VI.
“Ritchie, show up at Shibuya crossing at eight p.m. Saturday. I want money back.”
It does seem fitting to note here that as if he wasn't involved in enough drama, Shan had somehow also in the mix of things managed to get himself hit by a Japan Self-Defense Force truck. There are a lot of ironies, here, of course. But the long and the short of it is he is going to be paid a yen thirty million settlement, or almost 300,000 US for his two month stay in hospital and the reconstructive surgery on his legs. Or so he had me believe. Actually the final recompense is only 16,000 US, and much of that is already earmarked for the hospital and administrative fees. Be not quick to scoff at my naivety. I do not know or like Shan enough to investigate what he is doing, and three hundred thousand doesn't sound unreasonable considering the factors involved, especially the sensitivity of military vehicles hitting foreigners so widely reported in East Asian news. But Shan is able to use a sworn promise, hand in the air, pledge to the blood commitment, of providing 10% of settlement to me in return for my support of him in order to encourage my group's support of him during his period of trial. He even buys a few tailor-made shirts and spends some money on expensive drinks to show substance to his stories. The truth does come out eventually, in a curious way, but in the meantime, he's in jail, he's out; I'm visiting; I'm being caught up in events and unable to get funds to him; everything is to and fro.
“Ritchie I want full accounting of money entrusted to you and a refund of anything you haven't spent.”
The sound of his voice on that unexpected phone call does send a chill down my back. But stupidly, he doesn't even show up to his promised appointment; and it is only weeks later that he finally manages to hunt me down, at which point I bare my teeth to him and show no sympathy whatsoever as he explains where's he been for the last few months.
“There was an administrative error. They arrested me, but somebody broke into the records office and set fire to the building. So the police had no record of why I was being held, and they thought I was an illegal alien. They kept me on Sado-shima for four months until they figured out what had happened.”
“Sado-shima? Isn't that the old place where they exiled people?”
“Mmm.”
And Shan is actually being honest, for once; there was indeed a fire set by a deranged criminal that resulted in his extended incarceration; LeFauve for all his influence is almost certainly not behind this.
“Well what did you do? How was it?”
“They kept me out in fields doing carpentry work. It's been goddamn cold.”
“Well, I sympathize.”
“As for the money...”
As for the money, a fifth, which isn't unreasonable at all, disappeared in the handover from Eric to me, and more than a half we had to pay out to keep his stuff from being evicted from his apartment. After all, he just disappears all of a sudden after telling us that we need to look after his stuff for just a month, so one month drags to two, and two drags to three before we realize we have to cut the rate of spending and move everything to self-storage or we'll drain his bank account in two months. That is also a big waste of time and effort, not to forget all the intangibles of incurring U.S. Embassy wrath for assisting public enemy #1—who can put a price tag on that?
“As for the money, I'm wondering why you need it back at all? You promised 10% of the settlement, do you remember? So that would be three million yen.”
“10%? 10%? Do you have paper record of that?”
He looks at me with a look of scorn, but what Shan doesn't realize is that I have one more card than he does.
“No, but as you're smiling, I think you remember exactly well. So why do you need four hundred thousand yen back when you're the one who's supposed to be forking over three million?”
“It's a matter of principle, dog. Hand over full fifteen hundred thousand, and I'll give you what I promised.”
But Charis had already played one last card. It's almost bizarre that is the Christian girl, the girl of absolute morals, who suggested we wade through all his legal paperwork when he transferred his goods from his apartment to self-storage. But feminine deviousity trumps absolutism. “LE-SAMA, HERE IS RECEIPT FOR FINAL PAYMENT OF 1.5 MILLION YEN FOR THE INCIDENT TAKING PLACE IN TAKABASHI INVOLVING MINISTRY...” And we looked at each other in the musty storage building; this told us what we need to know.
