A small woman who goes after what she needs over the weekend in Tokyo.
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Things you need to know before reading this story: 1) It is long. 2) Lucian thinks that Naoko's name is Masumi. 3) The point of view goes back and forth between them. 4) It does not have a happy ending.
Naoko sat alone and small at the bar of the Hildebrand International Shinagawa City hotel, looking behind her at the ultramodern space divided into not-so-cozy seating areas by frosted aquamarine glass panels. She thought, maybe I got my timing wrong, coming here after work. Maybe this place is deserted on weekends. Shinagawa is a business district and this is a businessman's hotel. Nobody comes to Shinagawa on a weekend. Everyone wants to get out of Tokyo, not go to office building complexes. She was exasperated with herself for not thinking this through and she was probably right, at least under normal circumstances.
My plan was a stupid one, she thought. I'll go back to the office and sleep tonight on that cot they keep in the room where the sarariman work all night to put together proposals by close of business in Dubai. Then tomorrow I'll take the train home to Higashi. Her parents thought she was spending the weekend with Tadashi, her on-and-off boyfriend, but she'd just tell them they decided to cut it short. Things were not working out as she had planned, she thought. Not in anything. She would have felt better if her feet had touched the floor but the bar stool was much too high for her.
No bar in Tokyo is deserted for long, least of all the beginning of a weekend.
A nice-looking older Western man in a suit walked into the bar, looking glum. He sat at the bar, looking straight ahead. He did not see Naoko when he walked in because she was tiny and off to the side. He wanted to go home now but he had to spend another weekend in Tokyo. Damn engineers, he thought. They design these things so fancy and then when they break they yell at us because we can't fix it without funny-looking parts or tools and then they don't want to spend the money to keep a kit where their clients are. They spend more shipping our stuff around the world "overnight" and making us wait. If the Japanese -- the techies of the universe -- cannot fix their stuff themselves why does Chicago think my team can do it in a couple days without a test kit?
Lucian Comeaga ordered a martini. Five or six years ago he had rediscovered the pleasures of this 1950's drink and when he wanted to get his mind off work a nice martini was a good way to relax. Not to get smashed mind you but.... to unwind. He knew of this little martini bar in Roppongi but it was too far away, so he took his chances at the hotel bar here. Japanese don't order martinis, he thought to himself, but in all the years he had been coming here as a road warrior he never developed a taste for sake.
As he glanced around the room he noticed another martini. This was very unusual. That it was standing on the bar, next to a small purse with a long, thin neckstrap, in front of a tiny young woman in a dark blue dress was even more unusual. In all the times he had been coming to Tokyo, he had never seen a Japanese woman at a bar, alone, nursing a drink. And the drink happened to be a martini. What's more, she was being very careful not to look at him.
Lucian was not normally very assertive but this whole scene was so unusual. The little woman was not in the slightest threatening and the familiarity of the martini glass gave him the confidence of familiarity. Smiling more confidently than he felt, he moved over two seats, leaving a seat empty between them.
"You like martinis?" he said. "Most Japanese people don't."
The young woman looked up at him with a terror-stricken expression on her tiny, triangular face and blushed deep red over her face and neck and even down to the neckline of her dress. "I like martini be-cause it is like movie!" she said with a sprightly insouciance in her voice that her blush visibly contradicted.
Lucian struggled to say something else. "Yes, I like martinis very much. I am trying different flavors. They come in different flavors these days, you know." He reminded himself that he did not have to speak baby-talk to her. She could probably understand him a lot better than she could speak. Besides, if her English was not perfect, at least she could speak it well. He spoke no Japanese at all besides "Konichi wa!"
Naoko's heart was racing inside her little chest. Her plan was working! This big, nice-looking Western man is going to try to, what do they say in English, "pick me up", like he would try to lift me up off the stool, she thought, but it means invite me for a good sex time. "I only drink one kind. For me it is, how you say, retro chic!"
Lucian almost laughed out loud, it was such an outlandishly appropriate thing for her to say. He suddenly noticed that he was relaxed around her. He noticed that her high cheekbones gave an even more angular look to her face. Lucian tried not to stare. Her face might have been too stark for some men but he thought she was pretty.
"Do you come here often?" he said, at a loss for what to say now that the topic of martinis seemed to have been exhausted. Naoko had read about that line in magazines and she was not impressed that he was using it but she was very pleased that he was starting to hit on her.
"No. I not live so close. I live far away. I stay in Shinagawa this weekend just." She was just a bit flustered and her much-practiced l's were starting to sound like r's again and she was forgetting her syntax. Mrs. Yamashita, her English teacher at school, would have been disappointed in her. That's not all. Mrs. Yamashita would have been scandalized at what she was doing. Anyway, she could hardly tell him that there was no way she could afford to stay at this hotel or anyplace in Shinagawa. The drink alone was more than she would normally ever spend on herself and this thoroughly modest frock was her sexiest dress. She had spent good money on a pair of panty hose, too. She didn't like them but her girlfriends told her how it made a woman's legs look nicer than bare skin or little stockings. Her skin was pale.
Her hair was straight, no surprise there, but she had colored it a sort of chestnut brown and it made her tiny face look even more narrow. A little different on a Japanese girl but at least her hair wasn't pink, like in Shibuya. This woman would be a little too old for that, he guessed, not by her appearance but by her manner and her hands -- the veined hands of a woman, not the slightly pudgy hands of a girl.
She wasn't his type. Lucian always fell for a certain type of woman but it never worked out. He had not scored with a tall blonde with stringy long hair and boobs the size of Lake Michigan since his ex-wife left him. Of course, she was not exactly that type either -- her boobs were only half the size of Carlyle Lake. Why even have a type when nobody like that wants to hook up with you? Still, it was funny that he now found himself attracted to a woman who was the exact opposite of everything that had attracted him before.
He moved to the seat next to her and she did not move away when their legs touched. It occurred to him that most Japanese women her size have short legs but her legs were long in proportion to a small body. They still did not come close to reaching the floor. Her legs were thin, like the rest of her, he noticed, but nicely shaped in the calf. He wondered if she was a dancer.
While they talked, Naoko kept looking into his pale blue eyes as if she were searching for something. He thought she might think that blue eyes were unusual but surely in modern Japan they see blue eyes all the time. He kept looking at her eyes, too. They were the darkest brown, almost black and so deep. She was drinking with one hand holding the stem awkwardly but he could tell that any minute now she would use both. And so she did, after giggling and scrunching up her little triangular face in the cutest way. Her hands were so tiny the glass looked huge in her fingers. They were talking about Tokyo and places they liked.