In the Miso Soup (2 page)

“I want to try a lot of things, go to a lot of different places.” Frank showed me the bashful grin again, and I couldn’t help looking away. “According to what I’ve read, you can find it all here—Tokyo’s like a department store of sex!”

Frank took the
Tokyo Pink Guide
out of a dark-brown shoulder bag beside his chair and put it on the table. The magazine, not the book. It was only a few pages thick—more like a brochure, really—and the photo on the front was of crummy quality, as if to ensure that no one mistook it for anything they’d actually want to read. The publisher is a man in his fifties named Yokoyama who used to be in the news department of a TV station. Yokoyama-san has been incredibly nice to me. He refuses to charge me for my ad, for one thing, even though he doesn’t seem to be making any money on his rag. He claims that the Japanese need to give people in other countries more information about themselves, and that sports and music and sex are the only types of information that have true international appeal, and that of those three the one that speaks most directly to people’s common humanity is sex, and that the reason he keeps struggling to scrape the money together to publish the magazine is because he wants to make a difference, but I’m afraid he’s basically just a guy who likes dirty stuff.

“This is a country,” Frank said, “where you can take care of every conceivable sexual need, right? I definitely want to go to Kabuki-cho. I checked it out on the sex map while I was waiting for you, and it’s right near here, isn’t it? Look at all the marks for sex clubs in Kabuki-cho. It looks like the Andromeda galaxy!”

The magazine contains maps not only of Shinjuku but of Roppongi and Shibuya and Kinshicho and Yoshiwara, and even the sleazy parts of Yokohama and Chiba and Kawasaki. But Frank was right, Kabuki-cho was the undisputed champion. Sex businesses are indicated with a mark like a pair of boobs, and from the Koma Theater to Kuyakusho Avenue the boobs crowded each other like grapes on the vine.

“Where should we go first, Kenji?”

“You want to try several different clubs, then?”

“Yes.”

“You know you can get sex right away if you want,” I said, lowering my voice. “You could even have a girl delivered to this hotel. Club-hopping in Kabuki-cho can be fun, but it can also be pretty expensive.”

The cafeteria we were in wasn’t very big, and Frank had a loud voice. The waiters and the other customers were shooting annoyed glances at us. Even people who don’t understand much English tend to get the gist of this sort of talk.

“Oh, money’s no problem,” said Frank.

The New Year’s holiday was nearly upon us, but Kabuki-cho was as busy as ever. A decade ago, the sex industry catered mainly to middle-aged men, but now there are lots of young customers, too. It seems that more and more young dudes can’t be bothered to look for a girlfriend or a fuck-buddy. Overseas these guys would probably turn gay, but Japan has the Sex Industry.

As he blinked at Kabuki-cho’s neon lights and the more flamboyant touts and barkers in their kitschy outfits and the women standing here and there on the street trying to catch his eye, Frank slapped me on the shoulder and said “This is great!” It was freezing out there, but he wasn’t even wearing an overcoat. With his short, lumpy frame wrapped in that tacky suit, Frank was no treat for the eyes, but he blended right in with the streets and crowds of Kabuki-cho.

A group of black guys in matching red windbreakers were touting for a newly opened “show pub” that featured foreign dancers. They were handing out fliers and giving their pitch to the men walking by. “What you gentlemen need is to see some world-class nude dancing—at the unheard-of price of only ¥7000 for a full hour!” Their Japanese was flawless. Frank tried to take a flier and was ignored at first. He stood with his hand out, smiling, and the black guy reached around him to hand one to a passing Japanese. I don’t think the guy meant anything in particular by it. He may have had a certain reaction to Frank being white, or it could be that his employers told him to give precedence to Japanese over impoverished-looking foreigners, but in any case he clearly wasn’t trying to yank Frank’s chain. Frank’s expression underwent a disturbing change, though. It was only for a moment, but it startled me. The artificial-looking skin of his cheeks twitched and quivered, and his eyes lost any recognizable human quality, as if someone had turned out the light behind them. They might have been beads of smoked glass. The tout didn’t notice. He handed Frank a flier and said something in English that I couldn’t quite hear. I think it was simply about the dancers being not from the U.S. but Australia and South America, but the light came back on in Frank’s eyes, and his face relaxed. Something ugly had reared its head for a second and then vanished again.

