Toki
They’d stopped using my real name. I forgot it more often than not, and I found I didn’t much care.
Nintendo had been snoring all night. I got up for water. The moon was doing its blue thing through the window.
The water in this dump was fine. That counted for something. In the past half-year I’d lived in the basement of a tire factory, in a friend’s childhood bedroom still decorated for a ten-year-old, in the half-finished villa of an aspiring J-Pop starlet who apparently believed construction noise built character. This place was better. This place had a view of the Tokyo Tower. I looked at it often—from all over the city, from different angles and different moods—and it never failed to produce something like warmth and safety. It dispersed bad thoughts. I didn’t question this.
Toki, everything okay?
Yumi was on the sofa, watching American soap operas in the dark. She did this every night. Sleep meant nothing to her, she said, and she said it so rarely that I believed her. I nodded. She had her legs crossed on the coffee table, long and bare, and her right breast was making an escape attempt from the neckline of her nightgown. Stop staring at my incredible legs,
she said, not looking up. You’ll just start thinking about Ana.
She turned back to the screen as the commercial ended. I took a sip of water.
Yumi and I had sex sometimes. Nothing dramatic about it. She slept with Nintendo too, when I was at work—he occasionally tried to use this to impress me, which said more about him than he realized. I knew she preferred me. In the end none of it mattered much. Since arriving in Tokyo I’d been carrying heartbreak around like a stone in my chest, and slowly it had become architectural—part of the structure of how I moved through rooms and days. I had been happy once. Her name was Ana. It’s hard to forget someone whose name is three letters that appear everywhere: storefronts, graffiti, spines of books. Every time they find you, you’re back at zero.
I pulled on Nintendo’s work T-shirt from Little Foods—pink, which made me look absurd. Nobody cared. Not even Yumi’s cat, who walked past me toward the food bowl without a glance and then complained loudly about its emptiness. I needed to buy food. There were a few yen on the table.
I switched on my phone when I left. I’d brought it from Germany—couldn’t afford a newer one. One unread SMS blinked on the screen. Nobody back home wrote to me. Not even Ana. Fuko sent only a time, whenever he wanted me to come in. He was my boss.
Some schoolgirls smiled at me on the street, probably because of the pink shirt. Summer was at its peak. I turned into the side street and greeted the old man at the Mini Store 24/7. Fiuntzwanziksibän!
he shouted whenever I walked in, nearly killing himself laughing at the word. I smiled back like it surprised me every time, then moved through the aisles. The yen stretched to one full bag, barely. We were almost always broke. The rent on this dump was steep. I worked odd jobs at a small club, Nintendo sold fast food, and Yumi’s income came from somewhere nobody asked about directly, though we had our theories.
When I got home, Nintendo was at the iBook deep in World of Warcraft, muttering jargon into his headset. He’d once been the most devoted Super Mario fan I knew—the logo was still tattooed on his right calf—but somewhere along the way he’d sold his entire collection to fund the new habit. One old gray Game Boy survived the purge. Only Yumi ever played it anymore.
Where’s Yumi?
I called from the doorway, dropping the bag on the sofa. Out,
he said, and went back to his headset.
I poured food into the cat’s bowl and watched her attack it. Tokyo had not been what I imagined. I’d expected vivid and relentless and overwhelming—and that’s exactly what it was, but differently. A low-grade melancholy ran underneath everything and never lifted: at the arcades, at the pachinko halls, fumbling with bleached and over-accessorized girls I barely knew, eating breakfast alone with Yumi’s cat supervising from the opposite chair.
Sometimes late at night I was visited by the thought that I was missing something back in Germany. This arrived most reliably on weekends. I’d think about what Ana was doing at that exact moment, which idiot was allowed to press himself against her, who was getting her sounds that night. The tears had dried up long ago. What remained was a bottomless numbness—specific, familiar, mine. I’d carry it home eventually. Or it would just become part of me now.