Two-bit Whore in a $100,000 Kimono Part 2

Guest post by Brett Tompkins

Masako, the girl I'd met at Lynn's party, was a willowy, quietly intriguingly sly creature who winnowed her way into my affections within minutes, that night at Lynn's. And within minutes, we were off to the sake machine around the corner to fetch a "last-call" sake before the automatic shutoff at 11.

We hit it off pretty much immediately. She was tall for a Japanese girl, lanky and demure. She laughed at my jokes, encouraged my poor Japanese. I was smitten.

Masako lived in Tenjinbashi-suji Roku Choume, a town whose name was so long you'd be able to gulp down a Takara Can Chu-hai before you were finished deciphering the characters on the subway sign.

Within a week, I was at her apartment, a characterless metal-and-wood box on the seventh floor of some Kaidan (housing tract) building, but it was away from Lynn and it was my first Japanese girlfriend.

I loved Masako. She was going to rescue me from Lynn. I had called her on Christmas day of that year, getting her number from Lynn's phone book while Lynn was at work.

"Hah-loh," came the soft, lilting voice at the other end of the line. I introduced myself as "that guy from the party" and Masako smiled through the phone and said "Maybe we should, how you say? Getting together?" I wilted like a late-summer begonia.

After that first trip to her tract-housing flat, I was in business. I even developed a routine; Masako worked out of the house during the week as a freelance artist, and she didn't feel comfortable with me around on the weekdays, so I'd go over on Friday night and leave Monday morning.

Masako was great but quite firm about my being around; it disturbed her during the week, when she had to answer the phone as a freelance illustrator and talk to clients. But we worked out a weekend ritual in which she would meet me at Tenjinbashi-suji Roku-choume station every Friday evening, we'd go to the nearest Friendly for dinner and then back to her house for maybe a video and sex, or Bill Evans and sex.

Lynn immediately noticed the absence, explained as "I'm staying at Hiroshi's house."

Who was Hiroshi? "My new friend."

She didn't press me too hard, but my unexplained weekend absences were beginning to wear out our shield of civility. It soon became obvious to both of us that our relationship was quickly deteriorating. Here and there, signs of overt hostility began emerging.

In January, Lynn's work called her to Hiroshima, so I went along. By this time, I was almost penniless, but Lynn had the grace to front me and not make me feel miserable about it.

The first crack in her "nice girl" facade was to appear one morning in Hiroshima and would make me begin to despise her.

Arriving in that historic city, boggling as the Shinkansen pulled into the vast crater surrounded by towering hills, I was struck dumb by the ingrown memory I had created for myself surrounding the word "Hiroshima."

After settling into the Hiroshima Hilton that evening, Lynn safely gone to some meeting, I wrote a letter to my parents while gazing out the 24th-floor window at the verdant hills that had been blasted almost to glass not less than 47 years before. It was difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen this town so many years ago, and my accumulated mental baggage about the Bomb quickly led me into a profound gloom from which I could not quickly withdraw. I quaffed a few room-service sakes and occupied myself reading John Hersey's "Hiroshima," a somewhat perverse reading choice that I had packed the day before.

The "Incident" happened the next morning, as we were looking for the street car to the local subway, our final destination being Miyajima, a scenic island to the south. It was a Sunday, before seven a.m., and there were not many people about.

Lynn, losing her sense of direction, exasperatedly accosted a small, wizened old woman on the sidewalk and demanded where the streetcar was. I didn't speak any Japanese at this point, but Lynn's approach was to repeat the desired English word in katakana pronunciation until the poor recipient was beaten into understanding.

"Su-toh-rii-to-kaaa doko desu ka ," asked Lynn several times, and upon being met with incomprehension, her voice eventually peaked in an exasperated bellow. "SU-TOH RII-TO-KAA DOKO DESU KA?" she shrieked, frightening the old woman, whom I was already imagining as a hibakusha-one of the survivors.

I was incredibly embarrassed at her outburst. At this point, I didn't know Lynn very well as a person, but I was nonetheless quite pissed off. I jerked her aside by the arm and gritted "She doesn't understand." Lynn, astonished, could only stare at me, open-mouthed. How could I betray her in front of this little yellow monkey?

It was all downhill from there.

The Lynn horror-files continued that very same evening. We met a Japanese-American friend of hers who lived in Hiroshima and the three of us went out to eat. The room we were in was in a faux-train car, and while we were eating, a small group of Japanese children gathered outside the doorway to gape, as children will sometimes do. Lynn seemed outraged, making exaggerated faces and yelling in English "Do I look like a monkey to you? Who are the monkeys around here? AM I A MONKEY TO YOU?"

I was appalled, but since I shared her living space, I said nothing. Also, it had a great deal to do with my lack of Japanese. I simply had to cede to the Japan veterans--they knew more than I did and I simply had no choice in the matter, as far as I was concerned.

Still, our return to Osaka brought new tensions. I was sick to death of Lynn, and I wanted to move out. Nothing was available, however, in my spending category, that is.

At this point, the money was running out, quite seriously. I had to get a job.

I finally interviewed with a school south of Sakai--way south. I'd gotten the number from an ad in Kansai Time Out magazine.

