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

Guest post by Brett Tompkins

The first notion that I could get into real trouble was the uniformed officer who was waving people forward to enter the security line for the boarding gate area at Seoul's Kimpo airport. I couldn't tell if he was military or regular police, but he was wearing a gun, so I decided not to chance it.

Turning around as if I'd forgotten something, I went back and to the men's restroom, where I entered a stall and did all the remaining coke. There wasn't much about a quarter gram's worth, and I snorted it all, licked the paper and then flushed it. And flushed with new enthusiasm, I proceeded to the gate and boarded the KAL flight to Osaka.

It was the evening of November 25th, 1988, and I was about to start my new life in Japan.

The flight to Osaka was pretty short, and I passed the time by downing a couple of double Bloody Marys and chatting with a Korean businessman. He'd made this trip many times before. "Look me up when you get settled," he said. Maybe I should have. It would have been a possible job alternative to what was my inevitable fate, but I didn't know that at the time.

It had all been a lark, at first. A girl I'd met at a party back home a year earlier had breathlessly described her life as a JET in Japan, and I was infected by her enthusiasm. "Come out for a visit!" she gushed. I was intrigued. It was all so exotic. I was working at a dead-end job in a photo lab, spending my days listening to the radio in the dim red light and sliding sheets of film positives and negatives through viscid chemical baths, sometimes sharing a beer and a toot with one of the bosses. It was an easy life, but I was going nowhere fast.

I followed up with Lynn, writing letters and making the occasional phone call. Things Japanese began to take on a new significance, as I saw the possibility of actually going there. Sushi became more than sushi; now I wanted to know the etymology of the names of all the makis. A customer at the copy shop, perhaps Miyuki, became an ethereal creature who now knew, maddeningly, something I didn't. The calls to Lynn reinforced these feelings of repressed memories of Samurai-ness and before you could say "Shogun" I was repeating "Sumimasen" several times a day in the shaving mirror.

I lived for the phone calls. Just the sound of the ring on the other end of the phone line was compelling: a deep, melodious purr instead of the usual high-pitched stridor of American phones. "Moshi-moshi," would come the sultry voice on the other end, and there was no denying the frisson of excitement at the strangeness of it all. I would sometimes spend an hour on the phone to Lynn, damning the cost and drinking endless glasses of white wine.

Weeks turned into months, and at last I had a date for my departure in mind: November, the month in which I would turn 26. I began learning as much as I could about Japan and bought some tapes and textbooks to help me learn at least a smattering of the language before I went.

My friend Jeff, an air-traffic controller, questioned my sanity during an all-night tootski session. "Dude, cup of coffee costs three dollars, man. You'll never survive. Why don't you stay here and become an air-traffic controller? It's easy. I'll show you how."Most of my friends echoed his reservations about the cost of living. I shrugged it all off. Fuck 'em, I thought. They're all wrapped up in their insular little bubble-worlds and they couldn't for the life of them consider actually going out on a limb and taking a RISK. They would stay there forever, in their self-imposed monospheres, where they would remain until they died. Not me.

Lynn came back that summer, and though she was only there for two days there was a definite, palpable spark between us. However, it was not acted upon due to time and location restraints. After several hours of impassioned conversation and vows of toasts to be consumed the day I arrived, she went back to Japan and I began to get my affairs in order. I sold everything in my apartment, then sold my car, to be effective the day I left. I wouldn't be rich after all this, but I might scrape up two or three grand. I gave notice to the landlord and my boss. I went to the Japanese consulate in San Francisco and got my shiny new 90-day tourist visa. I actually bought my plane ticket and had some cash left over. Every day after the buying of the plane ticket was just a countdown. I was already putting my present aside and putting my whole future being into Japan. I ate, breathed and slept Japan, subsumed my entire existence to the arrival of that one day upon which I would board that plane.

November was an excruciatingly long time in coming.

I figured I'd get there, stay with Lynn and get acclimatized for about a month, while looking for a job. She sent me classifieds from the Japan Times and various other newspapers to let me know what sorts of jobs were available. So far, so good. I was bringing about a grand in cash. I figured it would tide me over for a month at least. I was to be wrong, but I didn't have a clue about that, or anything else then.

