Women On the Other Shore (11 page)

"Is it okay if I stay out a little longer?" Sayoko pleaded into the cell phone pressed to the side of her face. She had slipped out of the noisy tavern into the quiet elevator lobby ahead of the others to call her husband.

"Hunh?" came Shuji's voice from beyond a haze of static. Sayoko wasn't sure whether there was a note of irritation in his voice or it was just the poor connection. She glanced at her watch. Only a few minutes past eight.

"I mean, it's my own welcome party, you know, and they set it up on a Saturday just for me. I feel kind of awkward saying all of a sudden that I have to leave early."

"Now watch me get this foisted on me every weekend."

"Foisted?"

He had probably meant it as a joke: she could hear it in his voice.

But the reply had slipped out before she could bite her tongue.

"Akari went down a little bit ago," Shuji said. "She made me read the same book five times in a row." He'd apparently caught the edge in Sayoko's tone and changed the subject to avoid a confrontation.

The tavern's automatic door slid open and the rest of Sayoko's group came pouring out after settling the bill. Aoi hurried toward her.

"Sorry. I have to go," Sayoko said quickly into the phone. "And thanks. I promise not to be too late." She hung up.

84

"So? What'd he say?" Aoi asked with a hopeful smile, the smell of alcohol on her breath.

Sayoko smiled back and flashed her a V. "He said okay."

The Platinum Planet staff—Misao Sekine, Junko Iwabuchi, Mao Hasegawa, and Yuki Yamaguchi, who handled the accounting—

along with several others from the party, trooped across the street yelling out suggestions for their next watering hole. Takeshi Kihara held back, standing next to Sayoko. Was he coming to Aoi's place, too, she wondered with a measure of dismay. She'd hoped for a chance to talk with Aoi alone, and besides, she'd never really gotten a very good impression of Takeshi. It wasn't that he had a particularly unpleasant manner, but he made her feel ill at ease somehow.

When Takeshi stepped into the street to hail a cab, Sayoko quickly whispered in Aoi's ear: "Is he coming, too?"

"Hardly," she said. "He lives in the same direction, so we're dropping him off."

Sayoko breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Takeshi turned to shout that a cab was stopping.

"Promise not to be shocked when you see my place," Aoi said to Sayoko as she slid into the back seat.

"Should we have him go to Shimokitazawa first?" Takeshi asked from the front.

"Now don't get any ideas about tagging along. Sangubashi first is fine."

"Oh, sure. Like I'd want to do that. Give me a break," he said, then turned to the driver. "First to Sangubashi, and after that it'll be to Shimokitazawa."

The car started up. Sayoko stole a glance at Takeshi in the rearview mirror. She could only see one of his eyes.

The networking-slash-welcome party held in Shinjuku had started at five with about twenty people attending. It was a mixed crowd in both age and profession—a retail shop producer, an event coordinator, 85

a management consultant, an aspiring actor, and so forth—but Sayoko was struck that they all seemed very much like Aoi in spirit-completely open and unguarded, quick to laugh, and easy to talk to.

They'd immediately started treating her like an old friend. She spoke for a time about child rearing with a woman who published a free paper. She and Yuki Yamaguchi together offered some love advice to the young actor. She compared notes with Misao Sekine on the apartments they'd cleaned, each of them trying to trump the other's tale of the worst filth they'd encountered.

Except for her own colleagues, Sayoko still couldn't attach names to faces three hours later, but she felt as if she hadn't had so much fun laughing and talking with friends at a drinking place in a hundred years. Several times during the evening she had looked across the tatami-style banquet room for a chance to talk with Aoi, but Takeshi remained ensconced at her side every time. Not until the gathering was breaking up and they found themselves slipping into their shoes side by side had they been able to exchange any words at all, and it was then that Aoi had invited Sayoko to come to her place for some more drinks.

"Look, Takeshi," Aoi broke the silence in a serious tone of voice.

"That stuff you were saying before, about a personal guide of some kind who's not an interpreter or escort? I can't help thinking it'd be the same as turning people over to a local host. You're really only looking at the bottom line."

"I figured you'd say that. But you can't deny there's a real need.

It's a damn sight better than letting people fall into the clutches of some smooth-talking gigolo who hits on Japanese tourists."

