I drain the puddle of soup from my noodles. A dragon chases its tail around the world. So. For my coming-of-age birthday I also received a paranoid stepmother who underlines too much, and two or more stepsisters. Unfortunately the letter itself won’t help me find my father – it was unsigned, unaddressed, and posted in the northern ward of Tokyo, which narrows down the search to about three million people, assuming it was even written there. My stepmother is no fool. Her negative attitude is yet another hurdle. On the other hand, to be pushed away, I have to be touched. Also, my father didn’t write the letter himself – so at worst, this means he still isn’t sure about meeting me. At best, it means he hasn’t actually been told I am trying to contact him. It is at this moment that I realize I don’t have my baseball cap. This is the worst unbirthday present I could receive. That cap was a present from Anju. I think back – I had it in the games centre just now. I leave, and backtrack through the currents of pleasure seekers.
Zax Omega and Red Plague Moon
is still plying for trade, but my baseball cap has gone. I search the rows of students pummelling the offspring of
Street Fighter
, a crowd of kids gathered around
2084
; the booths of girls digitalizing their faces with those of the famous; the alleys of salarymen playing mah-jong with video stripstresses. Weird. All these people like my mother paying counsellors and clinics to reattach them to reality: all these people like me paying Sony and Sega to reattach us to unreality. I identify the jowly supervisor by the way he jangles his keys. I have to yell into his ear. I smell the wax. ‘Anyone handed in a cap?’
‘Wha’?’
‘I left a baseball cap here, thirty minutes ago.’
‘Why?’
‘I forgot it!’
Please wait – transaction being processed
. ‘You forgot why you left it?’
‘Never mind.’
I remember my spectator. In the upstairs pool room, he said. I find the back stairs and go up. The sudden quietness and gloom are subaquatic. Three rows by six of ocean-blue tables. I see him on the far side, playing alone, and on his head is my baseball cap. His ponytail is fed through the strap-gap. He pockets a ball, looks up, and gestures me over. ‘I figured you’d be back. That’s why I didn’t chase you. Want to win it off my head?’
‘I’d rather you just took it off your head.’
‘Where’s the fun in that?’
‘There isn’t any. But it is my cap.’
He sizes me up. ‘True.’ He presents my cap with a courtier flourish. ‘No offence meant. I’m not really myself tonight.’
‘No worries. Thanks for rescuing my cap.’
He smiles an honest smile. ‘You’re welcome.’
My move. ‘So, uh, how late is she now?’
‘When does “late” become “stood up”?’
‘I dunno. Ninety minutes?’
‘Then the bitch has well and truly stood me up. And I had to pay for this table until ten.’ He gestures with his cue. ‘Play a few frames, if you’re not busy.’
‘I’m unbusy. But I’m too broke to bet.’
‘Can you afford one cigarette per game?’
I am sort of flattered that he takes me seriously enough to offer me a game of pool. All I have had in the way of company since I got to Tokyo has been Cat, Cockroach and Suga. ‘Okay.’
Yuzu Daimon is a final-year law student, a native of Tokyo, and the finest pool player I have ever met. He is brilliant, truly. I watched
The Hustler
last week. Daimon could whip the Paul Newman character into coffee froth. He lets me win a couple of frames out of politeness, but by ten o’clock he’s mopped up seven more in U-turn-spinning, jump-shotting, unerring style. We hand in the cues and sit down to smoke our winnings. My plastic lighter is buggered: a flame flicks from Daimon’s thumb. It is a beautiful object. ‘Platinum,’ says Daimon.
‘Must be worth a fortune.’
‘It was my twentieth birthday present. You should practise more.’ Daimon nods at the table. ‘You have a good eye.’
‘You sound like my sports teacher at high school.’
‘Oh, please. Say, Miyake, I’ve decided Saturday owes me compensation for being stood up. What say we go to a bar and find a pair of girls.’
‘Uh, thanks. I’d better pass.’
‘Your girlfriend will never find out. Tokyo’s too big.’
‘No, it’s nothing that—’
‘So you don’t have a woman waiting anywhere?’
‘Not a non-imaginary one, no, but—’
‘You’re trying to tell me you’re gay?’
‘Not as far as I know, no, but—’
‘Then you took a vow of celibacy? You’re a member of a cult?’
I show him the contents of my wallet.
‘So? I’m offering to foot the bill.’
‘I can’t scav off you. You already paid for the table.’
‘You won’t be scavving off me. I told you, I’m going to be a lawyer. Lawyers never spend their own money. My father has a hospitality account of a quarter of a million yen to get through, or his department will face a budgetary reassessment. So you see, by refusing you put our family in a difficult position.’
That’s quite a lot of money. ‘Every year?’
Daimon sees I am serious, and laughs. ‘Every
month
, dolt!’
‘Scavving off your father is even worse than scavving off you.’
‘Look, Miyake, I’m only talking about a couple of beers. Five at most. I’m not trying to buy your soul. C’mon. When’s your birthday?’
‘Next month,’ I lie.
‘Then consider it a premature birthday present.’
