By Gordon Vanstone (Monsoon Books, 2021)

From Part Three: Tokyo (Tonkotsu), “Cosmic Pachinko”

The crack of a bat drew my attention to a row of batting cages, the most ill-fitting of Kabukicho’s diversions. Guess even hustlers and pimps need to blow off steam with a little wholesome recreation once in a while. 

The batting cages and dense block of love hotels mark the bottom fringe of Shinjuku’s red-light district. I emerged from the carnival-like atmosphere of Kabukicho’s libertinism and entered Shin-Ōkubo where it becomes clandestine, existing as necessity more than luxury.

I’d just left the Beatles McDonald’s. While I’d have liked to have met Yukie again after work, and make love until sunrise, it had become impossible to ignore, once again, I was financially fucked. With barely enough left from my bullfight winnings to purchase the requisite Chu-his to get me through another day, I was in no position to be shelling out for love hotels.

As I ruminated on money woes and when I’d get to be properly intimate with Yukie again, Jae-hyun rounded a Korean BBQ joint on the corner and headed my way.

‘Been keeping busy these days. Things must be progressing well for you.’ He noted my frequent absences from the café of late with a prideful gleam in his eye.

‘Yeah, things have been going okay,’ I admitted. ‘But, you know what they say, romance and finance, the scourge of a man’s existence.’

‘Ah, and which is getting you down?’

‘Surprisingly, the romance is on pretty good track. But financial difficulties are starting to hamper that,’ I said with a pathetic self-pitying pout and hoped he didn’t think I was about to hit him up for a loan. But there was a favour I’d been wanting to ask him, something that could help my money troubles as well as scratch a long nagging cultural itch. ‘Hey Jae-hyun, can you teach me to play pachinko?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ he replied, breaking into a broad smile.

Jae-hyun briefly stopped by his cubby and emerged donning a baseball cap pulled low and a bulky black jacket. We walked the streets of Okubo past several loud cajoling shops. For reasons, personal or professional, we couldn’t patronize any of those. Finally, we arrived at a rundown parlour off Okubo’s main drag.

‘You want to avoid the new bigger parlours, they rig the machines more and pay out less. They think they can get away with it with all that glitz and theatrics. They practically do, but us old hands know,’ he said, with an old cocksureness coming to surface.

Stage one, as Jae-hyun explained, was to walk around the place to find a machine that spoke to you. He said the pros study the machines for hours and see which ones are paying out, then snag them. We didn’t have time for that so were forced to go on feeling alone. It was a bit like being at the track, watching the horses as they were paraded around the paddock, and betting on a hunch the one who catches your eye.

The parlour still dinged and binged like the others, there still hung in the air a thick cloud of second-hand smoke and gentle whiff of fatalism; it was just the machines were a little bit older, the lighting drabber, and the carpet sullied with cigarette burns, old stains and sticky underfoot.

My sole peeled off the floor, and I seized Jae-hyun’s arm. ‘This one!’

A chair, padded with red vinyl covering like all the rest yet in the distinctive disrepair of the joint had rips in the covering and yellowing foam protruding out. It was the rips that caught my attention. There was one extended tear, and beside it, a diagonal cut intersected by a horizontal and that sliced through with another short vertical – making a distinct number fourteen.

I approached and swung the seat toward me, just to confirm, then sat. Jae-hyun seemed to approve of my selection as he walked to my side and stood ready to instruct. We put a five-thousand-yen note in the machine. ‘Okay,’ instructed my coach, ‘press the tamakashi.’

Inferring, I pressed a little red button and a bin which stuck out like a pouty bottom lip flooded with silver ball bearings. As instructed, I turned the handle on my lower right side, twisting back and forth.

‘You can’t manipulate the ball once in motion, just set it on the correct path,’ Jae-hyun told me as, by instinct or conditioning, his busted hand reached for the knob, and then retracted as if from a flame.

It was a delicate craft. If you turned the handle too sharply, the balls went right into the losing shoot at the bottom, if not enough, then they fell short of the goal. There were also pesky little pegs on the board, which would knock my ball off course if hit at the wrong angle.

‘Aim for the gap,’ he said. ‘Seek the clearest line to the winning holes.’

‘I am!’ Frustrated with my ability, I snapped. Thus far, I’d lost all balls down the losing side shoots.

‘You’re thinking too much. Forget any schemes or systems, find the feel and go with it,’ he directed in a firm whisper.

There’s some of that Zen shit I’ve been waiting for. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them to the machine’s bongo beat blast of blinking lights. Calmly, I adjusted the knob; based not on thought, but through sheer sense.

With my newfound rhythm, the balls started to fall into the winning destination, one after the other. It was like finding the g-spot, challenging to get there but once you had it, didn’t want to lose your place as the rewards came fast and furious, and felt pretty damn sweet.

