MANNY CAUGHT the last Chiba-bound train on the Tozai Line a few minutes after midnight. The car was nearly full as it left Nihombashi and he was lucky to find a seat. A slim woman nodded and scooted over to give him room; a fat salaryman crossed his arms and refused to budge.
It was thirty-minute trip to his apartment in Nishi-Funabashi. At each stop the fat man opened his legs wider and pushed against his knee. Manny turned and looked more closely—the man wore the traditional tan raincoat over a blue suit. He stared straight ahead and looked tense enough to pop. Slowly, he applied even greater pressure, until Manny’s knee began to ache.
“Excuse me,” Manny said, and slid out of reach. Tonight, at least, he refused to push back, to sit angry and uncomfortable, locked in a squabble for half an inch of space.
The salaryman grunted, annoyed that Manny had spoken. He shifted his eyes around the car to see if anyone had noticed. None of the riders seemed to be looking his way. He gave up on Manny and shoved against the body on his right, a kid in leather with half-black, half-orange hair and an electric guitar. The kid ignored the pressure for a moment and then stood up. He offered his seat to a young woman hanging off a strap. She scowled down at the salaryman and declined.
When the trained pulled into Nishi-Funabashi, seventy percent of the passengers rushed to get off first. The rest, too drunk or sleepy to fight the crowd, waited in their seats. The doors opened and spilled the mob onto the platform. A young man in a light-gray suit waited for the car to clear and then stepped toward the door. He stopped to allow Manny to exit first and said quietly, “Go ahead, please.”
Nishi-Funabashi was just a spot on a map, a place to change trains, not really a city and hardly a town. Workers from the hinterlands poured through on their way to Tokyo and most never left the station. Those that did wander away from the drafty terminus did so with specific intent. They wanted to drink, gamble or fuck.
The fucking took place in love hotels behind the station. One stood eight-stories high and was painted Kelly green. Its prices were low and the efficient staff changed the sheets in two minutes flat. Fleet-footed patrons that didn’t bother with foreplay could have sex and still catch the next train home.
Manny walked down the steps of the station past a long queue in front of a late-night taxi rank. The streets were nearly empty. A few blobs, workers unfortunate enough to actually live in Nishi-Funabashi, trudged up the road past fast-food joints, bars and mahjongg parlors. At the crest of the hill a major artery narrowed and choked cars into a couple of noisy bumper-banging lanes.
Most that lived in Nishi-Funabashi didn’t like to admit it. They dreamed of moving from concrete condominiums overlooking the snarling traffic to a place where kids could play safely. Just the old people wished to remain. They lived in big gloomy houses built a hundred years earlier with curving blue-tiled roofs and tatami rooms.
Once upon a time the old people had been farmers and Tokyo had seemed far away. Now their children were rushing to sell the last remaining fields and the old people puttered in gardens behind high stone walls. They grew solitary sunflowers and kept half-dead roosters that infuriated the neighbors.
Many were nearly as old as their houses and wore dark padded yukata and wooden geta. When they looked up they usually became confused. Tall buildings blocked the sun and the shadows were too cold to touch even in summer. They shivered and fretted in the lee of English-language schools and banks; they complained to fat carp lolling gold and salmon-red in rocked-lined pools.
Standing in the street, slick grandsons watched the big city ooze closer with delight and talked of tax laws and loopholes. They made plans to bulldoze the old houses and ignored their grandparents when they held their breath and began to turn blue.
Manny’s apartment complex was across the main highway, fifteen minutes from the station. Six two-story wooden buildings of twelve apartments sat between low hills. The weed-choked complex was surrounded by a new chain-link fence. Manny reached the padlocked gate and stepped off the cement walkway onto a path snaking through the grass. He slipped through a hole cut in the fence and returned to the walkway.
Plastic bags of garbage, torn open by dogs and cats, and rusting abandoned bicycles slowed his progress. The new moon, weak and distant, was reflected in the screen of a fat console TV half-buried in the damp earth. A piece of newer junk—a skinny avocado washing machine—rested on its back next to the TV. A wind without direction teased open its plastic lid and then slapped it shut.
