Harajuku Sunday (2 page)

"Nah, she's just a friend.
 
We were sitting next to each other on the same plane when we came over, and then we kept running into each other on the streets, it was weird, so we keep in touch.
 
But you know, I don't think we actually feel the slightest bit of any sort of chemistry with each other."
 
I ask him in turn about his apparent girlfriend—the tall "gazelle" girl that some of us have been talking over repeatedly—but Soren smiles sheepishly.

"Actually Ayako and I are not really boyfriend-girlfriend either.
 
She's still moping over some ex of hers, won't let me sleep with her."

"Oh my god," I say, "You realize you just disappointed the entire male gaijin population of
Tokyo
?
 
Everyone thinks that girl is unbelievable."

"Yeah, she's something isn't she?"

"She's like this girl out of like some mists and samurai novel—not your typical little tiny J-cutie, all fluff and squeaky voices, but somebody like…you know, Tale of Genji, samurai and cherry blossoms, castles in mists.
 
Ancient
Japan
.
 
'Cuz she's tall, you know.
 
She’s graceful."

"Yeah well, she's just letting me sleep in bed with her, not a move further."

"That's it?"

"Yeah, Ritchie. I like, try to touch her when we're in bed, but she just moves away."

"That's really sad," I say laughing. "You share a bed with a girl night after night, but you don't actually get any play."

We sit there silently for a moment, thoughtful, and the afternoon atmosphere seems filled with a sense of foreboding.
 
The immensity of the city sprawl hundreds of meters below the floor-to-ceiling windows is silent and unyielding, a steel-colored monolithic city, and for a moment one might almost characterize the mood as strangely oppressive.
 
The sun is appreciably low in the sky and one can begin to see the blinking patterns of light that mark buildings on commercial drives flickering to life as the changeover from daytime to evening begins.
 
Slowly, surely, the night city is stirring to life.
 
Then, suddenly, the silence is interrupted by the shrill ring of the telephone, which Soren, sitting near to, reaches over and picks up.
 
It's friends of his; they want to go for a ride.
 
Soren in sheepish tones answers a series of rapid-fire questions, something to do with a BMW Z3 wrapped around a telephone pole, or actually just punched against a highway barrier, "no engine damage, dude, no engine damage--just sheet metal" that's all, really.
 
There's some mutual agreement being hammered out, and then he puts down the phone.

"Uh, Ritchie, you free tonight?"

"Yeah, what's up?"

"People hanging out.
 
Let's go!"
 
So we hustle, and take the elevator down and walk over to Roppongi-dori, where there's a white Infiniti SUV backing up traffic.
 
Five minutes later, we're taking the onramp to the elevated expressways that shoot between the skyscrapers.
 
I recognize the driver, Takashi, too, a young Japanese dude who seems to know all the foreigners, everywhere, all the time.
 
I say hello and he smiles back and everyone's already talking excitedly to each other.
 
"Like we should totally share life stories and all because that's all we really have, each other," says somebody's dizzy chick.
 
I put on sunglasses; I grin.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, it's because cars are rare, because the trains run so regularly and everything is so convenient that getting to drive around the city is an experience of itself.
 
It's exactly that part of
Tokyo
near the river engineering works, where suddenly there's just sky on the break of evening that makes you feel that you've made the right decision and this is where you ought to be, the center of the universe, the cutting edge of the cutting edge.
 
Paris
?
 
NYC?
 
Those places are so last year!
 
On a day of clouds or rain,
Tokyo
washes aclean, and everywhere, in everything large and small, the palpable influence of the foreign-to-you aesthetic, the
Japan
feel, infiltrates everything, so that there's art and potential in all things, a brief glance from a girl on the sidewalk, the seemingly flimsy architecture, the display in a shoproom window.
 
You're at once in an ancient, ancient foreign country and yet the same time a new plastic fantastic metropolis, the center of fashion and commerce and desire.
 
That evening, we end up in Aoyama.

"You know the bassist for Quality of Light?"

"Yeah.
 
We went to college together.
 
He's a good guy."

"No way, that's way cool."

Soren takes us to a hole-in-the-wall bar on a side street, someplace you'd only ever find out about if somebody took you there.
 
We enter the joint, and for the first few moments are just staring around at things: the entire interior is molded in white 60s plastic, complete with corresponding day-glo fixtures, a colorful, retro circle motif, lime and orange, and bar stools, wall decorations, and lights all in the same repeating circle pattern.
 
Cibo Matto is blaring from wall-mounted speakers.
 
"Man, this place is melting," somebody says, and we're laughing at something, though we don't know what.
 
The hostess comes over and seats us at a booth.

"So, Takashi," I say, finding myself next to him, "what's been going on in your life?"

"Ahh, not much, Ritchie, same old same old.
 
So many people coming, so many people leaving, my head spinning, you know?"

"Yeah, I understand the feeling exactly.
 
Still, there are a few people who seem to just thrive here, hey?"

"Yeah, I guess a few.
 
But then sometimes I feel when new kids come in, I just getting older."

"Don't worry, dude, you look about twenty years old."

"That's what people say.
 
But Ritchie, I thirty now! So old!"

I chit-chat with one of the girls, the one who wants life stories, but she seems a bit spaced-out, just being like "wow" to everything and not seeming to quite grasp any responses, and then as a group we talk about where the most authentic Mexican food is in the city, though we all agree it's impossible to really get the stuff anywhere in Japan.
 
