But Koji’s my friend, probably my only one. ‘I’d love to come. What should I bring?’
‘Nothing, just bring yourself.’ So, flowers for his mum and booze for his dad.
‘I’ll come round after work then.’
‘Okay. See you.’
‘See you.’
It was a Mal Waldron time of day. The afternoon was shutting up shop early. The owner of the greengrocers across the street took in his crates of white radishes, carrots and lotus roots. He rolled down his shutter, saw me and nodded gravely. He never smiles. Some pigeons scattered as a truck shuddered by. Every note of ‘Left Alone’ fell, a drop of lead into a deep well. Jackie McLean’s saxophone circled in the air, so sad it could barely leave the ground.
The door opened, and I smelt air rainwashed clean. Four high school girls came in, but one of them was completely, completely different. She pulsed, invisibly, like a quasar. I know that sounds stupid, but she did.
The three bubbleheads flounced up to the counter. They were pretty, I guess, but they were all clones of the same ova. Their hair was the same length, their lipstick the same colour, their bodies curving in the same way beneath their same uniform. Their leader demanded in a voice cutesy and spoilt the newest hit by the latest teen dwoob.
But I didn’t bother hearing them. I can’t describe women, not like Takeshi or Koji. But if you know Duke Pearson’s ‘After the Rain’, well, she was as beautiful and pure as that.
Standing by the window, and looking out. What was out there? She was embarrassed by her classmates. And so she should have been! She was so real, the others were cardboard cut-outs beside her. Real things had happened to her to make her how she was, and I wanted to know them, and read them, like a book. It was the strangest feeling. I just kept thinking, well, I’m not sure what I was thinking. I’m not sure if I was thinking of anything.
She was listening to the music! She was afraid she’d scare the music away if she moved.
‘Well, have you got it or haven’t you?’ One of the cut-out girls squawked. It must take a long time to train your voice to be so annoying.
Another giggled.
The leader’s pocket phone trilled and she got it out.
I was angry with them for making me look away from her.
‘This is a disc collector’s shop. There’s a toyshop in the shopping mall by the metro station that sells the kind of thing you’re looking for.’
Rich Shibuya girls are truffle-fed pooches. The girls at Mama-san’s, they have all had to learn how to survive. They have to keep their patrons, keep their looks, keep their integrity, and they get scarred. But they respect themselves, and they let it show. They respect each other. I respect them. They are real people.
But these magazine girls have nothing real about them. They have magazine expressions, speak magazine words and carry magazine fashion accessories. They’ve chosen to become this. I don’t know whether or not to blame them. Getting scarred isn’t nice. But look! As shallow, and glossy, and identical, and throwaway, as magazines.
‘You’re a bit uptight aren’t you? Been dumped by your girlfriend?’ The leader leaned on the counter and swayed, just a few inches away from my face. I imagined her using that face in bars, in cars, in love hotels.
Her friend shrieked with laughter and pulled her away before I could think of a witty retort. They flocked back towards the door. ‘Told you!’ one of them said. The third was still speaking into her pocket phone. ‘I dunno where we are. Some crappy place behind some crappy building. Where are you?’
‘You coming?’ The leader said to the one still staring into space, listening to Mal.
No, I thought with all my might, Say no, and stay with me in my space.
‘I said,’ said the leader, ‘are — you — coming?’
Was she deaf?
‘I guess so,’ she said, in a real voice. A beautiful, real voice.
Look at me, I willed. Look at me. Please. Just once, look straight at me.
As she left, she looked at me over her shoulder, my heart trampolined, and she followed the others into the street.
The cherry trees were budding. Maroon tips sprouted and swelled through the sealed bark. Pigeons ruffled and prilled. I wish I knew more about pigeons. Were they strutting about like that for mating purposes, or just because they were strutty birds? That would be useful knowledge for school syllabuses. None of this capital of Mongolia stuff. The air outside was warmer and damp. Being outside was like being in a tent. A jackhammer was pounding into concrete a few doors down. Takeshi said that yet another surf and ski shop was opening up. How many surfers and skiers are there in Tokyo?
I put on a Charlie Parker anthology, with the volume up loud to drown out the ringing of metal. Charlie Parker, molten and twisting, no stranger to cruelty. ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo’, ‘How Deep is the Ocean?’, ‘All the Things You Are’, ‘Out of Nowhere’, ‘A Night in Tunisia’.
I dressed the girl in calico, and she slipped away through a north African doorway.
Here, being as different as I am is punishable.
I was in Roppongi one time with Koji, he was on the pull and got talking to a couple of girls from Scotland. I just assumed they were English teachers at some crappy English school, but they turned out to be ‘exotic dancers’. Koji’s English is really good — he was always in the top class at school. English being a girl’s subject, I didn’t study it much, but when I found jazz I studied at home because I wanted to read the interviews with the great musicians, who are all American. Of course reading is one thing, but speaking is quite another. So Koji was mostly doing the translating. Anyway, these girls said that everyone where they come from actually tries to be different. They’ll dye their hair a colour nobody else has, buy clothes nobody else is wearing, get into music nobody else knows. Weird. Then they asked why all girls here want to look the same. Koji answered, ‘Because they are girls! Why do all cops look the same? Because they’re cops, of course.’ Then one of them asked why Japanese kids try to ape American kids? The clothes, the rap music, the skateboards, the hair. I wanted to say that it’s not America they’re aping, it’s the Japan of their parents that they’re rejecting. And since there’s no home-grown counter culture, they just take hold of the nearest one to hand, which happens to be American. But it’s not American culture exploiting us. It’s us exploiting it.
Koji got lost trying to translate the last bit.
I tried asking them about their inner places, because it seemed relevant. But I just got answers about how tiny the apartments were here, and how houses in Britain all have central heating. Then their boyfriends turned up. Two bloody great US marine gorillas. They looked down at us, unimpressed, and Koji and I decided it was time for another drink at the bar.
But yeah, it’s certainly different here. All through my junior high school days people hassled me about my parents. Finding part-time jobs was never easy, either: it was as tough as having Korean parents. People find out. It would have been easier to say they’d died in an accident, but I wasn’t going to lie for those knob-heads. Plus if you say someone’s dead, then it tempts fate to kill them off early. Gossip works telepathically in Tokyo. The city is vast, but there’s always someone who knows someone whom someone knows. Anonymity doesn’t muffle coincidence: it makes the coincidences more outlandish. That’s why I still think one of these days my father might wander into the shop.
So, from elementary school onwards I used to be in fights. I often lost, but that didn’t matter. Taro, Mama-san’s bouncer, always told me it’s better to fight and lose than not fight and suffer, because even if you fight and lose your spirit emerges intact. Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don’t respect cowards. Taro also told me how to headbutt taller adversaries, how to knee in the balls and how to dislocate a man’s hand, so that by the high school nobody much bothered me. One time a gang of junior yakuza were waiting outside school for me, because I’d given one of their kid brothers a nose-bleed. I still don’t know who tipped Mama-san off — Koji, most probably — but Mama-san sent Taro along that day to pick me up. He waited until they had formed a ring around me down an alley, and then he strolled along and scared seven shades of shit out of them. Now I think about it, Taro’s been more like a dad to me than anyone else.