Manny had moved into the complex after the economic bubble had burst and construction work had dried up. The buildings were twenty-three-years old and ancient by Japanese standards. He lived on the first floor of Building 4 and considered himself lucky. Three weeks before a woman from Senegal had lost an arm when the iron staircase on Building 5 had collapsed.
Manny let himself into his apartment. His only home-improvement had been a steel hasp and a strong padlock. The lock was the reason he lived alone and why his few possessions remained his. He crossed the room in darkness and lit a kerosene lamp made from a jelly jar. The small flame provided sufficient light to get undressed but not enough to see any but the largest cockroaches scuttling across the tatami.
The room was very cold. Manny spent much of his time patching holes in the ceiling and walls with cardboard and duct tape but the night wind always found a way in. He hurried out of his clothes, crawled under a thin futon cover and stopped shivering after a few minutes.
It was too bad he’d returned so late—his favorite public bath was closed. There was another still open but it made him feel self-conscious. Citing AIDS as his reason, the owner had stopped admitting foreigners. There had been protests and the story had been picked up by the newspapers. A local official had reluctantly forced the owner to change his policy if not his attitude.
A surly old man, he now took the gaijins’ money with a grimace and slapped a dish-rag sized towel down on the counter. He also provided a piece of brown soap, no larger than a pat of butter, and hostility as hot as the water in the deep pools.
Manny didn’t mourn the loss of the bath too much. His new job would let him save enough to find a place nearer Sam and May. He concentrated on leaving and the apartment didn’t seem quite so awful. At least he had the place to himself. There were six Chinese next door and eight Malaysians wedged into the apartment above his head.
He just wished the government hadn’t turned off the water when they’d condemned the public housing project and relocated the Japanese residents. He could live without electricity and gas but the lack of water was inconvenient. Japan was a modern country, public taps and wells were hard to find. His neighbors on the other side of the hill were frightened when they found darker-skinned foreigners crouched in their yards, filling plastic milk containers from garden hoses.
But the price was right. Squatters paid no rent. A lack of amenities and confused, intermittent police harassment was part of the deal. Twice, in the months before Manny had arrived, cops had chased away the Bangladeshis, the Nigerians, the Filipinos and the rest. They’d returned the next day after dark.
The local government, tentative and unsure of itself when dealing with foreigners, had dithered. The chain-link fence had been tried after the evictions and had proved equally ineffective. The gaijins had been distressingly persistent and the problem had been passed up to the central government mandarins in Tokyo. What they would do next was anybody’s guess.
Manny woke to the roar of diesel engines, screams and lights as bright as day. The ground trembled beneath the building and he whispered earthquake. The light grew brighter in the window and he considered fire. His feet tangled in the futon and he fell grabbing at his clothes hanging on a hook on the wall.
He put on his trousers and opened the door. An amplified voice shouted in Japanese, a spotlight hit him in the eyes. Cops were everywhere, running and waving riot batons like swords. Mobile generators on the hillside spat clouds of exhaust blacker than the night and powered huge searchlights. He turned his head at the sound of ripping metal. Three bulldozers trampled over the fence and charged down the grass. They leveled their blades at Building 1 as gray prisoner buses with wire mesh windows rolled into position.
The cops began to shove the squatters onto the buses. Men without shirts and shoes and women dragging quilts screamed in a dozen languages. A loud-hailer answered as a bulldozer took a bite out of Building 1. The men tried to fight, the women tried to run. The bulldozer took another bite and Manny jumped out his back window.
He ran up the hill stumbling over junk hidden in the weeds. He didn’t stop running until he crossed the main highway. A taxi slowed as he collapsed on a bus stop bench. The driver leaned toward the window, took a long look, and drove away.
It seemed to take a long time for his heart to slow. Sweat began to dry on his chest and it felt cold. He put on his shirt and jacket, checked that he still had his wallet and passport. It took longer to lace up his sneakers. He’d torn his trousers climbing over the fence. Warm blood ran down his leg and made his fingers slippery.
