[3] in yokohama seeing ms maeda..

{I am writing this a few days, weeks later whilst waiting to leave, returning, sitting in the first class cabin on a JAL flight from Y to L. It’s October. My pen is writing on the dotted pages (everything starts from a dot) of this notebook. I am writing this into the notebook, words and sentences that can only appear on the pages and never in electronic media…… } After the council meeting I was attending the drinks and snacks party. I said I was attending the party to see my mother and brother but it was untrue. I was their to look at his parents, the Maeda’s, the primary council members from Red Swan. His family, like mine is founded on violence. The Maeda’s were standing by the bar talking to K and M. I have no idea about what. Should I ruin their day? Limp across the room and say <<hello, I’m his partner…>> a sentence more disturbing for them than the envelope in my pocket that he’d asked me to give them… sighs, do the sentences have any meaning that I have to reject? <<You don’t have to give the message to them. only if you feel like it. If it’s easier.>> It sits in my pocket, black ink on white paper, a cream envelope, kanji characters… Here I live within the name and identity my parents gave me, there he calls me by the false name i gave myself when we met, and which is the name on my office door. How did i get here?

I wish i had been born and lived and lived most of my life in the slums of Yokohama, perhaps been a barista or worked in a bookshop, a convenience store woman, perhaps a local police, instead of this. Before him/Niklas I had been lonely and insecure, and from the very start of our relationship it was impossible for either of us to avoid our pasts and now our futures. At (by the ) (that) time neither of us were at all comfortable with knowing about the other men and women the other had slept with. I could not imagine him fucking others, and he, i realise now, is still uncomfortable with the people I’ve fucked. He was as lonely as I was, as uncomfortable in his assigned identity as I am in mine. Lonely and insecure, waiting for the door to be forced open, to be made into a victim. I am less now….We met a few years after I was shot in my right leg, it took six months to recover. It was never the same again. Really after that I was useless. All of my strategies had to change after that. My everyday life changed after that. Though our initial meeting was engineered by me, and we exchanged words, sentences, gestures and pleasure. I am still surprised that we seduced one another, our silver tongues, the interest(s). What a professional woman like me needs, it turns out, is a quiet man who can speak, a quiet man who wants to hide in exile. A man who wants to escape his personal history. Can I say what it is that he needs from me? And me …. Niklas and I stayed together for a while that first summer, we simply developed a habit of being together. At first I thought he was just a man that I found unusually attractive and harmless… harmless for me would be dangerous for most people, I imagine. A brief affair before I returned to Tokyo and … though it felt like we were living together. I had never done this successfully before. The everydayness of our routines made me capable of avoiding the messages from Tokyo that required, would eventually require my attention. He would sit in the window of the apartment and talk about things as if it was forever…… We would window shop, go to the Third Ear bar and yet I couldn’t tell him about the world I was avoiding hearing from. I told him about my public work. We didn’t speak of our personal histories. That I left him in New York, that should have been the end, but wasn’t. Later in a city on another continent it became apparent that his life was not that different to mine, though his attempts to leave had caused the chaos and the deaths that followed. Though this only became clear later……. I think my clone appeared after I was injured and before we bmet and spent time together but I am not really sure. Certainly by the time we were in Stockholm my clone was in London……. The second time I took him to the crisis that was Sweden. I knew where he was, we spoke and so we went to Stockholm. Neither of us knew what we were doing staying in the Sheriton hotel. I was there for work, to resolve a crisis, waiting for people to arrive. I told him about my work. Even after we spoke about the things we had ignored I still managed to spend the night, night(s) with him though we were both unsettled by the talk of death, bodies falling to the ground, ( Prince was playing next door, music flowing in through the open windows.) I grabbed his arm, or he grabbed mine. He spoke about his family and the red swans. I took him with me to work, I took him to work, I showed him my work, to show him what I am. It was a big house south of Stockholm, Koreans and Russians, i left them with handcuffs, ceramic and ice. He didn’t panic. He knew what we were. He knew what I was. We still fell apart. Unable to talk about how we were the solutions to the others problems. We were unable to wait for the other. Niklas ran. Niklas vanished to London, I travelled back to Tokyo via Moscow and Beijing. I missed him. I thought it was over. We didn’t expect to see each orther again. Ever. We were like characters in a Duras story, full of regrets, haunted by death………. It was after this, him, after Niklas that I realized I shouldn’t really talk to men as objects of desire. I couldn’t. They simply weren’t. Other people weren’t. They simply aren’t. I met him. I missed him. Twice I missed him. Twice he missed me. Now staying at my house, makes it easier for him to talk about the bodies he left behind him. And I of course can speak about those I have left behind. He thinks there might be a better man or woman. He needs that momentary fear and jealousy. The truth is that I don’t want to talk to other men……… Between Stockholm and London there were two men and I could not speak with them. Between New York, Stockholm and London there were other women and he could not speak with them. If I cannot speak with them the sex is nothing… these days we only talk about it because he needs to feel special. That’s how men are, they want to be desired, they want to shine, even if they are recovering from their loneliness and solitude like Niklas……….. Niklas claims that he only talks to the humans in order to maintain the practice of making friends, but its not true. He speaks to people to hide (behind) his insecurity, his psychopathology. He can no more compare me to other women that I can compare him to other men and women. Am I a good choice? Sometimes Niklas leaves me alone with the people from the office. We drink together in one of the bars we go to, usually in silence. With some of the more understandable ones we can talk. With them I don’t have to prove anything, no matter who we are we are complete, as free as this society can let us be… Why did we take so long? The unmentioned violence probably, my clone says my injury meant the wrong people were affected.

