In The Tokyo Bay Coffee Lounge

Another excerpt from my unpublished novel Lizzie Goes To Japan. In this part, Lizzie has just arrived in Japan for the very first time with her boss, Richard, and they are staying at the Intercontinental Hotel in Tokyo.

'Hello, Richard?' Lizzie said into the telephone. She had pressed room-to-room call on her multi-role telephone in the hotel room and dialled 608. Lights had come on and gone off again. Amazingly, Richard seemed to have answered.

'I'm ready,' Lizzie said. She was so excited, she could hardly keep still. She had unpacked her new navy suit, still with the shop tags on, and donned it. Underneath this, she was wearing brand new white underwear. She felt wonderful.

'You're what?' She could tell he was flabbergasted, floundering. 'I'm just pottering here. I've only just cracked the safe.'

'What's taking you so long?' Lizzie asked. 'I already cracked the safe, unpacked, showered and dressed.'

'I need at least half an hour,' Richard said. He sounded peeved. 'AT LEAST. I haven't even showered yet. I thought you would be lying down. I thought you needed ages.'

'OK,’ Lizzie said, ‘I'll walk around and find a coffee. Then I'll come and pick you up.'

'I can't believe it,' Richard said again. 'I thought you were going to lie down.'

Her son, Eddie, had given her a pretty little notebook for her birthday. 'For your diary in Japan,' he had said. She took it now, together with the pen from the desk which had Hotel Intercontinental Tokyo Bay printed on it. She would keep that of course.

There were no stairs. Lizzie looked. Only the four lifts, all copper and gold colors, inside and out. Touch-reaction buttons. Containing, when they came, only Japanese people. Lizzie wanted to see some Caucasians. She said hello to the people in the lift, but nobody looked at her.

Next to the 5 button, it said Tokyo Bay Coffee Lounge. Lizzie pressed 5.

At the entrance to the Tokyo Bay Coffee Lounge, there was a male receptionist who said, 'Good morning, ma'am. What can I do for you?'

'I'd just like some coffee,' Lizzie said. 'Would that be possible?'

'Certainly, ma'am. This way please.'

The lounge was so beautiful that it took her breath away and she wanted to cry. She wished her children were with her to see this. It wasn't fair that she was seeing it and they weren't. They always did everything together. Lizzie thought of her children, staying with their friends and going rollerblading and swimming. Was that interesting enough for them? she worried. Wouldn't they be happier here?

Lizzie sat in the large bay window overlooking Tokyo Bay and stared at the Rainbow Bridge, with its lights flashing on and off constantly. She ordered some coffee, not too strong, and took out the little notebook. She wrote:

Dearest Eddie and Julie,

I am sitting in the bar of the hotel drinking coffee. The bar has a large window overlooking Tokyo Bay and the Rainbow Bridge, with flashing lights. All around I can see Tokyo. I am the only person in this bar and they are playing lovely soft music on the cassette.
I didn't sleep on the plane last night so I am very tired but I can't sleep now either. I am dressed up posh but I expect I still don't look good because I am so tired. Soon I am going to have lunch and then I'm going in the office. Maybe on the Monorail.
I love you very much and miss you a lot.

She hoped that the weather would get better. All her clothes were summer ones. On the other hand, Richard wanted to go to Mount Fuji with a colleague the next evening and had asked her to go with them. It was an overnight ride in the train, arriving at two o'clock on Sunday morning. This was the last thing Lizzie wanted, after jetlag. Richard only wanted to go if the weather was good, however, so simultaneously she hoped that the weather would stay bad for the weekend. She didn't want to be stuck on her own here for two days.

Lizzie listened to the music, took in the view, finished her coffee. Surely Richard would be ready by now. It was nearly half past twelve, so she had left him three-quarters of an hour. Anyway, she was too excited to sit still any longer. She looked around and realized she would have to leave the room to pay, probably the young man at the reception outside the bar.

The coffee was 900 yen. This seemed like an extraordinary amount to Lizzie, who had absolutely no idea how much one yen was worth. She supposed she had paid for the view.

'Has the weather been like this all week?' Lizzie asked. 'Do you think it will change tomorrow?'

The young man looked very worried and said, 'One moment, please ma'am.'  He dialled a number on his telephone and listened for a few minutes. He kept saying, 'One moment, please ma'am.'  Lizzie realized she must have put him under a lot of stress, demanding weather forecasts from him. But apparently, he could provide these, and seemed even to consider it his duty. However, it was not an easy task. He had to ring another number and listen again and when Lizzie said, 'Oh, no, really, you don't have to go to so much trouble,' he looked as if he would cry and kept on repeating, 'One moment, please ma'am.'

Eventually, he put down the telephone and said, 'Tomorrow is a little bit more fine ma'am, but Sunday is a little bit rainy again. I'm sorry about this ma'am.'

'Oh,' Lizzie said. 'Oh, thank you,' she said. It doesn't matter, because I am in Tokyo and I should not be complaining about the weather. It cost 9000 Deutschmarks to fly to Tokyo business class and I should not be complaining about the weather!  There are much worse situations in life than having to carry an umbrella around with you in Tokyo.