Manny waited until the trains began running five a.m. He cleaned himself up as best he could in the station toilet and took the first train back to the city. May’s coffee shop was closed. Sam had decreed Sunday was, now and forever, a holiday.
Too early to be knocking on doors, he walked to Sumida Park and climbed the bank overlooking the river. The morning sun glanced off bright work on tugs and launches and began to warm the water. A small sloop with a tangerine sail tacked down river, heading for Harumi Pier and Tokyo Bay.
He waited until ten and walked back to the coffee shop. There was no need to ring the bell, Sam, May and Helen were just leaving and he caught them at the door.
“What happened?” May cried, before he could speak. She dropped to one knee and examined the gash in his leg. A feeling of helplessness, of being a beggar, had tormented him all morning. Once again, he was reminded of his daughters as she ignored his protests and hustled him upstairs. The feeling faded as Helen bandaged his knee and May fetched some of Sam’s clothes.
They were on their way to Yoyogikoen, a park on the other side of the city, and he kept his explanation short and undramatic. May insisted that he move into the apartment. He was thankful when Sam said no. It was hard enough to accept the money, an advance on his salary, that Sam offered.
Back on the street, May wished him luck and Manny set off to find another place to live. Sam’s clothes were warm and smelled of water softener. He fingered the wad of bills in his pocket—Sam had borrowed from May and Helen to raise the cash—and smiled. The cops and their prisoner buses seemed farther away now.
Manny knew that you couldn’t rent an apartment without going through a middleman but he had no experience. He’d slept in Ueno Park when he’d arrived in the city and his first employer had provided a bunk in a workers’ dormitory. Squatting in Nishi-Funabashi had required no red-tape or contracts at all.
He splurged and paid a hundred and forty yen for a ticket on the Ginza Line to Ueno Station. Apartment rental agencies were a lucrative consumer shakedown and their hole-in-the-wall offices could be found clustered around any train station. Within ten minutes he’d found half a dozen, all easily identifiable by the scores of floor plans pasted in the windows.
Sunday was apartment-hunting day and the agencies were crowded with young couples. Manny stalled and had a cup of coffee. He sat by himself in the corner of a small restaurant and reviewed all the housing-related words he could remember. There weren’t very many and he knew he was going to have major communication problems.
He tried a small agency near the restaurant first. A stocky middle-aged man looked up from a desk in a dark, closet-sized office and scowled. Before Manny was two steps in the door he was waving his hand rapidly in front of his face and snarling, “That’s impossible. Go away. I don’t want to be bothered.”
Japanese could be a compact language and he was able to say all this by repeatedly spitting out a single word that sounded like “dah-may.” Combined with the hand-waving it was a brush-off all foreigners soon became familiar with. When Manny didn’t retreat fast enough, he stood up and crossed his arms to form an X in front of his face, Japanese sign language for “Get lost, dumbshit.”
The next agency forced Manny to reevaluate his tactics. He’d thought the crummier looking offices would be more likely to help a gaijin with limited funds. Again, he made it no farther than the door. The office contained six or seven metal desks stacked with musty documents. Two old crones with shifty faces and shapeless dresses hunched over desks drinking tea and punching fingers into calculators. The office smelled of wet dog.
He took a step back, startled by a yipping and a yapping. A pair of toy poodles leaped from desk to desk, charging straight for him. They landed on the nearest desk and skidded, their tiny claws frantically seeking purchase. Yip, yap and snarl—they shook their piss-yellow paws and tried to bite him with pointy teeth.
Clearly a more upscale establishment was in order, preferably one that didn’t keep vicious pets. He soon found an office with young staff members and Apple computers bolted to odd-shaped, European-looking desks. The boss smiled when he walked in and motioned for him to take a seat. Manny thanked the girl that delivered a cup of green tea and shook hands when an agent asked if he could be of service.
The agent was just a kid straight from college. He’d joined the firm three weeks before. As a first-year employee, he was paid a slave’s wage and could empathize with Manny’s budgetary predicament.
“Please speak slowly,” Manny said, understanding little but the agent’s smile.
