‘Denwa bango wa something-or-other desu.’ Beep. Beep. Beep. It was the last day of the month, and Nori wasn’t picking up. He had promised to help me, so I called back, repeatedly listening to the apologetic tones of the voice that spoke when his voicemail was switched off. Tonight was my last chance for a dohan — tomorrow our monthly bonus points would be calculated — and now he was knowingly standing me up. Super.
Once the rain eased to a fine drizzle, I made my way to the tiny East Roppongi apartment that Nicole and Abie shared to show them some abdominal exercises. After weeks of occupational binge drinking and little movement, we were all growing concerned about our waistlines expanding; the girls had even started running up and down the stairwell of their decrepit apartment tower in an effort to exercise.
Two thin futons, a gift from a customer of Nicole’s, took up most of the worn-out room, with shoes, luggage and Abie’s guitar from Grandpa filling up the rest. A micro-bathroom and playhouse kitchen completed the $1200-a-month apartment. It had been bearable, until the recent arrival of Nicole’s friend Stacy from New York, so that now, in a space so small you wouldn’t house your dog in it, they were living like three sardines in their own brine. I fully realised just how lucky Matt and I were to have our clean, modern, little abode. At least the state of it somewhat resembled what we were accustomed to at home. Without it I’d have already gone insane.
During a plank demonstration for the rectus abdominis, my phone rang briefly and stopped. It was a missed call from Nori, so I called back and waited. Ring, ring. ‘Denwa bango wa ...’ The same apologetic tones. How bizarre. He must have hung up and switched his phone off in less than a minute.
As a last-ditch effort to scrape together a dohan I tried Goro, the fashion guy, but he wasn’t answering either. Great. I’d been excommunicated, failed to meet the club’s two-dohan requirement and lost my hard-earned $500 bonus in the process. I wouldn’t be happy when Nori decided to resurface.
Ring, ring! This time it was Shin calling to interrupt in the middle of a downward dog, beneficial for the adductor magnus. ‘Hey, Shin, how are you? What are you doing?’
‘I am now taking my cat to my wife’s house. My cat cannot stay at home by herself. I go China on 7th, but only chance is today.’
Excuse me, what? Shin had a wife? Why did she have her own house? Was she his ex-wife? Were they separated? His casual indifference caught me completely off guard. It obviously was a non-issue, but I was still shocked. ‘Oh, uh ...’ I didn’t know what to say.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Running?’
‘No, yoga. I’m at Nicole’s apartment. We’re doing yoga so that we don’t get fat.’
‘No choice! It will happen ... everyone coming to Roppongi is getting fat. Ask Karolina. She knows. Anyway, she is coming tomorrow, so I will see you tomorrow.’
And with that, Shin left me chuckling yet again as he smugly hung up.
The reapplication of smudged mascara to inner lashes is a delicate procedure, even when there isn’t someone banging at the door of a change room too small to execute a jumping jack in. I narrowly missed an uncomfortable impact as Tehara knocked again, this time more swiftly. ‘Chelsea-san,’ he announced sternly, ‘Ito-san.’
‘What is he doing here?’ I seethed, jerking open the door. ‘It’s not even nine-thirty!’ Tehara shrugged and pushed up his glasses. ‘Ooooh, I can’t believe it, that lying little jerk!’
According to Nori, he’d forgotten to take his phone to work. It wasn’t until 8.00 pm that he’d seen my missed calls and no message. As he explained it, ‘I thought, maybe you need my help, and so I came straight here.’
‘Why didn’t you just call me? You knew that tonight was my last opportunity for a dohan. I could have asked someone else, but you promised! And how did you call me earlier, before eight o’clock, when you just hung up? I thought you said you left your phone at home.’
Nori laughed uncomfortably. ‘Uh, when? When did I call you? I ... I don’t think so. I could not, my phone was at my home, and I was at my hospital, in Yokohama.’
‘Your number came up on my phone, at around six o’clock,’ I insisted.
‘No, uh, I ... I ... uh, I don’t think so.’ He looked sweaty. Squirming. ‘I don’t know.’ I was about to press further when Nishi interrupted to seat a new Israeli at our table. I didn’t know who was more annoyed by her arrival, Nori or I. ‘Is it all right that she is sitting with us?’ Nori whispered after a particularly ignorant slew of comments from her about how Japanese men ‘wasted their money in these places’.
‘Of course,’ I snapped. ‘Why would I care? That’s what happens in a hostess club. Girls sit with you.’ Nori was visibly put out by my retort, but I didn’t care. His lack of acknowledgement for the disservice he’d caused me got on my nerves. So did his singing, every familiar inflection more grating than the last. The only thing that was tolerable about Nori was that just like clockwork, right before he left, he pressed another ¥10,000 into my hand, adding to a slowly accruing stack from the Bank of Ito.
He was absolutely adorable. Decked out in black suit pants and a pink shirt, Kazuhiro Kobayashi had dressed for a night on the town. Plump and round right down to his bright, shiny eyeballs, his animated face was accentuated by chipper giggles and outright startling squeaks. Even a chipmunk couldn’t have said ‘Call me Kozy’ any cuter. I wanted to squish him in a huge hug.
Almost immediately after arriving at Greengrass, Kozy had invited me to his apartment for a weekend lunch of o-kono miyake, his house speciality and, coincidentally, the only thing he could cook (for everything else, Kozy clarified, he ate out). A veteran bachelor, Kozy lived alone in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo, and although I declined his offer, I agreed to a thumb war to determine whether I’d go to a movie in Shibuya with him. If I lost, I had to go. If I won, I didn’t. His thumb was so much fatter than mine. It was an unfair advantage.
‘All right, but it has to be a Sunday, and I get to choose the movie.’
‘You have some paper for me?’
I handed him a Post-it note from my purse. ‘Pen?’ I offered, and Kozy squirrelled both away to write furiously before handing back way too much information: his full name, phone numbers (including the area and country codes), three different emails, and his sex — male, in case I was wondering. On the flipside he’d written, ‘Every Saturdays and Sundays is holiday.’
‘What sort of face do you like?’ he asked suddenly, pushing his lips into a pout.
‘What do you mean, what sort of face?’
‘What ... sort ... of ... face?’ he repeated slowly, as if I couldn’t understand English. ‘Handsome face,’ he said, jutting out his chin and exaggerating the pout, ‘or wild face?’As Kozy patiently held his features in a mask of ‘wild’ fury, I realised he was serious. ‘What face?’ he repeated. ‘Danger face?’
I burst out laughing. ‘Danger face? What on earth is a danger face?’
‘Like this,’ he demonstrated, and the only change from ‘wild face’ was that his eyes didn’t look so crazed. ‘Like Bond.’
It took everything I had to pull it together.
‘YES! That’s it! How did you know? Most definitely, a man with a danger face is what I like.’
Kozy puffed up in extreme satisfaction. He was, after all, a man proficient at a danger face. ‘And what about body?’ he asked. ‘Short and round is okay?’ I had to strain to hear what he was saying. Bon Jovi had just cut in on the karaoke system and an over-amplified bass fine was muffling out Kozy’s consonants. I raised my voice to be heard.
‘UMM, WELL, NO. THEN I COULDN’T WEAR HEELS, SO I THINK I NEED TO HAVE SOMEBODY TALL.’
‘SMALL!’ Kozy shrieked, dropping both hands in a double-barrelled karate chop to rest either side of his masculinity. ‘What PART small?’
I totally lost it. Kozy was just too much.