Silver balls spilled forth from the base and collected in a plastic basket below. So much so that one became filled and Jae-hyun needed to grab an empty one to replace. Somehow the impossible happened and the parlour’s constant clangour faded away, only the sweet, steady sound of cascading ball bearings, like monsoon rains against a corrugated roof, could I hear.

When my touch waned, Jae-hyun would jump in with more eastern visualization blather, like reading from a sutra of eerily relatable aphorisms. ‘Stars falling through the cosmos, guide them through this muddled universe …’ or ‘don’t struggle against the current; find the centre, relax and flow with it.’

‘Sugoi, aotari,’ Jae-hyun exclaimed excitedly as a waterfall of little silver balls filled an entire basket with a single pour. I didn’t know what it meant but knew it was good. The way the machine screamed and lit up, I figured I’d hit some sort of jackpot.

At that point, I wasn’t sure if we were making any money. It sure felt like it by the baskets of ball-bearings being set aside, plus Jae-hyun’s beaming smile was a pretty good indicator. Despite my ignorance of the rules and results, I could see the appeal. The randomness of outcomes, all the variables and obstacles encountered along the way. The parlour sets the pegs, so yeah, it’s rigged against you, that’s life! But you determine the course, and that sense of control – the gambler’s hit – permeates the player’s mindset so a belief prevails; I can beat the game, with just the right touch.

It felt like I’d only been playing for thirty minutes, but when closing time rolled around close to midnight, it meant we’d been there almost four hours. We exchanged our many baskets of balls from a kind of gift shop near the front. For my efforts, an alarm clock, teddy bear and handbag were handed over the counter, like if I’d rung three bottles at a carnival. In exchange for this newfound armload of crap, I tipped the attendant with a baffled expression.

Jae-hyun was unfazed. He led me outside and around the corner to a small kiosk, the TUC shop. I handed over my random objects, the officious gentleman did some number crunching, and stone-faced, he handed me a thick wad of crisp bills.

I counted our winnings as we walked back to the main street, just under a hundred thousand yen.

‘Thanks,’ I said, handing Jae-hyun his half.

He waved it away.

‘No, I insist. My first pachinko … it was something. I’ve wanted to try ever since I arrived, but never knew how.’

The money hung from my arm in the air between us. ‘I’ve got no need for it.’ He glanced at the cash and then away with a kind of disdain. ‘The experience itself was all the payoff I require,’ he added with the jubilant smile of a travelling Mormon.

I procured us a couple of tall cans from the nearest conbini, and without any explicit plan meandered past Don-don Quijote. Across Syokuan-Dori, and tilting at windmills, I pointed out Tatsuya and Machiko’s bar. ‘Had a pretty fucked up time there the other night.’

‘How so?’ Jae-hyun enquired.

I gave a brief backstory on Hideki, the names he’d written and then said, ‘We were not welcomed, to say the least. All but chased out of the bar by an unrelenting bitterness.’

‘Hmm, sounds uncomfortable,’ Jae-hyun said, and I could almost see his thoughts hopscotch down a memory lane where every square was a far more significant occurrence of undue prejudice. ‘But consider it a peg.’

‘A what?’

‘It’s an obstacle in your path, but how you rebound or bounce off of it will ultimately determine where you land.’

‘I’ve landed on fuck ’em and fuck it. I did my part and delivered my friend’s message,’ I said, my feigned indifference gnawed through by a persisting ire.

‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against,’ Jae-hyun continued, seeing through my wispy emotional smokescreen.

‘Are you a Christian?’ I asked, recognising the line loosely from the Lord’s Prayer I was required to learn somewhere in my youth.

‘Not particularly, I adhere to a meticulously sewn patchwork of theology,’ he said, tipping up the brim of his cap. ‘But in the end, they mostly overlap and intertwine. So “to understand all things is to forgive all things” if you prefer.’ Jae-hyun shrugged.

That one I didn’t recognise. ‘You forgive your pachinko bosses, for your hand and Eun-ae? Or Kim Jong’s regime?’

‘All of them … wholly! I had to. It was impossible to forgive myself until I learned to forgive others. My freedom was found in that forgiveness.’

Freedom? He lives in a fucking 2 by 2 closet, I thought. But we’d been down that road before so I shut the fuck up and listened.

The bottom hemisphere of Kabukicho was in full swing with all the usual suspects drifting through the streets and alleys, like hungry Pac-Man looking to satisfy insatiable appetites. Jae-hyun and I walked void of destination, yet veered deeper into the red-light maze, and who was leading who remained unknown.

