Ghostwritten Read online

  Mum. Dad.

  But we were only defending ourselves! There was one day, during my assignment to the Ministry of Information. One of our sister’s skin relatives, her unclean uncle, had taken court action to stop her selling their family’s farmhouse and land. He was a property lawyer. The Secret Service had brought this flesh brother in for questioning. His Serendipity instantly knew he was a spy sent by the unclean. An assassination plot was being engineered, it seemed. Laughable! All of us in Sanctuary knew how, thirty years ago, while travelling in Tibet, a being of pure consciousness named Arupadhatu transmigrated into His Serendipity, and revealed the secrets of freeing the mind from its physical shackles. This had been the beginning of His Serendipity’s path up the holy mountain. Even if the body of His Serendipity were harmed, he could leave his old body and transmigrate into another, as easily as I change hotels and islands. He could transmigrate into his own assassin.

  Anyway, this lawyer was injected with truth serum and confessed to everything. His mission had been to put an odourless poison into the refectory rice cookers. His Serendipity’s wife conducted the interview herself, I heard.

  You see! We were only defending ourselves.

  My fingernails are coming loose.

  I spent the afternoon walking to the lighthouse. I sat on a rock and watched the waves and the birds. A typhoon was moving up the coast of China, skirting Taiwan, and looming over the Okinawan horizon. Clouds were piling up in the west, winds were unravelling. I was being discussed, and decisions were being taken. What had gone wrong? A few more months, and my alpha quotient would have been 25, putting me in the top two hundred on Earth – His Serendipity had assured me, in person. I had ingested some of His Serendipity’s eyelashes. After winning converts on the Welcome Programme I was rewarded with a test tube of the Guru’s sperm to imbibe. It boosted my gamma resistance. I had been taken off the lavatory docket and been made a cleanser. For the first time in my life, I was becoming a name.

  The corrugated iron roof of an abandoned shed clattered to and fro in the wind.

  Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong, Quasar. It was your faith that brought you to His Serendipity’s notice. It is your faith that will guide you through the Days of Persecution, through the terrible days of the White Night to the New Earth. It is your faith that will nourish you now.

  Everything around me on this godforsaken island is crumbling. I should have stayed in Naha. I should have hidden in snow country, or deep-frozen Hokkaido, or lost myself amid a metropolis of my own kind. What happened, I wonder, to Mr Ikeda? Where do people who drop off the edge of your world end up?

  Typhoon weather.

  The curtains I keep drawn. Our Minister of Defence received some reports that the government of the unclean had developed micro-cameras which they implanted in the craniums of seagulls, which were then trained to spy. Not to mention the Americans’ secret satellites, scrolling over the globe, scanning for the Fellowship at the behest of the politicians and the Jews, who long ago had set up the Freemasons, and funded Chinese to pollute the well of history.

  I was sitting with my back to the lighthouse on the lonely headland. Headlights approached, seeking me out. I looked for a place to hide. There was none. A seagull watched me. It had a cruel face. A blue and white car pulled up. Too late, I looked for a place to hide. A door opened, and a dim light lit up the interior.

  They’ve found me! The rest of for ever in a cell . . .

  And then, so strangely, I’m relieved it’s all over. At least I can stop running.

  A hand was already clearing stuff from the front seat. Its owner leant forwards. ‘Mr Tokunaga, I presume?’

  Grimly, I nodded, and walked towards my captor.

  ‘I’ve been searching for you. The name’s Ota. I’m the harbourmaster. You spoke with my brother just the other day, about giving a lecture at my wife’s school. How about a lift back to town? You must be tired, after walking all the way out here, all on your own?’

  I obeyed, and still trembling I climbed in and put on my seatbelt.

  ‘Lucky I was passing . . . there’s a typhoon warning, you know. I saw a figure, all hunched like it was the end of the world, and I thought to myself, I wonder if that’s Mr Tokunaga? Not feeling too chipper, this evening?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve been overdoing it. The island air is good for clearing the head, but at the rate you’ve been tramping around . . . Terribly sorry to hear about your wife.’

