Ransom (2 page)

The sensei said,
Before practice you said you wanted to talk
.

Ransom remembered, sickly, that he had wanted to ask about the kuro obi. This was an unfortunate time to raise the subject. For months his confidence had been accruing. He was staying on his feet, staying on his toes, mastering through rote repetition the kata and the kumite—the forms and the fighting—until they began to seem instinctive reflexes of the blood. He was the best in the dojo—after the sensei, the Monk and Yamada—and in any other dojo he'd be a second-dan at least. The sensei did not put much stock in belts. Ransom understood the principle, but he wanted some verification of his progress. Somewhere along the line, the Monk had gotten his black belt and added three grades to it. Yamada had gotten his elsewhere. Everyone else had white belts, Ransom included.

The sensei was waiting, so Ransom asked if his front kick needed work. The sensei said his everything needed work.

Excuse me for asking, sensei, but, unworthy as I am, do
you think that it is possible that in the near future, at some time, I might receive the kuro obi? Or not?

The sensei reached under Ransom's arm and tugged at the obi wrapped around the bundle of his gi, both white. He said something Ransom couldn't make out, and slowly repeated himself. The sensei said,
If you get this obi dirty enough, I'm sure it will turn black
.

I'm serious
, Ransom said.

What difference does it make?
he asked.
When you're good enough, you won't care what color your belt is. As long as you want it, you're not ready for it
. The sensei lit a cigarette.
If I were you, I'd concentrate on not getting knocked down
.

Ransom bowed.
Thank you, sensei
.

The sensei nodded.

Ransom thanked him again, walked over to his bike and tied his gi on the back. Yamada hailed him from the other side of the lot. Though Ransom liked Yamada more than anyone else in the dojo, tonight he needed quiet and expiation, feeling on the verge of some incremental addition to his knowledge of himself.

Yamada slapped Ransom's shoulder and lit a fresh cigarette from the end of a butt. They chatted for a few minutes, replaying the practice, then walked across the street to the noodle shop. The toothless old sobaya-san bowed as they came in and called out a welcome. The warm interior reeked of pork broth, garlic and tobacco. The sensei sat with some of the others at a corner table. On the walls were photographs of him—holding trophies, shaking hands with the mayor, smashing a stack of pine boards with his fist. Kojak was on the television set over
the counter, speaking perfect, lip-synched Japanese. You can run, Ransom thought, but you can't hide. You don't even have to go home again. His father was one of those listed in the credits. After his first karate practice, Ransom had come here with his new comrades, suffused with the glow of initiation into a foreign sect; following his introduction to the aged, somewhat shabby proprietor, he had glanced up and seen his father's name on the television screen.

Ransom sat down next to the sensei. The Japanese-speaking Kojak screamed something that translated, “Get in here, Crocker.” Yamada went behind the counter and changed channels. He called for quiet. The face of a game-show MC filled the screen.

Hope you enjoyed our fat girl contest last week
, the MC said.
Our winner, Miti Keiko of Hyogo Prefecture, has received a lot of mail since the show, including an invitation to participate in the summer sumo tournament
.

The sensei offered that the champion fat girl looked like Yamada's sister.

Tonight
, the MC said,
we have something really special for you
. Ransom didn't catch what came next.

What did he say?

Farting contest
, Yamada said.

The four men in director's chairs on the stage introduced themselves: a Keio University student who said his main interest was video games; an office worker from Nagoya who clearly had second thoughts about the whole thing, since he would not look at the camera; a tongue-tied fat man whom the MC finally identified as a Tokyo subway motorman; and a sushi-shop apprentice who kept
waving at the camera. Standing beside the fat man, the MC suddenly pinched his nostrils and shouted,
False start
. The fat man squirmed in his chair.
One more and you're disqualified
. The MC flourished an aerosol air freshener.

The fat man took the prize: ten cases of canned sweet beans and a life-sized poster of Olivia Hussey as Juliet. Microphones and matches had helped to determine the outcome. All very tasteful. Coming up next was a man who swallowed live gerbils. Somebody, Ransom thought, ought to save Japan from the Japanese. He hated to admit it, but the crap his father turned out was better than this.

