The Hillary Raphael column.
making ends meet, swordfighting, the charm of a well-groomed lady
The bubble economy made her happy to be alive. It was a time of frenzied construction, exorbitant adult entertainment, and magnificently geometrical fashion. It was the Meiji Restoration redux– all roads led to Tokyo.
Ashley deeply enjoyed all the genetically-engineered produce they sold in the supermarket around the corner. It was all so crunchy and juicy, oversized and reeking of the bubblegum-flavor version of itself. Like so many of her clients, the fruit had been redesigned by the era, its parameters redrawn by the approximate hand of sudden wealth. She loved sinking her teeth into the tough skin of the new hybrid apple-pears that were so obviously meant to be peeled. That came to be the usual snack before sessions. After, she’d occasionally find a peeled one lying around, if she’d assigned that as a chore. They often love precision tasks like that, which are mundane, but carry the possibility of failure, cutting oneself and fucking up. With Takada, she’d jerk the pointy toe of her patent pump into his knuckles while he was peeling. The sight of blood made him feel authentic, like he was getting his money’s worth. The climate was so competitive, you’d have clients– once re-dressed in their navy blue suits– coolly appraising your performance, and even threatening to use another Dominate-girl. Trust the Japanese to get everything too-right. Ashley flashed on the bowlers and bustles of the Meiji period when she observed Takada fastening his Hermès ties. By her informal count, he owned nineteen of them, and remember that he only saw her on Tuesdays and Fridays. He may have had way more. Anyway, the clients themselves would keep you on your toes, make sure you kept it all stringent. Naturally, the bloodied fruits she’d throw away. The inside of her Burnable trash bin was often a scene of incredible carnage.
For the first time, she was surviving financially, prospering, you could say. She was even able to collect. It felt amazing to bid on the pieces she wanted. Of course, woodblock prints are small potatoes compared to the Old Masters that were being snapped up left and right at eight-digit prices, but it was a change. Anyway, the dilettante always gets the greater joy. Takada, I’m sure, wouldn’t’ve wanted to be held hostage by the Japanese Red Army and beaten brutally to an unrecognizable bloody pulp, limbs reduced to stumps. She supposed she’d found her calling as a human theme park.
Today it’s laughable that she could have regarded that little perverted blip on the radar screen of her life as a permanent state, but there you go. The young feel natural and perfect, like a well-oiled machine. Today she reads the newspaper and reads that the Japanese are in the middle of an unprecedented financial crisis– collapsed banks, zombie corporations, unemployed youth hanging around menacingly in the parks. They supposedly even have discovered random violent crime. Amazing. You never do know.
She had one of those clunky unwieldy mobile phones that were the best society could offer at the time. If you had it on vibrate mode, and set it down on a table, it could destroy the thing, like a low-grade earthquake, when someone called. She broke a fine crystal vase that way. Not that she’d ever actually wanted a fine crystal vase, but she’d gotten one as a kind of courtship token from a client, and had used it to hold mints instead of flowers. It shattered like a hail storm, spraying sparkly chunks all over that blue carpet the landlord had installed in every unit to justify the high rents. Note to self: don’t walk barefoot here for a long while. Though Takada et al took the occasional painful splinter as a sign of subtle genius and dedication.
Then there was the land line. It had a tinny hollow ring like a phone at the Alien Registration Office in Minato-ku City Hall. It would glow neon blue while it rang, just in case you had on stereo headphones or something. A visual cue like that could never have worked in a big American house with a lot of rooms. She tended to keep it on speakerphone so that she could sneakily tidy up while she talked. She was doing a brisk side business in compensation phoning— men she’d never meet except as a name on a personal check would call to be cursed and insulted in broken Japanese. She billed by the minute so it was great to have hands free during the agonizingly long and drawn-out process.
What to make of her wool boucl é suits? The row upon row of luxuriously crippling shoes? Her best print hung on the inside of her closet door, so that when it was swung open, and she was foraging through her fashion collection, she’d be inspired. It was a kabuki actor in the role of a fireman. He’s hoisting up a ladder. The sleeves of his kimono are pushed up all the way, and everyone can see his tattoos. They’re stupendous-peonies and dragons and phoenixes and waves and clouds and anything that seems to imply every icon the feudal age had ever heard of.