The day came, and I was off, via Los Angeles and Seoul. I brought the clothes on my back plus a couple more, my Ovation acoustic guitar and my Mac Plus, in a big, fuzzy custom case..

At LAX I was met by a former roommate from when I'd been living in Alameda. Carlton was an ex-fireman, ace racquetball player and party lunatic. I'd stowed about 2 grams of good coke for this occasion, and we took turns doing it up in the airport bar bathroom while we tossed back double Bloody Marys (only a dollar extra for a double), my flight to Seoul a few hours down the line. When the time came, we patted each other solemnly on the back and said "See you, man." It would never happen.

The flight across the vast Pacific had been an 11-hour eternity of thoughts and second thoughts, of fear and anticipation. And now past Seoul, finally, here I was, 20 minutes out from Osaka's Itami airport, with a buzz I was sure everyone could hear two seats away.

I was met outside baggage claim by Lynn, and we hopped a strange cab where the door opened by itself and the driver wore white gloves and the seats were trimmed in lace. It was raining mildly, and as we hissed down the highway the lights of the city spangled in day-glo neon colors, gaining in lurid intensity as we crossed an immense river and entered Osaka. Everywhere were the spider-like, angular Chinese pictograms, their meanings a complete and delightful mystery. And the people: black hair, darker eyes, hurrying here and there in absurdly formal dress; ties, skirts, flowery umbrellas, the occasional flash of a kimono and sandals. Bicycles swarmed everywhere like angry metallic bees. It was like landing on Mars. I knew I was home.

I didn't know, however, that Mars would hold a few surprises . . .

My first port of call on that stimulating evening was a cafe with televisions in the ceiling in Tenmabashi. I sat back and absorbed without processing, with no preconditions to be processing upon, while someone I later knew as Miyazawa Rie danced and giggled above my head and I mused over servings of spicy shrimp in some kind of tomato sauce and chilled Kirin beer and listened to Lynn's running commentary in a jet-lag-cocaine-alcohol induced haze. Don't ask me what happened to my bags; I only remember this upside-down television cafe and the rods-and-cones overdose that was full-bore Osaka to my jet-lagged self.

My senses strained. The mellifluous sound of Japanese alone was an aphrodisiac. The sheer mystery of the possible meanings brought about by the unintelligible mouthings of the incredibly sexy young waitress as she waited for our order made me melt in twelve different ways. She knew what she was saying, but why didn't I? It was incredibly arousing.

After an eon, we returned to Lynn's apartment overlooking the Tosabori river. I was struck by the Lilliputian door to her apartment, and its metal rigidity reminded me of a nuclear blast door. What were these Japanese living in fear from that they'd be building their doors out of reinforced metal? I was impressed.

That night, we made love, but that was the first and last time. I had a new mistress called Japan, and it took her less than 24 hours to claim my soul and lock my heart into her all-encompassing embrace. I didn't know it that night, but I was to remain there for five full years.

Lynn started getting on my nerves right away. She worked during the day, so I was on my own past 8 a.m. I awoke that first morning and listened to the muted sounds of Japanese life through the shut-tight windows as I lay in my sleeping bag, or what seemed to be one, on the soft surface of a tatami floor. I'd never heard the steady "katan-katan" of trains before, but it was to become a signature sound of life in Japan. There was never any shortage of those regular rumblings while I was at the apartment in Temmabashi, as we were just a few blocks from the main Keihan Osaka-Kyoto train station.

That sound of trains wasn't the only reminder that I was not at home any more; during the day there would be puzzling blasts of voices on what sounded like mobile speakers every so often, echoing across the Tosabori, or other times sounding just under my window, making me think of Orwell's 1984 and its protagonist, Winston Smith.

Who was bellowing these cryptic commands to the general populace? Why didn't anyone stop them? I didn't know that one day I'd be yelling from my balcony in perfect Japanese to "Please shut the fuck up."

