Grotesque (55 page)

“Ms. Kamei, sorry to bother you but would you mind coming here for a minute?” the office manager said. Kamei looked at the two of us. The color of her face changed as she hurried to our side. Her high heels clicked noisily, which caused all the other people working at their desks to look up in surprise. I could tell that she had intentionally made the noise.

“What can I do for you?” Kamei asked, as she looked from the office manager to me, clearly comparing us as she did. Kamei was thirty-two, five years younger than I. Five years but a world apart. She’d joined the company after the enactment of new equal-employment laws. A graduate of Tokyo University Law School, she was extremely conceited. And to top it off, she wore flashy clothes. I’d heard that she spent over half her salary on them. She still lived at home, and since her father had been a bureaucrat of some sort and was still in good health, she was affluent. I, on the other hand, had a mother who was a full-time housewife, and I had had to work to provide for her and my sister once my father died.

How was I supposed to have money to spend on clothes?

“I have a question to ask you,” the office manager began. “Does the noise that Ms. Sato makes disturb the others around her? I realize this is an awkward question and I apologize, but your desk is right next to hers, so I figured you’d know.”

The office manager hid the letter I’d received, and spoke to Kamei with feigned nonchalance. Kamei glanced over at me and took a deep breath.

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“Well, I’m busy with my typing so I imagine I create a lot of noise myself. I get wrapped up in what I’m doing and don’t really pay much attention to the racket I make.”

“I’m not asking about the noise you make, Ms. Kamei. I’m asking about Ms. Sato.”

“Oh.” Kamei acted embarrassed, but I spotted a glimmer of nastiness beneath her mask.

“Well … Ms. Sato always uses earplugs, so I don’t think she really notices the noise she makes. I mean, it’s small things, like when she puts her coffee mug down or rifles through her papers. And I guess you could say she bangs the drawers a lot when she opens and closes them. But it’s not really a problem for me. I mean, I just mention this because you asked.”

After she said that, Kamei turned to me and said softly, “I’m sorry.”

“Well, is it loud enough that we should ask Ms. Sato to be more careful in the future?”

“Oh, no … I didn’t mean … ” Kamei vigorously denied anything. “It’s just that you asked me—I suppose because my desk is next to hers—

so I answered. That’s all. I don’t think you should make a big deal out of it.”

The office manager turned to me.

“Okay? Are you satisfied? I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

The office manager always behaved this way. He never took responsibility for the problems that came his way but always tried to pass them along to someone else. Kamei looked at him disconcertedly.

“Excuse me, sir, but why did you call me over? What does this have to do with me? I really don’t understand.”

“Well, you wrote it, didn’t you?” I was practically shouting at her.

Kamei pursed her lips together in shock, as if she had no idea what I was talking about. She really did a good job acting the fool. The office manager turned to me and raised his hand as if to try to calm me down.

“Look, this is a matter of personal sensitivities. A person with tightly honed sensitivities wrote this, don’t you imagine? Let’s just leave it at that. Don’t make it worse than it is.”

The office manager picked up the phone on his desk and started dialing as if he had just remembered something he needed to do. Acting as 3 4 8

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if she had no idea what was going on, Kamei returned to her desk, her head hanging low. I couldn’t bear the thought of going back to my desk and sitting next to her, so I headed off to get some coffee.

The parttimer in the filing department and our office assistant were already in the kitchen preparing tea for a horde of people. The parttimer was a freelancer and the assistant had been sent over from a temp agency. Both had dyed their hair a brassy brown, cut short, with bangs pinned back off their foreheads. Both of them looked uncomfortable when they saw me enter, so I knew they’d been bad-mouthing me. I pulled a clean coffee cup off the counter and asked, “Is there any hot water?”

“Yes.” The parttimer pointed to the thermos. “We just poured it in the pot.”

I poured hot water over the instant coffee I had just purchased. The parttimer and the assistant stopped what they had been doing and watched me. They looked annoyed. I spilled some of the hot water on the counter, but I just left it there and returned to my desk. Kamei looked up and turned to me when I walked by.

