‘So, what do you think?’ he asked, but not in the spirit of actually soliciting her opinion. It was more of an attempt to confirm what he already knew:
She’s really something, isn’t she? You just don’t find young women like her any more. You see that, don’t you?
‘Strange girl,’ Kai said, exhaling smoke.
‘Strange?’
‘I’ve never met a girl quite like that before.’
‘Well, it’s a whole new generation, Kai.’
‘That’s true, but some things never change. What’s most important to a person, that’s the question. Always has been and always will be. When I meet someone, I can usually tell within a minute or two what it is they value most. The young people nowadays – men and women, amateurs and pros – generally fall into one of two categories: either they don’t know what it is that’s most important to them, or they know but don’t have the power to go after it. But this girl’s different. She knows what’s most important to her and she knows how to get it, but she doesn’t let on what it is. I’m pretty sure it’s not money, or success, or a normal happy life, or a strong man, or some weird religion, but that’s about all I can tell you. She’s like smoke: you think you’re seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there’s nothing there. That’s a sort of strength, I suppose. But it makes her hard to figure out.’
‘She’s nice, though, right?’ Aoyama said.
Kai seemed taken aback by this. She shook her head and stubbed out her cigarette.
‘Is that really what you think?’ she said.
A simple question, but it rocked him. He knew perfectly well that Yamasaki Asami wasn’t simply a nice girl, and yet that was how he’d chosen to think of her. Kai had put her finger on this bald self-deception, and he had the odd sensation of wanting to be surprised but not being able to.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m sure she’s not a bad person. I’m pretty serious about her.’
Kai frowned and shook her head again.
‘Nice person, bad person – that’s not the level this girl is at. I can see you’re crazy about her and probably won’t be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you’d be better off staying away from someone like her. I can’t read her exactly, but I can tell you she’s either a saint or a monster. Maybe both extremes at once, but not somewhere in between.’
9
The next morning, around nine-thirty, Yamasaki Asami telephoned the office. It was the first time she’d ever called him.
‘Aoyama-san, there’s a Miss Yamasaki on line four.’
Takamatsu, a young female staff member, had taken the call. The office was one large room, and Aoyama had no private quarters of his own. His employees called him simply ‘Aoyama-san’ – with the exception of Tanaka, an accountant in his fifties, who preferred the more conventional ‘Chief’. Takamatsu would naturally have asked what the call was in reference to. What had her reply been?
‘It’s me,’ she said when he picked up the phone. ‘I’m sorry to bother you at work.’
The staff would hear his side of the conversation – but so what, he thought. He’d eventually have to fill them all in anyway. Marrying a woman who was nearly twenty years younger than himself, and more beautiful than your average film star, was likely to earn him some teasing, but he was sure they’d all be happy for him.
‘Is it a bad time?’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of calling you anyway.’
‘I just couldn’t wait any longer to hear your voice.’
‘I know. Same here.’
Takamatsu, tapping at her computer keyboard, glanced over at him. Takamatsu was twenty-five. After graduating from college she’d spent a year in London, and upon returning to Japan she’d worked for a small TV station in her home town. But she’d left that job and applied to Aoyama’s company because of her burning ambition to work on real documentaries. At her interview she’d come across as fairly impertinent, and the senior staff members had opposed hiring her, but Aoyama was impressed with her English skills and her fire. He put her in charge of licensing foreign documentaries and facilitating joint projects with production companies overseas. Unlike so many young people, she managed to remain both passionate and objective about projects she worked on, not letting her own personal tastes cloud her judgement. Her boyfriend was a foreigner.
‘I’m sorry about last night,’ Yamasaki Asami said. ‘I guess I kind of lost it.’
‘There’s nothing to apologise for. It was my fault for bringing up something like that out of the blue.’
‘Do you understand why I’m calling?’
‘I think so. I wanted to hear your voice too.’
There was a subtle difference in the way she spoke to him now. Polite and refined as always, but she was using somewhat less formal language, and her voice seemed somehow more intimate, more trusting. That, Aoyama realised, was a direct result of last night’s kiss, and the fact that they now shared a secret of sorts. Aoyama welcomed this change, of course, and he found her voice more bewitching than ever. He had to concentrate to keep from breaking into a goofy smile.
‘I still don’t completely understand,’ she said. ‘Or, rather, I still don’t completely believe it.’
‘What I said last night?’
‘Of course. What else?’
‘It was all so sudden, after all.’
‘But it’s true . . . isn’t it?’
‘It’s true. Everything I said last night is the truth.’
He hadn’t got around to telling her about Shige, but that wasn’t a lie. Hearing her voice, he wished he could see her, be with her. And once that thought had occurred to him, every nerve in his body seemed to crackle with desire.
‘Can we meet again soon?’ she asked.
‘Of course. I wish it could be right now.’
He told her he’d call back later in the day to arrange something.
Takamatsu was watching him and smiled when he ended the call. He wondered if he should confide in her, ask her advice. He didn’t know what his next step with Yamasaki Asami should be. There was the question of sex, for example. Having confirmed their mutual feelings with that kiss, should they nonetheless wait until they were married to make love? He had hinted at this question to Kai the night before.
