Slow Boat

^{BOAT FOUR} NO WAY OUT

I never was much of a talker, but after that ill-fated car chase—when I lost my first girlfriend—I really clammed up. Let my fists do all the talking. I lashed out at everyone in range: the adults trying to hold me back, the other kids at The End of the World, everybody, anybody. Third grade, eighth grade, it made no difference to me. Then they sent me home to Suginami, supposedly rehabilitated.

Back to school.

As soon as I saw all those ugly faces for the first time in a year, I got kind of slap-happy.

I’m pretty sure I took a swing at every kid in my grade before the semester was up. I mean it. In the spirit of being open and honest, there’s something I need to admit. I didn’t spare girls. It was low of me, I know, but on average, they were the better fighters.

We beat each other senseless. All of us. There was plenty of hate to go around. “Peaceful resolution”? Huh? What’s that even mean? Peace is just a ruse. Granted, “ruse” wasn’t in my vocabulary back then. But I felt it in my bones. We all did. All rise, bow—and come out swinging!

In no time, I was slapped with a bad rep. I made it into middle school, but Suginami ward put me on blast. I was an ex-dropout who hit girls. Blacklisted. In middle school, likes and loves were flying all over the place. Boys and girls and unchained libidos. But I played no part in the adolescent melodrama. I was hanging out in my corner, alone, giving off bad vibes.

High school was easier on me. All boys. No girls meant no girls to hit.

But my school wasn’t easier on everyone. During my time there, three boys (in different grades) killed themselves, one kid in my grade survived a family suicide, and another kid murdered his parents in their sleep. (He doused his house in gasoline and set it on fire.)

The rash of deaths didn’t have anything to do with my school, though, not really. Every school has kids who want to kill themselves, and kids who want to kill their parents, and parents who want to kill their kids. But the media likes to find patterns where there aren’t any. FIVE TRAGEDIES IN THREE YEARS—WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS SCHOOL? There were talk shows about us, dramatizations, you name it. Our school was legendary. Every time I turned on the TV, I was back in school. It was crazy.

This school stood for everything wrong with the Japanese education system. Wild kids = wild homes = the end of Japan as we know it. Like that.

TV crews were always hanging around. We knew exactly what they wanted to hear—and we delivered. STUDENTS SPEAK UP—TEENAGERS AT THE END OF THE CENTURY.

We were in magazines and newspapers. We were even on TV. As unpaid extras.

The more over-the-top we were, the more they ate it up. Even though every word out of our mouths was pure bullshit.

We worked on our story, transforming an unexceptional boys’ school into the campus of the damned. People were afraid of us—even lowlifes from schools way worse than ours didn’t dare mess with us. That felt real good.

We felt something like school pride.

We invented a kind of language of our own. Words that fitted our own needs. Japanese for idiots, or something. For the first time in years, language made some sense to me. That was when I started speaking up—almost like a regular kid. Like I was part of something.

Sure, that camaraderie had its limits. Our language didn’t exist outside of the school and its immediate surroundings. And it didn’t last long. But it got us through some strange times.

Years later, I bumped into one of my classmates, but everything was different. When high school ended, that world ended. Everyone went their separate ways. Me? I went the way of the proper young gentleman. If you can believe: I studied liberal arts at a private university. No joke.

That came with a different circle of friends.

Boys and girls.

University. It didn’t take long to have a few close encounters with girls. But these girls were nothing like my first girlfriend. I mean, I wouldn’t call them “girlfriends”. More like science experiments. What happens when you introduce manganese dioxide to hydrogen peroxide? Oxygen! When ammonia and hydrochloric acid combine, you get… white smoke! Don’t try this at home, kids! Ha ha ha. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.

University.

School, sex, bar, school, work, double date (“collaborative research”), mid-terms, sex.

Science, it turns out, can be pretty medieval. Look at alchemy, the magic of converting base metals into gold. What am I trying to say? Love can lead to sex—of course. But there are times when things go the other way around. Sex can lead to love. That’s what I’m saying. I know it can happen because it happened to me. How many times? Well, just once.

I was nineteen.

And she was nineteen.

A bunch of us from class went out for drinks. We drank, a lot, then staggered over to her place. The couples among us vanished as the witching hour approached. Only four of us—two girls, this girl and me—stayed over, drinking and talking through the night. But as the night went on, the two girls started saying: “I gotta go home,” and “Shitshitshit, I need to get my books from my room,” and “Omigod, my hair is a total mess.” They left as soon as trains started running again in the morning. And then there were two. We said we were tired or cold or whatever—then got under the covers of her narrow single bed. We got good and close. I got a hard-on, then the thing that had to happen happened.

