A Woman's Nails Page 20

  She, for I never caught her name, lay down on a bed in the corner; I sat on the floor drinking shôchû. When she asked why I was sitting so far away, I put my shôchû down and sat on the edge of the bed. She motioned for me to also lay down, so I did, facing her.

  She was pretty, not a blemish to be found in her lovely ivory countenance. Tracing her soft features and full lips with my fingers, I told her she was beautiful and kissed her.

  When I woke the next morning, she was gone. All that remained was a tussle of damp sheets redolent of her fragrance and the image of her gorgeously plump body, ghostly blue from a distant streetlight outside, moving slowly and silently like a specter above me.

  At a time when I’m panhandling for friends, Alex is the only person I’m able to call a friend without cringing with embarrassment. That is saying a lot when you consider the sad excuses I’ve had the pleasure of meeting over the months.

  First off, there’s Dave, the guy who rented me a room in the condominium in the middle of nowhere when I moved to Fukuoka from Kitakyûshû. A degenerate gambler and womanizer, the only time he ever calls me up nowadays is when he wants to separate me from my money. “Hey, P, how’s it goin’? We oughta get together for a beer,” he’d begin affably.

  “Sounds great, Dave.”

  “By the way, do you need a couple of ceiling fans?”

  Ceiling fans? Is he high? I can’t imagine what I’d do with one, let alone two, ceiling fans. “No, not really.”

  “No? Ah, that's too bad. They’re a real bargain. Well, I’ll catch you later, P.”

  Then there’s the Canadian I met a few weeks ago.

  “Wow, you can speak Japanese,” he said, overhearing me chat up a Japanese girl at the Big Apple.

  “Not very well, I’m afraid.”

  He was fresh off the boat and as overwhelmed by everything as I had been a year earlier. I took him to Umie for a beer, where we ended up talking for hours. It had been months since another foreigner opened up to me, confessing all the things that were confusing and worrying him. I reciprocated by relating my experiences, the good, the bad and the miserable. I gave him my number and encouraged him to call anytime.

  As the Canadian was leaving, one of bartenders asked me if he was my friend. I looked towards the exit as he was walking out. Blond curls poked from under a gray baseball cap. “Yeah,” I replied. “Yeah, he is my friend.”

  To my happy surprise, the Canadian rang me up a week later and we arranged to meet at the Big Apple. He wasn’t there when I arrived, but I had expected as much: they don’t come much “looser” than Canadians.

  I sat down at a table by myself and started drinking, drank until I’d become drunk, continued drinking some more until the good mood that had accompanied me to the Big Apple had fizzled away. Only after I had become thoroughly useless with drink, barely able to manage the stool I was teetering on, let alone a conversation, did the jerk arrive. He was two and a half hours late, beaming like an idiot. I was two and a half hours deep into my cups, careening precariously.

  “How ya doin’, Pete?" he said, and flitted off into the crowd of dancers before I could tell him my name wasn't “Pete”.

  I left the bar alone, staggered down the street to Umie and hid in the comfortable anonymity of a dark corner where I sulked over two more beers. With my wallet running on fumes, I finally stood up and with uneasy steps began the long walk home.

  As I passed Big Apple, I caught sight of the Canadian, bent over and straining to tongue a chubby girl half his height.

  Good for you, I thought. Nice one!

  I considered continuing on, going home where the promise of a clean toilet to puke in awaited me, but decided, instead, to say good-night to the man whose invitation had coaxed me out of my caliginous hole in the first place. I wanted to give the friendship a chance, wanted to meet some other night when we could talk without having to worry about the time or without trying to get laid, talk until he had exhausted his curiosity and more importantly until I’d exorcised a demon or two.

  “Hey, Pete,” he said, finally coming up for air. He’d been going at it with piggy for so long, I was sure the two of them would asphyxiate.

  I tried to tell him I was heading home, but the words came out in an awkward slur. When I began to ask if he had plans for next weekend, he separated himself from the chick, and took a few steps towards me.