Sayoko gathered that they were discussing a new business idea.

Feeling rather like a child excluded from grown-up conversation, she watched the buildings drift past outside the window. T h e cab soon put the neon lights of Shinjuku behind them. 8:18
P.M
. On a normal Saturday, she would be cleaning up after dinner, pausing now and 86

then to look out at the inky blue sky beyond the glass doors to the balcony. Tonight she'd learned that the sky over Shinjuku at this hour glowed a bright purple.

al just don' t see what it accomplishes. You still write off any pos-sibility of the chance encounter they might have otherwise."

"That sounds typical, coming from you. But if you don't mind my saying, I think it makes a whole lot more sense than something completely unrelated like housekeeping."

"Sense? It's hardly your place to be telling me what makes more sense. It's my company, and besides, travel and housekeeping aren't unrelated at all."

"Well, maybe not, b u t . . . "

Takeshi turned in his seat to look at Sayoko sitting directly behind him and flashed her an enigmatic smile. She squirmed, wondering what he could possibly mean by this gesture.
I wish you'd hurry up
and get out, you creep!
she muttered to herself, still feeling like that excluded child.

After dropping Takeshi off, they drove on for a time before the cab pulled up in front of an aging ferro-concrete apartment building.

The rest of the quiet residential side street was lined with a mixture of private homes and wood-frame apartment buildings. Emerging from the car first, Sayoko tried to hand Aoi a share of the fare when she slid out behind her, but she refused to take it.

"This is the place," Aoi said in the silence that descended after the cab drove off. She raised her arm in a sweeping gesture toward the building. Leading the way inside, she stopped at a bank of rusty mailboxes to insert a key and remove her mail. The building had no security door at the entrance, and the elevator was such a relic Sayoko had to chase anxious thoughts from her mind as they ascended. They got off on the fifth floor and proceeded along the exposed walkway to Aoi's door.

"Please come in," Aoi said as she hurried to switch on several lights 87

around the main room. A
soft
yellow glow lit up the walls and ceiling of a one-bedroom apartment. There was stuff piled here, there, and everywhere.

The main living area measured about four meters by five, and the bedroom was a six-mat tatami room. Sayoko was taken aback to discover that Aoi lived in an apartment so much smaller than her own—though she supposed it was in fact ample space for a single person living alone.

"I knew it," Aoi said with a little laugh. She was starting to prepare something in the kitchen. "Everybody who comes here reacts the same way. They just gape. First the building's so antiquated, and then my place is always such a shambles. One person who came for drinks had the temerity to say she shuddered for the future of the company after she saw the state of my apartment. Well, I'll have you know, we may be in a bit of a slump at the moment, but we're not doing so badly that we can't meet the payroll. Oh, please sit down right there. Don't mind that stuff."

Sayoko moved a heap of clothes carefully to one side and sat down on the sofa. The curtains were open and she could see lights from the skyscrapers on the business side of Shinjuku shining in the darkness far in the distance.

"Wow! You have a great view!" she exclaimed.

"Yeah, that was what sold me on the place," Aoi said with obvious pleasure.

Sayoko looked about the room. A 25" TV. A synthetic leather sofa.

A large potted plant with dust-coated leaves. An abstract painting heavy on blue tones hanging on the wall. An assortment of magazines strewn about the floor. A vintage air conditioner that looked so old you wondered if it really worked. Some ebony furnishings and a grab bag of other items from across Asia. On the one hand, exotic figurines and fabrics brought back from trips overseas accented the room, along with the abstract painting, while on the other, stacks 88

of cardboard boxes stood in the corner and fax printouts crammed with tiny numbers littered t h e floor.

As she took it all in, Sayoko found herself wondering W
hat if?

What if she had gone on working at the film distributor instead of getting married? She would probably be living today in an apartment not so different from this one. All by her lonesome, or sometimes with a friend, she would come home drunk to a room like this, pour herself a nightcap, and gaze out at the city lights in the distance.

Aoi brought two wine glasses and a cheese plate to the coffee table and sat down cross-legged on the floor.

"What's your place like?" she asked.

"Three bedrooms," Sayoko replied. "About a twelve-minute walk from the station. Having a toddler means the place is always turned upside down."

