‘How hungry are you, Doi?’
‘I am hungry enough to cut off my thumb and chew it.’
‘Really hungry, then.’
‘Pass me that knife, will you?’
I make a ‘do I have to?’ face.
‘Pass me the knife, man, this is a hunger crisis.’
‘Be careful with that knife. Razor sharp.’
‘Why else would I want it, man?’ Doi places his left thumb on my chopping board, places the blade over it, and thumps the handle with his right fist. The blade slices clean through the knuckle. Blood spills over the counter – Doi reins in his breath. ‘There, that wasn’t so bad! He picks up his thumb with his right hand and dangles it in his mouth. Plop. I gargle dry air. Doi munches slowly, deciding if he likes the taste. ‘Gristly, man, but not bad!’ Doi spits out his thumb bone, sucked shiny and white. I drop whatever it was I was holding. Sachiko appears in the hatch – I point, and glug. ‘Doi!’ scolds Sachiko. ‘You prima donna! You just can’t resist a captive audience, can you? Sorry, Miyake, I should have warned you about Doi’s little hobby: magic school.’ Doi mimes a kung-fu retaliatory shuffle. ‘The Sacred Academy of Illusionists ain’t no hobby, chieftainess. One day there’ll be queues outside the Budokan to see me perform.’ He waggles his two attached thumbs at me. ‘You can tell from his eyes that Shiyake is one cat in sore need of the magic arts.’ ‘Miyake,’ corrects Sachiko. ‘Him too,’ says Doi. I don’t know how to respond to all of this – I am just relieved that the blood was only tomato juice. Five o’clock. Morning comes in for landing. Sachiko asks me to prepare some mini-salads, so I wash some lettuce and cherry tomatoes. The pizza orders thicken again – who eats pizzas for breakfast? – and before I know it Sachiko is back, doing a high-court voice. ‘Eiji Miyake, by the powers vested in me by Emperor Nero, and in view of your satisfactory behaviour, I declare your life sentence suspended for the period of sixteen hours. You will, however, present yourself at this correctional institution at midnight, for a further eight hours hard labour.’ I frown. ‘Huh?’ Sachiko points at the clock – ‘Eight o’clock. Surely you have a home to go to?’ The shop door slides open. Sachiko glances around, and looks back at me with an ‘aha!’ look. ‘The prisoner has a visitor waiting outside the gates.’
Ai says anywhere except Jupiter Café, so we walk towards Shinjuku to find a breakfast place. Talking is a bit awkward – we have not actually met since the day in Jupiter Café, even though we must have spent over twenty-four hours on the telephone last week. ‘If it was any more humid than this,’ I venture, ‘it would be raining.’ Ai tilts her face skyward. ‘Y’know, it is raining.’ She caught a coach back from Niigata yesterday evening, and looks travel-worn. I am as sweaty and dishevelled as a whorehouse bed. I imagine. ‘So how did it go with your father?’ Ai hums. ‘Pointless. I knew it would be . . .’ she begins. I make the right noises at the right time, but as usual when people discuss parental problems, I feel as if I am being told about a medical condition in an organ I lack. Still, I am booming with pleasure that Ai came to meet me for breakfast. We pass a tiny shrine – Ai breaks off to look at the trees, tori gate, straw ropes and twists of paper. A jizo statue sits behind an orange, a bottle of Suntory whisky and a vase of chrysanthemums. An old man is having a good long pray.
‘Are musicians superstitious?’ I ask.
‘Depends on the instrument. String players, technically including pianists, have the luxury of being able to practise until we get it right, and any mistakes we do make usually get swallowed up by the orchestra. Woodwind, and especially brass, have it tougher. However good you are, one unlucky blast and Bruckner’s celestial ninth gets blasted open with a – well, my last conductor’s metaphor – a shotgun fart. Most trumpet players I know have beta-blockers instead of cookies with their morning coffee. Are Yakushima pizza chefs superstitious?’
‘The last time I went to a shrine it was to, uh, decapitate its god.’
‘With a lightning bolt?’
‘I only had a junior carpenter set hacksaw.’
She sees I am serious. ‘Didn’t the god give you what you wanted?’
‘The god gave me exactly what I wanted.’
‘Which is why you sawed his head off?’
‘Yep.’
‘My, I must be careful about giving you what you want.’
‘Ai Imajo – I, Eiji Miyake, swear I will never saw your head off.’
‘That’s okay, then. But isn’t destroying religious artifacts a borstal-sized offence?’
‘I never told anyone until this morning.’