“Ms. Sato, please don’t take offense at what I said earlier. I think I must be pretty noisy too.”

I said nothing in reply, retreating behind my mountain of papers. I was on my fourth cup of coffee that day. I left each cup on my desk when I was finished with them, making space for the empty mugs. Each and every one of them had red lipstick stains on the rims. I figured I could carry them all back to the beverage counter when I was ready to leave for the day. That made the most sense to me. Kamei began to tap away softly at her keyboard. The sound drilled its way into my head. She may have been pretty, and she may have graduated from Tokyo University, but she couldn’t do what I did—and that filled me with a sense of superiority.

What would she say, I wondered, if she saw the large pack of condoms I had in my purse? That thought alone gave me pleasure.

The subway emerged from underground and headed into Shibuya Station.

It was the moment of the day I loved best: rising from deep underground to the surface. It gives me such an immense feeling of relief, liberation. Ahh. From here I head into the night streets, right smack into 3 4 9

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a world where Kamei would never tread, a world before which the parttimer and the assistant would flinch in fear. A world the office manager could not even imagine.

I reached the call girl agency just before seven o’clock. The office was in a studio apartment among the shops fining Dogenzaka Avenue. It consisted of a tiny kitchen, a toilet, and a minuscule shower. There was a sofa in the ten-mat carpeted room, as well as a television. The office desk, where a man sat answering the phones, was off in the corner. The man shook his bleached-blond head in boredom and thumbed through a weekly magazine. He dressed like a teenager, but he was in his thirties.

There were already about ten girls in the room, watching TV and waiting for phone calls. Some of the girls played with their Game Boys or looked through magazines. It was rainy tonight, and when it rains business is always slow. Everyone was settling in for a long wait.

This is where I transform from Kazue Sato into Yuri, my street name.

I took the name from the Yuriko I knew in high school, a beautiful but dim-witted girl. I sat on the floor and spread the economic newspaper that I hadn’t yet read over the glass-topped coffee table.

“Hey! Who left a wet umbrella here? You’re getting everyone’s shoes wet!”

A woman in a sloppy gray sweatshirt, her hair in a braid, shouted angrily. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and her face—lacking any evidence of eyebrows—looked freakish. Even so, once she put on her makeup, she was a reasonably attractive woman so she got lots of requests—which made her bossy and smug. I apologized and got up. I’d forgotten that I needed to leave my umbrella in the hallway out front.

Once she knew I was the culprit, the Braid began to make a fuss, hoping to earn a little sympathy from the man operating the telephones.

“You left your umbrella right on top of my shoes, and now they’re so wet—even on the inside—that I can’t possibly wear them. You need to pay me for this, don’t you think?”

I glared at her, folded my umbrella up, and stepped out to leave it in the hallway. There was a blue plastic bucket by the door where everyone else had put their umbrellas; I stuck mine in as well. To get revenge for her outburst, I decided to take a bigger, nicer umbrella out of the bucket on my way out, pretending to do so by mistake. When I went back inside the office, the Braid was still giving me sour looks.

“You know, I don’t know who you think you are, rustling your stupid 3 5 0

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newspaper when you can see the rest of us are trying to watch television.

And why do you think you can spread your stuff out all over the table here? Other people use the same space, you know. Try being a little considerate.

You can’t go around acting like you’re the only one here. And the same goes for the jobs. You’ve got to take your turn.”

The girls here were nothing like Kamei; they said just what they thought. I nodded begrudgingly. But it was clear the Braid was jealous of me. She had some inkling of the fact that I had a good education and a job in a top-notch firm. That’s right, you little bitch, by day I have an honest job. I graduated from Q University, and I am able to write intelligent and probing essays. In short, I’m nothing like you. Well, I could tell myself that all day long, but at night, on the street, a woman has only one thing going for her. And once she’s past thirty-five, she can’t help but despair over the fact that she is losing it. Men have excessive demands. They want a woman to be educated and to have a proper upbringing and a pretty face, and they want her to have both a submissive character and a taste for sex. They want it all. It is difficult to meet those demands and to live in a world where demands like this take precedence. No, more than that, it’s ridiculous even to expect that one could. And yet women have no choice but to try to manage, searching as they go for some redeeming value to their lives. Well, my greatest value was my ability to achieve a balance—and to earn money.

