He finally answered as his head hit the pillow.
‘Okay, the architect gets to make the decision on the house. Go and see it again tomorrow and you decide.’
Shimokitazawa, 2012
As she poured a mixer into the second Whisky Mac, the diamante on Hana’s short evening dress caught the bar spotlight like a cheap promise. She could carry as many drinks on the small, silvered tray as a Chinese acrobat now. While watching the effervescence Hana mentally measured her progress since leaving London: she had charted the temples in six districts of Tokyo and had to acknowledge what she could only describe as a personal insolvency. Living in Japan, with all its eccentricities, seemed an occupation in itself and she felt she was trapped sleeping or spending hours in the persistent half-light of the basement club.
The blinking neon arrow to the basement attracted mostly benign regulars. They were now on smiling terms with Hajime, who needed no encouragement to show off his broken tooth. The undernourished doorman had a prominent kanji character tattooed on his chin and she wondered what communication he had chosen to make ever so visible. He was paid to filter newcomers and the clients she had seen were fine. It was a relief that Tako had never once appeared. The job was just as it had been advertised: easy job; easy money.
Two months before she arrived, a hostess was abducted north of the city but she had stopped worrying that the same fate would befall every bar worker in Japan. She had Jess, and, besides, Wednesday night – their night off, when the transvestite danced – was as lively as it got.
Tom had rung, last night, and said he had issues with her working in a hostess bar. It was hard enough that eight hours behind, they didn’t speak often enough, but to have a disagreement too. His criticism was easier to bear than news that he was seeing a lot of Sadie. He had suggested the lawyer Ed should find some documentation: something with her name, or Naomi’s name … or his name. But there was nothing positive in the Helvetica Neue font that returned her text messages. Ed was out of the country. He was tied up.
Jess was over at the other end of the bar, picking her nails with a toothpick with great concentration. Backlit with amber light from the wall of whisky, she looked like someone Hana didn’t know. The bottles were tagged with personal labels for individual clients – Tanaka, Saito, Nakamura, Watanabe – warding off the impersonal among so many people. Jess slipped off her chair, pulling at her Lycra dress, to come and sit beside her.
‘Day off tomorrow. We’ll get a bento picnic from the 7-Eleven and take it to temple six hundred and fifty three?’ Jess’ enthusiasm was flagging.
Emiko, dressed as usual as a geisha hostess in her red kimono, brought them a tray of newly washed tumblers.
‘Polish those smiles.’ Her tone was pleasant.
The air was smoke-filled as Hana took up the lint cloth, behind her an enlarged print of an old woodblock, ‘The Diver’: an erotic dream of a geisha, lying in folds of generous kimono silk coupled with a giant octopus. Every tentacle, as she carried its weight, searched out an orifice. Emiko had explained that the kanji hieroglyphics floating like bubbles over the geisha, were moans of pleasure.
Emiko followed her disapproving gaze.
‘It’s okay, the artist got a month’s jail sentence for his efforts.’
Emiko motioned Jess to move causing her pretty hair ornaments to backchat in her heavily sprayed hair.
Aiming her toothpick at the ashtray Jess intended to offend.
‘Club rules. You girls can’t sit together.’ Emiko shuffled off in her two-toed socks and wedged geta.
Hana guessed the need for quiet respect among the shaky reality of lucky, nodding cats, of piped birdsong, of posters of tiger-maned genii gulping energy drinks, or large-eyed manga characters endorsing air-con systems. She had to invest in them herself and yet the references were still cold. She could not see how Naomi could possibly have belonged here.
‘Smile and play beautiful,’ Emiko called from the kitchenette, reminding them again to move apart.
‘We are starting to look like corpses,’ Jess complained of their nocturnal hours.
Her lips glossed a vampire-red made Hana giggle.
Emiko’s silken arm interrupted them to retrieve an ashtray from between them, her departure stiff, the ornamental cherry blossom in her hair shook indignantly. Hana gently pushed Jess until she slipped off her stool obediently.
‘I’m done here,’ Jess whispered vehemently out of the blue.
New clients arrived and the room became ionized with expectancy. Yoshi was a regular and his party tonight was Australian.
As Emiko had taught her to, Hana called out his regular beer order before Yoshi reached her: ‘Asahi, Sapporo, Sapporo.’ The longer the memory, the larger the tip. Was this the kind of man who might have known her father? The missing man who hadn’t even registered his name on her birth certificate? She had begun to toy with an identikit for him, which she revised and reconstructed at whim: the cosmopolitan business man lost to tragedy; the composer of international standing; the trading-company shogun.
Jess was to host another group of Australians from a shipping company as Hana wiped the condensation off the cold drinks. Deferentially she offered each man a glass as if it were jewel-encrusted. It was uncomfortable for her as she somehow found it sexually charged. Jess fell on the English speakers, as if she was dehydrated and they could quench her thirst.
The karaoke wailed.
Hana wanted to know what Hajime, the doorman, had stamped on his chin. At first Emiko left her to guess.
‘Mum. He is not so rough as he looks.’ She laughed.
She had to serve shabu-shabu stew, and as she stepped up to the tatami matting, across the smoke-filled room, waving from the exit, about to leave with one of the Australians, she spotted Jess,. Hana knelt to pour the hot sake. Why had she ignored their pact not to go off alone? It was about 2 a.m. and she hadn’t finished her shift. She couldn’t follow her.
She watched Emiko pick her way through raw scallions and carrots cut as blossom, to adjust the flame. In her concentration Emiko’s red-pressed lips might have been made of plastic. She ceremoniously brought a lacquer bowl to Hana’s ear, pausing for her to appreciate a skittering noise, eliciting Hana’s soft revulsion. This had become a ritual performance and, as the crustacean slipped into the boiling stock, Hana’s foreigner scruples made it a regular party trick.
Emiko confirmed that Jess had indeed left the club. Would her anger or concern win?
Emiko’s patience with Jess had finally run out.
‘Don’t worry.’ Her ornaments trembled in frustration ‘She does this.’
Hana left, emerging from the basement with her eyes closed against the sharp morning light.
When she opened them she saw a lone policeman, on the first shift at the Koban, stretching his arms. In the silence of the early morning, an apprentice monk stood across the road, his Buddhist habit and white leggings shaded under a straw-brimmed hat. He wouldn’t see many people at this hour. so the alms bowl he cradled seemed useless. The futility of it all. All she could do was wait at the homestay for Jess. As she left, club music drifted up from the depths, reminding her of home.
No one, she realized, could accompany her on this journey if she never made a move herself.
But where was Jess?
Hana