The Congress of Rough Riders

  Throughout all those weeks, Hitomi had remained on my mind. I was torn between my love for her and my inability to destroy my father. I knew from the start I could only have one of them and it had always been so that wherever I was was the place I felt most obliged to. And so during that time I chose my father over Hitomi and when he rejected me, I felt able to return to her. We had not spoken once during our time apart. For the first two weeks she had – I assumed – been screening her calls and had never returned any of the numerous messages I had left for her. After that, the operator told me that the line had been disconnected and I assumed that in her anger with me, she had changed her number.

  I wrote to her then and opened my heart in a letter in a way I had never done before. When I sat down with paper and pen, I wrote her name on the top of the page and then paused, wondering what it was I really wanted to tell her, determined that I would reveal all of myself to her and beg her to take me back. And that’s what I did. It was a love letter in the old-fashioned sense. I told her the things I’d done wrong and how much I missed her. I admitted that I had been slower to tell her that I loved her than she had ever been and that I was sorry for that and yet it was true, I did love her. In a moment of either insanity or a desire to be brutally honest, I revealed that I had been unfaithful to her while in London and then took back the words, saying that no, it had not been an infidelity, not for a moment; I had merely had sex with another girl and that was all. I laid my life in her hands and, knowing that I might be back in Kyoto before she even received the letter, asked her not to call me immediately or to write, but instead to think about my words, to question how much I also meant to her, and that I would see her soon, and we would put everything right. It was the most important piece of writing I had ever done.

  Arriving back in Japan a week later, I felt a great sense of relief; I truly believed now that I was coming home. I hadn’t seen Isaac again before leaving London and that preyed on my mind slightly, but now my mind had shifted. I was back in Japan, which meant that I was more Hitomi’s lover than Isaac’s son.

  A young man, a couple of years older than me and strikingly handsome, opened the door of Hitomi’s apartment when I rang the bell. My heart had been pounding inside my chest a moment before and when I saw him standing there I had to steady myself immediately, the very moment convincing me that she had found someone else.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked in perfect English, an amused smile flickering around his lips. He was bigger than most Japanese men, easily as big as me, and strong too. He held a glass of red wine in his hands and it occurred to me that while Hitomi always enjoyed opening a bottle in the evening when we were there, I almost never joined her, preferring to take a cold beer from the fridge or a Coke. I stared at the glass in his hand as he gently swirled it and wondered foolishly whether that was all it would have taken to have held on to her; a simple glass of wine.

  ‘Hitomi Naoyuki,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level. ‘Is she home?’

  He frowned and shook his head. ‘Perhaps you have the wrong apartment?’ he asked and I laughed, believing that he knew exactly who I was and was simply trying to get rid of me, afraid of a fight or a rival for Hitomi’s affections.

  ‘I want to speak to Hitomi,’ I said firmly. ‘Tell her it’s William and tell her I want to speak to her. Tell her now, will you?’

  He laughed and I could feel my blood begin to boil. ‘I told you, William,’ he said, his tone mildly insulting now. ‘There is no Hitomi here. You must have the wrong apartment.’

  I was ready to shove past him and storm through to the living room when a woman appeared by his side, looking at me quizzically. ‘This is my wife,’ the man explained and I caught a flash of his wedding ring as he put an arm around her shoulder. ‘This man is looking for a Hitomi …’ He glanced towards me. ‘Narajuki?’ he asked.

  ‘Naoyuki,’ I said, confused now but the woman shook her head. Speaking to her husband rather than directly to me, she reminded him that Hitomi had been the previous tenant. She had moved out a week before they had moved in, and they had moved in some five weeks earlier. The husband sighed and clicked his fingers.

  ‘That’s right,’ he confirmed. ‘I’m sorry, I knew the name meant something … I couldn’t quite remember. You are a … friend of hers?’

