Part 3 (1/2)

Takes.h.i.+ 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 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 Takes.h.i.+ is the perfect age, making him ten years her senior. 'Engaged,' which for Takes.h.i.+ adds the thrill of adultery while subtracting any responsibility. 'Only s.h.a.g women who have more to lose than you do' was a motto of his. 'Clubbed until four in the morning. Woke up Sat.u.r.day 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 d.a.m.n if she wasn't 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 Takes.h.i.+ is the perfect age, making him ten years her senior. 'Engaged,' which for Takes.h.i.+ adds the thrill of adultery while subtracting any responsibility. 'Only s.h.a.g women who have more to lose than you do' was a motto of his. 'Clubbed until four in the morning. Woke up Sat.u.r.day 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 d.a.m.n if she wasn't still still gasping for it!' 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 a.r.s.e! 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 l.u.s.t and sin before she becomes a housewife forever.'

She sounded a right slapper to me. Takes.h.i.+ 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'.

Takes.h.i.+ was still on the telephone. It seemed to be my turn to say something.

'What's she like? Her personality, I mean.'

Takes.h.i.+ 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 s.h.i.+ts 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 n.o.body 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 s.p.a.ce around them to insulate themselves, to remind themselves of who they are. Not in Tokyo. You just don't have the s.p.a.ce, 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 inside your head. 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 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. 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.

Takes.h.i.+'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 Takes.h.i.+'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 j.a.pan. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+t 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.'