Within a half-hour, we’d finished—twice. Our chemistry was incredible. Explosive.

We sat up at the head and foot of her bed and looked at each other. For real this time. Starting over. “Nice to meet you.”

We’re buck-naked.

Me: We’ve had class together—what—twice?

Her: Three times, I think.

Me: Really? Already?

Her: Did you skip one?

Me: I dunno. Maybe.

Her: What do you want to do for breakfast?

Me: Go to the station?

Her: The… station?

Me: At this hour, the soba stall’s probably the best bet.

Her apartment was in Komagome, at the end of the shopping district. It was a five-minute walk from the JR station. That’s right, JR. It was now Japan Railways. National Railways was a thing of the past. Because when she and I were nineteen, the world was 1994.

19-19-1994.

Sounds ominous. Like an emergency phone number you hope you never have to call.

We spent the next few months lost in sex. Somewhere in there, she became my girlfriend—the second to appear in my history. Long live poverty! Every girl I’d ever been involved with commuted from home—somewhere in the twenty-three wards of Tokyo. And the same went for me. A pure Suginami boy. When I needed privacy, I had to buy it. Most of the time, that meant love hotels. Karaoke boxes weren’t made for going all the way. But asking a girl to go fifty-fifty on a love hotel was basically impossible. In other words, “dating” tended to eat up what little money I had.

Until then.

Until her.

We did it whenever we felt like it. Because she had her own place. Her bed was ours to use however we wanted. We made it creak, we made it shake. That’s how we got closer—by getting physical. We were making something. Alchemically, I mean.

She was from way up north. Asahikawa, Hokkaido.

And she, by the way, had these amazing areolae, like, around her nipples. I’m a breast guy. I love breasts. But hers were special—unlike any I’ve ever seen. Just the shape of them—they had purpose.

“See this?” she asked, showing me her left breast while we were in bed. “Looks like Hokkaido, right?”

“Holy shit… Yeah.”

Without a doubt, her left areola was a flawless map of Hokkaido.

Complete with the Habomai Islands.

For the record, she called them her “areas”—not areola. A little too generic for my taste.

“Here are the Tokachi Plains,” she pointed, giving me the full tour. “…And here’s where I come from. The middle of the Kamikawa Basin. No, not there! That’s my nipple… See where the skin dips in? That’s the Ishikari River. Sapporo’s over here…”

“Cool, cool.”

“OK, pop quiz—where’s Hakodate?”

“Um, around here?”

“Gold star! You really know your geography. I don’t know where anything is around Tokyo.”

“God, you’ve got such excellent areolae. The more I look, the more I like.”

“Right? I’m really proud of my areas.”

“You mean… you show them to people?”

“Why? Are you jealous? Haha.”

That was how we loved each other.

“I had to come to school in Tokyo,” she tells me, “to break free from Hokkaido.”

She’s cursed, she says. A conclusion reached after eighteen years. Her fate was tied to her birth island. Hokkaido.

“Well, did it work? Do you feel free?”

“Not yet,” she says. “Take a look over here.”

From left to right. She directs my attention to the areola on her other breast.

This one was no less meaningful. It was just—I dunno—more geometric. A shape nothing like Hokkaido.

“If the left one’s Hokkaido,” she tells me, “then this one’s got to be someplace, too.”

“So,” I say, “if the one on the left is where you’re from…”

She cuts in: “…then the one on the right is where I’m supposed to go.”

“Yeah, the place where you’ll find peace and happiness. Your Shangri-La. So your areolae are like a map of your life.”

“Totally. I need to find this place… If I don’t find it, I’ll never break the curse, right? If I can’t find it, then there’s no way out—you know what I mean?”

It made perfect sense to me. So we started searching. For a place in the shape of the excellent areola on her right breast.

When I shut my eyes, I can see its outline perfectly.

Even now.

We had no money. So our dates were pretty much limited to the Komagome neighbourhood. Rikugien Park was our favourite spot. When we had no classes and no plans, we’d spend the whole day there—enjoying what the pamphlet bills as “one of the most beautiful places in Tokyo”. We got there at opening and stayed until they closed at five. Even admission stung a little, so we never splurged on the in-park teahouse or anything. We packed our own refreshments. Du Zhong tea poured into water bottles. We woke up at eight to make our own lunches. Some days, “lunch” was a couple of rice balls. Like I said, we were broke.