  I laughed slightly. Almost every time in the past that Hitomi and I had been out together and introduced to new people, they had asked me whether we were ‘friends’ as opposed to a couple, as if the idea of a Japanese with a Westerner, while perfectly within their limits of taste, was still slightly curious to them. ‘I’m her boyfriend,’ I said, an edge of anger coming into my voice which he detected and disliked.

  ‘If you are her boyfriend then you should know where she lives,’ he said. ‘And you clearly do not. Perhaps we should say goodnight.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said quickly, placing my hand against the door as he tried to close it. ‘An address,’ I said. ‘You have an address for where she moved to?’

  ‘She left no forward address,’ the woman said, addressing me now with kindness and I could tell from the way that she said it that she wasn’t lying. ‘She was gone before we arrived. A whole week. We never met her.’

  There was nothing more to be said so they simply closed the door in my face. I stood there for a moment, feeling lost and confused, before leaving the building and heading for a cheap hotel that I knew of nearby, believing that a good night’s sleep would help me organise my thoughts better. It was getting late anyway; I reasoned that I could arrive at her office tomorrow and speak to her then.

  However, when the morning arrived and I returned to the place where Hitomi and I had first met, the office was locked and when I looked through the glass on the door, it was obvious that there was no business in there any more as the room was entirely empty. As I walked away I noticed a sign advertising it as to let.

  I stood in the middle of a busy Japanese street and felt like throwing my arms in the air. I had two choices left. The first was that I could go to her parents’ home, where I doubted very much that she would be staying, and see whether they would give me her new address or telephone number, a scenario I believed was unlikely. So I chose the second option and waited outside Tak’s architectural offices one evening until I saw him come out – alone, luckily – and ran across the road to confront him, narrowly avoiding getting run over by a car as I did so. The horn sounded long and loud and one or two people looked in my direction irritably, but not Tak, who I had to run to catch up with and who I tapped on the elbow as I finally reached him. He stopped and turned, looking at me blankly for a moment before realising who I was and then his face broke into a wide smile, which surprised me a little, for he looked genuinely pleased to see me.

  ‘William Cody,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I almost didn’t recognise you. You’ve shaved for once.’ Instinctively, I stroked my cheeks and chin. ‘I thought you were back home.’

  ‘I am, Tajima,’ I said with a smile, granting him his full appellation for once.

  ‘Back home in London,’ he said quickly. ‘You know what I meant.’

  I shrugged. ‘I was,’ I admitted. ‘I just got back. I was waiting for you. I’ve been standing across there.’

  ‘You missed me that much, eh?’

  ‘Ha,’ I said without a smile. ‘Have you time for a drink?’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘Perhaps,’ he said after a pause. ‘I can’t stay for long. I have a date with a young lady from Nagasaki who I have been pursuing for many months. Hubba hubba. She has the longest legs I have ever—’

  ‘I won’t keep you long,’ I said quickly, not really wanting to hear the details of his latest paramour. ‘Let’s go to the Reu House.’ This was a bar I had been in many times before which only employed pretty, blonde American girls to wait on tables. It was a popular hangout and not far from where we were.

  ‘But the Reu House is where I am meeting my date,’ he said. ‘I don’t want her to arrive
and find us there together. Perhaps she would get the wrong idea about where the night is heading.’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re taking a date to the Reu House?’ I asked, amazed. ‘You’re the native here, Tak. That’s like holding your wedding reception in a strip club. You don’t take dates to the Reu House! You sit there gawking at the Noo Joisey hardbodies while she gets more and more fed up and leaves after two drinks. That’s lame, man.’ He looked mildly put out and I regretted having said that as, after all, I was relying on him for information. ‘Look I’ll just stay for one drink,’ I said. ‘Let’s just go there. It’s nearby. I promise I’ll leave before she arrives.’

  He nodded reluctantly and we made our way there; it was conveniently close to his apartment too and I suspected that Tak had planned it that way in case the evening went particularly well. His sense of opportunity had clearly overwhelmed his sense of romance. Once there, I wasted no time in getting to the point.

