Harajuku Sunday (8 page)

"So, Oh My God, What the Hell Happened at the Party?"

By the fourth time I go over the story, I'm beginning to slightly feel the absurdity of the situation, but this time, it's a big crowd, the first really general audience since Soren's birthday, a random encounter on the street that turns out to be running into a bunch of people out for Italian food.
 
All eyes are on me.

"So there's this Chinese dude, Shan, right?
 
Apparently he pulled out a knife out on Dominique after some kind of argument.
 
But it must have happened a few days after the party."

The girl who first queries me gets a sort of puzzled look.

"But what happened to Soren?
 
Why did he suddenly disappear?
 
Is he even still in
Japan
?"

"So I hear.
 
Still going to work everyday, not like it's hard since it's all in the same building.
 
But I think he just decided that he's had enough of partying."

"Wow, that's so sudden.
 
Weird.
 
Really weird."

It's here and events similar to these that I begin to get my first lessons in what really defines a human being.
 
I watch, unreacting but burning in cynicism, as people who have drunk deeply at Soren's parties, girls who have fluttered about him cooing and tossing their hair, guys who have knocked beersteins with him and called him "mate," now deprived of the free and flowing alcohol, the apartment open at all hours of the day and night, are the quickest to turn on the missing party-boy, competing to see who could come up with the cleverest put-downs on the absent figure.
 
Old Soren would have been all over the scene like a starving bulldog on a meaty bone, ripping out the one-liners and setting up the one-two kills of anyone stupid enough to challenge the existing order.
 
But instead, radiating out of the Hills Residence is just…silence.
 
So it's fashionable now to go on the offensive, secure in the knowledge there won't be payback.

"Hey do you guys remember when he crashed his brand new car just two miles out of the showroom?
 
Talk about a dork, can't even drive straight."

"Yeah I heard he was telling everybody he was sleeping with Shannon, but she says it was him who tried to hit on her when he was drunk, and it wasn't even sexy, just annoying."

"And jeez wasn't it weird how he kept that Chinese dude around, like stuffed in his closet just for when he needed him…"

"Yeah, like some below-the-stairs retard cousin he's pull out when he wanted to offend people.
 
I can totally see that dude pulling a knife on somebody." And then the conversation turns to all sorts of stories from the era before I knew him; weird moments everyone now begins to recall.
 
“So Soren's father had contributed great sums to a school and Soren went to a banquet they threw as a representative.
 
Shan is there as one of the beneficiaries of the scholarships that are funded by the donated cash, dressed up and wheeled out for the night to explain in awkward English how grateful they are for the support.
 
At the dinner table, the two hit it off.”

"No way, you guys got it all wrong.
 
It's three a.m. on a late Friday night, and Soren has just slept with some flaky little
Paris
Hilton-wannabe who has starred in a number of low-budget Hollywood flicks and has come to
Tokyo
in some misguided belief that if she's at least somebody in
Hollywood
, in
Tokyo
she's a goddess from the heavens.
 
The girl is passed-out drunk, completely zonked-out high on cocaine, and barely coherent if awoken.
 
When Soren orders some Chinese food and the delivery boy arrives, the possibility of a ridiculously amusing prank occurs to him.
 
For 50000 yen cash, the delivery boy is convinced to undress and spend the night in that bed.
 
When the starlet awakes the next morning, what she discovers is that her vaguely-remembered night of a handsome young finance playboy was apparently in reality involved a barely-literate Chinese food delivery boy and of course she's so mortified and so terrified Soren will tell everyone that now she's his slave. And that delivery boy is Shan!”

The most likely story is just the simplest.
 
Shan and Soren just met.
 
It could have been on the street, in some park, or some random casual acquaintance.
 
Soren did have kind of a thing for
China
; I sometimes saw him with a study book practicing the strange-sounding language.
 
And you might wonder what could a buck-toothed Chinese Waseda scholarship boy from a literally stench-ridden village have in common with a spoiled American playboy?
 
But that was exactly it: they were entirely compatible.
 
When Soren went just a little too far, when he had some girl ready to be completely outraged at who he was, he could always bring Shan out of whatever little box he stored him in, and be like, "Look, this is the alternative.
 
Do you notice the complete lack of desire to please or attract women?
 
The 100% lack of fashion sense or taste in music, ability in clever conversation?
 
Be grateful you're in the company of a guy who at least opens doors for you!"
 
And that would be usually enough; that would shut up most girls.

So maybe it might be said Shan is outside his league.
 
He's hanging out with people a bit more socially sophisticated than him.
 
He's a first generation Chinese guy studying science at a prestigious Japanese university trying to handle an American girl most guys would have trouble trying to keep on an even keel.
 
You can't skip generations like that--it's you who goes to the West on a scholarship, your son who goes to medical school, and the third generation, the Americanized generation, that finally dates American girls, smokes pot, and complains cleverly about society.
 
Maybe Shan is just trying to skip ahead too much time too quickly.
 
In any case, one day we hear about the police finally coming for him, formal charges have been filed by the U.S. Embassy. Another day my cell phone rings, and it’s some new girl demanding to know the latest news. And I’m like, “Not entirely sure, but I’ll do my best to update; something’s just so strange about the whole thing...”

“You think? I think everyone just thinks that guy is a psycho.”

