Some things are more terrible, more awful than you can imagine. It was in the car on the way to Fuyuki’s party that I remembered what oshaka meant. Where I’d read it. I sat up straight, breathing deeply to stop myself shaking. I should have stopped the driver. I should have opened the door and stepped right out of the moving car, but I was paralysed, the awful idea crawling through me. When I arrived at the apartment complex there was a faint glaze of sweat on the nape of my neck and in the hollows at the back of my knees.
My car had been the last in the convoy, and by the time I got upstairs people had already been seated to dine. It was chilly outside – the pool was freezing, crammed with reflected stars – so we were shown into a low-ceilinged dining room overlooking the pool. Tokyo Tower, on the other side, was so close that its red and white candy-cane light bathed the large round dining-tables.
I stood for a moment, surveying the scene. It all seemed so unthreatening. Fuyuki, tiny and skeletal and dressed in a red racing-driver’s jacket emblazoned with the word ‘ BUD ’, was in his wheelchair at the head of the top table, smoking a cigar and nodding genially at his guests. There were only a few spaces left at the table near the window. I slipped into a seat, nodding tightly to my neighbours, two elderly men, grabbed a napkin and pretended to be absorbed in unfolding it.
In the corner, behind the display cabinet, was a small galley kitchen where the waiters were busy with trays and glasses. Standing in the middle of the food-preparation area, cool and unflustered by all the activity, was the Nurse. Dressed in her trademark black skirt suit and turned a little away from the room, so that the glossy wig obscured part of her face, she was chopping meat on a large wooden board, her white-powdered hands moving deftly, almost a blur. Jason was watching her from the doorway, one hand raised casually to lean against the frame. A cigarette burned between his fingers, and he moved only to allow a waiter to pass with a plate or a bottle. I tucked the napkin over my lap, my movements wooden, automatic, unable to tear my eyes from the Nurse’s hands. What strange meat, I wondered, were they accustomed to preparing? And how had she removed the insides of a man, a man whose watch hadn’t even been disturbed in the process? The hostesses seated near the kitchen kept shooting her uncomfortable looks. With her holding the knife as she was, her hands moving so rapidly, you couldn’t expect people to act naturally.
A waiter reached into a circular recess at the centre of the table where I sat. He twisted his hand a few times and a sudden blue flame leaped into the air, making some of the hostesses jump and giggle. I watched the waiter as he adjusted the flame, then placed a large stainless steel flask of water over it. Dark pulpy strands of kelp moved at the bottom and, as the first bright bubbles collected like silver stones, ready to rise to the surface, he scraped from a silver platter into the water a pile of chopped carrots, mushroom and cabbage, a handful of tofu squares, creamy as flesh. He stirred the soup once, covered it with a lid and moved to the next table.
I looked down at my place mat. A large linen bib was folded in front of me, next to it miniature bamboo tongs and a small bowl of sauce, gleaming with fat.
‘What’s this? What are we going to eat?’ I asked the man on my right.
He grinned and fastened his bib round his neck. ‘It’s shabu shabu. Do you know shabu shabu?’
‘ Shabu shabu?’ The skin round my mouth tingled minutely. ‘Yes. Of course. I know shabu shabu.’
Sliced beef. Plain meat, brought raw to the table. Mama Strawberry wouldn’t eat shabu shabu here. She wouldn’t eat anything in this apartment because of those stories – the stories of strange meat, served up side by side with the stalls that sold oshaka. Oshaka. It was an odd word that meant something like second-hand, or discarded belongings, which would have been rare things in a city like post-war Tokyo where nothing that could have been eaten, burned or traded for food would have been discarded. But in the car I’d recalled there had been a more sinister meaning still: the yakuza had used a play on the words osaka and shaka, a reference to the Buddha, to describe very specific ‘discarded’ belongings. When Strawberry said oshaka she meant the possessions of the dead.
The waiter took the lid off the flask on the table and the sweet steam rose up in a column. In the boiling water the cubes of tofu bounced and lifted and somersaulted.