Shan does eventually get not quite US $5,000 back, which is more than fair; I only later remember the cell phone bill, the other incidentals involved that mean he has taken a very convoluted process to get back a difference of several hundred dollars, an amount he surely would have paid in filing fees considering all the legal rigmarole it takes him to do what he does, not to forget he still owed me the 10% even of $15,000 if not $300,000. Yet I suppose he gets some satisfaction out of finally making bureaucracy work for him, and I suppose in a sense he is pleased to finally have a high-hand on me, to watch me squirm and cough up cash in process that leaves him with a sense of power. More details spill out-- Dominique's drug-trafficking conviction (drugs hidden in a convenient pocket), Dominique's psychotic breakdown at the country club leaving one very frightened Chinese (!) male hiding in a bathroom (rumors?), Dominique's apparent charge at one point that it was I, actually, who pulled a knife on her. But finally, all things said, the real thing that needs to be recorded is something that nobody with a name points out.
“And did you see nothing suspicious with the timing of it all? That he gets accused so strangely coincidental with some other expressed incident?”
“No. Not until years, years later, and only after fiascoes of my own.”
But the quiet nagging voices are easily silenced and that criminal Shan is sent on his way.
This has been an account in neat and organized form of things that were all happening simultaneously and far more messy, emotionally-trying, and indeed victimizing than as can be expressed in linear form. I am sorry, of course, Tucker, for leaving you holding the bag like that, and yes yes yes Julian is that famous auteur who later went on to produce so-and-so movie but is currently curating $6 shows in Bowery. But then, all that being said, there is still that other major occupation of our lives, or simply our occupation, and this is of course at least two thirds of our energies, almost half our waking hours—it is really rather far too charming and amusing to pretend that one jets off to Japan, spends all of one's waking hours going to one or another amusing party or bar or club; that this is all of our lives or even just the meaningful part. I loved Japan, of course. What I didn't tell Tucker was that even the dyed-hair swarms of Roppongi that made me physically ill so many years ago also managed to inflict something psychological onto my view of the world. Of course I had known that the Japanese were odd; of course I had known that their cheap bleach-job youth were the trash of Asia. But it had never occurred to me so personally, hit so close to home, that there were aesthetic answers to things; that all of the contradictions of life could be answered in so insouciant a fashion.
Confession: in America I am nothing. A graduate of a medium-ranked Pennsylvania university, I can hope to work in a cloth-covered cubicle as a junior programmer at some semi-known company. The girls ignore me; my days are banal; and everything is just absolutely predictable to the nth degree, I have failed even in the timing of my birth, having missed the dot-com bubble that made people just two years older millionaires doing exactly the same major. Japan. I walk down the street, and girls giggle. My very presence in a subway car makes girls toy with their hair, and if I say something in English, I am instantly 'cool' and 'international.' But, even beyond this, even beyond the foreigner cool and all the assorted fringe benefits, detectable even in the most simplistic products or classical works of art, is a faint, tremulous, almost undetectable pathos of things, an indistinct undertone that only the most refined senses can pick up. Like a siren song, the country calls me, and when a salary offer from a company in Tokyo arrives, without a glance backwards I pack my bags and leave. My new company is a clean, bright, happy place overlooking the Dentsu plaza in Shimbashi, and I have the prestigious corner seat; I am the conquering American hero brought in to take our team to the very top of the rankings. And this I do, for a year, a golden year, operating in an archaic and stripped-down version of software that is totally obsolete in the U.S.
“Tell your friend that he's very rude.”
Had I known then what I knew just months later; had I had some inkling or prior warning about past history at the company or even just an especially perceptive and friendly ally from the domestic side, I would have been able, at the time of the initial assault, to have quickly turned the tables on the factory foreman and disarmed all onlookers instantly, preventing the internecine struggle that followed, and that left both of our influences hopelessly diminished. But at the time, I am completely focused on my battle with LeFauve; Charis, of all people, has taken this week to show up at my workplace with a prepared lunch, drawings gasps from assembled onlookers; and as people point out—even my stride is different; even my very walk has a combative and dominant edge, the purposeful roll of a fighter and brawler.
“That guy, you know, this is the first time he's ever talked to me in my eleven months here. I don't even know his name!”
“Mmm. Maybe that's part of the problem?”
For a second I look at my Japanese friend and remember the old saying-- you think you have a Japanese friend, until he enters a Japanese setting and you discover he's somebody else entirely. “You're taking his side?”
Tak grimaces; a look of pain crosses his head. “It's like this—Japanese society is a bit more focused on age and a bit more patriarchal than you might realize...”