Santa Claus works behind the bar, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer emerges from the toilets holding a mop, and elves in floppy hats wait on the tables. I watch snowflakes dance on the ceiling, smoking a Marlboro lit by the Virgin Mary. Yuzu Daimon drums along to psychedelic Christmas carols. ‘It’s called the Merry Christmas Bar.’
‘But it’s September ninth.’
‘It’s December twenty-fifth every night, in here. It is what we call a chick magnet.’
‘I might be being naïve, but could your girlfriend have just been held up?’
‘You are being whatever lies beyond naïve. What decade is this Yakushima place trapped in? The bitch stood me up. I know it. We had an arrangement. If she wanted to be there, she would have been, and I am now as single as a newborn babe, and she is jet-trash to me. Jet-trash. And don’t turn around right now, but I believe our feminine solace has just arrived. Over in the nook between the fireplace and the tree. The one in the coffee leather, the other in the cherry velvet.’
‘They look like models.’
‘Model whats?’
‘They wouldn’t look at me twice. Once.’
‘I said I’ll buy your drinks, not massage your ego.’
‘I mean it.’
‘Crap.’
‘Look at how I’m dressed.’
‘We’ll say you work as a roadie.’
‘I’m not even smart enough to be a roadie.’
‘We’ll say you work as a roadie for Metallica.’
‘But we’ve never met them.’
Daimon buries his face in his hands and chuckles. ‘Ah, Miyake, Miyake. What do you think bars are for? Do you think all these people enjoy paying exorbitant prices for pissy cocktails? Finish your beer. We need whisky to penetrate the enemy interior. No more buts! Look at the one in velvet. Imagine yourself untying the cords of that bodice thing she’s wearing with your front teeth. A simple yes or no will do: do you want her?’
‘Who wouldn’t? But—’
‘Santa! Santa! Two double Kilmagoons! On the rocks!’
‘So, after the rape,’ Daimon says in a loud voice as we take the adjacent table, ‘their world is bulldozed. Razed. She stops eating. She rips out the telephone. The only thing she shows any interest in is her dead son’s video games. When my friend leaves home for work in the mornings she is already there, hunched over the pistol, wasting men on the sixteen-inch Sony. When he gets back, she hasn’t moved a muscle. Kitchen pots still on the table – she doesn’t care.
Bangabangabang! Reload
. Back in the real world, the police drop the case – sexual assault during a night on the bare mountain? Forget it. Most men just can’t begin to understand what an experience like that . . . I despair of our sex, sometimes, Miyake. So. Nine months pass this way. She doesn’t leave the house once. Not a single time. He is going frantic with worry – you remember what a mess he was when you got back from your Beatles reunion gig. Finally he asks a psychiatrist for advice. Somehow, the shrink concludes, she has to be reintegrated into society or risk sinking into a state of self-willed autism. Now, they originally met in their university orchestra – she was a xylophonist, he was a trombonist. So he buys two tickets for
Pictures at an Exhibition
, and day by day erodes her resistance until she agrees to come. Cigarette?’
I could swear there was an ashtray when we sat down.
‘Excuse me?’ Daimon leans over to Coffee. ‘May I?’
‘Sure.’
‘Thanks so much. The night of the concert, she takes sedatives, they get dressed up, have a candlelit dinner somewhere high up, and take their seats in the front row. The trumpet starts. You know . . .’ Daimon hums the opening bars. ‘And she freezes. Her eyes are
ice
. Her fingernails sink into his thigh until they draw blood. She starts trembling. Forget the embarrassment, he has to get her out of there before she gets hysterical. Out in the foyer she tells him. The cymbal clasher – in the orchestra – she swears on her ancestor’s tomb that he was the man who raped her.’
I notice that Coffee and Velvet are tuned in.
‘I know what you’re thinking. Why not go to the cops? Nine cases out of ten, the judge tells the woman she was asking for it by wearing her skirt too high, and the rapist gets away with signing an apology form. She tells him that unless he avenges her honour she’ll throw herself from the top of the Tokyo Hilton. Now. You met him. He’s no mug. He does his homework, and gets an unregistered gun with a silencer, surgical gloves. One evening, while the orchestra are performing Beethoven’s Fifth, he breaks into the cymbalist’s apartment – he lives alone with his pet crystals. What he finds backs up his wife’s story. Internet porn print-outs, S&M gear, manacles hanging from the ceiling, a seriously worn and torn inflatable Marilyn Monroe. He hides under the bed. After midnight the cymbalist gets back, listens to his answering machine, has a shower, and gets into bed. My friend has a sense of the dramatic. “Even a monster should check under his mattress.”
Bangabangabanga!
’
‘Quite a story.’