  “Oh man, this is all I do, y'know? I mean, the only reason I come here, eh, is for the cheap beer and that,” he said with a nod towards the girl. The little piggy leaned against the wall with her head down and fiddled with her bangs. “Man, I dunno, Pete. It’s like I can’ really give you the kinna friendship you're lookin’ for, know what I mean?”

  I could have punched him, but drunk as I was I probably would have missed.

  “Most of the foreigners here are flakes,” I tell Shinobu. “And the Japanese, I’m sorry, but the Japanese are cold.”

  “It’s difficult for Japanese, too,” she reminded me.

  “You know what? Before I came to Japan, everyone said it was so easy to meet girls in Japan. ‘Girls just walk up to you,’ they said. ‘It’s tough to have a steady relationship because you keep getting lucky,’ they said. But I’m telling you it’s not easy to meet people, let alone someone you really care about.” Shinobu’s hands are on the table next to mine. “God, Shinobu . . . I was so lucky with Mie. But, you know, I didn’t realize it until it was too late.”

  “You still haven’t gotten over Mie-chan, have you?” she says, her hands retreating to the edge of the table. “It takes time,” she assures me, placing her hands on her lap. “You just need to be patient. But, in the meantime, you should ‘play’ with girls.”

  With no prospects on the horizon to “play with girls” as Shinobu suggests, I rent an adaruto bideo[14] on my way home and play with myself, instead.

  15

  NEKKO

  1

  I find myself at Umie again, same barstool up my arse, marinating my liver with the same cheap drinks in the hope that the proper combination of variables, like an alignment of heavenly bodies, will have Nekko-chan rubbing her body against mine and purring once more into my ear, the way she did two weeks ago.

  With nowhere to go, no one to meet and nothing to do after work last Saturday, I headed straight home.

  A few days earlier while I stared out a window at all the lovely young OL’s who were returning home from their offices, I grumbled to myself how nice it would be to not have to work until eight-thirty every evening, to have a life of sorts that involved dinner at six and dates and loafing in front of the television. Yumi, who overheard me, reported my grievances to our boss, as she often does, causing me to be summoned to the small classroom for my weekly reprimand.

  “I hear you’re dissatisfied with the schedule?” Abazuré began.

  “W-what?”

  “If you’re unhappy here, Peador, we can always find someone to replace you . . .”

  After assuring my boss that I was indeed quite satisfied with my job, and with the schedule, in particular, she got up and left.

  “What a feckin’ Nazi.”

  "What was that, Peador?" Abazuré asked, sticking her head back into the classroom.

  “W-what frightfully n-nasty weather we’ve been having lately.”

  “Yes, well, it’s supposed to clear up this weekend.”

  And so it did. On Saturday morning, I could hear the song of the cicada, long and steady, signaling that the rainy season was finally coming an end.

  Grumble as I did about not having weeknights free, the truth is when the weekends do come round, I am, more often than not, at a loss for what to do with myself. It isn’t the work that’s killing my social life: it’s me. It is as if I am attempting to commit suicide one bleakly unfulfilled day at a time.

  2

  Crawling out from mossy darkness beneath the small shrine in front of my apartment building was the bob-tailed stray cat I saw Reina petting that night so man
y months ago when I staggered home, drunk and dejected.

  “Here, kitty-kitty,” I called.

  The cat stopped in its tracks. I kneeled down and called out again. To my delight, the cat seemed to understand the blessed Mother Tongue and hesitantly approached me, pausing a few feet away, before coming closer and rubbing his arched back against my leg. I scratched it between his ears, eliciting a happy purr.

  “Why don’t you come up to my apartment, huh?” I said.

  The cat stiffened, the purring stalled.

  “What, you wouldn’t like that?”

  The cat looked at me and ever so slightly, yet unmistakably, shook his head, “No.”

  “Well, I can’t blame you. I’m not all that keen on hanging out at my place, either. Besides, you’re a stray. Move in with me, you’d lose your identity.”

