“You must meet new lovely friend Tara,” Yuki said suggestively as we had dinner one evening. “Masamichi meet her at architecture conference. She very smart young architect.”
I suspected at once that Yuki’s seal of approval didn’t mean that Masamichi hadn’t been there first. This was probably going to be a case of sloppy seconds. And yet, Tara… I felt there was something compactly poetic about that name. I found myself being besieged by images of a lithe woman, with long flowing black hair, a cute smile, silky-smooth legs, delightful little digits for fingers, a pert professional manner, intelligent, sparkling eyes and a fascinatingly self-absorbed face – a beauty, who was longing to meet me.
“When and where?” I was soon demanding of Yuki.
“Pick her up at my house next Tuesday at 9.00 p.m. Brind date!”
I spent half of the week quietly looking forward to my assignation, and on the day I arrived on the dot, something I rarely achieve. There were three people sitting in Yuki’s living room, munching on snacks and toasting each other with white wine. A beautiful apparition answering to almost all my preconceptions smiled up at me. Unfortunately, she was sitting next to a hunk in a tight T-shirt. Colossal biceps emerged from its short sleeves. On his other side sat another girl. She was wrapped in what can only be described as a three-man tent, made of taffeta. She was enormous. She was Tara.
I was about to join the threesome on the sofa, but Yuki was intent on ushering us out of the house at once. It would have been easier if she had allowed us a few minutes to get acquainted in her reassuring presence, but she obviously felt that she’d done her bit by introducing us. “Easier with four!” she whispered to me as the others put on their shoes. “By the way, her real name is Taeko, but when she did architecture Master’s in America, she call herself Tara. It’s her Western name.”
The beginning of my date felt like an abduction. The hunk bundled me and Tara into the back of his car and we sped off towards her apartment – a luxurious penthouse in an expensive district of Tokyo. Tara settled back in the seat and hooked her arm around the handle of a wicker basket. Inside it, a felt toy dog was nestling in some sumptuous yellow fabric. She stroked the dog tenderly and whispered to it in sweet baby tones, looking around at me with seductively sad eyes. The hunk drove fast. I mumbled something about having made a reservation at one of my favourite sushi restaurants where the sea bream was especially fresh, and promised that I had earned the clout there to change the booking to four people at the last minute.
“Sushi for pensioners!” the hunk exclaimed from the front, and they all fell about guffawing.
“Plenty for you to eat at home,” Tara promised me, running her fingers up the toy dog’s long strands of fur, squeezing my arm, then bending over to rub her nose against the dog’s.
Within fifteen minutes we were standing on the balcony of Tara’s flat in a pleasant breeze, looking out over lattices of roads along which processions of cars meandered like glowworms in the late-evening traffic. Tara opened a bottle of champagne, poured us all a glass – and professed to have just discovered that there was no food at all in the apartment.
“I don’t know about you three…” I started.
“We don’t want to go out, do we?” she broke in, in her rather energetic Japanese-American accent. “We’ll just have to make do with champagne and whiskey.”
The others enthusiastically agreed that they couldn’t eat a thing. I gulped. I was starving.
“Eating no fun,” said the hunk’s girl.
“Other things fun,” the hunk agreed.
Tara led us into her bedroom, a stainless-steel-and-glass boudoir with soft white lighting, designed by a friend of hers. The walls were draped with dark tapestries, between which hung several works of Araki Nobuyoshi, perhaps Japan’s best known photographer. Most of them were shots of bored-looking nude women offering up their various apertures for scrutiny; some of the women were pregnant, others were tied up or otherwise in bondage, and one girl reclining nonchalantly was receiving cunnilingus from a lizard.
“I am in mourning for Leontine,” Tara breathed to me in a flirtatiously plaintive way.
“Leontine?”
‘My little poochie-pooch-poo,” she explained, pouting irritatingly and speaking in a soft cooing voice. “She is now in Doggy Heaven with the Doggy Goddy. She was my baby, my everything. Now I only have her to remind me of Leontine.” And she pointed at the basket with the toy dog that she had been stroking and cuddling in the car.
“You can’t cry for ever,” giggled the hunk’s girlfriend, who had obviously lost interest in stories about Leontine’s passing and ascension to Doggy Heaven. The hunk didn’t care about Tara’s poochie-pooch-poo either. He was engrossed in looking at a photo of two girls casually entwined in a lesbian embrace.
“Let’s make ourselves comfortable,” Tara threatened.
“Comfortable?” I said. I knew this spelt trouble.
“Why not get into bed?”
I stood awkwardly at the side of the large metal-framed bed as the three of them clambered in.
“Come on, it’s alright,” Tara teased me. “Just get in! Nothing to drink for you if you don’t get in, you naughty naughty!”
So I slunk in, with the enthusiasm of a cat going for a swim in the canal, wondering what my alternative was. I could hardly sit on the end of the bed like a doctor performing his ward rounds. Nor did I want to leave. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, though some take-out sushi would have been nice.
As Tara snuggled up to me, I pretended to myself that I was performing a stint of social services in a very expensively appointed clinic, or else that this was all part of my getting to know the Japanese.
