Hiwa, p.19
Hiwa, page 19
‘I shut the radio away in here afterwards. There’s another console, but it’s not wired.’
‘It’s only yourself who’s been listening, otherwise?’
‘People thought you were a phantom of some kind.’
‘Is that so? Maybe we should let them keep thinking as much.’ The man pivoted around on the stool, his back to Jack. He ran a hand over the console’s top, then across the shaped details on the front of the cabinetry. ‘It’s a nice piece of craftwork. Curious that you heard me through it.’ He turned to face Jack again. ‘Sorry. I haven’t introduced myself – I’m Dylan.’
The man named Dylan reached out an open hand. Jack looked from his hand to his face. His features were kind, handsome. They bore the complex signatures of a mixed heritage. Yet, the bright green of the man’s eyes reminded Jack of Dot – and of Gregory.
Jack brought his hand up to shake Dylan’s. ‘Jack.’
‘What do you do here in the radio factory, Jack?’
‘I’m the foreman.’
‘A responsible position. You keep the place ticking over pretty well?’
‘If the workers are happy, the work gets done.’
‘Gregory’s a good worker?’
‘Yes.’
‘You take good care of him?’
‘He’ll always have a place in the factory.’
‘You know, I don’t think I said Gregory would die.’
Jack paused. ‘People heard you.’
‘I’m sure they heard something.’
‘They heard you speak of a dreadful incident – and a haunting. My workers aren’t liars. Gregory’s not a liar.’
‘Misunderstandings happen more readily than they should … There was only a story I knew, about an encounter Gregory had with a ghost. Though I’m not superstitious myself.’
Jack and the man regarded one another.
Then the man smiled, and Jack said, ‘You’ve really come from the future?’
‘Did I say that?’
Jack shook his head. ‘Not knowingly.’
‘Hm.’
‘Are there others who can – who can travel …’
‘It’s not like a taxi service, sorry.’ He tapped his wrists. ‘I have special technology inside me, in my blood. Your body has to be a part of the taxi, you see?’
The man unslung the object from around his shoulder. An ethereal blue light shone at the cylinder’s base.
‘It’s been on the blink. I’d say, from the sounds of things, that there’s been a causal loop.’ The man gave the cylinder a tap with his finger. ‘To prevent further leakages through time, I’ll try to stop things up at my end. But as a bit of insurance, if you could do something about that radio, I’d rest much easier … Look, you can’t breathe a word about any of this, okay? What you’ve heard over the radio, our time together tonight. I’m going to ignore the usual protocols here – they’re unpleasant. Instead, I’d rather have you on my side, helping keep Gregory safe.’
‘I hope to.’
The man frowned. ‘Sorry, I have to check this with you,’ he said. ‘I have to make sure. Did you hear anything else broadcast over that radio? I appreciate your honesty.’
‘Nothing much,’ Jack said, and a flush of shame kept him quiet a few moments. ‘Just you talking with someone, going about your business. In your home, I think. I couldn’t hear the other person.’
As Jack spoke, the man didn’t take his eyes off him. Then his features relaxed into a more open expression, a look of understanding.
‘You tuned in regularly to that?’ he said. ‘To my home life?’
Jack nodded. He glanced again at the scar running pinkly along the man’s forearm.
‘Hm. Uh-huh,’ the man said, as if deciding something. ‘Ashton is the other bloke’s name. He’s a good man. Saved my skin more than once.’
‘I gathered you care a great deal for each other. I found it interesting, and I … I liked hearing it. I wished I could talk back.’
‘We do care, rather a lot … It really meant something to you, hearing that?’
‘It did.’
‘I’ll be honest, the future’s not all roses. But I think I can see why you might want to escape the present. I can’t do that for you, and you absolutely must alter or – preferably – destroy this radio …’ The man pressed a thoughtful finger to his lips. ‘But if you feel like you want to connect again, try writing me a letter. Address it to Dylan – Dear Dylan – nothing tricky. Then store the letters somewhere safe and, when you feel ready, seal them in a box and bury it … maybe in the south-east corner of the factory grounds? I’ll dig the box up when I get back, in the future, and I’ll read everything you’ve put down. I’ll read every word. Okay?’
