Collected Essays (20 page)

So today I’m clear of all my interviews and duties, though it took some running around to find a new hotel. We’d been in the luxury Hotel Imperial and now found, thanks to connections of HARP, a more affordable room in Ginza Dai-ichi Hotel, which is a surprisingly large step down in the direction of the proverbial coffin hotel. The window is like a bus window with rounded corners, the bathroom is made of one single piece of plastic and is tiny, but for now it’s home. At first I’d tried calling hotels—our prepaid Imperial reservation ran out today, along with HARP’s responsibility towards us—but all were full, but cute roundeyed roundmouthed plumpcheeked Mr. Fujino of HARP helped us out one last bit by finding this.

We were thinking of taking a train to Nikko, but just things like eating are hard enough. We did have a good lunch today, in the basement of the Ginza Style Department Store at Sylvia’s urging. In the store we first went up to the roof and looked at their bonsai, they had one pine for something like ten thousand dollars, it was especially valuable because it leaned way over and half of its trunk was like rotted away. There was a thick-gnarled azalea for a nine thousand bucks, though the flowers on it seemed, to my mind, to ruin the effect of the scale. The department store was full of recorded voices, women’s voices talking, Sylvia said, in the voice of a Good Doll, a sing-song almost lisping voice. We sampled some of the many available things to taste in the gourmet food-shop in the second sublevel basement, hideous fishy wads and tortured slimy vegetables. After awhile I was laughing so hard at the gnarl of it all that I couldn’t stop. My lunch was good except that the soup reeked of mildew. Traced the cause finally to some thick limp strands of fungus(?), maybe they get the spores of mildew and nurture it like a bonsai until it’s a stalk the size of a carrot and then they slice that up and soak it in gecko juice or something and they put that in your soup. Once the offending strands were pincered out and banished to the furthest corner of the table, the meal was all right.

June 1, 1990, Morning. Shinjuku.

Morning, it’s raining cats and dogs outside, Sylvia is cheerful. Cozy in our tiny room.

Yesterday afternoon we went to Shinjuku. They had lots of pachinko places. I realize now that the machines are not separate entities, there is a vast common pool of pachinko balls behind the stuck-together rows of machines. Proof is that to buy new balls you put coins in a slot shared by your machine and the next machine, the balls don’t come from one machine or the other, they come from the common ball space. How apt a symbol of the Japanese flowing out of their offices and through their subways, the pachinko balls, each ball by the way with a character on it, invisible unless you pick it up and peer closely to see the character scratched on. When you’re through playing, there is a sink with towels near the door to wash off your hands. We walked through a neighborhood where I’d expected to see sex shops, but with Japanese reticence there was no way to tell which might be sex, or if you could tell, no way to tell what lay inside. Well, there
was
one obvious place—it had a big statue of a gorilla in boxer shorts with stars and stripes and an English sign saying, “This Is The Sex Place.” Gorilla in shorts is the typical USA male sex-tourist in their minds no doubt. Mostly Shinjuku was like a boardwalk with games, etc. There was a thin old-fashioned alley with a hundred tiny yakatori (skewered meat) places, we squeezed into one, with like a 5 foot ceiling, had a couple of beers and some skewers, a man helped us translate, “What kind you want? Tongue? Liver? Kidney?” “Uh…are those all the choices?” Then we went to an eighth floor bar called Gibson—I’d imagined maybe it was a cyberpunk theme bar as I’d heard some people use the phrase “Gibson literature” for “cyberpunk,” but that’s not what it was, it was just another of the zillion places selling whiskey and pickled veggies. We wrote postcards while the place filled up with office-workers in suits. When we got outside the Shinjuku lights were on, the big signs, awesome as the Ginza, but harder to see with all the train stations in the way. One particularly unusual light is a big 3-D cage of bars with neon tubes in every direction. A surface of illumination moved through the cage this way and that and then more and more of the bars came on to make a big chaotic 3-D knot of light.

Beautiful people on the subway, a schoolgirl with a big round chin, her lips always parted in a half smile, all of the women with the lusterless black hair and a few strands of bangs. Heart-stopping symmetries in these young faces, another girl with a slightly rough complexion carrying a basket of arranged flowers, pressing her offering into a corner away from the subway wind.