Ai gives me a look with ninety-nine possible meanings. McDonald’s has an electronic signboard above the door which reports how many seats are vacant – it flits in and out of single figures. Detectors are built into the seat, I guess. Ai tells me to go upstairs and find a table while she queues, and I am too exhausted to argue. McDonald’s stinks of McDonald’s but at least it will disguise the stink of Miyake the unshowered kitchen slave. Upstairs a flock of student nurses smoke, bitch and shriek into their mobiles. I add up the money I just earned and feel a little less tired. It is Europe Week in McDonald’s – a video screen hangs on the wall, and scenes of Rome glide by while soporific music sucks you in. Ai appears at the top of the steps holding the tray, looking around for me. I could wave, but I enjoy looking at her. Black leggings, a sky-blue T-shirt under a berry-juice silk shirt, and amber magma earrings. If Ai were a nurse I would break a major bone to get a bed in her ward. ‘They were out of chocolate shake,’ she says, ‘so I chose banana. I see you have a kinky fetish for nurse uniforms.’
‘They must have, uh, followed me in.’
Ai sticks the straw through my lid. ‘In your dreams – anyway, you reek of cheese. Sachiko says a lot of your customers are nurses – they train across the road. That squat grey building is Senso-ji Hospital.’
‘I thought it was a prison. Are you only having green tea?’
‘Green tea is all that my meal plan allows until lunch.’
‘Oh – I forget again. Sorry.’
‘No need to be. Diabetes is a medical condition, not a sin.’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Relax, relax; I know. Eat.’
A mighty river of drones flows below the window – civil servants rushing to get to their desks before their section chief is at his. ‘Once upon a time,’ says Ai, ‘people use to build Tokyo. But that changed somewhere down the line, and now Tokyo builds people.’
I let a squirt of shake dissolve on my tongue. ‘Back to your father: he said if you ignore him and go to Paris, you are never welcome in Niigata.’
‘So I said he can have it his way.’
‘So you won’t go to Paris?’
‘I am going to Paris. But I am never going back to Niigata.’
‘Does your father mean what he said?’
‘That was a thermonuclear threat aimed at my mother, not me. “If
you
want to be looked after by your own daughter in your old age,
you
make her stay.” In fact, he left shortly after to go and play pachinko. My mother broke down in gales of tears, just as he knew she would. I am thinking: what century is this? You know, there are mountain villages in Niigata that import Filipina wives wholesale in groups of twenty, because as soon as the local girls come of age they are on board the fastest shinkansen out of there. The men wonder why.’
‘So you won. You can go to Paris.’
‘In disgrace, but I am going.’
I light a JPS. ‘You are so tough, Ai.’ She shakes her head. ‘The gap between how other people see you and how you see yourself is . . . a mystery, for me. I think
you
are tough. I think
I
am as tough as your shake – which is nine parts pig lard, incidentally. I desperately want my parents to be proud of me. Real strength is not needing the approval of other people all the time.’ On a Roman balcony one slanting evening a girl puts sunflowers in a terracotta jar. She sees the cameraman, scowls, pouts, flicks her hair and vanishes. Ai dangles her teabag in and out of the hot water. ‘I honestly think they would have been happier if I had done a two year course in applying cosmetics at a women’s college, married the family dentist and spawned a hive of babies. Music. You eat it, but it eats you too.’ I swallow hashbrown-and-fries cud. ‘Still. Compared to the Miyakes, your family are the Von Tripps in
The Sound of Music
.’ Ai spins her teabag. ‘Von Trapps.’
A five-year-old comes up to our table from nowhere and looks at Ai. ‘Where do babies come from before they get into their mummies’ tummies?’
‘Storks bring them,’ says Ai.
The kid looks dubious. ‘Where do the storks get them, then?’
‘Paris,’ I tell her and get a smile out of Ai. The girl’s father appears at the top of the stairs carrying a tray of bright food and she runs off. He looks like a good dad.
Ai looks at me. I see her face as a very old woman, and also as a very little girl. I never looked into anyone’s eyes this long since my who-will-blink-first games with Anju. If this were a movie and not McDonald’s we would now kiss. Maybe this is more intimate. Loyalty, grief, good news, bad days. ‘Okay,’ I finally say, and Ai does not say ‘okay what?’ She rubs her thumbnail over a McTeriakiburger scratchcard. ‘Look. I won a baby robot turkey lunch box. Must be a good omen. Will you let me buy you a new baseball cap?’
‘This one was a present from Anju,’ I reply before I change my mind.
Ai frowns. ‘Who?’
‘My twin sister.’
Ai frowns more deeply. ‘You said you were an only child.’
