A Taste for Christmas Cake

"Please enjoy it at your leisure," she replied.

The boy glanced at me, unsure.

"Like I said, my treat. Merry Christmas and all that."

He smiled shyly.

"Kampai!" I said, leaning down to drink from the glass while it still sat on the table. The boy watched me.

I wiped away the sake moustache and licked a finger. "It's the only way you can drink the first bit without spilling it," I said.

He did the same and licked his lips. "Wow. It's really good!"

"You have to be careful, though," I said. "Rice wine is pretty strong."

After that we clicked our dripping glasses together in another toast. Soon after the mama-san arrived with our food. Everything proved delicious.

As expected, the boy had trouble using his chopsticks.

"Are you drunk already? I teased, amused as he made another abortive attempt to pick up a piece of fried chicken. "You really should pace yourself."

"Oh, no, no," he said. "I'm just not very good at using chopsticks."

"Here," I said, putting my own chopsticks back on my bowl and leaning across the table to take hold of his hands. "You're holding them wrong."

"I am?" He stared down at our hands as I repositioned the chopsticks.

"Yeah," I said. "That's the way little kids hold them."

I soon took him through a practice run, my hand still on his. We picked up the chicken together and brought it over to his bowl.

"Just remember," I said. "Your bowl is your base of operations. All the food from other dishes have to at least touch down on it before they go in your mouth. You can't just shovel stuff straight out into your mouth like a barbarian."

"Oh," he said.

"Rika never taught you about this sort of thing?"

He shook his head. "We always went to Western places."

"I see." I helped him take the chicken off his dish and was lifting it part way to his mouth when I let go of his hand.

"You do it the rest of the way." I told him. "You don't want me feeding you, right?"

He didn't reply. He was too busy wrestling with the chopsticks and trying to keep the chicken between the pointed ends. He managed somehow and got the morsel into his mouth.

"It's good!" he exclaimed.

"Well, the struggle makes it taste better," I said.

He put down the chopsticks and sighed. "You're right."

"What about?" I asked.

"Rika was only going out with me because I was a foreigner."

"Hey, don't worry about it," I said. The nurturing side of me was winning and I regretted my earlier cruelty. I lifted the second half of a battered oyster to my mouth. "How long were you going out for?"

"Three weeks."

I pulled the chopsticks from my mouth. I chewed on the delicious morsel and swallowed. Three weeks. Tears after three weeks.

"Three weeks, huh." I sighed. "You should try three years."

"Excuse me?" He lifted his eyes from where he was struggling to catch a slice of raw salmon from the salad.

"Three years," I said. I knew he didn't really want to hear about my problems, but I was already talking so I kept going. "I was going out with my fiancé for three years when he broke up with me."

"When did that happen?" he asked.

"A week ago."

"I'm sorry," said the boy, frowning. He really did feel sorry for me, the adorable creature.

"Well," I said. "It was my fault. I shouldn't have let things go on like they did for so long." The boy was still listening, so I kept talking. "I mean, I started to badger him about getting married. We'd been engaged for two years and it felt like things were going nowhere."

"What was his name?"

I blinked. "Kazuo," I said.

"Kazuo," he murmured, still fishing at that slice of raw salmon with his chopsticks. "Figures. I've never met a single nice guy called Kazuo in my life."

I stared at him, but his eyes were glued to the salmon. He finally snared it and held it up in triumph, grinning at me.

I felt my pulse quicken. I'd been in a tense state all night, even back at the end of year party. The rice wine had gone straight to my head and was making things worse. And now, with that tell-tale melty feeling below my waist, I knew I was going to do something stupid, something risky.

"Hey, you said you're learning Japanese, right?" I said. "Let me give you a quick lesson then. Scoosh over a sec."

I stood up and moved across to his seat. His eyes went wide with surprise but he quickly sat aside to make space for me. I leaned across him and pointed to the sake bottle. "You can read a few kanji, right? Can you read this? I know it's in cursive, but it's neat."

"Well," he said. I admired his willpower. My cleavage was right in front of him and his eyes didn't once leave the bottle. "The first character means beautiful, right? Goat with big written underneath it."

"You're right, it is," I said. You often forget what a character is made up of when you see the words every day of your life.

"And the second one I think means small."

"Few, actually," I said. "Sukunai. How about the last one? It's easy."