"Wow, I wish I had that kind of space. Is it a condo?"

Aoi poured t h e wine.

"Uh-huh. Complete with thirty-five-year mortgage."

In recent days, Sayoko had finally followed Aoi's urgings and dropped the customary honorific forms of speech she had initially used with her boss—though she still didn't feel comfortable addressing her by her first n a m e . On the days when she left work early, she always went straight h o m e and simply reported back to Aoi by phone.

Once Sayoko had finished describing her day's activities, Aoi would ask how things were going at t h e nursery school, or how Sayoko was faring with t h e "old bag" and her snide remarks. Sayoko would get caught up in Aoi's easy m a n n e r and say more than she should, and as the days went by she realized that she'd also stopped using the formal speech forms.

Sayoko took a sip of her wine. "You know, I feel really relaxed here. Maybe I'll come here with Akari if things get bad at home."

She meant it as a joke, but as the words left her lips she could hear Shuji saying "foisted" in her ear.

89

"Sure, anytime. Come right ahead. We can put down futons in the tatami room and sleep all in a row. On second thought, forget holing up in this tiny dump. If you're gonna run away from home, let's head for a hot springs somewhere. Soak in open-air tubs. Feast on fancy meals. Really live it up!"

Aoi lit a cigarette and laughed.

"Ooh, a hot springs. That's tempting. I haven't been to one in years."

"Then let's do it. Seriously!"

"I cringe to think what my husband might say. I'm so disgusted with him. Know what he said a while ago—of all the nerve? He said I'd 'foisted' Akari on him, can you believe it? As if he thinks spending time with his own daughter is some kind of tiresome chore, like the laundry or the dishes."

Her tongue loosened by alcohol, Sayoko let the words flow without restraint. She had discovered only recently how good it felt to spill. Whether it was the grief she got from her mother-in-law or the unguarded word her husband let slip, sharing it with someone brought out its funny side, and she could laugh and forget. On the other hand, even the tiniest little thing could take on exaggerated weight and start to feel like a major tragedy if she kept it bottled up inside. With Aoi, she'd found that she could talk about anything without the slightest hesitation.

"Oh, boy. I think you just reduced any desire I might've had to get married by at least seventy percent. That's why so many more women these days are saying forget marriage, forget kids. The true cause of plummeting birthrates isn't women who work, it's the grievances of happily married housewives."

"It's different for you, because you can take care of yourself just fine without a man. But going it alone was way too scary for me.

I never believed I could make it in the working world."

"Really? That's the exact opposite of me. I never believed I could 90

make it as a wife and mother. T h e working world is easy: you just do whatever comes up. Take care of business one thing at a time, and pretty soon the day is over. Repeat tomorrow."

Aoi paused, and silence filled the room. The smoke she exhaled wafted slowly toward the ceiling. Far beyond the window, tiny lights flashed on and off atop the skyscrapers of Shinjuku.

"Do you happen to have a snapshot of your daughter with you?"

Sayoko took out her cell phone and flipped it open to show Aoi the picture of Akari she used for her standby screen.

"Wow, what a sweetie! I think maybe she has your eyes," Aoi said, then without looking away from the screen asked, "Wasn't it scary when you had her?"

"Scary?"

"For me, it's absolutely terrifying. Fear's a real bugaboo, isn't it?

Here I am, a grown woman, supporting myself in my own business, happily making cold calls, confident I can take on men with twice my experience and come out on top, but the thought of bearing a child sets me quaking. Kind of pathetic, isn't it? But I can't help it.

I imagine the child I carried inside me growing up and getting hurt or breaking her heart over something I don't have the slightest clue about, and it scares the daylights out of me. I suppose it's because I never told my parents anything when I was young. What if my kid turned out like me? I'd hate that," she said with a chuckle as she handed the cell phone back.

"Actually," Sayoko said, looking at her daughter smiling back at her from the phone, "that's exactly what I think sometimes—that Akari's getting to be like I was. And I hate it, too. I want my daughter to be brighter, more outgoing, more sociable, you know, but when you consider what a terror she is at home, it's almost sad how timid she is outside. A lion at home but a mouse abroad, as they say. She's been going to school for nearly a month now and she still hasn't made any friends as far as I can tell. It reminds me of when I was little. When 91