But we were perfectly happy.

It got us giddy just watching the big-mouthed carp swimming in the pond.

Walking around the park always got us worked up. So we went at it—in the darker parts of the park. Hidden behind trees, out of sight. Sometimes we did our best to keep quiet. Sometimes we didn’t.

Cut us some slack. We were nineteen.

Our search for the mystery land mass mapped on her right breast went on. Whenever we found time (i.e., when we weren’t busy getting busy), we would hit the library or the bookstore. We’d look through travel books or spin globes in hopes of finding the place where she belonged. We even read anthropology articles, but nothing was panning out. We didn’t give up, though. Shangri-La was out there somewhere, waiting to be found.

We put on our thinking caps.

If Hokkaido’s cold, maybe this other place is warm—even tropical? So our eyes gravitated towards equatorial regions. We gave the Caribbean a good look. We studied the rigid borders on the African continent—lines left over from the colonial age. We kept an eye on the seas that had the most islands, the area between Indonesia and the Philippines, the Aegean Sea. Come to find out, though, the Aegean can actually get pretty chilly.

Alas, it’s darkest at the foot of the lighthouse. A saying meant just for us, it seems. It was July 1994. Mid-terms were probably over already. I ran into a classmate somewhere on campus—and he had all these geography books out on the table. Not college texts… more like supplementary material for middle-school texts. “For use with New Geography (Tokyo Publishing) or Our Society—An Introduction to Geography (Japan Books).” That sort of thing.

“What’s going on? Are you tutoring kids or something?” I think I asked.

“Uh-huh. I signed up with an agency. They find jobs for me.”

“Did they charge a lot?”

“Not that much. I get a lot of work, so it was totally worth it.”

“Cool.”

That was pretty much our whole conversation.

My girlfriend was there, too, quietly thumbing through those geography books, as if taking a trip down memory lane. She went through a set of flash cards of “Japan’s 47 Prefectures”. Chock-full of handy statistics: co-ordinates, population, resources, climate, etc. She lingered on the last of the forty-seven, Okinawa, just sort of hovering there. Then she said something.

Not words, really. If I had to write it down, I’d go with something like: N-mwah!

Me: Whatwhat?

Her: This.

She had her finger on it. This funny triangle, sort of in the middle of the ocean… Holy shit! It looked exactly like the one on her right breast. Miyakojima.

One of the islands of Okinawa (formerly the Kingdom of Ryukyu).

Unbelievable.

She’d found the other shape. On the left, Hokkaido. On the right, Miyakojima.

Her areolar oracle had been revealed in full.

It was in Japan all along. Talk about a serious short circuit. We’d been blind—hyperopic, at least. What made us so sure that her Shangri-La wasn’t in Japan? Another misreading in my life of misreadings.

In that moment, we understood. Setting foot on Miyakojima was the goal—the way out. But this story is a little longer than that, so bear with me.

Her: I need money for the flight.

Me: Right, of course.

Her: But that’s it, right?

Me: Guess so.

Her: Like, I need money for food and a room. But that won’t be a problem—as long as I get a job.

Me: And, like, stay there a while?

Her (looking into the distance): What’s stopping me? I mean, it’s Japan. I don’t need a passport. I don’t need a work visa.

Me: But what about school?

Her: First things first. My Promised Land awaits!

Fair enough.

If this was a kabuki play, this would be the place where the wooden clappers get faster and faster. Things were really moving now. All we needed was 20,000 yen each. We didn’t really think about questions like when or how long (i.e., winter break or spring break?). For the time being, all we needed was capital.

We started job-hunting. Easy enough. Campus was full of flyers for “short-term high-income employment opportunities”. They all looked like menus from subpar family restaurants. I weighed a few options before signing up with a security company that had me waving a blinking orange stick—directing traffic around construction sites.

She was looking at the same flyers, but ended up, through a friend, scoring a plum job at a beach snack bar. Somewhere on the Boso Peninsula, on the side that looks at Tokyo Bay.

The summer before that—summer 1993—was unseasonably cold. Like, record lows. Crops were lost, meaning rice shortages, and the Heisei Rice Riots. Nobody was rushing to the beach. Boso Peninsula was empty, like a ski resort in a snowless winter. But that was 1993. This summer—1994—was ultra-hot. Forty-year highs. Tokyo hit 39.1 degrees in August. HOTTEST DAY SINCE WWII. Air conditioners were selling like hot cakes… And keeping cool was serious business.

