Lost Girls and Love Hotels (10 page)

I
take the train with American Used Freak. He buys his ticket from the machine. Doesn’t offer to pay for mine. The carriage is nearly empty, but he stands up. Holding on to a hanging strap with both hands. Swaying with the jerk and pull of the train. We don’t talk.

When I was ten, I watched the neighbor’s dog pull a hedgehog through a chain-link fence and tear it apart. I imagine, as we make our way, in awkward silence, from Shibuya station to Love Hotel Hill, that sex with American Used Freak will sound something like that. Desperate and hungry. Plenty of slobbering and groans.

I lead him to the same hotel Kazu took me. Choose the Marquis de Sade Room. It has fancy pink furniture, a four-poster bed splayed with various ropes, gags and cat-o’-nine-tails. At the last moment, before pushing the button on the illuminated panel, I check my mobile phone to see if Kazu
has called.
Be patient. Be patient
. I could go home and sit in my room. Listen to the cockroaches scuttle behind the walls and worry about money and visas and my sanity. I could. I look over at American Used Freak, who hasn’t said a word since we left the station, who looks strangely stoic and handsome in the kind, muted light of the private lobby. I push the button.

When I come out from the shower and drop my robe, American Used Freak makes a sound, the kind of sound you’d make as you take a last suck of air before jumping from a high place into deep water. There’s a moment of hesitation, some sweat that collects like dew above his lip.

I walk over to him, stand close, so that my nipples harden against his T-shirt. “So, American Used Freak.” I put a finger to his chin. “What’s your name?”

It takes a few seconds, but a smile creeps onto his face. A crooked grin. He grabs my finger and brings my hand down to my side. “You can call me Used,” he says. “No need for formality.”

I toss him a coil of rope, push aside the cuffs, the riding crop, the whips and blindfold, and curl up on the bed. In the fetal position. Somewhere between seduction and submission. Used skillfully binds me to the ornate headboard, puts a finger to his temple in contemplation, then proceeds to stretch my legs, spread-eagle, to the bedposts. As soon as I’m bound, after Used tugs at the knots to test their strength, when I’m sure I can’t wriggle my way out, a sense of calm blankets me. There’s no use struggling. I go completely limp. My body begins to feel like a rubbery, lifeless
thing. I have the feeling that something is being drawn from my belly, through my skin, through the dirty mattress, the smoky carpet, through the ground, to the center of the Earth. I turn my eyes and find myself in a mirror, relieved that I’m still here. Still solid.

Used doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t even take his clothes off. With a languid nonchalance, he makes his way around the room. Dims the lights. Switches the music off. Buys a beer from the vending fridge, pulls a chair up to the end of the bed, and lights a smoke. In the dark room, with the shadows playing on his face, Used looks like a different person. Older. Less chirpy and benign. Fear squeezes my heart. I’m getting wet.

Time passes. Three cigarettes. I’m dying for a puff, but I don’t ask.

“You like this,” he says.

I stay silent for a moment, wondering if he wants an answer. Something in the way he holds his head, chin lifted slightly, a long ash hanging precariously from the cigarette poised before his mouth, tells me he’s expectant.

“I like to be passive,” I say. “Do you know what that means?”

He takes a deep drag on his cigarette. “I am good at English. You needn’t grade your language.” The words tumble out with his exhale. “Passive. To obey without argument. I don’t like passive.”

I want to explain to him. Maybe being passive is allowing the other part of yourself to take the lead. But I stay quiet. Scan the room. It is windowless, but on one wall
there is an illuminated panel framed with velvet curtains, to give the impression of a window. Used stands up and walks to the side of the bed, brushes aside a hair that’s caught in my eyelashes. His hand hovers around my face for a few seconds. I can smell the sharp odor of nicotine, but my craving for a smoke has gone. He smiles. Grabs hold of the pillow and pulls it from under my head, drops it to the floor, and returns to his chair.

“I like these places. Love hotels.” He gives the room a once-over. Nods. “Do you know the words in Japanese
omote-ura?
”

I shake my head.

“
Omote
is the front. How can I explain? The mask. In the love hotel there is no
omote
.”

