Zeitgeist (26 page)

“Hear anything from Eno lately?” Starlitz prodded.

“I know him back in Roxy Music,” Makoto said by reflex. “I know Brian Eno when he wear makeup and feathers.”

“D’you read his new book? The one about a year in the 1990s?”

“Professor Eno very good writer,” Makoto admitted sourly. He rolled his tongue inside his mouth and slowly emitted a quote. “ ‘Not doing the thing that nobody had ever thought of not doing.’ ”

Starlitz pondered this remark. Not many Europeans could have written that sentence. “Eno is heavy, man.”

“I keep diary for year 1999 now. ‘Oblique Strategy.’ ” Makoto looked up, stirring the noodle pot languidly. “You keep diary, Reggae?”

“Kind of a principle with me not to leave any paper trails.”

“You always on the road. You settle down, better for you. Got little girl, she happier with big house.”

“Look, man, don’t tell me that. That’s what I told
you
, remember? Not me.
You
.”

Makoto offered a sphinxlike grin. “We very balance here.”

Two of Makoto’s staffers drifted in, uniformed, tidy, and blissed out to the eyeballs. “We found another centipede in the sofa, chief,” one of them offered in Japanese.

“Well, tell me,” Makoto replied in Japanese, “was it a large, sluggish brown one, or one of those little electric-blue toxic bastards?”

“Big brown one, chief.”

“Stop fretting. The geckos will eat it.”

“You gettum plenty bug here?” Starlitz offered, in his execrable Japanese.

Makoto nodded sharply. “Like you wouldn’t believe, brother! It’s the damp. We sponge the mold off these plastic walls every week or so, but the bugs live under the house on the pilings. They breed inside those dead macadamia stumps.” Makoto scratched thoughtfully at his round, fluffy head. “The worst part of living here is the constant salt breezes. Ate all my studio equipment. Cars, computers, tape drives, you can pretty well name it: it just goes.”

The staffers drifted to a rust-spotted refrigerator and began removing fruit. They moved silently, but with amazing languor, as if under light hypnosis. One of them sliced through a big fleshy mango with a ceramic Nipponese blade the color of crab meat. The other started up a spavined Braun food processor. Someone in a remote area of the house put on a bonging tape of Balinese gamelan.

“That rust trouble too bad. Big shame,” Starlitz sympathized.

“Houseplants, though,” Makoto offered suavely. “This island has the best volcanic soil in the world. I have a bonsai on our back porch that’s three meters tall.”

“A bonsai? So big?”

“It’s a
joke
.”

“Sorry, my Japanese plenty rusty now.”

“Reggae, trust me, that illiterate crap you were speaking in that bar in Roppongi, that was never Japanese. That was your own unique personal dialect. That was Reggaeese.”

Makoto drained the pot and poured the noodles into a spotless tapered ceramic bowl. “You eat noodle!” he told Zeta in English. “Enjoy!”

Zeta grinned. “Gimme some chopsticks, guy!”

Supplied with sticks, Zeta began vacuuming her noodles with many piercing slurps.

Makoto eased himself onto a padded chrome stool. “I didn’t think she resembled you at first, but now I can perceive a strong family trait.”

Starlitz nodded.
“Hai.
”

“It’s very pleasant to meet this young lady. I heard you mention your daughter before, but I thought it was one of those impossible American divorce and custody things. Not that I mean to pry.”

Starlitz lowered his head in a jittery half-bow. “I’m sorry about leaving the act. About G-7. My fault.
Gomen nasai.
”

“Reggae, my brother, trust me, I understand. This is one of those
giri
and
ninjo
problems. It’s either
giri
, or it’s
ninjo
. That is human life. A man has to make his own karma, understand me? Either way is fine with me.”

Zeta looked up with a scowl from her rapidly vanishing noodles. “Stop talking so much Japanese! And especially stop talking so much Japanese about me.”

“You like to shop?” said Makoto artlessly.

“Spending money? Sure!”

“Your dad and I, we talk some business now. Kats take you to cool surf shop in Lihue. You buy everything groovy.” Makoto turned to a smoothie-guzzling staffer and spoke. “Katsu, take this haole kid downtown. Show her every clip joint on the beach. And use the MasterCard this time. It’s got the entertainment account.”

“Is the Lexus running, chief?”

“Sort of.”

“Okay.”

