Tokyo Page 3

  “I’ve got all sorts of cool places to show you,” I gushed, sounding like a boy trying to impress on a date rather than the father regaining his daughter. “Did you study any Japanese?”

  After a jet-lag nap on the sofa, I showed Mazzy the sights and sounds of Shibuya. Brash and neon. The ebb and flow of the famous crossing, the never-ending crowds teeming from the station as if the millipede steps of a single being. We walked past the hair-sprayed pimps beckoning women to hostess at clubs. We lingered beneath the tower-sized screens illuminating drunken salarymen, the gangs of schoolgirls hitching skirts, shoppers parading designer labels, and a cane-tapping blind man parting the flood. All of them intermittently photographed by a dumbstruck tourist with his lens to the lights.

  Then we sat and observed from a café window. The hypnotic waves of bobbing heads. Young and old in a capital that shuttles rather than jostles. Mazzy seemed quiet, but I hoped she was excited by the city she was about to make home.

  She did perk up for a while, asked questions about bowing, how to say thank you. Whether she could get California roll in Tokyo.

  Or it could’ve just been the caffeine from her double-shot that upped her interest in the country she’d fought to avoid living in. Because an hour later, on the 30th floor of the Metropolitan Building, an H-shaped tower with views from Yokohama Bay to the white tipped peak of Mount Fuji, she cried.

  “Hey, hey.” I put my arm on her shoulder.

  “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  A flock of Korean tourists swiftly moved through the viewing area, pulling down souvenirs and spinning back through the turnstiles.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I don’t know anyone.”

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ll treat you to some of the best sushi in Tokyo.”

  But her head and stomach were still in LA. We rode the lift down to the business district, and before I could hail a cab she saw a Sizzler and marched us inside, slouching on a leather booth seat and sulking over her iPhone between handfuls of nachos.

  “I told you. It won’t connect to a Japanese network.”

  “They have iPhones here, I’ve seen them.”

  “They call it Galapagos.”

  “What?”

  “Their network evolved separately.”

  “This place is fucked.”

  I told her not to swear.

  I told her she needed to step up and be an adult, that she was no longer a child.

  “So I should be making my own decisions.”

  I sighed, deflated. “Give a little. Please.”

  Neither of us could sleep that night. I lay in bed listening to her pad around the apartment, imagining I was her, looking out of the window onto the city. What did I see? What did I want from it all? What did I think of my father?

  She’d relaxed a little after the Sizzler restaurant, when I’d taken her into a Japanese phone shop and connected her to the pixel world of her peers, the light-fired comment and gossip that’s rewiring our youth’s neurones beyond anything my analogue generation can imagine and, increasingly, compete with. We frustrate our children asking how to find an address or download music, which button takes the photo. Still, she knew the rules around her father, and that if the phone came out at the dinner table or in a conversation it would be confiscated. And though she did follow protocol, I knew that with each mail, tweet, like, poke and ping, the social norms of my generation were being eradicated. What fool would bet on recognising the world at the end of the century.

  I was dozing when I heard a voice. Not hers.

  I woke from a half-dream where Tokyo had stopped. Paused. Each and every commuter, shopper, salaryman and high school student freeze-framed.

  Then again that voice.

  Mazzy was talking to Lydia on Skype. My bedroom door was shut, but both my window and Mazzy’s were open, and there was no mistaking her mother.

  “Mazzy,” she said. “We discussed this.”

  “You did with dad, but not me. And whose fucking life is it.”

  “Mazzy.”

  I got up and put on my dressing gown. Then I pushed open Mazzy’s door without knocking.

  “What the fuck, dad.”

  She was sat cross-legged on the bed, her iPad on the dresser. And Lydia, right there. Her whole face on the screen, in the room.

  “Ben?”

  “Who else?”

  “Sit down. All I can see is your crotch.”

  I sat, and asked Lydia if she let Mazzy swear in the house.

  “Don’t start.”

  “If you two argue this computer’s going out the window.”