“Shan wanted to play the Game, he wanted to go straight from the rice paddy to being a big city player. A guy like that has got to be intense to begin with, but when he can’t just seem the grasp the strategy of doing absolutely nothing at all...”

“If you're going to visit him in jail, just don't forget to invite me. I've never been to a jail.”

And separately: “Shan, you need to understand this.
 
This is far more at stake here than just getting a criminal record.
 
If you're convicted of a felony, you lose your visa, you lose your scholarship, you lose everything you and your parents have been working for for years.
 
Just admit you had a knife, the police will let you off with a warning, and get on with your life already, it's not a serious crime.”

“Ritchie, I did not pull knife on Dominique ReyFoorve. I did not pull knife on Dominique. She is crazy girl.”

Yet throughout these strange unsettled three weeks, the biggest engine of my cynicism is one of the smallest girls, Lydia, a little chipmunk-faced girl who comes over to join us, and who I watch literally switch positions in mid-sentence as she realizes which way the wind is blowing after spending a week out of town and being out of the loop. One second she's talking about how cool Soren is for getting a gang in to Vanilla ahead of the crowd; the next, she's agreeing how uncool his parties were, how bored she was all the times she was there.

IV.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to say what the major contributing factors are to the crisis of that mad, terrible summer.
 
The simple passage of age reveals that youth, burning with passion and dreams for what they will do with their lives, inevitably clash with each other with a terrible force that comes from mere inexperience.
 
But more simply speaking, it is not the wild crazy riots erupting in
China
on the anniversary of some wartime atrocity nor the “
Tokyo
prep school scandal” of the donor clashing with the established teacher at
Tokyo
's top international school that sets the mood for things: rather, it is simply the terrible, oppressive heat.

That year is a scorcher.
 
In June comes two one hundred degree days; July has a week of them.
 
August never drops below ninety, and then the heat just kept going.
 
September's temperatures are those of a typical summer's July, and there was no cool and refreshing breeze until the very last day of October, Halloween, when the heat finally broke into an autumn that came fully seven weeks late.
 
With this intense, solar radiance pouring into the urban heat island of
Tokyo
, all reflective surfaces miniature suns, and the humidity and temperature skyrocketing, the almost palpable waves of heat flowing through concrete walls and intervening trees to hold you in its insufferable grasp, meltingly hot, it is no wonder that the situation is fully primed for an explosive cataclysm.
 
Melting melting melting. We are melting into agonizing heat.
 
That inescapable heat—against which weak Japanese air conditioning units can barely keep up—is like a primeval force, a hated enemy that one meets at every corner.
 
You go left, heat. You go right, heat.
 
Every second stretches into agony,
 
sweat pours from every pore, yet the heat is inescapable.
 
Shimmering and simmering and slithering in broad waves, the heat engulfs one; the heat floods one.
 
You can't think straight.
 
One hundred ten degrees and rising, feeling nothing shy of one hundred fifty.

“Hey boys and girls, do you like to learn English?!”

There is a kind of male personality, not terribly cool, not terribly smart, but bright enough in its own way to specialize in an intellectual niche of its own, that is attracted to
Japan
and
Japan
alone.
 
These kinds of Japanophile boys, and they aren't really fully men, let's be fair, are usually all right to deal with if they have a bit of boyscout in them or an easy-going temperament, but some for whatever reason of personality or background, find themselves caught up in the bizarre uniquely unique mix of Japanese identity such that they become almost a parody of themselves; if they are political without being canny; if they are just macho enough to understand what they aren't but not so macho as to avoid being an English teacher in the first place, well then they turn into a sort of nerdy Japanophile artificially cheerful about teaching middle-school kids English, at worst wearing an American flag bow-tie and perpetual glued-on smile, “English is fun,” “English is easy,” “let's all learn English today,” the famous so-called 'English language monkey' or ‘backpacker punk on a lark’ getting his two thousand a month.

In the normal passage of things, these people would always inhabit the niche they do, living out their days in
Japan
with Dumiko their pregnant thirty-six year old Japanese girlfriend, their half-breed children, and their semi-impoverished existence giving way to a life drear and utterly hopeless aging in some forgotten road-end of lost
Japan
.
 
What sets the situation into motion, however, is the arrival of Soren a few years prior and his wild, alpha-male partyboy ways, his loud and continual contempt of these “Genki [=Perpetual Cheerful] English Teacher Monkeys,” and the simmering social outrage that I had detected as early as our first meeting, now, finally, can have its way.

Who knew that Redd (English language monkey extraordinaire) would feel such self-hatred and know in some small way that everything Soren said had a point?
 
Who could have told that Julian grew up all his days in
Wichita
dreaming of all the easy Japanese girls who would drop into his lap and of his clever little intellectual niche he could finally parlay into some kind of cool only to be a half-failed filmmaker?
 
The only thing we knew is that there were these types of individuals, and that for them,
Japan
was Supposed to Have Been the way they thought it was going to be.
 
But here was the same prep school jock and football hero taunting them as at home, and apparently getting all the girls.
 
Here they find Soren, still cool, still unreachable, still getting all the girls.
 
For them, Soren was the root of all evil, and now, finally, the day of the nerds has come; the hour of the revenge of the geeks has arrived, and they can strike back with all of their repressed fury, so confident and powerful as they choose to do so on the Internet.