Only its ferocity of determination to find something out that ultimately became an interpretive mirage anyway? Still there was Guade’s enviable energy, focus, stellar unconsciousness. Who knew what those implements might yield?
Moran took the local to Shinjuku san-chome. He exited through the basement of Isetan Department Store, and then, in a sudden lurch of sentiment turned right rather than left and started walking toward the main Shinjuku Station, the entertainment district. His business hotel was quite the other direction, a choice, he decided a thousand, more likely several thousand, Japanese business men made every evening. Japanese movies and television shows were filled with the adventures of peasants from Kyushu or Hokkaido who couldn’t keep away from the attractions surrounding Shinjuku Station.
This main entertainment district, the kabukicho, was a grid of narrow streets, closed to most cars, and suddenly on all sides by bars, night clubs, game parlors, pachinko parlors, strip shows, discos, tiny eating places (with six or eight stools at the counter), basement coffee houses and on top floor, lounges. Before every building tuxedoed barkers poured out beckonings in the scarlet and orange-filled sky. Neon pulsated; the clouds overhead contained apparently, fluorescent lights. Reams of wandering Japanese, men with arms around each other, propping each other up in order to vomit, chic couples in the latest gear—army fatigues, string dresses, wide lapel suits, elegant frost white blouses, white patent leather shoes. And spreading charcoal fumes. Wine stink. Sake scents. Boiling water humidity bathing the area. Lurid posters and mechanical neon signs, and withal, a constant babble in another language. Moran could only pick out phrases. He was better used to the slurring of the dialect in Osaka. There appeared to be a greater precision of pronunciation in Tokyo, less emotive signaling in the phrases, yet more hostility in the muted tones.
Moran stopped first at a ramen stand and ordered another bottle of beer. Then, bolstered, he headed back out into the throngs. He oriented himself by keeping an eye on the enormous billboard atop a building that ran the full length of the block, advertising a sado-masochist show. When the rant of the barkers became more insistent and the neon grew more brilliantly orange, Moran knew he had entered the roadway of so called “love hotels” and “Turko baths”. And then a young, apparently Japanese fellow, in a slightly stained double breasted tuxedo was standing in front of him speaking insistently into Moran’s face—about ten inches, it seemed, from his nose. Was it English?
“Good time, eh? Very good time in here. And not so expensive. Good time, eh? Eh?”
Moran instinctively drew back, but the fellow pressed in. His breath, like that of lots of Japanese, smelled foul. “Good time?” Moran queried attempting to slow the pressure.
“Yes. So. So. Very good time. I fix it for you. I fix it for you. Come on in. Come in now!”
“How much?” Moran asked, back stepping further.
“Very inexpensive. Come on, I’ll show you. He grabbed Moran’s left arm. Moran felt the envelope shifting. He clamped it harder to his side and went along with the fellow.
At first Moran thought they were going upstairs, but instead they passed beyond the stairway and with shoes still on came into a thickly carpeted lobby. There appeared to be a hotel registration desk.
“What is this?” Moran said, suddenly steadying fighting down the beer and scotch.”
“Turko. You know Turko? Don’t you want a bath? I think you do. I fix it for you. I find you a nice one speaking English. You’ll like this one. Don’t you want to?”
“Why not?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“How much?”
“You pay me two thousand yen. I set it up. Then you pay what she says. Okay?”
“Okay,” Moran said. He set the envelope on the counter top, got out his wallet and took two one thousand yen notes out, self-consciously keeping the extent of his holdings from general view. Moran felt strangely in control, as if he were designing the sequence of events. He had heard about Turkish baths, but the direct action possible in Shinjuku seemed liberating. And the scotch/beer empowering. If he were in charge, what could go wrong? Japan always left him always in charge if totally dependent. Japan was the safest spot on earth. And if he perished here, who would be upset anyway? Only this fellow whose unlined face and features like those Moran imagined American Indians must have possessed for the Pilgrims, bespoke only eagerness to please. No simply taking the money and running. He brought back a slender, short woman who was, Moran estimated, about thirty years old. She carried a red plastic shopping basket and a large sponge. She smiled and her one-piece jump suit with the sleeves and pants cut off at the highest joints reminded Moran suddenly of car hops in Florida. Was she on roller skates?
No, indeed, although she fairly glided upstairs, Moran following, the tuxedoed fellow smiling and bowing with each of Moran’s backward glances. About half way up the stairs Moran saw the envelope still on the Registry counter. He stopped, abruptly wheeled and bounded back down. He jumped the last five steps, vaulted to the desk and snatched the envelope up. Suddenly he felt absurdly foolish. The woman on the stairs smiled at him and waved him to come back up. Moran looked at the tuxedoed fellow, then held the envelope up. “Life insurance policies,” Moran shouted.
He went quickly back up the stairs. She led him to one of about fifteen doors opening off a long corridor. They came into a small six by ten foot room with a narrow massage table against one wall. There was a second room opening off the first. This contained a tiny, rather shallow bath tub. She motioned for him to take off his clothes. As he took off each garment she folded each with exaggerated carefulness, fitting each into the basket. When he was naked she handed him a traditional Japanese towel about nine by twenty inches of thin almost transparent white cotton. Then she indicated he should sit on the massage table. He put the towel across his loins. She stroked the hair on his chest, treating it with wonder and, he sensed, a rehearsed satisfaction. After she had tucked the basket on the floor under the table, she turned back to him and in rapid-fire Japanese said something that sounded like, “Sucki nee mahn en.”
“Eh?” Moran answered, trying to ferret out the meaning from the sounds.
“Sucki nee mahn en,” she repeated quickly, business-like, implacable.
Moran knew his numbers, “nee mahn en,” meant 20,000 yen, more than he had. “Ni mahn yen, desuka?” Moran asked to confirm the amount and to get more time to figure out what “sucki” might mean. He considered whether she meant it in Japanese or English, or did it mean the same in both languages?
“Hai, so desu,” she quickly confirmed the amount.
“Takai,” Moran answered, drawing out the last syllable, a device in Osaka that indicated the price was too expensive.
She appeared not to follow that evaluation.
Moran felt acutely vulnerable. The door to the corridor had been left open and it seemed the room was designedly cold. Chilled down. Moran shift his thin towel protection. He remembered clearly enough that in Japan you didn’t haggle. You didn’t bargain. Crude counter-offers were considered insulting. The door had been left open he decided to settle such insults definitively.
“Ni mahn yen?” he asked again.
“So desu,” she answered automatically with, he figured, a tinge of impatience.
“I don’t have it,” Moran said in slow, hyper-articulated English.
She smiled at him.
“I’m
