People Who Eat Darkness (11 page)

He met Lucie halfway through her second week at Casablanca. Except during his out-of-town business trips, he wrote to her and visited the club almost every day. The crush he developed on Lucie—not even adolescent, but childish, almost infantile in its abjectness—would have been obvious from this attendance record alone. His e-mails spelled it out in cloying detail.

“Thank you for your patience last night,” read his first message. “One thing that I can say to you now is that I will be sure to envy your future boyfriend in a Mad City, Tokyo.”

The next day he was apologetic: “I was so drunk yesterday and always, so I want to chit-chat with you when I am sober and normal. It might be very boring for you, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

Three days later: “I am interested in you because of being yourself. I know that you are the most CHARRRRRRRMING girl on this planet so far … See you soon! Kennnnnnnneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

Lucie had told him that one of the things she missed in Japan was black olives. On their first d
ō
han, they arrived at the restaurant, and a bowl of them had been placed on the table on Ken’s instructions. He noticed that the glass of Lucie’s watch was cracked; he had it repaired for her and gave her a Snoopy watch to wear in the meantime. “He is such a darling,” she wrote to Sam. “On Friday night last week he took me for dinner again and picked me up in his little black Alfa Romeo sports car and took me to a beautiful restaurant in a hotel on the twelfth floor overlooking Tokyo. It was fab. He then came to the club with me which gets me a ¥4000 bonus.”

“Tomorrow I have to wake up in the early morning for the important meeting,” Ken wrote to Lucie on May 24. “However, I will pop into CB to glance at your face even I cannot chit-chat tonight.”

Less than two hours later: “I guess it is too early for you to say that you promise dinner will not only be tomorrow night. Having dinner with me may be too boring or too disgusting to stand. Just I warn you. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

A week later:

To tell the truth, you have never left my mind even one second … Of course, I’m very much interested to get to know you more. However, I feel that I know you very well. Probably, you want to get to know me more more more
♪
How’d you like it? How’d you like it? Right? I strongly recommend that you should carefully do this nice man. He is sweet, smart and sexy, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha , , , , ,

And on June 5:

Dear my sweet friend Lucie,

You saved my life. I have just come from the heavy and shit (Wooooops) meetings today. Although it is Monday, I am almost feeling today is Thursday. My tank for jokes (other people say a “brain”) is dying. Today in some way it is very exciting but exhausted. In the early afternoon I climbed upto the top of Mt. Everest and in the late evening I was fallen into the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, It is not just a normal up-down in a day. However, now I am floating on the surface because your sweet mail like a life jacket … please forgive my written English. I am sure that you sometimes feel like corresponding with Papua New Guineans or a 7 years old boy.

“[Ken] was wasted tonight so it was quite hard work,” Lucie wrote in her diary. A few days later: “[Ken] … absolutely wasted—worst night so far in my opinion!!” But she displayed little self-consciousness about the relationship. A man more than twice her age, lonely, alcohol-dependent, and seemingly without other friends or attachments was besotted with her. At a time of crisis for his company, he was throwing away thousands of yen to spend every evening at her side. Far from discouraging him, she was behaving like an excited, delighted, appreciative sweetheart. And this, for someone in Lucie’s position, was normal. More than normal, it was her professional duty. Hesitant, decent, infatuated, and loaded, Ken was the perfect customer. If she hadn’t encouraged him, she would have lost her job.

Hostesses in Roppongi, the managers and waiters who ran the bars, even an anthropologist such as Anne Allison, all said the same thing: that hostessing was a game, governed by clear and binding rules, and that everyone—customers as well as girls—understood instinctively where the lines lay and when they were being crossed. But what if a man’s judgment became blurred by loneliness or drink or love or lust? What if one side stopped recognizing the rules?

“I do not agree that I am a mad man, but many people say so,” Kenji Suzuki wrote. “Alright. Even if I am mad, I were not mad with you last night at all and will not be mad with you in the near future either. Do not worry! Probably, you will soon be mad and angry with me sometimes.….. Hahahahahahahhaha.”

6. TOKYO IS THE EXTREME LAND

“During this time between arriving in Tokyo & buying this diary so much has occurred,” Lucie wrote.

