Ghostwritten

Tokyo

Spring was late on this rainy morning, and so was I. The commuters streamed to work with their collars and umbrellas up. The cherry trees lining the backstreet were still winter trees, craggy, pocked, and dripping. I fished around for my keys, rattled up the shutters, and opened the shop.

I looked through the post while the water was boiling. Some mail orders — good. Bills, bills — bad. A couple of enquiries from a regular customer in Nagano about rare discs that I’d never heard of. Bumf. An entirely ordinary morning. Time for oolong tea. I put on a very rare Miles Davis recording that Takeshi had discovered in a box of mixed-quality discs which he’d picked up at an auction last month out in Shinagawa.

It was a gem. You never entered my mind was blissful and forlorn. Some faultless mute-work, the trumpet filtered down to a single ray of sound. The brassy sun lost behind the clouds.

The first customer of the week was a foreigner, either American or European or Australian, you can never tell because they all look the same. A lanky, zitty foreigner. He was a real collector, though, not just a browser. He had that manic glint in his eyes, and his fingers were adept at flicking through metres of discs at high speed, like a bank teller counting notes. He bought a virgin copy of ‘Stormy Sunday’ by Kenny Burrell, and ‘Flight to Denmark’ by Duke Jordan, recorded in 1973. He had a cool T-shirt, too. A bat flying around a skyscraper, leaving a trail of stars. I asked him where he was from. He said thank you very much. Westerners can’t learn Japanese.

Takeshi phoned a bit later.

‘Satoru! Have a good day off yesterday?’

‘Pretty quiet. Sax lesson in the afternoon. Hung around with Koji for a bit afterwards. Helped Taro with the delivery from the brewery.’

‘Any vast cheques for me in the post?’

‘Sorry, nothing that vast. Some nice bills, though. How was your weekend?’

This was what he had been waiting for. ‘Funny you ask me that! I met this gorgeous creature of the night last Friday at a club in Roppongi.’ I could almost hear his saliva glands juicing. ‘Get this. Twenty-five,’ which for Takeshi is the perfect age, making him ten years her senior. ‘Engaged,’ which for Takeshi adds the thrill of adultery while subtracting any responsibility. ‘Only shag women who have more to lose than you do’ was a motto of his. ‘Clubbed until four in the morning. Woke up Saturday afternoon, with my clothes on back-to-front, in a hotel somewhere in Chiyoda ward. No idea how I got there. She came out of the shower, naked, brown and dripping, and damn if she wasn’t still gasping for it!’

‘It must have been heaven. Are you seeing her again?’

‘Of course we’re seeing each other again. This is love at first sight! We’re having dinner tonight at a French restaurant in Ichigaya,’ meaning they were having each other in an Ichigaya love hotel. ‘Seriously, you should see her arse! Two overripe nectarines squeezed together in paper bag. One prod and they explode! Juice everywhere!’

Rather more than I needed to know. ‘She’s engaged, you say?’

‘Yeah. To a Fujitsu photocopier ink cartridge research and development division salaryman who knew the go-between who knew her father’s section head.’

‘Some guys get all the luck.’

‘Ah, it’s okay. What the eyes don’t see, eh? She’ll make a good little wifey, I’m sure. She’s after a few nights of lust and sin before she becomes a housewife forever.’

She sounded a right slapper to me. Takeshi seemed to have forgotten that only two weeks ago he’d been trying to get back with his estranged wife.

The rain carried on falling, keeping customers away. The rain fell softly, then heavily, then softly. Static hisses on telephone lines. Jimmy Cobb’s percussion on ‘Blue in Green’.

Takeshi was still on the telephone. It seemed to be my turn to say something.

‘What’s she like? Her personality, I mean.’

Takeshi said, ‘Oh, fine,’ like I’d asked about a new brand of rice-cracker. ‘Well. I’ve got to go and sort out my estate agent’s office. Business has been a bit slack there, too. I’d better put the shits up the manager a bit. Sell lots of discs and make me lots of money. Phone me on my cell phone if you need anything—’ I never do. He rang off.

Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It’s so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It’s long since filled up the plain, and now it’s creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it’s already become out of date. It’s a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one. Things are always moving below you, and above your head. All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight. You have to do something to stop yourself caving in, or you just become a piece of flotsam or an ant in a tunnel. In smaller cities people can use the space around them to insulate themselves, to remind themselves of who they are. Not in Tokyo. You just don’t have the space, not unless you’re a company president, a gangster, a politician or the Emperor. You’re pressed against people body to body in the trains, several hands gripping each strap on the metro trains. Apartment windows have no view but other apartment windows.

No, in Tokyo you have to make your place inside your head.

There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it’s not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren’t born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who laugh at.

Takeshi’s place is the night life. Clubs, and bars, and the women who live there.

There are many other places. There’s an invisible Tokyo built of them, existing in the minds of us, its citizens. Internet, manga, Hollywood, doomsday cults, they are all places where you go and where you matter as an individual. Some people will tell you about their places straight off, and won’t shut up about it all night. Others keep it hidden like a garden in a mountain forest.

People with no place are those who end up throwing themselves onto the tracks.

My place comes into existence through jazz. Jazz makes a fine place. The colours and feelings there come not from the eye but from sounds. It’s like being blind but seeing more. This is why I work here in Takeshi’s shop. Not that I could ever put that into words.

The phone rang. Mama-san.

‘Sato-kun, Akiko and Tomomi have got this dreadful ’flu that’s doing the rounds, and Ayaka’s still feeling a mite delicate.’ Ayaka had an abortion last week. ‘So I’ll have to open the bar and start early. Any chance you could get your own dinner tonight?’

‘I’m eighteen! Of course I can get my own dinner tonight!’

She did her croaky laugh. ‘You’re a good lad.’ She rang off.

I felt in a Billie Holiday mood. ‘Lady in Satin’, recorded at night with heroin and a bottle of gin the year before she died. A doomed, Octoberish oboe of a voice.

I wondered about my real mother. Not hankeringly. It’s pointless to hanker. Mama-san said she’d been deported back to the Philippines afterwards, and would never be allowed back into Japan. I can’t help but wonder, just sometimes, who she is now, what she’s doing, and whether she ever thinks about me.