When the phone rang, she answered it concisely, “Fucking asshole! Late again, Suzuki! Can you ever do anything right?” Some first edition Yoshitoshi’s were coming up for auction in the next week. That meant she needed to work overtime before then if she was going to get anything good. “You’re stupid, but more than stupid. You’re extremely stupid!” The one she had her eye on was from the 32 Customs and Manners series. Painful Looking! shows a beauty-for-hire wincing as her arm is being tattooed. She’d first seen it at a Yoshitoshi retrospective at a department store gallery. Looking at it had made her grip the pink paper envelope bag in her hand so tightly that her nail had punctured it, then had to take the escalators straight down to basement level for a green tea jelly sundae. She had to own it. After she heard Suzuki come, she thanked him profusely, pulled off the pink rubber gloves she wore for washing the dishes, and got out the instant coffee for her next appointment. She lined up the Hello Kitty sugar bowl and creamer so that Kitty sat facing herself as though reflected in a mirror. The house then in order, she slipped into her fluorescent pink sneakers, fastening them with that fatalistic smooth-down gesture that is so satisfying in velcro. Her front door was so hollow that it was impossible to ever really slam it behind oneself. She always felt like she was sneaking out in the middle of the night, stealthily, a cheerfully dressed ninja.
Conveniently, her downstairs neighbor Mrs. Yamato, a lavender-haired widow with an eerily-proportioned bonsai grove on her terrace, was a retired sex worker herself, and therefore not at all scandalized by the piercing shrieks and staged scoldings leaking through the plasterboard between them. On the contrary, she thought it sweet the way these modern girls were adapting themselves to the changing market. Watching Ashley dart out for tobacco in PVC trench and matching thigh-high stilettos, she would often slide– headlong and proustian– into vivid recollections of her own changing styles over the course of time. It had been her duty and her pleasure to absorb trends, personalize them, then reflect them back to society. Yuichi (she got goosebumps even thinking of saying his given name, the three syllables stretching her lips into three different positions) had first just expressed general curiosity in a bouffant, without directly committing to an interest. After a few rounds of such hints, she was able to surprise him with a new look. His eyes had sparkled with a lascivious species of gratitude, and he’d bought her a pair of high-heeled pumps with wide gold buckles at the toes. How elegant. At his funeral, she’d worn a formal kimono of depressing gray without any jewels at all. His poor wife had cried so much even without having to think of his extra-marital expenditures. Yuichi’s charred bones, en route from the fire to the urn had looked undefeatable, like the branches of trees that survive a forest fire.
Bounding down the flimsy white stairs that barely clung to the outside of the building like a series of fire escapes, Ashley waved to Mrs. Yamato with her Hello Kitty key chain and did a quick beaming smile/ bow. Lovely girl, always so well-manicured. At street level, she broke into a trot, adjusting her gait so as to coddle her always-getting-injured left knee. Like most days, or most sunny ones anyway, she ran laps in the park dreamily, detaching from all her boring chores and re-cataloguing her desires. Her desires were her only real friends. They teased her and complimented her, validated her choices and brightened her vision of the future. Like most people, Ashley lived to consume, but unlike most people, her consumption stayed within the parameters she set for it, like a wild beast in a small pen. She wanted more prints, better prints. She wanted complete series, first editions, everything signed and in excellent condition. She watched her collection scroll through her mind like an animated movie. Her feet were a pink motion blur against the path’s gray gravel; her ponytail swung back and forth briskly.
The blood-curdling yelps that came out of the neighborhood swordfighting dojo were strangely comforting to her as she would run past it. Play fighting is always better than real fighting. Since she’d figured out what the small stilted building was doing in the middle of the park, she’d felt a growing fondness for it. The thwacks that were sticks against armored bodies were timed with shrieks like punch lines to jokes. Bodies in dialogue with one another, like dancers, she supposed, though she had never stopped her loops to try and watch. Not every moment of your day has to be a cultural learning experience. This time, just as she was rounding the corner of the building, a sharp pain, emanating out from her left instep, shot up her leg. Shouting herself, way more spontaneously and naturalistically than either the fencers or her clients–two good shouting-in-pain yardsticks–she crumpled to the ground. “Fuck me. Fuck. Me. Ow!” She sat there, a miserable heap of desperation, for a while, rejecting the pain. It dawned on her that she was always alone there, had always been the only runner on the stupid retarded path. It was always just her and the sound of the fighters, alone together in the green compression of the tiny park in Akasaka. So obviously not about to be trampled by any crowds, she let herself collapse further, resting her head on the gravel, stretching her legs out into the mulch border. The pain was taking advantage of her relaxed posture, like a date rapist, and was now coursing unchecked through her limb.