  ‘Death is a part of life.’

  ‘That’s a sound philosophy, but it can’t be easy to keep your thoughts focused.’

  ‘I can. I’m a good focuser.’

  He braked and beeped a couple of times at a goat standing in the middle of the road. Magisterially, the goat sniffed at us, and wandered into a field.

  ‘Must tell Mrs Bessho that Caligula’s escaped again. You name it, goats eat it! So, you’re a good focuser, you were saying. Splendid, splendid. It would be a crime not to try diving while you’re here, you know. We have the finest Pacific reefs north of the equator, I’m told. By the way, the youngsters are delighted at the prospect of a real computer man coming to talk to them. No great scholars, I’m afraid, but they’re keen. My wife would like you to join us for dinner tomorrow, if you’re free. So, Mr Tokunaga. Tell me a little about yourself . . .’

  The road looped back around to the port, as all the roads on this island eventually do.

  Clouds began to ink out the stars, one by one.

  Tokyo

  Spring was late on this rainy morning, and so was I. The commuters streamed to work with their collars and umbrellas up. The cherry trees lining the backstreet were still winter trees, craggy, pocked, and dripping. I fished around for my keys, rattled up the shutters, and opened the shop.

  I looked through the post while the water was boiling. Some mail orders – good. Bills, bills – bad. A couple of enquiries from a regular customer in Nagano about rare discs that I’d never heard of. Bumf. An entirely ordinary morning. Time for oolong tea. I put on a very rare Miles Davis recording that Takeshi had discovered in a box of mixed-quality discs which he’d picked up at an auction last month out in Shinagawa.

  It was a gem. You never entered my mind was blissful and forlorn. Some faultless mute-work, the trumpet filtered down to a single ray of sound. The brassy sun lost behind the clouds.

  The first customer of the week was a foreigner, either American or European or Australian, you can never tell because they all look the same. A lanky, zitty foreigner. He was a real collector, though, not just a browser. He had that manic glint in his eyes, and his fingers were adept at flicking through metres of discs at high speed, like a bank teller counting notes. He bought a virgin copy of ‘Stormy Sunday’ by Kenny Burrell, and ‘Flight to Denmark’ by Duke Jordan, recorded in 1973. He had a cool T-shirt, too. A bat flying around a skyscraper, leaving a trail of stars. I asked him where he was from. He said thank you very much. Westerners can’t learn Japanese.

  Takeshi phoned a bit later.

  ‘Satoru! Have a good day off yesterday?’

  ‘Pretty quiet. Sax lesson in the afternoon. Hung around with Koji for a bit afterwards. Helped Taro with the delivery from the brewery.’

  ‘Any vast cheques for me in the post?’

  ‘Sorry, nothing that vast. Some nice bills, though. How was your weekend?’

  This was what he had been waiting for. ‘Funny you ask me that! I met this gorgeous creature of the night last Friday at a club in Roppongi.’ I could almost hear his saliva glands juicing. ‘Get this. Twenty-five,’ which for Takeshi is the perfect age, making him ten years her senior. ‘Engaged,’ which for Takeshi adds the thrill of adultery while subtracting any responsibility. ‘Only shag women who have more to lose than you do’ was a motto of his. ‘Clubbed until four in the morning. Woke up Saturday afternoon, with my clothes on back-to-front, in a hotel somewhere in Chiyoda ward. No idea how I got there. She came out of the shower, naked, brown an
d dripping, and damn if she wasn’t still gasping for it!’

  ‘It must have been heaven. Are you seeing her again?’

  ‘Of course we’re seeing each other again. This is love at first sight! We’re having dinner tonight at a French restaurant in Ichigaya,’ meaning they were having each other in an Ichigaya love hotel. ‘Seriously, you should see her arse! Two overripe nectarines squeezed together in paper bag. One prod and they explode! Juice everywhere!’

  Rather more than I needed to know. ‘She’s engaged, you say?’