Words flowing in one direction. Letters with no hope of a reply. Yet it was something, Jack reasoned. It was a chance for guiltless confession. A chance for true expression, a chance to be his real self. Would it not in fact be a new way of being, however slight, within a different kind of world, however remote in time? And although Jack and his audience would remain separated by that dark valley of time, hadn’t they already been rescued from the fate of abstraction, from remaining always obscured behind the mask of the radio waves, of words inked upon a page? I will know his face, Jack thought, and he will know mine. He will hear me and see me, and he will know me.
‘I will,’ Jack said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Good. I look forward to reading them, to learning about a new friend, if I can say that. Now,’ – Dylan smiled at Jack again – ‘how about we chalk it up to a prank? Rather than a ghost, let people think it was all a put-on. Teenagers causing trouble. Steer away from any frightful notions, and restore Gregory’s confidence.’
‘You have a strong interest in Gregory’s wellbeing.’
‘We share a family lineage – he’s several great-greats removed, but the connection’s clear. It’s important to me that he stays fit, healthy and alive.’
A stillness fell over them, and Jack felt a familiar melancholy stir in his chest. He’d said goodbye to enough people whom he’d wanted to remain close to but never could. Having made it here safely once, might not this man, Dylan, manage it again?
A faint scratching penetrated the silence, coming from just beyond the storage room.
Both men stiffened.
Then Jack shuffled around to peer through a narrow gap between two boards of the door. The splinters of light that escaped the room were not enough to dispel the dark. He stood and gathered his sheet about him, but already Dylan had tugged the slender chain for the overhead bulb. As the light faded, Dylan retreated carefully past the console to the rear of the room. Jack felt for the door and eased it open. Still draped in his sheet, he stumbled out into the corridor, groaning as he tripped over the box of chains, spilling them in a dull rattle across the floor.
There came more scratching from nearby.
‘Who is it?’ Jack said.
Something tugged on the edge of Jack’s sheet where it trailed behind him. He turned and saw dimly against the pale fabric the figure of a large rat scurrying away.
Jack sighed and returned to the storage room. ‘It was nothing,’ he announced into that darkened space. ‘Nothing at all.’ But there was no reply and Jack knew that he was already alone.
Colleen Maria Lenihan
TE RARAWA, NGĀPUHI
Colleen Maria Lenihan (Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi) is a short story writer, screenwriter and photographer, who has studied creative writing in the Te Papa Tupu programme and at the Creative Hub in Auckland. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New Zealand Herald and her fiction on the Newsroom site, as well as in the Academy of New Zealand Literature anthology Taste of Clouds: New Zealand Writers Encounter Japan.
Lenihan spent fifteen years in Tokyo, followed by a year in New York City, and returned to Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) in 2016. Her television work includes Shortland Street, for which she is a storyliner and scriptwriter, and the Whakaata Māori drama series Ahikāroa. Her writing residencies include two for emerging Māori writers: at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in 2019, and the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2023.
‘Paradise’ is a story from Lenihan’s debut story collection, Kōhine (2022). She has described the book as ‘a short story cycle set between Japan and Aotearoa,’ linked by its recurring characters and thematic strands of loss, lives on the margin and restlessness – both in this life and the next. In ‘Spirit House’, the narrator divides the world into ‘people who stay and people who leave’, and remembers herself at the age of ten, experiencing a ‘profound yearning’ to ‘get out, get away from those green hills penning me in and see something – anything – different.’
That narrator is Maia, the protagonist of ‘Paradise’, and one of the key recurring characters in Kōhine. We see her at different points of her life: as a little girl with a ‘glow-in-the-dark crucifix’ on her bedroom wall; the new wife of a Japanese DJ with a disapproving mother; a bereaved woman returning to New Zealand for a tangi: an English teacher on a film set: a writer spending time in a North Shore ‘bubble’ and in too many tangled, unequal relationships.
