Oh, oh Tokyo!
Lost Girls and Love Hotels, By Catherine Hanrahan,
Viking Canada, 216 pages, $26
By Jim Bartley
June 6, 2006
'Sometimes, when I'm staring down a room of Japanese stewardesses-in-training,
looking across a sea of shiny black coifs, a chorus line of stockinged legs,
knees together, toes to the side, when I'm chanting 'Sir, you are endangering
yourself and other passengers!' I think I should have let my brother stab me. I
shouldn't have run when Frank came at me with the carving knife, yelling
'Satan! Satan!' I should have faced him, arms outstretched, eyes closed in
sacrifice, and let him put the blade into me."
As if that opening were not enough to wrest the mind and rattle the heart,
Catherine Hanrahan inserts multiple orgasms into her second paragraph -- and
spirited use of the "f" and "s" words to boot. Set in a Tokyo that pinballs
between funhouse and purgatory, this ambitious first novel may blow a few of
the book-and-brunch set out of their orientalist armchairs.
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On page three I began to chuckle -- slightly defensively, like an incredulous
tourist standing before a used-pantie vending machine. Page nine stalled the
giggles. In a washroom cubicle at Air-Pro Stewardess Training Institute,
Margaret listens to two saved messages on her cell phone. She's been rerunning
them for weeks and still hasn't faced the contents. One's from brother Frank;
the other is her mother: "Margaret I need you to call me. There's been an
accident."
She's been three months in Tokyo, two of them spooking the recruits at air
hostess boot camp. She's not a teacher but a "pronouncer," articulating
training-book phrases in Americanized English. Occasionally she's obliged to
play drunken businessmen in tense flight scenarios -- which she does with scary
(and riotous) panache. Through it all, a crippling sense of despair is held at
bay with the help of a fellow expat, Ines, and rounds of beer and sake after
work.
Sex is another coping strategy. Through Ines, she meets Kazu, a young gangster
who whisks her off to a love hotel. Declining the three-hour "rest" rate in
favour of an all-nighter, they have a workmanlike tumble in the Outer Space
Room. When Margaret makes a move to leave, Kazu asks her to stay. Breaking her
cardinal rule, she does.
They meet a few more times. When Kazu stops calling, it only proves how hard
Margaret has fallen. Then she gets fired for taking a student to a dance club.
Her Barbie-doll boss screams at her with forehead veins pulsing: "You have
tried to derange the recruits! . . . You have face splotch and smell of meat!
You are more worse than average foreign person."
We flash between past and present, an unhappy childhood in Canada and the
attempted cure in Tokyo's obliterating jangle. Her brother, schizophrenic and
institutionalized, was once something like her best friend. Now her growing
sense that she abandoned him fights for head space with the conviction that
nothing she can do will bring him back.
Hanrahan's streetscapes and school kids, bathrooms and noodle shops, social
blunders and rent-a-dog outlets all ring with authenticity. The novel soars on
optics and atmosphere and the ongoing ricochet of Margaret's culture shock. The
flashbacks to Toronto and family dysfunction feel roughed-in by comparison.
The symbolism can also feel overly schematic, as when Margaret, with narrative
convenience, catches sight of a missing girl whose face is postered all over
town and implausibly tries to chase her down in the teeming commuter crush of
Shinjuku Station.
It's a movie moment, the message all in the images with no need for Hanrahan's
underscoring: "I lose sight of the lost girl. Gone into the station or down the
stairs. Gone." We know who the lost girl is, and already feel for her.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.