  ‘Yeah. To a Fujitsu photocopier ink cartridge research and development division salaryman who knew the go-between who knew her father’s section head.’

  ‘Some guys get all the luck.’

  ‘Ah, it’s okay. What the eyes don’t see, eh? She’ll make a good little wifey, I’m sure. She’s after a few nights of lust and sin before she becomes a housewife forever.’

  She sounded a right slapper to me. Takeshi seemed to have forgotten that only two weeks ago he’d been trying to get back with his estranged wife.

  The rain carried on falling, keeping customers away. The rain fell softly, then heavily, then softly. Static hisses on telephone lines. Jimmy Cobb’s percussion on ‘Blue in Green’.

  Takeshi was still on the telephone. It seemed to be my turn to say something.

  ‘What’s she like? Her personality, I mean.’

  Takeshi said, ‘Oh, fine,’ like I’d asked about a new brand of rice-cracker. ‘Well. I’ve got to go and sort out my estate agent’s office. Business has been a bit slack there, too. I’d better put the shits up the manager a bit. Sell lots of discs and make me lots of money. Phone me on my cell phone if you need anything—’ I never do. He rang off.

  Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It’s so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It’s long since filled up the plain, and now it’s creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it’s already become out of date. It’s a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one. Things are always moving below you, and above your head. All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight. You have to do something to stop yourself caving in, or you just become a piece of flotsam or an ant in a tunnel. In smaller cities people can use the space around them to insulate themselves, to remind themselves of who they are. Not in Tokyo. You just don’t have the space, not unless you’re a company president, a gangster, a politician or the Emperor. You’re pressed against people body to body in the trains, several hands gripping each strap on the metro trains. Apartment windows have no view but other apartment windows.

  No, in Tokyo you have to make your place inside your head.

  There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it’s not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren’t born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who laugh at.

  Takeshi’s place is the night life. Clubs, and bars, and the women who live there.

  There are many other places. There’s an invisible Tokyo built of them, existing in the minds of us, its citizens. Internet, manga, Hollywood, doomsday cults, they are all places where you go and where you matter as an individual. Some people will tell you about their places straight off, and won’t shut up about it all night. Others keep it hidden like a garden in a mountain forest.

  People with no place are those who end up throwing themselves onto the tracks.

  My place comes into existence through jazz. Jazz makes a fine place. The colours and feelings there come not from the eye but from sounds. It’s like being blind but seeing more. This is why I work here in Takeshi’s shop. Not that I could ever put that into words.

  The phone rang. Mama-san.

  ‘Sato-kun, Akiko and Tomomi have got this dreadful ’flu that’s doing the rounds, and Ayaka’s still feeling a mite delicate.’ Ayaka had an abortion last week. ‘So I’ll have to open the bar and start early. Any chance you could get your own dinner tonight?’

  ‘I’m eighteen! Of course I can get my own dinner tonight!’

  She did her croaky laugh. ‘You’re a good lad.’ She rang off.

  I felt in a Billie Holiday mood. ‘Lady in Satin’, recorded at night with heroin and a bottle of gin the year before she died. A doomed, Octoberish oboe of a voice.

  I wondered about my real mother. Not hankeringly. It’s pointless to hanker. Mama-san said she’d been deported back to the Philippines afterwards, and would never be allowed back into Japan. I can’t help but wonder, just sometimes, who she is now, what she’s doing, and whether she ever thinks about me.

  Mama-san told me my father was eighteen when I was born. That makes me old enough to be my father. Of course, my father was cast as the victim. The innocent violated by the foreign seductress who sank her teeth into him to get a visa. I’ll probably never know the truth, unless I get rich enough to hire a private detective. I guess there must be money in his family, for him to be patronising hostess bars at my tender age, and to pay to clean up the stink of such a scandal so thoroughly. I’d like to ask him what he and my mother felt for each other, if anything.

