Sayonara Bar Read online

  The day it happened I was supposed to be in my Introductory Statistics seminar. Instead I was at my local Lawson’s trying to jolt my appetite out of a month-long cessation. A Tokyo Boyz ballad pervaded the convenience-store aisles like flatulent airborne bacteria. At the neat rows of refrigerated rice balls, my stomach winced and cowered. No change there, then. I sauntered up to the magazine rack and flicked through a TV guide. The girl beside me was scanning the advertisements for liposuction at the back of a fashion magazine. I glanced at her and smiled. She edged away with a haughty flip of her hair. I selected a packet of vitamin C tablets and waited by the cashier, tapping my foot. ‘That will be 120 yen,’ the Lawson’s automaton bleated. Her bar-code scanner then crashed to the counter as I began to scream.

  Thus marked my first ascent into hyperspace. Imagine, if you will, that, having spent a lifetime burrowed into the hairs of a lion, one day you’re ejected from your cosy abode to be confronted with the lion in its roaring entirety. Imagine absentmindedly staring through an innocuous, gum-snapping Lawson’s clerk and then, right before your eyes, she transmutates into a grotesque, thousand-headed demon. Imagine her head exploding into an infinity of aggregate layers, into layers of skin and flesh and cartilage and skull and brain. Imagine her head blown wide open so that every internal angle is externalized in macabre, bloody grandeur. Imagine suddenly being able to ‘see’ the fourth-dimensional representation of every thought and emotion pounding within her skull. (Oh God! He’s screaming like a wild animal. I hope he hasn’t got a knife. I don’t want to get hurt. Oh please, God, don’t let him hurt me!)

  Imagine a hand descending from the sky and wrenching you, as you flail and cry, from the amniotic fluids that cocoon you through life; watching all physical boundaries fall away, as concepts such as ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are rendered obsolete. Imagine calmly computing this million-fold splurge of sensory input and calmly acknowledging that you have just perforated the next level of the physical world, a level that your mind had conspired to shield you against. But despite this seamless mental transition, you can hear the screams of your infinitely inferior, third-dimensional self. Great lung-rupturing screams. Screams of raw human suffering; those of a woman in childbirth or a man in an aeroplane plummeting from the sky.

  I crash to my knees, screams trampolining from my bleeding diaphragm, my fingertips gouging at my temples. ‘Stop! Stop! Fucking stop!’ I beg. And then, all of a sudden, it does.

  The utter embarrassment! I wreaked enough pandemonium to convince everyone Armageddon was in the vicinity. I succeeded in scaring seven shades of shit out of the Lawson’s clerk, the liposuction girl and some builders browsing the porn section. Once the universe had contracted to regular size I sat gibbering like a traumatized ape for a few minutes while the clerk called the emergency services. Then, with an amazing display of initiative, I picked up my chewy vitamin C tablets and scampered back to my student residence.

  ‘Hi, Watanabe. It’s really quiet now the Mitsubishi men have left. But I’m glad they’ve gone. Lecherous creeps. Always trying to tease a few inches off my hemline with their beady eyes.’

  Katya has slunk into the kitchen while I’m chopping some spring onion to garnish a bowl of Udon noodles. My fight-or-flight reflex lurches. I have the same irrational fear of Katya that my mother has of microwaves – she will always scuttle to another room when one is nuking stuff.

  ‘Watanabe . . . your company is so refreshing after all those salarymen gawping and pawing at us. You’re so shy . . . always hiding under that baseball cap of yours . . .’

  I am cutting far more spring onions than a bowl of Udon could possibly need. Why does Katya always succeed in making me blush? She enjoys terrifying the socially inadequate: it reinforces her ranking in the pecking order and offers cheap distraction from her vapid inner monologue. I decide to flex into the fourth dimension. Katya’s dulcet tones are much less intimidating when juxtaposed with her lower bowel movements. As I transcend, Katya explodes into a million shattered mirror fragments, each one reflecting a different physical and mental aspect of her. Her thoughts trail along dimly, like a myxomatosis-ridden rabbit. (I bet he’s never had sex at all . . . I bet he wants to have sex with me . . .)