Mama-san told me my father was eighteen when I was born. That makes me old enough to be my father. Of course, my father was cast as the victim. The innocent violated by the foreign seductress who sank her teeth into him to get a visa. I’ll probably never know the truth, unless I get rich enough to hire a private detective. I guess there must be money in his family, for him to be patronising hostess bars at my tender age, and to pay to clean up the stink of such a scandal so thoroughly. I’d like to ask him what he and my mother felt for each other, if anything.

One time I was sure he’d come. A cool guy in his late thirties. He wore desert boots and a dark-tan suede jacket. One ear was pierced. I knew I recognised him from somewhere, but I thought he was a musician. He looked around the shop, and asked for a Chick Corea recording that we happened to have. He bought it, I wrapped it for him, and he left. Only afterwards did I realise that he reminded me of me.

Then I tried calculating what the odds against a random meeting like that were in a city the size of Tokyo, but the calculator ran out of decimal places. So I thought perhaps he’d come to see me incognito, that he was as curious about me as I was about him. Us orphans spend so much time having to be level-headed about things that when we have the time and space to romanticise, wow, can we romanticise. Not that I’m a real orphan, in an orphanage. Mama-san has always looked after me.

I went outside for a moment, to feel the rain on my skin. It was like being breathed on. A delivery van braked sharply and beeped at an old lady pushing a trolley who glared back and wove her hands in the air like she was casting a spell. The van beeped again like an irritated muppet. A mink-coated leggy woman who considered herself extremely attractive and who obviously kept a rich husband strode past with a flopsy dog. A huge tongue lolled between its white teeth. Her eyes and mine touched for a moment, and she saw a high school graduate spending his youth holed up in a poky shop that obviously nobody ever spent much in, and then she was gone.

This is my place. Another Billie Holiday disc. She sang ‘Some Other Spring’, and the audience clapped until they too faded into the heat of a long-lost Chicago summer night.

The phone.

‘Hi, Satoru. It’s only Koji.’

‘I can hardly hear you! What’s that racket in the background?’

‘I’m phoning from the college canteen.’

‘How did the engineering exam go?’

‘Well, I worked really hard for it...’ He’d walked it.

‘Congratulations! So your visit to the shrine paid off, hey? When are the results out?’

‘Three or four weeks. I’m just glad they’re over. It’s too early to congratulate me, though... Hey, Mum’s doing a sukiyaki party tonight. My dad’s back in Tokyo this week. They thought you might like to help us eat it. Can you? You could kip over in my sister’s room if it gets too late. She’s on a school trip to Okinawa.’

I ummed and ahed inwardly. Koji’s parents are nice, straight people, but they feel it’s their responsibility to sort my life out. They can’t believe that I’m already content where I am, with my discs and my saxophone and place. Underlying their concern is pity, and I’d rather take shit about my lack of parents than pity.

But Koji’s my friend, probably my only one. ‘I’d love to come. What should I bring?’

‘Nothing, just bring yourself.’ So, flowers for his mum and booze for his dad.

‘I’ll come round after work then.’

‘Okay. See you.’

‘See you.’

It was a Mal Waldron time of day. The afternoon was shutting up shop early. The owner of the greengrocers across the street took in his crates of white radishes, carrots and lotus roots. He rolled down his shutter, saw me and nodded gravely. He never smiles. Some pigeons scattered as a truck shuddered by. Every note of ‘Left Alone’ fell, a drop of lead into a deep well. Jackie McLean’s saxophone circled in the air, so sad it could barely leave the ground.

The door opened, and I smelt air rainwashed clean. Four high school girls came in, but one of them was completely, completely different. She pulsed, invisibly, like a quasar. I know that sounds stupid, but she did.

The three bubbleheads flounced up to the counter. They were pretty, I guess, but they were all clones of the same ova. Their hair was the same length, their lipstick the same colour, their bodies curving in the same way beneath their same uniform. Their leader demanded in a voice cutesy and spoilt the newest hit by the latest teen dwoob.

But I didn’t bother hearing them. I can’t describe women, not like Takeshi or Koji. But if you know Duke Pearson’s ‘After the Rain’, well, she was as beautiful and pure as that.

Standing by the window, and looking out. What was out there? She was embarrassed by her classmates. And so she should have been! She was so real, the others were cardboard cut-outs beside her. Real things had happened to her to make her how she was, and I wanted to know them, and read them, like a book. It was the strangest feeling. I just kept thinking, well, I’m not sure what I was thinking. I’m not sure if I was thinking of anything.

She was listening to the music! She was afraid she’d scare the music away if she moved.

‘Well, have you got it or haven’t you?’ One of the cut-out girls squawked. It must take a long time to train your voice to be so annoying.

Another giggled.

The leader’s pocket phone trilled and she got it out.

I was angry with them for making me look away from her.

‘This is a disc collector’s shop. There’s a toyshop in the shopping mall by the metro station that sells the kind of thing you’re looking for.’

Rich Shibuya girls are truffle-fed pooches. The girls at Mama-san’s, they have all had to learn how to survive. They have to keep their patrons, keep their looks, keep their integrity, and they get scarred. But they respect themselves, and they let it show. They respect each other. I respect them. They are real people.

But these magazine girls have nothing real about them. They have magazine expressions, speak magazine words and carry magazine fashion accessories. They’ve chosen to become this. I don’t know whether or not to blame them. Getting scarred isn’t nice. But look! As shallow, and glossy, and identical, and throwaway, as magazines.

‘You’re a bit uptight aren’t you? Been dumped by your girlfriend?’ The leader leaned on the counter and swayed, just a few inches away from my face. I imagined her using that face in bars, in cars, in love hotels.

Her friend shrieked with laughter and pulled her away before I could think of a witty retort. They flocked back towards the door. ‘Told you!’ one of them said. The third was still speaking into her pocket phone. ‘I dunno where we are. Some crappy place behind some crappy building. Where are you?’

‘You coming?’ The leader said to the one still staring into space, listening to Mal.

No, I thought with all my might, Say no, and stay with me in my space.

