I met Lily in a bar in Shibuya. It was only a few months ago, though it seems longer. She was with Bob, the teacher I’d become acquainted with in a dentist’s waiting room, and some other English teachers, and I did not want to be there. I rarely socialized with other foreigners, and since I’d started seeing Teiji I had no desire or need to see anyone else. But Bob had called to ask me especially.
“There’s a new woman working at the British bar I go to, Lucy. Well, girl really. She’s a bag of nerves. She’s never been abroad before and she looks as if she’s just landed on the moon. I don’t know how she’s going to cope.”
“Oh.” What was it to me?
“She needs help. I mean, she needs to find a flat. She’s living in a seedy gaijin house now with some real assholes and she’s the only woman. If she doesn’t get out soon, I think she’ll crack up.”
“It’s not hard to find an apartment. I’ve done it.”
“Lily doesn’t speak a word of Japanese.”
An unusual name. I liked it. “So can’t you help her?”
“I thought you’d be able to help. You found your place on your own so you know what’s around and what to look for. Besides, your Japanese is better than anyone else’s. It was just an idea.”
“It sounds more like a plan than an idea.” But I am a Leo and respond well to flattery. Bob had won my help.
“Will you come out for a drink with us on Friday? We’re going to an izakaya in Shibuya. Just meet her, yeah? If you don’t want to go round estate agents with her, at least you could give her some advice.”
It’s not that I’m so ungenerous as a rule but I wanted to spend every minute of my time with Teiji, or by myself, thinking about Teiji. There was no space for this wimpish woman. Lily. I imagined a tall, beautiful woman with pale skin and a long white neck. She’d be in a corner of the bar sipping gin and tonic from an elegant glass. She would look at me and smile serenely. Beautiful women are always pleased to look at me. My dark eyes are too piercing to be beautiful. I am the ugliness that defines their beauty. For that matter, men are pleased to look at me too. They think, I may not get a supermodel, but at least I know I can do better than get her. You could say, then, that I have a unique beauty; people like to look at my face, they like me to be around for aesthetic reasons. I envied Lily before I’d seen her.
I entered the bar and found the English teachers sitting in a corner, talking loudly about work. Lily was the only one of the group I didn’t know. She did have pale skin but she was short and jagged, all elbows and knees. She had a large tuft of dyed auburn hair that rose an inch or so from her head and then flopped over her left eye. Her eyes were dark, like mine, but without expression. They sat beneath her eyebrows like two fat plums. She peered at me from under the tuft. Her eyes and fingers twitched. She was attractive, but also slightly comical and instead of envying her, I found myself smiling.
“’Ello.”
I located her accent immediately, to East Yorkshire. I am no Professor Higgins, it just happens that she sounded exactly like the girls I was at school with. Years of traveling, speaking other languages and trying to disassociate myself from my origins have left me with no traces of my original accent. I speak in a neutral, hard-to-locate voice, and it suits me very well. I have no patience with people who carry their accent like a flag or anthem, determined to assault you with their provincial jingoism.
Lily smiled at me, then twitched and fiddled with her fringe.
“I like this Japanese beer,” she said to me. “It’s great.”
“I’ll have Guinness. When did you arrive?”
“Here? The pub?”
“No. Japan.”
“Oh.” She dropped cigarette ash on her lap and brushed it clumsily with her fingers. Her hands were shaking slightly. “Last Friday. To be honest I never thought I’d get here and now that I am I’m not really sure why, you know.”
I nodded.
“It’s like, I’ve got to get used to a new home, a new language, everything. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, you know, everybody else really seems to fit in. This is my first night off and I’m all at sea.”
“You’ve only just got here. Of course it’s hard at first. What brought you to Japan?”
“I was in a relationship that ended. My boyfriend, Andy, I left him, you see.”
I thought she was about to start crying. She flicked her tuft off her face and lowered her voice, as if to let me in on a secret.
