The birds were smuggled from Australia to Indonesia, then shipped to China, Korea, and finally to me in Japan. We had purchased three hundred budgerigars and cockatiels from aborigine poachers, but because of customs delays, only a third survived the trip—and they did so by eating their brothers.
Budgie Beauty Salon. It was going to make us rich. With help from my girlfriend’s father, we signed a ninety million yen lease in Tokyo’s Harajuku district: the cutesy/costume/goth mecca of the world where thousands of teenage girls swarm from their suburban lives for weekends in neon and frills.
I quit my English teaching job and for six long months we built our salon. Hiroko took care of the paperwork while I took care of my dream. In the back-room aviary I nursed the birds to health, washed the blood out of their feathers, oversaw their breeding, and taught them some necessary Japanese:
“Irasshaimase” – welcome.
“Kawaii!”—cute!
One clever cockatiel even learned: “Watashi wa tori desu!”—I am a bird!
The salon was decorated with artificial waterfalls that cascaded down the walls and through the raised grated floor to wash away the crap. Mirrors on stainless steel rods came out of the water to face twelve gorgeous barber chairs: green leather and chrome with glow-in-the-dark piping. Overhead: the newest and hottest J-pop from thirty-eight speakers: Exile, Glay, Bump of Chicken—state of the art moving lights keeping the rhythm. The customers put on matching green goggles, shower caps, and aprons (all decorated with smiling cartoon parrots and theirs to take home for an extra fifty yen)—and then had their heads raised into a trapdoor in the bottom of a two foot square cage suspended from the ceiling where five hungry birds waited to work. Pimples, moles, skin tags gone! A single millet seed stuck with honey to each unsightly blemish. Afterwards, a soothing antibacterial facial.
We couldn’t fail. There are two things Japanese girls have an abundance of: disposable income and a deeply entrenched aesthetic appreciation of cute.
We advertised on television and in magazines, saying that the first fifty customers could take a real bird home. The ads showed gorgeous models smiling as they cuddled adorable feathery vessels of love: pint-size parrots in yellows, greens, blues, and whites.
A week before opening they started getting in line: posses of teenage girls with Doraemon coolers and Hello Kitty sleeping bags. Our timing was perfect: it was the end of summer holidays. Start your term with a fresh face! So many people lined up that the police had to erect crowd control barriers and close two busy intersections. We were ecstatic.
Our first day was beautiful: over seven hundred customers served in fourteen hours! Because I hadn’t fed them in days, the birds were particularly voracious, devouring seeds and pustules alike in a flapping frenzy, the girls shrieking and giggling in pain and delight, little drips of blood swelling on their faces. Afterwards, looking into the mirror, a lutino cockatiel singing on their shoulder—they all smiled: the experience was worth a little pain and two hundred yen.
Hiroko and I were happy and exhausted from running the entire salon ourselves. Everything was going according to plan until the sixth day.
The veterinarian that headed the inquiry said that the birds had developed a taste for blood. That’s why that one poor girl had most of her lips, ears, and nose eaten off. It was ridiculous, he said, that there was no one paying attention to stop it. The girl apparently had been too terrified to move or scream, and I found her that way when her seven minutes were up.
Hiroko and I stayed open for a few more days, that is, until the tabloids got hold of the story: then there was no one. After we closed, it came out that a few girls had developed serious infections and would probably lose their faces and dozens claimed that they had contracted HIV. A class-action lawsuit was filed; Hiroko and I counted our assets. The same agent that got me the birds agreed to buy them back at a quarter of the price (he then sold them, I hear, at a considerable profit to a group of Chinese epicures). Regardless, the money I made from that transaction was enough for me to take a ferry to Korea—thus leaving my lover to my creditors—and then fly home to Canada, where I got a job here, as the pet shop bird man.
Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Shawn Otis