‘I said,’ said the leader, ‘are — you — coming?’

Was she deaf?

‘I guess so,’ she said, in a real voice. A beautiful, real voice.

Look at me, I willed. Look at me. Please. Just once, look straight at me.

As she left, she looked at me over her shoulder, my heart trampolined, and she followed the others into the street.

The cherry trees were budding. Maroon tips sprouted and swelled through the sealed bark. Pigeons ruffled and prilled. I wish I knew more about pigeons. Were they strutting about like that for mating purposes, or just because they were strutty birds? That would be useful knowledge for school syllabuses. None of this capital of Mongolia stuff. The air outside was warmer and damp. Being outside was like being in a tent. A jackhammer was pounding into concrete a few doors down. Takeshi said that yet another surf and ski shop was opening up. How many surfers and skiers are there in Tokyo?

I put on a Charlie Parker anthology, with the volume up loud to drown out the ringing of metal. Charlie Parker, molten and twisting, no stranger to cruelty. ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo’, ‘How Deep is the Ocean?’, ‘All the Things You Are’, ‘Out of Nowhere’, ‘A Night in Tunisia’.

I dressed the girl in calico, and she slipped away through a north African doorway.

Here, being as different as I am is punishable.

I was in Roppongi one time with Koji, he was on the pull and got talking to a couple of girls from Scotland. I just assumed they were English teachers at some crappy English school, but they turned out to be ‘exotic dancers’. Koji’s English is really good — he was always in the top class at school. English being a girl’s subject, I didn’t study it much, but when I found jazz I studied at home because I wanted to read the interviews with the great musicians, who are all American. Of course reading is one thing, but speaking is quite another. So Koji was mostly doing the translating. Anyway, these girls said that everyone where they come from actually tries to be different. They’ll dye their hair a colour nobody else has, buy clothes nobody else is wearing, get into music nobody else knows. Weird. Then they asked why all girls here want to look the same. Koji answered, ‘Because they are girls! Why do all cops look the same? Because they’re cops, of course.’ Then one of them asked why Japanese kids try to ape American kids? The clothes, the rap music, the skateboards, the hair. I wanted to say that it’s not America they’re aping, it’s the Japan of their parents that they’re rejecting. And since there’s no home-grown counter culture, they just take hold of the nearest one to hand, which happens to be American. But it’s not American culture exploiting us. It’s us exploiting it.

Koji got lost trying to translate the last bit.

I tried asking them about their inner places, because it seemed relevant. But I just got answers about how tiny the apartments were here, and how houses in Britain all have central heating. Then their boyfriends turned up. Two bloody great US marine gorillas. They looked down at us, unimpressed, and Koji and I decided it was time for another drink at the bar.

But yeah, it’s certainly different here. All through my junior high school days people hassled me about my parents. Finding part-time jobs was never easy, either: it was as tough as having Korean parents. People find out. It would have been easier to say they’d died in an accident, but I wasn’t going to lie for those knob-heads. Plus if you say someone’s dead, then it tempts fate to kill them off early. Gossip works telepathically in Tokyo. The city is vast, but there’s always someone who knows someone whom someone knows. Anonymity doesn’t muffle coincidence: it makes the coincidences more outlandish. That’s why I still think one of these days my father might wander into the shop.

So, from elementary school onwards I used to be in fights. I often lost, but that didn’t matter. Taro, Mama-san’s bouncer, always told me it’s better to fight and lose than not fight and suffer, because even if you fight and lose your spirit emerges intact. Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don’t respect cowards. Taro also told me how to headbutt taller adversaries, how to knee in the balls and how to dislocate a man’s hand, so that by the high school nobody much bothered me. One time a gang of junior yakuza were waiting outside school for me, because I’d given one of their kid brothers a nose-bleed. I still don’t know who tipped Mama-san off — Koji, most probably — but Mama-san sent Taro along that day to pick me up. He waited until they had formed a ring around me down an alley, and then he strolled along and scared seven shades of shit out of them. Now I think about it, Taro’s been more like a dad to me than anyone else.

A leathery man in a blood-red jacket came in, ignoring me. He found the Charles Mingus section and bought about two-thirds of the stock, including the collectors’ items, peeling off ten-thousand yen notes like toilet paper. His eyeballs seemed to pulse to the bass rhythm. He left, carrying his purchases in a cardboard box which he assembled himself on the counter. He hadn’t asked for a discount, though I would have gladly given him one, and I was left with a wad of money. I phoned Takeshi to tell him the good news, and that it might be best if he came to pick the money up himself that night. I knew he had a cash-flow problem.

‘Ah,’ gasped Takeshi. ‘Baby! That’s the way. That is very, very, very good!’

There was hallucinogenic music on in the background that sounded like a migraine, and a woman being tortured by tickling.

Feeling I’d phoned at a bad time I said goodbye and hung up.

And still only 11 in the morning.

Koji was the class egg-head at high school, which made him an outsider, too. He should have gone to a much better high school, but until he was fifteen his dad was always being transferred so it was never that easy for him to keep up. Koji was also diabolically bad at sport. I swear, in three years I never saw him manage to hit a baseball once. There was one time when he took an almighty swing, the bat flew out of his hands and hurtled through the air like a missile, straight into Mr Ikeda, our games master who idolised Yukio Mishima even though I doubted he’d ever got through a whole book by anybody in his entire life.

I was doubled-up laughing, so I didn’t realise nobody else was. That cost me school toilet-cleaning duty for the whole term, with Koji. That’s when I learnt Koji loved the piano. I play the tenor saxophone. That’s how I got to know Koji. A winded games teacher and the foulest toilets in the Tokyo educational system.

One of our regulars, Mr Fujimoto, came in during the lunch hour. The bell rang and a gust of air rustled papers all around the shop. He was laughing as usual. He laughed because he was pleased to see me. He put a little parcel of books down on the counter for me. I always try to pay for them, but he never lets me. He says it’s a jazz disc consultancy fee.

‘Mr Fujimoto! How’s work today?’

‘Terrible!’ Mr Fujimoto only has one voice, and that is very loud. It’s as though his greatest fear is to not be heard. And when he really laughs the noise almost pushes you backwards.