I had to take several trains and subways from Temmabashi to get there. Sakai Language Institute was an end-of-the-line destination no matter how you cut it. It was at least an hour and a half, one way.

The owner was a Hawaii-educated Japanese guy named Don Hayashi. Standing six feet-two inches, behind his affable tatemae mask, Hayashi was to turn out to be a verifiable Nazi.

He told me I'd be getting my sponsorship-meaning my work visa-one month after a "probationary" period. Fine and dandy. The pay was around Y200,000 a month, for lessons five days a week. I'd have about two hours of lessons in the morning, then about two hours in the evening. This left about five hours every day that I had free--an hour and a half from home and at least 45 minutes from Tennoji, the nearest major station. I couldn't quite wrap my mind around this concept of "work," but I smiled and nodded my way through the interview. "You won't be sorry that you hired me, Dan," I assured Hayashi, unconsciously adjusting my necktie knot to reflect my self-hanging skills. Dan hired me on the spot, and thus began my initiation into teaching English in Japan.

To begin with, at Sakai Eigakuin, the staff wore nametags. Not nametags of their own Japanese names, but contrived English ones, such as "Mary" and "Liz." I felt slightly uncomfortable addressing the secretary as "Mary," but she seemed to like the role-playing, so I shrugged it off and went along with the charade. I noticed that even the Japanese students would address her as "Meaari-san." I knew that there was something not quite right here, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I just assumed that all English schools in Japan were a bit eccentric.

The head teacher at Sakai Eigakuin was a stuffed-up, 27-year-old red-headed Nazi from middle America, who saw his munificent role in Japan as a somewhat philanthropic condescension-based task of "educating the natives." He employed his limited Japanese (which was at the time far better than mine) loudly, and often. He was an officious little prick. I was pathetically polite to him, an attitude which I now regret.

The first days were a nightmare. Waking after a 2 a.m. session at Ai Cafe and finding the apartment deserted after Lynn had gone to work, I would gulp a coffee and rush out the door to catch the subway at Temmabashi station at 7 or so. I arrived at the school at about 8:45 and was teaching by nine. The first shift was housewives, only some of whom spoke English. I privately debated whether some of them spoke Japanese.

After the morning lesson I had to twiddle my thumbs until five o'clock--an astonishing five hours away. Then, I had lessons until 8, mostly groups of high-school-aged girls and a few juku-inducted boys. The lessons were from some dwarf-minded book that no one, including me, understood, but that was the school text and we were ordered to abide by it.

Back in the world of Lynn and Temmabashi, things were heating up--she'd had enough of me and I'd had enough of her. I had to move out.

I found a place in Sakai, a small suburb about an hour away from central Osaka by train. It was the Rinkai Hotel, a place that advertised itself as "Foreigners welcome!" in the Kansai Time Out. I called them.

"It's a hovel" was the consensus of the few foreigners I knew, and that was what was going through my mind as I arrived in front of the hotel after walking from the train station at 10:30 p.m., one early January night.

The receptionist, working behind the small, isolated counter in a drab, industrially colorless room, was friendly and spoke English. "It's 1500 yen a night," she said (approximately $15 US at the time.)

Great, I thought, I'm finally officially homeless.

And I was. Marooned, with next to no money in my pocket and a dodgy job for the future, I drowned my sorrows in cheap 1.18-liter "milk cartons" of sake that could be bought at the corner machine.

Foreigners came and went from the Rinkai, but I mostly passed them as I came in or went out. There were no murmured greetings or pleasantries; everyone pretty much kept to themselves. The Face of the World away from work for me was the receptionist who toiled at the reception desk in the dingy lobby.

I spent my evenings lying on my bunk, the lights off, drinking sake and listening to the same Japanese pop tape on headphones, over and over. For some odd reason I was attracted to the predictable, slick music with the indecipherable lyrics. Besides, it had been given to me by a cook at Ai Cafe. I was missing a world within a world.

Sometimes, when I was edging into maudlin sentimentality, tears would begin to seep as I contemplated my somewhat precarious situation. I was alone in a cheap hotel 7,000 miles away from anything I could call home. I was surrounded by hordes of gibberish-talking strangers who really couldn't give a fuck whether I lived or died.

It was at least worth another drink.

The first few days at the Language Institute were the most tedious of my life so far. To fill up the noxious five-hour gap, there was only one remedy as far as I could see: find a good bar to drink beer and write letters at or study Japanese between sessions, a logical extension of my 2 a.m. assignations at Ai Cafe with the taxi driver, Nakamura-san.

In Sakai, there were precious few kissatens (coffee-shop-bars), but I was able to find one about half a mile away that was almost always empty. The bemused mama-san would serve me hot sake on a small floor-level table, often bringing unasked-for goodies such as deep-fried squid and raw green beans, since I hardly ever ate, just drinking sake and writing letters, and she must have felt sorry for me.

During those times, as I scratched away on my letter paper and sipped my sake in solitude, I would sometimes pause and look around at the worn shojis, the tan-yellow tatamis and the shuffling mama-san who would spirit in and out of the room like an old ghost, and in these moments I felt that I was truly in Japan, the old Japan, not the new one, and somehow I felt serenity as I never had before.