We were exhausted by Tokyo. Exhausted from the excitement of having finally arrived, from steering through the crowds and having our ears rattled by the strident chatter all around us, jetlagged, sand-bagged by the sauna heat of the city’s streets. Exhausted above all by the people of Tokyo. Whether we asked for directions or tickets or help, their reaction often seemed to be surprise with a hint of having been subtly yet deeply offended. Neither of us could understand the Japanese and they seemed unable to understand us.
Ben went out for food on the third day and came back with a solution to our problem.
“I’ve hired a guide,” he said. He collapsed onto the bed and handed me a neat little bamboo box and a fork. “Bento, from that stall just down the street. You like noodles, right?”
“Thanks,” I said. I heaved myself upright and opened the box. They looked more like worms, but I didn’t fancy squeezing into the hotel’s tiny lift and going down to the street to find anything else. “What kind of guide?”
“A good-looking one,” Ben said, grinning. He opened his own bento box and dug in to the vegetables.
“He or she?”
“She,” Ben said, his words muffled by a mouthful of carrot. “Sakura. And she might be able to get us in to watch the Sungoliath match tomorrow! How’d you fancy that?”
“I thought there weren’t any tickets left for sale?”
“Well, don’t ask, don’t get,” Ben replied. “I asked, she said it’s possible. Maybe she knows someone at the club. Yuk! There’s shrimp in this rice.”
“Swap,” I said, offering my box in exchange. “Mine’s just plain noodles. I don’t think the Japanese count shrimp as meat.”
“I don’t think they count vegetarians as human,” Ben said.
“They definitely don’t think of us as human. Everyone stares when they hear us speak English.”
Ben didn’t reply. We both knew the stares were directed at me.
*
Sakura was as beautiful as a porcelain doll. She greeted Ben with a graceful bow and a smile. When he turned to introduce me to her, she looked down at me. It was the first Japanese facial expression I understood beyond all doubt.
Contempt.
She was smiling again before Ben turned back to her, a fake smile. I put on an identical smile for her, raising my eyebrows to make it look super-sarcastic.
“Where would you like to go first?” Sakura asked us. No, not us. She flicked the merest glance at me and spoke to Ben.
“The Sungoliath match?” Ben asked.
“Tonight, this is difficult,” Sakura said. “I will show you some famous places in Tokyo, if you would like this instead?”
“Please do,” Ben said. “Shall I drive?” he asked me.
I nodded. The only wheelchair we could hire was hand-propelled, and I was finding it tiring. Especially as Tokyo pedestrians avoided each other without seeming to try, but rarely looked far enough down to see me in time to avoid a collision. I felt safer with Ben pushing.
It did mean that Ben and Sakura walked side by side behind me while I had to crane my neck to see either of them. Each time I tried to join the conversation, Sakura looked away and addressed her replies to Ben. In the end I sat back and enjoyed the sight of this incredibly crowded and brilliantly lit city.
Sakura stopped abruptly. “Tachinomiya!”
Ben wheeled me around to face the bar Sakura had stopped at. It was open-fronted, with a bar running along one side. It was also crowded, packed with customers standing around tall tables.
“Is there room?” I asked, but Sakura was already snaking her way in, beckoning Ben to follow. He pushed my chair into the crowd.
“Sumimasen… sumimasen…” We’d learned the phrases for ‘Excuse me’ in every nation we’d travelled to over the years. From the blank stares of the other customers, maybe the Japanese themselves were unfamiliar with the term.
“Here,” Sakura declared, indicating a table with that graceful open-hand gesture we saw from every Japanese giving directions. The two men standing there stared at me, picked up their drinks and moved away. I looked around, but every table in the bar was the same – a metre tall.
“Isn’t there somewhere we can sit down?” Ben asked.
“This is tachinomi bar,” Sakura stated. “Everybody stands.”
“Ella can’t…”
“It’s fine,” I said, just loud enough to carry over the noise of chatter.
Sakura handed the menu to Ben and smiled. “Many fine beers and saké on offer here. Perhaps you will choose for us.”
“Would you like a saké, Ella?” Ben asked.
“Please,” I said. I doubted the toilets here were accessible by wheelchair. Small drinks were the wise option.
“A bottle of saké!” Sakura declared. “And we will start with ukon-hai, cocktail that defeats hangovers.”
The drinks arrived, and Ben handed my ukon-hai down to me. It smelt of turmeric and looked like pondwater. We lifted our glasses to each other and drank. Ben handed me a saké and took my empty cocktail glass to put on the table.
“Perhaps a snack,” Sakura suggested.
“Snack!” Ben agreed. He reached the menu down to me, and I scanned it quickly.
“I don’t think we should,” I said.
Ben tipped his saké down in gulp. “C’mon, Ella - Just a snack!”
“You are not hungry, perhaps,” Sakura said, flicking a glance at me. “Ben-san, you would like to taste traditional tachinomi dish?”
“As long as it’s vegetarian,” Ben said. “I don’t eat meat, so no pork chops or shrimp.”
Sakura nodded. She beckoned a waiter and gave what sounded like a series of firing squad orders. The waiter bowed and left.