“They know us in Lihue,” said Makoto, polishing off a final chunk of Spam. “Everybody knows everybody, on a small island like this. You bring a crew of twenty in from Tokyo, you run a big tab at Taisho’s down on the South
Shore—that’s the only sushi joint in Kauai that has fresh squid—well, people get to know all about you. People look after each other around here. Even the Anglos have Asian values. So your daughter will be okay.”

Zeta emptied her bowl. “I need to use the bathroom, Dad.”

Makoto gestured silently at a speckled plyboo exit.

They left. Then Zeta looked up at him candidly. “Is Makoto a nice guy, Dad?”

“He’s very rich.”

“But he’s kind of nice, right? He’s not mad at you about the band. Those were good noodles.”

“Yeah. Okay. Ten or twelve layers down, under the contracts, and the record deals, and the touring, and all the times he got screwed over, and all the trouble he has to take to be one of the hippest sons of bitches in the world—yeah, Makoto’s a nice guy.”

They got lost in the nexus of interlocking flow-spaces, and emerged somehow in Makoto’s master bedroom. There were two floral-printed beds in there, amid a private maze of sandalwood screens. The place had a damp sexual reek of patchouli, musk, and wheat germ.

Starlitz noted that Makoto’s bedtime reading was a dog-eared copy of Haruki Murakami’s
Norwegian Wood
.

Makoto was obsessed with the novelist. He had read all the guy’s books with fanatical faithfulness,
Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, Hard-Boiled Wonderland
, even the bug-crushing
Wind-Up Bird Chronicles
, which read like fifty kilos of boiled radishes if you weren’t Japanese, but if you
were
Japanese, it was a scarifying, transformative cultural experience.

Norwegian Wood
, Murakami’s first novel, was the narrative keystone of the Murakami oeuvre, in that it was all about an appallingly hip, soulful, and sensitive Japanese dude, with tremendously good taste in clothing and music, who is way too good for this sorry world, and is right on the verge of deciding to kill himself—but then, his girlfriend obligingly kills herself first. Only people who weren’t Japanese could be crass enough to find this story
line funny. From a Japanese perspective this was a tale of total sexual, political, and existential authenticity.

There had been one crucial, Suntory-whiskey-and-Gekkeikan-sake-drenched night in Goruden Gai when, over the drunken bellowing of the sweating, tightly packed crowd in an ultrahip bar the size of a phone booth, Makoto had been getting this crucial narrative point across to Starlitz.

Starlitz had listened with great care. It was always worth talking to Makoto. The guy was a great listener, he had astounding ears. Makoto’s ears were the best-looking things on his head. Makoto could hear things that scarcely any human being on earth could hear.

So Starlitz had remarked: “Makoto, I definitely see why the girlfriend has to go. That is a totally dramatic and moving resolution of the story line. By hanging herself she’s validating the hero’s unspoken anguish. But let’s just assume—for argument’s sake—that the protagonist has a higher-level grasp of his existential situation. He
knows
that he is an arty intellectual having a lethal identity crisis in his highly conflicted, ultracommercial Japanese society. So, as an act of deliberate perversity he arranges that the girlfriend
doesn’t
kill herself. Instead, the girlfriend is well fed, properly exercised, looked after, respected, and pampered in every conceivable way.”

“Reggae, that would be a lousy novel.”

“Of course it would, but listen to me, man:
Norwegian Wood
is only forty-five thousand words long. That is a fucking
short book
, Makoto. If you swallow that fishhook, you and the girlfriend are gonna choke on your own vomit like Hendrix and Joplin. But if you somehow break that master narrative, you’re gonna be rolling in royalties when every other tortured artist who is the voice of his fucking Japanese generation is stuck in a fucking cremation urn.”

This was a rather involved debate, but Starlitz’s Japanese always improved radically when everyone around him had been drinking heavily. Makoto heard what he was told, and something important broke inside
of him. Makoto had to elbow his way out of the bar and into a Tokyo alley, to throw up everything he understood.

After that incident Makoto had stopped writing his own incredible, idiosyncratic songs, which nobody comprehended anyway, and started writing brilliant global-pop pastiches that generated large sums of money on a regular basis.

“Dad, is this a bathroom?”

“Yeah. I think this must be Barbara’s bathroom.”

“Dad, can you come in there with me? I’m kind of scared.”

It was a very scary bathroom. Glaring stage mirrors and big fluffy carpets. Scented candles. Incense. Peacock feathers. Oils. A walk-in makeup arsenal. Terry-cloth shower sarongs in eight shades of tropical pastel. Barbara’s eyelash curlers looked like Swiss quark-smashing equipment from CERN in Geneva. There was a highly polished bronze Kali in the corner with big gleaming seashell eye-whites.

