Number9Dream Read online

  > what sort of man are you?

  My father rests his left foot on his right knee. ‘Let me see. I’m Japanese, fifty next birthday. By profession I am an actor. My hobbies are snorkelling and wine appreciation. But fear not – all these details will come to light as our relationship unfolds, and I trust you’ll be visiting again soon! I would like to introduce you to a special person. What do you say?’

  > okay

  The screen scrolls to the right, past the wine bucket. A woman – in her late thirties? – sits on the floor, smoking, humming snatches of ‘Norwegian Wood’ between drags. She is wrapped in a man’s shirt, and black leggings hug her shapely legs. Long hair flows down to her waist. She has my eyes. ‘Hi, Eiji.’ Her voice is tender and pleased to see me. ‘Can you guess whom I might be?’

  > snow white?

  She smiles at my father and puts out her cigarette. ‘I see you have your father’s sense of humour. I’m your mother.’

  >but mummy dear, you haven’t seen daddy for 17 years

  The program processes this unexpected input while the storm head-butts the window. My mum lights another cigarette. ‘Well, we had a few fences to mend, I admit. But now we get on like a house on fire.’

  > so you finally ran out of suckers to give you money?

  ‘That hurts, Eiji.’ My virtual mother turns away and sobs alarmingly like my real one, a sort of dry, hidden quaking. I am typing in an apology, but my father responds first. He speaks in a slow and threatening thespian lilt. ‘This is a home, young man, not a hotel! If you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head, you know where the door is!’ What a pair of virtual parents the program generated for me! They are thinking, what a virtual son reality generated for us. The plum blossoms suffer wear and tear in the unseasonal weather.

  ‘Hello? Wakey! Anybody home?’ A man in Jupiter Café shouts so loudly he drowns out the sound of the virtual rainstorm. ‘Wrong change, girlie!’ I unplug myself and turn around to see what the fuss is about. A grizzly drone in a stained shirt snarls at the girl with the most perfect neck in creation – when did she get here? She stares back, surprised but unfazed. Donkey is washing dishes, staying out of trouble, while my girl struggles to be polite with this human hog. ‘You only gave me a five-thousand-yen note, sir.’

  ‘Listen to me, girlie! I gave you a ten-thousand-yen note! Not five! Ten!’

  ‘Sir, I am quite sure—’

  He rears up on his two hind legs. ‘You accusing me of lying, girlie?’

  ‘No, sir, but I am saying you are mistaken.’

  ‘You a feminist? Short-changing ’cos you’re frigid?’

  The queue of customers ruffles uneasily, but nobody says anything.

  ‘Sir, I—’

  ‘I gave you a ten-thousand, you abortion bucket! Correct change! Now!’

  She pings open the till. ‘Sir, there isn’t even a ten-thousand note in here.’

  Hog slavers and twitches his tusks. ‘So! You steal from the till as well!’

  Maybe I am still semi-stoned from the hash, or maybe Virtua Sapiens reshuffled my sense of reality, but I find myself walking over and tapping the guy on his shoulder. He turns around. His mouth is one bent sneer. Hog is larger than I thought, but it is too late to back out so I attack first and hardest. I douse his face with coffee and head-butt his nose, really, really hard. Christmas lights flicker in my eyes – Hog backs off, leaking a bubbly ‘Aaaaaaaaa’ noise. Blood trickles from his nose through his fingers. I steady myself and my hand gropes for something to brandish. The pain in my forehead crushes my voice jagged. ‘Get out right now or I’ll smash your fricking teeth into tiny fricking splinters with’ – I look at what I’m holding – ‘this ashtray!’ I must look deranged enough to mean business – after wheezing about police and assault in a beaky voice, Hog retreats. The customers look on. Lao Tzu pats my shoulder. ‘Neat work, Captain.’ Donkey comes over to her co-worker, all concern. ‘Are you okay? I didn’t know what was going on . . .’ The waitress with the perfect neck slams shut the till, and glares at me. ‘I could have handled him.’

  ‘I know,’ I reply. The Christmas tree lights fizz dangerously.

  ‘But thank you anyway.’ She gives me a cautious smile, so when the Christmas lights fuse I have something to take my mind off the pain. I sit back down and pain takes over my head for a while.

