Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Hamlet II, 2

I don’t feel like writing anything new for a few days, so until I do I’ll be posting old stories and journal entries written over the last 20 years, with a minimum of editing. Here’s the first one, about a night in Tokyo in 1983 or 1984.

It is written in sparkler sparks on the night

You look at the clock. Two o’clock in the morning. The women in the house all work as hostesses and they are still straggling home, full to the gills with champagne. They have two cassette players going, one downstairs in the dining room, one upstairs in the room next to yours. You put a pillow over your head as you have seen done in cartoons, George Jetson maybe, and think of your job interview the next morning.

You count languages in an attempt to get to sleep: Hebrew, English, American, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Turkish, in that order.

A musty smell emanates from the tatami mat. A rotten smelling vapor passes through the room from outside, and fades again in the breeze. A ghost of Asia haunts Japan. Old cigarette smoke lingers. You aren’t in the least sleepy. Your body has not yet adjusted to the new time schedule.

At two-thirty a girl named Wenke comes into the room fast and excited, the way she does everything, and this is what you find appealing about her. “Oh, sorry man. I didn’t mean to wake you up.” She speaks idiomatic English with an odd accent. Her English is unusually clear and deliberate, rubbery, as if her teeth were latex or Tupperware instead of enamel, but this is not true, you notice: they are like small Chicklets, even, white and sharp.

“Would you like a cigarette?” you ask her so she’ll stay longer. “They’re Exports, Canadian.”

“Of course, what brand?”

“Export is the name of the brand. They’re good cigarettes.” You break open a carton you had brought along to give to people as presents. She shakes her hair out of her eyes. It is straight and blonde. “Thank you.” She smiles a crooked smile. She is small and eighteen and energetic and that charms you. Her shoulders would fit in the cupped palms of your hands. You could break her over your knee if you wanted. “Want to go get a beer?” she asks.

Outside in the warm, lovely night air she is telling you about back home in Sweden. In the winter they stay up all night at friends’ homes, drink hot chocolate and watch the northern lights. This is awfully wholesome nostalgia for a woman working as a hostess, you look at her and think how fast things are happening for her. The way she says Northern Lights makes you want to go see them: you see colors flaring in an inky sky around you and shiver imagining a vast emptiness impossible in Tokyo. Her voice makes the aurora borealis real. You make a note to be careful, here is a girl you would believe, no matter what she says.

You light up another Export and give her one. The beer machine is a Kirin machine and has a selection of six different sizes: 135 ml, 350 ml, 500 ml, 750 ml, one liter and the large five liter party size mini keg. You each get 500 ml cans because the liter cans get warm before you can finish them.

“Feel like just walking around for a while?”
“Sure, Wenke says. “It’s good to be out in the air after sitting inside all night.”

You head down the darkest street you can find and explore the warrens of Shitamachi. In front of an electrical appliance store you see a used TV in the garbage and decide to pick it up on the way back.

Wenke says she owes money to an Israeli boyfriend she met on a Kibbutz, that is why she is working as a hostess. He’s waiting for her in Thailand.

“Why don’t you just fly straight back to Stockholm?” you ask her. You mean, if she is so homesick, and what kind of a man would make her do such shitty work. She just looks at you as if you have said something stupid. She is only eighteen, you remind yourself, and she may love him.

She stops. “Shh.” She points. On a dark side street a tiny flame dances up as an old man in a yukata and sandals lights sparklers with a disposable lighter. They catch and he dances in the street, making rounded white, gold and green patterns in the pitch darkness. The fireworks illuminate his serious old face, and the heads of three tiny grinning children watching him from an open window, despite the late hour. The sparklers burn out and you walk on.

“When you blink your eyes, you can still see the sparklers,” Wenke says.