Michael Hoffman
Michael Hoffman’s characters are, willy-nilly, participants in plots that don’t add up. Some emerge stronger; others, shadows of their former selves. The six stories and one novel that make up this collection are set, wholly or primarily, in Japan, land of the artful mask. Meet the man who loses his key and sets in motion a chain of events whose incomprehensibility he will never understand; a small girl who accosts a fugitive murderer (is he really a murderer?) for sex, only to be admonished to go back to school; a murdered boy who is resurrected (is he really?) and wreaks his mad revenge; and, finally, Sidney Levin, whose reunion twenty years later with a lost Japanese girlfriend ends in a hopeless entanglement with her growing daughter.
MICHAEL HOFFMAN was born in Montreal, Canada, and has lived in Japan since 1982. He is the author of Withdrawal (2003) and The Empty Cafe (2001), and co-author of Tokyo Confidential (2001), a collection of short pieces on life in Japan. His short fiction has appeared in various North American and Japanese magazines. As a freelance journalist he is a regular contributor of essays, book reviews and translations to Japan’s English-language media.
“Are you - “ Sidney looked at her in sheer disbelief - “Are you threatening me?”
Mariko shrugged. “If you see me as a threat, then I suppose I’m threatening you. If not, then no.”
“You are sixteen years old, and I -”
“Am an old man of forty-something going on fifty who is living in sin with my mother. It’s an impossible situation, isn’t it? But what can I do? I have fallen madly, hopelessly in love with you! Can you really not have known? But of course you knew. You knew all along. You’ve been torturing me on purpose!”
All this was spoken so lightly, and with such evident mockery, that Sidney felt he had to laugh, though it came out sounding forced and harsh. Mariko smiled in acknowledgment. “On purpose,” she repeated. “The suffering of others, you know - seeing it, better still causing it - is a much sharper sexual pleasure than sex itself. You look surprised, but I’m convinced of it. Bedroom sex is just a pale, ritualized substitute for the real thing, the real thing being, as I say, suffering.”
“Suffering,” Sidney echoed hollowly.
“Suffering. I have just one more question for you. Supposing I were to just throw off my clothes and sit down on your lap. Would you be able to resist me?”
Sidney looked at her steadily but expressionlessly. He did not say a word. The silence lasted some time. In Mariko’s smile there was not a hint of tension. She seemed to be genuinely enjoying the situation she was creating, without caring very much how it should turn out.
“Probably you wouldn’t,” she said at last, shrugging indifferently. “But that’s just biology. Any woman at all would do - as long as she didn’t have a stye in her eye, of course. It wouldn’t be much of a triumph.”
“I think you’d better go, Mariko,” Sidney pronounced gravely, knowing even as he spoke how utterly ridiculous he sounded.
Mariko gave another slight shrug. “Bye,” she said. She turned around and walked out of the room.