  I wonder if my mother drank at Jupiter Café during her time in Tokyo. Maybe after Anju and I were born, maybe in this very seat, waiting for a summons from Akiko Kato. PanOpticon drones work Sundays too. A steady stream files in and out of the building. Nearly two weeks have passed since my abortive stake-out, and my father is still lost in Tokyo. Could be a distant suburb, could be that guy reading the sports pages on the next table. Lao Tzu is two stools along, plugged into his nutty game. ‘Hi.’ The waitress with the most perfect neck holds a coffee jug. ‘Refill?’

  ‘No more money, I’m afraid.’

  ‘On the house. Payment in kind for security services rendered.’

  ‘Then I would love a refill. Thank you.’

  She pours. I watch. She asks, ‘How is your head?’

  I lean on my elbow and cover my throat to hide my lovebite. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Another muffin? I’ll pay for it.’

  ‘What I would love, if you wouldn’t, uh, mind’ – my pain makes me braver than I would normally dream of being – ‘is your name.’

  Her cautious smile takes a moment to arrive. ‘Ai Imajo.’

  ‘Ai Imajo.’ What a cool name.

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘Eiji Miyake.’ Not so cool.

  ‘Eiji Miyake,’ says Ai Imajo, and I feel loads, loads better. She studies the bash on my forehead. ‘Doesn’t it hurt like crazy when you head-butt somebody?’

  ‘Not if you know what you’re doing. Apparently.’

  ‘So you don’t go around head-butting people every day?’

  ‘That was my first head-butt.’

  ‘An historic occasion.’ The intersection lights go green and the traffic buzzes and swarms into the haze. ‘Where else have I seen you, Eiji Miyake?’

  ‘The day of the storm. Two weeks ago. You thought I was – well, I was, I suppose – listening in to your phone call. At the end of your shift. I was sitting here for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ai Imajo thinks back, nodding. ‘I remember.’

  ‘Blasted, blasted, blasted bioborgs!’ Lao Tzu swears at the vidboy3.

  ‘I’m on my break. Mind if I sit here?’

  Do I mind? ‘Sure.’ And to my joy and mortification – I am so cacked up from a night with a stranger in a love hotel – the girl with the most perfect neck in creation is sitting beside me. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Did you meet up with whoever?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Whoever you were waiting for, on the day of the storm.’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  I work from the abridged version and leapfrog Akiko Kato. ‘Relative.’

  ‘How long have you been looking?’

  ‘Three weeks . . .’

  ‘Three weeks since you arrived in Tokyo?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Her cheeks dome and her eyes crescent. I love smiles like this. ‘Your accent. You’ll lose it in six months. Where are you from?’

  ‘You won’t have heard of where I’m from.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Yakushima. An island off—’

  ‘—Southern Kyushu where the Jomon cedars grow, the oldest living things in the eastern hemisphere. So how are you finding Tokyo, this difficult town?’

  Tokyo, this difficult town. How cool is that? ‘Full of surprises. Sometimes lonely. Mostly weird. I can’t walk in a straight line. I keep bumping into people.’

  ‘You have to stop thinking about walking. Like catching food in your mouth – think about it, you miss. How do you know your relative passes by here?’


  ‘I don’t, really. I don’t even know what he looks like.’

  ‘Is he a distant relative?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to bore you.’

  ‘Do I sound bored? Why not look in the telephone book?’

  ‘Dunno his name, even.’

  Ai Imajo frowns. ‘And does he know your name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Place an ad in the personal columns. “Relatives of Eiji Miyake – please contact this PO box.” That kind of thing. Most Tokyoites read the same three or four newspapers. Your relative might not read it himself, but somebody else might. You’re looking dubious.’

  I think hard.

  Ai Imajo studies me. ‘What?’

  Oh, I love being studied by Ai Imajo. ‘I have no idea.’

  That smile again, mixed with confusion. ‘I have no idea what?’

  ‘No idea why am I so stupid I never thought of that. Which newspapers?’

  ‘O Wild Man of Kyushu,’ says Buntaro back at Shooting Star, ‘your eyes are a pair of piss-holes in the snow.’ My landlord is eating a blueberry-blooded ice lolly. On the video screen a man in a black suit walks through a desert. A bottleneck guitar swirls with the tumbleweed. The black suit needs a dry clean and the man needs a shave and a shower. ‘Morning. What’s the movie?’

