The Meeting (A Tokyo Story)
My bed takes up almost the whole room. It is on the seventh floor of a hotel---how many floors there are altogether I can’t say---near a train station somewhere in Tokyo, the biggest city, so I have heard, on earth. I am told that many hotels in Tokyo have rooms like this, that really there is nothing at all extraordinary about it, but it seems extraordinary to me, knowing as I do nothing at all about Japan and never having been here before. I say extraordinary---and yet it is hard to say in what this extraordinariness lies. Perhaps it is in the almost absurd over-largeness of the bed in proportion to what seems the exaggerated smallness of the room. Or perhaps it is the full-sized mirror on each of the three walls, so that if you are not looking out the window---and why should you be? there’s nothing to see---you can scarcely help but be looking at yourself. Beneath one mirror, taking up what little space there is between the wall and the bed, is a narrow desk which, just as the room is almost entirely occupied by the bed, is almost entirely taken up with a computer console. (Playing around with it last night I saw it was also a TV.)
I am in Tokyo on business, having arrived the day before yesterday. This is not my usual territory---as a rule I represent our firm’s interests in Western Europe; but when one of our Asia-Pacific sales people suddenly fell ill, I was deputized on the spot, in view of my wide knowledge of the firm’s affairs and despite my almost total ignorance of how matters stand in Japan, to take his place.
I just woke up, and have not yet looked at my watch, so I do not know what time it is. (There is a clock on the bedside lamp table, but its ticking, though faint, disturbed me, and last night before going to bed I took the battery out.) My usual waking time is 6:30, so it is probably around then---though it may be that my body clock has been thrown off by the extreme time difference. I slept deeply, but restlessly; I recall no disturbing dreams, and yet somehow I do not feel quite right. There is a sour taste in my mouth, a heaviness in my head and an inexplicable throbbing in my right arm, as though I had knocked it or something, which I have no memory of doing. It is strange. Walking from the train station to the hotel yesterday evening, I was suddenly accosted by a prostitute, who clutched my arm and said, “Sex? Sex?” I shook her off and slipped into the hotel lobby, and there the matter ended. Why, I wonder, should my arm ache where she clutched it? Her grip was eager but hardly powerful.
However, it is of no importance. I must throw off the covers and get ready. Today I am to meet with the directors of our principal Japanese client. On this meeting the success of my trip depends.