Twenty-Six (33 page)

Only a small proportion of the vehicles in the central city were private passenger cars. The rest were passenger buses, green-and-yellow taxis with rear doors that gaped open and slammed shut at the push of a button from the driver’s seat, two-wheel, three-wheel, and four-wheel scooters, some with plastic bubble visors, some with roofs, used to deliver pizza, noodles, curry, coffee, developed photos, videos, groceries, alcohol, cooked rice in covered Styrofoam containers, uncooked rice in bulky plastic bags. Scaled-down cars that reminded her of Volkswagen Beetles with mumps, mini-garbage trucks, flatbed trailers, souped-up motorcycles ridden by messengers covered head to toe in red leather, chauffeur-driven sedans carrying government and company officials, limousines carrying gangsters with permed hair and tattoos, one-speed bicycles with rattly fenders and big parcel carriers fore and aft, carrying commuting business types from home to station and back.

Everyone dressed conservatively: blue or grey or brown business suits with white shirts and ties for men. Blue or grey or brown skirt suits with white blouses for women. Even on the weekends, the dress code was strict. Belted tan pants with a designer-logo sweatshirt and loafers for men, pleated slacks and loose-sleeved blouses for women.

Meta noticed that if she acted like a Canadian, said
sorry
when someone stepped on her toes, let others go ahead of her in line,
she didn’t stand a chance in Tokyo. No matter what day of the week it was, the prevailing pace in Tokyo was one of urgency. Everyone had to get where they were going quickly, as though all were perpetually terrified of tardiness.

Isetan sat directly atop Shinjuku Station, which someone at her college had told her was the busiest train station in the world. Meta could have descended to the underground without leaving the department store and taken a train to Yotsuya San-chome, not far from her apartment, but she’d been lost underground in Shinjuku Station already and she’d vowed never to go down there again. Having emerged from Isetan onto the street, she instinctively sought shelter from the mad-with-motion crowd. She rushed headlong down Shinjuku-dori in the direction of Shinjuku San-chome. When the crowd thinned a little after four or five long blocks, she ducked down a side street to where she remembered a Kohikan she visited a week before. Her legs were tired from walking, standing, waiting, and what she most wanted to do was go home. But at present, she couldn’t face any of the means of getting there.

The Kohikan’s gleaming shopfront of glass and polished chrome stood out in contrast to the block of sooty and dusty brick. She slipped through the door and made her way immediately to the booth at the back that was surrounded by a brass-plated railing. She liked this booth precisely because it felt so isolated. The light from the windows at the front of the shop didn’t reach there, most customers didn’t peer this far back into the shop. The smell of fresh, strong coffee being ground and brewed began to revive and console her. She took off her coat and hung it on a coatrack beside the booth and sat down.

A slim young waiter approached her tentatively, afraid, she
knew, that he’d face some unforeseen difficulty with this foreign client. He passed her a menu. Without looking at it, she said:

“Toki-meki kohi,”
Heart-beating-fast coffee
. “Onegaishimasu.”
Please
. He smiled with relief and bolted for the counter, where he would grind the beans, measure the grounds, boil the water, and filter her exactly one cup of coffee.

She took the wrapped box of ornaments from the Isetan bag, placed it carefully on the table and once again admired the beauty of its wrapping. The contents of the box were ornaments, but the box actually looked better than what was in it.

“I love you. I love you. I love you,” someone in the restaurant said in North American English. “Why do they make this so complicated?”

Meta closed her eyes and shrank into her seat. She wished she could vaporize herself, disappear in a stream of particles and reappear behind the locked door of her apartment. There were few enough foreigners in this city that it was relatively rare to find herself in a subway car or restaurant with another gaijin, but when she did, she was almost always mortified at how loudly other gaijin spoke in public. Hadn’t they noticed how rude it sounded?

“Toki-meki kohi desu,” the waiter said. She opened her eyes to acknowledge receipt of the coffee, and looked across the restaurant to the table directly in front of the shop window. There he was, the big obnoxious foreigner who gushed out loud about love in a public place. He was hunched over a piece of paper with a pen in his right hand, scratching. On the other side of the booth, two young women bantered back and forth in Japanese, now and then pointing to something on the paper the foreigner was filling out and explaining in broken English, so quietly Meta could barely hear what they were saying.

“What’s the point in only having these forms in Japanese if they let you fill them out in English?” the man was saying to no one in particular. Neither of the women across from him was listening. “What’s this part again?” He held the sheet up and pointed at a corner of it. Both women leaned in and looked carefully at the sheet.

The sugar on Meta’s table was in the form of brown, rock-like crystals. She dissolved a few of these in the black coffee, then picked up the tiny white china creamer from the side of her saucer and emptied it into the cup. She stirred this mixture together with a small gold-coloured spoon and savoured the first sip of the bittersweet blend.

She took her green notebook from her handbag.
HIGH GRADE NOTEBOOK
was written in big black letters across the top. In smaller lettering beneath appeared the statement:
this notebook was made by automatic and excellentic machine
. Two months ago, when she’d seen this notebook on a shelf in a stationery store, it had delighted her. Since then, she had seen a pencil case with “The recycling strategy with a 100% increase in fascination” on it, a plastic ruler that said “Bastard!”, and a T-shirt with a picture of a rooster on it that said “I am king of cock.” She’d enjoyed having a chuckle at the slightly askew sentence on the notebook’s cover before, and probably would again, but at present it only bewildered her.