This is a topic of massive importance to the foreigners of
Tokyo
.
 
We can spend thousands of conversations and start bitter feuds over the question, but tonight Takashi's antsiness does not disappear, and then in what seems all of a sudden but is probably nothing of the sort, he gets a phone call and talks excitedly to whoever it is on the other end, and then has to leave, promises to meet up later that evening, and the girls, including the spacey one, decide they'd like to go for a spin as well, and suddenly all of a sudden it's back to just Soren and me, staring into our drinks as rock music blares.
 
I'm not actually all that close to Takashi, he’s just that 'foreigner-lover English speaker' who knows every single foreigner, but Soren apparently has some kind of prior friendship, and maybe as a side-effect of the Ecstasy, he seems troubled by some sort of social diss, some emotional intensification even if there's no basis in logic.
 
Or maybe Soren actually does take it harder than most; maybe he projects unruffled confidence so habitually it makes him actually much more full of doubt inside.

"Man, I think I'm about to have a breakdown."

"No, bad idea, about what?
 
Just take a deep breath and calm down."

"No, I mean really man.
 
I'm about to go."
 
Suddenly he gets up and stalks off to the bathroom.
 
When he comes back, there's the faint odor of vomit coming from him.
 
"You wouldn't understand. There's some other stuff going on.
 
 
I'm never going to get free of it. Anyway...that felt good," he says, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
 
"Just the drugs talking."

"Are you okay now?"

"Let me see."

A few minutes pass, and we hang out in the bar thinking our private thoughts.
 
Things seem to settle, but then all over again, Soren feels claustrophobic-the walls are closing in, fast—and much worse this time.
 
He needs to go; he really needs to get out of here.
 
"C'mon Ritchie, help me out here man."
 
We pay the check and leave.
 
I try to find a cab.
 
Soren's pupils are dilated.

"It's kind of a waste," I say, after he tells me he wants to take a Prozac to shut down the MDMA.
 
"Don't you know how hard it is to score good stuff?"
 
But then, he is sweating and pale, maybe even green.
 
He disappears again, this time for a convenient alley, and then returns.
 
"Ok, let's get the cab."

This time, one is right there.
 
We hustle the driver; we ride back to Roppongi, and then double-time all the way back up to Soren's twentieth-floor apartment.
 
"Okay, okay," he says, after he sweeps dozens of vials out of the bathroom medicine cabinet, and finally—finally—finally--finds that Prozac, which he dry-swallows, gulping it down.
 
Both of us collapse onto his black leather coach where we had started the evening, but with the view now of the city fully night.

"So you feel better now?"

"A thousand percent," he says, with eyes closed, and shudders.
 
He's subdued, but it's only been a matter of seconds since he swallowed the Prozac, far too early for the SSRI to have had any impact.
 
It's true what they say, I think, it is all in the mind.

"Were we sitting near an overpass, and then I went and took a piss at one point?"

"Right before we got the cab."

"Okay good, I was starting to think I hallucinated that."

For a few hot moments, I feel a flash of hatred.
 
It's one thing if those who have more than you have greater strength of character.
 
But I would never let myself get into this sort of state.
 
As quickly as it comes, though, the feeling passes; I recognize the absurdity of the situation; I'm not going to get caught up in it.
 
It's actually much later before I consider the possibility that the whole breakdown is an internal, drug-induced mind-game on Soren's part, a sort of emotional trick.
 
He's lonely; he wants a male friend.
 
This is his way of establishing grounds for me not to feel inferior in his presence, as so many others did.

This is how begins Soren's and my friendship, a brief, breathless, high-octane, flighty sort of relationship that fuels itself precisely because so many come and go in that city.
 
That summer I meet Soren, I have already been in Japan for more than an entire year, and probably met upwards of two hundred people, most of whom I end up meeting only once or twice again if ever.
 
Such is the young gaijin expat reality.
 
My Tokyo days, however, date from the beginning of knowing Soren, for it is only through him that the chaos and churn begin to fall into a recognizable pattern, and hence, one that can be exploited.
 
You go to people's parties, but do not throw your own.
 
You ask for favors, but manage to delay recompense.
 
You mooch and prevail, because there is a brand new person to meet just around the corner or landing at Narita, and they are too dazed and confused at the rush of oncoming sensations, they are too young and naive and so easily fooled, all the intensely foreign and new exotic surroundings dazzling their senses, to understand what is happening, and they accept anything and everything as merely part of the experience.
 
So long as you are relentlessly recognized as being in the know, so long as you are picking up new people faster than you are losing the old, the process is entirely sustainable.
 
In this way
Tokyo
yields to me.
 
If my new engagement of the city is actually the one that is truly naïve and trivial, if I accept this external system as my own without thinking it through enough, then this is only something inevitable, a completely foreseeable counter-season to the relative middle-class childhood and a university life on scholarship.
 
Here, now, in Japan, with Soren, with his flowing stream of acquaintances and connections, the onrushing flood-tide of people streaming through the city, and finally, yet most certainly not unimportantly, the apartment that becomes the solar center of a constellation of activity for a free-spending crowd of young undisciplined expats, I am reborn into a priest of restlessness and a prophet of those without code.