The shop is smack bang between the business district of Otemachi and the publishing district around Ochanomizu, so our salaryman customers usually work in one or the other. You can always tell the difference. There’s a certain look that mega-Money bestows on its handlers. A sort of beadiness, and hunger. Hard to put your finger on, but it’s there all right. Money is another of those inner places, by the way. It’s a way to measure yourself.

The publishing salarymen, however, often have a streak of manic jollity. Mr Fujimoto is a prime specimen. He puns regularly and appallingly. For example:

‘Afternoon, Satoru-kun! Say, couldn’t you get Takeshi to give this place a new coat of paint? It’s looking kind of run down.’

‘Do you think so?’ I can smell the pay-off approaching.

‘Definitely! It’s positively seedy!’

Uh?

‘Seedy! CD! See-Dee!’

I wince in genuine pain and Mr Fujimoto gurgles appreciatively. The worse the better.

This lunchtime Mr Fujimoto was looking for something Lee Morgan-ish. I recommendedHank Mobley’s ‘A Caddyfor Daddy’, which he promptly bought. I know his tastes. Anything on the loony side of funky. As I handed over his change he suddenly became serious. He switched to a more formal mode of speech, took off his heavy glasses, and started cleaning the lenses.

‘I was wondering whether you might be planning to apply for college next year?’

‘Not really, no...’

‘So, would you be thinking about entering a particular profession?’

He’d rehearsed this beforehand. I guessed what was coming.

‘I don’t really have any plans at the moment. I guess I’ll just wait and see.’

‘Of course, Satoru, it’s absolutely none of my business, and please forgive me for interfering in your plans, but the only reason I’m asking is that a couple of positions in my office have just become available. Very humble. Just glorified editorial assistants, basically, but if you were interested in applying then I’d be happy to recommend you for one of them. Certainly I could get you to the interview stage. And it would be a foot in the door. I started out myself this way, you know. Everybody needs a step up, occasionally.’

I looked around the shop.

‘That’s a very generous offer, Mr Fujimoto. I’m not sure how to answer.’

‘Think it over, Satoru. I’m going to Kyoto for a few days on business. We won’t start interviewing until I get back. I’d be happy to have a word with your present employer on your behalf, if that’s what’s worrying you... I know Takeshi has a lot of respect for you, so he wouldn’t stand in your way.’

‘No, it’s not really that. Thank you. I’ll think seriously about it. Thank you... How much are the books?’

‘Nothing. Your consultancy fee. They’re just a few samples, we give ’em out free to people in the trade. These pocket paperback classics, they walk off the shelves. I remember you said you enjoyed The Great Gatsby — there’s a new Murakami translation of Fitzgerald’s short stories we’ve just brought out, The Lord of the Flies, that’s a laugh-a-minute, and a new García Márquez.’

‘It’s very kind of you.’

‘Nonsense! Just give the idea of publishing a serious think. There are worse ways to make a living.’

I’d thought about the girl every day since. Twenty or thirty or forty times a day. I’d find myself thinking of her and then not want to stop, like not wanting to get out of a hot shower on a winter morning. I ran my fingers through my hair and contemplated my face, using a Fats Navarro CD as a hand-mirror. Could she ever feel the same way back? I couldn’t even remember accurately what she looked like. Smooth skin, highish cheekbones, narrowish eyes. Like a Chinese empress. I didn’t really think of her face when I thought of her. She was just there, a colour that didn’t have a name yet. The idea of her.

I got angry with myself. It’s not as if I’m ever going to see her again. This is Tokyo. And besides, even if I did see her again, why should she be in the least bit interested in me? My mind can only hold one thought at a time. I may as well make it a thought worthwhile.

I thought about Mr Fujimoto’s offer. What am I doing here? Koji’s getting on with his life. All my high school classmates are in college or in a company. I am unfailingly updated on their progress by Koji’s mum. What am I doing?

A guy in a wheelchair flashed by outside.

Hey, hey, this is my place, remember. Time for jazz.

‘Undercurrent’ by Jim Hall and Bill Evans. An album of water, choppy and brushed by the wind, at other times silent and slow under trees. On other songs, chords glinting on inland seas.

The girl was there, too, swimming naked on her back, buoyed along by the currents.

I made myself some green tea and watched the steam rise into the disturbed afternoon. Koji was knocking on the window, grinning at me berkishly, and pressing his face up against the glass so he looked like a poison dwarf.

I had to grin back. He came in, walking his loping bumpy walk.

‘You were miles away. I came via Mister Donuts. Vanilla Angel Donuts okay?’

‘Thanks. Let me make you some tea. This great Keith Jarrett record came in yesterday, you must give it a listen. I can’t believe he makes it up as he goes along.’

‘A hallmark of genius. Fancy a couple of drinks later?’

‘Where?’

‘Dunno. Somewhere frequented by nubile girls on the prowl for young male flesh. The Students Union bar perhaps. But if you’re busy sorting out the meaning of existence we could make it another night. Smoke?’

‘Sure. Pull up a chair.’

Koji likes to think of himself as a ruthless womaniser like Takeshi, but really his emotions are as ruthless as a Vanilla Angel Donut. That’s one reason I like him.

We lit up. ‘Koji, do you believe in love at first sight?’

He rocked back on his chair and smiled like a wolf. ‘Who is she?’

‘No no no no. No one. I was just asking.’

Koji the philosopher gazed upwards. At length he blew a smoke ring. ‘I believe in lust at first sight. You gotta keep a certain hardness, or you just turn to goo. And goo isn’t attractive. And whatever you do, don’t let her know how you feel. Or you’re lost.’ Koji went into Humphrey Bogart mode. ‘Stay enigmatic, kid. Stay tough. You hear?’

‘Yeah, yeah, like you, for example. You were as tough as Bambi when you were last in love. But seriously?’

Another smoke ring. ‘But seriously... well, love has got to be based on knowledge, hasn’t it? You have to know someone intimately to be able to love them. So love at first sight is a contradiction in terms. Unless in that first sight there’s some sort of mystical gigabyte downloading of information from one mind into the other. That doesn’t sound too likely, does it?’