Frank looked at the flier and said to the guy: “Your Japanese is amazing, where are you from?” When the guy said New York, Frank beamed at him and told him the Knicks were on a winning streak and looking like a new team. I know that, the guy said, handing another passerby a flier.

“We get all the NBA action—hell, TV here even tells you where Michael Jordan played golf on his day off, and what his score was.”

“You don’t say,” Frank said and slapped him on the back. As we walked away, Frank draped his arm over my shoulder and said: “What a terrific fellow, Kenji—a man in a million!” As if he’d known him for years.

We came to a stop in front of a sign with one big eye. “Even I know what this is,” Frank said. “A peep show, right?”

I explained how this one worked.

“You get in a booth with a one-way mirror and watch the girls undress. In each booth is a little semicircular hole, and if you put your dick in there they jerk you off. These places were really popular until just recently.”

“They aren’t popular now? How come?”

“Well, peep shows are cheap. To turn a profit they need a lot of customers, but they can’t pay the girls that much. If the money isn’t good all the young and pretty girls quit, and if the girls aren’t young and pretty the customers stop coming. It’s a vicious circle.”

“How much is it? The sign says ¥3000—what’s that, $25? Kenji, $25 for a peep show and a hand job? That
is
cheap!”

“That’s just what it costs to get in. You have to tip another $20 or $30 for the hand job.”

“Still, that’s not bad. The girl who does the stripping is the one who jerks you off, right?”

“Usually you can’t see who’s on the other side of the wall. That’s why there were rumors about old ladies doing it, or gay guys. Which is another reason these places aren’t so popular anymore.”

“So it’s not worth going in?”

“Well, they
are
inexpensive, and you wouldn’t need an interpreter. I could go get some coffee or something and you’d only have to pay for one.”

As we talked, the touts began flocking around us. Most of them were from the newer “lingerie pubs” and none of them knew who I was. The old hands know me by sight, but of the maybe two hundred touts on this street at least eighty percent were rookies. The dudes who become touts are generally at the end of their rope: guys who for one reason or another can’t work anywhere else, or who are desperate for some quick cash—which is why they tend to come and go so quickly and why they aren’t necessarily reliable. You can generally trust the touts who’ve been around a long time, though.

“Kenji, what are these fellows saying?”

I took a moment to explain what a lingerie pub was, but the touts were talking much too fast for me to translate: “Absolutely no additional charges! Normally it would be ¥9000 but because it’s the end of the year and we’ve just opened we’re only charging ¥5000! Would I lie to you? When I say the girls are young, I’m talking barely legal! Naturally your foreign friend is welcome too! It’s just down those steps over there! Right this way! We have online karaoke and a full catalogue of English songs! Please, gentlemen! If you’re not satisfied with the quality of the girls or the atmosphere of the pub, you’re absolutely at liberty to turn around and walk out! You can’t pass up an opportunity like this! Once the new year arrives, the price goes right back up! What have you got to lose?”

As we walked away from this fairly overbearing pack of touts, Frank said, “I heard that the Japanese were nice, but this is amazing.” He kept turning to look back at them, still milling about in front of the peep show. Most of them were wearing cheap suits like mine. This was Kabuki-cho, not Roppongi, and you didn’t see many designer clothes on these streets. The only way you could tell most of the customers from the touts was that the customers were walking and the touts looked like they were loitering. Even from a distance, touts have something lonesome about them. Most of the guys I know who’ve done the job a long time are sort of worn thin—not physically run down, but like something’s eroded away inside. Even when you’re talking to them face to face you have this feeling of not connecting, as if the words just pass right through them. Sometimes they remind me of the Invisible Man, but I’ve never quite understood why they end up that way.

“These fellows are nothing like the seedy characters who work for American sex clubs,” said Frank. “They’re more like Eagle Scouts or something! How do they find the energy to be so friendly all night?”

“For every customer they bring in they get a commission.”

“Well, that’s only fair, I guess. But can you trust what they tell you?”

“It’s best to be suspicious if the price seems too cheap.”

The idea of a lingerie pub clearly appealed to Frank.

“Shall we go see some Japanese girls in their underwear, then, for starters?” he said.

“You can’t have sex there.”

“I know. I want to build up to that slowly anyway, and right now girls in their underwear seems like the best way to start.”