  “We promise, Ben, don’t we.”

  “We do.”

  “Happy families,” said Mazzy.

  “Don’t be glib,” warned Lydia.

  For the first time in years, possibly ever, we sat around and talked things out together. Almost. Lydia, from what looked like her study in California, joined forces with me to convince our daughter that six months in Japan would be good for her.

  “You mean good for you two.”

  Ex-husband and ex-wife, united. We needed each other in battle. Mazzy cried and swore, threatened that she’d get on a plane to London, and that if we forced her to go to school here she’d, “Sit in class like a fucking zombie.”

  The turning point was a speech from Lydia, on how proud she already was of her daughter, and that after her own parents had sent her to Canada for a summer while they sailed around the Caribbean she came back a smarter, more independent woman. No longer a girl.

  Finally, Mazzy agreed to be in Tokyo for at least a month. “A trial,” she stated. “Then I get to decide my own future.”

  Lydia said, “Thank you, Ben.” And I thought her as condescending as ever. Eight years older than me but eternally wiser. I asked Mazzy to put the kettle on while I talked to her mother.

  “A conference call about me, without me.”

  “You make better coffee.”

  She looked at the screen for permission. “Skype me tomorrow.”

  “Love you.”

  Lydia wore a black track top, her hair tied up in a ponytail.

  I said, “We got that sorted.”

  “For the moment.”

  “Thanks. For your support.”

  She shrugged. “Ultimately, it’s her decision. But I swear if one of those reactors starts leaking then she’s on the first plane back.”

  I nodded to the camera, to the mother of our child.

  “And that’s my decision.”

  “Hai.Wakarimashita.” I bowed.

  “Don’t be childish.”

  “That’s Japanese for yes, and that I understand.”

  Lydia glared at the camera. Through the screen, across a continent, and into my eyes. “Look after her, Ben.”

  **

  Her long black hair would fall over her toned shoulders when she walked from the surf with her brown skin gleaming. A champion swimmer at college, trips to the beach were spent building sandcastles with Mazzy while her mother cut waves and dived like an oiled and sleek cormorant. I’d look to the glitter and static of the bright surface, see her shadow vanish, and turn back to the grand plans of a two year old builder and her foot deep moat.

  Mazzy would hold up dull, chipped treasure. “Look daddy.” And a broken shell from an ancient sea would be the most prized object in the world.

  Washing the salt from Mazzy’s hair, wrapping her in a towel and watching the sunset blaze over the porch while she gurgled and tried her first words.

  There were times I sat in her room while she was sleeping, studying the rise and fall of her tiny chest, a feathery sigh, the cow lick curls across her forehead. Part of me wished to leap into the future and see a confident young woman striding across a campus. I wanted to jump from the p
ermanent anxiety of fatherhood into the knowledge of a job well done.

  And this was before the wave.

  It was a bright, windy day. Lydia went for a swim, but the tussling currents had been too much for even her muscular strokes, and she’d come in breathless after only ten minutes.

  “That’s one feisty ocean,” she said, grabbing the drink bottle.

  “We’ll just paddle,” I said. “Ankle deep.”

  “Toe deep,” she warned.

  We were, I swear to this very day, paddling in the foam, not even in the wash of breaking waves.

  I had my back turned to the sea.

  “What the fuck were you looking at?” I’d later be asked.

  “A dog,” I told Lydia.

  “A fucking dog.”

  I was watching a dog leap and catch a frisbee, as was Mazzy, when I was slammed so hard from behind that I thought someone had run up and tackled me. I had Mazzy’s hand, but would’ve pulled her arm off if I hadn’t let go.

  I remember sand in my mouth, clutching, reaching, grabbing. Water, not Mazzy. Her tiny body in the brunt of tide. When the wave slid back to the sea I found my feet. Mazzy was tumbling like a bundle of laundry in a washing machine, sucked into the white teeth of the next breaking wave.

  I ran, waded.

