Tokyo Page 2

  As I was looking for a bush to shelter under the only car I’d seen since the woodcutter pulled over.

  A kimono salesman took me all the way to Kochi, thrilled at the chance to practice his broken English while his precious dresses swayed on hangers above the back seat. Although I’d received only generosity and kindness travelling Japan, nothing had prepared me for the moment he untied a drawstring bag and emptied dozens of pearls onto his palm, rolled them around then picked out two. Placing them carefully into my cupped hands he’d said, “Omiyage.” Souvenir. From our two languages I worked out he was telling me to give them to my bride on my wedding day.

  I’m not superstitious, but perhaps if I hadn’t lost them, somewhere between the Japanese countryside and the Nevada desert, I’d still be married.

  三

  KOJI OKADA CLOSED his eyes and waited for her to sleep. In his dark reverie she seemed phosphorescent, almost burning. He waited for the cabin lights to dim and then he opened his eyes. She was curled in her seat. Bare feet pulled up from the floor. He studied her red-painted toenails. Blood jewels in the screen light. He wanted to draw the blanket over their nakedness.

  Abruptly, he stood and opened the luggage rack. He checked the aisles, the dead rows of dreaming passengers.

  Then he ripped the tag off her bag, snapping the plastic cord. He took down his briefcase and walked to the rear of the plane and sat in a spare window seat. Once more he looked to the shock-mouthed O of the dazzling moon, the two of them face to face, before he shut the blind and went to the lavatory.

  He slid back the latch, put down the seat and studied her handwriting. Her name.

  四

  WE ROSE ABOVE Tokyo in a flying car. On the apex of Rainbow Bridge, a span of steel and concrete tall enough for container ships and oil tankers to cruise beneath, I watched the cityscape loom.

  “Japanese engineering,” stated my driver, Professor Yamada, noting my focus on the rivets and cables stretching towards the sun.

  “I had a Toyota Corolla,” I told him. “When I was a student. Every time it rained I had to jump start it.”

  Yamada shook his head.

  “I always parked facing downhill if the weather looked bad.”

  “No, no,” said Yamada. “Japanese car. Built by British worker.”

  He laughed, that sonorous bass. With his long black hair and white teeth he looked like a cartoon villain. Not that I’d have shared this thought with him, eminent social psychologist at Tokyo University, colleague and mentor, driving me to collect Mazzy from the station.

  “She wanted to ride the train herself,” I said, checking my watch, again, and wondering if I’d done the right thing by letting her ride the airport shuttle rather than wait at the terminal. “She told me she wasn’t a child any more.”

  Yamada apologised, before explaining that the welcome ceremony for international staff couldn’t be rearranged.

  “The Japanese responsibility to company before family.”

  Once more we went through the formalities of his apology and my dismissal of its necessity.

  “Anyway,” I said. “This is the deal on her coming to Japan. That I’m not going to babysit her twenty four hours a day.”

  “Is she,” Yamada paused, searched the neural database of his phrases. “The apple of your eye?”

  “She is. But her mother has made her a little sour.”

  Generally, Yamada’s English was excellent, and I was wary of correcting him unless his idiom was so arcane that Dickens would have thought it outdated. Or his earnest phrasing was a comical faux pas. At a reception in London he’d daintily lifted a china cup from its saucer and announced to our hostess that it was an ‘adequate’ tea.

  “When I last visited the UK, I was very shocked.”

  Yamada changed the subject, avoided talk of family and divorce, the private life bared.

  “You have forsaken community for authority of law. Security cameras. Speed cameras. Garbage police. The riots were no surprise.”

  I wasn’t about to begin defending the ills of British society. I could hardly argue with him. Once the smoke had settled on the charred city centres, a broadsheet editor asked me to contribute a piece on mob psychology. In the article I’d argued that the increasing number of cults, sects and churches, along with a splintering of political values in parties across the globe, as well as the bands of British kids in delinquent union, were symptomatic of rifts in society, a lack of belonging.

