You are divorced. Recently, surgically. The papers signed, the rings returned like faulty merchandise. Tokyo is supposed to make you feel useful, worldly, detached, but it only makes you aware of how little you know of everything: the train system, the language, yourself.
The concierge suggests a geisha-themed karaoke bar. He does this with a wink so small it might have been a dust mote in his eye. You go anyway.
Inside: red drapery, dim chandeliers of paper cranes, and waitresses in polyester kimonos that look both earnest and rented. Salarymen sing off-key ballads to an audience of their own exhausted friends. You order plum wine and find it tastes like syrup with a grudge.
She appears beside you, a woman in wig and kimono, the costume cheap but the poise not. She calls herself Akiko, though the delicate grin that follows makes it clear the name is approximate.
‘You look like someone who’s lost a bet,’ she says. Her English is careful, ironic, as though she’s practising sincerity on you.
You tell her you’re in Tokyo on business, which feels like both an answer and an alibi.
You sing together—something vaguely American, belted with enough drama to pass for feeling. You laugh. It startles you. You haven’t heard yourself sound that alive since the marriage, which ended like a chair giving way beneath you at a party.
Later, you walk with her back to your hotel. The wig stays on. Your heart performs small tricks of protest, like a dog refusing to come inside. In the room she asks if you’re sure. You nod, as though nodding has ever made you brave.
The sex is not what you expected. It is better and stranger, as if the rules you once obeyed were revealed to be jokes. She touches you like someone finding a radio station in static. You do not think of your ex-husband, who touched you like fruit he was uncertain about buying.
Afterward, the wig tilts, showing a glimpse of short, dark hair, ordinary and beautiful.
‘Most people think geishas are fantasy women,’ she says. ‘Fantasy women know most people are temporary.’
You want to ask what that makes you, but the question already sounds pathetic in your head.
At dawn you dress quietly. The city outside is pale, geometric, and indifferent. You leave a note that says only Thank you. It feels like leaving a receipt.
On the bullet train to Kyoto, you sit across from two businessmen in suits, each identical in their constipation of expression. They ignore you politely, which is to say perfectly.
The landscape rushes past: rice fields, tidy homes, a horizon too polite to intrude. You think of her—wig off, hair smashed, quite drunk, singing to a man who will cry into his miso afterwards and call it enlightenment. You doubt she remembers your name. You doubt you gave one she hasn’t already assigned to someone else. The note you left probably went straight into the trash with the room service menu and the instructions for operating the toilet.
One of the businessmen glances at you the way a person checks a dented suitcase on a carousel—curious only in case it’s theirs. The train enters a tunnel. Your reflection surfaces in the window: pale, uncommitted, like a placeholder for a better idea someone forgot to pitch.
Then the tunnel ends. Your face is erased cleanly, like it was never part of the draft.
The businessmen keep typing.
The train doesn’t slow, or care, or circle back.
M.L.Ellison is in the field of medicine, splitting her time between London, UK and Accra, Ghana.
Illustration via Unsplash.