She nods with a wry smile. “If you can call it that. Our relationship isn’t conventional.”
“So what is it?”
“Passionate.” She lowers her eyes and adds quickly: “But not always in the traditional sense of the word.”
“What’s the traditional sense of passionate?”
She turns her wrists and stretches her body, unable to sit still for a second.
“Sex.” She peeks at Xavier to see his reaction. Xavier smiles. New dishes are served, soup perfumed with delicate yuzu lemon, and fish wrapped in cedar leaf. Excellent food for such a modestly priced restaurant. Xavier watches her as she eats with great relish, but still with the lightness and elegance of a bird.
“What does your boyfriend do?”
“Reizo? He wants to write a novel. A book about what he calls “Japan the whore”. I’ve read some of it. A lot of violence. It’s about young people…” Xavier isn’t paying much attention. He’s basking in the sparkling light of her presence.
“I think Reizo has a screw loose,” Yori concludes. “He’s so over-the-top at times. He regularly ties a hachímalá around his head, one of those headscarfs with special ritual symbols, the kanji, supposed to have the power to fend off evil spirits. Then he sits cross-legged and meditates in zazen, with a dagger in his hands. After a bit, he starts to shake like a madman, pretending to plunge the blade into his belly.” She giggles, again covering her mouth. “Playing the macho comes naturally to him. Man as warrior, flirting with death, that kind of thing.”
Xavier decides not to respond to her comment. “And what do you do?”
“I’m a street jester. I sing karaoke and invent reasons for people to fill my money box. It’s getting tougher by the day. More and more people are losing their jobs. We’re all going down together. The proud yellow race, captain of Asia, blah, blah, blah. In actual fact, we’re a sick people, Xavier.” Douterloigne loves the way she pronounces his name: it sounds almost Spanish like Javier. He’s not in love, but he knows that love is the only natural force in the universe capable of striking faster than the speed of light. After what happened to Anna, he’s having a hard time looking at life through rose-tinted glasses.
“Where do you live?”
“I rent some rooms with a bunch of young people in the centre of the city.” Yori smiles and coughs delicately. “What the hell, I can trust you with the truth. We’re actually squatting in a disused factory. We’ve divided it up into living spaces, using stuff we either found, scrounged or chipped in to buy. And we have our own club: the Suicide Club. Some of us are thinking of really doing it, if they can get enough publicity first. Suicide as a happening, you could call it. If there’s no other way out, suicide is a noble option.” She shrugs. “Want to hear a funny story about my boyfriend Reizo, the crazy he-man?”
Xavier is amused by her attempts to use English. Before he can answer, she’s laughing in her furtive, nervous style. “Maybe you won’t think it’s that funny. Westerners have a different mentality from us.”
“Not me.”
Yori shrugs. “A year and a half ago, I was attacked on the street close to our squat by a man wearing a motorbike helmet. He stabbed me four times with a knife and left me bleeding. I can still see him standing in front of me, licking the blade clean. He wanted me to see. I was found by an acquaintance, who contacted my boyfriend. Reizo came running, wept onto my bleeding chest, picked me up and took me to the hospital on his moped. It was touch and go.”
“That was very noble of your boyfriend.”
Yori lowers her eyes, and this time Xavier notices her face twitch nervously. “He still thinks I didn’t recognise him.”
He doesn’t understand what she means and knits his brows.
“The man with the helmet who stabbed me was Reizo himself. Completely out of his mind on amphetamines. That’s what I believe.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “When he’s high he cuts himself, the back of his hands, then he forgets. His hands are covered in scars. I got a good look at my attacker’s hands.”
Xavier knows how ambivalent relationships can be, but he still suspects she’s made this story up. He doesn’t know why. It makes her even more interesting.
“You stayed with him, though.”
“We’re two shipwrecked people on a raft,” she says. “If one of us jumps off, the balance is disturbed and we both end up as dinner for the sharks.”
“Dangerous love.”
Yori shrugs and looks at the tabletop feigning bashfulness. Her lips are the colour of an open wound and as soft as silk.
“Love is for sick minds. In Japan, we only refer to it in novels, or when there’s a crime of passion. Reizo is my koibito.”
Xavier nods. The word “love” is a nineteenth century French invention, exalted by the literati of the day. He’s aware how uncomfortable the Japanese are with it.
“Koibito: the one who arouses your passion.”
She nods. “Against your better judgement.”
“Did you know that your word for love, ai, is a cry of pain in my language?”
“Then I must love Reizo in your language.” She giggles, again shielding her mouth with her left hand. “Reizo is talented, I’m convinced of that. But he has a strong death wish.”
“I expect that makes him artistically interesting,” Xavier Douterloigne remarks calmly. “But it must be very tiring, I guess.”
She shrugs again. “I can’t complain. If a man isn’t dynamite what use is he? Most men are so blinkered and moody. I like them better when they’re weighted down with mental burdens. I’ve been pushing him too much to finish his book recently. It drove him mad, so he used his knife to teach me a lesson. He’s writing about a future in which Japan is an authoritarian police state. The young are considered dangerous. When they turn seventeen, they’re dropped on an island, where they’re filmed by television cameras, fighting each other to the death like the gladiators of old.”
Yori takes a large mouthful of tuna fish and dashi, a sour broth based on seaweed and soy sauce.
“The plot might seem a bit over the top, but it’s actually cool,” she says. Xavier thinks the way she purses her lips to pronounce the word “cool” is hilarious. “I’ve read a few chapters. Blood and sadism, right? He writes about a Japan that’s concealed in each and every one of us.”
“My sister kept a diary,” Douterloigne says. It was out before he knew it. Yori ignores the past tense. “I thought you were an only child.”
“Only son. I’ve got a sister, Anna.” Xavier bends down to fish Anna’s grey, misshapen diary from his suitcase and puts it on the table between them. Yori looks at it, but doesn’t touch it. “She’s in a wheelchair,” Xavier says. He’s not a very good liar and he has a feeling his words sound artificial and hesitant.
“Was she born with a handicap?”
Xavier leans back. “No. It’s only been a little over a year.”
“How did it happen?”
Yori watches the tall blonde Xavier take a deep breath. He looks away from her. “I’d rather not say.”
This kindles her interest. “Why not?”
The European is starting to feel very ill at ease, she can tell. Yori licks her lips. “I’m a child of hibakusha myself. My parents were just children when the bomb was dropped. They survived, but it left them scarred. So they were bullied, humiliated and excluded.” Yori pats her stomach. “We, their descendants, are handicapped on the inside. Genetic time bombs, is what we are. My father only lived to be thirty-six, my mother just made it to forty-nine.”