I couldn’t stop thinking about Fuyuki. Every time the lift bell rang and the hostesses swivelled round to yell in unison across the club, ‘ Irasshaimase! Welcome!’ I’d sit forward on the edge of my seat, my pulse leaping, thinking I might see his wheelchair gliding across the floor. But he didn’t come into the club that night, or the next.
Over the days that followed, I would take out his card and look at it several times a day. Sometimes I went into a kind of trance holding it, turning it over and over in my fingers. His name meant Winter Tree and something in the combination of the calligraphy and the nature of the characters was so powerful that I only had to glance at the black on white to visualize, in astonishing clarity, a forest deep in snow. I would retrace the kanji with my calligraphy brushes, picturing a mountainside, a pine forest, snowdrifts and icicles in the trees.
Now that I knew what would make Shi Chongming relent and give me the film, now that I was going to make the leap, I had become a serious student of the erotic. I started to watch the Japanese girls on the streets in their Victorian petticoats and lacy pumps, their ‘loose socks’ and short kilts. In traditional Japan, eroticism was something slender and pale like a flower stalk – the erotic was the tiny patch of bare skin on the back of a geisha’s neck. It’s something different the world over. I stared for hours at the Russians in their big high heels and orange suntans.
I had a lot of wage packets backed up, just sitting in a bag in the wardrobe doing nothing except making me jittery. Eventually I got up my courage and started shopping. I went to astonishing places in Ginza and Omotesando, caves crammed with sequined slippers, pink négligés, hats trimmed in purple marabou and rose pink velvet. There were cherry pink platform boots, and turquoise bags covered in hundreds of stick-on Elvis Presleys. The salesgirls with their bunches and ballerina skirts had no idea how to deal with me. They chewed their nails and watched me with their heads on one side as I trailed up and down the aisles in amazement, getting to know how people made themselves look sexy.
I began to buy things – I bought taffeta and velvet dresses, little shrug-on skirts in silk. And shoes, so many shoes: kitten heels, stilettos, court shoes, black-ribboned sandals. In a place called the Sweet Girls Emporium and Relax Centre, I bought a box of Stoppy hold-up stockings. I’d never worn stockings in my life. I dragged home piles of bags, weighed down like an ant.
But, of course, I didn’t have the courage to wear any of it. Everything stayed packed away in the wardrobe, day after day, all the dresses with red tissue paper taped round them. I thought about them, though, I thought about them a lot. Some nights I had a little ceremony that I kept absolutely secret. When the others were in bed, I would open the wardrobe and take out all the things I’d bought. I’d pour a glass of chilled plum liquor and drag the little dressing-table to a place under the light so that the mirror was properly illuminated. Then I’d go to the wardrobe and take a dress from its hanger.
It was horrible and exciting. Every time I saw myself in the mirror and reached automatically for the zip, ready to rip off the dress, I would think about Fuyuki sitting in his wheelchair, saying, ‘Are they all so pretty in England?’ Then I would stop, take a deep breath, slowly rezip the dress, and force myself to turn back and look, to study the white tops of my breasts, my legs in silk, dark, like inky water. I put on very high heels and painted my lips in a deep red, pure like heart-blood. I crayoned in eyebrows, and for a long time I practised lighting and smoking a cigarette. I tried to imagine myself, sitting formally in Fuyuki’s home, leaning towards him, cigarette smoke trailing across my painted lips. In my mind’s eye one of my hands was resting on a locked chest, the other was extended elegantly, palm up, to receive a large key that Fuyuki was passing to me.
After a long time I would open my eyes, go to the wardrobe and take everything out of its tissue paper, then arrange it in a ring round me. There were velvet strappy sandals, négligés in tangerine and cream, a crimson Ravage bra in the shape of a butterfly, still in its Cellophane. Things and things and more things, stretching out across the shadows. I’d lie down then, stretching out my bare arms, and roll over, mingling with my belongings, smelling the newness, letting them brush my skin. Sometimes I’d group them according to different rules: according to material, for example, black piqué crushing peach silk noil, or according to colour, saffron with copper, silver with teal, lilac and electric pink and grey. I held them up to my face and breathed in their expensive smells. And, because I must be a bit funny like that, the ritual always seemed to lead to one thing: my hands in my knickers.
The Takadanobaba house was big, but sound spread like water along the timbers and through the flimsy rice-paper screens. I had to be quiet. I thought I’d been careful until very late one night, when it was over, I slid back the door to go to the bathroom and found Jason a few feet away in the moonlit corridor, leaning out of the window, a cigarette between his fingers.
When he heard the door open he turned to me. He didn’t say anything. He looked lazily down at my bare feet, then up to the short yukata, to the flushed skin on my chest. He let the smoke curl up out of his mouth and smiled, raising an eyebrow, as if I was a huge and pleasant surprise to him.
‘Hello,’ he said.
I didn’t answer. I slid the door closed with a bang and locked it, sinking down with my back against it. Dressing like a sexy person – that was one thing. But Jason – well, Jason made me think things about sex that were much, much more frightening.