salaryman vomit. The Moonlight Venus got by on location alone, being within spitting distance of two soaplands, a strip club, and a branch of Bottomless Kup. It was sleazy even by Piss Alley standards.
Opening his wallet, Kit extracted 50,000 yen. “Surely you must have one room?”
Mrs. Keita regarded the money wistfully, something very close to regret crossing her wide face. “Unfortunately not,” she said. It seemed unlikely, given Mrs. Keita’s hotel had never been booked out in its long and insalubrious life. This was the place that charged a group of Germans floor space in the boiler room when a typhoon had ripped away the hotel’s roof and made their original room unusable.
“Okay,” Kit said. “No problem.”
Hair bleached and a new stud through his lip, Ryuchi leaned against a wall by the counter, a position undoubtedly chosen so he could watch a young Filipina flash fry a tuna burger. Having drenched the nugget of yellow fin with mango relish, she sprinkled chopped coriander over the top.
“One to go,” she said.
So low slung were the girl’s jeans that it looked only a matter of time before gravity eventually won. Mind you, Kit still reckoned Ryuchi could have done more than glance across at him and then look back.
“Hi,” said Kit. “How’s it going?”
Ryuchi had spent two summers in London in the late nineties, which had frozen his personal style and command of English into something resembling a manga interpretation of post-rock lite.
“Fine,” Ryuchi replied.
“You got a moment?” said Kit, wanting to ask what he’d done to offend Ryuchi’s mother, a woman who made a living out of being almost entirely unshockable. “I could buy you a beer.”
“I’m kinda busy…” Ryuchi shrugged. “You know, work to do.”
There was one customer in the café, a foreigner in a dark suit scrawling something into a black notebook with a silver pen. He’d finished his tuna burger in a couple of bites and was now trying to wipe mango relish from his book’s cover.
“Supplies,” said Ryuchi, noting Kit’s glance. “I’ve got to fetch the supplies.”
“Sure,” Kit said. “Maybe see you later.”
“Yeah.” Ryuchi’s wave of the hand was casual, the tightness around his eyes anything but…“Good luck.”
The transvestite behind the counter at Moonlight Venus named a price for a room that was outrageous, halving it when Kit turned away, and halving it again when he reached the door.
“We don’t get much call for all-nighters,” s/he said, adjusting a flowered kimono.
Kit kept his comments to himself and went to check a cluster of back-lit photographs on the wall. There were twenty-five photographs, each showing a different room. The ones lit were free. He could have a room draped in black satin, red velvet, silver rubber, or ivory coloured faux fur. Two of the rooms were old school/high concept, one mirrored on all four walls, its ceiling and floor, the other done up like a stage set from Casablanca, complete with miniature grand piano.
The final room on offer was the one Kit chose. It was pink, had a school desk, and came with a free pair of fluffy handcuffs. Other than that, it looked relatively normal.
Barely large enough to qualify as a real room, the box-like space Kit rented for the night offered a double bed, a video screen, and—a nice touch—a kettle, a black lacquered tray, and two incredibly delicate tea cups. Three condoms and a pack of what claimed to be obstetrical wipes were hidden inside a Hello Kitty box next to the kettle.
The handcuffs hung from a hook above the bed. They were sealed into a plastic bag and came with a little note asking that the cuffs be used in a manner that was both thoughtful and safe. Consent is mandatory, said the note.
On the back of the door were two other notes. The first announced that Moonlight Venus had been licensed, under the Entertainment & Amusement Trades Control Law (Revised), the second reminded patrons that criminal gangs were forbidden to block book hotels.
Having unpacked and then repacked both leather cases, to see exactly what was in each, Kit tried to sleep, wrapping himself in a sheet and dimming the lights; but sleep was difficult to find, largely because the couple in the room next door were obviously new to each other and still excited.
Cardboard-thin walls left little to the imagination, from rising moans that became shouts to the slap of flesh against flesh and the laughter of release. So Kit listened for a while and let his thoughts wander, none of them being important enough to be dragged back for questioning. Technically speaking, he was fucked; how much thought did it take to work that out?
His wife was dead, not that anyone but him seemed to consider she was his wife. His bar was burned. His friends had turned into strangers. He would like someone to blame, but was afraid that if he examined that thought too hard he’d discover the someone was himself.
Couples came and went, with a peak at just after midnight and another at around four, when some of the hostess bars closed. Pretty soon the noise of people making love, having sex, and sometimes just talking to each other blurred into the background, became familiar, and finally slipped out of Kit’s mind altogether.