AN: All dialogue, unless otherwise noted, is spoken in Japanese. For cultural objects that don't fully translate I've added a glossary at the end of the chapter.
If New York was the city that never slept, then Terry thought Tokyo was the city that never dreamed. Its denizens pulsed through the neon veins of the city, on their way to work and back, or another kind of work: the work of being fashionable, or up-to-date, or whatever. Harajuku and Akibahara were as businesslike and devoid of passion as any office building. That youthful swelling of imagination, of constant cultural renewal that you saw in other cities (if only at the fringes) was absent. This wasn't all a bad thing – Terry had lived in Baltimore for a couple years, and a city that didn't dream was better than one with nightmares. Still, he felt stifled, like the city was sucking up his soul.
But that was probably all bullshit. He was just blaming the city for his own miserable life.
Terry sat in his cramped bedroom, staring at a blank piece of paper. A saccharine J-Pop song invade his room through the weak walls. He was trying to draw a naked girl – more specifically a nude version of a character from a popular anime series he had never watched – but it wasn't coming out right. Every drawing was frightening, not erotic – the girl looked monstrous.
Naomichi knocked on his door, and then opened it without waiting for a reply. "Hey man, how are those pages coming?"
"They're not," Terry said. He pointed to the wastebasket, overflowing with discarded drafts.
"Dude, stop masturbating and just draw it," said Naomichi.
"Those aren't tissues, they're pieces of paper."
"Really? Paper seems a little coarse to me."
Terry might have laughed if he was in a better mood, but right now Naomichi just irritated him. His partner was everything he feared he was becoming – overweight, chubby and bespectacled, obsessed with anime, video games, and sex. Naomichi's clothes perpetually smelled, and Terry had never heard him taking them to the laundromat. He was a thirteen-year-old trapped in a thirty-two-year-old's body. And circumstance forced Terry to work with him.
"Seriously, can we do something else?" said Terry. "I'm just not feeling this girl."
"Of course you're not feeling her. She's a drawing."
Terry supposed that expression didn't translate over into Japanese. "I mean, I'm having trouble drawing her. Can we just go back to doing Gurren Lagann? I can draw those girls fine."
"Look, you get to pick the next project," said Naomichi. "But I want to do this series, and you should to. It's new and hot and it'll sell a ton. Our doujin could be one of the first on the market."
"So it doesn't have to be good?" said Terry.
"None of this has to be good. It's pornography, not fine art. Just draw what people want to jack off to and they won't nitpick."
Naomichi grabbed the pack of pocky he had left his room to get and returned back to drawing his half of the doujinshi. Terry tried once again to draw, focusing on the pictures of the girl Naomichi had given him. They just kept looking younger. Terry wondered whether his work was staving off the urges of some pedophile, helpfully directing his desire away from real, flesh-and-blood teenage girls. Or maybe this kind of thing only excaberated desire. He didn't know; both made sense.
Terry's pencil idly wandere across the page. He discovered after a few minutes of drawing that he was sketching his high school girlfriend, Sarah Tamblin. She was a sweet girl, who thought that because Terry was an artist he was some kind of pure-hearte soul. But he was just another teenage boy, and she was just another teenage girl, and after a year of dating he had given up on being a gentleman and snaked his hand up her skirt and she had slapped him so hard it left a mark and that was that. Her handprint only took minutes to fade, but Terry had wanted it to last forever.
He drew her with a schoolgirl uniform. They had both gone to public school, but he was so used to drawing schoolgirls that the uniform grew unconciously. He stopped to look down at what he had done. It was Sarah, but it wasn't, it was a manga girl with big pleading eyes and a small demure mouth and blemish-free skin.
Terry wondered at this drawing, which had suddenly turned into a character. Who was this girl? Why was she smiling? What would she be ten years from now, what had she been ten years ago? He had given birth on the page, but all he had created was body and not mind.
But he was wasting time. He should get back to this new doujin, even if he wasn't enthusiastic about it. Terry set the drawing of the girl who looked like Sarah aside, but not before scrawling on the bottom: "SAKURA TANIGAWA."