  The familiar, terrifying sway of the crowd. A phenomena I’ve been obsessed with since watching the Asch inspired drumbeat experiment, where a group of subjects were simply asked to count the number of times a drum was struck. Six people listened to a drum beaten eight times. Five of the six subjects were confederates planted by the researchers, and when asked how many times the drum had been struck, each replied, “Seven.” The guinea pig, in almost all of the tests, conformed with the group despite believing he or she had actually, and correctly, counted eight.

  When the terror cell pledges deathly allegiance, it is with flesh and blood they are bound. Not the seemingly tangible god.

  Although gangs of youths burning and stealing was hardly original, the summer riots forced a change in my angle on group theory. We needed the positives of crowd psyche. When a third opportunity to return to Japan appeared in my in-box, a focus on the power of community and co-operation, rather than the twisted eccentricities of the cult lives I’d previously studied, I phoned Mazzy and began the negotiations to convince her, and her mother, that a radioactive country recovering from an earthquake and a tidal wave was going to be home for the next six months.

  **

  Since the divorce ten years ago, a wrangling that only US courts could have choreographed, Mazzy had lived with her mother just outside of San Diego.

  We did love each other, once. Lydia and I. Fiercely, with an intellectual passion as much as any physical desire. When she proposed the clause of sharing royalties on any books or papers I’d written while we were married, I simply accepted, much to the attorney’s chagrin, as her influence on my thinking was undeniable.

  Though it certainly wasn’t love at first sight.

  We met on the driveway of a house in Santa Fe. Beyond a sprinkled lawn and a white door framed by fake Roman columns, in a carefully constructed dormitory of aluminium bunk beds and flat-pack closets, lay 39 men and women dressed in black trousers and black shirts, brand new Nike trainers. Over each of their faces lay a square of purple cloth. Mostly they were young, healthy and intelligent. IT professionals and budding lawyers, graduates from Ivy League schools.

  And members of Heaven’s Gate.

  All but two had eaten an apple sauce cyanide and washed it down with vodka, dying in organised shifts so each following group could wrap plastic bags over their heads to ensure suffocation, and prepare their souls to be gathered by an interstellar ship tailing the Hale-Bopp comet.

  My first post after the PhD was assisting a research project in Los Angeles, devising exit strategies for gang members, and I knew Lydia from a lecture I’d attended at Berkeley. An admired cult specialist, she was the go-to expert for news desks reporting on criminal clans. Now she’d been called in to help document a death scene. When I stepped past a cop and dropped the name of her department colleague, she turned and asked, “And you are?”

  Then she was waved through the police tape while I stood with the gawkers on the pavement.

  I’d driven up on a tip off from one of her students, the news piquing my morbid fascination with mass suicide. I was a student of Waco and Jonestown, had devoured accounts from surviving members, pored over the details of cult life and read the warped manifestos, and then, finally, the police reports of the flaming and tragic showdowns.

  However, my immature curiosity turned to shock and anger when paramedics wheeled out the bodies.

  Lydia had bee
n allowed inside the house, the morgue. The next day I sent her an email apologising for my crass introduction. She didn’t reply for a month, and then asked if I could meet her that afternoon at a highway diner near San Diego.

  I took a booth seat by the window. Got there early and watched a bad coffee cool on the Formica table. Before she walked across the car park and into the diner. The force of her in a room. That long, glossy hair, pinned back by her sunglasses. A dark, wild lustre, inherited from a native American grandmother in British Columbia.

  We said our hellos and sat down, both apologising for being rude at our first meeting.

  “I was playing up my credentials to the police,” she explained. “I knew what a coup it was to get in there.” She shook her head. “But I wasn’t expecting that. The neatness. How ordered the killing was.”