The phone rang. I turned to look hopefully at the dispatch operator. I wanted him to pass me the job. But he pointed to the Braid. She went to the vanity in the corner, pulled out her makeup kit, and began putting on her face. The other women continued watching television or reading their magazines, hoping they’d be the next to go. I started to eat the food I’d bought earlier at the convenience store, pretending I didn’t care. I returned to reading the newspaper. The Braid let her hair down and wiggled into a tight red minidress. Her legs were straight but heavy and her hips were wide. What a pig. I looked away. I hate fat people.

It was nearly ten o’clock, and the phone still had not rung again. The Braid had long since returned. She sprawled out on the floor, seemingly exhausted, and watched television. The mood suffusing the apartment was one of resignation. I was depressed, figuring it was now too late for much of anything. And then the phone rang. Everyone perked up their ears and looked over at the dispatcher. He had a troubled look on his face as he pushed the HOLD button on the phone.

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“It’s a request to visit a private residence. An apartment in Gotanda that doesn’t have a bath. Do I have anyone who’ll go?”

A woman with a face like a horse whose only redeeming feature was her youth lit a cigarette and said, “I’m sorry, but I draw the line at men who don’t have their own bathing facilities.”

The Braid ripped into a bag of chips and spoke in agreement. “What a jerk. If a man doesn’t have a bath in his apartment, he’s got no business calling for a girl to visit him there.”

A number of angry voices concurred here and there.

“Okay then, I guess I’ll have to tell him no.” The dispatcher glanced over at me as he spoke.

I stood up. “I’ll go.”

“Will you, Yuri? That’s great. I’ll make the arrangements.”

The dispatcher looked relieved, but after he told the man on the other end of the phone okay, I noticed that he was smirking to himself. I realized that he might have been grateful to me for my willingness from a business point of view, but from a personal point of view it was clear that he despised me.

I pulled out my compact and touched up my makeup. The other women looked at me in disgust. I knew they were thinking, My, my, you certainly pay a lot of visits on men without bathrooms!

Don’t be so squeamish, girls, I wanted to say. You’re too soft. If you do business with a man who has a handicap like that, you can turn it to benefit yourself. Serve him shorter and charge him more for the inconvenience.

Laugh at me now, but you wait and see what it’s like when you’re thirty-seven. Then you’ll understand. I wasn’t going to let those silly girls get me down.

In three years’ time, I’ll be forty. That’s when I’ll retire from this group. I’ll have to. My time will be up for this line of work. If I can’t get work as a call girl, I’ll market myself as a “mature lover.” Or I’ll start trolling the streets and procure my own customers. And if I can’t stand it, I’ll have to quit all together. But once I’m no longer able to find liberation in my night work, I imagine my day job will fall apart as well. That’s what I fear, but I have to keep on living even so. So my biggest obstacle is my own insecurity. If I can’t keep my balance, I need to harden myself further.

I stepped into the tiny bathroom and changed into a blue miniskirted 3 5 2

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suit. I’d bought it off the bargain racks at the Tokyu Department Store for ¥8,700. Next I put on a long-haired wig. The hair fell all the way to my waist. Kazue Sato had turned into Yuri. I felt I could do anything. I picked up the slip from the dispatcher with the address and phone number of the client and walked out the door. I searched through the bucket, selecting what was probably the Braid s long stylish umbrella, got in a cab, and headed toward the man’s apartment in Gotanda.

The apartment was beside the train tracks. I paid the cab fare and made sure to get a receipt. Some agencies have their own cars and drive girls to their customers, but my office has us pay for cabs. Then they reimburse us later.

Mr. Hiroshi Tanaka, Apartment 202, Mizuki Heights. I took the flight of stairs on the outside of the building and knocked on the door to apartment 202.