The first letter I wrote you started off like this:

“Excuse me.”

Meta jumped back from what she’d been writing, and instinctively, without looking up, flipped the page so no one could read it. She glanced up to see the big foreigner she’d been watching fill out the form earlier. He stood over her with what he no doubt considered his best, most pleasant smile. His cotton dress shirt held big creases where the starch had given way. He wore a dark-blue tie and a navy suit that was slightly too large for his slim frame.

“Can you speak English?” he asked.

She leaned back from him a little and could not stop herself from quickly eyeing him up and down. His brown shoes were scuffed down to the undyed leather.

“Yes,” she said quietly, cautiously.

“I’m sorry,” he said, softening his face even more. “Was that a yes?”

Meta nodded.

“I need to ask a favour,” the man said. His hair needed trimming, and his face was grey, as though he hadn’t eaten properly in a while. Still, Meta realized now that he was younger than she was. He was twenty-one, twenty, maybe even nineteen. She did not respond, physically or verbally. She did not move a muscle to indicate that she’d even consented to listen.

“I’m going to marry that girl over there,” he said. He pointed back to the table where he’d been sitting, where there were clearly
two
young women. He did not bother to acknowledge this, let alone differentiate his intended from his unintended. He paused now to regard Meta. His eyes focused on her forehead, then her lips, then quickly flitted down to glance at her breasts before returning to her eyes.

“I need …” he glanced over his shoulder and seemed slightly
unnerved, much less sure of himself than he’d been a minute ago. “We need … another witness.”

Meta bit her top lip as she thought a moment.

“What would I have to do?” she asked.

“Just sign this form.”

“Just sign it. Nothing more?”

“Name and address is all this form asks for.”

“I don’t have to go to the ward office?”

“No.”

“They’re pretty trusting.”

“One thing I really like about this country,” the man said, “is it proves that if you treat people as though they deserve to be trusted, they will act trustworthy.”

“I can’t read this form, so I don’t know what I’m signing,” she said.

“I know it’s asking for a lot in a way. It’s just that we have to do this today because …”

“All right, I’ll sign,” Meta said. She interrupted him deliberately so she would not have to find out anything about him and his wife-to-be.

“This says
name
and this says
address
,” the man said, pointing to the blanks on the page.

“Mathilde LeBlanc,” Meta wrote in the square for name. Beside address, she furtively copied the address of the coffee shop off of the dessert menu posted on the napkin dispenser.

“Thanks so much,” the man said as she handed him back the form. “We really appreciate this. Listen, can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?”

“No,” Meta said, guilty that he was so appreciative of her lie.
When Meta got back to her own apartment, she was tired enough to sleep, though it was only mid-afternoon. There was a note taped to her door, a piece of pink paper, folded once in the middle.

Please come to my place!
it said in the scrolly writing of someone to whom the Roman alphabet was straight and square and foreign. She left the note on the door in the hope that Yuka would think she hadn’t returned yet. She almost had the door closed when a knock on the opposite side of it startled her. When she opened it, Yuka stood in the doorway in a faded floral smock. Her head was inclined forward in an attitude of supplication.

“Please come to my place!” Yuka said in a breathy voice.

Too tired to argue, Meta followed Yuka into her apartment and took off her shoes before stepping up onto the tatami.

Yuka and her son lived in an apartment only a little larger than the one Meta lived in by herself. Three of them had lived there for years, before her husband had died. Yuka herself had been here for at least nineteen years, since her wedding day in 1968, and it seemed to Meta that she had not had the heart yet to change much since the husband had passed on. Yuka’s husband, whom she referred to as Mr. Tamaguchi, had been a highly placed salaryman in a Japanese pharmaceutical company. His salary had afforded them very nice furniture and appliances, but Yuka had explained that Mr. Tamaguchi’s family, when he himself was scarcely old enough to remember, had been deeply affected by the hardships and scarcity of the war. Yuka’s nice furnishings were crammed into the apartment alongside the older furnishings that no one would buy second-hand, but that Mr. Tamaguchi had not been able to bring himself to throw out. The apartment was overwhelmed with an accumulation of things. Their small living room contained two couches, two armchairs,
two televisions, two stereos, a china closet so full that the contents seemed painted on the glass of the doors, a coffee table and four chairs, a portable sewing machine, a gas heater, a dehumidifier, and a partially covered stack of tightly folded clothing, for which there was no other storage space, that reached almost to the ceiling in one corner.

The cluttered room, along with the stale smell of years of smoking in this tiny place, pushed in on Meta’s chest, making it difficult for her to breathe.

She sat at the dining table while Yuka poured coffee for them and took a seat opposite her. Her son, Kazuhiro, sat slumped, completely without expression or movement, into a corner of the newer couch. He did not speak any English, so Meta greeted him in Japanese. “Konichiwa.” He did not respond. The newer television was turned on, but no one was watching it. On screen was a game show in which a group of shivering, frightened-looking young men were being forced to jump into a pool of ice water.

“What happened to your hand?” Meta asked, pointing at a circular mark at the V of Yuka’s right thumb and forefinger. Yuka covered it quickly with her left hand. “I burn it at the cooker,” she said. Meta stood up to get a better look at the wound. “My god, that looks really painful,” she said, gently pulling away the concealing hand.

“Not so painful,” Yuka said.

“Ouch!” Meta said in sympathy. She looked Yuka in the eye. “You burned this … at the cooker?”

Yuka blinked uncomfortably a moment, then looked away.