“Well, I had to. We were going to get married but it all went horrible. And I was in a terrible state and I decided I just had to leave, you know. You see, he was very possessive and even though I don’t think he liked me very much, he still followed me round sometimes, to make sure I didn’t have fun with anyone else. I really don’t know what he thought I was doing. So I wanted to escape from him, but it wasn’t just that. I wanted to start things all over again so I thought I’d travel, you know, see the world and that.”
“Good,” I said. “A new start. I hear you’re looking for somewhere to live.”
“Yeah. The place I’m living now, it’s . . .”
She appeared to run out of steam and sat staring at the table. I knew the kind of place it was and I knew its inhabitants. I’ve seen them. A run-down building with a bunch of Western men coming home nightly with their conquests. Men who would be nothing special in their home countries suddenly find themselves sought after by women because of their race. They get the pretty women they’ve never had before and they have moved up to the next link in the food chain. It goes to their heads. They live in splendid semen-saturated squalor. As many women as possible, as often as possible and a fresh lie to each of them. And there are cockroaches too.
“I’ve just got to get out. Can you help me? I don’t speak any Japanese and I really don’t know how to go about this. I only came to Japan because my friend knew about this job at a bar here. Excuse me, I must go to the loo.”
She darted out of the room. I turned to Bob.
“I’ve got nothing in common with her. I don’t want to get stuck with looking after her.”
“Lucy, she’s new here.”
“Tokyo’s full of foreigners who are new here. Every day more arrive. If I looked after all of them, I’d never have a life of my own.”
“All right, all right. I just got the impression that she’s lonely.”
“Everybody’s lonely.”
“Fine.”
I thought of my first Japanese friend, Natsuko, and her smiling face welcoming me when I arrived, knowing nothing, in Tokyo.
“Bob, I’ll help her find an apartment, but I’m not getting stuck with her.” I hissed, “I can’t stand East Yorkshire people.”
“I didn’t know you were so prejudiced.” He laughed. “Besides, I thought Yorkshire was your part of the world.”
“It is. That’s my point.”
Lily returned.
“I’ll take you to find an apartment. It’s not so hard but there are places that will rent to foreigners and ones that won’t. Also, money’s complicated. As well as a deposit and rent in advance, you’ll probably have to pay key money—like a deposit except that you’ll never see it again.”
“I don’t care. I’ve brought my savings.”
“You’ll care when you see how much it is. And you’ll have to have a Japanese guarantor.”
“My boss’ll do that. He said so.”
“That’s fine, then. I’ll translate for you, if you want.”
“Thanks very much. It’s all a bit different from Hull.”
“It certainly is.”
Lily caught something in my voice. “Where are you from?”
“Near Hull, the coast.”
“What a coincidence! Me too. Fancy running into someone from home all the way out here. That’s made me feel a lot better, that has. It’s so good to have friends from home, don’t you think so?”
“I haven’t lived there for a very long time.”
“It’s your roots that count.”
“Plants and trees have roots. People have legs.”
We arranged to meet the following weekend. I thought that I would help her find her apartment and never see her again.
That was the beginning of Lily, in my story. Clumsy and faltering. It was not so much of an entrance after all but then, as you will see, Lily was so much better at exits.
I am not sharing this information with the policemen, not unless things get nasty. For the moment I am ignoring them quite successfully. Kameyama is still shouting at me. His voice fades in and out of my hearing. I catch fragments. He tells me that if I don’t cooperate they will keep me here all night, bring a colleague or two to ask more questions. He suggests we all sit quietly while I think about what happened, and what I can tell them. The consequences of my words and my silences will be severe. He doesn’t need to remind me that Japan maintains the use of the death penalty—hanging, in fact—for certain murders. He informs me, unnecessarily, that I am unlikely to get much sleep tonight.