So she went back to her room and fetched her umbrella and her briefcase and took the lift again down the one floor to Richard's room (she would have liked to have taken the stairs but there were no stairs) and knocked on the door.

He held the door open for her to walk in and she walked right in, right up to the bay window, because then she was out of his way, and she felt different, really good in her new navy blue suit, completely confident and clean and happy. When she turned round, she realized he was still standing by the door, just standing and staring at her.

'I thought you would need much longer,' he said accusingly. 'I've barely done anything here. I didn't even think you were going in to the office. I thought you were exhausted.'

'Well, I was,' Lizzie said. He was annoyed, for some reason. What could that be?  What had she done wrong now?  'It's just that I had a shower and then I felt much better. Anyway, I've got my umbrella,' she said, waving it. 'It's raining.'

Richard did not smile. He came back into the room and started collecting things to take with him. The umbrella joke was over. Already, their rooms had taken on male and female properties. His looked like a man's room, tidy and smart and warm yet masculine. His curtains were drawn. Hers looked like a woman's room, prettied up, the desk full of things like perfume bottles and notebooks, her dressing gown on the chair and books (where had they all come from) all over the place. Her curtains were wide open, for the view of the Rainbow Bridge. She had opened her tiny window and had not been able to shut it again. They each had a newspaper, The Japan Times, but his was in the bin already and hers was on the desk. She was going to take every newspaper home with her, as well as every scrap of paper and ticket she found with Japanese on it. She did not dare tell Richard this. He would think she was twelve years old.

Did he not want her to go in to the office?  How could this be?  Surely he had not dragged her all the way to Tokyo to sit in a hotel room?

'I just tried to get ready as quickly as possible,' she tried smiling. 'I thought you were raring to go.'

'Well let's go then,' said Richard. He found his little key, the card with the little metal strip that you pushed into the slit in the door. They took the lifts again and pressed L for Lobby. Lizzie looked at herself discreetly in the mirrors inside the lift. She didn't look too bad.

Outside, Richard took her umbrella and held it over both their heads. That made her feel better and protected at last. 'Have a nice day,' Melissa, the American bell-girl, said to them.

'The Yuri Kamome's just here,' Richard said. 'This is excellent. Two minutes to the Monorail, then about twenty minutes to the office. Average travelling time in Tokyo to work, one way, is one and a half hours.'

At the station, almost everything was in Kanji. There were machines where they had to buy their tickets. 'Throw in 300 yen,' Richard said. A ticket came out, then you put that ticket into a little gate machine and it came out the other side. Richard seemed to know all this, although it was the first time he had been to this station and stayed at this hotel, because the office had moved since his last visit.

The station seemed to be full of birds. At least, you could hear them, but you couldn't actually see any birds at all. Lizzie didn't even understand how the birds could fly in there. The station was covered with a beautiful glass roof and a glass wall and automatic glass doors separated the platform from the rails. The train stopped with its doors aligned with the glass doors on the platform, and all the doors opened. So there was no chance of anybody committing suicide by jumping on the tracks. Same with the hotel windows, Richard said. They couldn't risk anybody jumping out of the window.

Inside the train, a woman's voice announced the next station first in Japanese, which seemed to take for ever, then in English. She said, 'The next-ter station is... ' and then, 'Thank you for travelling with the Yuri Kamome line.'  Richard thought that was funny and Lizzie giggled all the time. He nodded at a young man asleep in his seat and said, 'Look, there's a Japanese in his typical work position.'  Every time they reached a station, Lizzie said, 'Is it here?' and Richard said, 'No, not yet.'  She spent all the time looking out of the window. Unusual buildings were everywhere, she had never seen architecture like it. She felt as if she had stepped into the twenty-second century. One building seemed to consist of enormous steel pipes with a huge ball in the middle. Another one was completely triangular. Suddenly a telephone started to ring, and a man reached into his pocket and pulled out the smallest mobile Lizzie had ever seen. It looked like a toy. He said, 'Mushi-mushi,' in a very quiet voice, Lizzie knew that was Japanese for Hullo on the telephone.

The woman said, 'The next-ter station is Telecom Center,' and Richard said, 'This is it.'  The Monorail turned a corner round past a building with a blue reflecting roof, with large letters on it saying TIME 38. Lizzie knew that was the name of the office building, Time 38. What did that mean? Why Time?  Where were Times 1 to 37?

She would not have found her way out of the architectural jungle without Richard. There seemed to be several different exits to this station which took you to several different buildings. Actually, they were all signposted but Lizzie would have had to have gone right up to the signs to read them in English. TIME 38 was actually an enormous building but she was beginning to realize that this was nothing unusual. It had just seemed so small from the Monorail, because they had been travelling above it.

'When we get in,' Richard said, 'We are going to have some lunch.'

Oh good, Lizzie thought, because actually I am absolutely starving.