Harajuku Sunday (16 page)

“And now you've decided to move here?”

“This country is just beautiful, you know.
 
It's like they do everything in the most beautiful way possible; not the best or most efficient way, but the way that's going to surround themselves with aesthetic things.”

“Mmm, I don't know about that.”

VI.

“Ritchie, show up at Shibuya crossing at eight p.m.
 
Saturday.
 
I want money back.”

If he wasn't involved in enough drama, Shan had somehow also in the mix of things managed to get himself hit by a Japan Self-Defense Force truck.
 
There are a lot of ironies, here, of course.
 
But the long and the short of it is he is going to be paid a yen thirty million settlement, or almost 300,000 US for his two month stay in hospital and the reconstructive surgery on his legs.
 
Or so he had me believe.
 
Actually the final recompense is only 16,000
US
, and much of that is already earmarked for the hospital and administrative fees.
 
Be not quick to scoff at my naivety.
 
I do not know or like Shan enough to investigate what he is doing, and three hundred thousand doesn't sound unreasonable considering the factors involved, especially the sensitivity of military vehicles hitting foreigners so widely reported in East Asian news.
 
But Shan is able to use a sworn promise, hand in the air, pledge to the blood commitment, of providing 10% of settlement to me in return for my support of him in order to encourage my group's support of him during his period of trial.
 
He even buys a few tailor-made shirts and spends some money on expensive drinks to show substance to his stories.
 
The truth does come out eventually, in a curious way, but in the meantime, he's in jail, he's out; I'm visiting; I'm being caught up in events and unable to get funds to him; everything is to and fro.

“Ritchie I want full accounting of money entrusted to you and a refund of anything you haven't spent.”

The sound of his voice on that unexpected phone call does send a chill down my back.
 
But stupidly, he doesn't even show up to his promised appointment; and it is only weeks later that he finally manages to hunt me down, at which point I bare my teeth to him and show no sympathy whatsoever as he explains where's he been for the last few months.

“There was an administrative error.
 
They arrested me, but somebody broke into the records office and set fire to the building.
 
So the police had no record of why I was being held, and they thought I was an illegal alien.
 
They kept me on Sado-shima for four months until they figured out what had happened.”

“Sado-shima?
 
Isn't that the old place where they exiled people?”

“Mmm.”

And Shan is actually being honest, for once; there was indeed a fire set by a deranged criminal that resulted in his extended incarceration; LeFauve for all his influence is almost certainly not behind this.

“Well what did you do?
 
How was it?”

“They kept me out in
 
fields doing carpentry work.
 
It's been goddamn cold.”

“Well, I sympathize.”

“As for the money...”

As for the money, a fifth, which isn't unreasonable at all, disappeared in the handover from Eric to me, and more than a half we had to pay out to keep his stuff from being evicted from his apartment.
 
After all, he just disappears all of a sudden after telling us that we need to look after his stuff for just a month, so one month drags to two, and two drags to three before we realize we have to cut the rate of spending and move everything to self-storage or we'll drain his bank account in two months.
 
That is also a big waste of time and effort, not to forget all the intangibles of incurring U.S. Embassy wrath for assisting public enemy #1—who can put a price tag on that.

“As for the money, I'm wondering why you need it back at all?
 
You promised 10% of the settlement, do you remember?
 
So that would be three million yen.”

“10%?
 
10%?
 
Do you have paper record of that?”

He looks at me with a look of scorn, but what Shan doesn't realize is that I have one more card than he does.

“No, but as you're smiling, I think you remember exactly well.
 
So why do you need four hundred thousand yen back when you're the one who's supposed to be forking over three million?”

“It's a matter of principle, dog.
 
Hand over full fifteen hundred thousand, and I'll give you what I promised.”

But Charis had already played one last card.
 
It's almost bizarre that is the Christian girl, the girl of absolute morals, who suggested we wade through all his legal paperwork when he transferred his goods from his apartment to self-storage.
 
But feminine deviousity trumps absolutism.
 
“LE-SAMA, HERE IS RECEIPT FOR FINAL PAYMENT OF 1.5 MILLION YEN FOR THE
INCIDENT TAKING PLACE
IN TAKABASHI INVOLVING MINISTRY...”
 
And we looked at each other in the musty storage building; this told us what we need to know.

Shan does eventually get not quite US $5,000 back, which is more than fair; I only later remember the cell phone bill, the other incidentals involved that mean he has taken a very convoluted process to get back a difference of several hundred dollars, an amount he surely would have paid in filing fees considering all the legal rigamarole it takes him to do what he does, not to forget he still owed me the 10% even of $15,000 if not $300,000.
 
Yet I suppose he gets some satisfaction out of finally making bureaucracy work for him, and I suppose in a sense he is pleased to finally have a high-hand on me, to watch me squirm and cough up cash in process that leaves him with a sense of power.
 
