Haruki Murakami - Dance Dance Dance

The article fit the drawing. A young woman believed to

be in her early twenties was discovered strangled to death with a stocking in a luxury Akasaka hotel. Completely naked, without identification, an assumed name, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing new to me, except for a one detail: Police were running down probable links to a prostitution ring, an organization that dispatched call girls to first-class hotels.

I returned the magazines to the racks and sat thinking. How had the police been able to narrow their leads to the prostitution ring? Had some hard evidence turned up? Not that I was about to call those two cops to find out.

I left the library and ate a quick lunch nearby, then went for a walk, waiting for a brilliant notion to pop into my head. No such luck. I walked to Meiji Shrine, stretched out on the grass and looked up at the sky.

I thought about the call girl organization. Worldwide sex-o-grams. Place your order in Tokyo and your girl is waiting in Honolulu. Systematic, efficient, sophisticated. No muss, no fuss. Very businesslike. Just went to prove, once you've got an illusion going, it can function on the market like any other product. Advanced capitalism churning out goods for every conceivable niche. Illusion, that was the key word here. Whether prostitution or discrimination or personal attacks or displaced sex drive, give it a pretty name, a pretty package, and you could sell it. Before too long they'll have a call girl catalog order service at the Seibu department store. You can rely on us .

I looked up at the sky and thought about sex.

I wanted to sleep with Yumiyoshi. It wasn't out of the question. Just get one foot in her door, so to speak, and tell her, «You have to sleep with me. You should sleep with me.» Then I undress her, gently, like untying the ribbon on a pre­sent. First her coat, then her glasses, then her sweater. Her clothes off, she'd turn into Mei. Cuck-koo, she says. «Like my body?»

But before I can answer, the night is gone. Kiki is beside me, Gotanda's graceful fingers playing over her back. The door opens. Enter Yuki. She sees me making love with Kiki.

It's me this time, not Gotanda. Only the fingers are his.

«I can't believe this,» says Yuki. «I really can't believe

this.»

«It's not like that,» I say.

«What was that all about?» says Kiki for the umpteenth time.

It's not like that, I insist. The one I want to sleep with is Yumiyoshi . I just got my signals crossed.

First thing, I have to untangle the connections. Otherwise, I come away empty-handed. Or with someone else's hands. Or even a missing hand.

Leaving the grounds of Meiji Shrine, I went into a back-street cafe in Harajuku and had a good strong cup of coffee. Then I walked leisurely home.

In the evening Gotanda rang.

«Sorry, I don't have much time now,» he spoke on the fly. «Can I see you tonight around eight or nine?»

«Don't see why not.»

«Good, let's have dinner. I'll come pick you up.»

While I waited, I put away my suitcase, then went over the receipts from the trip, methodically separating Maki­mura's charges from my own. Half the meals and the car rental go to him, along with Yuki's personal purchases— surfboard, blaster, swimsuit, ... I itemized our expenses and slipped the calculations into an envelope together with the leftover travelers cheques, ready to be cashed at the bank and returned to Makimura. I always keep on top of these business details. But not because I like them. I just hate sloppiness in money matters.

After finishing with the accounting, I mixed up some baby whitefish with boiled spinach to go with a bottle of Kirin black label. Then I reread a Haruo Sato short story from years ago. It was a lovely uneventful spring evening. The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.

When I tired of reading, I put on the Stern-Rose-Istomin Trio playing Schubert's Opus 100, a piece I always reserve for spring. It breathed with the lush sadness of the night. Where off in the depths of gloom drifted six white skeletons. Life was sinking into an abyss, bones hard as memories posi­tioned before me.

Gotanda swung by at eight-forty. He was wearing a perfectly ordinary gray V-neck sweater over a per­fectly ordinary blue button-down shirt with—you got it—perfectly ordinary cotton slacks. And still he looked striking. Extraordinarily so.

He was curious about my digs, so I invited him in.

«Nice,» he said with a shy smile. Such a sweet smile, it made you feel like offering to let him stay for a week.

«Takes me back,» he said, as if to himself. «Reminds me of the place I used to have—before I hit it big.» From any­one else, the comment would have been an unbearable snub, but from him it was a compliment, straightforward and pure.

I offered Gotanda a big cushion and got out my fold-away low table from the closet. Then I brought us black beer with my spinach-and-whitefish concoction and put on the Schubert again.

«Fantastic!»

«Really? How about something else?»

«I'd love it, but I don't want you to have to go to the trouble.»

«No trouble at all. I can whip something up quick and easy. Nothing too fancy, though.»

«Can I watch?»

«Sure,» I said.

Scallions tossed with salt-plum. Wakame seaweed and shrimp vinaigrette. Wasabi preserves and grated daikon with sliced fish mousse. Slivered potatoes in olive oil and garlic with minced salami. Homemade cucumber pickles. Yester­day's hijiki seaweed plus tofu garnished with heaps of ginger.

«Amazing,» sighed Gotanda. «You're a genius.»

«Very kind of you to say so, but I assure you, it's real sim­ple. Just throwing together stuff I have around.»

«Sheer genius. I could never do it.»

«Well, thank you, but I could never imitate a dentist.»

«Aaa—,» he said, dismissing my return of compliment. «You know, would you mind if we didn't go out tonight? This stuff is great.»

«Fine by me.»

So we drank and ate. When the beer ran out, we switched to Cutty Sark. We listened to Sly and the Family Stone, the Doors and Stones, Pink Floyd. We listened to the Beach Boys' Surf's Up . It was a sixties kind of night. The Loving Spoonful, Three Dog Night. Any self-respecting alien transponding in from Sirius would have thought himself caught in a time warp.

No alien showed, but from ten o'clock it did start to rain. Softly, quietly, barely audible on the eaves. Almost silent as the dead.

As the night wore on, we stopped putting on music. My apartment didn't have the thick walls of Gotanda's condo­minium, and loud noise after eleven asked for complaints. With the music off, the whisper of the rain underscored the tone of our conversation. The police hadn't made much headway on Mei's case, I lamented. No, they haven't, Gotanda sighed. He'd been checking the newspapers and magazines too.

I opened a second bottle of Cutty Sark, and for the first round we toasted Mei.

«The cops have narrowed their investigations down to prostitution rings,» I went on, «so they must have gotten a

hold somewhere. I'm worried that'll lead them to you.»

«There's a chance,» said Gotanda, knitting his eyebrows slightly. «But it's probably okay. I was a little nervous, so I asked the folks at my agency about it. Whether that club's as tight-lipped as they claim. And you know what? Seems the club has a lot of political connections, some pretty big names apparently. So even if the club did spill to the police, they wouldn't be able to go sniffing too far. They couldn't lay a hand on anybody. And for that matter, my agency has a bit of clout too. Some of the bigger stars have very close friends in high places. Sometimes in not-so-nice places. So either way, the cops don't have a lot of room to maneuver. And because I'm a money tree for the agency, they don't want anything to happen to me. I'm a major investment. They don't want to see my value plummet. True, if you'd men­tioned my name to the cops, my ass would've been hauled in for sure. All the political connections in Ginza couldn't have kept that from happening. But no fear of that now. The rest is a power play, one system against another.»