He left at ten and rode home along the river, which rippled with moonlight like the slow bulk of a sleeping reptile. The river looked much better at night, when you couldn't see the submarine garbage and the water's dubious tint. He stopped beside the Imadegawa Bridge and shut down the bike, an aging Honda 350 Scrambler that fashion-conscious Japanese bikers wouldn't be seen dead on. The air coming off the river was cool and rank with effluvia. The moving water made him restless. It was April and he could feel the ferment of soil and flora around him. He was twenty-six years old and he had been in this country almost two years. He felt a keen pang of nostalgia, but he didn't know for what. Maybe for the time before he had realized that good intentions don't make you innocent, for the time when he had less to regret. Ransom wasn't sure if he was waiting for something to happen, or hoping that nothing would. Sometimes he felt he was preparing for some sort of confrontation, and at other times he believed that he had seen enough trouble already.

Ransom kick-started the bike and turned around, retracing part of the route he had just taken, giving in to an urge he had been resisting—for easy company and conversation in his native tongue.

Buffalo Rome was the place to go if you hankered to see someone you'd met in Katmandu or Chiang Mai. The Asia pilgrims were a different type from the less druggy Japan hands, professorial students of Muromachi period temple architecture, acolytes of Zen and tea ceremony. The Dharma Bums washed up here after bleary months on the subcontinent, travelling high and dry—ahead of the monsoon rains, behind the cannabis harvest—arriving at this terminus trailing strange stories and doctrines. The Japanese patrons, mostly students whose costumes ranged from beatnik to proto-punk, were here to cop some cool from the various gaijin.

The first person Ransom picked out of the crowd was the narc sitting near the door. Shades, Berkeley sweatshirt and beads. The obvious wig. He smiled when he saw Ransom and snapped his fingers. “Be crazy,” he said.

“Rock out, baby,” Ransom said.

“Right on.” The narc held out his palm and Ransom slapped him five, wondering if there were a special school where these cops were trained, and if so who were the teachers. Buffalo Rome had yet to host a single bust, not that it lacked for drugs; only the mentally impaired could
mistake a Kyoto narc for a real person. All this was amusing until you considered the fate of someone busted by sheer luck. The Japanese took dope very seriously, reportedly to the point of beating prisoners on the feet, withholding food for days, interrogating round the clock. Ransom had avoided drugs for some time, so it didn't much concern him now, although thinking about it always made him nervous, reminded him of casualties.

Ransom generally felt slightly tainted after a night at Buffalo Rome. He stayed away for weeks at a time, then went in three or four nights running. That his friend Miles Ryder was co-owner was among the reasons he found for squandering his time and money there. He saw Miles's Stetson above the heads at the bar. As always, returning after a fair absence, Ransom had the impression of great space; the bar was huge by Japanese standards—nearly the size of an indoor tennis court, with a high cathedral ceiling. Before Ryder and his silent partner had turned it into an absurdly profitable watering hole, this had been a sake warehouse. They had set up a bar at one end, a stage at the other and wire spool tables in between.

Miles was talking to a blonde in a white dhoti, and made an elaborate show of greeting Ransom.

“Sensei. We are honored to have you with us. What news from the front?”

“Are you a teacher?” the girl asked. A gold ring decorated one side of her nose. “
Sensei
is teacher, right? I did a little studying on the boat from Pusan.”

“Right you are,” Miles said, “but that's just the beginning. It's a high honorific for which we English speakers
have no true equivalent. It means master, doctor, honcho. I bestow it on our friend Ransom, because he is an inspiration to us all, gaijin and Japanese alike.”

The girl studied Ransom with interest. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I hope to slake a mild thirst and an inexplicable urge for company.”

“I mean in Japan.”

“Ransom is in training for the afterlife,” Ryder said. “He is a nonviolent samurai warrior who hopes to qualify as a bodhisattva.”

“My boyfriend's back from the bathroom,” she said. “I guess I better go see if he's okay. He's had amoebic dysentery ever since Lahore. See you guys later.”

“What are you drinking?” Miles asked, bowing extravagantly to Ransom.

“Tea.”

“On the wagon?”

“Neither on nor off a wagon,” Ransom said, irritated. “I just don't drink anymore.”

“The people who saw you last Saturday night will be relieved to hear it.”