My first foray on my first day was in search of food. Japan, after all, was known for all manners of rice and fresh fish, and I'd brought with me a love of sushi and sake, so I figured I was in the right place for the best of both.

I walked across a weird footbridge across a river that first afternoon, not paying attention to where I was going. I just wanted to see.

There was a small grocery store there, somewhere across the river, and I went in, marvelling at all the bizarre packaging and odd designs. What on earth was "Let's Happy?" I spotted some rice, and thought "Yes, I'll buy rice, because that'll be the cheapest thing here in Japan, a country whose staple food is rice. I'll make some makis and surprise Lynn." The small bag of rice read "Y10,000." I thought it must be a misprint, but I didn't have the language to ask anything. I left with some packaged spaghetti sauce and some pasta. Maybe I'd surprise Lynn with some Italian food instead.

She was nonplussed when she returned from work that evening. "Yeah, rice is expensive. They only want Japanese rice in Japan, so they charge whatever they want for it." I was boggled.

I slept in my own room. Lynn slept in the next one, separated only by the thin foam core sliding partitions I learned were called fusuma. After that first intense night, I suddenly had no desire to sleep with Lynn any more. Maybe it was the incredible awakening I'd had just walking around the neighbourhood that first day-the realization that Japanese girls were incredibly pretty, far beyond all my previous yardsticks of "pretty." With inescapable and instinctive logic, I immediately determined I wasn't going to waste any more time in a "relationship" that I knew would ultimately go nowhere.

It didn't help that Lynn almost immediately adopted a Jewish mother posture towards me. I was not to eat this because "it wasn't good" for me. I wasn't to go out without a coat because I'd "catch a chill." I drank too much. This kind of mundane Western domesticity felt incredibly stifling. I hadn't come halfway across the world to live in some American microcosm. I wanted to live, breathe and osmose Japan, to feel it burning in my veins, 24 hours a day.

I passed the first few surprisingly chilly November afternoons a few blocks away in a coffee shop that I'd discovered in those first wanderings, named Ai Cafe窶任afe of Love. I bought bottles of Suntory beer at 500 yen a pop窶蚤 lot of money for my budget窶蚤nd wrote letters at the counter. I felt like I was an astronaut reporting to Mission Control. I tried ineffectually to communicate with the bemused staff, who eventually began to accept my presence and not startle at every sound I made, like lowland gorillas. I drank and wrote, trying to make sense of the immense flow of throughput my brain was trying to deal with and translate it in a manner that the people back in "the world" would understand.

I got the worst cold I'd ever had on my 26th birthday, three days into Japan. Everything was yellow, with accompanying chills. Lynn was useful, with lots of soup and comfort. While she was gone I drank her Amaretto and brooded. I began to play my guitar intensely, waking up, having coffee and then sometimes spending three hours a day doing just scales. Then I went to Ai Cafe and wrote letters and drank beer. Lynn would come home at about 7 and we would chat desultorily. She never tried to persuade me to share her bed again. I suppose my indifferent air discouraged her.

I began to wake up at 2 a.m., get dressed, and go to Ai Cafe. Beer was only 450 yen at that hour, and a flood of taxi drivers invaded the place every night at around midnight. They'd sit around smoking cigarettes and reading Japanese comics and babbling in their incomprehensible babble. I began to stay until 4 a.m., absorbing the smoke, drinking beer and occasionally playing PacMan at one of the video game tables. No one paid me any mind. Eventually I became part of the wallpaper. The "Master," a no-nonsense middle-aged fellow, quickly grasped what food I liked and what I didn't like on it, like bonito flakes. He cooked a mean soba, a buckwheat noodle dish.

One night at around 2 a.m. the master motioned me over to a taxi driver who was sitting at the counter. It turned out that this taxi driver spoke some English. Thus began the Great Learning. From that day on, I always woke up at 2 a.m. and went to Ai Cafe. Nakamura-san began to teach me Japanese. I drank beer and made notes. I was now able to flirt with the girl who worked the late shift, through Nakamura-san. "One important thing at a time" was my mantra. No sense in overextending yourself.

I met Masako at an informal gathering Lynn had chosen to host at her place.