20 days is all it has been. We arrived in a shithouse, but slowly turned it into our home. We have survived mass starvation and drunk any weight that dropped off, right back on. We found jobs as hostesses at a club called Casablanca. We have drunk more alcohol in the last 20 days than I have ever consumed in my whole drinking lifetime …

It has been an extremely hard & emotionally taxing 3 weeks. Tokyo is the extreme land. Only high as a kite or lower than you can imagine over here … never anything between the two.

Filling all of the next page, in giant, overlapping, individually shaded, graffiti-style letters, are the words TOKYO ROCKS.

Casablanca closed at two a.m., or after the last customers had left. The girls would help them on with their jackets, guide them unsteadily through the leather-clad door, and trill their thanks as the elevator rose to meet them.

“Goodbye, Yamada-san. Goodbye, Imoto-san. Please come again! Goodbye—see you soon!”

Then they would slip back inside, change out of their dresses, and escape into the humid darkness.

This was the moment, as the foreign hostesses were emerging from their clubs, that the Roppongi night turned on a pivot. There was a clear and inescapable choice. If you went home at this point, you would wake up tomorrow with something of the morning left—time to tidy up, go shopping, meet a friend for lunch. If you stayed out, you would be drinking until dawn. “There’s no such thing as just one drink in Roppongi,” the foreign investment bankers used to say, and Lucie knew the truth of this. “Last week was a bit mad,” she wrote to Sam. “For some reason I got plastered every night from Wednesday onwards. You get so many drinks bought for you after work, and as work doesn’t ever end before 2 really before you know it it’s 7 a.m. daylight and you’re falling round the streets of Tokyo. The bars here are very cool, you just can’t help it.”

There was Geronimo on Roppongi Crossing—cramped, raucous, and decorated with the severed ends of expensive silk ties, chopped off and presented as offerings by drunken bankers. There was Castillo, with its sign banning Iranians and its renowned DJ, Aki, who had an unmatched collection of records of the 1980s. Wall Street had a screen above the bar displaying stock prices; Gaspanic was the sweatiest and most carnal of them all, a grope pit of booze and dancing. The most popular place among the hostesses was the Tokyo Sports Cafe, which had the same management as the strip clubs Seventh Heaven and Private Eyes, and the One Eyed Jack’s hostess bar next door. At this time of night, a group of hostesses rarely had to wait long for someone to buy their drinks. In the Sports Cafe, as in the clubs, they were paid a percentage on wine and champagne purchased by male friends. After being sacked by Casablanca, this was how Helen Dove made a living for a while—lingering in the Sports Cafe, making a ¥8,000-a-night commission on the drinks men bought for her.

Lucie enjoyed the nights—or early mornings—out after work. But no one loved them more than Louise.

One Saturday, Ken Suzuki took Lucie out to dinner. Afterward, she wrote e-mails in an Internet café and met Louise at midnight. At Geronimo there was a crowd of familiar faces. The girls drank shots of neat tequila. Louise was soon “slaughtered” and engaged in conversation with a man named Carl. “We then went to Wall Street,” Lucie wrote, “where the night started to go really wrong.”

Louise made a new friend. He was “a cute guy,” Lucie recognized, but she sensed danger in him. He reminded her, she wrote, of her deceitfully self-destructive ex-boyfriend Marco. “Lou however by this point was too drunk for rational thinking.” The three of them left Wall Street together and went on to a club called Deep Blue, “where Louise now decided she wanted something else to perk her up.” Lucie went on: “We found some friends there and for me the night was getting good—then Lou started losing it.”

The girlfriend of Louise’s new friend arrived, but Louise was oblivious to her fizzing jealousy. “Lou was losing it more & more, kissing the guy in front of her blissfully unaware,” Lucie wrote. Suddenly, the music had been switched off, the lights were up, and everyone in the club was watching a five-way brawl on the dance floor. “The girl went for Lou,” Lucie wrote, “I went for the girl, the guy went for Lou, I went for the guy, the guy went for me, the bouncer went for the guy—
eventually
I went for the bags, I went back for Lou, we went to the lift, we got stalked by psycho man, & finally we got home.”

“I never heard from Lucie that she was having a great time,” Sophie said. “I’m sure that she was going out and getting drunk, partying hard—but I don’t think she was happy. I don’t say that because of her fate—I really don’t think she was. I remember being worried that she wasn’t happy.