"It's year," he said.

"Well done!" I exclaimed. "So we read it bi-shou-nen."

"Isn't the first character -mi?"

"Well, sometimes," I said. "Like in my first name. Mi-eko. But here's it bi."

"Oh." He furrowed his brow.

"So have you guessed what the word means?"

"Beautiful-few-years?"

"Haha," I said. "That's what makes Japanese so difficult. Shounen - few years - actually means 'boy' or 'young man'."

His eyes lit up. "Oh, like Shounen Jump." It was a monthly manga magazine for boys.

"Yeah," I said. The kid really was a bit of a geek, wasn't he? "So altogether it means 'beautiful young man'."

"Oh," said the kid.

"It's a cute name for rice wine," I said. Was he going pink again? "Whenever I order it I always imagine I'm at one of those host-clubs."

He blinked. "A host club?"

"You've been to Kabukichou in Shinjuku, right? Did you see all those posters with the young guys on them?"

"What, those posters with the guys with long hair?" He drew his hands down from his head to his shoulders. "Kinda girly, like the talents from Johnny's?"

"Yeah, they're advertisements for host clubs. Basically, a middle-aged woman like me goes there and pays some money to have a beautiful young man serve her drinks and talk to her and show her attention and that sort of thing..."

"Oh," said the boy. "I think I've heard of them." He looked thoughtful and then took another drink. "H-have you ever been to one?"

I laughed out loud. "What? Oh, no. Even if I had I wouldn't admit it. It's shameful."

But wasn't that more or less what I was doing now? I felt a sting of shame at what I was doing, but I knew I wasn't going to stop. In half an hour, the attention I'd got from this kid had made me happier than I'd been in years.

I was thankful for him, then, calling me away from that party. In this kind of state I would have ended up taking someone home. I probably would have ended up with that moron Hideyuki. Well, it was his loss. Screw him and his warmed-over high-school heart-throb looks. Less than two weeks after I'd broken up from a three-year relationship and he was already well on the way to working me. Lingering at my desk at work, mock-shy glances during meetings, calling me Mi-chan...

And screw Kazuo as well. All those years wasted. So I was 33 now. I was still young, really. Look at this kid beside me. I knew the scent of my body, its closeness was doing things to him. He kept glancing at my cleavage: those push-up bras really do work wonders. Making young guys horny wasn't exactly a challenge, I knew, but right now it was what I needed. I was still feeling bruised. I needed someone to look at me the way this kid was right now. His naivety and sensitivity delighted me.

The boy finished his drink and stared at the glass. With me beside him he was finding it difficult to find new places to direct his eyes.

I took the bottle and freshened his drink. When I started to do the same to my own he protested.

"I should pour it for you," he said.

"Oh no!" I said, mock-scandalised. "Then I really will feel like I'm at a host club."

The boy was flustered but did a pretty good job pouring the drink, considered. It only just overflowed.

"Whoops."

"Dai-dai-saabisu," I joked. "It takes a bit of practice." I brought the drink to my lips. "Delicious. I'll finish this one off and you can try again."

Drink followed drink. The kid got better at serving them. We were soon laughing and joking like old friends. Whoever invented alcohol should have got the Nobel Prize. I knew I'd regret drinking so many in the morning. You always end up tasting rice wine all the next day and every taste is a brutal reminder of how it's your own fault your head is throbbing so much you want to throw yourself under a train.

I knew I'd probably regret a few more things as well. The mama-san was no doubt observing us discretely from the corner of her eye as she watched TV behind the counter. I knew my every movement was utterly transparent to everyone except the kid himself. He kept treating me with respect, deferring to my opinions on everything we were talking about: nuclear power, Japanese TV, the existence of aliens, whatever. I was still his superior, even if I was becoming increasingly incoherent and kept thrusting my boobs at him.

"...so yeah, Japanese people don't really have an ego as such," I said, warming to my subject: cultural differences between the East and West. "For us, it's all just superego or id. Superego when we're at work, id when we're at play. Whereas you guys are always policing everything you do or think, even in private. I mean, that whole guilt thing. I understand feeling guilty if you've done something wrong, but why should you feel bad about something you might do? Or something you're just fantasizing about doing?" I took a sip of my drink. "Haha. You can tell I'm a psychology dropout, right? No money in it. Everyone in this country just bottles everything up or hits the bottle."