And silence falls in this small room with its table and three chairs. The room is a cliché but I want to believe my feelings are wholly original. For what Lucy desires now, more than anything in this world, is a bowl of noodles. Specifically she would like udon, big fat white worms of noodles, but she would settle for squiggly ramen, or even delicate skinny soba. She would like noodles in a big brown bowl, with a raw egg broken into the soup and a pair of lacquer chopsticks with which to catch them and gobble them up. I bend my head toward my imaginary bowl, as if to inhale the flavor.
The only way to eat noodles is, of course, to fish them out of the broth, partially, and suck them straight into your mouth, slurping continuously until the bowl has nothing left but soup and a few floating morsels. Most Westerners who come to Japan find it hard to do. If you have been brought up with the guilt of noisy mastication, it is impossible to slurp well. And if you can’t slurp, you can’t suck the noodles into your mouth so it becomes impossible to eat them efficiently. Most people give up halfway through the bowl or eat horribly slowly. I took to slurping immediately. When I discovered that Teiji worked in a noodle shop, I knew he was mine. Was it a coincidence that he worked in such a place?
Yesterday, I went back to the noodle shop. I knew that I was moving farther away from Lily and Teiji with each hour that passed, and so I returned, ludicrously hoping that I would see Teiji. I wasn’t going to speak to him. I just wanted to catch a distant glimpse of his shoulder-blades under his T-shirt, or his profile as he wiped the tables. But I knew perfectly well that the shop had changed hands and Teiji would have no reason to be there. I knew that but, as any good stalker will appreciate, it did not stop me looking.
I could see from the outside that the shop had changed. It was cleaner, brighter, and there was a new name over the door. The grime had gone from the windows and the slanting doorstep had been leveled out.
I went inside and sat nervously at a counter that ran along the back wall of the shop. A young, fresh waiter took my order for tamago udon. While I waited I mopped my forehead with my hand towel. I took a pair of wooden chopsticks and snapped them apart. The steaming bowl arrived and I began to eat. The noodles were delicious but, perhaps because of the nature of recent events, when I looked into the bowl I found myself thinking of a murder case I’d read about here a few years ago.
The killer had a street stand selling noodles. He also had a dead body to dispose of. In order to avoid the fingerprint problem he had hacked off the corpse’s hands. He then proceeded to boil the outer layers of skin off the hands by dropping them into the hot noodle broth, on the street, under the unknowing eyes of his hungry customers. I don’t know how he was caught but I wondered about it. Did a passerby notice, out of the corner of her eye, a human hand floating to the surface of the delicious bubbling soup? Did a customer find that the noodles tasted a little gamier than they should?
I thought of Lily and my noodles tasted sweeter for a few seconds. Then I sensed Teiji behind me, watching and frowning upon my act of metaphysical cannibalism. I dropped my chopsticks. One of them fell and hit the floor. I bent to reach it, feeling tears accumulating, and knocked the bowl off the counter. It smashed and the noodles and soup splashed across the tiles. I felt the eyes of everyone in the restaurant studiously avoiding my direction. Perhaps in Britain I would have had a round of applause. I tried to call for a waiter but my voice was taken up with quiet, deep sobs that sounded as if they were coming from someone else.
A waiter rushed toward me with a dustpan, brush and mop. He told me that there was no problem though I could see he hardly knew which implement to use first. Before I could say no thank you, another waiter had slipped a full bowl of noodles onto the counter in front of me, compliments of the shop. I had no choice but to start again. After a few minutes my childish crying came to a stop. I dried my eyes and nose with my hand towel and, feeling a little better, began to eat.
By the time the last inch of noodle was inside me, my eyes were only slightly sore. I felt as if I had been bandaged up. By whom? By the noodles, though I caught myself thinking of a kind nurse in my childhood, and then of the other nurse I knew, Lily. I left the shop feeling fed and satisfied.
I will try to sustain myself now on the memory of the taste. My back is beginning to ache from sitting in this uncomfortable chair. I suppose I am allowed to stand for a moment and stretch. I move, and feel a little better. The policemen stare at me with identical expressions of weariness. I ignore them.