“OK, OK,” the kid said, fingers flying over a computer keyboard as he manipulated the office data base. He shook his head and yanked on his skinny tie; he shoved a pack of Marlboros at Manny and fanned a sheaf of computer printouts.
Manny took one of the cigarettes as the kid mumbled to himself and began to root around in the bottom of the desk. A storm of file folders flew out and littered the floor; the boss raised his eyebrows and the kid shouted, “I’ve got it!”
He slapped a piece of paper on the desk. “Nobody wants this one.”
The offering looked like it had been kicking around the office for years, it had yellowed and the edges were ragged. The floor plan was drawn with a weak jerky hand. It wasn’t an apartment, just a single room.
“It’s cheap,” Manny said.
The agent nodded. “Really, really cheap. Only 20,000 yen a month.”
It was a ten-mat room. Manny had expected to get no more than six and would have settled for four and a half. You couldn’t rent a toilet in Ueno for 20,000 yen—there had to be something wrong. He examined the drawing carefully. There was a window but he couldn’t find a kitchen or bath.
The kid noted his concern and launched into an excited explanation of the particulars. Manny strained to understand, catching one word in ten. He rephrased what little he’d understood into gaijin Japanese.
“It’s part of a house and I can use the bath and toilet?” he asked.
“And the kitchen.”
“The owner is an old woman who lives alone?”
“Yes, but she’s healthy.”
“What’s the catch?”
“Huh?”
“It’s still too cheap. A ten-mat room is big. Why hasn’t anyone rented it?”
The kid laughed and offered Manny another smoke. “Ahh, I understand. It’s cheap because she only wants a gaijin.”
“Why?”
“Because you have to teach her English two hours a week.”
“How old did you say she is?”
A chubby man in a plastic apron pointed a heavy cleaver in Manny’s direction and berated the crowd, insulting anyone who refused to buy his wares. Manny smiled and the fishmonger grinned.
His wife, so short her head was barely visible above a mountain of dried fish and paper-thin seaweed, snapped, “What are you smiling about, old man? You tryin’ to ruin our business again?”
The fishmonger sighed. The grin, however fleeting, had been a flagrant violation of Edokko rules of conduct. Edokko were long-time downtown residents, literally, children of the city of Edo. It was an awesome responsibility. His customers expected him to be rude and irascible twenty-four-hours a day. Ungrateful wretches, they had no idea how tiring it was to be perpetually obnoxious.
Manny gripped the collar of the housing agent’s suit jacket as they moved deeper into Ameyoko market. The noisy Sunday crowd eddied and swirled down the alley and tugged on him like a rip tide. He was afraid if he let go he’d be washed away and surface somewhere near Hong Kong.
The kid stopped and pointed. “She lives up there.”
Dead in the heart of Ameyoko, the city’s best and sleaziest district. It was his favorite section of Tokyo, a last-remaining slice of Asia a block from Ueno Station.
“Too noisy? No good?” the agent asked.
A Yamanote Line train roared past on elevated tracks and Manny shouted to be heard. “No, it’s OK. No problem.”
Ameyoko reminded him of Olongapo and Manila, it was one the few areas in the city where he felt at ease. He like the fish smells and the tea smells and how easy it was to get lost. It would be a good place to live—people were alive here.
The shops were jammed together helter-skelter and bargain hunters grazed through narrow aisles aimlessly. Salarymen squinted at ten thousand gaudy ties wrapped in crinkly cellophane; gum-popping counter girls screamed back at preteens clamoring for discount video games. Undercutting competitors in Shibuya and Aoyama by fifty percent, shopkeepers treated their patrons with a brusque equality.
Manny had once needed warmer socks and had spent twenty-five minutes haggling over three pairs knitted in the mills of Shenzhen, China. Finally, the owner of the stall had thrown up his hands, puffed out his chest and refused to go any lower. He’d stuffed the socks in a wrinkled bag appropriated from a famous department store and held it out—take it or leave it.
The price had been fair and Manny had paid, counting out his money carefully in fifty- and one-hundred yen coins. One by one, the shopkeeper had dropped the coins in his shirt pocket. His wife had looked up as he’d pushed Manny out of the shop. She’d laughed as he’d dragged him toward a stand-up bar shadowed by the trains rushing out of Ueno Station.