‘Mmm. Dunno.’

I poured my friend’s tea.

The cherry blossoms were suddenly there. Magic, frothing and bubbling and there just above our heads filling the air with colour too delicate for words like ‘pink’ or ‘white’. How had such grim trees created something so otherworldy in a backstreet with no agreed-upon name? An annual miracle, beyond my understanding.

It was a morning for Ella Fitzgerald. There are fine things in the world, after all. Dignity, refinement, warmth and humour, where you’d never expect to find them. Even as an old woman, an amputee in a wheelchair, Ella sang like a girl who could still be at high school, falling in love for the first time.

The phone rang. ‘It’s Takeshi.’

‘Hi, boss. Are you having a good day?’

‘I am not having a good day. I’m having a very bad day.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘I am a fool. A bloody fool. A bloody, bloody fool. Why do men do this?’ He was drunk, and me still on my morning tea. ‘Where does this impulse come from, Satoru? Tell me!’ Like I knew but was refusing to grant him enlightenment. ‘A sticky wrestle in an anonymous bedroom, a few bitemarks, about three seconds’ worth of orgasm if you’re lucky, a pleasant drowse for thirty minutes and when you come to you suddenly realise you’ve become a lecherous, lying sleazebag who’s flushing several million sperm and six years of marriage down the toilet. Why are we programmed to do this? Why?’

I couldn’t think of an answer that was both honest and consoling. So I went for honesty. ‘No idea.’

Takeshi told the same story three times in a loop. ‘My wife dropped by to pick me up for lunch. We were going to go out, talk things over, maybe sort things out... I’d bought her some flowers, she’d bought me a new striped jacket she’d seen somewhere. Hopelessly uncool, of course, but she remembered my size. It was a peace-pipe. We were just leaving when she went to the bathroom and what did she find?’

I almost said ‘a nurse’s corpse’, but thought better of it. ‘What?’

‘Her bag. And dressing gown. The nurse’s. And the message she’d written to me, in lipstick. On the inside of the mirror.’

‘What was the message?’

I heard ice cubes crack as Takeshi poured himself another drink. ‘None of your business. But when my wife read it she calmly walked back into the living room, poured vodka on the jacket, set it alight, and left. The jacket shrivelled up and melted.’

‘The power of the written word.’

‘Damn it, Satoru, I wish I was your age again. It was all so bloody simple back then! What have I done? Where does this myth come from?’

‘What myth?’

‘The one that plagues all men. The one that says a life without darkness and sex and mystery is only half a life. Why? And it was hardly like I’d been rooting Miss Celestial Beauty Incarnate. She was just some stupid slag of a nurse... Why?’

I’m only nineteen. Graduated from high school last year. I don’t know.

It was all pretty pathetic to listen to. Luckily at that moment Mama-san and Taro came in so I could leave Takeshi’s unanswerable questions unanswered.

If Mama-san were a bird she would be a kind, white, crow.

Taro would not be a bird. Taro would be a tank. For decades, long before I was on the scene, he has escorted Mama-san everywhere. Their relationship has depths to it that I’ve certainly never sussed. I’ve seen old photos of them from the sixties and seventies. They were a beautiful couple, in their way. Now they make me think of a frail mistress and a faithful bulldog. Taro, the rumours go, used to do odd jobs for the yakuza in his youth. Debt collection, and suchlike. He still has some versatile friends in that world, which is very useful when it comes to paying protection money on The Wild Orchid. Mama-san gets a sixty per cent discount. Another of those friends with connections at city hall managed to obtain my full Japanese citizenship.

Mama-san brought me my lunch box. ‘I know you overslept this morning,’ she crackled, ‘because of all the bloody racket.’

‘Sorry. What time did the last guests leave last night?’

‘The Mitsubishi men: 3.30 a.m., or so... One of them has a real thing for Yumi-chan. He insisted on a date next Saturday.’

‘What did Yumi-chan say?’

‘The Mitsubishi men pay on time. They have a whacking entertainment budget they need to use up every month. I promised her a new outfit from somewhere plush if she said yes. Besides, the man’s married, so it won’t get complicated.’

‘Go out with Koji last night?’ Taro cased the joint like a bodyguard looking for escape routes.

‘Yes. I drank a bit too much. That’s why I overslept.’

Taro guffawed. ‘He’s a good lad, that Koji. He’s got his shit together. Meet any chicks?’

‘Only ones who want to know whether your sportscar has tinted windows.’

Taro harrumphed. ‘Brains aren’t everything in a woman. Ayaka was saying only this morning, a lad your age should be stoking the poker more, it’s not healthy to—’

‘Taro, put Satoru down.’ Mama-san smiled at me contentedly. ‘Aren’t the cherry blossoms outside a picture? Taro’s taking me on a shopping expedition, and then we’re going to see the blossoms in Ueno Park. Mrs Nakamori’s girls have invited ours along to a cherry-blossom party this afternoon, so we’re going along to make sure they don’t get up to too much mischief. Oh yes. That reminds me. Mrs Nakamori asked if you and Koji might be free to play in their cocktail lounge next Sunday. Apparently the trombonist in their regular band was involved in some sort of accident involving a bent pipe and some zoo animals. I thought it best not to pry. The poor man isn’t going to be able to unbend his arm until June, so the band has had to cancel their fixtures. I told Mrs Nakamori that I wasn’t sure when Koji started back at college. Maybe you could give her a ring today or tomorrow? Come along now, Taro. We must be off.’

Taro picked up the book I was reading. ‘What’s this? Madame Bovary, eh? That French geezer? Wouldn’t you credit it, Mama-san? We couldn’t get him to study for six years of education, now he’s reading on the job.’ He read out a bit I’d underlined: ‘“One should be wary of touching one’s idols, for the gilt comes off on one’s fingers.”’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘Funny things, books. Yes, Mama-san. We’d better go.’

‘Thanks for bringing my lunch.’

Mama-san nodded. ‘Ayaka made it. It’s broiled eel. She knows how much you like it. Remember to thank her later. Goodbye now.’