  ‘I’ve been calling Hitomi,’ I said. ‘Her phone’s been disconnected.’

  ‘Really,’ he said in a non-committal tone.

  ‘I’ve been calling since I went back to London,’ I continued. ‘She never returns any of my messages. Then it’s disconnected. I went to her apartment and she doesn’t live there any more. I went to the office and it’s been boarded up.’

  ‘You’ve been busy,’ said Tak.

  ‘Don’t give me a hard time,’ I asked, shaking my head irritably. ‘Where is she? What’s happened to her?’

  Tak laughed and leaned forward. ‘You went away, William,’ he said. ‘You left her. You went back to England. For all she knew you were never coming back.’

  ‘I’m back now,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You made a choice,’ he said. ‘And you chose England, am I right?’ I said nothing for now. ‘Hitomi has made choices too.’

  ‘What kind of choices? Where is she? Has she started a new job? Is she working somewhere else?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, William,’ he said. ‘She asked me not to.’

  I stared at him, amazed by this. ‘She what?’ I asked. ‘Why would she do that? It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘She feels – I think – that your relationship was not meant to be. She believes your heart is in England and as you know, she’ll—’

  ‘Die if she goes to England. I know. She’s told me.’

  ‘So she couldn’t follow you there. She believes your choice was the right one.’

  ‘Tak,’ I said firmly. ‘Just tell me where she is, will you? For God’s sake, I need to talk to her.’

  ‘I can’t do that, William,’ he repeated in a calm voice that annoyed the hell out of me. ‘Hitomi is my sister and she gave me strict instructions on what to do if you ever contacted me. I can tell her your number if you want, but other than that…’ He shook his head, indicating he could go no further. I knew there was no way that I could convince him and so, frustrated beyond belief, I scribbled down the phone number of the hotel where I was staying, and the number of the newspaper offices where I had worked before, telling him I could be contacted at either of those for the time being. We parted quickly after that and I went straight home, believing that he would probably have called her a moment after I left the Reu House and that she might be calling even then. I was wrong. Ultimately, I was never to receive another phone call from Hitomi while I was in Japan.

  Disappointed by our lack of contact and trying to find a way to keep my mind occupied while my search went on, however, I tried to re-establish my life in Tokyo, renting a new apartment and returning to work at the newspaper. My editor was delighted to see me again; strangely, my column had proved so popular that when it had ended, they had received many letters from readers demanding its return. It was a popular newspaper with both Japanese and visiting or ex-pat Westerners alike and my articles on living in a foreign culture – an innocent abroad – had clearly kept them amused and entertained.

  My articles were easy to construct. Every week I would write two thousand words on what I had done over the previous seven days. More often than not the events I depicted were either entirely fictitious or based on something I had heard had happened to another. I played the role of the slightly clumsy, unlucky-in-love Englishman; the floppy-haired ex-public schoolboy attempting to become immersed in another culture. Ironically, while my Japanese readers could laugh at my foolishness for being a stupid foreigner, the Westerners also laughed at me, believing that they – who I was attempting to lampoon – were nothing like the kind of idiot portrayed in my work. As well as the column, I wrote some other pieces for the weekend magazine and had begun writing some celebrity profiles (usually of visiting Western movie stars) before my enforced return to England.

  To my surprise, the return of my column provoked great approval and shortly afterwards the newspaper received an offer from the Associated Press for syndication in a range of newspapers across the Asia-Pacific region. Overnight, and with absolutely no extra work on my part, my salary increased six-fold and I found myself in the curious position of being comfortably off and a minor celebrity in the city.

