Tojo: A Short Sample from "Sleeping With the Material World"

We don't want to do this too much while we shop this book around, but we thought it would be nice for our followers to get a sense of what this book we're writing is all about. So here's a short sample section where Sarah meets a cute surfer named Tojo and hooks up with him. This is taken from near the end of Chapter 3, on Sarah's second trip to Tokyo:

Tojo:

Anne and I had a casting together. She and I had the same look – skinny, white, blonde – so we ended up at a lot of castings together. We pulled into the parking lot a bit early, and as we waited I bit into a Nutri-Grain bar. I had a thing for candy bars at home and now that I’d gotten to know Tokyo I’d found the westernized spots in town where I could go to buy North American stuff.

“What is that?” Anne asked.

“Just a granola bar,” I said.

“Gran-no-la,” she enunciated each syllable. “That word funny.”

“Hey,” I slapped her and pointed out the window. “Who’s that guy?” A Japanese guy had gotten out of a separate car in the lot with a model and was heading into the casting ahead of us. He was medium build, dressed like a skater, but he immediately looked familiar. “I swear to God, he looks exactly like Pharell Williams.”

“The rapper?” Anne said. “He does, too.”

“What’s his name?”

“Whatever, Sarah. He is another DTA," my DTA Masahiro said from the from the front seat. "Who cares?”

“Serious, though," I said. "I want to know his name. And what agency he works for."

“He's called Tojo,” Masahiro said. “I’ve seen him around. Are you girls ready to go in?”

“Ready to get his number, more like,” I joked. Anne rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I'm ready," I said, more seriously.

I only smiled at Tojo at that shoot but I tracked him down to his home agency and made sure he met me eventually. I asked around and found out that while his day job was as an agent, he was a professional surfer who had a beach house out of town. More importantly, as far as anyone knew, he was single. I ran into him at as many castings as I could.

“You’re cute,” I told him one day while we were in the lobby of another shoot. He was wearing a fashionable dressy getup – a yellow dress shirt with a popped collar under a sleek jacket. It was cutting-edge, industry stuff, revealing enough that you could tell he had muscle but not obviously. He leaned over to me and cupped his ear.

“What you say?”

“You’re cute,” I laughed and hit him on the arm. I flexed my puny white little arm at him and giggled. “Big muscles.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, smiling at me and miming a front crawl. “No gym. I work out in water.”

“I know all about you,” I said. “You’re the pro surfer.”

“Yeah,” he smiled.

I chased Tojo around town until he got around to asking me out. When he took me back to his apartment and lay with me I could feel the power in his body. Every muscle movement while we fucked seemed orchestrated, attuned to the most minor cue. Just from sleeping with him I could understand how he could undulate with the waves. It felt like we had connected souls. He was a physical specimen but his strength was organic. It didn’t come from millions of reps but was the strength of someone who used every inch of his body.

He was Buddhist and usually stoned. His English was poor, but the way our bodies melded together was all the communication we needed. I was happy to be with him. We developed an arrangement. Both of us would work in the city throughout the week, seeing each other sporadically. On Friday night I would go out to the club with the girls and at last call Tojo would pick me up and drive me out to his beach house in Chiba, an hour outside the city. There, we could forget all about modelling and the industry and just surf, eat, sleep and fuck all weekend.

The house was white and box-shaped, more of a cabin than a real house. The running water had to be turned on when we arrived and it usually took a few minutes for it to run through the pipes. Tojo had painted each wall a different colour – it was all reds and yellows – and hung some of his own artwork in the rafters. When we stepped in the door we were surrounded by vistas of oceans and skylines, which lent the place a flowy vibe. There were surfboards and bongs everywhere. He had rigged old surfboards in the rafters and all around as furniture. But when we were at the beach house we were there to be outside. The first time I went, Tojo took me out on the water. We put on wetsuits (and my God, did he look fantastic in a wetsuit) and lay facedown in the shallow water on the board. Tojo paddled with his arms and guided the surfboard past me.

“I’m scared!” I said. “I’m going to slip off and drown!”

Tojo paddled back to me and held onto me as he showed me how to guide the board. Dog-paddling was easy enough, and as I lay there on the gentle waves by the shore I began to understand how he loved it so much. The freeing sensation of the water lifting your body up was amazing. Tojo paddled a little further out and jumped into a standing position on the surfboard to ride some waves. He swam back to me.

“Now you try,” he said. “Try stand up.”