  Lydia hurdled past me, high-stepping the swirl before diving into the mouth that swallowed her daughter. After the rush of shattered wave, she appeared, rose from the surf with Mazzy in her arms. A whole ocean defeated. She fought off another wave which tried, and failed again, to snatch what it had very nearly claimed.

  Mazzy coughed and spluttered. Where there’d been no lifeguards there were now bronzed men sprinting. “She’s bleeding,” someone said. Possibly me. People were told to stand back. A jeep pulled up and Lydia got in the passenger seat with Mazzy in her arms. I held onto the side rail with another lifeguard. I couldn’t even tell you if it was a man or woman.

  What I do know is that Lydia carried Mazzy from the medical centre, the cut on her ear sealed with a Band-Aid. She kissed her head again and again. “Mazzy, baby.”

  I drove home while Lydia cried. When we got back to the house Mazzy was asleep and Lydia carried her into the front room and laid her on the sofa and told me to get a blanket.

  **

  “You got me chocolate for mochas?”

  I walked away from the screen, Lydia, and into the kitchen where Mazzy was opening cupboards.

  “I did.”

  “Thanks, dad.”

  In the east above the towers, a vein of gold cracked the overcast sky. I slid open the doors and stepped onto the balcony, watching crows swoop between the rooftops. Mazzy brewed the coffee and carried the mugs outside.

  “What did mom say?”

  “That she loved me.”

  “You’re being sarcastic.”

  “So she doesn’t?”

  “Dad.” She passed over the mocha. “Strong and sweet.”

  I took the mug and sipped. “We won’t be going back to sleep after these.”

  Buzzed on caffeine and resolutions, I called a taxi and took Mazzy to the Tsukiji fish market. We watched the trawlers dock with loaded nets, how the salt depth dripped from gleaming scales and pooled on the cobbles like low tide. Lobsters and crabs escaped from polystyrene boxes, crawling between the steps of fishmongers and buyers, chefs from restaurants haggling over cuts of tuna and catches of salmon. A truck drove away filled with squid. Through the windows we saw the transparent bodies of negligee pink, an alien fleet sailing into a sushi knife ambush. Mazzy was rapt. She stopped and studied tanks of sea urchins. Mesmerised by an old woman with eels in her fists like currents of dark.

  When we sat and had breakfast at a nearby family restaurant she took out her sketchpad and started drawing. Goggle-eyed fish and lobster claws. The rubber-suited men with flashing knives.

  She could always draw, but her talent had matured. I picked up a Daily Yomiuri and pretended to read while she shaded scales and fins. I wanted her to know how amazed I was by her rendering, how proud, but needed to get the compliment right so I didn’t sound like the condescending parent praising the average. She’d spot a fake comment, always had. “That scepticism is your English DNA,” Lydia had once told me. “Not mine.”

  Mazzy turned the pad and showed me a squid, hovered in the dark window of the aquarium truck, eyes flecked with light.

  “You should draw everyday,” I said. “I’ll throw away my camera if you capture the world like this.”

  She spun the pad, considered her creation. “I’ll come back with my colours.”

  In the taxi home I told her the folk story of Urashima Taro, the fisherman who saves a turtle being teased by a group of boys. When another turtle comes ashore the next day, and tells him the turtle he rescued was the daughter of the Sea Emperor, he’s granted gills to swim down to the underwater palace of the Dragon God. Here he meets the turtle he saved, a princess, of course. After a few days together Urashima Taro tells the princess he has to go back to the surface world, and she gives him a magical box that will protect him, but which he must never open. Back in his town he finds that all the people he knew have vanished. He recognises no one, and when he asks after his own name he’s told the ancient story of a fisherman who drowned at sea. In his three days underwater, three hundred years have passed on land. Overwhelmed by grief, he opens the magical box and is engulfed by a cloud of smoke, turning his beard white and crooking his back. A voice from the sea, the princess, tells him that the box contained his old age.

  Mazzy listened, nodded and waited. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “That’s it?”

  “The end. In some versions he turns to dust because no one can live three hundred years.”