An ominous-looking fencer emerged from the building, surrealistically incongruous in his indigo pantaloons, metal face cage, and gleaming breastplate. He slid into one of the dozen or so pairs of waiting sandals that were lined up along the doorway on the wooden platform, then glided toward Ashley silently, without even any gravel-crunching noises. Pulling off one pneumatic blue glove, he floated to a halt in front of her. She raised her face, now glistening with dripping snot and falling tears, rested her eyes briefly on the blue-dyed wool of his crotch, then dragged her gaze away to the face. Behind the titanium bars, his face was slender with shiny recessed eyes. He laid the bare hand on the top of her head. She must have broken something. She couldn’t stop sobbing. He put his glove back on. Stooping over, he got both his forearms under her armpits and lifted her to standing. Reflexively she leaned her full body weight on him and together they dragged themselves to the dojo stairs. Another fencer, identical but bigger, came out to meet them. The second one said, “I’ll help,” with this gruff, marbles-in-mouth tone. Each jamming a shoulder into one of her armpits, they got her up the stairs and deposited her onto a glossy wooden floor.
The stench of sweat was almost unbearable. To add to her problems, she started to feel like she might vomit, too. She’d gotten so used to threatening to puke into the faces of her regular clients that she’d almost forgotten what an awful prospect it was in real life. She fixed her eyes on the ceiling rafters, also of a glossy blond wood, telling herself, “Don’t vomit, don’t vomit, don’t vomit.”
The gruff one told the original one, “Go ahead and take care of the others.” Then turning his full attention to Ashley, he asked, “Is it ok if I take off the shoe and touch you?” In the corner of her eye, the fencers stalked each other with an elegance she’d never before known, which was as violent as it was polite. At that moment, a flower bloomed in her mind. Being this close to those familiar distant screams was a revelation.
She phoned in her bids from bed. Painful Looking! went to someone with a far bigger budget than her own, but she was pleased to pick up a less iconic piece by someone else. It showed a kabuki actor in the role of someone famous’ wife getting a Western-style haircut for the first time. Work went on, leg in a cast or no. When someone wants to be dominated, it doesn’t matter how you do it, only that it gets done. She had Takada peeling those overly grapey black grapes at her bedside; Noguchi had to drink the contents of her bed pan. That worked so well that she later ended up institutionalizing it, keeping a log book, well after she recovered, with one gold star for every serving consumed. Unthinkingly, or just made sloppy by depression, she had ordered Takada to fetch his own leash from the closet. The session went just fine, but after, as he was adjusting his cufflinks, he remarked to her, somewhat condescendingly, “I was so surprised, you know.”
“Surprised about what?” She adopted a feminine and polite tone with him in the after-hours.
“Wasn’t that a Kunichika print of Chokichi the Eagle hanging in your closet? Excellent embossing. Pretty rare nowadays.” His comment was like a gloved finger up her rectum. Perhaps it would have been more professional to live and work in separate spaces, but the mental exercise necessary to do it becomes perplexing for one whose person is the service. Would, then, being blond be a busman’s holiday? Your mind could fall into a spiral, thinking like this.
“I don’t know anything about that. I just think it’s a pretty picture.”
“I see.” He felt an irritation well up in his chest, without knowing the exact source of it. Who wants to stare at Edo prints while you’re paying good money to be humiliated? He was finding it harder and harder daily to relax. On his way out, he gave a terse quick I-think-we-both-value-discretion bow to the old crone who was always watering her plants as he was leaving.
Leaning back into her white ruffled pillowcases, Ashley fell into her recently acquired masturbatory routine. Reaching her pink-manicured hands into her panties, she fingered herself remembering the fencer from the park, whose eyes had glinted at her through his face grill. She replayed being hoisted up, the stiff gloves under her arms, pressing the sides of her breasts. When the smell of sweat and indigo dye and some scented toiletry came into her mind’s nose, she came convulsively, the free leg bending into the immobilized one. Wiping her crotch with a scented tissue, she thought about what she could bring to the dojo as a thank-you gift. She wanted it to be really classy– even classical– not flashy or self-satisfied. Mrs. Yamato would know. She was old school.
