“And in one bar there were a few rich Japanese women, and the weirdest thing was, they seemed to like tattoos as much as male Japanese do. I mean, these are very artistic people, right? Like us, the women were there to hire cocks, but they wanted tattoos-”

“Especially on dicks.”

“So in that one bar they had a kind of tattoo parade.”

“And the winner was a Jap in his mid-thirties. They kept using this word donburi, donburi, which we thought was about buri, you know, cigarettes, but it turned out donburi means ‘total body tattoo’ in Japanese.”

I rub my jaw and stare at her. “It does?”

“Yes, and he won the contest-they were really great tats. But he wouldn’t go with any of the women. He said he wasn’t for hire; he only came to parade his tats.”

35

Let’s call him Ishy. Never mind how I found him-yes, I visited most of the gay bars off Surawong but uncovered no more than his cold scent, so to speak. It seemed the Jap with the shocking tattoos and still more disturbing stutter was no more than an intermittent extrovert who used the bars as his shop window-he sold no flesh, only his art. Now here he is in a Japanese restaurant on Soi 39. You don’t want a list of every link in the chain-each shopkeeper, whore, bar owner, bouncer, bent cop, mamasan, security guard-that led me here.

You have seen such restaurants in movies about yakuza mobsters: underlit, with booths in dark wood, warm sake in tiny stone jars, a secretive, whispered inebriation in which soul brothers share male truths, serving girls in frilly aprons who curtsy (when they probably should be bowing: they’re Thai); it is permissible to pass out from alcohol poisoning but not to talk loudly. He sat alone in a booth in front of a pint bottle of the finest sake from the renowned distillery of Koshino Kagiro. His stutter, though appalling when sober, dissolved into a passionate loquacity when the warm alcohol infused his brain. In accordance with the yakuza tradition of honor and initiation, the last segments of the pinkies on both hands had been severed. He merely grunted when I sat opposite him in the booth, as if my arrival were somehow inevitable, and called for a second place setting that I might share his bento boxes of sashimi, yellowtail, bream, and tempura shrimp. He ordered miso soup for me, stared into my eyes with a kind of impersonal hostility, then said: “Put the salmon on the rice, pour some green tea over it with some miso and shredded nori.”

Oddly enough, he is a tall, handsome fellow whose social skills have been irrevocably crippled by his graphic genius. How can a man indulge in small talk when his inner eye sees great epics on the smooth surfaces of his companion’s flesh? When he offered to do a full-size Laughing Buddha on my back for free if I would submit to those foot-long tebori needles rather than a Western tattoo gun, I began to understand his speech impediment. When we were both drunk enough, we migrated from the booth to the stools at the bar.

When not full of ink and body art, his conversation debauched into the yakuza gangs of Tokyo and Kyoto, stories that to me owned the sadism and gigantism of an alien cosmology. It seemed, quite suddenly, that he was sharing his autobiography. Here too only the horimono mattered. How to persuade a thug, a failed sumo wrestler (say) with room temperature IQ, that he really doesn’t want that ugly blue dagger in indigo from knee to crotch on both thighs, but rather a sinuous, elegant rose bush with each petal a masterpiece of detail? The cities of Ishy’s Japan fairly burst with cutthroats swarming out from Underground at dusk (each with at least one pinkie missing), masters of mutilation, intimidation, and murder, of whom he was able to save only a few from the degrading clichés of his trade and then only at the risk of his own life. Nonetheless his fame grew: in Japan even thugs have culture. Senior mobsters called upon his services, he dined and drank at famous and famously discreet men’s clubs where accomplished geishas entertained him and his clients; sometimes he was asked to tattoo the women with something elegant on the lower back or stomach. With enough sake in him he was able to overcome his inhibitions and attempt to bring enlightenment to the dull minds of the yakuza godfathers: his art was not an offshoot of graffiti (for which he had an abiding loathing) but part of the great ink-drawing tradition of Hokusai and his predecessors.

One karma-laden night he talked that giant godfather Tsukuba out of an M16 on both forearms and into a view of Mount Fuji, snow and all. Granted, Tsukuba was extremely drunk, as was Ishy.

“Do it now,” demanded Tsukuba.

“Where do you want it?” the body artist inquired.

“On my forehead,” yelled the don, provoking a chorus of admiration for his daring. Next day, sober, Ishy knew it was time to leave his homeland for good. A very powerful mobster with a brilliant picture of Mount Fuji on his forehead was baying for his blood. Natural destinations for one of his calling would have been Hong Kong, Singapore, Los Angeles, San Francisco -which is why he chose none of them, for surely Tsukuba would be looking for him there. Bangkok was the place to hide, with its small and discreet Japanese community and the countless tattoo-hungry hookers. He kept a low profile, rarely worked from home, accepted commissions only from trusted clients (Japanese businessmen mostly, who seemed to spend much of their waking lives dreaming up erotic horimono with which to decorate their favorite girls, having pretty much exhausted the vacant spaces offered by their wives’ bodies). From time to time, though, the artist in him craved a deeper recognition. Much of the work on his own body he had done himself, but from the start he had known that his destiny lay with donburi: total body tattoo. Where even his resourceful tebori needles could not reach, he created detailed blueprints for a trusted apprentice to follow. The result was a beautifully integrated tapestry in which the themes that dominated his life were interwoven and explored like melodies in a Mozart concerto: Mount Fuji, a Toshiba laptop, a geisha in full regalia, the first Honda moped, a dish of Kobe beef, Admiral Yamamoto in full dress uniform, five drunken samurai in traditional body armor, each of the positions for copulation recommended by the Kama Sutra-and so on. In Bangkok he started parading himself at gay bars, just to exhibit his work.

Drunk together after more bottles of sake than I can remember, Ishy finally undid his shirt, then took it off. The donburi was like a silk T-shirt of quite fantastic quality, with a subtle symphony of colors composed on a precise pyramidal structure that, if I am not mistaken, was a clear reference to Cézanne. Thai waitresses all came to admire. “You can take off the rest of your clothes,” one of them told him. “No way you’re going to look naked.”

So he did, and there it was, though I refrained from studying it too closely for fear of being misunderstood. The girls were less inhibited, however, and one of them worked his member, the better-she explained-to appreciate his art. Fully tumescent, his penis provided a unique and very Japanese perspective on the Battle of Midway.

Apparently most comfortable in his designer skin, Ishy poured more sake and shared his inner life.

“I was one of those, you know?”

I had learned by now that much of his conversation assumed clairvoyance on the part of the listener. “High tech from the start?”

“I never really learned to talk to people. It still feels weird to me, which is why I stutter so much. I played games on a pocket calculator from the age of four onward. When the first personal computers arrived, I knew why I had incarnated at this time. After a while I couldn’t leave my bedroom. My mother used to leave food at the door, and my dad left books. Once they had a doctor come to examine me. He said I was nuts. There was no cure, half my generation had the same problem. One day my dad left a book of horimono illustrations along with some Hokusai prints-he was at the end of his rope with me.” Ishy paused to swallow sake. “It was like a religious experience. Actually, it was a religious experience. I asked my father for more art books and, above all, more horimono. He obliged with a virtual library. Above all others the great Hokusai stood before me clothed in his gigantic talent. Even today I could sketch a perfect copy of each and every one of the ukiyo-e woodblocks, and I know every stroke of ‘The Breaking Wave’ as another man might remember the words of a favorite song.”