The sky was brightening up. I ate my boxed lunch, wishing I was in Ueno Park too. Mama-san’s girls are fun. They treat me like a kid brother. They would have spread out a big blanket under a tree and would be singing old tunes with made-up words. I’ve seen foreigners get drunk in bars out in Shibuya and places, and they turn into animals. Japanese people never do that. The men might get friskier, but never violent. Alcohol lets off steam for Japanese. For foreigners, alcohol just seems to build steam up. And they kiss in public, too! I’ve seen them stick their tongues in and grope the girl’s breasts. In bars, where everyone can see! I can never get over that. Mama-san always tells Taro to tell them we’re full, or else she stings them for such a whopping cover charge that they never come back.

The disc finished. I ate the last morsel of broiled eel, rice and pickle. Ayaka knew how to make a good boxed lunch.

My back hurt. I’m too young for my back to hurt. This chair has become really uncomfortable lately, I can’t sit still. When Takeshi gets over his present financial crisis I’ll ask him about getting a new one. Looks like I’ll have to wait a long time, though. I wondered what to play next. I burrowed through a box full of unsorted discs that Takeshi had left on the floor behind the counter, but there was nothing I didn’t already know. Surely I could find something. We have twelve thousand discs in stock. I realised I was scared of not needing music any more.

It turned out to be quite a busy afternoon. A lot of browsers, but a lot of buyers too. Seven o’clock came round quickly. I cashed up, put the takings in the safe in the tiny office, set the alarm and locked the office door. Put my lunch box and Madame Bovary in my bag, a Benny Goodman CD that I was going to borrow that night — a perk of the job — flicked off the lights, and locked the door.

I was outside rolling down the shutter when I heard the phone ringing inside. Damn! My first impulse was to pretend I hadn’t heard it, but then I knew that I’d be spending the whole evening wondering who had been trying to ring. I’d probably have to start phoning round people just to see if they’d phoned me, and if I did that I’d have to explain why I hadn’t answered in the first place... damn it. It would be easier just to open up the shop again and answer it.

I’ve thought about it many times since: if that phone hadn’t rung at that moment, and if I hadn’t taken the decision to go back and answer it, then everything that happened afterwards wouldn’t have happened.

An unknown voice. Soft, worried. ‘It’s Quasar. The dog needs to be fed!’

Excuse me? I listened for more. The static hiss sounded like the crashing of waves, or could it be the noise of a pachinko arcade? I didn’t say anything — it’s best not to encourage these crank callers. There was nothing more. As though he was waiting for something. So I waited a little longer, and then I hung up, puzzled. Oh well.

I had my back to the door when it opened. The bell jingled, and I thought, ‘Oh no, let me out of here!’ I turned round, and when I looked up I almost fell backwards over a limited edition box set of Lester Young. The floor of Takeshi’s Jazz Hole swelled.

It’s you! Peering into the dimness of my place.

She was speaking to me. She was actually here. She’d come back alone. I’d imagined this scene so many times in my head, but each time it was I who started things. I almost didn’t catch what she was saying. She’d actually come back!

‘Are you still open?’

‘—yes!’

‘You don’t seem very open. The lights are off.’

‘—yes! Erm, I was getting ready to close, but until I close, I’m very completely open. Here!’ I switched the lights on again. ‘There.’ Wishing I sounded cooler. I must look like a junior high school kid.

‘Don’t let me stop you going home.’

‘Don’t let — no, you’re not. Erm, I. Take your time. Please. Come in.’

‘Thank you.’ The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes and at the me that lives in me.

‘I—’ I began.

‘This—’ she began.

‘Go on,’ we both said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You go on. You’re the lady.’

‘You’re going to think I’m a nutcase, but I came in about ten days ago, and,’ she was unconsciously rolling on the balls of her heels, ‘and there was this piece of music you were playing... I can’t get it out of my head. A piano and a saxophone. I mean, there’s no reason why you should have remembered it or me or anything...’ She trailed off. There was something odd about the way she spoke. Her accent swung this way and that. I loved it.

‘It was two weeks ago. Exactly. Plus a couple of hours.’

She was pleased. ‘You remember me?’

I didn’t quite recognise my own laugh. ‘Sure I do.’

‘I was with my revolting cousin and her friends. They treat me like an imbecile because I’m half-Chinese. My mother was Japanese, you see. Dad’s Hong Kong Chinese. My home’s in Hong Kong.’ Nothing apologetic about the way she spoke. I’m not pure Japanese and if you don’t like that you can stick it.

I thought of Tony Williams’s drumming in ‘In a Silent Way’. No, I didn’t think of it. I felt it, somewhere inside.

‘Hey, that’s nothing! I’m half-Filipino. The music was “Left Alone” by Mal Waldron. Would you like to hear it again?’

‘Would you mind?’

‘’Course I wouldn’t mind... Mal Waldron’s one of my gods. I kneel down to him every time I go to the temple. What’s Hong Kong like, compared to Tokyo?’

‘Foreigners say it’s dirty, noisy and poky, but really, there’s nowhere like it. Not anywhere. And when Kowloon gets too much you can escape to the islands. On Lantau Island there’s a big buddha sitting on a hill...’

For a moment I had an odd sensation of being in a story that someone was writing, but soon that sensation too was being swallowed up.

The cherry blossoms had come and almost gone. New green leaves, still silky and floppy, were drying on the trees lining the back street. Living and light as mandolins and zithers. The commuters streamed by. Not a coat in sight. Some had come out without their jackets. No denying it, spring was old news.

The phone rang. Koji, calling from the college canteen. ‘So. Who is she?’

‘Who?’

‘Stop it! You know perfectly well who! The girl at Mrs Nakamori’s last night who sat there swooning on your every note! Let me see... Her name began with “Tomo” and ended with “yo”. What was she called I wonder? Oh yes, that’s right. Tomoyo.’

‘Oh, her...’

‘Don’t give me that! I saw you two making eyes at each other.’

‘You imagined it.’

‘You were making eyes at each other! The whole bar saw. A sea-cucumber would have noticed. Her father definitely did. Taro noticed. He came up to me afterwards and asked me who she was. I’d hoped that he could tell me. He said to grill you. And what Taro wants he gets, so I’m grilling you.’

