The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 36

Things I know about Japan, contemplated at thirty-five thousand feet:

A question: why are planes always at thirty-five thousand feet, not ten and a half thousand metres? Has the sky not gone metric?

I flew into Tokyo as the sun rose.

A traditional Japanese-style hotel room. Tatami mats on the floor, mattresses in bright neon greens and pinks to be rolled out, a view of a French-style café and a computer-repair shop across the street. A sliding door to the bathroom; a toilet with a control containing twelve different buttons, of which only one was “flush”. There is no international symbol to represent that function best described by the slow release of waters into the toilet bowl to disguise the sound of a woman pissing. The music the toilet could perform from a tiny speaker above the cistern was of five sorts — traditional Japanese, girl-band, boy-band, the sound of birds chirruping, or Rod Stewart.

Next to my hotel, a love hotel offered its services, pink neon signs inviting courting couples in for an illicit few hours together, no questions asked. The screen between the outside world and the receptionist was opaque, so that no one might see your features. The entrance and exit were hidden from view, but I thought I saw a couple — a man in his fifties, bespectacled, ironed shirt, shoes shined, and a girl, barely seventeen years old, long dark hair and a little pleated skirt, scuttle away with the look of good people caught in a shameful moral trespass. In recent years the government had tried to crack down on love hotels; sex and play were two words they were uncomfortable putting together.

Would it be fair to say that Japan is racist?

Perhaps fairer to say that Japan is not used to black women, and definitely not women of mixed race, even ones who carry a forged British passport and a large quantity of unfavourably converted yen. No one’s really racist any more, just as no one’s really sexist. They’ve just got their view about things, you see.

I forced myself to stay awake as long as I could, buying a few supplies, lifting the occasional wallet, searching for food that would be gentle on the stomach. Sushi was a safe start, if you ordered wisely. Stone fish, pickled plums, jellyfish, unagi — these all took a little more building up to. No point trying to walk anywhere in Tokyo, the city was too big. Take the train, find a district within which you’re willing to walk, Asakusa or Ueno, where the older styles and skills still survived beneath the skyscrapers; the fish market at Tsukiji. Outside a pink bar in Shinjuku a man approached me, grinning widely, and exclaimed in English, “You hostess?”

I shook my head, and he nodded fervently, adding, “You hostess? You very beautiful.”

His teeth were perfectly white, his hair was in full retreat from his forehead, though he could not have been a day over thirty. From the door of the bar, a woman with blonde hair down to her hips, a freckle-spotted tan and an Australian accent emerged, took the customer by the arm and guided him back indoors with a cry of, “So sorry, so sorry, she’s just a visitor, more sake?”

He said something I couldn’t hear, and she laughed dutifully, and afterwards came out for a cigarette and said, “It’s a decent life really. Most of the men just want company, to talk. If you’re white and interested, it’s even better. It doesn’t get to sex unless you want it to, and you can make them pay, but I don’t need to. Champagne, gifts, tips — in four months I’ll have earned enough to buy a house back home.”

She offered me a cigarette, and I shook my head.

“You thinking of joining? You’d be unusual, but this is Shinjuku. You can be disgusting as a decomposing rhino and someone will want to fuck you, because you’re unusually disgusting. But you’re very beautiful, I think.”

“Get many salarymen?”

“Lots. Most of them are married but, like I said, it’s just talk. Lonely men who like to talk with someone… else.”

Out of interest, I said, “Have you got Perfection?”

She laughed. “Sure. I used to. Everyone in this city wants to be perfect. I did okay too, won like, six months discounted membership at some really swanky gym downtown, the perfect gym you know, to get the perfect body. But it got access to my bank accounts or something, or maybe my loyalty cards, you know like I don’t even know how it did it but I must have ticked a box or something, and at thirty thousand points it started telling me to quit smoking and drink less, and I was like, fuck that, and at forty thousand points it started sending me stuff from agencies that it said better matched my character profile than my current work — I mean, fuck? Like, a fucking app telling me what to fucking do with my life? Anyway, after that I started to lose points like a space invader. ‘Perfection lies within you,’ it said. I deleted the fucking thing when I got back to ten thousand points, but you know what? My friend, who fixes computers and shit, says there’s still, like, stuff on my phone tracking me, I mean, like, Perfection has still got all that access because I can’t like, just stop it, what the fuck.”

Permissions that the Facebook Messenger app requests when downloaded to your phone:

Perfection had almost exactly the same permissions, with one difference:

I considered for a moment the power of this tool, and saw bank accounts and passwords, online shops and credit cards, maps and travel patterns, blackmail and bribery roll before my eyes.

I wondered what I could do with that knowledge, being a thief.

Then I chided myself for narrow thinking, and asked instead: what could I do with that knowledge, being a god?