  She wanted to talk to another professional about the disciple’s final subversion. How a group gains the consciousness of the individual. She tried to be clinical in her explanation, the hypotheses and arguments. Names of researchers. I nodded. Professor Lifton’s characteristics of mind control: the demand for purity, doctrine over person, sacred science and the dispensing of existence. She waved away the standards with exasperated gestures, and I offered what empathy I could when her voice wobbled. She was older, more qualified, but had stood in a room full of bodies.

  “Come on.” she said. “You talk. Tell me something.”

  That flowing, raven hair, still damp from a swim.

  “Why were you driving up to death scenes on a sunny afternoon?”

  I told her about visiting the Masada fort in Israel when I was a schoolboy, reading dusty plaques about the hundreds who killed themselves, and their children, rather than surrender to the Romans.

  “They saw a comet to jump on.” She shook her head. “Bad joke. What else got you into watching sheep.”

  “My fear of crowds.”

  “That’s a new one.”

  I confessed I was both terrified and intrigued by a group soul. Whatever the intentions. That I hated demonstrations, and could only play team sports if I was captain.

  “That’s like saying you’ll only be the citizen of a country if you can be President.”

  “Dictator.”

  She laughed. Bluntly she asked if I was married, and when I said no she made a joke that single life is a dictatorship where one person is happy, and that married life is a democracy where compromise means nobody is.

  “I could compromise.”

  She smiled. A spark to her brown eyes, a playful twinkle. It was the hint of a flirt, a study of my face.

  Later, she’d tell me she was guessing my age. She was wrong. She thought I was older. But it didn’t matter then. Or the next weekend. The age gap was a thrill for us both, sitting on the porch of her house outside San Diego, the faint, orange glow of a bushfire in the silver mountains. A bottle of wine in the ice box. We could hear coyotes howling in the dark, the hum of an occasional car winding through the darkened valley.

  I was, I still am, a young father. I was twenty six and she was thirty four. Hardly on the last ticking of her biological clock, she made it clear she was too old to be fooling around with men cutting notches into bedposts.

  “Handle it,” she’d challenged, on a drive to the Grand Canyon three months into our relationship. “I want a family, and you need to know that before we get into something that eats up years.”

  I was going through a euphoric period when she threw down the gauntlet. I cycled to work and sat in an office that overlooked a tree lined campus. Lunched on a rooftop that offered views of the sapphire Pacific. Mid afternoons I drank coffee with a woman who was beautiful, thrilling, and whip smart. She’d conjure up theories and destroy revered ideas in the same breath.

  “We have something here, Ben, you know that. But I’m not fooling around, getting old and bitter because I didn’t have kids.”

  She was driving. Sunglasses on. All that sky and desert reflected in the lenses.

  “Well?”

  The window was down, her hair whipped around her face.

  “You’re driving too fast for me to jump out.”

  It was a stupid remark.

  “Okay,” she said, checking the rear view mirror. “Go on. Do it.” She slowed down to thirty, tires thudding over the rumble strips.

  “I’ll raise you a wedding.”

  The car juddered along the edge of the highway.

  “Look out.”

  She swerved from a prang with signpost before accelerating back onto the asphalt, revving the engine hard.

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “We could drive into Vegas tonight, and wake up tomorrow man and wife.”

  Lydia drove on, chewed her bottom lip. “Neither of us do God, so what does a piece of paper mean to anyone but the IRS?”

  “Last of the romantics.”

  “Ben, stop fucking with me. Especially while I’m driving.”

  We drove into Las Vegas after sundown, the whole neon shebang calling us from the desert like some gaudy mirage that didn’t vanish when we arrived. Beneath the flashing bulbs and coloured fountains, we sat in backed up traffic with kitsch limousines and tour buses, hotel shuttles filled with Chinese gamblers. I wound down the window and listened to a gaggle of Geordie women argue about the price of a helicopter tour.

