Non-Stop Till Tokyo (2 page)

You didn’t think of that, did you, bitch Kelly?

I was on the next but one carriage down the platform, back past the top of the escalator. Were the yaks looking at me? Everyone else was running now so I ran too, leapt on, hurried to my window seat, legs shaking, excusing myself to the old lady in the aisle seat next to me. The announcement came. The bullet train whined into smooth motion.

And as we passed the escalator, as the train began to accelerate, I saw that the yakuza goons weren’t there.

That could mean they’d gone down, deciding I wasn’t going to be on this train. Maybe they were just grunts,
jun-kosei-in
, trainee goons whose duties extended to phone answering, cleaning and violence.

Or maybe they were
kumi-in
, soldiers. The next level up, the ones who got to drive the bosses and serve their guests. The ones who were entitled to use their initiative, like, say, jumping on the train without a ticket just to make sure they hadn’t missed the gaijin bitch they wanted to kill.

The train was accelerating away with incredible speed and smoothness, making me feel dizzy. I couldn’t relax. If they were on the train—

Oh God almighty. They were at the end of the carriage.

They were big. They looked round aggressively, making too much eye contact. Everybody else was edging out of their way, faces hardening with dislike, nobody quite prepared to challenge them, and they were staring at every woman under forty in the carriage. What could I do?

They didn’t know I was mixed race, I repeated frantically to myself. Did they? Surely not. They were chasing a blonde, blue-eyed gaijin hostess. They’d expect the blonde hair to be hidden, but under a hat rather than in a bag. If I could just make sure they didn’t look behind my tinted glasses… I needed something to read to camouflage myself among the other passengers, but if I opened the bag, I could imagine that Judas-coloured dress tumbling out, screaming for their attention. What else could I do?

They were heading down the passage between the seats now, peering rudely into people’s faces, mutters of subdued alarm or annoyance rising from the passengers as they passed.

I folded my betraying fingers under my palms and said to my neighbour, “Excuse me, Auntie, but I hope that you are taking a holiday?”

“I beg your pardon?” She looked slightly startled that I had struck up a conversation when that was normally an
obāsan
’s prerogative. Just my luck if I got the only untalkative old lady in Japan.

“A holiday,” I said desperately. “I am going to visit my grandmother in—” Oh God, where was the train going? “—Chubu province. She has nine grandchildren and I am the least dutiful.”

“Nine? Ah, is that so? I have only three, and the eldest, he is at school in Sapporo, he never visits…”

I let myself relax slightly against the seat as the torrent of genealogical information and family complaint began. The yakuza goons were very close now, but just because they were hated and feared across Japan didn’t mean they would be able to confront an
obāsan
in full flood.

“…and then she dated an American student for months, my neighbours were quite shocked, but I said live and let live, it’s not as though they married of course—”

The yakuza had reached us. I didn’t look up. Auntie held out her ticket to them without looking.

“—and in any case, if young Shin had proposed when everyone told him to, she would probably have refused him, daughters being so tiresome, yes, what is it?” She looked round sharply at the big man who was still looming over us, peering at me. “Is there a problem—hey, you aren’t a ticket inspector, are you? What are you doing, looking at us so rudely? Get away from my daughter.” (She called me
musume
, daughter, in the same way that I called her Auntie—it’s just a courteous and friendly way to talk. It’s not my fault if they thought she meant it literally.)

“Well?” she demanded shrilly. “I’ll call the ticket inspector. Get away. Beast.”

The yak recoiled and lurched off down the train, and I let out the breath I suddenly realised I’d been holding. I would be spending the rest of the journey listening to every detail of Auntie’s life unless she moved on to another victim, but that was fine with me. Surely the goons would get off once they’d prowled the length of the train.

And then all I had to do was disappear into Japan while an entire yakuza family tore Tokyo apart looking for me, and while I worked out how to tell them they had the wrong woman.