‘There’s not much to tell. She came into the shop four weeks ago. Then she came in again last week. We got talking, just about music, and we went out on a date or two last week. That’s all.’

‘A date or seven you mean.’

‘Well, you know how it goes.’

‘Not that I want to be nosey or anything, it’s just that I didn’t get the chance to interrogate her last night. But, er, so have you, y’know, snipped her ribbons and unwrapped her packaging yet?’

‘The girl’s a lady!’

‘Ah, yes, but every lady is a woman.’

‘No. We haven’t.’

‘You always were a slow worker, Satoru. Why not?’

‘Because...’ I remember her body wrapped inside my duffle-coat as we walked along, sharing the same umbrella. I remember spending the whole movie holding her hand. I remember her eyes scrunched up in laughter as we watched a street performer who stood motionless on a pedestal until you left a coin in his urn, when he changed his expression and pose until the next coin was dropped in. I remember her trying not to laugh at my bowling alley disasters. I remember lying on the blanket in Ueno Park as the cherry blossom fell onto our faces. I remember her in this room, in this chair, listening to my favourite music as she did her homework. I remember her face as she concentrated, and that strand of hair that fell down, almost touching her notebook. I remember kissing the nape of her neck in elevators between floors, and springing apart when the doors suddenly opened. I remember her telling me about her goldfish, and her mother, and life in Hong Kong. I remember her asleep on my shoulder on the night bus. I remember looking at her across the table. I remember her telling me about the ancient Jomon people who buried their kings in mounds, on the Tokyo plain. I remember her face at Mrs Nakamori’s when Koji and I did ‘Round Midnight’ better than we’ve ever played it before. I remember... ‘I dunno, Koji. Maybe we didn’t do it because we could have done it.’ Was that true? It would have been easy, just to slip into a love hotel. My body certainly wanted to. But... but what? ‘I really can’t say. Not because I’m being coy. I don’t know.’

Koji made the sage noise that he always does on the rare occasions when he doesn’t understand something. ‘So, when do I get to see her again?’

I swallowed. ‘Never, probably. She’s going back to international school in Hong Kong. She only comes to Tokyo every couple of years with her father to visit relatives for a few weeks. We have to be realistic.’

Koji sounded more depressed about it than I did. ‘That’s terrible! When’s she going back this time?’

I looked at my watch. ‘In about thirty minutes.’

‘Satoru! Stop her!’

‘I really think... I mean, I think that—’

‘Don’t think! Do something!’

‘What do you suggest? Kidnap her? She’s got her life to get on with. She’s going to study archaeology at university in Hong Kong. We met, we enjoyed each other’s company, very much, and now we’ve parted. It happens all the time. We can write. Anyway, it’s not like we’ve fallen longingly in love with each other, or anything like that—’

‘Beep beep beep.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, that was my bullshit alarm going off.’

I dug out some old big band Duke Ellington. It reminds me of wind-up gramophones, silly moustaches and Hollywood musicals from before the war. It usually cheers me up. ‘Take the “A” Train’, rattling along on goofy optimism.

I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and I thought about Tomoyo for the fiftieth time that day.

The phone rang. I knew it was going to be Tomoyo. It was Tomoyo. I could hear aeroplanes and boarding announcements in the background.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Hello.’

‘I’m phoning from the airport.’

‘I can hear aeroplanes taking off in the background.’

‘Sorry I couldn’t say “goodbye” properly last night. I wanted to kiss you.’

‘So did I, but with everyone there, and everything...’

‘Thanks for inviting me and Dad to Mrs Nakamori’s last night. My dad says thanks too. I haven’t seen him nattering away like he did with your Mama-san and Taro for ages.’

‘I haven’t seen them nattering away like that for ages, either. What were they talking about?’

‘Business, I guess. You know Dad has a small stake in a night club. We both loved the show.’

‘It wasn’t a show! It was just me and Koji.’

‘You’re both really good musicians. Dad didn’t shut up about you.’

‘Nah... Koji’s good, he makes me sound passable. He phoned about twenty minutes ago. I hope we weren’t too gooey at the bar last night. Koji thought we were a bit obvious.’

‘Don’t worry about it. And hey! Dad even implied, in his roundabout way, you could visit during your holidays. He might manage to find a bar for you to play sax in, if you wanted to.’

‘Does he know? About us?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Takeshi doesn’t exactly give me holidays... At least, I’ve never asked for one.’

‘Oh...’ She changed the subject. ‘How long did it take you to get so good?’

‘I’m not good. John Coltrane is good ! Wait a sec—’ I grabbed a copy of John Coltrane and Duke Ellington, playing ‘In a Sentimental Mood’. Smoky and genuflective. We listened to it together for a while. So many things I wanted to say to her.

There was a series of urgent rings. ‘I’m running of out money — there’s something — Oh, damn, ’Bye!’

‘’Bye!’

‘When I get back I’ll—’

A lonely hum.

At lunchtime Mr Fujimoto came in, saw me, and laughed. ‘Good afternoon, Satoru-kun!’ he jubilated. ‘Blue skies, just you wait and see! Tell me, what do you think of this little beaut?’ He put a little package of books on the counter, and straightened out his bow tie, arching his eyebrows and acting proud.

A grotesque polka-dot frog-green bow tie. ‘Absolutely unique.’

His whole body wobbled with mirth. ‘We’re having a disgusting tie competition in the office. I’ve got ’em licked, I think.’

‘How was Kyoto?’

‘Oh, Kyoto was Kyoto. Temples and shrines, meetings with printers. Uppity shopkeepers who think they have a monopoly on manners. It’s good to be back. Once a Tokyoite, always a Tokyoite.’

I started my rehearsed speech. ‘Mr Fujimoto, when I told Mama-san about your kind offer to help me get an interview at your office she gave me this to give you. She thought you and your co-workers might enjoy it at a cherry-blossom party.’ I heaved the huge bottle of rice-wine onto the counter.

‘Sake! My word, that is a big boy! This will last awhile, even in an office full of publishers! How extraordinarily kind.’

