Blue Haired Girl
by James Roth

Yuji was easy enough to seduce. But things didn’t go as I’d expected after that. My lucky day! I picked him up at a video arcade next to a sex shop in Kabukicho, just where Nobuyuki had told me he’d be. He went there after work to catch an Odakyu train to Setagaya. When he’d finished playing the game a wide grin spread across his face, like he’d had an orgasm, before he looked up at me. I said, “Final Fantasy is my favorite too.”
+++++He continued on staring at me the way an otaku does, a bit nervous and unable to speak. I was wearing my heart-shaped eye glasses with the red frame, no lenses, and I’d gotten my lips as shiny a red as the frame of the glasses. I was one of those characters in Final Fantasy that had come to life, just as I’d planned. He was so dumbstruck that I was the one who had to say, “Maybe we should go to a hotel?”
+++++The Amour was just down the street, in that area where the love hotels are lined up, one right after the other. I’d been in most.
+++++Yuji booked the expensive room that I wanted, decorated like some sort of spaceship, the walls all silvery. Fake windows, looking like those in a spaceship, were fixed to the walls. The room, even for me, was a thrill, the fantasy appeal of it. Lights swirled around like stars, so that those on the bed felt like they were going through outer space as they fucked.
+++++Yuji was good for two rounds. After the second round he told me my blue hair was what had turned him into a man. He hadn’t gone two rounds with his wife since their honeymoon in Hawaii.
+++++Afterwards I had a quick shower, dressed, and when I was making my way to the door, he said, “My wife and her brother put you up to this. I know they did, Mai-chan.”
+++++Him saying that didn’t totally catch me by surprise. I already knew that Nobuyuki was going to use the photos he’d taken of us going into the Amour for blackmailing Yuji, but how many men are willingly to follow their dicks into being blackmailed? Only the really randy ones, and Yuji hardly looked to me to be that type. But, well, men, you never know what’s going on between their ears until they drop their pants.
+++++Nobuyuki was a former yakuza who now worked as a private detective, meaning he was taking lots of photos of people doing what they shouldn’t be doing and going through family records to find out for the bride’s family if someone in the groom’s family was dirty. You never know what dirt there is in a family’s history. I’m evidence of that. I would’ve died if I’d lived in the same house with my father for another day.
+++++“My wife has a lover,” Yuji said.
+++++“Goodbye,” I said.
+++++“She wants a divorce.”
+++++“Give her one.”
+++++“A divorce will derail my career. I’m a section chief at Pacific Sushi.”
+++++He’d said this as if it meant something to me.
+++++“I’ll pay you twice as much as Nobuyuki.”
+++++That got my attention.
+++++Yuji was sitting up against the backboard of the bed, his white, hairless chest looking like a moon.
+++++“One hundred thousand,” I said.
+++++He grinned, and for a second, with that grin, he was sexy, had power. It’s interesting how a man’s appeal can change so fast.
+++++“One hundred thousand,” he said.
+++++“And what is it you want me to do?”
+++++“Come over here,” he said, patting the edge of the bed.
+++++I went to the bed and sat there. He put a hand on my thigh and smiled. His touch made me start to get wet.
+++++“One hundred thousand to start,” I said.
+++++“We’ll negotiate the bonus later,” he said.
+++++I took off my glasses and bent forward, and he kissed me and worked his hands up my blouse to my breasts.
+++++“Tell me again,” I said, “about your position in that company. What’s the name, Pacific Sushi?”

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James Roth

James Roth has published fiction in Mystery Tribune online, Fleas on the Dog, Crimeucopia, and Short Story Town, to name a few. A historical noir/mystery novel of his, The Opium Addict, set in Meiji Japan, is forthcoming this fall. Blue-haired Girl is the prologue to his second novel, set in modern Japan. He is a fellow in the U.S. State Department's EFL Program and lives in Zimbabwe.
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