You could say it began when Mama-san called me into her office in the early hours of the morning, or before that, when Mitsuyoshi-san walked into the Primrose Path. Probably it really started when Kelly—that bitch—joined the bar, and I wouldn’t change my name. But if you want the whole story, it began when a Swedish UN official married a Cantonese interpreter from Hong Kong.

My father was a typical Scand in looks, blond hair and blue eyes. I take after my mother—black hair, narrow hips, no bust to speak of and olive skin tone. My cheekbones are high and my face wide, and if you glanced at me in my dark glasses on a Tokyo street, you’d register me as Asian, if not necessarily Japanese. But I have my father’s eyes—heavy-lidded, but vivid, iceberg blue (which means there’s blue-eyed genes on my mother’s side too, but let’s not go there)—and when I put on the blonde wig and “gaijin up”, you’d swear I was middle European. A bit Slavic, a bit Germanic—you’d place me in Vilnius or Krakow, maybe. I’m a regular cosmopolitan girl.

I was brought up all over the place, like many UN brats. You could say I had three mother tongues, since French and English come with the territory, and my parents spoke Cantonese at home. So I started off with a lot of languages, and I didn’t stop.

Supposedly we’re all born with a language instinct hardwired into our brains—a natural grammar into which the rules and vocabulary of specific tongues are slotted. Much of a child’s brain is taken up with acquiring language, and then, around seven or so, the language engine starts to wither away, presumably because it’s done its job. That’s why adults find it hard to learn new languages fluently, why kids can create a grammatical language out of any old jumble of sound, why abused children kept from human contact will never learn to speak properly if they’re found too late. Language acquisition has to be done early or not at all.

For most people.

I’m one of the other kind.

There are quite a few of us, actually. We hang on to our language engine like some people keep their milk teeth. We acquire new languages in months or weeks, new dialects in days. I’ve never “learned” Italian, but after a fortnight in Florence I was chattering fluently. I know German and Swedish, and if you have those you can manage Dutch and Afrikaans and Norwegian…

I studied Japanese, along with Korean, at college because it’s one of the oddballs, a language with virtually no living relatives. I could already read Chinese characters, which Japanese uses, so although the US State Department classes Japanese at the highest level of difficulty to learn, by the time I graduated I was as fluent as a native speaker.

So. There I was at twenty-two, Kerry Ekdahl (named for my Irish godmother, since you ask), straddling east and west, with any number of languages under my belt and absolutely no idea what to do with them. Because the thing about languages is: you can speak them, so what? There are plenty of people who speak Korean and Swedish and Japanese and the rest, maybe not all together, but who needs that when interpreters are ten a penny anyway?

Which means there isn’t much money in interpreting, and even less interest. You spend your days telling Norwegians what Koreans have said about DVD player production, and it’s just too boring to contemplate.

That was the problem. I’d strolled through school and won prizes at college for something that was as natural as breathing. I didn’t know what hard work was, and when I found out, I wasn’t prepared to do it.

I’d spent a blissful year in Japan while doing my degree. I met Noriko when I was helping out at an English course she’d attended (not that she’d learned anything), and formed an instant threesome with her and her childhood friend Yoshi. We’d had more fun than I could remember, shopping and skiing and spending long, giggly nights at hot springs and ultra-trendy bars, drinking lemon sours and eyeing up the men, and when I left, Noriko had made me promise to come back as soon as my course was over, insisting that I wasn’t fit to buy shoes on my own. So I told her to rent us a flat and took off for Tokyo, figuring that I could live as a schoolteacher in one of the language schools. But the job was dull and the pay was awful, and what exactly was I going to do with my life anyway? Japan is full of drifting gaijin teaching at language schools, and every one of them has the look of marking time, definitely planning to do something with their lives once they work out what their destinies should be, and many of them are pushing forty, often from the wrong side.

Yoshi listened to me whinge about this with amazing tolerance, considering his IT job gave him four days’ holiday a year. Noriko had no such patience, and when I was bemoaning my inability to afford the most gorgeous pair of boots in an insanely expensive Ginza shop, she told me to get a grip and use my talents. I was gaijin—a foreigner—and could look Western, and I spoke dozens of languages, and that added up to real money.