As I have said, I agreed to meet Lily and help her find a home. So, though I had no interest in her at all, I waited for her at the station in Itabashi. She was ten minutes late and apologized about it for the next fifteen. She rabbited on about the awfulness of her current accommodation and expected me to listen. I paid attention to some of it but not all. I find it hard to concentrate for long in conversation and my mind wandered to other things. I started to think about the first time I tried to rent an apartment in Tokyo and was turned down by streetfuls of estate agents because I was foreign. It took weeks to find a place. In the end I settled for a poky room above a noisy garage because I was tired of hunting. I have come to love that room, though, and had hoped I would never have to move. These days it is easier for foreigners and easier still for Lily because she had me to help her.
She rattled on.
“Andy wanted to get married and I did too but I didn’t want to hurry and I thought we should wait till we had more money saved up. He thought that meant I was seeing someone else and I was just trying to put off the wedding so he got more and more jealous. I mean, jealous of a man who didn’t exist! It got to be embarrassing because he’d start to suspect people, you know, like the milkman and that. He had a go at one of his friends once for saying hello to me in the street and that was too much so I left him and went to stay with a friend. Anyway, he guessed where I was so I moved to her sister’s and then another friend’s and finally someone told me I could get work here, and I did. Sorry, am I really boring you with all this?”
“Not at all.” I was not answering to be polite but because it was true. I wasn’t bored because I wasn’t listening to much of it. I was somewhere in my own thoughts while her words covered the air around us like wallpaper. I paid just enough attention to have a grasp of the topic for future reference.
“What about you?” She turned her head to me. “Have you got a boyfriend?”
I couldn’t demean Teiji by referring to him with such a common and banal term. On the other hand, I supposed he was my boyfriend. We didn’t exactly date but I couldn’t say he wasn’t my boyfriend. Lover, perhaps. But what was I to him? I didn’t know and for some reason I didn’t feel comfortable thinking about it.
“Mm,” I said quickly and changed the subject. “There are several estate agents along here.”
I suggested Lily find an apartment near a station, on a high floor. Even in Japan a woman living alone can’t be too careful. But Lily wanted to be somewhere quiet, away from stations, and on the ground floor because it would feel more like a house and not an apartment.
“It’ll be a bit cheaper then,” I conceded.
One-roomed apartments in Tokyo are pretty much like each other. All the places we looked at had polished wooden floors, were six tatami mats in size. The kitchens were small but clean and new. They had narrow balconies and unit bathrooms, a big plastic bubble of a room where each facility is part of the mold. Some apartments were older than others, some noisier. I enjoyed looking. Lucy cannot visit a home, occupied or not, without imagining herself into it.
One had a balcony that overlooked a crooked old house with flowerpots on the garage roof and several cats asleep among them. I thought it might be possible to climb down to the roof without the residents of the house noticing. It would be a good place to sit and read on a warm afternoon.
The next apartment was so dark that even with all the lights on there was just an eerie yellow dinge. The balcony was faced by a dirty gray apartment building. When I looked down from the balcony I could see through the windows into the rooms. I spied on a kitchen.
A middle-aged man was putting a pan on the stove. He lit the gas, stood and stared at it. A woman—his wife, I guessed—came and stood with her back to him, fiddled around in a cupboard. It looked as if neither knew the other was there but the room was so small they must have known. The woman left the kitchen and I went back into the apartment where Lily was now inspecting the bathroom. She had her tongue out in concentration, like a child painting a picture.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“The place is a goldfish bowl and there’s no natural light. Let’s go.”
It was the right answer for Lily. Had it been my choice I would have taken it. Lucy could imagine crouching on her balcony at night, peering from behind a drying towel into the lives of her neighbors. From the windows of my own apartment that is impossible. The petrol station beneath my balcony provides me with day-long entertainment, but at night it’s quiet. I would have liked to be able to see into a kitchen or living room.
Finally Lily chose a place that had big wide windows and a small park outside. Its only drawback was that it was old and so more vulnerable in an earthquake.