The sliced beef came round, cut as fine as a carpaccio, the plate visible through the flesh. I allowed the waiter to place the platter on my left, but I didn’t immediately start rolling the meat on to my tongs as my neighbours were doing. Instead I sat and stared at it, my throat knotted. Everyone was eating, lifting the raw slices of beef, holding them up to the light so the meat was illuminated in its red and white marbling, then plunging it into the boiling water, swishing it back and forward – swish swish, shabu shabu. Dunk it in the sauce now, and throw back your head. The diners dropped the meat almost whole into their mouths. Pearls of grease collected on their chins.
People would soon notice I wasn’t eating, I thought. I snapped up some meat, dipped it in the sizzling soup and lifted it to my mouth, taking a tiny nibble from the edge. I swallowed hard, not tasting it, thinking suddenly of Shi Chongming and how painful it was for him to eat. I rested the remainder of the meat in the sauce bowl and took a hasty swallow of red wine. Bison, over on Fuyuki’s table, wasn’t eating either. There was a faint look of unease on his face as he studied the Russians, who sat on either side of him, both shovelling the beef enthusiastically into their mouths. That’s because you know, Bison, I thought. You know all about oshaka and zanpan stew and what Fuyuki thinks makes him immortal. Don’t you? You know the truth.
The waiters had stopped moving in and out of the little galley kitchen, and Jason had slipped inside. He stood quite close to the Nurse for some time, talking to her in a low murmur. Every time I looked up he was there, speaking urgently, trying to convince her of something. She didn’t break off from her work – it was almost as if he wasn’t there. Once he happened to turn and look into the dining room and caught me watching him. I must have looked very white and shocked, sitting so upright at my table. He opened his mouth, seemed about to say something, then swung his eyes to indicate the Nurse, and sent me a private smile, a smile I was supposed to share. He put the tip of his tongue on his bottom lip, pushing against it so that the inside of his mouth was momentarily revealed.
I dropped my eyes to the cooling meat on my chopsticks. A growing skin of congealing fat was whitening on it. My stomach cramped, discomfort raced through me.
At the other table Bison and Fuyuki were discussing a skinny young man with pockmarked skin and dyed-blond, feathered hair. A new recruit, he looked anxious to have been summoned to the table. ‘Step forward, chimpira,’ said Fuyuki. ‘Come here, chimpira. Come here.’ Chimpira was a word I hadn’t encountered. It was only months later that I discovered it was a term for a Mafia junior soldier. It meant, literally, ‘little dick’. The chimpira came to stand in front of Fuyuki, who turned his wheelchair away from the table and, using his cane, lifted one side of the chimpira ’s baggy lavender suit to reveal not a shirt but a black T-shirt. ‘Look at this,’ he said to Bison. ‘This is the way they dress today!’ Bison smiled weakly. Fuyuki sucked in his cheeks and shook his head regretfully, dropping the cane. ‘These young ones. What a disgrace.’
He made a gesture to the waiter, who went into the kitchen. Someone brought a chair and the neighbouring guests shuffled away so that the chimpira could edge in next to Fuyuki. He sat, nervously wrapping his jacket round the offending T-shirt, his face pale, glancing at the other guests. It was only when the waiter returned hotfoot with a tray from which he unloaded two small, unglazed cups, a jug of sake, a sheaf of heavy white paper and three small bowls, containing rice and salt, that the chimpira relaxed. A whole fish lay on a platter, its sunken eye on the ceiling. The chimpira was looking at all the equipment of the sakazuki ritual. It was good news. Fuyuki was welcoming him into the gang. As the ritual began – fish scales scraped into the sake, salt pinched into pyramids, oaths pronounced by Fuyuki and the chimpira – I realized that every guest in the room had turned their attention to it. Nobody was watching the kitchen, where the Nurse had laid down the kitchen knife and was rinsing her hands at the sink.
