Jubilee Hitchhiker (143 page)

The stranger in the English hat, so helpful and friendly, suddenly ran off in the opposite direction. Richard chased after her, but she disappeared into the fog. Brautigan and Thibeau continued to the restaurant and dined with Takako Shiina. Later, all three returned to The Cradle for a nightcap. About four in the morning, when Jack was fast asleep in his hotel room, the phone rang. It was Richard. “That woman we were with tonight is sixty-five years old,” he said. “Good night, Jack.”

One afternoon during his brief stay, Jack went with Richard to a pornographic movie theater, “this boring soft-core porno” Brautigan enjoyed. Richard bought the tickets and kept the stubs, mentioning they were “for the IRS.” Once inside, Brautigan sat Thibeau down. “I'll be back to get you in an hour,” he said, returning as promised. “I knew better than to ask Richard where he had been,” Jack said, “because that would have ruined it. You never ask questions like that.”

Another drizzling afternoon, when Richard and Jack stepped from the Keio Plaza to catch a cab, Brautigan took hold of Thibeau's arm and hauled him out beyond the protective entrance canopy into the falling rain. “You know,” Richard told his friend, “you think you know everything.” He pointed up into the storm-tossed sky. “Those hawks know everything.” Riding a thermal, spiraling through the dark clouds, the twin silhouettes of gliding raptors turned above them.

After Thibeau departed, Brautigan again recruited Curt Gentry for his nighttime barroom forays. Literary conversation occupied a good deal of the time that the two writers spent together. Curt Gentry had been friends with Yukio Mishima, the esteemed Japanese author, who had on three occasions been a candidate for the Nobel Prize and whose spectacular ritual death by seppuku six years earlier made headlines around the world. “Richard was fascinated with him,” Gentry recalled, “fascinated by his suicide.”

Celebrated as a novelist, playwright, poet, short story writer, and essayist, Mishima created his own private right-wing army, the Tatenokai (Shield Society), and dedicated it to renewed nationalism and veneration of the emperor. On November 25, 1970, armed only with swords and daggers in the samurai tradition and dressed in uniforms Mishima designed himself, the famous author and
four members of the Shield Society gained entrance to the office of the commandant at the Ichigaya Military Base, the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Jietai (Japan's Self-Defense Forces), barricading the door and tying General Mashita to his chair. Mishima went out onto the balcony and harangued the one thousand soldiers ranked below to rise up and overthrow the existing government. The troops drowned out his speech with jeering mockery. Mishima returned to the commandant's office and committed ritual hara-kiri. After the author sliced open his abdomen with a dagger, his second decapitated him with a sword. A startling photograph of Mishima's severed head on the commandant's Persian carpet appeared in
Life
magazine, fascinating Richard Brautigan.

Brautigan “really pushed” Gentry to use his influence to arrange an introduction to Yoko Sugiyama, Mishima's widow, who lived under the protection of the Shield Society. “I went to some trouble to try to set up a meeting,” Curt recalled, “and I got her to agree to see him. Richard never followed up. And I'd keep reminding him of it, and he said he was too busy or he would always make excuses.” Gentry thought Brautigan was unwilling to “go out of his way to get to know the Japanese.” To Curt, Richard remained the eternal observer. “He wanted to know Mishima from a distance and not try and get closer to him.”

Richard did meet a number of distinguished living Japanese writers during his first stay in Tokyo, mainly through his nightly visits to The Cradle. Shiro Hasegawa (described by Kazuko Fujimoto Goodman as “a writer of great integrity”), best known for his collection of short stories,
Tales of Siberia
, ran into Brautigan at Takako's basement bar, “slumped against the wall” after a hard night's drinking. Hasegawa wrote a poem for him, “Dickinson's Russian,” a comic riff on Richard's short story “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA,” about a man who replaced his plumbing with poetry. Brautigan used this poem, in its original form and in a translation by Fujimoto, at the beginning of his poetry collection
June 30th, June 30th
.