  ‘Paris, Texas, by Wim Wenders.’ Buntaro piles in the last of the ice lolly before it collapses down his hand. I watch for a while longer. Not much happens in Paris, Texas. ‘Sort of slow, isn’t it?’

  Buntaro licks his hand. ‘This, lad, is an existentialist classic. Man with no memory meets woman with huge hooters. So. How was your night? No memory or huge hooters? You can’t fool me, y’know. I was young myself, once. You are a quick worker, though, I got to grant you that. Two weeks in the big bad city and already chasing the more fragrant sex.’

  ‘I sort of ran into friends.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Speaking of friends, I saw a monster cockroach earlier.’

  ‘Take it up with my landlord.’

  ‘Seriously, I thought it was a hairless rat. Then it twitched its antlers. I tried to splat it, but it took off and flew up the stairs. Vanished under your door quicker than you could say “In the name of all that is holy, what is that thing?” Maybe your starving moggy ate it. Maybe it ate your starving moggy.’

  ‘I fed my starving moggy before I went out.’ Good to see Buntaro getting used to the idea of Cat living in my capsule.

  ‘Aha! So your tryst was planned!’

  My head throbs. ‘Leave me alone,’ I beg. ‘Please.’

  ‘Was I knocking you? Empty what’s full, fill what’s empty, scratch what itches. The three keys to harmony. But what is that unidentified red patch covering your throat?’

  Attack is defence. ‘Your trouser flies are way open.’

  ‘Who cares? The dead bird does not leave the nest.’

  ‘The bird can’t be that dead. Look at your wife.’

  ‘The bird is dead. Look at my wife.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You’ll see what I mean one day, my boy.’

  I’m about to go upstairs when three high-school boys march in. The leader asks me: ‘You got Virtua Sapiens ?’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ says Buntaro. ‘The sequel of Homo ?’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It’s a video game,’ I explain. ‘Out last week.’

  The second-in-command ignores me. ‘Got Broadsword of Zyqorum, then?’

  ‘No software. All videos.’

  ‘Told yer!’ says the leader, and they troop out.

  ‘You’re welcome, lads.’ Buntaro watches them go. ‘Y’know, Miyake, I have it on reliable authority – Baby and You, no less – that the average Japanese father spends seventeen minutes per day with his sprog. The average schoolboy spends ninety-five minutes per day inside video games. A new generation of electronic daddies. When Kodai is born, he is getting his bedtime stories from his parents, not from sicko druggo psycho freako programmers. I’m already getting my big fat “No” for when Kodai comes running for a video game machine thing.’

  ‘What if he comes running in tears because none of the kids in his class will talk to him because his daddy’s too mean to buy him a game system?’

  ‘I—’ Buntaro frowns. ‘I never thought of that. What did your dad do?’

  ‘He was in another part of the country.’

  ‘What about your mum, then?’

  One little lie leads to another. ‘I had my soccer club. Anyway, I need to, uh, get cleaned up.’ I climb up to my capsule, shower – by the time I towel myself dry I am sweaty enough for another shower – and unroll my futon. Sleep is not coming. Ai Imajo keeps floating up. Her supple neck, her smile. She says my name. I get up and try to do some bottleneck guitar chords, but my fingers are rusty. I check the cockroach motel. Only one guest – a baby. Cockroach has spread the word about motel hospitality. Cat comes back and laps her water dish dry. I fill it up, but she laps that dry too.