‘No, it was kind of you. I’m sorry I’m too ignorant to accept your generous offer.’

‘Not at all, not at all. No umbrage taken, I promise you... It was just a passing...’ Mr Fujimoto looked for the right word, blinking hard, and laughed when he couldn’t find it. ‘I don’t blame you in the least. You wouldn’t want to end up being like me, would you?’ He found that a lot funnier than I did.

‘It’s not my place to say this, but I wouldn’t mind ending up being like you at all. You’ve got a good job. Unforgettable bow ties. A great taste in the world’s finest jazz discs.’

He stopped smiling for once and gazed out. ‘The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, it turns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits the ground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only absolutely perfect when it’s falling through the air, this way and that, for the briefest time... I think that only we Japanese can really understand that, don’t you?’

A van roaring the message Vote for Shimizu, the only candidate who really has the guts to fight corruption screeched past like a drunken batmobile. Shimizu never betrays, Shimizu never betrays, Shimizu never betrays.

Mr Fujimoto trailed his fingers through the air. ‘Why do things happen the way they do? Since the gas attack on the subway, watching those pictures on TV, watching the police investigate like a crack squad of blind tortoises, I’ve been trying to understand... Why do things happen at all? What is it that stops the world simply... seizing up?’

I’m never sure whether Mr Fujimoto’s questions are questions. ‘Do you know?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know the answer, no. Sometimes I think it’s the only question, and that all other questions are tributaries that flow into it.’ He ran his hand through his thinning hair. ‘Might the answer be “love”?’

I tried to think, but I kept seeing pictures. I imagined my father — that man who I had imagined was my father — looking out through the rear window of a car. I thought of butterfly knives, and a time once three or four years ago when I was walking out of McDonald’s and a businessman slammed down onto the pavement from a ninth floor window of the same building. He lay three metres away from where I stood. His mouth was gaping open in astonishment. A dark stain was trickling from it, over the pavement, between the bits of broken teeth and glasses.

I thought about Tomoyo’s eyebrows, her nose, her jokes, her accent. Tomoyo on an aeroplane to Hong Kong. ‘I’d rather be too young to have that kind of wisdom.’

Mr Fujimoto’s face turned into a smile that hid his eyes. ‘How wise of you.’ He ended up buying an old Johnny Hartman disc with a beautiful version of ‘I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart’.

A mosquito blundered its way into my ear, suddenly there, loud as an electric blender. I pulled my head away and swatted the little bugger. Mosquito season. I was scraping its fuselage onto a bit of paper when Takeshi’s estranged wife marched in, pushing her sunglasses up into her bountiful hair. She was accompanied by a sharp-dressed man who I immediately sensed was a lawyer. They have a look about them. When Takeshi offered me this job I’d spent a whole evening over at their apartment in Chiyoda, but now apart from the curtest of nods Takeshi’s wife ignored me. The lawyer did not acknowledge my existence.

‘He,’ Takeshi’s wife pronounced the pronoun with the unique bitterness of the ex-wife, ‘only leases the property, but the stock is worth quite a lot. At least, he was always boasting that it is. The real money’s in the hair salons, though. This is just a hobby, really. One of his many hobbies.’

The lawyer demurred.

They turned to go. Takeshi’s wife looked at me as she was stepping through the door. ‘You can learn something from this, Satoru. Never make a big decision which will alter the shape of your life on the basis of a relationship! You may as well take out a mortgage on a house made of sponge cake. Remember that.’ And she was gone.

I thought about what she had said as I put on a Chet Baker disc. A trumpet with nowhere urgent to be and all day to get there. And his voice, zennish murmurings in the soft void. My funny valentine, You don’t know what love is, I get along without you very well.

The phone rang. A hysterical Takeshi. Drunk again.

‘Don’t let them in! Don’t let that mad cow in!’

‘Who?’

‘Her! Her and her backstabbing-scumbag-bloodsucking lawyer, who should be representing me! They’re going after my testicles with a meat cleaver! Don’t let them look at the stock — don’t let them look at the accounts — it’s illegal — and hide the limited edition original Louis Armstrong. And the gold disc of ‘Maiden Voyage’. Stick it down your boxer shorts or something — and—’

‘Takeshi!’

‘What?’

‘It’s a bit late, I’m afraid.’

‘What?’

‘They’ve already been. Just to look around for a few seconds, so the lawyer could see the place. They didn’t look at the accounts, they didn’t evaluate anything.’

‘Oh. Great. Just great. Great. What an utter, pigging, mess. That woman is Mad Cow Disease on two legs... And what legs they are...’ He hung up.

The sunlight hummed and was soft. Shadows of twigs and branches swayed ever so slightly against the back wall. I thought of a time many years ago when two or three of Mama-san’s girls had taken me boating on a lake. One of my earliest memories.

Your place does keep you sane, but can also keep you lonely.

What was I going to do? I rolled up my shirt and looked on my forearm. There was a snake which Tomoyo had drawn on with a blue pen yesterday afternoon. I asked her, why a snake? She’d laughed at me like she was in on a joke that I wasn’t in on.

Two thoughts walked into my place.

The first thought said that we hadn’t slept together because sex would have closed an entrance behind us and opened an exit ahead of us.

The second thought told me quite clearly what to do.

Maybe Takeshi’s wife was right — maybe it is unsafe to base an important decision on your feelings for a person. Takeshi says the same thing often enough. Every bonk, he says, quadruples in price by the morning after. But who are Takeshi or his wife to lecture anybody? If not love, then what?

I looked at the time. Three o’clock. She was how many thousand kilometres and one time zone away. I could leave some money to cover the cost of the call.

‘Good timing,’ Tomoyo answered, like I was calling from the cigarette machine around the corner. ‘I’m unpacking.’

‘Missing me?’

‘A tiny little bit, maybe.’

‘Liar! You don’t sound surprised to hear me.’

I could hear the smile in her voice. ‘I’m not. When are you coming?’

And so we talked about what flight I could catch, where we would go, how she would level things with her father, what I could do to avoid eating into my meagre savings too much. I felt as near to Paradise as I have ever been.