The kid swirled his drink around and laughed.

"You don't have to laugh at my jokes just because I'm your sempai," I said, serious.

"No," he replied. "I... I was laughing because you're right. We're always overthinking everything we do. I think it's a Christian thing. It's probably why everyone is so screwed up."

"Oh, please don't take it as a criticism," I said, placing a hand on his shoulder. "I think you're far more psychologically healthy in other ways. For one thing, you're not a bunch of passive-aggressive man-children like Japanese men."

The kid said nothing and I realised my clumsy, misanthropic apology had just made him more uncomfortable. I finished my drink so that he'd have to repour it and hopefully get distracted from my boorishness while I composed myself.

It worked. "So you studied psychology at University?" he asked.

I took the drink up eagerly. "Uh-huh. It was my major along with English."

He sighed. "It must be great to be fluent in two languages."

"Well, I don't know about fluent," I said, flattered. "My English still stinks."

"No, it's excellent," he said. "I've been studying Japanese for years and I still haven't got any good."

"You just need a Japanese girlfriend who isn't obsessed with speaking English," I said. I remembered what he'd said about Rika insisting on speaking English with him all the time, even though her English was borderline incomprehensible. "Your Japanese will be great in no time."

The kid said nothing right away. I had my drink against my lips before I realised he was crying.

"Damn," I said, pulling my drink from my lips and placing it back on the table, spilling it in the process. "Damn!" I grabbed a handful of napkins and dabbed at the spilt liquid. I wanted to dab at his eyes and comfort him but I knew that would be taking things too far, so I just kept dabbing, as if cleaning up the spilt sake would somehow absolve me of my thoughtless words. Instead I just ended up soaking the napkins and pushing the liquid around the table.

He was covering his face with a hand, scrunching his brows in pain. There was nothing else for it. I leaned across and slipped my arms around his shoulders. His body went stiff with surprise.

"Shh," I said, hugging him to me and patting his back. "I'm sorry. Look, I'm a bit drunk. I'm always saying stupid stuff when I'm drunk."

His body slowly relaxed in my arms. "No, you're not... it's okay," he whispered. He took his hand from his eyes and looked at me, his eyes glistening.

The moment grew awkward. I either had to kiss him now or stop hugging him. I stopped hugging him.

That bitch Rika. I hated her more than anything. No one had ever cried tears over me like this. I wanted to cradle his head in my hands, wipe those tears away with my thumbs. Instead I offered him a napkin.

"I'm sorry I'm such a mess," he said. He took the napkin and stared at it, blinking his red eyes.

I'd handed him one I'd soaked up the spilled sake with.

"Oh shit." I searched for more napkins. They were all dripping with sake.

The kid burst out laughing. I stared at him and then joined in too.

"I think we should get out of here," I said. It was late and we were probably outstaying our welcome. I looked to the mama-san and made the 'writing-the-bill' gesture that meant we were ready to go.

She brought us the bill with a smile and more tissues.

I took out my credit card. The kid started to protest and I placed a finger against his lips. I left him sitting at the table and wiping his eyes with the tissues while I settled the bill at the counter.

As the mama-san applied my card to one of those old manual receipt-printers, I leaned across the counter.

"Uhh, I was wondering if there were any, uh, hotels nearby?"

The mama-san looked up at me. I'd expected censure or at least that silent, polite disapproval that older people are able to pull off so effortlessly, but instead I saw a glint of amusement in her eyes.

"I'll draw you a map," she said.

As we left the little izakaya the mama-san bowed to us with a cheery "Please be careful!" before taking in the little sign and closing the door. Halfway down the street, while I was still blinking at the map she'd drawn on the back of a napkin, the street became dark. She'd switched off the lights.

We really were in the middle of nowhere.

"Is there really a hotel around here?" asked the kid.

I took out my phone for the extra light. "Well, not exactly." I raised my phone to his face and he blinked at the sudden brightness. "You know about love hotels, right?"

His mouth opened in surprise. "A love hotel?"

He obviously knew what I was talking about. "You're never really that far away from one while you're in Japan," I said. "You ever stay at one?"

He shook his head.

Well, he did have an apartment, after all.

"You don't have them in your country, do you?"

"No," he said.