“One hour, at this time of night, will cost ¥7000 to ¥9000 per person, and since hardly any of the girls speak English you’ll have to pay for me too. There are pubs where you can touch the girls and pubs where you can’t, and there are ones that put on shows and ones where the girls will dance on your table, but the prices don’t vary that much.”

“I prefer your normal kind of place, where the girls just sit next to you and talk,” Frank said. “After all, if the price doesn’t go up much even with all those options, then the pubs without the options must have the prettiest girls. Right, Kenji?”

I found a tout I knew and had him guide us to his pub. Satoshi was the same age as me, twenty. At eighteen he’d come to Tokyo from Yamanashi—or Nagano, I forget which—to attend a college prep school, and almost immediately went mental. I didn’t know him then, but he once showed me a souvenir of those times. He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children’s building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train. Why would you do that, I asked him, and he shrugged. I don’t know, man, I found them at Kiddyland and I just wanted to buy them and play with them somewhere, you know, and then I thought the train would be good, and it
was
good, man, it’s fun trying to build a castle on a moving train, you can like lose yourself or whatever and not have all these weird thoughts, because at the time I kept having this weird thought about poking some little girl’s eyes with a pin or a toothpick or a hypodermic needle, something pointy like that, and it scared me to think about what if I really did it, but once I started playing with my blocks on the floor of the train I forgot about that obsession or compulsion or whatever you call it, because it’s not easy to stack blocks on the floor of a moving train, you really need to concentrate, and the Yamanote Line has some major curves, like between Harajuku and Yoyogi especially, and I had to cradle the little castle in my arms to keep it from falling apart. Sure I got yelled at, man. I don’t know how many times conductors and station workers yelled at me, and I was even picked up by the railway cops a few times, but, hell, it’s not like I was doing it during rush hour. Anyway, this went on for about six months, but then when I came to Kabuki-cho it cured me. Hey, I wouldn’t say I love Kabuki-cho—I mean, I doubt if anybody
loves
it—but it’s an amazingly easy place to be, and who’s going to think about sticking needles in little girls’ eyes when they’re working in a town they like and have a chance to go to the university of their choice?

“One of our girls speaks a little English, man. If she’s available I’ll send her over to you for no extra charge.”

Satoshi led Frank and me to a green door in the basement of a nearby building. I’d been to this pub any number of times, but I can’t remember what it was called. All these places have similar names, for one thing. No one racks their brains to come up with something original because no customer in Kabuki-cho would ever choose a club just because it has a clever name.

The interiors of all lingerie pubs look pretty much the same, too. They don’t actually share a common design, just the same sort of crappy materials. Frank looked at the girls clustered on the sofas in their underwear and gave his bizarre bashful grin.

The girl who could speak a little English was called Reika. She wore her hair up and expensive-looking purple lace underwear, and aside from a flattish nose and coarse skin, she was pretty cute. Along with Reika came Rie, a big girl with average features and a physique like a volleyball player, who liked white underwear and laughed a lot. Just because a woman laughs a lot doesn’t mean she’s got a sunny disposition, though, especially in the sex trade. Once we were all seated and the whiskey tray was brought to the table, Satoshi turned to me and said thanks, man, and headed back out to the street. There were only two other customers in the place, and I vaguely wondered how much Satoshi would get for bringing us here. We know each other fairly well, but we don’t talk about stuff like that. Not trying to find out too much about other people’s finances is one of the most important rules for surviving in Kabuki-cho.

Frank nodded at the girls on either side of him, that weird smile still scrunching up his face. His cheeks were turning pink, and I don’t think it was only because the room was so warm. It’s hard to relax with girls sitting next to you in their underwear, even for guys who go to lingerie pubs all the time. It’s not like seeing girls on the beach in bikinis. The swell of breasts in a lacy brassiere, the waistband marks on tummies, the subtle shadow of pubic hair through white panties—unless you’re drunk, it seems almost cruel to look and you find yourself averting your eyes. Turning away from the girls and Frank’s bashful grin, I fixed my gaze on the computerized tropical fish in a virtual aquarium against the wall. Anyone who didn’t know better would have thought the two brilliantly colored angelfish were the real thing. I don’t know much about angelfish, but even the way they moved their mouths looked real. There did seem to be something indefinably unnatural about them, though. Like Frank’s grin.