“Dad, what is
that
thing?”

“That’s called a bidet, honey.”

“She doesn’t have any toilet in here, Dad.”

It was true. The diva possessed no toilet. “Uh, we’ll try Makoto’s bathroom instead. He’s pretty much bound to have a toilet.”

Makoto had a low, crouching Japanese toilet surrounded by gently mildewing stacks of
Metropolis
and
I.D
.

Zeta set her lips firmly, in grim feminine commitment. “I can’t go here. I’ll just wait.”

“You sure you can wait all the way to Lihue?”

She nodded. “I guess I have to.”

AFTER ZETA’S SLOUCHING DEPARTURE IN THE LEXUS, Starlitz and Makoto met over honeysuckle-ginseng tea in a lava-lined conversation pit. Makoto’s low coffee table had the black lacquered gleam of a concert Steinway. The walls here were hung with exquisite ukiyo-e Masami Teraoka originals, from the Hawaiian artist’s legendary
“McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan” series. Makoto had put his manifold charity plaques on display: his involvement in African river worm blindness campaigns, Caribbean AIDS testing, free flak jackets for UNICEF workers. Outside the sliding Perspex doors lurked a pebbled Zen garden, with a raked sea of symbolic pebbles washing against six large concrete chunks of the demolished Berlin Wall.

“
Tabako
?” offered Makoto.

“I quit again.”

“Me too,” Makoto lied. With feigned indifference he tossed aside a pack of imported Seven Stars. Then he opened a mahogany box and lit a tightly rolled reefer. He dropped the match in a massive onyx tray.

“One of these days the Big Boom will return to Nippon,” he offered tangentially.

“That’s what they say. There’s bound to be a boom for every bubble.”

“When Japan rich and happy again, then I go back to live. I go back often, you know. For studio work. But … it’s like spirit die in Japan. Everything smell of decay.”

“Smelled Russia lately?”

Makoto laughed. “Russia drink too much, never work. Of course they are broke. But why are
Japanese
broke? Japanese work very hard every day! Why, Reggae?”

“You tell me, man. Why should I have all the answers?”

Makoto sniffed fragrant resinous smoke, cracked his solid guitar-playing knuckles, and switched to Japanese. “It’s true: you don’t have all the answers. That’s obvious to both of us now. Because you lost the bet.”

“That’s right.”

“The French One died. Snorting smack. In some crap hotel in the middle of Asia.”

Starlitz said nothing.

“I thought you’d win that bet, Reggae. Not that I cared. It was a crazy bet. Why would you want to make a bet like that? You win the bet, you get a little money. You lose that bet: you have to be magic, baby. Magic.”

Starlitz spoke in English. “I wouldn’t call three hundred million yen tax-free ‘a little money.’ I would have had some major use for that kind of bread. On the far side of Y2K a fat stack of yen would have been handy.”

“It isn’t much money,” shrugged Makoto. “First hundred million yen is hardest. But now, you lost. Right?” He looked at Starlitz candidly, vague interest dawning.

Starlitz shrugged mournfully. “Yeah. So I’ll be magic, man. I’ll be magic for you real soon now.”

“Where did it go wrong?” said Makoto.

“Well, man, I’ve been thinking about that. Seriously. It would be easy to say that I blew off the gig for personal reasons. Because of my little girl, and the
giri
and the
ninjo
obligations, and all that. Yeah, I dropped the G-7 gig, I gave it up. But if it wasn’t my daughter showing up, it just would have been somethin’ else. It was just dumb of me to think that we could create a multinational pop act that would make us a shitload of money, but that had absolutely no talent, soul, inspiration, or musical sincerity whatsoever.”

“It make good sense. Basic modern trend of the industry.”

Starlitz spread his hands. “Sure, sure. I mean, of course you and I could create a successful global pop act. We had the capital, we had the know-how, we had the contacts. But I couldn’t
get away
with that. The world only
looks
that fucking cynical. I was violating a major narrative. I should have
known
some girl would end up getting dramatically killed over G-7, even though the act was totally bogus and meant absolutely nothing.” Starlitz sighed. “And it was the
French One
too. That clinches it for sure, man. See, the French One was the very best one, she understood the whole G-7 pitch, she knew we were creating a scene that was a total precession of the simulacrum with no real signifiers. Besides, she was the only one who could sing.”