Ransom had quit tobacco and alcohol when he took up karate, with only occasional backsliding in both departments, Saturday night, for instance, involving two Aussie merchant marines and one bottle of absinthe. Some of his most precipitous backsliding involved absinthe. He had thought this beverage the casualty of changing tastes and law, the downfall of French Symbolist poets as well as the source of their twisted visions; but in Japan it was still legal. Naturally, he investigated.

As Miles ducked behind the bar, strains of amplified guitar began to rise through the crowd noise. On the stage, Kano was hunched over the neck of his Gibson, fingering the tuning posts. Ransom smiled. Mitsuhashi thumped the pedal of the bass drum, which bore the roman letters
MOJO DOMO
. Up front, people were making encouraging noises in English, broken English and rehearsed black dialect.
Play those blues. Get funky. Get down
. The band had a hard-core following, both gaijin and Japanese, and regarded the blues as a spiritual orientation—for them the spirit born in red delta clay out of the souls of black ex-slaves was universal and redemptive. Their Mecca was Chicago. Mojo Domo hoped someday to make a pilgrimage in veneration of the masters—Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, Elmore James. Meanwhile, they were fiendish collectors of old Chess and Vee Jay recordings and devoted servants of Muddy Waters, for whom the band had once opened a set in Osaka during his last Japanese tour. Kano breathed his name with a mixture of reverence and chumminess, although Ransom felt that Kano disapproved of Muddy's longevity; Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Johnson were, in dying young, perfectly immortal. Mojo Domo had been offered recording contracts backing up Japanese pop stars but they refused. They only played blues. Ransom thought them admirable, if faintly comic.

He took a seat at the bar and ordered a cup of tea. A tall, ethereal-looking American he knew only as Eric appeared beside him.

“How's the karate?”

Ransom shrugged.

“You really ought to try aikido,” he said. “No offense, but I mean, karate is so violent. In aikido you learn how to overcome through yielding. It's like that game kids do, what do they call it, Paper, Scissors, Rock. Rock dulls the scissors, but paper covers rock.”

“You left out the part about the scissors cutting the paper,” Ransom said.

Eric assumed an expression at once indulgent and triumphant. “Even in conversation you're aggressive, combative, unyielding.”

“You should hear me talk to myself. It's brutal.”

Eric ordered a beer and attempted to explain how Ransom could get in touch with his
ki
, the life force, the whole ball of wax. Listening to Eric, Ransom decided that one of the things he liked about the Japanese was their distrust of loquaciousness, their suspicion of language itself, although he wasn't sure what was left if you dispensed with it.

Eric buzzed on and Ransom considered the hollowness of expatriate communities. The individuals might be interesting enough, but they had in common only what they had already left behind. Having exhausted the subject of ki, Eric said goodbye and shuffled off when Miles drifted back.

“DeVito's acting up tonight,” Miles said. Ransom followed his gaze to a table where two gaijin were arm wrestling, one of them sporting a samurai haircut. This was DeVito. “I may need you to help me beat him senseless.”

“DeVito's already senseless.”

“You think you could take him?”

Ransom shrugged. “It's not something I've given any thought to. I don't fight outside the dojo.”

“What good are fighting skills if you can't thrash scum like DeVito? What are you supposed to do if someone picks a fight with you?”

“The sensei says the best defense is two feet.”

“Kicking ass, right and left. I rest my case.”

“Not quite. You run away.”

“This took you two years to learn?” Ryder's eyes registered a new point of interest. Ransom turned to look. Marilyn was just inside the door, looking around.

“What's she waiting for?” Ransom said. “A drum roll?”

Ryder waved her over. She didn't move in the tentative and pigeon-toed manner of Japanese women. It seemed to Ransom that she didn't walk like any Asian women he had ever seen. He supposed that she had adopted this bold Western stride in her native Saigon, back when it was an American outpost. Ransom had met her here last Saturday. Ryder, who had met her at the same time, was already infatuated. She was a refugee from Vietnam, she explained, and her real name was Mey-Van. She was a singer in a Kyoto nightclub, where her manager billed her as Marilyn, which, although virtually unpronounceable for the Japanese, had a shamanistic power because of its former attachment to Monroe-san. Marilyn herself much preferred it to Mey-Van.