Ghostwritten (6 page)

Rather more than I needed to know. “She’s engaged, you say?”

“Yeah. To a Fujitsu photocopier ink cartridge research-and-development division salaryman who knew the go-between who knew her father’s section head.”

“Some guys get all the luck.”

“Ah, it’s okay. What the eyes don’t see, eh? She’ll make a good little wifey, I’m sure. She’s after a few nights of lust and sin before she becomes a housewife forever.”

She sounded a right slapper to me. Takeshi seemed to have
forgotten that only two weeks ago he’d been trying to get back with his estranged wife.

The rain carried on falling, keeping customers away. The rain fell softly, then heavily, then softly. Static hisses on telephone lines. Jimmy Cobb’s percussion on “Blue in Green.”

Takeshi was still on the telephone. It seemed to be my turn to say something.

“What’s she like? Her personality, I mean.”

Takeshi said, “Oh, fine,” like I’d asked about a new brand of rice cracker. “Well. I’ve got to go and sort out my estate agent’s office. Business has been a bit slack there, too. I’d better put the shits up the manager a bit. Sell lots of discs and make me lots of money. Phone me on my cell phone if you need anything—” I never do. He rang off.

Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It’s so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It’s long since filled up the plain, and now it’s creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it has already become out of date. It’s a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one. Things are always moving below you, and above your head. All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight. You have to do something to stop yourself caving in, or you just become a piece of flotsam or an ant in a tunnel. In smaller cities people can use the space around them to insulate themselves, to remind themselves of who they are. Not in Tokyo. You just don’t have the space, not unless you’re a company president, a gangster, a politician, or the emperor. You’re pressed against people body to body in the metro, several hands gripping each strap on the trains. Apartment windows have no view but other apartment windows.

No, in Tokyo you have to make your place
inside
your head.

There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise, and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash
place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it’s not
too
disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren’t born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who to laugh at.

Takeshi’s place is the nightlife. Clubs, and bars, and the women who live there.

There are many other places. There’s an invisible Tokyo built of them, existing in the minds of us, its citizens. Internet, manga, Hollywood, doomsday cults, they are all places where you go and where you matter as an individual. Some people will tell you about their places straight off, and won’t shut up about it all night. Others keep it hidden like a garden in a mountain forest.

People with no place are those who end up throwing themselves onto the tracks.

My place comes into existence through jazz. Jazz makes a fine place. The colors and feelings there come not from the eye but from sounds. It’s like being blind but seeing more. This is why I work here in Takeshi’s shop. Not that I could ever put that into words.

The phone rang. Mama-san.

“Sato-kun, Akiko and Tomomi have got this dreadful flu that’s doing the rounds, and Ayaka’s still feeling a mite delicate.” Ayaka had an abortion last week. “So I’ll have to open the bar and start early. Any chance you could get your own dinner tonight?”

“I’m nineteen! Of course I can get my own dinner tonight!”

She did her croaky laugh. “You’re a good lad.” She rang off.

I felt in a Billie Holiday mood. “Lady in Satin,” recorded at night with heroin and a bottle of gin the year before she died. A doomed, Octoberish oboe of a voice.

I wondered about my real mother. Not longingly. It’s pointless to long. Mama-san said she’d been deported back to the Philippines afterwards, and would never be allowed back into Japan. I can’t help but wonder, just sometimes, who she is now, what she’s doing, and whether she ever thinks about me.

Mama-san told me my father was eighteen when I was born. That makes me old enough to be my father. Of course, my father
was cast as the victim. The innocent violated by the foreign seductress who sank her teeth into him to get a visa. I’ll probably never know the truth, unless I get rich enough to hire a private detective. I guess there must be money in his family, for him to be patronizing hostess bars at my tender age, and to pay to clean up the stink of such a scandal so thoroughly. I’d like to ask him what he and my mother felt for each other, if anything.

One time I was sure he had come. A cool guy in his late thirties. He wore desert boots and a dark-tan suede jacket. One ear was pierced. I knew I recognized him from somewhere, but I thought he was a musician. He looked around the shop, and asked for a Chick Corea recording that we happened to have. He bought it, I wrapped it for him, and he left. Only afterwards did I realize that he reminded me of me.

Then I tried calculating what the odds against a random meeting like that were in a city the size of Tokyo, but the calculator ran out of decimal places. So I thought perhaps he’d come to see me incognito, that he was as curious about me as I was about him. Us orphans spend so much time having to be level-headed about things that when we have the time and space to romanticize, wow, can we romanticize. Not that I’m a real orphan, in an orphanage. Mama-san has always looked after me.

I went outside for a moment, to feel the rain on my skin. It was like being breathed on. A delivery van braked sharply and beeped at an old lady pushing a trolley who glared back and wove her hands in the air as if she was casting a spell. The van beeped again like an irritated muppet. A mink-coated leggy woman who considered herself extremely attractive and who obviously kept a rich husband strode past with a flopsy dog. A huge tongue lolled between its white teeth. Her eyes and mine touched for a moment, and she saw a high school graduate spending his youth holed up in a poky shop that obviously nobody ever spent much in, and then she was gone.

This is my place. Another Billie Holiday disc. She sang “Some Other Spring,” and the audience clapped until they too faded into the heat of a long-lost Chicago summer night.

•  •  •

The phone.

“Hi, Satoru. It’s only Koji.”

“I can hardly hear you! What’s that racket in the background?”

“I’m phoning from the college canteen.”

“How did the engineering exam go?”

“Well, I worked really hard for it.…” He’d walked it.

“Congratulations! So your visit to the shrine paid off, hey? When are the results out?”

“Three or four weeks. I’m just glad they’re over. It’s too early to congratulate me, though.… Hey, Mom’s doing a sukiyaki party tonight. My dad’s back in Tokyo this week. They thought you might like to help us eat it. Can you? You could sleep over in my sister’s room if it gets too late. She’s on a school trip to Okinawa.”

I ummed and ahhed inwardly. Koji’s parents are nice, straight people, but they feel it’s their responsibility to sort my life out. They can’t believe that I’m already content where I am, with my discs and my saxophone and my place. Underlying their concern is pity, and I’d rather take shit about my lack of parents than pity.

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 mom and booze for his dad.

“I’ll come around 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 greengrocery 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, drops 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 smelled 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 color, their bodies curving in the same way beneath their same uniform. Their leader demanded in a voice cutesy and spoiled 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 cutouts 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 cutout girls squawked. It must take a long time to train your voice to be so annoying.

Another giggled.

Another’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 toy shop 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 Mamasan’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 throw-away, 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 toward 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 color 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 homegrown counterculture, 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.