  This celebrity increased further when – to my fury – I began to receive copies of the other newspapers syndicating my work and saw that above my byline and beside my photograph was a line drawing of a cowboy figure blowing smoke away from the top of a large handgun. They had obviously picked up on the fact that my name was the same as the great western hero Buffalo Bill and, without even thinking for a moment that we could possibly be related, had run the picture to draw attention to the column. Soon, I found that I would get looks around town or in restaurants or bars as people realised that I was that William Cody, the idiot Englishman who wrote the funny stories, and point at me from afar. Happily, my celebrity was minor enough that I was rarely approached by anyone, but from time to time a drunken lout, having saved up his joke all night and believing that he was the first to come up with a phrase of such originality, would creep up beside me and shout ‘Stick ’em up,’ a phrase which always had the power to bring me straight back to my childhood classroom days.

  I tried to enjoy my new-found fame – I wanted to enjoy my success as I had never imagined that I would have any – but it was difficult for I had never felt as lonely as I did then. My mind was on my loss twenty-four hours a day. The fact that Hitomi was out there somewhere and I could not find her left me constantly wondering what she was doing. I wanted Hitomi and believed that I had lost her, partly through Isaac’s deception, and partly through my own sense of family responsibility. I became angry with myself, embittered; I drank more, I slept around. I became complacent and caused a distance to grow between my colleagues and myself as I became more convinced of my own celebrity and importance; I was twenty-three years old and despite all the good things that were happening to me, I had never been so unhappy.

  And then, one evening while getting slowly drunk on my own in (ironically) the Reu House, attempting to chat up the American waitresses with little success, for they knew me only too well and one or two had already made the mistake of coming home with me, I was approached by a young Japanese woman of my own age who had been peering at me from a bar stool for about thirty minutes before making her way over.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘It’s Wilbur, isn’t it?’

  ‘William,’ I said, irritated that she could read the column, commit my picture to memory, but find herself unable to remember my name correctly.

  William, that’s right.’ she said apologetically. ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ I squinted and tried to place her; she didn’t look familiar. ‘Mayu,’ she said, pressing a hand to her chest lightly. ‘We met once, about a year ago? At Hitomi’s birthday party?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said quickly, recovering even though I didn’t have the first clue who she was. ‘Of course. Mayu. How are you?’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ she replied and we stood there and stared at each other for a moment with nothing particularly to say. ‘You’re back in Kyo
to,’ she said eventually, stating the obvious and I nodded.

  ‘Apparently,’ I said in a dry voice.

  ‘But are you just back on business? I can’t imagine you’d want to leave Hitomi on her own in a place like that for very long.’ She gave a laugh and I immediately perked up and put my beer down so that I might focus on her a little better. I didn’t want to make it too obvious that I was unaware of Hitomi’s whereabouts, in case she got scared and didn’t want to reveal any more. Fortunately, she hadn’t finished speaking yet. ‘All those sexy French men,’ she said, laughing a little more and her face flushed slightly. ‘I wouldn’t be able to resist them if it was me.’

  ‘Well, I trust her,’ I said quietly, my heart beating a little faster in amazement that such a conversation was actually taking place. We’re very happy after all. Have you ever been there, Mayu?’ I asked.

  ‘To Paris?’ she replied and I felt like giving a little gasp of delight but held myself in. ‘No, not yet. Someday, though, I’d love to go. I’ve always imagined it’s such a romantic city.’

  ‘It is,’ I said, despite the fact that I’d never been within a hundred miles of it. ‘It’s beautiful. Especially at this time of year. I’m only here to organise shipping the rest of Hitomi’s things over there. We don’t think we’ll ever leave. You should come visit us, you know.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ she said, a little taken aback I think by my sudden enthusiasm and generosity. ‘I’ll have to start saving.’

  ‘Well we could put you up,’ I said, trying not to overdo it too much. ‘Hitomi would love to see you. Just give us a call. You have our number, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, looking around as her friends were standing up to leave and waving for her to join them. ‘But don’t worry, I can call Tak someday and get the details. He’s got your number, yes?’

  ‘Don’t phone for a while,’ I said, ecstatic now and anxious to be rid of her, ignoring her last question. ‘We’re going away on a trip for about six weeks. Perhaps after that?’