Not as an interpreter, though. Not exactly.

The Primrose Path was a discreet high-end hostess bar in Shibuya, Tokyo’s party quarter. The name was in English, so everyone called it Purimurosupasu without thinking further about it, and I don’t imagine many people understood the name, let alone the pun—in Japanese, “primrose” was an old term for a tart. It catered mostly for businessmen, away from their families, bored of the company of their mostly male colleagues, generally incompetent at talking to women and, frankly, needing to pay attractive young ladies to put up with their company.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong, or at least mostly wrong. The mama-san who ran the bar made it clear that we offered pleasant company, flirting, and a lot of drink. We also, once I arrived, offered language services second to none, and that was something the salarymen really thought worth paying for when they were stuck with foreign colleagues to entertain. But any extras were at the girl’s discretion and not conducted on the premises. And Mama-san was personally against extracurricular activity, partly because the sex trade was yakuza territory, and partly because it was in the end a waste of our assets.

“Never sell it, never lend it, never give it away,” was her trademark instruction to new girls.

“But, Mama-san,” we’d complain, “what do we do with it, then?”

“Invest it!” she’d yell, her fat cheeks bunching with laughter. “Speculate to accumulate!”

Okay, it was sleazy. There’s no way hostess work isn’t a bit sleazy. But I never sold it or lent it (giving it away was my business), and I had a lot of very interesting conversations among the drunken slobber, often with some surprisingly nice men. I had to “gaijin up”, because looking foreign got better tips, and I wore a blonde wig (three, in fact, in slightly different lengths which I rotated so it looked like my hair was growing) but that wasn’t much of a hardship. And the money was amazing, even if you weren’t selling anything but time and sympathy. The salarymen tipped like cash was going out of style. I once made a vulgar but clever pun to a Korean guy—you’d have to speak Japanese and Korean to get the joke, but take my word for it, it was a killer—and he actually fell off his chair laughing, then fished three ten-thousand-yen notes, close to three hundred dollars, out of his wallet and passed them to me, hands shaking as he giggled. Just for a joke. God knows how that showed up on his expense account.

So the money rolled in, and I learned lots of interesting things about Japanese business, and the Primrose Path expanded its clientele, and we were all very happy indeed, and if my life was still going nowhere in particular, now I could afford boots from any shop in Ginza I liked.

Then Kelly the Bitch joined us.

The first annoying thing about her was—oh hell, everything, really. She was tall and slim, with oversized breasts, long blonde hair and huge blue eyes. Her Japanese was dreadful, but it didn’t matter because who wanted to listen to her talk? She walked in, and the rest of us could feel the cold draught as our regulars shifted away towards her.

And then there was her name.

The thing is, clichés apart, Japanese just doesn’t have an “r” or an “l”. There’s a sound transcribed in Roman alphabet as “r”, but it’s actually somewhere between the two—make an “l”, but don’t let your tongue touch your tooth ridge, and you’ll be somewhere near it. Most Japanese native speakers don’t really hear the difference between English “r” and “l”, since the sounds don’t exist in their language, and even those who do detect the difference often find it hard to reproduce it in speech. So, having a Kelly and a Kerry presented something of a problem to most of our clientele, and even the staff.

But she refused to change it.

That bitch. I was there first; I had regulars; I’d been there for nearly two years. Mama-san agreed that I shouldn’t change my name, but Kelly insisted she’d keep her own and made it a sticking point, and Mama-san wasn’t going to let that tall blonde money-honey walk into someone else’s hostess bar. This wasn’t just me being petty: it was a problem. We got each other’s calls and so on, but the real issue was that the customers came to us to be flattered and listened to and pampered, not to have their faulty pronunciation rubbed in their faces as they asked for Kelly-not-Kerry and the wrong girl pranced up. It caused embarrassment, and you don’t do that in Japan.