“Ben…” I tugged his hand, but he was leaning over to pour another saké for himself and Sakura. Their conversation went on above my head, as if I were a child in a roomful of adults. I was so used to sitting face to face in English pubs that the sight of the inside of their nostrils and the underside of their chins twitching above me was like watching aliens.
“What do you think of tachinomi bar?” Sakura asked Ben.
“It’s busy,” Ben said. He poured himself another saké and offered the bottle to Sakura, who shook her head. “Tokyo is really crowded.”
“Tokyo is megalopolis,” Sakura announced. “Ah! Food!”
The waiter slammed a bowl and plates onto the table and I caught the sharp waft of wasabi. Only one dish had mentioned wasabi. I tugged at Ben’s shirt and said urgently “Ben… don’t.”
Maybe he didn’t hear me over the rising noise level. He flicked food from the communal bowl onto a plate and passed it down to me as Sakura filled a plate for him. I could smell roasted meat over the sweat and tobacco undertone of the bar. I saw his face from below, the food lifted to his mouth, his eyes on Sakura. The ripple of jaw muscles, the bulging throat as he swallowed. The convulsion. Silence.
“You like the gyutan, Ben-san?” Sakura asked.
He tried to reply, but it was a mistake to open his mouth while looking at her. Most of the vomit went in her direction. Her shriek stopped the chatter in the bar for almost a minute.
*
We halted our escape for just long enough to buy supper from our favourite bento bar. The seller was frying pork as we arrived and Ben gagged. I smiled apologetically at the bento seller, and he smiled back, saying quietly; “Green special.” He bowed to me as he handed me the boxes of food and I bowed in return, low enough that I felt a vicious twang in my back.
Back in the tiny hotel room I put the boxes onto my side table, swung myself onto the bed and folded the wheelchair. It closed easily, all the parts clicking neatly into place like an expensive jigsaw. I wished that Sakura had put a little effort into making our evening work that smoothly.
Ben lay down beside me, wiping sweat from his face and swallowing every few seconds as if he had a golf ball lodged in his throat. I offered him his box but he shook his head.
“I don’t think I can eat anything right now. I can still taste…”
He gulped.
“Don’t puke in here,” I said. My back hurt from being rattled away from the tachinomi bar at high speed and from bowing. I couldn’t face making several trips to the shared bathroom at the end of the corridor to clean up after him. I turned away from him before I began to eat.
Eventually, he opened his box and picked at the cooling rice and chopped onion and green shoots wrapped in leaves and tied with a single thread of something like the string you strip from an old runner bean pod. Even that was too much like a strip of gristle for Ben tonight, and he dropped it into the box, shuddering.
I stacked the empty boxes on my table and laid back carefully, fidgeting to ease my aches. Budget hotels out here were thin on puff in the pillows.
“Sorry,” Ben said.
“I did try to warn you,” I said. “Didn’t you read the menu?”
“No,” he said. “Couldn’t focus. Too much saké on an empty stomach. Sakura nodded when I said I was vegetarian, and I thought…”
“The Japanese won’t say no directly,” I said. “I read it in that guide book yesterday, while you were out getting bento. Sakura knew there was nothing on the menu except meat, but she would think it rude to say that you couldn’t eat there.”
“It’s rude to let a vegetarian eat… What was I eating?”
“You told her you didn’t eat shrimp or pork chops,” I reminded him. “So she ordered…” Entrails, I could have said. Testicles. Uterus. Ox tongue braised in saké and wasabi. That was just the English part of the menu. “Neither shrimp nor pork,” I said. “But it definitely wasn’t vegetarian.”
“It wasn’t a nice place,” Ben said.
Dusk faded in fast. We lay side by side in the dark, watching the reflection of city lights on the ceiling. The river of people in the street far below sent up their offering of chatter and music to our open window. I turned my head to look at Ben and was suddenly delighted and grateful to have him on my level again.
“The bento vendor said he’d put ‘green special’ in our boxes,” I said. “Even mine.”
“I don’t understand the Japanese,” Ben said. “The bento vendor goes out of his way to be kind, and Sakura wouldn’t even look at you.”
“Some people don’t like facing difficult subjects,” I said. “Like clients in wheelchairs.”
“You aren’t difficult,” Ben said. He reached for my hand and squeezed it. He knows when my back really hurts by the way I move. Squeezed hands are our substitute for hugs on my bad nights.
“I make our lives difficult,” I said. “We can’t get the wheelchair onto a train without a lot of fuss. People stare at me in the street. I can’t reach the table in a tachinomi bar.”
“Sakura took us there to embarrass you,” Ben said. “That was spiteful. I’m starting to hate this city.”
“They’re people, the Japanese,” I said. “Just people. Some are spiteful, some don’t know how to deal with me and some are kind… You’d see them differently if you weren’t with me.”
“If you hadn’t been with me, I would have thought Sakura was wonderful,” Ben said. “You show me who’s wonderful and who isn’t. You look after me. You tried to save me from eating…”
I had to distract him from that memory of roasted gristle.
“I had to,” I said. “You were disabled by saké tonight.”
We held hands as we fell asleep.
BIO: Julie Bissell grew up in east London and worked as a treasury manager and accountant. Now retired and living in rural Essex, she writes short stories and theatre scripts in whatever time she can spare from keeping a large garden under control.