‘Not over yet. My damn lighter isn’t working. One moment . . .’ Daimon leans over to Coffee, who is already opening her designer handbag. ‘I’m terribly sorry to trouble you – thanks so much.’ She even lights it for him, and then one for me. I nod shyly. ‘Revenge is the purest medicine. You probably remember the local rags – “Who Banged the Cymbal?” – but a successful murder is only a question of planning, and the police have no clues. His wife recovers in a matter of
days
. She starts teaching at her school for the blind again. Chucks out the video games. And come spring, when the Saito Kinen Orchestra go to Yokohama, this time
she
insists that they buy front-row tickets. Like before, but happier. He can live with his conscience – he only dispensed the same natural justice as the state would have done if it had sharper cops. They get dressed up, have the candlelit dinner somewhere high up, and take their seats in the front row. The string section start in – and she freezes. Her eyes are
ice
. Her breathing changes. He thinks she’s having some sort of attack, and manages to get her out into the lobby. “What?” he asks. “The second cellist! It’s him! The man who raped me!” “
What
? How about the cymbal clasher I killed last year?” She shakes her head like he’s crazy. “What are you talking about? The second cellist is the rapist, I swear on my ancestor’s grave, and if you don’t avenge my honour I’ll electrocute myself.’
‘Unbelievable!’ gasps Coffee. ‘Like, what did he do next?’
Daimon rotates, Coffee crosses her legs, and we become a foursome. ‘Went to the cops. Confessed to the cymbal player’s murder. By the time he was brought to trial, his wife had accused nine different men of raping her, including the minister for fish.’
Velvet is aghast. ‘Did all that really happen?’
‘I swear’ – Daimon blows a wobbly smoke ring – ‘every word is true.’
When I get back to the table after placing my order with Santa, Daimon’s arm is around Coffee’s chair. ‘Like, aha’ – Coffee pokes out her tongue between her white lips – ‘Santa’s little helper.’ Her face is marshmallowed with cosmetics. Velvet swivels towards me. Her tights whisper and Godzilla wakes up. ‘Yuzu-kun tells me you’re in the music biz.’ I smell her perfume, moistened and salted with sweat. ‘I’m modelling at the moment, doing a series of shoots for Tokyo’s biggest chain of body correction clinics.’ She leans towards me, her Lark Slim awaiting a flame, and Godzilla rears his fearsome head. Daimon spins his lighter across the table. Velvet’s face glows. A whole evening without thinking of Anju, until now.
Velvet wraps her arms around my chest as we lean into the first corner, less than a second behind Daimon’s Suzuki 950. My Yamaha 1000 bucks and growls down a gear. The sun-buckled stadium, the golden trumpets, the giant Bridgestone airship: the touch of Velvet’s hands makes it hard to concentrate. Daimon clips a row of dancing police cones, and above the din I hear Coffee puppy-squeal. ‘C’mon!’ Velvet whispers in my ear, just for me, and her whisper is a ghost writhing naked in the curves of my inner ear. I feel as hard and full as the Yamaha fuel tank. Coffee whoops. ‘Better than the real thing! Giddyup!’ Daimon leans into the chicane. ‘Realer than the real thing,’ I hear him murmur. I follow his driveline, and down the long straight I nearly pass him, but Coffee watches my screen and tells Daimon when to block me – ‘Gotcha!’ she laughs. I skid through a patch of oil, at 180 kph – Velvet’s fingers dig into me, the rear wheel overtakes the front, but I keep my bike on the road. We scissor through the zoo – I glimpse zebras streaming, manes flowing. Coffee retrieves her mobile phone, beeping ‘Star Spangled Banner’, answers it and proceeds to have a conversation about where she is and how totally unbelievable her night is. Recklessly I frape my Yamaha around the long, banking curve – I cut inside Daimon and we are neck and neck. ‘Say, Miyake, this is as valid or as stupid a test of masculinity as anything else, don’t you agree?’ I risk a side glance. ‘I guess’ – he flashes a dangerous grin. ‘Like, a twenty-first-century duel,’ comments Coffee, putting her phone back in her bag. ‘For sure!’ replies Velvet. ‘Miyake is going to make you eat grit, right, Miyake?’ I say nothing but her little finger mines my navel and threatens to worm farther down until I say, ‘Okay.’ ‘Settled, then,’ replies Daimon, and veers into me. Velvet screams as I lose control and slam into an oncoming jomo fuel tanker.
Baaannnnnnggggggggg
! When the fun-size nuclear explosion dies down, Daimon and Coffee are disappearing into the distance, small as a full stop. ‘Nasty accident,’ tuts Daimon. My Yamaha stutters into second gear. ‘Like, ruthless!’ laughs Coffee. ‘No way he’ll catch up now.’ Daimon glances over at me. ‘Poor Miyake. Remember, it’s only a video game.’ Velvet’s grip loosens. An absurd idea comes to me that owes more to two whiskies on two beers than original thinking. I skid the Yamaha through a U-turn, and discover that, yes, I can drive counter-clockwise. The ‘Seconds Elapsed’ tick down. The zebras in the zoo stream backwards. A programmer as nutty as Suga must have written the software. Velvet’s hands tweak my nipples to show approval. We pass the start line – ‘Laps Completed’ reads ‘-1’. I tear up the swing-bridge – the bike flips up as we leap through space, and shudders as we land on the far ramp. Here comes Daimon on his Suzuki. ‘Like, what?’ Daimon begins a sentence with ‘You sneaky fucking—’ I mirror his evasive swerve, and skid straight into his headlamp, as round as the moon on a bright day. No explosion. Our bikes freeze in mid-tilt, the music stops and the screens die.