But I'm already shutting my ears to this kind of talk; I hang them all with the same cord.
“All right, I don't have time to deal with small dicked losers with inferiority complexes. We have a entire series of products to roll out in six months, and the team had best fall in.”
Energia K.K. divides fairly predictably into two camps on either my or the foreman's side, or rather, most of the people seem to have some or other inclination although a noticeable minority remain aloof. As Tak says, Japanese culture still places a premium on the opinion of elders; the foreman is forty-five or older, and I am a freshly-minted university grad. But on the other hand, we are a new media technology company; our floor is filled with talents and design specialists, and these give me a little wink or nod, or otherwise indicate that they need a programming specialist more than a washed-up middle-aged son of an electrician. But then: Shimamura. And it takes me not months, but years to understand his play in this evolving little drama of ours.
“Ah, Ritchie-san. You think we will achieve good results next year?”
“Yes, sir, most definitely! We're all going to do our best, and totally wipe out the competition! Let's all do our very best, 'cuz I think we have a really cracker-jack outfit!”
“Ritchie! Ritchie! Shut the hell up!”
The last comment, of course, is the foreman's. I don't even remember until years later that it is Shimamura who brought on this moment; actually at the moment the most striking and painful realization is the entire room has fallen into silence. The entire company is watching at the end of the year banquet as the foreman stares at me with undisguised malice. I compose my face.
“Yes, sir, understood, and thank you sir.”
And conversation resumes.
Man fights against nature, against fellow man, against society, family, nations, reality itself. In the race to divide the pie, certain pieces will go to some individuals; others will seize portions that differ slightly from what they expected, even at times more so than they ever deserved. But conflict in the workplace; the war that takes place in so controlled and polite a setting, is always all that more vicious because the stakes are real.
"Okay this is the problem with foreman. If he had a problem with me, why didn't he come up to me one-on-one and explain what his gripe was. I take issue with the fact that he was talking to me for the first time--for the very first time--only when my friend is visiting the company, causing me to lose face with my friend, and that he is starting the battle only when he is surrounded by two of his friends. Talk about your total pussy!"
My conversation partner, another expat from a different division of the company, nods sympathetically.
"And his team! They don't even hold eye contact with me when we pass in the hall. This is basically your definition of total passive-aggressivity, 'snipe from afar' loser and weaklings are tigers when it's battle at a distance, but completely fall apart face to face! I have things at stake here, too. My IT specialty is only useful to three or four corporations in the world. I can't back off because one pencil-dicked washed-up loser can't manage his own insecurities. What an absolute worthless piece of garbage."
As war breaks out, management and assorted big-picture types race to put out the fire, knowing the potential for open conflict to spread, infect the organization, and bring operations to a stand-still. But as time passes, the dawning realization is that trying to push the two of us together; trying to effect a friendship between the foreman and me, does only more harm rather than good.
"Look Ritchie. Try to look at things from the foreman's point of view. He's a forty-five year old factory labor chief who will never earn more than four-point-five million yen a year. All his life he's wanted a desk in the headquarters, and now he finally gets one, only to immediately run into the hot-shot foreigner talent, brought in at a widely known cool six million a year. You're young; you have a beautiful girlfriend; all the Japanese girls coo at you on the street. Of course he's going to hate you!"
"I understand this. I sympathize with this. But here, just take a look at this winter ski trip list... Sugiyama Daiichi, Nakayama Tomoko, Takahashi Yuuta.. and then, 'RIICHI.' It's like I get to be some parody of a human being; they walk around mockingly saying 'Riichi' 'Riichi' 'Riichi' like I'm some kind of TV entertainment talk show host while they get to be the real human beings."
"That pisses me off, too. More than I care to admit."
It lasts for months. I begin to get on guard, looking for fresh outrages; I know I'm causing stress to the foreman as well, but he has the advantage of numbers, and he is required, by his job, to frequently visit the actual factories; I never know when or where he will turn up. But finally I begin to slip; it's just too much to handle all at once. Sometimes good happens, and sometimes bad, but the trend is down-down-down. It becomes impossible to work; to think straight; and my results are slipping. But finally, finally, I begin to get leverage against the foreman.