  “Where’s the happily ever after?”

  “Not in a Japanese fairy tale.”

  “Have you heard the one about the moon princess?”

  “Kaguya-hime?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Some guy on the plane.”

  “Some guy?”

  “A Japanese guy. We were looking at the moon above the clouds, and he told me about Kaguya-hime.”

  “How old was he? This guy.”

  Mazzy shook her head, incredulous. “Dad,” she pleaded.

  I left it there, abruptly. We’d had a good morning, and could do without a missile of fatherly paranoia.

  七

  KOJI HAD SAT in the same carriage as Mazzy on the express train into Tokyo. Four rows back. He studied how she watched the flashing countryside, the bamboo thickets and anonymous suburbs. How a city assembled on tinted glass. He followed her all the way to the ticket barrier at Tokyo station where her father, of this he was sure, hugged his daughter.

  Koji had patience.

  He once sat in the White Room of the group house for a week. Longer than any of the others.

  A white room. White walls, floors and ceiling. White screws in the light fittings. He wore a linen gown and white gloves. He was forbidden to look at his own skin. They brought him one bowl of rice a day. Dressed in white. Veiled. He ate from a white bowl with ivory chopsticks, and the only colour he saw was his urine and excrement.

  On the seventh day two of the younger women came into the room and knelt before him. One of them carried a large glass vial. She held it while the other drew apart his gown. She took hold of his penis and masturbated him into the container. They carried his semen from the room and closed the door.

  Later, Koji could not tell if it was night or day, The Leader slid back the screen and told him to stand. She was old, feeble. Dying from electromagnetic waves. Yet she knew which day the world would end, and that extra-terrestrials would ferry them to refuge. She beckoned Koji to follow her along the sodium lit corridor. He smel
led dying flesh beneath her thin gown, and his own seed on her papery skin.

  He’d once been chosen.

  Wanted.

  八

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the divorce was settled in a San Diego courthouse, I left LA and landed in the drizzle of Heathrow.

  Five years in California. An ex-wife and a beautiful daughter. After the wave our family had lasted six months. Even though it was finished the moment Lydia had come arrowing past me into the sea.

  Boxes of books arrived at my parents, the divided CD collection. A country and a marriage were no more than images fired along my synapses. Apart from the single page letters, the felt-tip pictures mailed weekly by my little Mazzy.

  I moved into a scruffy flat on the unfashionable side of Notting Hill, and spent my new life stuttering along the Central Line between Shepherd’s Bush and Holborn. From a canyon filled with sage and buckwheat, the Pacific rollers steady on the golden shore, my daughter in my arms, to a damp room on the edge of a council estate.

  With a research team funded by the Football Association and MET police, I was collating data on crowd control techniques. I studied films of wayward hooligans then commuted home to walk past gangs of spitting youths stalking west London. Videos of mobs torching cars and smashing windows, the burliest thugs yanking designer dresses off worried mannequins – the grainy archives, before an updated summer of fire and riots was digitised and recorded on phones and cameras.

  This was stock footage from the 70s, men in flares throwing bricks and bottles. “The good old days,” remarked a former organiser we’d paid to explain game day tactics and the syncopation of mob violence, outwitting the police to get the fight they’d spent all week planning.

  He smoked a pack of Superkings and harked back as if he were the victorious revolutionary ousting a stubborn dictatorship, while I took pages of notes on essentially the same scene: the to and fro rush of police versus crowd, before an eventual numbers dominance, or a cavalry charge of mounted officers, cleared the street.

  The Football Association had paid us to find solutions, to qualify the use of maximum force with the least manpower, and my flash of inspiration came from a need to end the project early as much as any eureka moment. First I contacted the American Beef council, who in turn put me through to the Texas Ranchers Association. We paid for a cowboy to fly out to a sports hall in Reading and corral hordes of undergraduates running from one end to the other. He showed us that with minimum policing a rampaging crowd could be contained in the same way a stampeding herd of cattle could be brought to a halt.