Authors: S. Michael Choi
Harajuku Sunday (18 page)
“Dude, how about talking about things that count?
How about this world full of inequities and unfairness?
How about reform and making the world a better place?”
“Give me a freakin’ break!”
Don’t hate; don’t judge.
Realize that everything you enjoyed your time there came from me; that either me or somebody right reporting to me built it up.
The freakin’ paperback exchange—sheesh—that was launched after a lazy Saturday coffee near Inokashiro.
Yet the war is breaking apart at work; other-Ritchie comes home, sometimes fists clenched in rage, sometimes waking up at night with teeth gritting.
All these passive passive passive Japanese, playing little games of pretending to be friendly and then slipping away.
Offering fake little smiles and sarcastic bows, but hating the foreigner, hating especially the foreigner whose girlfriend shows up to work, hands out homecooked sweets.
The smallest dicked, most insecure males in the world, the weakest least-liked of all the world’s nationalities. Japanese losers. I hate them.
Finally the weekend of the company trip opens up with absolute clarity, a clear blue winter sky of limitless visibility; had the sky not been blue, it surely would have been a diamond carpet of stars stretching to the ends of the galaxy.
Yet here already we are assembling at Shibuya station; already the cars of our caravan are lining up, and in the pleased relaxed anticipation of maximum physical exertion, we hang out, waiting for the full arrival, self-consciously cool in ski goggles and sunglasses.
"So, ready?"
"Yeah, let's go."
"Uh, Nagai-kun, let me ride in your car..."
We meet up in Shibuya on an early Saturday morning, the sun not quite up, and late night clubbers wasted and drunk stumbling to the main station to await the first train.
As the morning fully breaks, our group assembles, and we load up the vehicles with our baggage, sunglasses on in crescendoing light, before finding the expressway and heading north to Tohoku.
Our destination for the night is
Fukushima
, about halfway up to the real far north, but good enough to get real snow.
To each side, the city falls away.
At first, it’s just a matter of each conglomeration of tall buildings becoming less impressive and more far between, but by Inoshiro there are rice paddies to the roadsides and large green fields separating waterways and park walkways, distant elevated tracks the Shinkansen to
Morioka
.
Then finally it’s genuine countryside: undeveloped land and the foothills of mountains—forested ridges that surround a highway that ascends inexorably to higher elevations.
And here, like a shock, nature hits, like a blow to one's chest, a complete reversal of values; shocking tree movement, shocking sunlight between hillsides, such intense sensation that I feel as if I am a two-dimensional drawing, as unreal as a cinematic separation layer of meaning.
Snow falling from a leaden sky! Mountains that rise up to meet us, tower up, into which we plunge! The incredible brilliance of sunlight glittering from an inland lake! Maybe it is because I have spent the last six years in the city, nature is almost tangible, frangible, almost a fist in my throat.
Nobody else, however, seems to notice, and fearful of coming off as crazy, I keep my silence. And the driver, Imai, turns on the traffic radio; he is a bit concerned about being able to get physically back, but as for turning back, this won't happen; we won't let it.
It isn't until we pass through a mountain pass that all of a sudden the wind shifts and we are immediately, irrecoverably bombarded with snow.
The effect is of a total blizzard.
The massive scale of the white-out is so intense, in fact, that out of concern our driver turns on the traffic radio, but of course the true powder-hounds in our caravan will hear nothing of turning back; this is unbelievably positive news for them as we are already two hundred kilometers out of the city.
A heavy density of snow falling against a gray-white cloud sky with oncoming traffic providing headlights subdued by the weather and evergreen trees covered with blankets of this and previous snowfall.
The roads are covered to the depth of four to six inches and traffic slows to 60 kph pace, evenly spaced out on the mountain highway.
“But at least it's going to be brilliant.”
“Un-freakin' believable.”
We pile out of the buses; Tucker and I organize the foreigners and associated Japanese so everybody knows what is going on.
“Okay, come here; that is where you get your lift ticket. That is our lodge…”
I catch sight of some beautiful Japanese girls; I take note of the breathtaking scenery. But then I pull away from the group.
I am a much better snowboarder and this trip, this trip, I have no feeling of sociality in my heart.
It’s really falling apart now, and I need to renew myself with pure sport.. Somewhere, elevation
And this also—the crystalline perfection of winter air, the hoarfrost, the icy damp of snow crystals that have worked their way between jacket and ski pants.
“A dagger in the heart” one writes of cute lost blonde girls small as a button; “a knife down one's throat”--the sensation of countryside opening up before one as one leaves the city—all of its history and baggage—behind; the pain that is so deep, so fundamental, that one is incapacitated and speechless—such terminology can only be reserved for communion with nature, so terrible, so unforgiving, against which our measures of human lives are so frail.
Is there any other way it would happen?
The storm hits me at the top of Flattern Peak 2, and here is total white-out; here is visibility two point five meters.
Siberia
!
Stalingrad
!
The nightmares of winterbound soldiers thousands of kilometers from home.
Only indistinct shapes can be seen in the distance; the ropeways mark the path to trails, but whether one returns to the main gate, whether one skis deeper into the park—this is unknown.
I am susceptible, of course, to the glorification of the inaccessible and luxuriant where words else fail.
Do we read Hemingway because the trauma of senseless slaughter has given him highest wisdom?
Or are we voyeurs (and not even so much as our parents' parents' generation) to bohemian
Paris
,
Duisburg
limousines, the Crillon, laughing rotund Greek counts both superior and beneath us?