  ‘Hmmm, Udon.’ She lowers her head to the bowl and slurps, ‘hmmm-ing’ as though the Udon broth is giving her much sexual gratification. I will have to wipe away the fuchsia lipstick with a dish rag before I put that through the serving hatch. ‘Delicious! Bravo, Watanabe!’

  Fire crackers combust in my cheeks. Here is something no one knows about Katya: she is anorexic, and judging by the acid bile eating through the walls of her contracted stomach she hasn’t eaten for the last fourteen hours. I slide the Udon through the serving hatch.

  ‘Y’know what, Watanabe . . .’ Katya lisps peevishly ‘. . . you never look me in the eyes!’ She crosses her arms and pouts. ‘What colour are they, Watanabe? Get it right and I promise to scrape the crap from that pile of dishes for you.’ She gestures towards the washing-up and closes her eyes.

  The opportunity to shift Katya to the other side of the kitchen presents itself. So what colour are her eyes? Well . . . I could describe to you the texture of her vitreous humour (gloopy, like hair gel) or the interlocking pattern of rods and cones on her retina (honeycomb) or the angle of light refraction at her corneas (43.2°). I could relay to you the images that dance along her optic fibre to the surround-sound, wide screen of her mind. And the colour . . . The irises of her eyes hang like a frozen mineral substance, the palest, devil-may-care shade of . . . ‘Blue.’

  ‘Shame on you! They’re brown!’

  Excuse me? Brown?

  ‘I knew I wouldn’t have to get my hands dirty!’ she meows and sashays out to the bar, her hips in a figure-of-eight victory swivel.

  Brown? My fourth-dimensional radar sweeps over the kitchen. Everything is as it should be. Detergent spurts inside the dishwasher, the electric coils of the oven cool and contract. Every angle, internal and external, of the walk-in fridge is laid out. Every nook and cranny, every aubergine and onion and leek. Mould liquefies a bag of carrot detritus on the second shelf. From my fourth-dimensional vision, nothing is clandestine. So how did Katya manage to hide the colour of her eyes?

  As I became accustomed to dimensional transcendence, I learnt to isolate distinct hyper-objects from the chaos. In hyperspace, internal organs inhabit the same plane as external features such as skin, hair and clothes. Each human body is shrouded by a four-dimensional, machine-gun splatter of hyper-gore. Imagine all of the blood geysers from all of the slasher movies you’ve ever watched in your whole life compacted into one. Then project it into four dimensions. By my tenth visit to hyperspace I was able to recognize organs and biological functions, and now after several months of hyperspace I can read blood-sugar levels, recognize the malfunctioning of organs and diagnose diseases.

  When you shift up a dimension the thoughts of other creatures are as easy to translate as the scratching of thirst in your own throat. The fourth-dimensional realm is electrified with the mental activity of all animal life. Thousands of internal monologues clamour relentlessly for your attention. I have squandered many hours riding on the Osaka underground, mesmerized by the cogitations of strangers, transfixed by the neuroses and perversions darting about the confines of our subterranean capsule.

  It was Mary who unwittingly lured me to The Sayonara Bar. By then I had officially quit university and chosen to spend my days tramping about Osaka. I first encountered Mary in a bank vestibule in Shinsaibashi station. It was the lunch-time rush and I was waiting to withdraw my 1,000 yen daily allowance for a salmon rice ball and a pack of Lucky Strikes. Impatient electrical pulses twitched about my fellow queuers as they waited in ten-deep lines at each cash dispenser. A spectrograph of stress and tension grew as they shifted from foot to foot, cracked knuckles and made critical mental appraisals of one another.

  C’mon, you senile old witch! Move it! C’mon, you Alzheimer’s infest
ed moose! What? How many times does she have to insert her card?!

  Momoko Yamada, 20, office lady

  If that insipid Malibu Barbie clone doesn’t stop screeching into her mobile . . . Hey! What was that look for? Jesus! If you don’t like people looking at your legs, then wear a longer skirt.

  Noburu Yoshikawa, 28, telesales executive

  Is there enough time to decode the Andromeda Corporation microchip before I smuggle it out of the country in my prosthetic arm? Or should I wait until the team pick me up in Brazil?