I lowered my glass and watched in silence as she wiped her hands on a towel, smoothed her wig – her big hands moving flat down the back of the crown – then removed from a drawer a large fliptop canister. She opened it, plunged her hands inside, moving them round and round. When she removed them they were covered in a fine white powder that might have been talc or flour. She shook them, allowing the excess to fall back into the tin, looked up and spoke one sentence to Jason. I edged forward on my chair, trying to read her lips, but she turned away and, whitened hands extended in front of her in the manner of a doctor entering an operating theatre, put her back to the door at the far end of the kitchen, pushed through it and was gone. No one noticed her leave, nor when Jason put out his cigarette and looked at me, his eyebrows raised, a smile working its way across his face. I held his gaze, my face colouring. He tipped his head in the direction the Nurse had gone and showed me his tongue again, moist above his chipped tooth. He held up his hand and mouthed the word ‘five’, then he was gone through the same door, leaving me sitting in silence, in a cold pool of thought.
Jason was like nothing I’d ever dreamed of. All this time I’d been dealing with something completely outside my understanding. I was meant to follow him. I was meant to wait five minutes then follow, to find him and the Nurse undressing each other. I was probably meant to watch them – the indescribable vignette he had fantasized about, the malformed and the lover. And then I was supposed to join in. I had a sudden, macabre picture of a Japanese dance I’d once heard described performed by the prostitutes in a hot spring: the dance in the stream, it was called. With every step she takes into the river she must raise her kimono a little higher to keep it dry. She is revealed inch by inch. A white calf. Pale, bruised skin. Everyone holding their breath at the promise of more to come. The hem rises a little more – a little more. What would the Nurse look like naked? What would he be thinking when he touched her? And what would she be thinking when she touched him? When she touched living human flesh, how did she separate it from the dead human flesh that she ground up for Fuyuki? Would he whisper to her what he’d whispered to me: I just love to fuck freaks…
I lit a cigarette, pushed back my chair with a sharp squeal and went to the glass doors that led to the swimming-pool. They were ajar, and the poolside was still and eerily silent – apart from the bluk-bluk-bluk of the pool filter and the muffled traffic coming from the Number One Expressway. Only my pupils narrowed. The rest of me was quite still. Noiseless. Slowly, moving like a snake, my focus stretched out into the corridors around me, slowly, slowly, moving sinuously across the courtyard. Small lamps were placed at intervals around the pool. I put my fingers on the glass pane. The lamps reminded me of the small Buddhist lamps that were burned next to a corpse.
Where had Jason and the Nurse gone? Wherever they were, it left the rest of the apartment empty, unguarded. This was the irony: Jason couldn’t know how he had helped me. I imagined the rooms below me, as if a floorplan was drawn on the window in front of me. I saw myself, or my ghost, walking down the plush corridors, turning into the room under the pool. I saw myself bending over a glass tank, lifting something in both hands…
I glanced over my shoulder. Fuyuki and the chimpira were eating shabu shabu, Bison was on his feet, bent over a chair, talking to a hostess in a strapless dress. No one was looking at me. I pushed the glass doors open a fraction more and took a step into the damp night. The room under the pool where I’d seen the glass tank was in darkness. I took a breath and stepped forward, my heels metallic on the cold marble. I was about to push away from the doors when, in the room behind me, someone began to cough loudly.
I turned. The chimpira was patting Fuyuki on the back, his head bent in concern, muttering to him in a low voice. The wheelchair had been pushed back from the table, and Fuyuki was positioned with his head and shoulders pushed forward, his feet in the expensive designer shoes sticking out starkly in front of him, his body describing a hairpin. All the conversations in the room faltered, all eyes were on him as he clawed at his throat. The chimpira scraped his chair back and stood up, waving his hands uselessly, looking quickly from one door to the other as if expecting someone to come and help. Fuyuki’s mouth opened, almost in slow motion, his head curled back, then – in a sudden spring – his arms shot out and his chest bent backwards as taut as a bow.