In ‘Paradise’ she is a young solo mother who’s been lured by another New Zealander to Tokyo, to earn good money working as a stripper. In the story ‘Little Miss Paranoid’, Maia, as a child, is told that a stripper is ‘a rude lady who takes all her clothes off’. ‘That girl doesn’t belong here,’ the two Israeli co-workers observe, and Maia struggles to navigate the multinational and sexual politics at the club in Shinjuku. ‘This country is twisted,’ she complains, buying a schoolgirl costume to wear at Halloween, but Maia is beginning to twist herself, to harden and contort. The question she asks of her friend Laura – ‘What are we doing here?’ – is the persistent pressure throughout Lenihan’s collection, particularly in the stories of young women trying to re-invent, or re-shape, their lives.
Paradise
Maia hadn’t slept on the overnight flight. Dazed, she floated down a moving walkway through the calm of Narita Airport. Then it was all clamour and rush to catch trains into Tokyo. At the turnstile she grabbed a Japanese girl’s subway ticket by mistake, and the girl cried out in dismay.
Maia struggled to keep up with Laura, who strode through the sea of Japanese. The humidity made her wilt in her winter dress. She’d never felt air this thick before: heavy and laced with diesel and soy sauce. From the back of a cab, the seats covered in a spotless doily-like lace, Maia marvelled at the crowds, the giant TV screens playing frenetic ads at high volume, the colourful billboards, the incomprehensible kanji characters. Even the trees around the Imperial Palace looked Japanese. As they clambered out, the taxi driver made protesting sounds as Maia tried to close the door.
‘Don’t do that; you’ll break it! It closes automatically,’ said Laura.
The sign on the drab block of apartments said ‘AKASAKA WEEKLY MANSION’.
‘When a Japanese tells you they live in a mansion, this is what they mean,’ said Laura.
Their room was two single beds, with side tables. Laura eased herself out onto the balcony and lit a cigarette.
‘I’m shattered,’ Maia said, and collapsed onto her bed. Laura had already claimed the best one near the window.
‘It’s Friday night! We gotta work.’
The two women jostled for position in front of the only mirror, curled their hair, carefully applied heavy make-up and shoved some dresses into a bag.
Maia and Laura made their way through crowded plazas to an entrance with a brass plaque that said: ‘SHINJUKU PARADISE – GENTLEMEN’S CLUB’. Stairs led them underground to a stage with a pole on it. There were booths and tables with red velvet club chairs clustered around the stage. The walls were mirrored, and a disco ball cast a spell over the empty room. The bartender was cutting limes, and greeted them with a cheery ‘Ohayō!’ Maia recognised one of the four Japanese words she knew.
‘Why did he say good morning?’
‘This is our morning. You’re a vampire now.’
They went to the dressing room and joined fifteen other girls. Two of them were arguing in Hebrew and wore G-strings. They stopped abruptly when they saw Maia and whispered to each other. In the back corner, three blonde Australians discussed boob jobs.
Maia put on a black, sheer dress and the Lucite heels that Laura had instructed her to buy. Laura called them ‘stripper heels’, and Maia saw that all the girls were wearing the clear shoes, except for a Japanese girl in sandals. Maia was glad she had the right shoes. She checked herself out in the mirror. Long, dead straight, jet-black hair, a nice face, big tits and a slim body.
‘This is Eden; she’s from New Zealand too,’ Laura said to Joy, a girl with dirty blonde hair and a tattoo of the Grim Reaper on her back. Joy glanced at Maia with sad, blue eyes and said nothing. She took a sip from a foil pouch.
‘What’s that?’ asked Maia.
‘An energy jelly drink. I didn’t eat today. Kinda weird, but you get used to it.’
‘Smells like rank pussy in here,’ Laura said.
Maia stood by the bar doing shots with Laura and studied the girls onstage. They danced mainly to R&B and hip-hop. She watched as dancers crawled up to the men sitting around the stage and drew money out from their wallets with sultry long looks. One of the Australians, Cherry, climbed up the pole, flipped herself upside down, clung on to it with her legs and slithered off her top. Her implants looked ready to burst through her skin.
‘I can’t do this,’ Maia said.
She thought back to that coffee she’d had in Wellington with Laura, who had just returned from her first stint in Japan with Gucci this and Prada that. Maia, an underpaid and overworked single mother, begged her for help. She hadn’t thought this through.
‘Ha; don’t worry. Pole tricks aren’t important. Keep it sexy; you’ll be fine,’ said Laura.
‘And now, we have next on stage … the lovely Miss … Eden!’ the DJ announced.
