Bicycle Days (6 page)

Alec nodded, not quite sure what it was he was supposed to understand. Then he watched Mr. Hasegawa make enough of an entrance for both of them, knocking and grunting and finally striding through the hanging strips of cloth and into the barbershop like a feudal lord returning to his fiefdom after battle.
He might have laughed, except that Mr. Hasegawa had a firm grip on his arm, pulling him into the room behind him. Their entrance was greeted by immediate action. The proprietor vaulted from the barber’s chair and folded the newspaper in a single motion. His wife and apprentice covered the room in a few quick steps. And then they were all standing in a row, bent to the waist, telling Mr. Hasegawa what an honor it was to see him again. The proprietor called him “Sha-cho,” a term of great respect used for company presidents. Mr. Hasegawa seemed to stand taller, grow larger. He introduced Alec to the proprietor and his wife. He boasted about Alec’s intelligence and his skill in Japanese, about the high social standing of his family in America.

The proprietor ran his fingers through Alec’s hair. The apprentice looked on intently, studying the older man’s technique, the way he touched the hair, his understanding of its texture. Alec looked at both of them, wondering who cut
their
hair—it was as short as Mr. Hasegawa’s. Spots of scalp showing through. And bristles. A room full of hedgehogs. He touched his own hair again, trying to calm himself. The proprietor’s wife led him to the barber’s chair. Her fingers moved softly up and down his arm. The apprentice disappeared into a back room concealed behind an orange curtain and reappeared carrying a tray of steaming white towels. Alec closed his eyes as the proprietor coiled the hot towels about his face. He could hear Mr. Hasegawa’s continued boasting and the faint cooing sounds of admiration made by the proprietor’s wife.

The towels came off. Alec opened his eyes. The proprietor was already bent over him, applying warm shaving cream with a brush. Over his shoulder, Alec saw the apprentice taking towels and passing implements. The proprietor reached out his hand for the straight-edge razor. Alec had never been shaved before, and he felt his body go rigid at the sight of the blade. The proprietor leaned down over him. Small beads of sweat had formed on his forehead, on the smooth skin where his eyebrows were supposed to be, on his equally hairless upper lip. Behind
him, Alec saw the apprentice pause in confusion: now that the master was at work, he didn’t know where to stand. As though performing some kind of ritual mating dance, he began to move in short, jerky steps behind the proprietor, his head bobbing closer and then farther away, trying to find the most unobtrusive place from which to observe.

When the shave was finished, the proprietor wiped Alec’s face with a scented towel. Alec noticed that he seemed preoccupied, his eyes darting sidelong glances toward the chair where Mr. Hasegawa now sat. Reflected in the mirror he saw the proprietor’s wife standing behind Mr. Hasegawa’s chair, his face in her hands, her red-nailed fingers massaging his temples. The back of his head was resting against the pillow of her breasts. His eyes were closed, and he was still grunting and boasting, though more softly now, brief comments about the success of his business. She did not once look up from what she was doing, and after a minute Alec realized that the proprietor had stopped glancing at her altogether and resumed his work.

The haircut was beginning. The proprietor shook a milky substance into his palms, which he quickly cupped over Alec’s head like a helmet. Alec closed his eyes as the hands warmed his scalp. Then the hands lifted and the fingers began to work. They started with his hair and moved to his temples, the back of his neck, behind his ears. Knuckles of smooth stone kneaded his skull as though it were dough, while agile fingertips pressed heat into unseen areas of pain and tension. Minutes passed. Alec felt himself floating. The sound of clipping scissors came to him from far away. It was a dream, his head somehow suspended above his body, his hair rising still higher, infused with the warmth and energy of the proprietor’s sure hands. He kept his eyes closed and listened to the cutting of his own hair and thought that he had never in his life met such wonderful, dedicated people. Such noble people.

It was not right then that he noticed how quiet the room had grown. It seemed that Mr. Hasegawa had run out of boasts for a while, and the proprietor’s wife had stopped cooing. It was not
then that Alec noticed their absence from the room, but later, when the apprentice was already opening the many different bottles of tonic to be used when the haircut was over. And the first of those tonics had already been massaged into his scalp by the time they returned from the back room acting as if nothing had happened. Alec’s eyes were open then, and he looked over at Mr. Hasegawa, who was sitting again in the straight-backed chair, and then back at the mirror, at the hairless face of the proprietor, for some sign of understanding or recognition of what he knew had taken place. But nothing had changed. The proprietor was all fierce concentration, all points of energy, the way he had always been. He was finishing the job he had set out to do.

For a moment, Alec thought he might see himself get up and walk out of the barbershop, away from his own soiled notions of dignity and dedication. But he didn’t move a muscle. He stayed where he was in the barber’s chair, staring at the newly visible patches of his scalp, as one scented tonic after another was massaged into his hair.

T
here was a note from Boon sitting on Alec’s desk when he arrived at the office Thursday morning. This in itself was not unusual—Boon had told Alec that he was a message writer by nature, constantly scribbling here and there, leaving a trail of paper scraps throughout the office. This message was even more cryptic than usual, and Alec had to track Boon down in order to translate it.

“Oh, that,” Boon said, rummaging in his closet. “I want you to head over to MITI this afternoon around two-thirty. There’s this guy over there—I think his name is Nobi Sato, or something like that. Anyway, he’s only twenty-seven, but they’re already giving him a lot of responsibility in the high-tech trade area. So I thought it might be a good idea if you and he got together, got to know each other a little bit. Besides being a help to us, he could probably introduce you to some people. You know, socially. Hey, here it is.” He pulled out an old tin of black shoe
polish, then stuck his head back into the closet. “Now where’s the brush, for Christ’s sake?”