Everyone in the room moved at once. They leaped from their chairs, rushed to him. Someone was shouting orders, someone else knocked over a vase of flowers, glasses were dropped, the waiter slammed his hand on an emergency button. Above me the red light on the wall flashed silently on and off. Fuyuki was trying to stand now, rocking violently from side to side in his wheelchair, his hands flailing in panic. Next to him stood a hostess, making odd little sounds of distress, shadowing his moves, bobbing up and down, trying to hit him on the back.
‘Out. Out.’ The chimpira ushered the girls in the direction of the corridor. Other hostesses followed, corralled so swiftly that they all dominoed into each other, shuffling forward with surprised looks, squealing, pelvises forward in surprise as if they’d been goosed. The chimpira looked over his shoulder to where Fuyuki had dropped to the floor, on his knees, jerking and scrabbling at his throat. ‘Out,’ the chimpira shouted to the girls. ‘ Now! Out! ’
I was trembling. Instead of following the crowd I stepped away from the glass door and walked quickly towards the pool, heading for the far corridor. It was quiet in the courtyard, the red light flashing up off the water. Behind me in the lighted room the phone was ringing, someone was barking orders.
‘Ogawa. Ogawa!’ It was the first time I’d heard anyone address the Nurse by name. ‘Ogawa! Where the fuck are you?’
I kept walking towards the far doors, out into the silence, my head held erect and sombre, the light and the sounds fading behind me. Just as I passed the pool and was almost home free, the doors ahead opened and out came the Nurse. She walked dazedly in my direction, pressing her wig into place, straightening her dishevelled clothes.
Maybe the enormity of the situation was only just dawning on her because she was trancelike as she headed for the commotion behind me. At first I thought she hadn’t seen me, but as we drew close she automatically extended her hand to sweep me along, forcing me towards the room. I took a few steps backwards, keeping her pace, edging out sideways, wide, so I could slip out of her orbit and disappear back into the night. I glanced around – at the various doors and windows – for somewhere to slide into. Then, before I knew what was happening, the chimpira had appeared from nowhere, grabbing my hand as if I was a child.
‘Let go,’ I said, staring down at his hand. But he was pulling me back into the room, following the Nurse. ‘ Let me go.’
‘Get out of here. Go with the others. Now!’
He manoeuvred me through the doors, pushing me back into the noise and confusion. The room was in chaos. Men I didn’t recognize had appeared in doorways, people were running down the corridors. I stood where I’d been ushered, the other girls in an uncertain cluster round me, bumping and shuffling, not knowing what to do. The Nurse pushed through the guests, elbowing people out of her way. At the far end of the room a lamp fell to the floor with a terrifying crash.
‘My bag!’ wailed Irina, sensing we were all about to be thrown out of the apartment. ‘I’fe left my bag in there. What about my bag?’
The Nurse bent and lifted Fuyuki in one movement, catching him easily as a toddler round the waist, sweeping him immediately to a sofa under the window, shuffling his feet forward, bending him over. She put both arms round his ribcage, laid her face against his back and squeezed. In front of her legs his little feet lifted and dangled momentarily, marionette-like, then dropped to the floor. She repeated the movement. His feet made their little puppet dance again, then a third time, and this time something must have shot out because someone pointed to the floor, a waiter discreetly swiped it up with a napkin and someone else sank into a chair, hands on their temples.
‘ Arigate-e! ’ sighed one of the henchmen, clutching his chest in relief. ‘ Yokatta! ’
Fuyuki was breathing. The Nurse carried him to his wheelchair and dropped him into it. I got one clear view of him, slumped exhaustedly, his hands dangling limp, his head to one side. The waiter was trying to force a glass of water on him and the Nurse was kneeling at his side, holding his wrist between thumb and forefinger and timing his pulse. I didn’t have a chance to stay and watch – a fat man in winklepickers had appeared in the door and was guiding all the girls back along the corridor towards the lift.