“The beach is waaaaay packed,” she said after her third or fourth day. “It’s insane.”

Why are my summers always cursed? I guess I should be grateful that my fifth-grade summer died suddenly and didn’t drag on forever. This time around, summer was endless. And ruthless. University classes were slated to start in mid-September, and her beach gig was supposed to wrap up by the end of August. That gave us a couple of weeks in between, for ourselves. That’s why I put up with it.

With the reality that we couldn’t just be together whenever we wanted, not now.

We’d discovered the undeniable truth that making money means selling time. Selling time means time apart. Her bed was no longer Aladdin’s magic carpet—always good for a shag. We tried to make things work. After my job, I’d go right to her place in Komagome. Let myself in, wait for her.

But Boso isn’t exactly close. It’s in the next prefecture. I’m pretty sure she had to change trains at Tokyo Station to get there. She had to be there really early to open up. Sometimes she stayed late to spend time with co-workers, too. At first, it was hard to pin down when she was coming home. After a little while, though, she stopped coming back at all. She started staying with a girl she knew in Chiba.

“If I head back now, there’s no way I’ll make it to work tomorrow morning…”

Says the voice on the other end of the line.

But why am I playing the obedient husband? Alone in her apartment, waiting for the phone to ring.

Then the thing that had to happen happened.

But wait. Not yet. I have a confession to make. I need to be honest. I was hardly innocent myself. I made my own mistakes. With a twenty-something female security guard from work. I mean, she was friendly. And we… got friendly. Not just once. Four times—no more. “Four”, by the way, doesn’t reflect the number of times in a single night. Saying “she seduced me” wouldn’t be completely honest either. Sex was in the air. In the workplace. And good luck curbing the sexual urges of a nineteen-year-old male.

At first, I just acted cool—like she’d never find out. And she wouldn’t. The two of them lived in different worlds.

There was zero chance of them crossing paths.

But that doesn’t mean I got off scot-free.

Something I’ve noticed: whatever happens to me happens to those around me. She was hard at work at the beach—and, just like that, two weeks had gone by without us sharing a sack. There was one time we got close, except: “I’m on my period.” Fact is, she was barely ever at Casa Komagome at this point. Really, I should have been paying the rent. Then it hit me: What if she’s sleeping with someone else? Where did that suspicion come from? From my own indiscretions, obviously. That’s what got me thinking.

Thinking? More like I was consumed by jealousy.

But I tried to hide it. I mean, I had no proof—and, more to the point, I had no right.

I wanted to be optimistic. Like, if something’s going on, maybe it’s just meaningless sex… right?

Crap, this sucks.

I had a pretty good guess who the mystery lover might be. “Yakisoba Man”. A local surfer she worked with. He was older than her (older than us, I guess…), and apparently he could fry noodles like nobody else. The second I heard about this dude, something didn’t sit right. I mean, he’s too healthy—a healthy mind in a healthy body. Nothing like me. I’d never touched a surfboard, and instant ramen was the fullest extent of my noodle abilities. Don’t get me wrong, I have some pretty strong feelings about Peyoung sauce, but I couldn’t compete with this motherfucker.

I break the news to myself: “Listen, man, chances are good she’s sleeping with Yakisoba Man.”

“I see. Is it fatal?”

“No,” I tell myself. “Because I love her.”

I won’t push it, I can’t. It’s just temporary. It’ll end when Boso closes. Things can go back to the way they were—our love is strong. As long as I don’t blow it now. September will make everything right. We’ll be back in our honeymoon suite in Komagome. I mean, Yakisoba Man’s geographically out of range—he lives in Chiba. So I keep my mouth shut and wait for the tide to turn.

But that didn’t happen. September rolled around, and she was still hanging out in Boso, not coming home at night.

I think it was a few days into the month—maybe a week?

This memory has no when. I know. On some subconscious level, I want to forget, right? Some complex? Some deep desire? But I definitely remember where I was. In the apartment in Komagome. Her apartment—but she’s not there. I’m waiting for her. Waiting for that ominous sound.

The phone rings.

Twice. Then it stops. Then it starts again.

I pick up. “Hello?”

It’s her. “I’m at Haneda…”

I can hear the roar of Tokyo International Airport in the background. She’s on a payphone, calling her home phone—calling me.

“I got two tickets for Okinawa,” she says. She doesn’t wait for me to say anything back. “Two tickets to leave Haneda, touch down in Naha, then fly over to Miyakojima. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I–I think so.”