“How do I even?”

He showed me. The first time he jumped into position at full speed and I could hardly see any of it. He mimed it a bit slower so I could kind of understand it. But he was still too fast and I was scared to try it on my own. He explained that I had to slide my feet on the board and try and stick the landing, like catching your balance after you jump off a jungle gym. If you didn’t stabilize immediately you would go overboard. I finally tried once, noncommittally. I tried to mimic Tojo’s movements and landed face-down in the ocean with a mouth full of saltwater.

“I can’t do it!” I laughed. I was frustrated, but exhilarated. Just trying it was an adrenaline rush. I could sense right away that I wanted to try it again. “This is fun though!”

“So fun,” Tojo said, smiling at me from his surfboard.

I tried again. This time I felt my feet get to the spot on the board where they needed to go, but I lost my balance immediately and went sideways. I tried again, and it was back to facefirst in the water. I swam over to Tojo and splashed him.

“I suck at this,” I laughed. “I’m so clumsy. How do you do it?”

I tried a few more times to stand up before resigning myself to paddling the board near the shoreline. Tojo thought that it was his fault that I couldn’t nail it, but I don’t think it was. I just didn’t have the upper body strength or athleticism to be good at it right away. But I loved it anyway. The whole experience was mind-shifting. It was the only activity I’d ever experienced that stimulated every muscle in my body. It was exhausting but empowering. My whole body buzzed as I got out of the water. I felt alive.

It was nice just watching Tojo surf. In the moment it didn’t matter that I was a model and he was an agent, that I was in Japan chasing a career and money. It was just about being kids and having a great time together. When he got back to shore the sun was starting to set so we headed back to the house. He started a cooking fire out front. There was a cheap stove in the house but whenever the weather was nice he cooked outside. I would just sit there by the fire and watch him as he explained what he was making, all the ingredients that came together over the open flame. He would show me with his hands rather than his words, because of the language barrier. It was important to him that I pay attention as he shared the information. It was his way of showing me how much he cared about me. After dinner we would go inside to sleep or have incredible sex. He was a formally trained masseuse, so sometimes he would just massage me and it felt better than sex.

Tojo was a true gentleman. I was petulant – complaining that he hadn’t brought my favourite food up to the beach house or getting frustrated when he couldn’t understand me. He would always approach angry Sarah with that Buddhist calmness, accepting my anger and giving it back to me as love. And it always made me more angry that he could just be so accepting rather than feed my anger back to me. But now, looking back, I think he was teaching me something about the world. One weekend, after we had just finished an amazing day of surfing, good sex, massages, and napping, we were on the floor of the beach house painting together.

“This is amazing,” I said. “I feel like I’ve connected with you, deeply connected.”

“What you mean?” he said.

“You make me feel amazing,” I said. “I have such strong feelings for you.”

“Feeling?” he said. “What feelings are?”

“Feelings,” I said, gesturing to my heart. “You know, how I feel for you. Inside of me.”

“I don’t understand.”

Tojo could understand nouns and active verbs fairly easily – I could point to a surfboard and say “surfboard,” and he would understand what I meant – but communicating more abstract thoughts with him was harder. It’s hard to point to a feeling. I looked around for the Japanese phrasebook I usually used with him, but I hadn’t bothered to bring it up. I patted his chest and then mine.

“Feelings.” I took a crayon and pulled out a piece of paper we hadn’t painted on yet and drew a picture of a person holding their heart and then another person holding their heart and then I drew a line between the hearts. “Feel love.” Then I drew a sketch of an angry couple fighting with each other and drew a line between them. “Feel angry.”

“Ah. Feelings,” he said. “Good feelings, bad feelings. Inside. Yes.”

It was such a basic concept – feeling – and yet so revelatory to explain to someone else. It reminded me how much we take for granted with people who speak the same language as us – we assume they understand our meanings and connotations when we use abstract concepts that are hard to physically define. Tojo got my basic point but he didn’t necessarily really understand what I was trying to say. Feelings are pretty ambigious.

But in teaching him the word I also started to analyze my own relationship with the word. My Dad had always told Bob that men didn’t cry and I’d always figured that if my father and brother didn’t cry, and they were put together, but my Mom always cried and her life was a mess, that I’d rather be like a man. I’d avoided crying in front of anybody for years. I’d spent my whole adolescence running away from any emotional tenderness. I realized I was nobody to be teaching anybody about feelings – I was just learning the true meaning of the word myself.