Hitting number-three on the speed dial, she smiled to herself. When, sitting in her art history classes in college, had she ever dreamt of this nutty reality? That she’d be consulting this retired geisha girl for etiquette details, making this incredible money for doing nothing. Mrs. Yamato detested talking on the phone, feeling like she was talking to the land of the dead, unable to match a human face to the words. She promised to come visit in half-an-hour, after freshening up a little. Ashley killed the time watching a game show she only half-understood, which seemed to challenge housewives to prepare stacked lunch boxes at break-neck speeds, although there may have been more to it than that. Mrs. Yamato let herself in through the unlocked front door, balancing a tray of sweets, a bottle of plum wine, and two glasses against her hip. She wore what looked like that year’s Hanae Mori dress. Ashley was flattered to have found such an unlikely and sincere friend in her own cozy and overpriced building.
Stuffing their faces like schoolgirls, Ashley told her the whole story, confessing her crush on the one who originally came to her, the smaller, more weightless one. Mrs. Yamato kept up a steady stream of insider-ish nods. “Yes, I completely understand. A friend of mine ended up marrying the firefighter who dismantled her parents’ house during the Taisho fires. A really romantic episode.” After some deliberation, she told Ashley that it would have to be a multi-tiered action. First, sweets for the entire dojo. Next, she could leave something for the two who helped her. Once they had personally thanked her, she would be able to determine the identity of the special one, then leave him with a true love token. After that, it would be up to him. Sorry, that’s the reality of life.
That night, as she lapsed into cranky broken leg sleep, images of the fencer came to her again. Tears stained her face and soaked her pajama sleeves as she let herself sink into the histrionics of wishing he were in bed with her. The next morning, she had a rare early appointment with Suzuki, who needed to shake off some nerves before an important meeting. As he let himself out, she shouted, “And don’t come back, you useless lazy guy!” just for good measure. She called the supermarket to place a delivery order. “Yes, that’s right. It is an awful lot of fruit, isn’t it? Please send it over when you can.”
Wrapping the seedless tangerines in a special cloth the way Mrs. Yamato had demonstrated, she crutch-hopped to the park, and left her package at the foot of the dojo stairs. Returning home, she could scarcely wait for a reaction. She listened to pop music. She baked darjeeling tea muffins. She made her obligatory weekly call to her mother to assure her that the English teaching was going great. So rewarding to work with children. Finally, the next day, Mrs. Yamato came up with her mail. A small blue envelope sent her heart racing. “On behalf of the entire dojo, I thank you for the charming gift.” It was signed with some excessively cursive characters that Ashley couldn’t make out.
Phase Two: she hobbled over with two bottles of Chivas Regal, elaborately wrapped, and left them, marked “For the Helpful Ones.” The crows were ripping into the municipal issue garbage bags outside her apartment when she returned. The flammable remnants of the past week of her life, in a blurry and truncated edit, were spread on the pavement: tea leaves, bloodied tampons, mandarin peels, Hello Kitty band aids, splintered chopsticks, old issues of AnAn. Her non-burnable bag would have been far less varied: maybe one devastated toothbrush and a dozen empty Pocari Sweat bottles. These jaunts up and down the stairs were excruciating; it was hard to know whether or not they were rehabilitative.
Pink-cheeked and drained, she found a porcelain blue A4-size envelope lying in the doorway alongside her grocery delivery. A whiff of incense forced itself on her when she broke its seal. To her Californian nostrils, it was patchouli, but Mrs. Yamato later pegged it as hinoki wood. A single white sheet had an incomprehensible phrase, rendered so by its expression in some kind of classical (or anyway abnormal) Japanese in a too-fluid handwriting. She unpacked the cartons into the stunted little fridge, jamming styrofoam-webbed apples into the produce bin, individually wrapped bananas into the egg rack, mini-currants into the butter compartment, leaving just enough space for bottles on the door. The womb-size freezer still had last week’s green tea ice cream pint, now half-full in Ashley’s punctilious scrape-out-a-perfect-portion style. She loved the rectangular pints. Unable to wait another moment, she phoned her neighbor-turned-translator.
Men visited the blossoming plum trees in Kitano or the wisterias in Otani, not to admire the flowers but to crush them in their hands. “This is definitely from the seventeenth century,” was Mrs. Yamato’s conclusion. “I don’t know exactly who wrote it because I’m not a formally educated woman, but it’s obviously one of the group who wrote from the Pleasure Quarters.” The ink was twirled lightly over the translucent shallow-crenellated white sheet. “Of course, no signature.”