"So where do you go if you want to make love to your girlfriend and you don't have an apartment all to yourself?"

He was taken aback by my question. "Well, uh... usually, we just kind of do it there anyway."

I was scandalised. "Even when other people can hear everything?"

"Uh... I guess you just try and keep things down. Also, flatmates usually make themselves scarce if they know you, uh..."

"What if you're still living at home with your parents?"

"Well, you usually just wait until they're out."

My ignorance and surprise was all an act. This was a carbon copy of a conversation I'd had with young foreign colleagues numerous times. In Japan, love hotels are a necessity. Houses are simply too small, and walls too thin, for discrete love-making given the Japanese love for privacy. But I just had to use the opportunity to tease the kid mercilessly. Even in the dark I could tell he was blushing - his stuttering voice told me all I needed to know.

The thought of his discomfort made my blood run fast and hot.

We soon found the love hotel. They're not designed to be easily missed, after all. The glary lipstick-pink neon of the hotel's sign beckoned to us at the end of a darkened suburban street identical to every other.

"Hotel Starry Heart," the kid read out as we got closer. The words were surrounded by a red heart and flanked by a set of blinking yellow stars.

I sighed. "Embarrassing, I know. You don't know how ashamed I was when I'd learned enough English to realise how bad Japanese English really is."

"I think it's a cute name," he said. "But is it really okay for us to stay at a, uh..."

I stopped and smirked at him. "Worried something might happen?"

His face turned to a mask of shock. "No-o, I just..."

"Well," I said. "They're still just normal hotels, beneath all the gimmicky theme-rooms and silly names. And right now it's either stay at one or sleep in a paddy field."

The kid nodded, defeated, and followed close behind as I led him inside the hotel.

----

We stood in front of the display, the photo of each room flanked with a little button. The occupied rooms were all blacked out, but there were a number of rooms still available.

"Anything catch your eye?" I asked the boy.

He looked at each of the photos. I knew he was not very good at making decisions - he'd shown that numerous times over our little impromptu dinner - and I was enjoying making him squirm.

"There are so many to choose from," he murmured. "Why aren't they all booked up? It's Christmas eve, right? Wouldn't lots of couples want to, uh..."

"Well," I said, charmed by his embarrassment. "There's a very simple reason behind that. See the different prices for Rest and Stay?"

"What does Rest mean?"

I chuckled. "It's when you only use the room for a couple of hours. Once you've, haha, enjoyed your 'rest' you can just up and leave. You don't have to make believe you're staying at the hotel to get a good night's sleep, although you can do that too, of course."

The boy blushed. "So most people have already had a uh, 'rest' and gone home?"

"You catch on quick." I sighed. "Seems like no one wants to stay in bed and snuggle afterwards. That's Japan for you - rush, rush, rush. I'm guessing foreigners would be more into the whole 'stay' thing, right? What with your relaxed attitude to everything..."

He nodded. He agreed with everything I said, even when he was living proof my generalisation about foreigners was wrong. It was adorable.

"So," I said. "Are you going to pick one or are we going to have to spoon up here together in the foyer?"

At the word 'spoon', the kid swallowed and darted forward, picking a room at random.

"Well, let's go get our key."

I pushed the money at the disembodied hands at the counter. The rest of the attendant was shielded from us in deference of our privacy, but I could tell from the pronounced veins they were an old woman's hands. I chuckled to myself. It seemed my reckless behaviour was being enabled by older women tonight.

I led the kid into the elevator which was waiting for us. We of course met no one. There was a different exit provided for those leaving, allowing them to enjoy their post-coital glow without the potential embarrassment of running into someone else.

I walked fast, with an almost unseemly eagerness. The kid hurried to keep up with me, always staying a step behind like a little shadow.

We soon found the room. Apart from the slight ghost of cigarette smoke it was a pleasant enough room. The room was dominated with a huge bed with an array of buttons on its headboard. There was a big flatscreen on the wall for watching pink videos, and a little bar fridge. I ducked my head into the bathroom and whistled.

"Look at the size of that tub!"

The kid poked his head in beside me. "Wow," he said. I knew he was genuinely impressed. The bath was the size of a Jacuzzi. Japanese people love their baths and the bigger the better.

"You could fit almost all of Eastport's management team in that one tub," I mused. "It seems a waste for just the two of us."