--
Other than looks, there weren't many similarities between Sarah Tamblin and Sakura Tanigawa, but one of the few was that both were virgins at age eighteen. Sakura hadn't preserved her cherry out of any kind of prudish reluctance, but simply because the boys around her (and they were, after all, nothing but boys) were so stupid, immature, and for the most part just plain ugly. Her eyes were set on only one man, who was on a completely different level from these children, and who just happened to teach her English class.
Sakura was a B student in every other class, but even though she rarely payed attention to the material in English class, once she was at home she threw herself into it, hoping desperately to impress Mr. Bradshaw. And it worked, or so it thought.
"Very good," Mr. Bradshaw said to her in English as he handed back her test, a sterling blue "92" written on the top corner. "To tell you the truth, you know English better than a lot of Americans."
Sakura flushed. "Thank you very much, Mr. Bradshaw," she said in English. She still had a fresh-off-the-boat accent, but her grammar and vocalbulary were near-perfect. An unexpected benefit of her love.
And it was love – not some stupid schoolgirl crush. She had found the
gaijin
handsome from her first day of high school, and over the year she learned of his sense of humour, his compassion, his obvious intelligence, and fell deeply in love. He was her ideal man, really. Sakura had left Mr. Bradshaw a love letter in second year, in faltering but very explicit English, and handed it in between the sheets of her homework. He had never responded to it in any way. At first she was crushed, sure it was a rejection because she was ugly or irritating. Sure, it was against the rules to sleep with your students, but why would you fly halfway around the world to teach English unless you wanted to score with some young, nubile Japanese girls? He must be sleeping with the prettier girls, and had no time to fit her into his schedule. Sakura had spent the weekend after that crying and moping, her friend Natsumi holding and comforting her as best she could.
Over time she had come to believe that Mr. Bradshaw was just that pure-minded. No stories, not even rumours, of affairs with students had ever surfaced – and these things were fairly common at her school. So Sakura bided her time. She was already eighteen, and had turned from a gawky teenager into an adult woman with long legs and full, ruby lips and C-cup breasts (one of the biggest in her class). In a few months she would finish high school and they would no longer be student and teacher but just a man and a woman. She would have him then.
Until then she would just smile, wear her skirt high, and keep studying.
--
Three hours later, Terry had only done three pages of the doujin he was supposed to be working on, and they were crap. Every sex scene he drew looked the same, just with the names and hairstyles changed. Every artist has moments where they suspect that they're a total hack, but Terry was pretty sure those moments weren't supposed to last six months. On the other hand, he kept returning to his sketch of Sakura Tanigawa, adding in background and thinking up the story this girl belonged in. She was a schoolgirl, of course – some conventions had to be followed. He decided she was in love with her English teacher. Her foreign English teacher. He realized it was kind of masturbatory, but who would know? To the few who even paid attention to the byline he was Taro Ozuma, just another Japanese artist.
Naomichi emerged from his dank room, experimentally stretching his legs. "How's it going over there, Terry?"
"It's, uh, going. I'm almost out of paper, of all things." He thought of a way to kill some time. "Actually, I think I might head down to the store now.|
"I can do it, man. You're way behind on your pages." Even though they were supposed to be partners, Naomichi acted like a disappointed boss most of the time.
"Come on, the art store's right on the corner," Terry said, faintly angry that he had to plead. "And stretching my legs could do me good. Get the creative juices flowing."
"It's a bad excuse for a break," said Naomichi. "But I guess I can't force you to work. Just make sure it's done by the end of the week. And get some ink too, I don't think what we have will be enough for this one."
Terry knew he shouldn't resent Naomichi. It was only because of him that Terry could stay in Japan, and it was only because of him and his job (usher at a movie theatre) that they made rent and food every month. Terry, on the other hand, was practically a charity case. But with the tight quarters and tight deadlines bickering and resentment sprung up like weeds.
After descending several floors of his apartment building, deciding to take the stairs rather than the temperamental elevator, Terry burst out into the the sunny, crowded street. He was used to the stares that came with being a blonde-haired white guy in Japan, as well as the bubble of space around him on even the most crowded subway car. He walked down to the small art store on the corner and got some decent paper and ink. Terry wondered if and how he could get out of his present situation and start being able to afford the fancy pens and tools he saw in the glass display case.