  We checked into a hotel, walked rows of clunking slot machines and watched four consecutive sunsets blaze and fade on the roof of a miniature Venice. Then, after sharing a bottle of champagne, we walked into the 9th Street Elvis Chapel and bought the Hound Dog wedding package.

  五

  AFTER THE PLANE taxied to a halt, and the cabin doors hissed open to Japan, Koji stood quickly and scanned the aisle.

  There she was.

  Luminous above the dark heads.

  He lost sight of her while he waited to exit. Passengers with bags and belongings. Fools with duty free and branded shopping. He pushed past a tall American man who told him to wait his turn. He thought about the man fighting for breath, drowning in his grip.

  Koji needn’t have rushed, panicked. She was delayed at passport control. The line of foreigners entering the country was longer than the line of returning Japanese, and he was waved through before her without a question asked.

  Lingering in the corridor to the baggage hall, he stared at the planes through the window. Jet liners nosing into the terminals. Like toys. He’d wanted to be a pilot, once. When she passed by he watched her reflection on the glass.

  Then the empty, revolving carousels. Koji stood beside a pillar while the passengers waited for their cases to appear. They switched on phones or yawned. She looked around the hall, at signs and at people. He liked the way she flicked her hair over one side of her head.

  He pulled her tag from his pocket. Again, he studied her name, tracing the looped writing with his fingertip.

  When he next looked up the luggage had appeared. The tall American man lifted her suitcase onto the tiled floor. He smiled. She smiled too. Bright, white teeth. A pink doll mouth.

  Then she wheeled her suitcase towards customs, beaming at the official. He briefly checked her passport, and then gave it back. She bowed, a little awkwardly, and walked into Japan.

  He followed, waiting on the marked line as the gloved official checked his declaration form. Koji watched him read. He was young. Perhaps they were the same age. The official checked his passport. Compared photo and flesh. He asked Koji about Los Angeles, whether he’d bought any souvenirs for his family. Koji watched his Adam’s apple move as he talked. It was too large for his thin neck, and he wanted to slit his throat and see what came out.

  Koji answered the question. He told the official his mother and father were dead.

  The official closed his passport and returned it held in both hands. Then he waved him through to arrivals.


  Koji didn’t expect to see her alone. Walking away from the express train counter, the ticket in her hand like a fan.

  六

  WAITING AT THE gates in Tokyo station. An ice-cold melt in my sternum. The fear, when I realised Mazzy’s phone wouldn’t connect, and that if she didn’t get on the right train I’d be flapping around searching for her on the biggest transport system in the world. Bumped and nudged in the criss-crossing tangents of zipping commuters, I cursed out loud. At myself. Too eager to please, swayed by the will of my teenage daughter.

  I checked my watch against the clock on the concourse, the confirmation she was late. I imagined phoning Lydia, the accusations and apologies.

  Then she was there at the barrier.

  “Dad.”

  Waving and smiling. Remembering she was supposed to be mad at me for press-ganging her to Japan.

  In the reluctant hug, was love. I could feel it in the give of her shoulders, see it in her sparky blue eyes, ours, not her mother’s. Yet how strange and disconcerting to see her older when I leaned back and looked her up and down. Only six months, but the girl had gone and the woman was beckoning.

  “I’m not going to make you eat dolphin.”

  She shrugged. “I’m over that. It’s the radiation I’m supposed to watch out for.”

  More college kid than high school. The backpack exchanged for a wheeled suitcase and designer handbag.

  “I didn’t know you could see plutonium with the naked eye.”

  “Mom’s gonna mail with a list of foods to avoid.”

  I didn’t hear myself tut.

  “Don’t tut so loud.”

  But Mazzy did.

  We jumped in a taxi, talked about the flight and school. I hated these first conversations, stilted like old colleagues or distant relatives. The awkward settling in before the father-daughter dynamic returned. Knowing that the more we spoke the quicker the paternal atmosphere would resume, I improvised my knowledge on Tokyo, a bogus tour guide.