“Bob said there haven’t been any tremors for ages,” Lily said.
“But that’s when you have to worry. When you have a series of small ones it means that everything’s OK. If there’s nothing for a long time then you know that the big one could hit.”
“I didn’t know that.”
We went to the estate agent’s and I helped Lily sign documents. I was tired and ready to go home but Lily was intent on thanking me.
“Let me at least buy you a cuppa somewhere. Go on.”
I didn’t want to be with her. I didn’t dislike her and yet I saw her as a representative of the place of my childhood. I couldn’t like her. I knew that if we spent more time together she would start to talk about Yorkshire again and its godforsaken beauties and comforts.
“I really am tired. You go. One of the nice things about Japan is that it’s perfectly OK to be in a cafe or restaurant alone. No one will pester you or stare at you.”
“I don’t even know how to order a cup of coffee. I don’t know any Japanese at all. Sure you won’t come with me?”
Her blank eyes flickered suddenly with fear.
“I’ll come, then. Just to show you how to order in a cafe.”
We found a small, ferociously air-conditioned coffee shop. Lily sat and put her bag on the floor beside her. It was a refreshing sight. I had forgotten that people put bags on floors in Britain. In Japan the floor is considered too dirty. I rarely carry a bag. I like to stuff the things I need into my pockets, so it is not an issue that touches me. A handbag is part of a femininity I have never felt I had the right to aspire to. Still, I liked to see Lily put her bag on the floor.
When the waitress came, Lily whispered to me that she wanted a coffee. I told the waitress that we weren’t ready.
“Lily, you’ve got to be able to order for yourself. It’s no good looking at me. How will you eat and drink if you can’t ask for anything?”
“But I don’t know what to say. How can I speak Japanese? I don’t know anything at all.”
I found her wimpishness irritating but at the same time felt a sisterly protectiveness. She was helpless.
“I bet you do. There are some Japanese words that everyone knows. How about shogun?”
“Oh, OK. Yes, I’ve heard of that. I don’t know what it is, though. Origami. I know that one. Or is that Chinese? No, it’s Japanese, isn’t it. Is it? I don’t know.”
“It’s Japanese. Kamikaze?”
“Yes. Those pilots in the war. Erm. Sumo. Karaoke. Futon.”
“See. You do know some.”
“Karate. Noodle.”
“That’s not Japanese. There are lots of words for noodles. I’ll teach you some time. I want tea and you want coffee, right?”
“Right.”
“So tea is kohcha and coffee is koohii.”
“Kohcha. Koohii,” she repeated with a strong Yorkshire o.
“Yes. Now, when you want to say ‘one’ you add hitotsu.”
“Hitotsu kohcha—”
“No. Kohcha o hitotsu. Koohii o hitotsu.”
“So it goes backward. What’s ‘o’?”
“It’s just a particle. It doesn’t really mean anything—”
“So why do I need to say it?”
“You just do. Are you ready?” I was never meant to be a teacher.
“No, wait. Let me have a little practice first. Kohcha o hitotsu. Koohii o hitotsu. How do I say ‘please’?”
“Just add kudasai on the end. OK, I’m calling the waitress.”
Lily said her piece to the waitress who, fortunately, understood.
“Wow. Me speaking Japanese. Wait till Andy finds out.”
“I thought you weren’t in touch with him anymore.”
“No, I’m not. He doesn’t know that I’m here. Hardly anyone knows. I don’t want to see him again but at the same time, I don’t believe I never will.”
“How come?”
“He was so possessive, as I said. I think he’ll either track me down and come after me or he’ll meet someone else and be obsessive about her instead.”
“That would be better.”
“Didn’t you say before that you had a boyfriend? What’s his name?”
“Teiji.”
“Is he a translator too?”
“He’s a photographer. Well, he works in a noodle shop.”
“But he wants to be a photographer. Brilliant. I love taking photographs but I’m not very good. I like pictures of views—you know, sunsets and that. I wish I had a camera here now. Does he sell his pictures or what?”
