The best thing for tired muscles isn’t a massage gun, it’s Doja Cat and her husky voice. Ever since discovering this truth, her albums have become a staple of my post-workout routine. By eleven o’clock, when I get to the gym after a morning working on my novel, I’m usually the only woman there. It was the same that day: after almost barbell-squatting myself into oblivion, I found myself alone in the locker room, where I began blasting the album Planet Her from my iPhone. Swaying to the beat, I sluiced the sweat off in the shower, wrapped myself in a towel and drank my protein shake. Doja Cat was issuing a series of very frank demands for the supply of pleasure to her body, and her lyrics made me feel like both source and object of that desire, loosening my entire being into a soft pulpy mess.

When the old woman walked in, ‘Need to Know’, a deeply erotic track in which Doja Cat’s breathy vocals threaten to consume the rest of the music entirely, had just begun to play.

She was a regular at the gym, one I’d said hello to several times. Some days, when I came in earlier than usual, I’d catch her just as she was leaving, so it was a surprise to see her just getting here. According to my gossipy personal trainer, she was well into her nineties and turned up at the gym almost every weekday. She’d even featured in a television segment on ‘Respect for the Aged Day’ about sprightly seniors who weight-trained on a daily basis. In the ruthless setting of the gym, whose members were always silently trying to one-up each other with the size of their barbell weights or the difficulty of their routines, her warm-hearted smile and unhurried movements had an almost maverick quality. When she was using them, even the most intimidating-looking pieces of equipment seemed to adopt friendly expressions.

When I took my iPhone from the bench and made to turn the music off, she immediately reached out to stop me.

‘Oh no,’ she said, withdrawing her arm before it made contact. Her back was slightly hunched, but the legs that supported it were planted firmly on the ground. ‘You had the place to yourself before I barged in here. Don’t mind me! I wouldn’t want you turning your special music off on my account.’

At this point, switching it off seemed like it would actually be the rude thing to do, so I bowed gratefully and let the music play on. Still, I wasn’t entirely comfortable subjecting this kindly, well-spoken lady to lines like ‘I heard from a friend of a friend/That that dick was a ten out of ten’. I decided to at least turn the volume down slightly.

There was a pause. Then, as she was unbuttoning her blouse, her hands suddenly stopped.

‘This music . . .’ she murmured, ‘what would you call it? The way she’s rattling off all the words like that instead of singing them . . . and the way they all seem to rhyme, almost like it’s the words themselves that are the music . . .’

‘Rap?’ I suggested. Behind me Doja was rhyming time and pipe and like.

‘Rappu?’

‘Er, yes. This is a song by a female rapper called Doja Cat. Genre-wise you’d call it hip-hop.’

‘Do-ji-ya. That’s her name, is it?’ The old lady lowered her eyes slightly, as if pondering something. ‘And this Dojiya-san—is she American?’

Was she American?

I wasn’t sure exactly where Doja was from, but she did sound American . . .

‘Yes, she’s American,’ I said, nodding.

‘I see, yes, I thought she might be. And, I wonder, do you know what sort of things she’s singing about?’

She asked the question flatly enough, but I could tell she wasn’t just making conversation. She really wanted to know—had a Need to Know, you might say—more about Doja Cat’s music. So, secretly berating myself for being so flippant when it came to Doja’s nationality, I decided to tell the old lady something I felt a little surer about.

‘She doesn’t do drugs,’ I said. The song had just changed to ‘I Don’t Do Drugs (feat. Ariana Grande)’.

‘Doraggu?’

‘Yeah, as in illegal substances. That’s what she’s singing: “I just want you, but I don’t do drugs”.’

‘Ah,’ she replied, her expression indicating that everything made sense now. ‘In other words, the other ladies and gentlemen who are into this rappu thing—they’re normally on all sorts of stimulants and things, are they?’

‘Oh, not stimulants, more like . . . Well, maybe, but—’

‘Don’t worry. I get it. I’m sure with music like Dojiya-san’s, that sort of thing would come rather in handy.’

With this, she lowered her already drooping head into a series of deep bows, like someone prostrating herself before a country’s flag.

I clammed up, uncertain how to take what she’d said. Depending on how I phrased my response, there was a chance I’d end up leaving this ninety-something-year-old with a prejudiced view of Doja Cat, even a misunderstanding of hip-hop as a whole. I told myself that this was probably one of those comments you’re supposed to just brush off with a chuckle. But it was too late for that now: the old woman had stopped short in the middle of getting changed and was standing there in her shorts and sports bra, waiting for me to go on.

Even as the awkward silence dragged on, Doja Cat was filling the locker room with that mesmerising husky voice of hers. Then, as ‘You Right’ came on and The Weeknd told Doja Cat ‘you still hesitate ’cause you choose loyalty’, I opened my mouth once more.

‘Not all rappers do drugs, you know,’ I began, still hesitating. ‘I know that on the surface we’re having a normal conversation right now, and for two people whose entire relationship is that they bump into each other at the gym every now and then that should be enough, I really am aware of that, but—and this is just my personal opinion—maybe this sort of tiny misunderstanding in the middle of an ordinary bit of small talk is actually the sort of thing that ends up triggering some sort of momentous event. You know, like a war or something.’

‘A . . . war?’

