Kikuchi-Lotmann
Now we see him stepping into the ring, the master of ceremonies dressed in boots and frock coat, carrying whip and megaphone, a shaman and arbiter of marvels.
Quin came and went. Big Gobi left the apartment with him once, for the first visit to Father Lamereaux, but he was so confused by the meeting Quin left him behind after that. Quin said something about the names Father Lamereaux had given him. Big Gobi nodded and kept his eyes on the television screen.
Names are fine, he muttered as Quin closed the door.
The Living Room was an underground bar many levels below the street. Quin knew the Japanese custom of referring to all female proprietors of bars as Mama.-san, so as soon as he came upon a waiter, after having walked down several hundred steps, he asked for Mama-san saying they had a mutual friend, Father Lamereaux.
The suspicious waiter directed him to a corner where there stood a man of some four hundred pounds, a former sumo wrestler with a huge mallet resting on his shoulder. The former sumo wrestler held the mallet over Quin’s head until the waiter returned.
The waiter bowed. He apologized for his family and education, his meanness of spirit, his boorish and crass behavior, his whining voice, his unsavory appearance and total incompetence. Mama would see him presently.
In the meantime Quin was invited to be her guest in the Round Room, reserved for the most honored guests. They left the wrestler in the shadows and started down an interminable spiral staircase. Occasionally the waiter stopped to ask Quin if he liked Japan, and when Quin reassured him that he did the man sucked air noisily through his teeth out of wonder or gratitude, or simply because nothing else seemed appropriate.
After descending another three or four hundred feet they entered a circular room where a dozen men or more sat at a counter facing the wall, or rather small windows recessed in the wall. Their backs were to him and no one turned when he came in. The waiter directed him to an empty stool, sucked air, and disappeared.
A face peered up at him from the bartenders’ runway, which was sunken so the heads of the bartenders would not protrude above the counter. Quin ordered a drink and saw a hand come up over the edge with a glass.
On the counter in front of him there was a console of buttons. Family portrait, said one. Small projection lamp, said another. Tattoos. Kobe cameras. Quin arbitrarily pressed the button for Nose.
The screen that Quin had mistaken for a mirror flickered. The screens were built in such a way that only the man directly in front of one could see which private movie he had selected. To everyone else the screens remained mirrors reflecting a distorted view of the small round room.
The first nose was flat and spreading. It grew in size until the screen could no longer contain it. The pores, rich dark holes, were soon big enough to put a fist in, as big as craters in a desert. The rims of the craters were cracked, deep down inside lay heaps of fertile material. The picture continued to expand until there was only one enormous pore on the screen, a volcanic crater not unlike the one to be found on top of Mt. Fuji, the sides of the pore cut by ancient landslides, the center black with dormant bacterial lava.
The frame faded and another nose appeared, life-size, narrower than the first, quivering, and undeniably sensitive. A chrysanthemum or a cherry blossom presented itself to the nose. The nose hesitated and then inhaled deeply, bringing on a multitude of tender sensations.
The third nose moved rapidly. The hairs in the nostrils flapped as a bowl of custard slipped into view. The nose slammed itself into the custard, emerged, rammed itself into the waxy cartilage of an ear.
The same nose moved down a neck, across an armpit, through the crevice made by two pendulant breasts. It nudged a woman’s erect nipples, poked the ridges of her rib cage, shook itself vigorously in her navel, pecked at the mound of her smooth belly. It caressed the thighs and burrowed between the toes, sampling, working swiftly.
Quin’s head jerked back. For an instant a totally different image had appeared on the screen, or so it seemed. A scene from what looked like a barnyard, healthy animals being cared for by healthy, smiling peasants wearing starched muslin and embroidered blouses, East Europeans of some kind, Slavs perhaps, cheerfully tending their animals under the benign guidance, the approving fatherly gaze of a dashing man with a moustache and a worker’s cap, dressed in a loosely fitted black suit and a high celluloid collar.
Lenin?
The image was gone at once and not so much seen as imagined, an effect that made the tale of the nose curiously disturbing. Somehow the suggestion of an actual historical event added authenticity to a film that might otherwise have been merely obsessive and unreal.
The nose lay on its back as a woman’s legs opened at the top of the screen. The legs descended, spread wide, bringing down a curtain of wiry hair that ended the film.
Quin’s glass was empty. Even the ice was gone. A legend beside the buttons on the counter noted that all the films were changed every third day. It also invited the guest to indulge himself in combinations by pressing several or all of the buttons at once, thereby creating unique themes previously unwitnessed. Quin was about to order another drink when the waiter reappeared, apologizing as before, and invited him to pay a visit to Madame Mama.
Once more they walked down a spiral staircase, but this one was narrow and plain and neither carpeted nor lit by chandeliers. It wound down between weathered boards that formed a square shaft, reinforced at every level by what appeared to be a roof. In fact, Quin wondered if they were descending through a pagoda that had been built under the ground instead of above, narrowing into the earth instead of the sky.
She sat at the bottom of the well in a bare wooden room, a tiny white-haired woman in black kimono, her only decoration an oval emerald resting on her forehead. She inclined her head as she greeted him, a kindly, aristocratic woman who spoke precise English with a slightly archaic accent.
The sages like to remind us, she said, that the only life we know here is as one underground, that we must pass through many incarnations before we finally see the sun. A pagoda can also have three or five stories, but mine has seven. Is Father Lamereaux still alive?
Yes he is, answered Quin.
How strange. I always thought he died during the war.
No, but it seems he’s been pretty much of a recluse since then.
I see. Well he was very kind to me once and we must never forget a kindness. What may I do for you, Mr. Quin?
Father Lamereaux thought you might have known my father in Shanghai. He thought you might have been there when he died.
And when was that?
About 1937 I think.
Mama’s face showed no expression.
I was there about then, she said, and I did know many foreigners, many of whom died, most of them in the end. But they were all nameless to me. We didn’t use names then. Ever,
And you’ve never heard of someone called Quin?
Mama frowned. She unfolded her hands, paused, refolded them in a different way.
Yes, I believe I have. But it wasn’t in Shanghai, it was in Tokyo. It was in connection with something that had happened in Shanghai eight years before I lived there.
Mama spoke slowly. She talked of Japan before the war, of Shanghai and the desperation she had known there. She said that to recall the events of that lurid era would be to play an uneasy, painful game with the past. She talked for over an hour and asked him to come to see her again. Meanwhile she offered him the use of an interpreter to help him find the other person Father Lamereaux had mentioned.