These thoughts race through the mind of a snow-bound skier, though practicality returns with the strapping of boot to board, inches off the cliff wall.
And then, with heart pounding, to leap off; to jump into the void, and be consumed instantly with the immediate task of meeting the onrush of terrain with a skilled and practiced eye.
A sloosh here, and a slash there; a long slide down one gentle incline to fishtail against the sudden approach of tall fir-trees.
And then suddenly air where ground is expected; an only subconscious noting of a buried flagline; one is off-piste now, one is off-piste now, the snow is two feet deep and utterly ungroomed.
Losing velocity is equal to suicide.
[Okay this is what happened. I have already lost. They came over to me at workplace (and of course a they, no Japanese person ever dares confront an American one-on-one) and told me I wouldn’t be here next year.]
In pure powder, one is weightless.
There are over thirty commonly used words to describe various types of snow, but the best, the very best, is champagne—a frothy light nothingness that melts beneath one's skis, that offers minimal resistance yet effortless support.
To crash into a bank of champagne is to sink into a perfect pillow of utterly ethereal fluff.
In World War II an Allied pilot fell six miles from the sky and landed in a bank of champagne—he survived, whereas any other surface then known to man would have spelled instant death.
Flip-turn, flip-turn, flip-turn.
In a cloud bank now, I slide through acres of champagne without the slightest expenditure of energy, sense of time, or sensation of gravity.
This goes on for seeming eternity.
But as quickly as it begins, the trees are now starting to creep in close, we're out of the fog now to noticeably lower terrain, and finally, in a little valley with a melting stream at the bottom, I slush out of snowboardable terrain to collapse, exhausted, into a convenient bank, and seek to take my bearings, knowing a long trek now awaits, if only that much, to return simply to the place I began.
[I wouldn’t weep before them. It was all going to happen anyway. I did great work. Towards the end when I was sensing the movement, I went from sixty hours a week to seventy. But I had disturbed the ‘wa,’ the Japanese harmony. It was simply unseemly to have a twenty-something pushing around a middle-aged man. And the apparent police record; all the rumors of outside trouble—these didn’t help.]
Is this all metaphor?
Maybe.
Maybe I'm writing this just for you, maybe I can't stop.
But I know the tears, then, are real, the salt water blur behind complete opaque gold-mirrored lenses of my ski goggles, and the central, central pain, a pain like a sensation of freezing—although I am not cold—that burns to the very core.
This is the end; this is the end.
Winter is here. In my heart had been borne a hatred so intense that my face became a smiling mask.
This isn't “Fear and Trembling;” this isn't about grudges or vendettas or counterstrikes delivered decades later.
Rather everything happened the only way it could have happened, and I knew who was behind it, and it was only hours before I returned to the lodge, the sky already evening and twinkling with stars, and trip-mates worried but relieved at my safe return, but everyone already gossiping I'm not going to be renewed on contract next year.
It has a strange feeling this time; those events that had disrupted into non-linearity, as compared to the instant
Heady days and strangely totalitarian skies; the autumnal and spring winds, the winter that melted away; transition
Tokyo
.
[All those English teachers on their programmes; their ready-made friends; their two thousand a month. How fortunate they are and not even knowing who did everything for them.
And me and my savings and built-up infrastructure, and relationships that all depended on continual high salary (how could I maintain ties with the clubs if I didn’t have four thou in discretionary spending a month at the very least?)]
And even Tucker is falling behind as I become an eater of pure light and a drinker of mere energy.
I will lose my job.
But who cares? I will cease all contact with everyone else, but what to matter?
The dizzying faces of other human beings, agents of a LeFauve who is actually doing nothing; the workplace conflicts that make us too aesthetically or intellectually outraged to even bother with this thing called reality; I am now infinitely beyond the reach of any other human being, and I can’t be bothered with your commonplace concerns.
The crash is coming.
The crash is coming.
Like a dizzying ride down a mountainside of pure, pure snow, I know that I have exceeded all safety boundaries years or eons ago, and the city is conquered, supplicant, legs spread and yielding before my sarcastic, unaccepting, coldly assessing eye.
Goodbye Charis!
You leave after I yell at you in a fit of rage, calling you a whore. Goodbye Tucker!
Your mercilessly bottom-line personality annoys me, and I don’t need you as much as you need me.
Goodbye Shan!
You are destined to be judged by the merciless policies of the Tokyo Metropolitan Criminal Court and deported back to Chinkyland.
We should have had deep conversations.
We should have talked about Life and Despair and Fate and History, but face it, we’re all too well-off and beautiful to really ever care.
I wish I could be deep.
I wish I didn’t have to spit in your eye.
That night, the last night in
Fukushima
, my eyes suddenly open in the darkened room, and I am instantly awake.
In the dim light from underneath the door to the hallway, I can tell that nothing is amiss, but I rise up anyway.
It's as if something other than the fully conscious decision-making part of my brain is deciding something.
Intellectually, I rationalize that I want to take one last dip in the rotemburo, the outdoors bath, so long as I have the opportunity, and I do gather up the materials for this task and then ever-so-gingerly open the door.
The hallway is quiet.
There might be the faintest of buzzes from the fluorescent lights that line the hallway, but otherwise the silence is only broken by the occasional creaking noises of the wooden building.
Through dim corridors and down the stairs I walk and then approach the door to the outdoor bath.
Once again the antechamber is unoccupied.
I grab one of the plastic hampers to toss my clothing in, and wearing nothing but a friendship bracelet on one wrist, walk outdoors into a cold winter night.