[[…so here I limp, limp, limped across the room, leaning on my cane. My knee was hurting. I did not put the support on today, a mistake. When I am in Tokyo my leg hurts more than there… I have been doing to much and need a rest. I continue limping towards Maeda, she of the red swans. Niklas mother. They are what he is in exile from. Late Capitalist Fascists, they dream of a hideous utopia, an endless future of mass consumerism. I support myself on my cane. the cane he gave me….]] Ms Maeda I say, I am Nishi and I have a message for you. Actually I have an envelope that contains a message from your son for you. Inspector, so you’re Nishi I wondered what you were like….. [[ I do not say, your son lives in London, is happy there, and will never return here. He apologises to you for this. But he says that his partner, his girlfriend would not like him here. ]] Anyway, I have his card for you if you would like to speak to him. And hand her the envelope and his card. [[ I massage my knee not looking up as she reads the letter.]] Do you know what’s written here ? No, I didn’t look. [[I lied]] Are you here as Nishi or Nomiko? [[I wondered why she thought there might be a difference.]] Nishi, though both really… I’m glad you don’t know, Maeda said, I’ll speak to him, are you serious ? It’s fate, we tried to avoid it, I tried to avoid it, he tried to avoid it. but neither of us can. I keep him under light surveillance, so I knew about Nishi but not that it was you. How do you know him? Maeda asked me. An accident I told her, just an accident. You should speak to him as he works for my clone, and [[as an afterthought]] is under heavy protection. We didn’t say very much, we had nothing to say. [[ i thought of the year(s) i spent trying to put her in jail. to end up like this her exiled son protecting her…]] [[ there was nothing else to say…. I wish we could have done it all together in Tokyo, you don’t know what you don’t know, anyway that we have done it all together in London done it all together in Tokyo. Done it all together in Tokyo done it all together in Tokyo, though what all means is unknowable. I stand up and leave circulating around and across the room to vanish.]]

{Postscript waiting for the train into London, her right hand half raised, next to the grand staircase at the Station, where Nomiko once saw the tortoise disappear with Andie Wildermuth and later another saw the lion embrace the skinny Japanese violinist at the top of the stairs….}