Non-Stop Till Tokyo Read Free Page A

languages is: you can speak them, so what? There are plenty of people who speak Korean and Swedish and Japanese and the rest, maybe not all together, but who needs that when interpreters are ten a penny anyway?
    Which means there isn’t much money in interpreting, and even less interest. You spend your days telling Norwegians what Koreans have said about DVD player production, and it’s just too boring to contemplate.
    That was the problem. I’d strolled through school and won prizes at college for something that was as natural as breathing. I didn’t know what hard work was, and when I found out, I wasn’t prepared to do it.
    I’d spent a blissful year in Japan while doing my degree. I met Noriko when I was helping out at an English course she’d attended (not that she’d learned anything), and formed an instant threesome with her and her childhood friend Yoshi. We’d had more fun than I could remember, shopping and skiing and spending long, giggly nights at hot springs and ultra-trendy bars, drinking lemon sours and eyeing up the men, and when I left, Noriko had made me promise to come back as soon as my course was over, insisting that I wasn’t fit to buy shoes on my own. So I told her to rent us a flat and took off for Tokyo, figuring that I could live as a schoolteacher in one of the language schools. But the job was dull and the pay was awful, and what exactly was I going to do with my life anyway? Japan is full of drifting gaijin teaching at language schools, and every one of them has the look of marking time, definitely planning to do something with their lives once they work out what their destinies should be, and many of them are pushing forty, often from the wrong side.
    Yoshi listened to me whinge about this with amazing tolerance, considering his IT job gave him four days’ holiday a year. Noriko had no such patience, and when I was bemoaning my inability to afford the most gorgeous pair of boots in an insanely expensive Ginza shop, she told me to get a grip and use my talents. I was gaijin—a foreigner—and could look Western, and I spoke dozens of languages, and that added up to real money.
    Not as an interpreter, though. Not exactly.
    The Primrose Path was a discreet high-end hostess bar in Shibuya, Tokyo’s party quarter. The name was in English, so everyone called it Purimurosupasu without thinking further about it, and I don’t imagine many people understood the name, let alone the pun—in Japanese, “primrose” was an old term for a tart. It catered mostly for businessmen, away from their families, bored of the company of their mostly male colleagues, generally incompetent at talking to women and, frankly, needing to pay attractive young ladies to put up with their company.
    Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong, or at least mostly wrong. The mama-san who ran the bar made it clear that we offered pleasant company, flirting, and a lot of drink. We also, once I arrived, offered language services second to none, and that was something the salarymen really thought worth paying for when they were stuck with foreign colleagues to entertain. But any extras were at the girl’s discretion and not conducted on the premises. And Mama-san was personally against extracurricular activity, partly because the sex trade was yakuza territory, and partly because it was in the end a waste of our assets.
    “Never sell it, never lend it, never give it away,” was her trademark instruction to new girls.
    “But, Mama-san,” we’d complain, “what do we do with it, then?”
    “Invest it!” she’d yell, her fat cheeks bunching with laughter. “Speculate to accumulate!”
    Okay, it was sleazy. There’s no way hostess work isn’t a bit sleazy. But I never sold it or lent it (giving it away was my business), and I had a lot of very interesting conversations among the drunken slobber, often with some surprisingly nice men. I had to “gaijin up”, because looking foreign got better tips,