“She was like me in that way. We’d … get involved in an act almost. If people around me are getting drunk, I’ll get drunk, and if people around me are reading books in the library, I’ll read books in the library. That’s not to say that I always do what I don’t want to do. But there’s something quite genuine about that need to be accepted. Lucie did thrive on being well loved and popular, and she was. But, as she got older, she got involved in things that weren’t really her.

“I think Lucie felt quite rejected out in Japan. I certainly got the impression quite early on that she wasn’t having fun and that she was putting on an act—go out, join in, but never really feel content in your skin.”

*   *   *

Lucie was still preoccupied by thoughts of home and the people she had left behind there. At Geronimo one night, the DJ played “Fields of Gold” by Sting, which reminded her of Alex, the young Australian barman in Sevenoaks. “I can’t imagine what it’ll be like finally to clap eyes on him,” she wrote in her diary. “I get a ‘flip’ sensation in my stomach just thinking about it, sometimes it seems like tomorrow, other times it feels like a century away. All I think of is him … holding my hands, looking with his beautiful eyes boring into mine, catching his bottom lip with his teeth … Even at the bar, wasted, surrounded by the company of men, he’s still in my every thought.”

Money was a worry, as usual. At the end of May, three weeks after arriving in Tokyo, Lucie carried out one of her regular reviews of her finances. Her debts—including two bank loans, a bank overdraft, debts to her mother and father, a credit-card bill, and the balance on the “Princess Bed”—amounted to about $8,000. Minimal payments on all these, plus the rent on Sasaki House, the rental charge for her bicycle, and a modest ¥20,000 (about $188) a week for living expenses used up her entire hostessing income. It was obvious that it would take months to reduce her debts even slightly; her original plan of returning home in early August would have to be abandoned. “There’s nothing I can [do] except deal with it,” she wrote, “but it’s left me with a gutted feeling Alex & I won’t work out and home now seems so much further away. I still feel such a huge sense of disorientation & being lost, yet every time I seem to settle on something—it changes.”

But there was more bothering Lucie than money and an absent boyfriend. It came out in a passionate, lonely, and probably tipsy diary entry three weeks after arriving in Japan.

Date: 26/5—5:50AM

I don’t know what’s wrong but this place seems to be bringing out the absolute worst in me. I can not stop crying. I have such pain in my stomach—a real physical symptom of feeling absolutely crushed. I am so cried out, tears no longer come in one lot, they only come exhaust[ed]ly in waves.

I’m not coping well here. I can’t pull myself out of this hole I’ve fallen into.

I’ve had to leave Lou in the Sports Cafe with Keenan—I couldn’t stand it any longer. I feel so fucking horrible there—I hate it.

I feel so ugly & fat & invisible in there I constantly hate myself. I’m so average. Every single part of me from head to toe is completely average. I must have been kidding myself that I could make it out here. I hate the way I look, I hate my hair, I hate my face, I hate my nose, I hate my slanty eyes, I hate the mole on my face, I hate my teeth, I hate my chin, I hate my profile, I hate my neck, I hate my boobs, I hate my fat hips, I hate my fat stomach, I hate my flabby bum, I HATE my birthmark, I hate my bashed up legs, I feel so disgusting & ugly & average.

I am so fucking up to my neck in debt & so badly need to do well. This is not a bad thing to do with Lou & I’m really happy for her—but I’m a crap hostess. I’ve had 1 dohan only cos of Shannon, another stood me up—I mean how shit must you be for a dohan to stand you up? I only have [Ken] now—but how long will that last? Louise gets men falling over themselves to request her—I get fake no’s & stood up.

Nishi gave her a tip & she’s being so fab about it, but she’s just falling so well into it—making heaps of friends & as usual no matter where I am—I feel alone.

It’s not 7oaks, it’s me.

I can’t explain this feeling to anyone, this feeling of complete detest for myself & this feeling of being so average. I’ve tried so badly to understand why & to make Mum and Lou understand—but they think I’m being silly—but I really feel like this
so
much. It’s a feeling of being so invisible, being no-one, feeling like I’m never a part of something & never quite fitting in.

… I know Lou has been all over the place for the last year, but she never has that feeling of no self worth.