‘Eden needs another shot,’ Laura said to the bartender.
Maia looked out into the darkness. Men gazed up at her like she was the sun. She grabbed hold of the pole and spun around it clumsily. She pouted and leaned over; she let herself slide down the wall in what she hoped was a seductive way. Every time she caught a glimpse of herself in the myriad reflective surfaces, she felt ridiculous; caught in prisms of mortification. When a heavily tattooed gaijin customer beckoned her over with a note in his hand, it was a relief. It gave her something to do. She slunk over and let him put it in her cleavage. Laura gave her a thumbs-up from the bar. When her song finally ended, Maia gathered up her dress, pulled it over her head and raced off the stage. ‘You have a request, Miss Eden,’ said Little Joe, the Nigerian floor manager, steering Maia to a table.
Customers from Saudi Arabia.
‘I asked for a girl from New Zealand,’ said one of the men. ‘Such a beautiful place. Maybe that is why you are so beautiful.’
‘Oh, you’ve been?’
‘Yes, I loved it. Wonderful. But in my country, we don’t like other men to look at our women.’
A couple of drinks in, she noticed him glancing over at the booths at the back of the club, where customers were getting lap dances. She took him by the hand and led him to a row of plush round chairs. She leaned over him and pushed her breasts in his face, while looking over at what the other girls were doing. Lots of slow grinding in the shadows. He put his hands on her waist and looked up at her. A blacklight made his teeth and the whites of his eyes glow.
After six songs, she asked for her money. His face darkened.
‘A girl like you isn’t worth even 5 yen,’ he spat.
The Nigerian dance manager came over.
‘Everything okay, Eden?’ he said.
The Arab paid.
After work finished at three, Maia and Laura met some of the other dancers at Half Time, an American-style bar with dark wooden decor and vintage signs.
‘So, what do you all do back home?’ said Nina, a redhead from New York.
‘I was a sergeant in the Israeli army,’ said Noa. She had large dark eyes and thick black hair. Her friend Alana was tall and lanky with frizzy hair. They were often in trouble at the club for arguing with the customers, managers and each other.
‘Wow. How was that?’ said Maia.
‘What do you think? It fucking sucked!’
‘She was my boss,’ said Alana. ‘I was just a private.’
‘When we first saw you walk into the dressing room tonight, we said, “That girl doesn’t belong here,”’ Noa said.
‘Why?’ said Maia.
‘Too beautiful,’ said Alana.
Maia and Laura wove through the narrow aisles of Don Quijote, a twenty-four-hour discount store full of snacks, souvenirs, make-up, appliances and sex toys. Laura pointed out some squeezable stress balls shaped like tits in the children’s toy section.
‘This country is twisted,’ said Maia.
‘Ah, here’s the costume section,’ Laura said. She combed through stacks of costume packs. Slutty nurse, slutty witch, slutty air hostess. Maia wanted something Japanese-y. Slutty pilot, slutty fortune teller, slutty policewoman.
‘Oh look,’ said Maia, and held up a pack that displayed a picture of a Japanese woman posing coyly in a blouse with a navy-blue sailor-style collar, red ribbon and pleated skirt. ‘Think I could pull this off?’
‘That’s a Japanese schoolgirl uniform,’ said Laura.
‘Perfect.’
All the girls were in costume for Halloween. There was a genie, several French maids, Alice in Wonderland, a honeybee, a dominatrix, Cleopatra … The genie winked and clasped her hands together as Maia came out of the dressing room in her schoolgirl uniform.
‘Your wish is my command,’ the genie said.
The club was decorated with fake spiderwebs. A waiter dressed as Superman brought her a double vodka cranberry to drink while she waited to be sat with customers. Her new customer, Kyomin, rumoured to be Korean mafia, came in while she was on stage. He was in his early thirties, tall and well dressed. He had an attractive face, with wide, high cheekbones. Kyomin strolled up to the stage, holding bills out in front of him like a fan, and spun her around slowly as he stuffed ichiman yen notes all around her G-string, making a skirt of money. Everyone in the club clapped. The other girls looked jealous as Maia strutted around with a thousand dollars in her underwear. Back at the table, Kyomin presented her with a Prada bag, which drew even more envy.