Winter hits that year with a special, crazed intensity. Just as conflict has been simmering for months before finally erupting into the open, so it seems that previous overly-warm years have been storing up some reservoir of cold weather that now breaks upon us with a strength and ferocity that is untold. A gigantic blizzard, a veritable winter hurricane, blasts into Kanto, snowing for days straight and bringing the city to an absolute standstill. But the snowhounds; the powder-freaks and winter sportsmen-- these are all giving little winks to each other, and despite all ongoing dialectics; despite the march of schedules and timetables and software release dates, this too is a private reality; a shared understanding against the debacles of the day.
"Shan, I have no desire to hang out with you, but allow me to counsel you this far. You are handling the case completely wrong. I think Waseda would even have backed you up from the start had you just denied her charges without denying that you were in a relationship with her. Your story holds no water, and so you have no credibility."
"Oh yeah, big words now, Mr. Spectator! You know everything about law. Amazing you didn't solve my case already."
"Look the idea is not to save yourself; your own reputation is clearly nonexistent. You have to dig up dirt on Dominique herself."
The battle goes on, November, December, January. Finally January Shan is sent to court for the final hearing, and I'm not there; I only learn later through other means, the trial begins and Shan confronts a subdued, distant Dominique in the courtroom, and all charges are dropped. However, once more there is a technicality. Shan has not been in university sufficiently to be a "full-time student;" he has violated the terms of his visa, even though being found innocent of everything. With his head hanging low and thoughts of the eternal sea, he is led away in chains and LeFauve sneers in victory, his white teeth conspicuous on his dark brown face. At work, my white-hot intensity conflict with the foreman results in no progress and both of us are disgraced in a sense; me for fighting the working man, the foreman for fighting a twenty-four year old, but I am the one on a non-protected contract. Let there be one cautionary voice in my head. Let there be an advisor at this one point in the drama to put a restraining hand on my shoulder, saying ‘caution, caution.’ But there is no such thing. There is only the absolute zest of the ‘video-game existence.’ Every moment is pregnant with meaning; every decision is enripened with possibility, every random encounter is another chance to turn things around.
“Hi, you must be new to Tokyo? My name’s Ritchie Ufuo. I work with events and the foreigner scene here. Here’s my business card. We’re doing a ski trip next month.”
“Hello, you’re with the AEON group? I run a foreigner ski club. This is our flyer.”
“Could you post this ski trip flyer in your break room? Thanks…”
Who is this strange person, infinitely active, infinitely restless, infinitely energetic bouncing across Tokyo that last, final winter that decides everything? In recollection he seems scarcely me, somebody else, a caricature of a human being, so absolutely certain the next moment is the most important one, so absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his cause. He is brilliant, this Other Me. He is so close to being totally satisfied—but only the next moment count; only the next win, the next social victory, the next score of a ticket sold to a ski trip. I know it is me in truth. Even living that person, I am aware of a certain divergence of reality—and Charis, as well, trying to put the brakes on something, succeeding only in seeing the moment of perfect closure pass, only to sadly walk away, only to know how beautiful things are—if only they can be contained. But even the self-aware monster is self-knowingly charging ahead. The breakdown at work is just the final proximate cause; there is no more stopping things now.
“How many you sold?”
“Forty.”
“Great. I unloaded thirty-three so far.”
“We going to reach two hundred.”
We are all of us—Soren, Tucker, me, maybe even Charis—superficial, immature, childish, perhaps even worthless people. Our superficial interactions reveal a life of total ease, one in which all problems are solved for us, and nothing really important can break through. But even this being the case, I can’t help but record that mad, bad winter. It’s mad and it’s bad, and things are really blowing up now and I can’t really be expected to destroy my life, reach some overwhelming poverty just to record genuinely deep things, am I? This is me. Hate me. Love me. Forget me. I don’t care. I am jumping around Tokyo selling ski trip tickets, and I am conferencing with Tucker, and I am the center of young Tokyo, take it or leave it. I didn’t ask to be born, and I didn’t ask for such overwhelming comfort and ease in my life. I was born to it. Everyone had to collapse so I could inherit. So I make the most of what I have, and despise the ugly, the poor, the diseased and infirm, because they do not belong to my circle, and if I don’t pull off this ski-trip, LeFauve will win; I will be swept away.