  One time I was sure he’d come. A cool guy in his late thirties. He wore desert boots and a dark-tan suede jacket. One ear was pierced. I knew I recognised him from somewhere, but I thought he was a musician. He looked around the shop, and asked for a Chick Corea recording that we happened to have. He bought it, I wrapped it for him, and he left. Only afterwards did I realise that he reminded me of me.

  Then I tried calculating what the odds against a random meeting like that were in a city the size of Tokyo, but the calculator ran out of decimal places. So I thought perhaps he’d come to see me incognito, that he was as curious about me as I was about him. Us orphans spend so much time having to be level-headed about things that when we have the time and space to romanticise, wow, can we romanticise. Not that I’m a real orphan, in an orphanage. Mama-san has always looked after me.

  I went outside for a moment, to feel the rain on my skin. It was like being breathed on. A delivery van braked sharply and beeped at an old lady pushing a trolley who glared back and wove her hands in the air like she was casting a spell. The van beeped again like an irritated muppet. A mink-coated leggy woman who considered herself extremely attractive and who obviously kept a rich husband strode past with a flopsy dog. A huge tongue lolled between its white teeth. Her eyes and mine touched for a moment, and she saw a high school graduate spending his youth holed up in a poky shop that obviously nobody ever spent much in, and then she was gone.

  This is my place. Another Billie Holiday disc. She sang ‘Some Other Spring’, and the audience clapped until they too faded into the heat of a long-lost Chicago summer night.

  The phone.

  ‘Hi, Satoru. It’s only Koji.’

  ‘I can hardly hear you! What’s that racket in the background?’

  ‘I’m phoning from the college canteen.’

  ‘How did the engineering exam go?’

  ‘Well, I worked really hard for it . . .’ He’d walked it.

  ‘Congratulations! So your visit to the shrine paid off, hey? When are the results out?’

  ‘Three or four weeks. I’m just glad they’re over. It’s too early to congratulate me, though . . . Hey, Mum’s doing a sukiyaki party tonight. My dad’s back in Tokyo this week. They thought you might like to help us eat it. Can you? You could kip over in my sister’s room if it gets too late. She’s on a school trip to Okinawa.’

  I ummed
and ahed inwardly. Koji’s parents are nice, straight people, but they feel it’s their responsibility to sort my life out. They can’t believe that I’m already content where I am, with my discs and my saxophone and place. Underlying their concern is pity, and I’d rather take shit about my lack of parents than pity.

  But Koji’s my friend, probably my only one. ‘I’d love to come. What should I bring?’

  ‘Nothing, just bring yourself.’ So, flowers for his mum and booze for his dad.

  ‘I’ll come round after work then.’

  ‘Okay. See you.’

  ‘See you.’

  It was a Mal Waldron time of day. The afternoon was shutting up shop early. The owner of the greengrocers across the street took in his crates of white radishes, carrots and lotus roots. He rolled down his shutter, saw me and nodded gravely. He never smiles. Some pigeons scattered as a truck shuddered by. Every note of ‘Left Alone’ fell, a drop of lead into a deep well. Jackie McLean’s saxophone circled in the air, so sad it could barely leave the ground.

  The door opened, and I smelt air rainwashed clean. Four high school girls came in, but one of them was completely, completely different. She pulsed, invisibly, like a quasar. I know that sounds stupid, but she did.

  The three bubbleheads flounced up to the counter. They were pretty, I guess, but they were all clones of the same ova. Their hair was the same length, their lipstick the same colour, their bodies curving in the same way beneath their same uniform. Their leader demanded in a voice cutesy and spoilt the newest hit by the latest teen dwoob.

  But I didn’t bother hearing them. I can’t describe women, not like Takeshi or Koji. But if you know Duke Pearson’s ‘After the Rain’, well, she was as beautiful and pure as that.

  Standing by the window, and looking out. What was out there? She was embarrassed by her classmates. And so she should have been! She was so real, the others were cardboard cut-outs beside her. Real things had happened to her to make her how she was, and I wanted to know them, and read them, like a book. It was the strangest feeling. I just kept thinking, well, I’m not sure what I was thinking. I’m not sure if I was thinking of anything.