  The cat closed his eyes and nodded.

  “You’d lose your freedom, too, I guess. That’s pretty much what it comes down to, doesn’t it: freedom? Out here, you can come and go as you like, drink with the boys, get a pussy so hot she screams all night. Granted, you aren’t really the wild, wandering type now, are you? Always lolling about this shrine here.”

  The cat hissed and moved stiffly away from me towards the small shrine.

  “I know. I know. It’s the principle.”

  He turned slightly to look at me, bowed his head gracefully, and ducked back into the mossy shadows below.

  “It’s the principle,” I said to myself. “Or, a deep attachment to those marvelous balls of yours. Move into someone’s home and, the next thing you know, it’s snip-snip and a gay collar around the neck.”

  As I stood up, a rapid succession of distant explosions coming from the west echoed heavily off the walls of the apartment towers, silencing the cicada in my neighbor’s garden.

  “What the hell was that?”

  Turning, I found a bevy of pretty, young girls dressed in colorful yukata. As they walked by, their wooden geta[15] scraped against the asphalt, making the following sound: karan koron, karan, koron.

  I called out to the girls and asked if there was some kind of matsuri going on, a festival I didn’t know about. Being in the doghouse ever since Reina and my break up, I had been left completely out of the loop. Murahachibu’ed—ostracized from the village, as it were—I didn’t know what’s going on half of the time anymore.

  One of the girls replied that there would be hanabi at Seaside Momochi. Fireworks at the beach. I would have loved to ask the girls if I could join them, but I just stood silently in their wake, watching them mince away.

  As I have said, I had no plans for the night, no one to meet. It was a pathetic state of affairs when on a Saturday night all I had to look forward to was the writing of vapid letters, the study of arcane kanji, and the reading of pulp fiction. Sadly, ever since Reina had said sayonara to me, that was pretty much all my weekends had amounted to.

  Well, now I had something to do.

  Like tributaries flowing towards the sea, thousands of matsuri-goers walked, drove or pedaled down any road or path available. I made my own way in the slowly gathering dusk towards Seaside Momochi via the normally quiet neighborhood of Tôjin Machi, which had come alive with a festive entrepreneurial spirit. Food stalls selling beer and other refreshments had been set up and were manned with gravel voiced barkers trying to drum up business. The rows of red lanterns hanging from the eaves of izakaya had been turned on, noren curtains placed above their entrances, and the appetizing smell of yakitori was now wafting from the pubs. Most people, however, just kept on moving towards the beach.

  Interestingly, this neighborhood was once an enclave of Chinese and foreign residents during the Heian Period (794-1192) over a millennium ago. Besides the name, literally Chinese Town, the only hints that remain of the area’s historical past are the impossibly narrow, barely navigable streets which meander like a warren among modest, tightly packed houses and old wooden temples.

  As I squeezed myself down one of these constricted arteries, I noticed that the tarpaulin and scaffolding around one of the larger temples had been taken down, unveiling a garish, vermilion-colored five-storied pagoda. In this post-bubble economy, it seems the only industry that is thriving anymore is the business of death: funeral parlors, Buddhist altar retailers, cemeteries and charnel houses like the one this red eye-sore was supposedly advertising.

  I passed through a narrow alley overgrown with ivy and purple morning glories that opened onto the main boulevard running parallel the coast. Traffic in both directions of the thoroughfare had been brought to a standstill, with pedestrians overflowing the banks of the sidewalks and moving between the cars like water over and between pebbles. It served the drivers right for being silly enough to take their cars.

  A convenience store had recruited a small army of high school girls, dressed in coloful yukata and jimbei[16], to sell drinks and snacks to passersby. The girls, however, were whipped up into such a frenzy, screaming like banshees at the pedestrians, that they were doing more harm than good. Most of the pedestrians high-tailed it past the convenience store to escape the noise. My boss before I came to Japan often told me that the worst kind of employee you could have was a hard-working idiot and I could see that he was right.