Used stands at the foot of the bed, cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth, and unties my legs. “These things are difficult for gaijin to understand.” The knots seem intricate, but he releases them as you would the laces on your shoes.

“It’s not rocket science,” I say. Trying out my voice.

“No, but it’s subtle. Something Western people don’t appreciate.”

I try to think of something clever. “
Wabi-sabi
,” I say.

“Ha! Love hotels do not have
wabi-sabi
. Simplicity and elegance. No.”

“What’s your point then?”

“I am returnee—I was educated in America. So I will never belong in Japan. Truly. But I am certainly not one of
you. Lapping at freedom like a dog at his bowl. No appreciation.”

He moves to my head. In the moment it takes him to untie my hands, I glance over to the mirror. Without the pillow to prop up my head, I can only see a sliver of myself. The ash from his cigarette falls on my neck. “So sorry,” he monotones, and roughly flips me onto my belly.

“
Ura
is what lies behind.” He collects my hands and feet and holds them together in a little bouquet, twists the cord around, ankles to wrists until I’m hog-tied. Steps back for inspection, mumbles a little in Japanese
(Dou shiouka? What shall I do?)
and wedges the pillow under my hips. “
Ura
is the true thing.”

My neck and back are starting to ache.

“Are you uncomfortable?” Used asks.

I shift a little bit. Open my knees a bit wider.

“If you move the next position will eventually hurt, and the next one. You ought to get used to how it is now.”

Used is quiet for a moment. I can’t see much—some bedsheets, a patch of wall, the sliver of me in the mirror. My sense of hearing gets sharper, as though I’ve been scanning radio frequencies, going through the crackle and hiss and finally turning the knob just so. I hear the room—the hotel—perfectly. The sound of Used smoking. The suck and the long exhale. I hear, through the wall, the sounds of a couple doing it. The creak of the bed. The rhythmic
ah-ah-ah
of the girl.

Used is at the side of the bed. His hand on the inside of my thigh. I want to change the energy in the room. I lift my hips an inch, let out a little moan of anticipation. “See how wet I am?”

“I could kill you and no one in Japan would care. Only about bad press maybe.”

“That’s not true,” I mumble into the pillow. “Someone would care.”

Used takes his hand from me and moves away. “Just wait,” he says. I hear the hiss of a beer can opening. “I’m going to tell you something.”

Used’s Something

“When I was a high school student,” Used tells me, “I knew a girl. There was always gossip about this girl, maybe because she was quiet and beautiful. Very white, with small lips. Probably because she had no mother. She lived alone with her father. No one knew about her mother. Perhaps she died, or ran away with a lover. I don’t know. The girl had an odd name as well—Lily—like the flower.”

“I thought at the time that Lily and I were perfect for each other. My father’s company had sent him to England for six years. I had gone to school there. I was what they call ‘returnee.’ My Japanese-ness was less than others’ maybe. And I could speak English. Anyway, I was good at sports and taller than the other boys, so I got some respect that way. Still, I was different. Like Lily.”

Used and Lily would meet in the afternoons at her
apartment, when her father was still at the company. She had a small, Western-style bed and her room was filled with all sorts of girl things. Posters of singers, dolls and toys, stacks of comic books. In the absence of a mother, Lily kept the small apartment clean for her father, but her bedroom was a mess. The floor was carpeted with clothes, every surface was cluttered with makeup, the window and vanity mirror were a collage of tiny Print Club machine photos. It almost hurt your eyes it was so full of things, but Used liked being there. She’d make a snack and some tea, and they would talk a bit. Then she’d crawl under the covers of her bed, pull the duvet up to her chin and look at Used.

As soon as he took his school-uniform jacket off and found room next to Lily on the small bed, his cock would get hard and his face would flush. This seemed to do something to Lily, push some trigger, as if arousal began in another person, and only after she saw it would it move to her body. Taking care not to let the duvet fall below her collarbone, Lily would shimmy out of her clothes and press herself against Used. She would never let him remove his clothes and she would never, under any circumstances, let him see her body.

They never had sex, but in the sincerest, sweetest meaning of the term, they made love. Used felt as though he wanted Lily to pass through his skin, to be absorbed into him.