“One hundred ten tickets. Net fifty bucks each, we will clear five grand.”
“Not bad. But we can do better.”
Let me burn into this paper how awesome we are. Let me write my name across the stars, Ritchie Ufuo, Tokyo events promoter, Tucker Black, club kid and sunglasses-wearer. We are so unbelievably cool that we do not even know your name.
“How is the thing against the foreman going?”
“He tried again to slap me down; end of year party. Went nowhere.”
“Small dick!”
“Typical Jap!”
I know you do not like me. I know that I had a certain measure of good will that I have now exhausted, coming off superficial, trivial, pointless to exist. But I cannot lie about these conversations; I cannot record deep things as having been discussed when all we do is pose and blow smoke in other people’s eyes. I go from party to party; I am welcomed in thirty different apartment buildings merely by name. But that is all there is in this life, and your miseries and commonplace career moves; your feeble attempts to gain leverage when economies do not yield profits so easily do not impress me. I am me. I am God. I am Ritchie Ufuo.
“So you just arrived Japan? You’re living in Chiba? Ah, god you gotta get out of this place.”
“No, I like literature. I just want to read, not really party all the time in the city.”
“Baby you can’t last in that place. It’s nowhere!”
Everything that is to come in young twenty-something foreigner Tokyo gets built that winter. On the ashes of the foundation of the old Soren empire, I built a superstructure that takes Tucker to his highest degree, that integrates all the various currents of six thousand people who count into a perfect, beautiful whole. Maybe you know somebody who lives here during this time and doesn’t know me. But probably that person doesn’t count. Maybe you think this is all superficial childishness. Yes, this claim holds true.
“Dude, how about talking about things that count? How about this world full of inequities and unfairness? How about reform and making the world a better place?”
“Give me a freakin’ break!”
Don’t hate; don’t judge. Realize that everything you enjoyed your time there came from me; that either me or somebody right reporting to me built it up. The freakin’ paperback exchange—sheesh—that was launched after a lazy Saturday coffee near Inokashiro. Yet the war is breaking apart at work; other-Ritchie comes home, sometimes fists clenched in rage, sometimes waking up at night with teeth gritting. All these passive passive passive Japanese, playing little games of pretending to be friendly and then slipping away. Offering fake little smiles and sarcastic bows, but hating the foreigner, hating especially the foreigner whose girlfriend shows up to work, hands out homecooked sweets. The smallest dicked, most insecure males in the world, the weakest least-liked of all the world’s nationalities. Japanese losers. I hate them.
Finally the weekend of the company trip opens up with absolute clarity, a clear blue winter sky of limitless visibility; had the sky not been blue, it surely would have been a diamond carpet of stars stretching to the ends of the galaxy. Yet here already we are assembling at Shibuya station; already the cars of our caravan are lining up, and in the pleased relaxed anticipation of maximum physical exertion, we hang out, waiting for the full arrival, self-consciously cool in ski goggles and sunglasses.
"So, ready?"
"Yeah, let's go."
"Uh, Nagai-kun, let me ride in your car..."
We meet up in Shibuya on an early Saturday morning, the sun not quite up, and late night clubbers wasted and drunk stumbling to the main station to await the first train. As the morning fully breaks, our group assembles, and we load up the vehicles with our baggage, sunglasses on in crescendoing light, before finding the expressway and heading north to Tohoku. Our destination for the night is Fukushima, about halfway up to the real far north, but good enough to get real snow. To each side, the city falls away. At first, it’s just a matter of each conglomeration of tall buildings becoming less impressive and more far between, but by Inoshiro there are rice paddies to the roadsides and large green fields separating waterways and park walkways, distant elevated tracks the Shinkansen to Morioka. Then finally it’s genuine countryside: undeveloped land and the foothills of mountains—forested ridges that surround a highway that ascends inexorably to higher elevations. And here, like a shock, nature hits, like a blow to one's chest, a complete reversal of values; shocking tree movement, shocking sunlight between hillsides, such intense sensation that I feel as if I am a two-dimensional drawing, as unreal as a cinematic separation layer of meaning. Snow falling from a leaden sky! Mountains that rise up to meet us, tow