I stopped in my tracks and swung the back of my hand in front of Jae-hyun’s chest to halt his progress. There, before the Robot restaurant, in front of an old-school izakaya situated on the street like an Edo era abode rather than your usual garish Kabukicho establishment and next to a potted gumtree plant, the elegant fingers of a pianist played the single string of his silent instrument. ‘Check him out,’ I pointed with excitement.

‘The kite-flyer of Kabukicho, ne!’ His eyes squinted and lips curled into a subtle smile. ‘Quite a character.’ He shook his head with undiminished fascination at the specimen. ‘Oh, so you can see him? That’s good, most don’t or simply choose not to.’

‘Yeah, I noticed he goes largely ignored by the masses,’ I said. ‘Stumbled upon him a few times now but I’m still trying to figure out why he does it … like a ritual or something? But for what?’

‘Yes, a ritual sounds about right. I don’t really know, I imagine so he can see … Above it all, beyond you or me, and all the rest.’

I mulled until my head hurt. ‘You ever see what’s on the other side?’ I stared up at the dark blue underbelly. ‘The design that faces the night sky?’

Jae-hyun flickered a puckish smile. ‘Now you’re thinking like me. Many a night I wandered these streets pondering the same. Even asked Kai about him on a number of occasions. He wouldn’t tell me much, just flashed me a knowing grin,’ he chuckled with a light-hearted frustration.

‘Hold up. Kai knows him?’

‘Yeah, Jun and him go way back. Seen them chatting away, on anonymous corners all over Kabukicho through the years.’

This blew my mind. First that Kai ever left the vicinity of our little netcafe and secondly he interacted with someone willingly. ‘So they like friends, family, colleagues?’ Come to think of it, there was a likeness. If not in appearance, then the way each, in his own way, was too strange for this world.

‘Damned if I know.’ He tipped his can and drank. ‘Partners in some odd scheme, acquaintances at best maybe,’ Jae-hyun mumbled.

His bulbous head emerged from the wide teal lapels of that night’s leisure suit. He paid no mind to the gawking strangers down the block, but bore a concentrated look as he fixated on centring the rhombus at some specific point in the sky. ‘You got any theories?’ I asked. ‘On the design.’

‘More than you’d want … how much time you got? But I’d like to hear yours. Get a fresh take.’

I stared up, took a drink of grapefruit Chu-hi then let the can fall and dangle by my side. ‘It just came to me now … but like an ancient symbol of some sort, an Aztec eye or something?’

‘The Ollin. Hmm, very nice.’ His head nodded in slow motion. ‘Movement, shifting shapes, Gemini, and Venus, the evening star – pulsating hearts, and the earth quakes, a beat of butterfly wings or undulating motion of weft as the loom weaves,’ he spat like Twista. Off the top of his head, the string of connections came as if a computer crunching complex formulas. I understood none of it, but the words individually hit my subconscious like pinpricks.

‘It’d answer a lot but raise just as many questions,’ Jae-hyun finished, lost in contemplation.

I feel that. ‘Your theory? Just give me the top two or three.’ I smirked up one side of my face.

He was in good spirits, took two long drags and laughed heartily. ‘That I can do. The first … You ever read the Iliad?’

‘I like dead writers but not that dead,’ I smiled back.

‘Well, really intricate and busy, like the shield of Achilles. A universe unto itself, an alternate reality, soaring above it all, under Jun’s watch and control.’

I looked at the kite-flyer of Kabukicho, Jun, as I guess he goes by. Rooted to the pavement like the potted plant he stood beside and just as unassuming. I discounted Jae-hyun’s first theory, out of hand.

‘Or if you like, some incarnation of the yin and yang … the kite sways in constant deliberation. Would explain the location. Kabukicho after the gloam fades, what a better place to gauge the duality of man?’

Each theory came with a gleam of the eye. I sensed he was holding out on me. There was a final, a favourite yet. ’Come on, one more. You’re saving the best for last, eh.’

He glanced over with a conspiratorial smile, as if about to share a thought that shouldn’t be shared then looked back up at the kite. ‘Just black,’ he said. ‘Pitch black.’

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. On we sauntered in reflective silence, reviewing each step of the personal journeys which preceded us.

⁂

Rainy Day Ramen and the Cosmic Pachinko can be bought from Amazon.com; Amazon.jp; Kinokuniya stores in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan (Shinjuku); Dymocks in Australia; and Waterstones in U.K.

Note: This book contains language and scenes that may be offensive to some people.

About the Author:

Gordon Vanstone hails from Victoria BC, Canada. After graduating with a Bachelor of Education from Simon Fraser University, he moved overseas and worked as an international school teacher throughout Asia, including eight years in Tokyo. Gordon currently lives in Singapore and works in sales and marketing for an education company. Rainy Day Ramen and the Cosmic Pachinko is his first novel. Visit his website, or follow him on Instagram.