June 1, 1990, Afternoon. The Kabuki theater, Momotaro.

Leaving the hotel for Shinjuku yesterday afternoon I decided, once we were a block or two away, that I should go back and leave my sweater, and then made a wrong turn and blundered around in circles for half an hour, finally giving up and keeping the sweater and with difficulty finding my way back to waiting Sylvia. Our first night here we had to take a cab just to find our way back to our hotel. Amazing how difficult it is to orient with
no street names
. Some of the larger streets have names, but the names are “all the same” and “impossible to remember,” especially since it is very rare that the name, if there is a name, is written out in Western letters. And you can’t orient very well by landmarks since the buildings are mostly gray concrete boxes, or by signs, as the signs are crazy scribbles. Seeing some country-yokel type Japanese guys in our hotel I wondered how
they
ever find anything, and it occurred to me that they must simply ask instructions every block or so. The Japanese always seem ready to help each other, there are, for instance, so many staff always in restaurants and stores, like two or three times as many as back home—reminiscent also of the way there were like seven different guys working as “manager of HARP.” The Japanese overemploy so that everyone can get lots of help and service, they give it to each other and they get it back. Generalities, perhaps false, but it’s fun to try and see patterns here. One of the mysteries guidebooks and more experienced visitors mention is that there are effectively no usable addresses, houses in a district being numbered according to the order in which they were built, and many of the streets really not having any name at all. How can such a system work? It works if you think in terms of moving along like an (here’s that impolitic word again!)
ant
, rubbing feelers with the ants you encounter, getting bits of info as you need them. Given the city as a hive-mind extended in space and time, you need only keep asking it where you are and how to get where you are going, and it will tell you. You just feel-feel-feel your haptic way. As opposed to the can-do Western approach where you get a map and fix your coordinates and set out like Vasco da Gama, or like an instrument-navigating airplane pilot, and reckon your way to your goal, all by yourself, not asking for any help.

At breakfast on the 15
^th
floor there were two halves, Japanese breakfast half where you could get “rice set” including rice, boiled fish, miso soup, pickled vegetables, or American half where you get eggs. We opted for egg. The music in the Japanese half was a recording of a cuckoo, on the American side, Muzak. Great mushroom omelet, though. Looking out the window through the Saturday morning rain, we could see into a building with a many-desked office. The guys in there were doing calisthenics together, just like Japanese workers are so often rumored to do. It’s healthy, natch, and perhaps a way of bonding—”we all did the same motions at the start of work.”

In the morning paper, I read that one of the biggest gangs in Japan, their like Mafia, is called Yamaguchi-gumi. Such a sweet-sounding name for a gang…like the Little Kidders.

The National Kabuki Theater is in the Ginza, so we walked up there to see if we could get in. Good fortune. They had an 11:00 AM matinee with easily-bought inexpensive tickets to sit in the highest (4
^th
floor) seats. And a booth selling boxed lunches! Sylvia got two octagonal wood boxes with sushi in them, even though we weren’t hungry, the box appeal was irresistible. So there we were in the highest row, with Japanese all around us. There’s a really pronounced dearth of other Westerners here—often as not there are in fact no others in sight (save at American breakfasts). Incredible, really, the depth of U.S. ignorance of Japan—before coming here I didn’t even know the name of any of the parts or sights of Tokyo. Anyway, up in the highest row of the Kabuki we sit, looking down at the not-really-so-distant curtain which has two flying cranes sewn on, and numerous bamboo trunks, pictures of them I mean, very Japanese style, beams overhead with some slight decoration on them and light wallpaper with a meandering parallelogram design. Rows of red paper lanterns here and there on the sides. Then it starts. There were four scenes with men, a boy, and two “women,” though in kabuki the women are played by men, who are called “onnagata,” as opposed to “tachiyaku,” who act male roles. It’s such a sexist society the women can’t even be actresses, man, it’s wife or geisha and nothing else. The kabuki was like theater, not like opera, with no singing, although if a group laughed, they’d kind of chorus the laughing, and in the big emotional scene after her son is murdered, the mother’s sobs were like, Sylvia said, an aria. I opened my box lunch and ate of it, also drinking of my canned soft drink: Oolong Tea. The box was covered with paper with large elliptical pastel polka dots. The best food in it was a little sweet yellow rubbery dough cup holding a sushi of rice and salmon eggs. Another good thing was a single stray green pea. At the peak of the kabuki play’s action (it lasted an hour in all, though if we’d stayed there would have been a whole second number of dance) the younger brother goes and shakes the older brother, who is lying in bed asleep. The older brother jumps out of bed, knifes the younger brother in the stomach, delivers a speech (probably about why it is “right” to be doing this, the prick), and then knifes him again, killing him, and bringing on the mother’s “aria.” Last time anyone wakes
that
guy up.