  Kaori Tanizaki, 36, housewife and flower arrangement teacher

  Many pairs of eyes spun towards Mary as she stepped into our air-conditioned vault. En masse, the private cogitations of those around me skidded to a halt and with a chaotic jangle homed in on her Amazonian proportions. We Osakians are used to Westerners, but even by Western standards Mary is a giantess. She strutted through the dense nebula of curiosity to join a queue. She stood with her shoulders thrust back and her vertebrae set poker-stiff, as though her mutant stature was a lifestyle choice, not a blow dealt by the gods of genetic inheritance.

  I bet if Spiderman and Godzilla and the Yakuza and that big American lady had an Ultimate Death match, the American lady would pulverize them all!

  Yuu Kawagawa, 11, accompanying his mother on a trip to the Hankyu department store

  I too was intrigued by Mary. She gazed stoically into the middle distance as she waited in line. Her mental activity was negligible, practically flat-lining. All her thoughts had been displaced by a melody – the most haunting melody that I have ever heard, a bittersweet refrain to the indignity and pathos of life.

  I trailed Mary from the ATM annexe so I could cling onto that melody for a few moments longer. I pursued her past Laundromats and Pachinko parlours. I followed the swish of her leather jacket and her lion’s mane of golden hair, my heart somersaulting every time her profile dipped into view. The melody continued as though in abhorrence of a silent vacuum. We pushed through the noonday crowds of Shinsaibashi and cut through a urine-breathing alley. We clambered up six flights of stairs (me stealthily wheezing a flight behind). When I emerged on the sixth floor the last strains of melody disappeared behind heavy double doors. Ahead, the Amazonian girl was now shedding her jacket and talking in excellent Japanese to a burly matron presiding over the bar. Etched upon the glass and shaded with gilt were the words THE SAYONARA BAR.

  The door swung open. The matron loomed upon me. ‘Oi!’ she growled through her tar-pit larynx. ‘Are you here about the job?’

  Behind her, Mary appeared and smiled at me for the first time. Pheromones glided through the air in a Viennese waltz. Desire galloped across the pastures of hyperspace. My heart flared as I suddenly realized what that melody was. I nodded wordlessly and she ushered me inside.

  3

  MR SATO

  I

  How quiet it is at night. Nothing more than the rumble of distant factories and the shiver of trees in the breeze. And the moon, a pale orb in possession of the sky, scattered with tarnished constellations.

  I find this wakefulness, this hyperactivity of mind, very frustrating. It must be the green tea I drank earlier: green tea always leaves me overstimulated. The silhouette of the hedge obscures my view, unruly prongs of foliage reaching into the dark. Must remember to give it a trim on Sunday.

  The geraniums, by the way, are flourishing. We have Mrs Tanaka to thank for that. They’d have withered right away if it wasn’t for her efforts with the watering can. She’s always been an old fusspot, hasn’t she? Every morning she’ll wait until I am leaving for work before scuttling out of her house, hair in pink curlers, her quilted dressing gown flapping about her ankles. This morning she gave me two salmon rice balls wrapped in a gingham handkerchief. She told me that I need to get more sunshine, that death from overwork is epidemic these days. ‘I’ve never been fond of sunshine,’ I told her. She didn’t believe me. ‘Mr Sato! How can you not be fond of sunshine? It’s the source of all life.’ Then she continued to make enquiries about my well-being, brushing aside my insistence that I am in good health. She usually makes me late for work. I’ve begun to leave the house several minutes earlier to allow for these daily inquisitions.

  I don’t agree with Mrs Tanaka’s opinion that I work too hard. Her generation had a much more resilient work ethic than ours does. Her generation made Japan into the economic powerhouse it once was. This generation is simply treading water . . . and I fear things are in decline. Every year the new intake of graduates at Daiwa Trading seem a little more dismissive of company etiquette, a little too eager to escape their desks at the 5 p.m. chime. It’s been hectic at the office lately and I find myself putting in a lot of overtime to take up the slack, racing to catch the last train, which leaves Umeda at 11.30. I can just see those frown lines puckering your brow! I know how you disapprove. I promise to slow down in May, once the quarterly shareholders’ report is out of the way. Then I might take a holiday, maybe in China – you always wanted to go to China, didn’t you?