Used assumed that after a few weeks, Lily would lose her shyness and he’d be allowed to see her body, but it never happened. If anything, she became more and more vigilant
about keeping the covers pulled up to her chin at all times. He wondered if maybe there was a scar or a burn on her body—some mark she was too embarrassed to show him. Under the duvet, after they’d made love, he would run his hand over her thighs and back, along her abdomen. The skin seemed uniform and unflawed. A little trail of fine hairs led his hands down from Lily’s navel to the tuft of hair on the gentle rise of her pubic bone. He observed her body without eyes—charted it—and Lily would moan a little or fall into a light sleep.

“One day Lily’s father returned home early. I was in her bed when we heard the scratch of the key in the lock. He coughed loudly—that awful salaryman cough from too much smoking. He yelled, ‘
Tadaima!’
and Lily put her clothes on in panic. It all happened so fast, and I was so frightened, I didn’t even look at her body as she dressed. She was going to go into the living room when she turned around and searched through some clothes piled on the floor for a cotton cooking apron. The kind housewives wear, with stupid English slogans and teddy bears. Her apron said:
I FEEL COOKIES
. She looked scared. Her hair was fuzzy and knotted at the back. After that I always loved these stupid English sayings on things.”

Used stayed there in Lily’s bed until her father went to take a bath. Lily kissed him good-bye and laughed a little in relief as he left.

Things went on like this for a couple of months—the talking, the tea and snacks, the sweet, shy lovemaking—until suddenly Lily told Used that she couldn’t see him in
the afternoons for a while. She had to take care of her grandmother, who was ill.

“I tried to make myself busy after that. I played baseball with my school friends. Once or twice in the month after that, Lily asked me to come over, but things were changed. She seemed tired most days, and I was too full of wanting her to act as normal.”

Just after winter began, Used started to hear gossip about Lily. She was seeing some boy from another school. She’d go to love hotels with him and bring him to her apartment.

Used started following Lily after school. He would enter the subway carriage next to hers, stand by the through-doors, and watch her. She was tall for a schoolgirl and always wore a red muffler, so it was easy to find her among the tangle of commuters. After a week of following her, Used started to learn Lily’s body language intimately, as though it was his own. The way she’d rock on her heels when she was waiting on the train platform. Chew at her fingers when she was nervous. Nod her head again and again when her friends babbled at her, like she was urging them on, or urging them to finish. There were things about her that he did not know. Like how she evaded him sometimes, in the narrow streets around the station, disappearing for an hour or two then turning up again at the ticket kiosk. Like what she was thinking when she was alone.

“I waited by her building one day. She didn’t arrive home until after eight o’clock. All the time that I was waiting
there, looking up at the balconies of her building, I remember feeling deeply sad. Almost every balcony had some similar arrangement of the same objects. Some potted plants. A clothesline. A futon draped over the rail to air. I looked from building to building and almost each apartment was identical. Then I started to think about the people in every apartment. I wondered how many of them felt this awful pain of mine.

“For just a moment I felt comforted by the thought that I wasn’t alone, but that didn’t last long. The sadness, the jealousy, the comfort, they turned into a hard piece of anger. If I squinted my eyes, the buildings looked like grids. If I looked at Tokyo from above, the city would also look like a grid of little squares. I was simply something to fit in one of the slots. The lonely schoolboy. The unsatisfied. I sat there, on the cold cement of the entranceway, and when Lily finally walked up, I didn’t feel anything else, just anger.”

Lily invited him in but told him he couldn’t stay long.

“My father will be home in an hour or so.”

Lily fussed over the tea in the kitchen. She burned herself on the handle of the teapot and sucked her finger.

“How is your grandmother?” Used asked. A blank white space was filling his body, like anesthesia taking hold.

“She’s okay,” Lily took careful little steps with the tray in her hand. “Are you hungry?”

“Why don’t we go into your bedroom, huh?”

“Well, my father will be coming—”

Used took the tray from her and put it on the table.
Maybe she could feel the white space inside him, or maybe she felt guilty, but her hand was stiff and clammy when he led her into the bedroom.