“Why of course?” Ashley found something sadistic and discreet in the gesture. The two qualities combined into something she couldn’t break down on the spot.
“A man in love is always anonymous at the beginning. Until he’s secure about acceptance.”
Her ponytailed young mind, now racing, now ambling through a sentimental and pornographic slide show of the fencer, started pumping happy painkiller chemicals into her bloodstream. Her leg was mending. “But what does he mean by it?”
“Your client?”
She looked into Mrs. Yamato’s face in disgusted shock. It was a face whose frame had kept it cute, despite having been re-upholstered in this wrinkled skin. “My client? I’m thinking the fencer.”
“Oh….maybe. Yes, right.” Looking at her lap politely, the older neighbor felt sympathy flood her chest, remembering now the personal life that one wants so badly to maintain. This girl will have to live through thousands more moments of misplaced affection. “Ashley, the fencer will take more work. Be patient. The strange-feeling notes usually come from a client who feels too much.”
“Oh.”
That night and the next morning, desolation trailed her like a swarm of fireflies, showing itself in short bursts, then retiring again into the darkness of her routines. Hurting others, even for profit and pleasure, did little to dull her pain. She missed the rhythmic buzz of running, and even the now-distant comforts of a boyfriend. Her mind was disorganized, her closet a mess. She balanced her postal savings book to pass the time. By afternoon, she was driven to pursue a marron glac é cream puff at the Afternoon Tea Salon around the corner. Though the better one could be found at Almond in Roppongi, she had an in-house appointment with Takada in just an hour-and-a-half, which would give her maybe twenty minutes to sit and enjoy the thing with a hot marron au lait, considering her limited mobility. Her leg throbbed as she got into a black denim mini and Fiorucci t-shirt, and she cursed the frailty of her body and swallowed one pill out of her waning opiate stockpile. Inching past the humming green park and into a crushed velvet booth, her thoughts glowed with the absence of pain, a light-filled vacuum that processed stimulus into soft giggles. She felt the crisp flat origami of cash caress her through the cotton lining of her hip pocket and ordered her treat.
As the porcelain tray arrived to the table in the reassuring pale hands of a kimono creature, an unfamiliar office lady slid into the booth across from her. The painkilling slo-mo let Ashley take her in frame by frame, pixel by pixel: an angular bob parted on the left side, a slim face, a whiff of Opium-by-YSL perfume, precise black eyeliner, a white Peter Pan collar, one pearl stud visible on the left side, a gauze square affixed to the right forearm with Hello Kitty tape, a Chanel watch. “Is it ok if I join you? I think you speak Japanese.”
Ashley’s mind was delighted to note the way her mouth answered on its own. “Sure, please go ahead.”
“Are you feeling a little better? Your leg?”
“Yeah, a little. Thank you. Would you like some of my chestnut cream?”
The woman smiled and showed cute little pearl teeth. “No, thank you, I’ve ordered myself some Earl Grey.”
Ashley’s mind wondered who this chick was, but her mouth came out with, “Oh, bergamot, nice flavor.”
Little Pearl Mouth continued, “I’ve been so concerned for you, but I didn’t know how to reach you. It was really so lucky to run into you like this.”
Something jumped, clicking various parts of the cognitive engine into place. Ashley sat up out of her slouch. “Sorry, do I know you?”
Little Pearl Mouth gasped, raising her hand to cover her mouth in perfect office lady fashion. “Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself! I’m Makiko, from the dojo. Sorry, I always forget that my face is covered in that thing.” She chuckled like the housewives on the game shows.
“What?”
“Oh, wow. Sorry, I’m the one who helped you up, when you fell in the park. Thank you very much for the fruit. We really enjoyed it. And the Chivas Regal. I don’t drink, but my husband does. Very much!” She laughed again like the tv ladies, the interlocking C’s on her watch rising to block her chin.