The scenery was a really authentic-looking Japanese house, so much better than, for instance, the “Japanese” set in the production of M. Butterfly we saw in SF last winter. It was just so fuckin’ authentic. Another cool thing was that, Macbeth-like, the climax is taking place during a storm, and they had really good thunder sounds that I could tell came from an incredibly experienced Japanese thunder master shaking a big piece of special kabuki thunder metal, as opposed to playing a track on some sound-effects CD. Good lightning effects against the house’s translucent windows too. One last interesting feature were the “kakegoe,” which are special shouts and whoops which certain audience members give at crucial moments, like when an actor first comes on they might shout his name, or at the end of a scene they shout something, but never shout at a wrong or intrusive time, of course, being into the wa and the Zen and the group mind as they are. “You go on and yell something,” I whispered to Sylvia, and next time somebody yelled like KAGU-WA, after the mother did her aria, Sylvia yelled KAGU-WA too. Later, telling Sylvia’s cousin Zsolt about it, I exaggerate and say that Sylvia stood up and yelled “right on!” in the middle of silence.

We took the subway up to Akihabara, which is supposed to be this big electronics market, but couldn’t find any action near the subway stop. Saw a man on a bicycle delivering takeout food, which was a tray held up on one hand with a covered dish and, get this, two covered dishes of
soup
. Soup on a tray on a bicycle. The dish-covers were like the top of an oatmeal box, i.e. a disk with a half-inch of cylinder sticking out, looked like black leather, like a dice-cup.

So got back on the Hibiya Line to Ueno Station, where there’s a godzillion people in the street. Saw a guy buy a dose from a “One Cup” sake machine and chug it, this right outside the pachinko parlor where I lost another five bucks. They even sell fifths of whiskey in the vending machines, I’m not kidding. My initial pachinko win seems to have been a fluke. Looking at the balls in this place, I realize they all have the same character on them, a number 7 in this case, so maybe in each place there is a like cattle-brand symbol on their balls so you can be found out if you sneak in your own balls. Before, I’d thought it was a different symbol on each ball, like names. We went into Ueno park, and saw a lovely Shinto shrine, someone playing nice flute off in the trees, people pulling a cord hanging down in front of the temple to rattle a bell up in the eaves, a way of getting the notice of the gods. Like the other temples, this had a “backwards” swastika on it, oriented in effect so that it was “rolling” to the right. I remember from my childhood year of boarding-school in Germany a kid saying, “
die Hackenkreuz rollt links
,” a wiry, high-cheekboned kid with a deep, bossy voice, he was also the source of the rule, “
die Kaffemuehle dreht rechts
,” which was used to determine the order of play in card and board games, “the coffeemill turns to the right.”

A group of schoolboys stopped us in the park with the same “May I speak with you” English-practicing routine that schoolgirls had pulled on us in Asakusa. More bizarrely, a team of three twenty-year-olds stopped us, one with a video camera, one with a mike, and one (a woman) holding a placard with four cartoons of incidents in the life of Momotaro who is, they assured us, a well known Japanese character. They told us the action in the first and third frames and we were to fill in descriptions of what happened in the second and fourth frames. In the first frame Momotaro is born, his father found him when he cut open a peach. (Hiroshi later tells me that “momo” means “peach” and “taro” means “first born son.”) In the second frame two demons steal money from the parents. In the third frame Momotaro and his three friends—a dog, a monkey, and a crane—sail to the island of the two demons. In the fourth the monkey and the dog kill the two demons while Momotaro and his dog look on, and his parents bow to him. Then they gave us two postcards and they didn’t ask for money or try to get
anything
from us, though of course they had videoed our answerings. Was it an art project, a sociology study? Will I ever know?