  Anyway, I finished work at seven tonight. We all got sent home early, as the whole computer network has been infected with a virus from South Korea, which brought things to a standstill. It was strange to leave the office while it was still daylight outside. Some of my colleagues went out drinking. As always they invited me and as always I apologized and made my excuses. I am sure my co-workers think me very odd and antisocial, but, as you know, I do not care for bars and discothèques and suchlike. I found myself home by eight with nothing more for my evening’s entertainment than some take-out sushi and the television remote. How that wretched, glowing box gives me a headache! All those flashing lights and cheering studio audiences. After dinner I turned it off and looked about the house for some chore to do, but as I take care of everything on Sundays there was nothing left to fix or clean. So I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table instead, drinking green tea and listening to classical music on the radio. They played Elgar earlier. It reminded me that I still haven’t done anything about your cello. It sits in the spare room, gathering dust. Maybe I should donate it to the local high school – I am sure that there are plenty of budding cellists who would appreciate it. It’s been selfish of me to cling onto it for so long.

  II

  Mrs Tanaka is at it again. She ambushed me as I left for work yesterday morning. ‘Mr Sato! Coo-eee! Mr Sato!’ She hobbled across the dew-drizzled lawn, nearly slipping in her excitement. I was concerned because she had forgotten her housecoat, but despite the frigid morning air she was very sprightly.

  ‘Mr Sato! Guess who is coming to Osaka!’

  Apart from the residents of our neighbourhood Mrs Tanaka and I have no other common acquaintances that I know of. ‘I have no idea, Mrs Tanaka,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh yes, you do!’ she insisted, her eyes sparkling mischievously. ‘It’s my niece Naoko!’ She clapped her hands with a delight I could not partake in. ‘Her company has transferred her to their Osaka branch!’

  ‘That’s wonderful news,’ I said, smiling politely.

  ‘Isn’t it just?’ she replied with a crafty grin.

  A frozen smile masked my torment. I sensed an invitation to dinner in the offing. Naoko and I would soon be seated opposite each other, stiff with mutual disinclination, awkwardly eating Mrs Tanaka’s simmered dumplings. Then Mrs Tanaka would slyly slip away to attend to some urgent chore she’d claim to have forgotten . . . Oh, the wretched embarrassment! Naoko may be a lovely girl, but an atmosphere of discomfort lingers between us. It is not that I dislike her. What is there not to like? It is just that I will never like her enough. Not nearly enough to consummate Mrs Tanaka’s silly romantic plans.

  My encounter with Mrs Tanaka was just the beginning of a very peculiar day. At about mid-morning I was summoned to the Deputy Senior Managerial Supervisor’s office. Murakami-san’s office was very pleasant and spartan, save for a display cabinet resplendent with golfing trophies. He took great pains to make me comfortable, disp
atching his secretary to make a pot of barley tea and inviting me to sit in his plushly upholstered wing-back chair. He even offered me a cigarette, which I of course declined. The young secretary returned and bustled about in a fricative murmur of nylon tights, pouring us tea. Murakami-san sat in the chair behind his desk. Behind his broad shoulders stretched Osaka’s dirty skyline, gauzy clouds misting the tops of skyscrapers. As his secretary left he grinned widely, revealing teeth like broken china, colliding at hazardous angles. The skin around his permanently bloodshot eyes crinkled.

  ‘Sato-san,’ he began, ‘I want to voice my appreciation of all the hard work you have been putting in lately. We are delighted to have you join our department. You have exceeded your reputation as a dedicated, first-rate employee by far.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said and bowed my head in humble pride. Upper-level management at Daiwa Trading rarely dole out praise, even to the most diligent of employees. To be praised by Murakami-san is to be picked out by a celestial spotlight.

  ‘But I am concerned that you have been working too hard.’

  My head snapped up in surprise. I have never heard a superior express such sentiments before. ‘I . . . I apologize . . .’ I stammered. ‘But last week we lost some computer files so I had to organize—’

  He dismissed my defence with a backhand flap. ‘Those files weren’t that important; besides, we got a repair man to recover them from the hard drive last night. You did all that work for nothing.’ He patted his immaculately coiffed silver hair. Perhaps he expected the revelation that my labours had been meaningless to aggrieve me. It didn’t in the slightest.