Non-Stop Till Tokyo Read Free Page B

and I wore a blonde wig (three, in fact, in slightly different lengths which I rotated so it looked like my hair was growing) but that wasn’t much of a hardship. And the money was amazing, even if you weren’t selling anything but time and sympathy. The salarymen tipped like cash was going out of style. I once made a vulgar but clever pun to a Korean guy—you’d have to speak Japanese and Korean to get the joke, but take my word for it, it was a killer—and he actually fell off his chair laughing, then fished three ten-thousand-yen notes, close to three hundred dollars, out of his wallet and passed them to me, hands shaking as he giggled. Just for a joke. God knows how that showed up on his expense account.
    So the money rolled in, and I learned lots of interesting things about Japanese business, and the Primrose Path expanded its clientele, and we were all very happy indeed, and if my life was still going nowhere in particular, now I could afford boots from any shop in Ginza I liked.
    Then Kelly the Bitch joined us.
    The first annoying thing about her was—oh hell, everything, really. She was tall and slim, with oversized breasts, long blonde hair and huge blue eyes. Her Japanese was dreadful, but it didn’t matter because who wanted to listen to her talk? She walked in, and the rest of us could feel the cold draught as our regulars shifted away towards her.
    And then there was her name.
    The thing is, clichés apart, Japanese just doesn’t have an “r” or an “l”. There’s a sound transcribed in Roman alphabet as “r”, but it’s actually somewhere between the two—make an “l”, but don’t let your tongue touch your tooth ridge, and you’ll be somewhere near it. Most Japanese native speakers don’t really hear the difference between English “r” and “l”, since the sounds don’t exist in their language, and even those who do detect the difference often find it hard to reproduce it in speech. So, having a Kelly and a Kerry presented something of a problem to most of our clientele, and even the staff.
    But she refused to change it.
    That bitch. I was there first; I had regulars; I’d been there for nearly two years. Mama-san agreed that I shouldn’t change my name, but Kelly insisted she’d keep her own and made it a sticking point, and Mama-san wasn’t going to let that tall blonde money-honey walk into someone else’s hostess bar. This wasn’t just me being petty: it was a problem. We got each other’s calls and so on, but the real issue was that the customers came to us to be flattered and listened to and pampered, not to have their faulty pronunciation rubbed in their faces as they asked for Kelly-not-Kerry and the wrong girl pranced up. It caused embarrassment, and you don’t do that in Japan.
    That was Kelly all over. She had what another of the American girls described as a sense of entitlement. “Because I’m worth it” was her theme song. She wanted to keep her name, no matter if it was bad for me and the business and even her customers, so she did. She was a shocking miser too. The money flowed in at the bar, and the rest of us spent accordingly, buying presents and exchanging clothes and treating one another to dinners and drinking sessions, but I don’t think Kelly ever bought a round. She almost never came out and hardly spoke to anyone, partly because her Japanese was so awful (which didn’t stop her laughing at the other girls’ English), partly because she was a miserable bitch. She stiffed the cleaners on their tips and made twice as much mess as anyone else. And she was absolutely, utterly arrogant. She looked down on the rest of us, and her customers, and she swanned around as though she were the mama-san herself, until Minachan, a hostess with a wicked turn of phrase, dubbed her “Wagamama-san”—Miss Selfish.
    She was stupid enough to think herself clever, and she was greedy and manipulative, and she thought the rest of the world was just like her. I