More details spill out—Dominique’s drug-trafficking conviction (drugs hidden in a convenient pocket), Dominique's psychotic breakdown at the country club leaving one very frightened Chinese (!) male hiding in a bathroom (rumors?), Dominique's apparent charge at one point that it was I, actually, who pulled a knife on her.
 
But finally, all things said, the real thing that needs to be recorded is something that nobody with a name points out.

“And did you see nothing suspicious with the timing of it all?
 
That he gets accused so strangely coincidental with some other expressed incident?”

“No.
 
Not until years, years later, and only after fiascoes of my own.”

But the quiet nagging voices are easily silenced and the convicted criminal Shan is sent on his way.

This has been an account in neat and organized form of things that were all happening simultaneously and far more messy, emotionally-trying, and indeed victimizing than as can be expressed in linear form.
 
I am sorry, of course, Tucker, for leaving you holding the bag like that, and yes yes yes Julian is that famous auteur who later went on to produce so-and-so movie but is currently curating $6 shows in Bowery.
 
But then, all that being said, there is still that other major occupation of our lives, or simply our occupation, and this is of course at least two thirds of our energies, almost half our waking hours—it is really rather far too charming and amusing to pretend that one jets off to Japan, spends all of one's waking hours going to one or another amusing party or bar or club; that this is all of our lives or even just the meaningful part.
 
I loved
Japan
, of course.
 
What I didn't tell Tucker was that even the dyed-hair swarms of Roppongi that made me physically ill so many years ago also managed to inflict something psychological onto my view of the world.
 
Of course I had known that the Japanese were odd; of course I had known that their cheap bleach-job youth were the trash of
Asia
.
 
But it had never occurred to me so personally, hit so close to home, that there were aesthetic answers to things; that all of the contradictions of life could be answered in so insouciant a fashion.

Confession: in
America
I am nothing.
 
A graduate of a medium-ranked
Pennsylvania
university, I can hope to work in a cloth-covered cubicle as a junior programmer at some semi-known company.
 
The girls ignore me; my days are banal; and everything is just absolutely predictable to the nth degree, I have failed even in the timing of my birth, having missed the dot-com bubble that made people just two years older millionaires doing exactly the same major.
 
Japan
.
 
I walk down the street, and girls giggle.
 
My very presence in a subway car makes girls toy with their hair, and if I say something in English, I am instantly 'cool' and 'international.'
 
But, even beyond this, even beyond the foreigner cool and all the assorted fringe benefits, detectable even in the most simplistic products or classical works of art, is a faint, tremulous, almost undetectable pathos of things, an indistinct undertone that only the most refined senses can pick up.
 
Like a siren song, the country calls me, and when a salary offer from a company in
Tokyo
arrives, without a glance backwards I pack my bags and leave.
 
My new company is a clean, bright, happy place overlooking the Dentsu plaza in Shimbashi, and I have the prestigious corner seat; I am the conquering American hero brought in to take our team to the very top of the rankings.
 
And this I do, for a year, a golden year, operating in an archaic and stripped-down version of software that is totally obsolete in the
U.S.

“Tell your friend that he's very rude.”

Had I known then what I knew just months later; had I had some inkling or prior warning about past history at the company or even just an especially perceptive and friendly ally from the domestic side, I would have been able, at the time of the initial assault, to have quickly turned the tables on the factory foreman and disarmed all onlookers instantly, preventing the internecine struggle that followed, and that left both of our influences hopelessly diminished.
 
But at the time, I am completely focused on my battle with LeFauve; Charis, of all people, has taken this week to show up at my workplace with a prepared lunch, drawings gasps from assembled onlookers; and as people point out—even my stride is different; even my very walk has a combative and dominant edge, the purposeful roll of a fighter and brawler.

“That guy, you know, this is the first time he's ever talked to me in my eleven months here.
 
I don't even know his name!”

“Mmm.
 
Maybe that's part of the problem?”

For a second I look at my Japanese friend and remember the old saying-- you think you have a Japanese friend, until he enters a Japanese setting and you discover he's somebody else entirely.
 
“You're taking his side?”

Tak grimaces; a look of pain crosses his head.
 
“It's like this—Japanese society is a bit more focused on age and a bit more patriarchal than you might realize...”

But I'm already shutting my ears to this kind of talk; I hang them all with the same cord.

“All right, I don't have time to deal with small dicked losers with inferiority complexes.
 
We have a entire series of products to roll out in six months, and the team had best fall in.”

Energia K.K. divides fairly predictably into two camps on either my or the foreman's side, or rather, most of the people seem to have some or other inclination although a noticeable minority remain aloof.
   
As Tak says, Japanese culture still places a premium on the opinion of elders; the foreman is forty-five or older, and I am a freshly-minted university grad.
 
But on the other hand, we are a new media technology company; our floor is filled with talents and design specialists, and these give me a little wink or nod, or otherwise indicate that they need a programming specialist more than a washed-up middle-aged son of an electrician.
 
But then: Shimamura.
 
And it takes me not months, but years to understand his play in this evolving little drama of ours.