“No, you don’t—you don’t know if the extra ticket’s yours. I don’t even know… My job at the beach is over. I guess it’s been over for a while. I’ve got the money now, and I’m ready to leave. I can even cover a room for two. So… I’m going to Miyakojima. Myself plus one.”

“Plus me?”

“I don’t know…”

“What do you mean?”

“I need to make the same call to someone else.”

I say nothing.

She doesn’t ask me to come.

She tells me her flight number. Tells me her departure time. Says she’ll be waiting by the airline counter.

There isn’t much time.

“I can’t make this choice alone,” she says. The noise of the terminal nearly drowns her out. She sounds a little hoarse, but I can’t be sure. “So you have to choose for me. You have to choose me. If you drop everything and come with me, the ticket’s yours. If you can’t choose me, then I can’t choose you.”

Silence. That’s it?

No explicit mention of Yakisoba Man.

“I’m getting on this plane—I’m leaving Tokyo,” she says, “and I want someone to come with me…”

The call ends with a soft click.

Then total silence.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP—the alarm in my brain is screaming again. I’m fully alert. I decide. I choose her. There’s no need to overthink it. I love her, and everyone fucks up, right? I mean, I fucked up. Right?

If I run as fast as I can, I can get to the station in under a minute and a half.

Save that seat for me.

Komagome Station is on the Yamanote Loop Line—so I’ll take the Yamanote to Hamamatsucho, then grab the monorail to Haneda. But first things first. The Yamanote is a circle—so which way gets me there faster? Something tells me to go with the outside loop, towards Tokyo Station. I don’t count stops or anything. I just listen to my bones.

But something’s wrong at Komagome Station. I hear the announcements, but I can’t get a good read on the situation. All I know is that there’s a situation. OK, they’re saying something about “the power grid”. Outside loop’s down. Down how? How down? I map the Yamanote in my head. The dot for Komagome rests near the northern edge of the circle—Hamamatsucho is towards the south-east. (Counting stations after the fact: Hamamatsucho is twelve stops from Komagome on the outside loop—seventeen stops on the inside.)

OK. Change of plans. The inside loop’s still running, so I’ll take the loop the other way. I’ve already lost several stations’ time—gotta fly.

The train shows up, and it’s packed. Full of people who got turned around, like me. Therein lies the beauty of the loop—it’s a simple detour, go the other way. I force my way onto the train. It leaves Komagome, making brief stops at Sugamo, Otsuka, Ikebukuro. Then, a few hundred metres shy of the Mejiro platform, the train grinds to a halt. I didn’t know about the guerrilla attacks on Tokyo’s power stations. That information wasn’t available on the trains. No one had a cell phone—because the train was stuck in 1994. “Synchronized attacks,” the media would call it the next morning. What the fuck, extremists? Now my train’s stranded between Ikebukuro and Mejiro—the most distant point on the loop from where I need to be. Well, shit. Even the air conditioner is out of commission—in this record heat. The train was hot to begin with, and overcrowded—we’re all dripping with sweat. I hear a beat, leaking out of someone’s headphones. Tick-tick, tick-tick. Tick-tick, tick-tick. Almost like a time bomb about to explode.

A time bomb inside of me.

In this heat, we’re all an inch from losing our shit.

An announcement comes over the speaker. The conductor levels with us: We don’t know when we’re going to be moving again. Please stay calm.

And that’s when I lose it. “I want to get off!” I scream.

Within a couple of seconds, everyone else loses it too: “So what!” “Suck it up!”

You don’t understand, I say. If this train doesn’t start moving, I’ll miss my flight. I’ll never get out of Tokyo. I’ll lose my girlfriend. So—“OPEN THAT FUCKING DOOR! LET ME THROUGH—I’LL OPEN IT MYSELF.”

They try to stop me as I struggle towards the door:

“THE TRAIN WON’T MOVE IF THE DOORS ARE OPEN!”

“DON’T TOUCH THAT FUCKING DOOR!”

But justice is on my side. “MOVE,” I demand. And I push. “I’M GETTING OUTTA HERE.” If I can get off this dead train, I can get a taxi on Mejiro Avenue, or hightail it to Takadanobaba and take the subway. It’s not too late. I can still reach her. So—“OUTTA MY WAY, ASSHOLES!”

I start elbowing, pushing, throwing punches. But the whole train’s seething with rage. When I let my fists fly, fists come flying right back. The harder I hit, the harder I get hit. Action and reaction. I started it. And now they’re ending it.

I’m knocked down, beat up, blacked out.

Yeah… No way out.