“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
“But he will in the future?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But it’s a hobby. So he can put them on the walls to brighten them up, and give them to people and stuff. That’s nice.”
Why did Teiji take photographs? He gave a few of them to me but mostly he did nothing with them. I realized it must have sounded odd to Lily but I didn’t want to talk about it with her.
“Do you think you’ll stay in Japan long?”
“I don’t know. It’s funny because I’ve only been here a couple of weeks, but I’m a bit homesick. There are things I miss that I probably wouldn’t even want if I was back at home now. Do you find that?”
“This is home now so all I can think of is how homesick I would be if I ever left Japan.”
“I miss fish and chips. And shops where I can buy what I want. I’ve noticed the shoes here are all too small for me. I could just do with a walk down Whitefriargate to look at shoes.”
“That’s true. With my big feet I have a shoe problem too.”
“Do you miss the Yorkshire coast?”
“No.”
“There must be something about it you like.”
“There is. Erosion. That part of the coast has some of the worst erosion in the world. It’s falling into the sea as we speak. A foot or two every year falls off the edge and drowns itself. Or swims southward and becomes part of East Anglia. That’s something I like.”
“I went to the seaside when I was a kid. We used to go at weekends. I remember paddling in the sea till my skin went blue. And there were those huge waves that knocked you over. I hated the cold but I did like being in water.”
Lucy was jolted into the past and missed whatever Lily said next. Lucy was swimming, trying to go fast enough to keep warm when she felt furry hands stroking and clinging to her legs. At first she thought it was one of her seven brothers, a prank, but the touch was feminine and insistent like the caressing fingers of a mermaid. She thought it was pulling her down, under the waves to drown her, but not violently, softly and quietly. A couple of minutes later she was kneeling in shallow waves. Dark, heavy seaweed was wrapped around both legs.
“I liked eating candyfloss at the beach,” Lucy heard Lily say.
“I did, too. I loved candyfloss.”
“And ice creams, but the sand always blew in and stuck to it.”
We finished our drinks in silence. I had goose bumps from the air-conditioning. When we went back into the warm humidity, I was disorientated to find myself in Tokyo.
“Never thought I’d be in Japan,” Lily said, removing her cardigan. “If you’d’ve asked me a year ago I wouldn’t’ve found it on a map.”
I should have walked away then. She knew how to get home. But something occurred to me and I stupidly opened my mouth and shared it with Lily.
“I’m going hiking on Sunday with Natsuko—she’s a colleague—and I think you’d like her. It’s not a particularly difficult hike but should be quite interesting. You might want to come.”
Lily was lost, lonely, out of her depth, in need of kindness. I knew that. Let me explain why I was so unwilling to spend time with her. It was because of another story, a story that I didn’t tell Lily. And one that I’m not telling the police. I told only Teiji. I told Teiji once and once is enough to tell the story of one’s life.
This is how it happened. I lay between the covers of Teiji’s bed. He slipped in beside me, warmed my bare skin with his, held his camera at arm’s length, pointed it and took a picture of us. It was one of the few photographs he took that included his own image. He tossed the camera aside and whispered something. What did he whisper? It seems to me now that Teiji and I never used words, but of course we must have. I remember times when I’m sure we were talking but I cannot recall a syllable of what we said. I have a sense that feelings and ideas passed between us like telepathy but that is too fanciful. I can’t hear Teiji’s voice but he must have had a voice. If I concentrate then what I hear is a sound like the patter of raindrops coming from our mouths. No pauses, no turn-taking, just water falling. I can’t be sure of his exact words, but this is what I believe he said that evening.
“How did you get here?”
I resisted the temptation to say, “I took the Yamanote line and then I walked,” for I knew that was not the answer to his question.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“But you’re here, in Japan. I found you. You came to Japan from another land, another continent, so far away, and I found you in my camera. How?”
And I told him. I started from the beginning and told him almost everything.