No going back now. ‘I told you a lie. Only the one. I want to untell it. I have a whole load of other stuff to tell you too: my grandfather contacted me – thanks to the personal ad you suggested – and my stepmother and half-sister met me. More of an ambush than a meeting, actually. I also figured that trying to find someone who obviously doesn’t want to meet me, even if he is my father, will only make me miserable, so I quit . . . What is it?’ Ai is frying with exasperation. ‘That is so
you
of you, Miyake!’ I try to understand. ‘What is?’ Ai knocks on her forehead with her knuckles. ‘Okay, okay. Start with your twin sister. Then do the stepmother. Go.’
I float back to Shooting Star around noon as buoyant as a light wave. Ai has classes for the rest of today, but she is coming round to my capsule tomorrow . . . Wednesday’ – I have to stop to remember which day I am on. I am thinking about Ai about ninety times an hour. It was funny when we said goodbye at Shinjuku – we got hopelessly lost because I was following her while she was following me. The walk from Kita Senju station is pleasant today. Shrubs, autumn trees, kids in pushchairs slurping lollies – today they defeat the bog ugliness of Tokyo. ‘Good morning, Eiji-kun,’ says Machiko pleasantly, ‘you reek of cheese.’ She is watching a Beat Takeshi movie set in Okinawa. ‘Good director, but only truly cool actors dare act uncool roles.’ Machiko shows me her holiday photos and gives me a picture I like of an orange orchard vanishing up a rain-hazed hillside. We talk about Nero’s for a while. Machiko has this gift of making me feel I am interesting – and I nearly tell her about Ai but I am afraid I would sound slushy, and besides, there still is not much to tell, so I climb up to my capsule.
‘Eiji-kun! I forgot to give you this. It was delivered this morning.’ I turn around, and go back down for the package – one of those padded envelopes, the smallest size they come in. The addressee is Mr Fujin Yoda – who? – living in Hakodate up in Hokkaido. An
INCORRECTLY ADDRESSED
message has been stamped on the front. On the back is my name and address, printed under
SENDER
on a stick-on label. ‘Anything wrong?’ asks Machiko.
I keep my wits about me and say, ‘Nothing.’ Something is wrong, however – I never posted it. Up in my capsule a shredded tea towel puts the mysterious package out of my mind – Cat, purely out of spite, because she slept alone last night. I hope she stops shredding before she starts on my shirts. I shower, tidy up the scraps of clawed cloth and thrash out a Howlin’ Wolf version of ‘All You Need Is Love’ on my guitar. I should be dropping with tiredness, but I am immune to sleep. Then I remember the package. I slit it open. Inside is a computer disk wrapped in a letter. I twist some ice from the ice-tray into a glass and fill it with water. I love the sound the cubes make as fissures shoot through.
Tokyo, 1st October
My name is Kozue Yamaya. However unlikely or brutal this account of the last nine years of my life appears, I ask you to read it until the end. In your hands is my final testament. I shall ask you to be my legal executor.
Endings are simple, but every beginning is made by the beginning before. The one I shall choose is a night in the rainy season nine years ago. In those days my name was Makino Matani. She was a housewife with a two-year-old son, and married to the owner of a financial services company. She was a recent graduate in Business Studies from a respectable women’s college in Kobe. Every New Year she exchanged greetings cards with her ex-classmates who were married to dentists, judges and civil servants. An ordinary life. The rainy season came. I remember those last moments perfectly – my son was playing with a plastic train set, and I was cleaning the rainy-season mould in the shower cubicle. I could hear the television reporting flash floods and landslides in western Japan.
The doorbell rang. I answered it, and three men barged the door and snapped the chain my husband had trained me to use. They demanded to know where my husband was hiding. I demanded to know who they were. One slapped me hard enough to dislodge a tooth. ‘Your husband’s case officers,’ he snarled, ‘and
we
ask the questions.’ He and another searched the house while the third watched me try to reassure my screaming son. He threatened to maim my son if I didn’t tell him where my husband was. I called my husband at work and discovered he had phoned in sick that morning. I called my husband’s mobile and discovered the number had been disconnected. I called his pager – dead. I was nearly hysterical by now – the thug poured me a shot of my husband’s whisky, but I couldn’t swallow it. My son watched with big scared eyes. The two other thugs returned with a box of my husband’s personal effects and all of my jewellery. Then the bad news really began. I learned then my husband had run up debts of over fifty million yen with a Yakuza-backed credit organization. Our life assurance policy had been doctored to name this organization as sole beneficiary in the event of his suicide. The house and contents were their property if my husband defaulted on repayments. ‘And that,’ said the most violent of the three, ‘includes you.’ My son was taken into the next room. I was told I was now responsible for my husband’s debts. I was then beaten and raped. Photographs were taken ‘to guarantee my obedience’. I had to endure this torment in silence, for the sake of my son. If I failed to obey their orders, the photographs would be sent to every name in my address book.