The shopkeeper had slapped his hand on the bar and pulled Manny’s money from his pocket to pay for the first round. He’d conspired with the proprietor of the bar to thwart Manny’s efforts to pay for anything at all.
Communication had been easy, flowing as freely as the beer poured from cold brown bottles. Working stiffs with wives and kids, they’d waved their hands, patted each other on the back and ogled women they wouldn’t have dreamed of pursuing.
At last, when everyone in the bar had been rip-snorting drunk, the shopkeeper and the bar owner had provided a demonstration of sumo fighting techniques. The shopkeeper’s wife had arrived as they’d charged, grappled and laughed. A cold winter rain had been falling for hours. She’d held an umbrella over their heads and led them home through the darkness.
Manny had been treated to dinner—tempura—and the honor due a guest. The next morning he’d struggled from his dormitory bed with a pounding headache, a rebellious stomach and no socks—he’d left them on the bar, pushed aside and forgotten in their crumpled bag. Still, they had been one of the true bargains of his life.
The agent led him up a wooden staircase at the back of a leather goods shop. The door opened and a small, crinkly face peered at the two men. She stood on her tiptoes to get a better look, the top of her head almost reaching Manny’s shoulder. Her hair was silver, long and loose.
“Is this my foreigner?” she asked. She looked younger than her eighty-three years. Her voice was strong and her eyes clear.
The agent took a long time making introductions. Her name was Nobuyo Kojima and she asked, “You’re not an American?”
The kid didn’t give him time to answer, he began speaking too fast for Manny to follow. I’m about to flunk the gaijin test, he thought. Japanese liked foreigners that fit a specific image—young, white, spunky and naive. American blondes with less than three months in country were prized most of all. Canadians of the proper race and age were almost as good and Australians were acceptable. British were looked upon with skepticism.
Manny stopped listening the second time the kid mentioned the Philippines. He didn’t have a chance, the Japanese no longer believed they were Asians. Where this left them in the global scheme of things, he didn’t have a clue.
Kojima-san waved away the agent’s explanations and invited them into the house. She led Manny down a dark hall to a room at the back. The tatami was new. Still green, it smelled of fresh-cut grass. Sunlight streamed in through a large open window. A colorful Ukiyoe print, sea-blue and magenta, hung on the wall. A black lacquer table sat in the corner. Overhead, a carved sandalwood lamp with a round neon bulb dangled from a brass chain.
Kojima-san looked up at Manny and spoke shyly in English. “I’m sorry. No TV.”
“The room’s beautiful,” Manny said, and nodded at the kid grinning widely in the doorway. “He didn’t tell me you could speak English.”
“I can only a little. My husband taught me. He was a trader for Nissho Iwai. He did business overseas. Now, I have no chance to speak English because I’m an old woman. Nobody talks to me.”
Her accent was awful and she hesitated between each word but a Manny could understand the true meaning easy enough—nobody talks to me in any language at all.
She bustled across the room and slid open a closet door printed with blue herons on a snow-white background. “Sorry, no bed.” She pointed inside at bedding and cushions. “I have futon and zabuton. Do you know futon?”
“Sure. I like it, it’s easier than a bed.” He hesitated. “So, would it be OK for me to stay here, Kojima-san?”
“Yes, but can you teach me English a little?” She paused and felt adventurous. “Or maybe, you could teach me Taga...uhh, Taga...” She blushed.
“Tagalog,” Manny helped.
“And tell me of Cebu.”
“Cebu?”
“My honeymoon. It was in...” Nobuyo Kojima tried to remember, to look down the years, to recall palm trees, the sun and a coral blue sea. “I was nineteen. Mr. Kojima was sent to Cebu for two years and I went, too. That was in 1928. Beautiful, beautiful.”
Manny smiled. He’d never been to Cebu or any of the Visayan islands. But that didn’t really matter. Kojima-san only wanted someone to listen and help her with her memories. He knew he could do that much; he missed the Philippines, too.