At two-thirty, Alec was nervously pacing back and forth in the elevator of the MITI building. MITI stood for the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the most powerful of Japan’s government ministries. The bureaucrats who worked there represented the top of Japanese society, both professionally and socially. Alec wondered what exactly it was that he represented. He thought of the job he used to have at a neighborhood movie theater when he was fifteen.

He stepped out of the elevator and walked down one long hallway after another, following the directions he had been given over the phone. The building was clean and well lit—much better, he had heard, than some of the other ministries. But it still seemed oppressive, with hundreds of doors lined up in a row on each floor. One of these doors belonged to Sato’s department. Alec pushed it a couple of inches and poked his head into the room.

Scuffed metal desks and filing cabinets covered the square space, all of them buried under stacks of unfiled papers, half-empty Styrofoam cups, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. The windows were propped open with books, a single fan circulating the hot air. Behind the papers, a battery of young white-shirted Japanese men pored over their research.

A couple of heads looked up when he entered, then back down at their work. Alec cleared his throat. In Japanese he asked if, by any chance, Sato-san was in the office. From behind the tallest stack of papers, a hand shot up.

“Hi. Alec, right? I am Nobi.”

They shook hands. Alec said, “Nice to meet you. Your English is terrific.”

Nobi smiled. “Not true, but thanks anyway. I studied in America.” He waved his hand in the direction of the door. “This really is not the best place for conversation. Perhaps we should go downstairs for some coffee.”

They took the elevator to the basement, where the ministry coffee shop was located. The room was partly filled with older ministry officials, many of them peering at each other through heavy black-rimmed eyeglasses. After they were seated, Alec watched Nobi while he ordered iced coffee for both of them. He spoke to the waitress in masculine Japanese that sounded abrupt, almost guttural. She responded without seeming to be there at all, the word
hai
coming from her mouth like electronic beeps. Absently Nobi waved his right hand, the waitress hurried away.

“My director here at MITI has heard very good things about you from Mr. Boon,” Nobi said.

“Thanks, that’s nice to hear,” Alec said. “But I haven’t even been here a week yet, so I can’t really say I’ve been much of a help to the company. I’ve been mostly, you know, getting settled and stuff.”

“Are you here for a long time?”

“I don’t know. At least for the summer, though it’ll probably be longer. It’s kind of a trial period, in case things don’t work out. I got the job through a professor of mine at school who knows Mr. Boon.”

The waitress arrived with two glasses of black coffee on ice. She was very careful not to look at either of them. Alec waited until she had left before speaking again.

“So how did your English get so good?”

“Well, I joined MITI after I graduated from Todai—Tokyo University,” Nobi said. “I had been through the usual school English program, but, like many Japanese, my English was still not good. So the ministry paid for me to study economics at Stanford for two years.”

“Do you ever think about going back?”

Nobi looked surprised. “To America? No—well, perhaps sometimes. You probably have heard how it is: a person leaves Japan for too long a time and cannot ever really return—he becomes too different. I think sometimes that I returned just before it became too late. I was having such a good time in
California, with an American girlfriend and everything. Two or three months longer and perhaps I would have decided not to return to Japan. But I do know that I have a position in Japan that I would never have anywhere else. And, of course, I am Japanese.”

“It’s not easy to arrive in a new country and feel comfortable the way you did,” Alec said. “Not that easy for me, anyway. Not here, where things are so different. I mean, I knew it would be different. But it’s …” He paused. Nothing came to him. “I don’t know. It’s just really different.” He felt his face getting hot, took a sip of coffee.

“That is exactly how I felt when I arrived in California,” Nobi said. “Time makes some differences less strong, I think.”

“Which differences?”

“Which differences are important to you?”

Alec shrugged. “I don’t know. Too many.”

“How about a girlfriend? Do you have one?”

“A girlfriend? No. Not at the moment.”

“So there is one thing that can change. Yes? If you have a Japanese girlfriend, other differences will disappear. It is the best way.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Alec said. “But I don’t know any women here. And I don’t know how to meet them, either. Not in Japanese. That combination can be sort of prohibitive.”

“Not prohibitive,” Nobi said firmly. He took a sip of coffee and leaned closer to Alec. He looked as though he was enjoying himself. “You have to be very careful with Japanese women when you first meet them. American women are more aggressive. In America, you walk up to a pretty girl and ask her to dance. Yes? They expect you to. But it is not like that in Japan. Here you have to be patient. The women learn to expect a certain kind of behavior from men, and when they do not get it, they fly away. And then it breaks our hearts. Yes?”

Alec fiddled with his spoon and anything else he could find on the table. “Okay. So let’s say I go to a club. Right? And I see this woman over by the bar—she’s beautiful, and I want to meet her.
What then? I mean, if I can’t ask her to dance, there are only so many things I can say to her.”

“But you must not think of it in that way,” Nobi said. “Remember: this is Japan. There is much less flexibility in relationships between men and women here. First date, second date, third date, on each one she expects that you act a certain way, that you do and say certain things. It might not sound so exciting now, but it is.” He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, put it back in his pocket. “All right. So you see a beautiful woman and you think you will die if you do not meet her. Yes? That is very good—everything will be right because of that feeling. You must walk up to her slowly and compliment her. Not like a big movie star, but quietly. I would say that quiet confidence is very important. So, you compliment her beauty and her clothes, everything, and you make her laugh. And then you suggest dancing. Before you leave, you tell her that if you do not see her again, you will become very ill, you will be hospitalized. When she hears that, she will give you her phone number. That is the first meeting.”