Affair in Tokyo

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a selection from: Chapter One EVERYBODY SEEMED TO BE HAVING fun; there was enough noise, music, and laughter, girls and strong beer. The fights were stopped quickly and there wasn't enough light to hurt anybody's eyes. You could almost forget the scum-covered Tokyo canal next to the place, almost forget that the short-legged, glossy-haired girls dancing there looked at their soldier and sailor lovers through eyes like black mirrors that hid an unguessable mixture of interest and hatred. This was the brawling Come Again Club at the fringe of the sin-thick Shimbashi district of Tokyo. Some small brown businessman had listened thoughtfully to his emperor's so-sorry speech eight years ago and had taken down his rising-sun flags and banzai posters, putting up English signs that read, WERCOM AMERICANHAVE DAM HOT TIMECOME AGIN, just as the young men of the First Cavalry walked carefully and wonderingly into the streets of Tokyo. In 1953 the Come Again Club was still doing business in beer, girls, and noise. I was finishing a small argument with a stocky lad from one of the British regiments, a yellow-haired kid with bad teeth, who wore the gray-brown woolly uniform of Her Majesty. The argument was about how much room at the bar I was entitled to, but the anger behind it was because I was bigger and my teeth were O. K., because I probably had money and spent it easily. Because I was American. I can understand that stuffI was raised by folks that worked hard on a Mississippi farm. We didn't like kids from the town, where folks had money and fed and dressed their kids better than we were fed and dressed. We used to rough them up for no other reason. Mostly they're good lads, the Britishers, and sometimes friendly, but in a way they've got hard feelings, sometimes, for the Americans. I could understand, and still I couldn't take a bad time from the stocky kid. He faded back into the noisy corners, deep in shadows, and I had another bottle of Asahi beer. The Come Again Club was a kind of Japanese joke, a West Side Chicago tavern in Tokyo style, full of thousand-yen short-time girls who knew more about us, our habits, our weaknesses, than all of the psychological-study experts of the United States Army. I took a long drink of the hop-high, malty beer and played with the idea of writing a suggestion to Far East Command that they fire all the slick civilian psychologists and hire some musume from the joints of the Shimbashi to tell them what American soldiers think about. Maybe I was a little drunk, but there was some sense to the idea. I finished the bottle, got up, and started to walk toward the doorway. It opened on a little alley that led to the Street beside the stinking canal. Know where you're going, Sergeant? A girl had come out of the darkness near the wall, through the body-tight dancers toward me. A tall girl, a long-legged American girl with a soft, clear voice. You don't see American girls in the Shimbashi clubs. American girls didn't fit into the life of places like the Come Again. These were for the soldiers of half a dozen armies, for the short-legged, black-eyed women who were ready for them, for the rat-faced pimps.

Author / Editor: McPartland, John

Category: Novels

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