Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

After searching for weeks for work in Tokyo, she finally landed a job at an amusement park. It was called Summerland, because, in Japan, anything vaguely amusing had an English name. It was in Akigawa, miles away from the real Tokyo, but each of her previous days of job hunting had sent her farther and farther away from the city. “Economic downturn,” one Office Lady told her. The girl, with her exchange-student English and quick appraisal of Dina’s frustration, seemed cut out for something better than a receptionist’s job, but Dina understood that this, too, was part of the culture. A girl — woman — would work in an office as a glorified photocopier, and when she became Christmasu-keeki, meaning twenty-five years old, she was expected to resign quietly and start a family with a husband. With no reference to her race, only to her Americanness in general, the Office Lady had said, sadly, “Downturn means people want to hire Japanese. It’s like, obligation.” So when the people at Summerland offered her a job, she immediately accepted.

Her specific job was operator of the Dizzy Teacups ride, where, nestled in gigantic replicas of Victorian teacups, Japanese kids spun and arced and dipped before they were whisked back to cram school. Summerland, she discovered, was the great gaijin dumping ground, the one place where a non-Japanese foreigner was sure to land a job. It was at Summerland that she met Arillano Justinio Arroyo, with his perfectly round smiley-face head, his luxurious black hair, always parted in the middle, that fell on either side of his temples like an open book. Ari was her co-worker, which meant they would exchange mop duty whenever a kid vomited.

By summer’s end, both she and Ari found themselves unamused and jobless. She decided that what she needed, before resuming her search for another job, was a vacation. At the time, it made a lot of sense. So she sold the return part of her round-trip ticket and spent her days on subways in search of all of Tokyo’s corners: she visited Asakusa and gazed at the lit red lanterns of Sensoji Temple; she ate an outrageously expensive bento lunch under the Asahi brewery’s giant sperm-shaped modernist sculpture. She even visited Akiha-bara, a section of Tokyo where whole blocks of stores sold nothing but electronics she couldn’t afford. She spent an afternoon in the waterfront township of Odaiji, where women sunned themselves in bikinis during the lunch hour. But she loved Shinjuku the most, that garish part of Tokyo where pachinko parlors pushed against ugly gray earthquake-resistant buildings; where friendly, toothless vendors sold roasted unagi , even in rainy weather. Here, the twelve-floor department stores scintillated with slivers of primary colors, all the products shiny as toys. The subcity of Shinjuku always swooned, brighter than Vegas, lurid with sword-clashing kanji in neon. Skinny prostitutes in miniskirts swished by in pairs like schoolgirls, though their pouty red lips and permed hair betrayed them as they darted into doorways without signs and, seemingly, without actual doors.

At the end of each day, she took the subway, reboarding the Hibiya-sen tokkyuu , which would take her back to the gaijin hostel in Roppongi. She rented her room month to month, like the Australians, Germans, and Canadians and the occasional American. The only other blacks who lived in Japan were Africans: the Senegalese, with their blankets laid out in front of Masashi-Itsukaiichi station, selling bootleg Beatles albums and Tupperware; the Kenyans in Harajuku selling fierce tribal masks and tarry perfumed oils alongside Hello Kitty notebooks. The Japanese did not trust these black gaijin , these men who smiled with every tooth in their mouths and wore their cologne turned on high. And though the Japanese women stared at Dina with the same distrust, the business-suited sararimen who passed her in the subway stations would proposition her with English phrases they’d had gaijin teach them—“Verrry sexy,” they’d say, looking around to make sure women and children hadn’t overheard them. And even on the tokkyuu itself, where every passenger took a seat and immediately fell asleep, the emboldened men would raise their eyebrows in brushstrokes of innuendo and loudly whisper, “Verry chah-ming daaark-ku skin.”

Ari found another job. Dina didn’t. Her three-month visa had expired and the Japanese were too timid and suspicious to hire anyone on the sly. There were usually only two lines of work for American gaijin —teaching or modeling. Modeling was out — she was not the right race, much less the right blondness or legginess, and with an expired visa she got turned down for teaching and tutoring jobs. The men conducting the interviews knew her visa had expired, and that put a spin on things, the spin being that they expected her to sleep with them.

Dina had called Ari, wanting leads on jobs the English-language newspapers might not advertise. Ari agreed to met her at Swensen’s, where he bought her a scoop of chocolate mint ice cream.

“I got offered a job at a pachinko parlor,” he said. “I can’t do it, but you should. They only offered me the job because they like to see other Asians clean their floors.”

She didn’t tell him that she didn’t want to sweep floors, that too many Japanese had already seen American movies in which blacks were either criminals or custodians. So when they met again at Swensen’s, Dina still had no job and couldn’t make the rent at the foreign hostel. Nevertheless, she bought him a scoop of red bean ice cream with the last of her airplane money. She didn’t have a job and he took pity on her, inviting her to live with him in his one-room flat. So she did.

AND SO did Petra and Zoltan. Petra was five-foot-eleven and had once been a model. That ended when she fell down an escalator, dislocating a shoulder and wrecking her face. She’d had to pay for the reconstructive surgery out of her once sizable bank account and now had no money. And Petra did not want to go back to Moldova, could not go back to Moldova, it seemed, though Ari hadn’t explained any of this when he brought Petra home. He introduced her to Dina as though they were neighbors who hadn’t met, then hauled her belongings up the stairs. While Ari strained and grunted under the weight of her clothes trunks, Petra plopped down in a chair, the only place to sit besides the floor. Dina made tea for her, and though she and Ari had been running low on food, courtesy dictated that she bring out the box of cookies she’d been saving to share with Ari.

“I have threads in my face,” Petra said through crunches of cookie. “Threads from the doctors. One whole year”—she held up a single aggressive finger—“I have threads. I am thinking that when threads bust out, va voom, I am having old face back. These doctors here”—Petra shook her head and narrowed her topaz eyes—“they can build a whole car, but cannot again build face? I go to America next. Say, ‘Fix my face. Fix face for actual .’ And they will fix .” She nodded once, like a genie, as though a single nod were enough to make it so. Afterward she made her way to the bathroom and sobbed.

Of course, Petra could no longer model; her face had been ripped into unequal quadrants like the sections of a TV dinner, and the stitches had been in long enough to leave fleshy, zipper-like scars in their place. The Japanese would not hire her either; they did not like to view affliction so front and center. In turn, Petra refused to work for them. Whenever Dina went to look for a job, Petra made it known that she did not plan on working for the Japanese: “ I not work for them even if they pay me!”

Her boyfriend Zoltan came with the package. He arrived in toto a week after Petra, and though he tried to project the air of someone just visiting, he’d already tacked pictures from his bodybuilding days above the corner where they slept across from Ari and Dina.