  Risking permanent hearing loss, I approached the Sirens and scooped out three cans of Kirin Lager from a kiddy pool filled with ice and water. Then, after paying an inflated matsuri price, I drifted back into the unstoppable river of sweating bodies flowing towards Momochi.

  It was amazing how many other people were doing exactly what I was trying to do, and the following day I would learn that several hundred thousand people had descended upon the beach and its environs that evening. Many of them, stuck in gridlock, would end up watching the fireworks from their cars.

  After walking for thirty minutes through the bustling crowd, I found a clearing on the promenade encircling the Dome, and with beer in hand, watched the ninety-minute-long fireworks and laser light show run its impressive course.

  As good as it was, and it was admittedly far better than anything fireworks display I had ever seen before, the thing that I found most intriguing was the hundreds upon hundreds of beautiful young women who were dressed up like dolls in their colorful yukata. With their dark hair pinned up and lovely necks exposed I wanted to kiss them all. And yet, I couldn’t help feel like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner who lamented:

  Water, water, every where,

  And all the boards did shrink;

  Water, water, every where,

  Nor any drop to drink.

  Women, women, women every where, nor a single one to call my own.

  Oh, what I would have given to have one of them on my arm, fanning me with her uchiwa and helping me laugh away the insufferable loneliness that had accompanied me to this, my first Japanese fireworks display. All I had to do was reach out and try to speak to one, but the shyness that I had been wearing like sackcloth and ashes silenced me.

  3

  After the show, I returned to my apartment where I paced my small apartment like a caged tiger. With nothing to do, I tried to reconcile myself to another night alone with a bottle of Glenfiddich and some individually wrapped, bite-sized chocolate baumkuchen a student had given me as an omiage, a souvenir, from a trip she had taken to the city of Kôbe.

  I drank the scotch straight, one warm glass after another, until the alcohol seeped like ether into every cell of my body. And yet, the itch remained. Saturday nights weren't supposed to be spent like this.

  I took another baumkuchen out of the bag and looked at the wrapping. Like most sweets, it carried a cheery message written in English: “You get the feeling that the Bluebird of Happiness is going to bring a little your way, too.”

  Whatever.

  Checking the contents of my wallet, I was disheartened to discover that I only had a few thousand yen left, hardly enough for a wild time on a Saturday night. More alarmingly, it wouldn’t be nearly enough to keep my belly full thr
ough to payday. But, in the end, future hunger pangs yielded to the itch to go out, and so with a quick change of clothes, I was out the door, heading once again for Oyafukô.

  I went to the only place that promised the slim chance of running, if not into my Bluebird of Happiness, then at least into an acquaintance, someone I could talk to: Umie. However closely my life may have resembled death, that thin sense of familiarity between myself and the other patrons of Umie provided me with the modest reassurance that I could still, though tenuously, be counted among the living.

  I entered the bar, no bigger than a shipping container, squeezed past a group of young women on the dance floor, climbed the short flight of steps to the L-shaped counter and planted my arse on a vacant stool. After ordering a Heineken, I glanced back towards the people dancing or chatting below and recognized a number of fellow barflies. Among them was Kazuko, the butch-dike who had introduced me to Umie back in April.

  Seeing me, Kazuko hurried up the steps to greet me. “Mistah Oh Really-san. I’m seeing you, berry, berry surplised!!!”

  Kazuko’s two year’s abroad had done wonders: no one could butcher the Mother Tongue as fluently as this struggling linguist could. Lord only knows how her English had been before the trip.

  “I’m surprised to see you, too, Kazuko.”

  “What doing?”

  “What am I doing here?” I waved my bottle of Heineken.

  Not sure why, but Kazuko found this terribly funny and burst out laughing. She could be as charming as a mule’s back hoof.

  “You funny man, Mistah Oh Really-san,” she said with a thwack to my back just as I was taking a swig of beer. Beer dribbled from the corner of my mouth past my chin and down my neck.