Read an excerpt from Tokyo Stories
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Sex, Lies, and
Too Much Champagne
"This restaurant is really going downhill," Henry said, smiling deliciously and at the same time shaking his head at his date. "I asked for their best champagne and they give us Moet. They’ve obviously stopped stocking up on vintage Krug. It must be the economy – or all that competition from Roppongi Hills."
It was his favorite line. The restaurant had stopped carrying Krug almost a year ago and Moet was a perfectly good alternative, but he still liked saying this anyway.
They were at Campidoglio, which was reportedly the top Italian restaurant in Tokyo, and Henry was taking out Lala, a German-Hungarian model who had recently appeared in the Japanese version of Vogue, for the first time.
On first dates, Henry liked to impress his girls big-time. He often didn’t have to try very hard because his lifestyle and his bachelor toys all screamed "Babe magnet! Shockingly successful!"
When he picked the girls up next to the black taxi line at Roppongi Hills or right by Fuji Bank in Omotesando in his top-of-the-line silver Porsche convertible, most of them would take one look at his baby-on-wheels and then get starry-eyed and utter something really uncool like, "Ooh – I’ve always wanted to ride a Porsche!"
Then, at the restaurant, he would order champagne and hand his date the menu, which was a piece of laminated cardboard with dinner prices that could practically have doubled as a downpayment for a car.
"Choose whatever you like," he would say indulgently, flashing the lucky girl his best smile. "I want you to have a really good time."
Henry could tell the really classy girls apart this way.
Most of the girls he dated were either country bumpkin foreigners hoping to land a lucrative modeling career on the strength of their blonde hair and long legs (otherwise they’d have to return home and become supermarket check-out girls); or Japanese secretaries and stewardesses who were desperately looking for foreign husbands and pretending to work in the meantime. Either way, he usually met the girls on the weekends while in a severely inebriated state at a Roppongi bar or disco and called them up for a date within a few days.
At the restaurant, most of the girls would take a look at the prices on the menu and either burst into nervous giggles or gasp, "Gosh, everything is so expensive here." Then, predictably, they would order the priciest entrée or pick something really ordinary like consomme soup and spaghetti carbonara because the rest of the menu was too hard to figure out.
B-o-r-i-n-g.
These kinds of girls, he’d take them out once or twice for fun. If he was in the mood -- which was almost always -- he would take them back to his flat afterwards. But he never ever went out with them more than three or four times lest the girls start to think they were in A Relationship and have complicated expectations. In this way he liked to think of himself as the Ultimate Benevolent Playboy since he always took great pains not to lead the girls on with unrealistic hopes. He just wanted to have fun. And it vexed him that, no matter how hard he tried, most of the women he dated still ended up with expectations that he had not really raised – and then he always got blamed for their hurt feelings. It wasn’t his fault that he had never met anyone he could commit to.
However, Lala was different from the other girls who usually passed through his life, and he knew it from the outset. For one thing, she had actually gone to university in Munich and had been a real model in Europe. Her agency had sent her to Tokyo for a big fashion shoot, where she had hit it off with the high-flying Japanese photographer who had worked with her, and then she had moved in with him for two months. The relationship soon petered out due to language difficulties, but by then she had already sealed her Tokyo modeling agency network so she decided to stay on. Modeling jobs in Japan still paid better than those in Germany anyway.
In Europe, Lala had dated a German count and the cousin-in-law of a Spanish prince so she was used to being spoiled. When Henry had picked her up in Omotesando for their date at Campidoglio, she had glanced at the door of his Porsche – which had been vandalized a week earlier in an illegal parking zone in Nishi-Azabu – rather than at the Porsche itself. Then she carelessly flung her bag into the passenger seat before getting in, and asked, "How did you get that big scratch mark on the side?"
No mention of the Porsche. He liked that.
Then, when he did his best champagne routine, she had focused her blue eyes on him and said, "Henry, I happen to like Moet over Krug."
He liked that even more.
Finally, the menu test. But she was just too smart to even fall for it. She returned the menu to him unopened, batted her fake eyelashes at him, and commanded, "You choose for me. I want to see what kind of taste you have."
A girl with spunk. He had met his match. He was hooked....
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