‘Should you sleep with her?’ Kai had said. ‘You got me. Young women today are all over the map on that one. Some are offended if men try to have sex with them and some are offended if they don’t. So I have no way of knowing, particularly when it comes to a girl who’s so hard to read. But one thing I can say for sure is that the more intimate you become with her, the more obsessed you’re going to get. You’ve got to carve it into your skull, Ao-chan, that you don’t really know anything about this girl. And it’s not as if there’s some infallible method for getting at the truth. You know, there’s something old-school about this one, in a way. Back in the day, in the geisha world, you’d run across a girl kind of like her every now and then. Breathtakingly beautiful, very popular with the clients, nothing but the top class of patrons, but basically unfathomable. They’d have an almost unnatural sort of beauty, the sort of beauty that made you wonder if it hadn’t been nourished by all the misery and misfortune in the world. The sort of beauty that can destroy a man. And of course that sense of danger, too, seems to drive men wild. The old
femme fatale
thing.’
Aoyama invited Takamatsu out to lunch. He phoned from the office to reserve a table at what she said was her favourite restaurant in Tokyo, an Indian place in Jingu-mae. There were only eight tables, and people without reservations were queuing. Takamatsu was a regular, apparently: the head waiter knew her and seated them next to a window with a view of the Jingu woods.
‘Shall we have beer?’ she suggested.
Aoyama ordered two bottles of Indian brew. Takamatsu drank hers straight from the bottle, the label of which featured three pink flamingoes. He waited until the tandoori chicken and prawns arrived before relating the story thus far, from his first meeting with Yamasaki Asami to last night’s kiss.
When he finished, Takamatsu said, ‘Good heavens. When did you become such a romantic?’
‘Me?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I’ve become a romantic?’
‘Could there be a more classic case? Aoyama-san, I always thought of you as one of the few people in Japan who’s capable of making a proper documentary.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘You’re the one who taught me that romance has no place in documentaries – not as a motivating force, anyway. That it’s too amorphous and vague and ultimately insidious.’
‘I said that?’
‘Not in so many words, maybe, but it’s one of the things I’ve learned from you. Naturally work and private life are two different things – I’m basically a romantic myself, I’d say – but it’s never good to let romance blind you to the truth, is it?’
The silhouetted branches of plane trees waved in the wind outside the window. A dish of aubergine and shredded meat was placed before them, and Aoyama studied Takamatsu’s face as she dug in. He felt he finally understood what Kai had been saying the night before. Takamatsu had an average face. She was attractive enough – bursting with confidence and ambition and blessed with regular features and a good grasp of make-up and fashion. Quite sexy, really, but average nonetheless. Yamasaki Asami’s face and body, on the other hand, evoked a kind of perilous fragility that made you feel as if things were on the verge of collapse, as if the centre couldn’t hold and the axis had already begun to tilt. When he was around her, he was in a constant state of mild anxiety. His heartbeat would speed up, and he was never truly at ease.
‘So there’s something I’m missing?’ he said.
‘Duh!’
‘But I’m perfectly aware that I’m crazy about her. Doesn’t that count for anything?’
‘Do you want to have sex with her?’
He hesitated before answering that. If he replied truthfully –
Of course, but I have this fear that she’ll vanish at the first touch
– Takamatsu was sure to laugh. Suddenly he felt as if he understood what ‘romantic’ meant.
‘Sure I do.’
‘Why haven’t you, then?’
He nodded but said nothing, staring at his spoonful of pork curry.
‘You’re afraid to, right?’ Takamatsu was wearing a thoughtful frown, but when Aoyama nodded again she laughed. He laughed too. ‘Good heavens!’ she said.
‘It’s not that I’m afraid the sex won’t go well,’ he hastened to explain.
‘Let’s hope not. Any man over forty who’s still bad in bed might as well stop breathing.’
‘So, what
am
I afraid of? That something would go wrong and she’d stop liking me?’
‘You’re asking yourself that one, right?’
‘Yeah. I guess I’m just so nuts about her that . . . I don’t know. It’s not as if there’s anything specific to be afraid of. I’m just afraid.’
‘That’s the romanticism.’
‘Yeah, well, whatever it is, it’s self-indulgent and counter-productive. And it’s not as if I don’t know any of the lines men use to try and seduce women. Why not just pick one, and if she turns me down she turns me down and we wait till we’re married? Simple enough, right?’
They were enjoying a dessert made of carrots and milk when Takamatsu said, ‘So where would you go to have sex? A hotel? Or your house in Suginami?’
‘Maybe I’ll take her away somewhere for a weekend.’
She nodded. ‘Not a bad idea.’
‘That’s right. We’re installing a new computer system, so I’m going to close down the office for a couple of days while they set it up. Anyway, there’s this great hotel in Izu, fantastic food, hot springs, the works. I thought it would be nice to get away and have a chance to really talk about things. Do you think you’d be interested?’
After returning from lunch, Aoyama had stepped out to a pay phone. Yamasaki Asami’s response was immediate and enthusiastic. ‘I’d love to!’ she said in her most animated voice. Aoyama was tense from just pronouncing words like ‘hotel’ and ‘hot springs’. It was, he thought, very much like saying, ‘Let’s not wait till we’re married to have sex.’ There were no official guidelines for seducing a woman, or for analysing her response. But at some point, as a man, you had to make a move.
‘What sort of clothing should I bring?’
‘Clothing?’
‘I suppose people dress fairly formally in a place like that?’
‘Not at all. It’s a resort, so casual is fine.’
Before ending the call he arranged a time and place to meet but didn’t raise the question of one room or two. In fact, he’d already reserved the room just before calling her: a junior suite with twin beds. They’d leave on Saturday, three days from now.
He needed to tell Shige about this, of course, and did so at dinner that evening. Shige had no objections but admitted to wishing he could have met her first.
‘Just one night?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. I’ll be home by Sunday evening.’