‘Sorry, I know this is all a little sudden. But there really is a part of me that can’t help feeling that way—like really believing it. As in, maybe all it takes is for one average citizen living an average life to show a bit too much apathy towards one of their fellow humans for a war to break out. That’s why I take my conversations with strangers very seriously. If we don’t manage to see eye-to-eye on this, and you walk out of here thinking that hip-hop is basically a collective noun for a bunch of junkies, it might come back to haunt me in some terrible and irreversible way. So—and I know this is a bit of pain—but would you mind if, right now, I gave you a full run-down of the historical relationship between hip-hop and drugs?’

‘Of course,’ said the old woman, looked at me with the unclouded expression of a young girl. ‘But first, can I tell you something? I’ve lived through a war, you see. And in the middle of it, I did some drugs.’

‘. . . Sorry?’

‘Yes. In nineteen forty-five, I ate some chocolate spiked with meth.’

The old woman went on to recount, in such vivid detail you’d think it had happened yesterday, her memories of this brush with methamphetamines. I’ve met plenty of elderly people who start rambling about the war at the slightest opportunity, but for something that a half-naked old lady was telling me in a gym locker room, her story was pretty, well, dope. In fact, I don’t even know how much of it I should share here.

In any case, I can tell you that in 1945, she was still just a twelve-year-old girl, and that twelve-year-old girl really did end up taking meth.

As part of the wartime mobilization of school-age children, she’d been taken to a factory that had been set up inside an all-girls’ school. There, under the army’s orders, she began packaging chocolates that were embossed with the imperial chrysanthemum. These chocolates were to be given to kamikaze pilots before they embarked on their suicide missions. While she was working, she hid one of the chocolates in her underwear, took it home with her and ended up eating it in an air-raid shelter. All of this she told me to the background strains of Planet Her. Speaking of which, what does ‘Planet Her’ even mean, I wonder?

‘You know what the worst thing about the war was?’ she said. ‘The words. I couldn’t stand the words we had to use.’ The same slight smile on her face, but a sort of light in her eyes now, faint yet piercing.

‘The . . . words?’

‘Yes. All these horrible, ugly words, words I’d never heard before, were suddenly flying about all over the place, and there were three phrases in particular I just couldn’t stand: “emergency shelter”, “air-raid siren”, “brutes and barbarians”. When people said “brutes and barbarians” to talk about the Americans and British, they’d get this mean look on their faces. When the air-raid siren went off, it meant my friends died, which was awful. And the emergency shelter was a nasty, dark, dirty, cramped little space where I should never have been in the first place.

‘So that day, when the air-raid siren went off, I ran to the emergency shelter and I got out the chocolate I’d pinched from the factory and I ate the whole thing. I wanted to forget all the ugly words and the awfulness of the situation and of course at that point I had no idea there was meth in the chocolate. But all it took was one bite and right away my body started getting all warm and I started feeling very funny indeed. In fact I felt good. The words I hated so much began to loop around in my head, air-raid-siren emergency-shelter brutes-and-barbarians, air-raid-siren emergency-shelter brutes-and-barbarians, air-raid-siren emergency-shelter brutes-and-barbarians, over and over, hundreds of times, making a rhythm, making a song, until before I knew it I was having the time of my life.

‘Then, all of a sudden, more words started to come . . . air-raid siren, I dare-say it’s tiring, this lair’s uninspiring and the spare air’s expiring, I want to be comatose in traffic flows, finding repose in sumo shows, dipping toes in a lake that glows with fish who swish around me . . . Like a series of bad jokes, the rhymes kept welling up from inside me like the ramblings of someone delirious with fever, until all of a sudden I had turned into a tropical fish. The dingy shelter had been replaced by a turquoise limestone lake, I was happy, I was swimming, I was in cavorting to and fro. In the shimmer of the water blue’s glitter even the siren’s warning was the dawning of a rainbow-forming fragrant morning when the emperor and empress, impotent but endless, offered absolution for the future dissolution of the Meiji constitution. I couldn’t take it any more, all these words bubbling up inside me. I wanted to feel them in my mouth, to hear them with my ears, so I started to let them out—Brutes and barbarians? The truth’s even scarier/These malicious disses only make the citizens warier/Atrocious and lawless how our most precocious and flawless/Are forced to thoughtlessly slaughter and then fall at close quarters/We oughta live life not waste it/Not just sit by but taste it, let’s face it—

‘I couldn’t stop. The words felt so good in my mouth I began to cry. They were pouring out of me now, pouring out and melting beautifully into the water all around. I could feel the music on my tongue, I wanted more and more, I wanted words for eternity. It was a pleasure like nothing I’ve ever known.

‘Do you know what I’m talking about, young lady? I bet Dojiya-san would. Ah, yes, Dojiya-san the American would know exactly what I mean . . .’

The whole time she’d been talking, I’d been unable to tear my eyes away from the old woman’s body, from the tough skin that had kept it safe for over ninety years.

As though suddenly noticing my gaze, she shyly pulled on a T-shirt. And then, in a voice so cute it made my chest burn, Doja Cat sang Oh, I love the taste/Oh-la-la-la-la-la/All on my tongue, I want it, and the music stopped.

References

Fumiyo Ooka, ‘Philopon’ and the ‘Special Attack’ Units: How Female Students Prepared Stimulant-Infused Chocolates for Suicide Pilots, Based on the War Experiences of Kazuko Umeda, Self-published, 2021.