The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 38

Discipline.

My Japanese is pretty poor, but my hosts were charming and patient.

Discipline.

Dressed in a lilac summer dress, I started to hang out at the karaoke bar round the corner from Prometheus’ Yamanote office. On the third night, having practised carefully in my room, I sang “Black is the Colour” in front of a floor of extraordinarily drunk executives, one of whom had butchered the song the night before, and who immediately bought me a bottle of champagne and invited me to join their group.

Mr Fukazawa worked in human resources for Prometheus, and after we savaged a duet of “Summertime” together, he put his head on my shoulder and with tears pricking the rims of his eyes proclaimed, “There are no women as wonderful as you in all Japan.”

He passed out in a gentle alcoholic stupor before I could disillusion him of this notion, so instead I lifted the cash contents of his wallet and his security pass, and laid his head gently down on the white leather couches and snuck out before the next rendition of a Bon Jovi number could deface the walls of the bar.

Discipline.

Two doors down from the love hotel on my street, and below a restaurant specialising in grilled fish, a café dedicated entirely to arcade games lured in men and women, young and old. I played Mortal Kombat against a girl with pigtails sticking out either side of her head, and she won, and I said, “Have you got Perfection?”

“Sure!” she replied brightly, pulling her phone from her bag. “But I’m not doing very well.”

“Why not?”

“When I came in here, it registered the local wireless networks and knew where I was, and perfect women don’t come here.”

“That doesn’t seem to stop you.”

She hesitated, looking for a moment guilty. “I dunno,” she said at last. “In seven thousand points I get a free make-over at Peach Princess Parlour, and I just love their products, and I know tonight’s going to set me back on points so I suppose… I dunno… I suppose I’ll have to do better.”

She was hoping to get an internship at Prometheus, the office in Yamanote.

“And what do they do there?”

“They design computer software, you know. I’m good at all that sorta stuff and no one is going to marry me so I gotta look out for myself, you know?”

On the screen, her avatar spat lightning from his fingertips, and my character fell down dead, the screen blaring my defeat.

“One more round?” I asked, manoeuvring my bag closer to hers, the better to steal her mobile phone.

“Okay… one more…”

Discipline.

The day Rafe Pereyra-Conroy flew into Tokyo International Airport to visit the offices of Prometheus, I had already bought a complete itinerary of his trip from a disgruntled driver in Monaco, who felt he hadn’t been given his fair tip.

The guy’s a billionaire, he grumbled. Guys like that shouldn’t get to pay going rate.

I was at the airport when he arrived on his private jet, and I trailed his convoy of three cars through the streets of Tokyo to his top-floor suite in Chiyoda. At the front door of the thirty-storey building, he was met by a woman. Filipa Pereyra-Conroy, older sister, sometime scientist, now head of development on Perfection in all its technical wonder. The newspaper photos had done her no favours; she had been a slightly out-of-focus blob of pixels behind her younger brother.

All thought is feedback.

The world of the super-rich/super-powerful isn’t so large. Sometimes you run into familiar faces, even if they don’t remember you.

As a woman in a sharp suit with a sharp business card and a significant bribe that I presented in both hands with a bow to the manager of the building, I got a tour of the tower where the Pereyra-Conroys stayed.

“My company specialises in luxury housing projects for the developing market in the Middle East. We can learn so much from Japan,” I announced, as he showed me the internal waterways that trickled busily through the atrium of the building, the palm trees growing from great pots of dirt layered over with white pebble, the dry garden on the twenty-first floor — “Mr Ko at 128 is a zen master,” he explained. “He tends to these things.”

“And does Mr Ko ply his trade anywhere else?”

“Of course, ma’am. He’s a gynaecologist and a zen master.”

“Is that a usual combination?”

“I don’t think so. Most of the priesthood come from finance.”

I counted birds taking flight, etched in silver on the walls of the twenty-third floor. If the patterns of bending reeds and lotus flowers, of cherry blossom swept away by the wind and creatures bursting from the water into the sky repeated, I could not see where.

“And how do you get an apartment here?” I asked. “I couldn’t find it listed on the web…”

“No, ma’am! One must achieve perfection.”

Was this a Buddhist aphorism I didn’t fully comprehend…?

“No, ma’am. Only members of the 106 Club live here.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, and only when he too stopped to look at me askance did I remember to keep smiling, keep walking, be my smile, be my walk, and said casual as anything, “Of course. They are exactly the kind of clientele we cater to.”

I counted doors, windows, floors.

I counted steps.

From these, I counted members of the 106 Club living in this building alone, and was briefly afraid.

A woman in the cramped tailor’s shop round the corner from the apartment.

“It used to be cheap housing, good housing, for people government supports,” she grumbled, examining a tear in a skirt as I leant on her counter and struggled to pull meaning out of her heavily inflected English. “Poor people, hard life. But bosses said no good, pull down, put up big apartments for important people. Much protest, many petitions, but do no good. Minister says big new apartment good: now minister lives there! Protested to police, but police commissioner live there. Say it perfect, perfect place for good people to live in.”

“Where are the poor people now?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Tokyo too expensive for them. Leave city; go somewhere cheap. Hard, hard. Can’t get work in cheap places. Can’t live in expensive ones. No way up.”

She held up the skirt with sudden triumph and declared, “What you think of this?”

I examined the offending garment — not mine — a thing of grey wool woven with a light blue chequer pattern. “It’s all right,” I said with a shrug.

“It skirt of club dancer! She tear it with nail while stripping! She nice girl, very nice girl, wanted to be computer scientist but didn’t get grades. Now she owns club; always tips, sometimes brings sweet buns because I’m widow. Always way, yes? People say must do one thing, but world says must be another.”

She cackled brightly at her wit, and I thanked her in English and Japanese, and left to the sound of her merriment.

Discipline.

A run.

A walk.

A talk.

Back straight.

Eyes forward.

Head up.

Shake hand.

Wash face.

Study target.

Prepare plan.

My life is a machine.

I am a machine, living my life.

Click click click, the gears turn, and I live.

I live.