Ashely’s pain seemed to be darting from one spot to another– first, her eye sockets, then one rib, then the good leg, in turn, started aching. She listened while pearl-toothed, sleek-coiffed “Makiko” spoke of having been girls’ university kendo champion and of her addiction to the sport. “It makes me feel really good when I make that one perfect strike!” When asked what she studied in college, Ashley automatically said “Art History”, only realizing full seconds later that it was actually true. Art History major, East Asian Studies minor, another lifetime. She felt alone, in a sickly instant, like a wilderness hiker realizing the last marker he’d seen was a long time ago. The thought of the guy she’d last broken up with at home was too unbearable. Instead, she catalogued the lovers she’d circulated through since moving here. The Colombian diplomat, the British securities trader, the Ducati dealer, the– what the fuck, it was pointless, masochistic, and vacuous to review it. There would always be a feeling just out of reach, lingering just past her field of vision that these men could only hint at. She longed to create order where there was none. By then, even the wall clock, five minutes slower than Pearl Mouth’s wristwatch, told her she was late.
“Hey, listen, Makiko, I kind of have to get going, but do you want to meet again?”
“I can walk you home.”
Ashley was feeling too muddled to refuse. She half-heartedly hoped they wouldn’t run into Takada on the stairs, but then again how could she even work up the conviction to care? What did it matter what this complete stranger thought? She would just say he was “a friend” and fine, leave it at that.
The broken one leaning on the good one, the two women made it up to her lightweight front door. Ashley was veiled in sweat from the exertion, disbelief still suspended like crazy, just to believe that this was the fencer. On the ground, like a fragile and useless welcome mat, lay a new bright blue envelope. She scooped it up, saying, “What a surprise. I’ll read it inside.” Flipping on the lights, her little apartment looked like a dollhouse, a shrunken simulacrum of an apartment where a real grown-up would live. She flopped down on the bed, ripping open the package. The girl in the saturated, embossed Yoshitoshi print looked out at her as she looked into the folder. A note from Takada explained in embarrassingly simple Japanese that he was terminating their arrangement, but that he was sure she’d do fine without him. He hoped she’d enjoy the gift, as it was a token of his sincere esteem for her. She was an excellent Dominate-girl, one who seemed to invest herself in the moment. Forgetting her guest, she held the gorgeous paper in her fingertips, feeling the hundred years that had elapsed between Yoshitoshi’s Meiji studio and now.
But her guest still existed, very much. “Wow! How incredible! A beautiful print!”
Ashley smiled vacantly. “It’s called Sleepy Looking! Have you ever seen it?”
Makiko shook her glossy bob. “Never. It’s beautiful. That was on your doorstep, huh?” Her pearly little teeth looked good in the dollhouse. “Who left that? Your boyfriend?”
“Uh, no,” Ashley hesitated for a moment, not sure what was holding her back or why anything should ever hold her back. It was her life, after all, the only one she had. “No, I’m a Dominate-girl.”
“A what?”
“You don’t know what that is? I though we were famous, in news magazines and stuff.”
“Sorry, I don’t know.”
Ashley felt so liberated by all the weirdnesses piling up around her. What a day. She put her hand on top of the fencer’s. “Can I kiss you?”
“Huh?” Her perfectly penciled eyes widened by three-fold.
“Just to say thank you.”
Wanting to avoid awkwardness at all costs, the tiny polished lady nodded, glossy bob undulating in assent. Ashley first planted a sweet little dry kiss on her lips, then slipped in her tongue, thoroughly enjoying the long-delayed make-out session with the fencer. Makiko pushed her away, mumbling something about having to get going. It was getting late supposedly. Through a vaseline-coated lens, she watched Makiko let herself out, the door closing behind her with a whisper.
Later, when the appropriate phrase occurred to her, Ashley said, “I think you’re a Dominate-girl, too. Underneath it all.” Sleepy indeed, she lay on her ruffled bed staring at the print for hours until she fell asleep touching herself, still hell-bent on meeting the fencer from the park, thanking him, fucking him.
xx HR
(an extract from the forthcoming Backpacker: New York, Seoul, Phnom Penh, Sapporo, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Mexico City, Maputo, Tokyo, Mon Amour)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hillary Raphael holds an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City where she won the MFA Thesis Prize for her novel, I love Lord Buddha (Creation Books). She is also known for a non-fiction book about the Japanese butoh dance movement, Outcast Samurai Dancer, a collaboration with Japanese culture expert Donald Richie. Her novel Backpacker: New York, Seoul, Phnom Penh, Sapporo, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Mexico City, Maputo, Tokyo, Mon Amour is forthcoming in 2007. Read her 3:AM interview and contribute to her backpacker sex project, tokyomonamour.com