“All those aspects of Japan that I have carefully sought out,” I reprimanded myself silently, “all those so-called ‘experiences’ I have had: they’ve actually been highly controlled, highly unthreatening.” This thought alone compelled me to stay, to be daring, to challenge myself – though I would have much preferred to make my excuses and leave this deeply unwished-for encounter with a trio of well-organized, self-confident and autonomous young Japanese professionals. I laughed inwardly at memories of starchy Noh plays, tea ceremonies performed by women with permafrost expressions, and male Kabuki actors playing damsels in distress with that sing-song shriek that is supposed to depict a woman taken aback by sudden grief.
Tara turned to face me, as the other two cuddled and confided and laughed in whispers. I feared the worst.
I got it. As she puckered up her lips and moved in for the kill, I was assailed by a burst of insupportably bad, absolutely rancid breath.
I jerked back and started asking her urgently about contemporary Japanese architects. What were they doing? Where were they going? Were there different schools? Trends? Why were they more successful abroad than in Japan itself? Did Masamichi’s work interest her? I clasped her shoulders in a vice-like grip to hold her off, making no pretence about rebuffing her. The whiskey bottle stood half-empty on the little glass-and-metal designer table next to the bed.
“Masamichi is a fake,” she averred. “That’s not real architecture. He designs standard offices and homes. Uninteresting stuff!” Again she lurched at me and tried to press her mouth to mine, exhaling another blast of poisonous breath into my face. I turned away.
“You don’t find me attractive because I am fat,” she snarled at me while stroking my neck. “I know that’s the reason. Men used to desire me madly.”
“You are attractive, most attractive,” I muttered, seizing the opportunity for dialogue and hoping that it might stem her erotic fury. “I just hardly know you.”
“Well then, what’s wrong with me?” she enquired, gently placing her other hand on my chest. She started undoing my shirt buttons.
Though I was revolted, I couldn’t help admiring her shameless self-possession, even as she was leading the charge in a rape scene. The surroundings, too, seemed so composed, so organized, so impressive. They somehow justified the instant, Dionysiac adventures she was hankering after. I just wished she could be a little more reserved while in bed with a reluctant stranger, or perhaps introduce a preliminary stage into her seduction ritual. Such as brushing her teeth.
“Well?” she exclaimed impatiently – and she ripped off her blouse and straddled me. Two enormous breasts sprang out and quivered before my now horrified eyes. The hunk and his girl were already getting it on next to us. Reassuring images of a more peaceful evening – perhaps enjoying seconds of sea-urchin sashimi, or participating in the serenity of an incense ceremony – flashed involuntarily through my mind. Even the grimy philosophy department at Todai made a fleeting appearance, the first time that its dilapidated and forlorn rooms had managed to comfort me.
“No, I’m not on for it,” I insisted. “I’m definitely not.”
“Yes you are!” she countered. She was drunk and lusty. I realized that manoeuvring her off me would be a logistical challenge of considerable proportions. As I pondered my options, she grabbed my shirt with one hand and tried to tear it off, while the other hand reached down to unbutton my trousers. I seized her plump arms and tugged her to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, in a futile effort to get her off me. She bent down and again planted her gas-attack mouth on mine. I pushed her aggressively away – my resolve stiffened by that further encounter with her halitosis. Then she bit my ear, viciously.
“Get the hell off…” I yelled, as my ear reeled from its first experience of cannibalism.
As I finally wrestled free of her, the white pillow under my head fell to the floor, now stained with a large patch of blood. The other two had emerged from their writhings to observe the fun. I leapt out of bed, the three of them laughing out loud at me as I silently located my jacket and coat. Their expressions said: “Why chicken out now? Not much has happened yet anyway.” Araki’s photographs echoed this message, even amplified it. Anything seemed unadventurous compared to what his girls might get up to. I felt defiant and also oddly sheepish. But I had one overriding aim: to make it to the front door without either Tara’s breath or her anger getting the better of me.
The dark streets outside felt like a golden oasis of liberty. As I walked to the local railway station, I could have hugged every passer-by, every drunken salaryman, for showing enough respect to ignore me. Every now and then I was sure that someone would pounce from out of a dark alley, but people seemed to be going out of their way not to touch me.
I called Yuki from the deserted station after being told that I had missed the last train back to Kamakura. I gave her an earful then and there. She immediately invited me to stay the night. When I got to her house, she was sympathetic – although not wholly mortified.
“But Masamichi said Tara so nice and so competent,” she said. “Perfect for you. I think intelligent more important for you than good-looking.”
“Intelligent?” I gasped. “She’s mad!”
“But she seem so good person to us,” Yuki kept saying, on autopilot. “Maybe you overreacting.”
“She tried to bite my ear off!”
“Excellent professional reputation,” Yuki observed.
“She bit half my ear off!”
“She very nice to animals,” Yuki countered.
“Yes, nicer than to humans.”
“Pity you don’t like. I thought she so perfect for you.”
I gave up resisting. It was clear that Yuki didn’t want to know, and anyway there’s no arguing with a Japanese non-sequitur stubbornly maintained. All I could do was stagger off to bed, nursing my stinging ear, and worry about how many infectious diseases Tara’s furred teeth had landed me with. I lay awake for half the night, the whole grotesque scene replaying in my mind on an endless loop, hoping that Leontine in Doggy Heaven with the Doggy Goddy was watching over my ear and restraining the advances of her mistress’s bacteria. Leontine, I was sure, had made the right decision to leave her mistress for a better world. She was a smart dog.