  Later I go out to buy the Tokyo Evening Mail. I take the submarine into Ueno, and find a quiet place in the park to fill out the classified ad box. I make several false starts – it is crucial that I don’t write anything that will provoke my stepmother or make it look like I want money. Finally I’m satisfied with Plan C: a short, simple message. I’ll post it tomorrow during my lunch break. I suck a champagne bomb. Ueno park is full of families, kids, couples, old people, rings of foreigners – Brazilians maybe, Chinese, each nationality on its own patch of territory. Museum-goers, photographers, skateboarders. Cicadas in the trees, babies under the trees, a funfair through the trees. Oily pigeons. Velocodrome motorbikes rip around the far perimeter. The air is candy floss, incense, zoo and octopus-dumpling-flavoured. I walk down to Shinobazu pond to watch people feed the ducks. I lie down against a tree and put Mind Games on my Discman. It is the hottest afternoon in the history of September. I watch clouds. Here comes Picture Lady, arguing with an invisible companion. I wonder if I will ever find the guts to ask Ai Imajo out on a date. I watch a young woman feeding the ducks bread crusts from a paper bag. She has a stack of library books on her bench. I drowse. The woman wheels her bicycle over, as if she wants to talk to me. She studies my face. I press ‘Stop’ on my Discman and park noises flood back. ‘No,’ she finally says, ‘this is not just one of those coincidences.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  She shakes her head in disgusted disbelief. ‘Daimon is spying on me.’

  I prop myself up. ‘Who are you?’

  She sets her face hard. ‘I do not need this shit.’

  Uh?

  Her finger curses me as she hisses. ‘Tell him to go fuck himself! Tell him to sell his elopement fantasies to his squeaky schoolgirls! Tell him he is worth nothing! Tell him my country stopped being a Japanese colony at the end of the last war! Tell him if he tries to call I’ll change my number! Tell him that if he shows his face at my apartment I’ll drive a fork into it! Tell Yuzu Daimon to slime away and die! And all of this applies to you, too.’

  Ducks honk.

  All at once I understand. This woman is Miriam, the hostess at Queen of Spades. The woman who didn’t meet Yuzu Daimon at the games centre yesterday evening. The woman I helped Daimon get even with. This is awful. ‘I swear,’ I begin, ‘I . . . I had no idea, I wasn’t spying on you just now, I’ – ducks flap by – ‘I never realized, I mean, this is all a mistake, I had no idea you would be here – how could I? I mean, I don’t even know Daimon really—’

  First, the sycamore tree blips spokes. Second, it sinks in that she kicked me hard and straight and true, in the balls. Third, I writhe on the ground as acorns of agony shower down around me. Fourth, I hear her voice, cold enough to freeze the pond. ‘I know exactly who you are, Eiji Miyake. You are a leech who tells lies for a living. Exactly like your father.’ She walks to her bike. I try to ignore the pain and replay her last line. ‘Wait!’ She is already cycling away. I wobble to my feet. ‘Wait!’ She is pedalling away, over the causewa
y between the duck-pond and the boating lake. I try to run but the pain takes my breath away. ‘Miriam! Wait!’ Mothers with pushchairs turn to look, a bunch of motorbike kids watch and laugh. Even the ducks laugh. ‘Miriam!’ I crouch down, defeated, and watch her disappear into mirages and spray from the fountains. She knows my father! I want to feel hope but I want to bawl with frustration. I hobble back to my stuff, where I find one thing more, lying in the dust between the roots of the sycamore. A library book which fell when Miriam crippled me. What book is it? I can’t read a word – it is in Korean.

  In the Shibuya back streets I am lost in no time. Yesterday and this afternoon seem weeks apart. This grid of narrow streets and bright shadows, and the pink quarter of last night, seem to be different cities. Cats and crows pick through piles of trash. Brewery trucks reverse around corners. Water spatters from overflow pipes. Shibuya’s night zone is drowsing, like a hackneyed comedian between acts. My eyes begin to get lost in the signboards – Wild Orchid, Yamato Nadeshiko, Mac’s, Dickens, Yumi-chan’s. Even if I happened to find Queen of Spades, search fatigue would probably stop me seeing. I left Shooting Star without my watch, and I have no idea how fast the afternoon is passing. My feet are aching and I taste dust. So hot. I fan myself with my baseball cap. It makes no difference. An old mama-san waters marigolds in her third-storey window box. When I look back at her she is still watching me, absently.

  The phone booth is a safari of porn and smells of never-washed trousers. You don’t need to buy sex mangas in Tokyo – just find the nearest callbox. Me and my cousins would have saved a fortune. All the shapes and sizes I ever imagined, and lots of others, too. Threesomes, foursomes, S&M, high-school revue, special silver service for octogenarians. ‘Directory enquiries,’ answers a woman. ‘What city, please?’

  ‘Tokyo.’