The music critic and writer Tadasu Tagawa also met Richard at The Cradle. At the end of the first week in June, they traveled by car to Osaka, in the Kansai region at the mouth of the Yodo River on Osaka Bay. Created by the warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi in the sixteenth century as a commercial center separate from the imperial powers of Kyoto, Osaka gave rise to a merchant class at first despised by the nobility. The Toyotomi clan built the great Osaka Castle between 1583 and 1586.

That evening, Richard and Tadusu attended a performance of the Black Tent Theater Group in Gifu, a suburb of Osaka, on the bank of the Nagara River, where
ukai
(cormorant fishing) had enjoyed an unbroken thirteen-hundred-year history. The birds are controlled, several at a time, by handlers manipulating long leashes that prevent them from swallowing the salmonid
aju
they caught. Brautigan watched the fishermen on their boats in the river, blazing fire-baskets dangling over the bows. He saw fish rising and thought of the Yellowstone and the trout awaiting him when he returned to Montana in the summer.

Later that night, something grotesque and unpleasant occurred between Richard and Tadusu. The next day, they returned to Tokyo together on the bullet train from Nagoya, Japan's fourth-largest city. Speeding through the Japanese landscape at 120 miles per hour, Brautigan, still drunk from the night before, ranted and raved about the events of the previous evening. He blamed all the ills in the world on his new friend, telling Tadusu to consider him dead. Richard took Tadusu's hand, saying, “My flesh is cold to you. Dead.”

Tagawa's eyes filled with sadness. Brautigan forbade him to read one of his books again, knowing how much he loved them. By the time the train reached Tokyo Station, Richard's unwarranted anger had subsided. He took Tadusu's hand again, saying, “I'm alive for you. The warmth has returned to my flesh.” Back in his room at the Keio Plaza that night, Brautigan phoned Tagawa. “Are you fine?” Tadusu said.

“Yes, I am fine,” Richard replied.

The next day, Brautigan awoke at 4:45 am, ate an early breakfast, and recorded the entire episode in a long poem, “Lazarus on the Bullet Train.” First light revealed another cloudy morning in Tokyo. A little before eight, he wrote a brief letter to Don Carpenter, addressing the envelope first, one of his old habits. Richard predicted he would have a long day and stay up all night. “I love Tokyo at night.”

Kazuko Fujimoto had had a serious abdominal operation six days before. On the evening of the ninth, Brautigan went to the Toho School of Medicine Hospital to see his recuperating translator. David Goodman accompanied him. “I don't think he would have been able to get to the hospital on his own,” Fujimoto speculated. Richard watched Kazuko eat her dinner. This made him feel sad. She seemed so tired. Fujimoto remembered Brautigan as being very quiet and sweet. “I don't think he said any jokes,” she recalled. “Usually he said some jokes and he is the one who is the most amused.” Richard's discomfort inspired his poem “Visiting a Friend at the Hospital.”

Curt Gentry had been wrong about Brautigan's willingness to engage with prominent Japanese intellectuals and misjudged his friend's interest in traveling beyond the municipal boundaries of Tokyo. Richard, for his part, never brought Curt to The Cradle, his newfound hangout where he met local poets and writers. Brautigan fell back on his long-standing habit of compartmentalizing his friends. The Cradle was private territory he would not share with Gentry. Let his old friend think the Café Cardinale remained his favored Tokyo stomping ground. Curt and Gail left Japan in late May. Early in June, they traveled to Hawaii. On the thirteenth, Gentry celebrated his forty-fifth birthday by marrying his research assistant at the top of Mount Tantalus, overlooking the Punchbowl Crater, Diamond Head, and downtown Honolulu.

Brautigan spent more and more time downstairs in The Cradle. His friendship deepened with the proprietress, Takako Shiina. One night after hearing her sing, Brautigan wrote a poem for Takako. They drank through the night together, sharing conversation and intimate secrets, fellow travelers on what they called the “Calle de Eternidad,” an echo of Brautigan's visit to Ixtlan, Mexico, sixteen years before. In the wee hours, Richard and Takako decided that they were brother and sister on a spiritual plane. Brautigan didn't leave The Cradle until just before sunrise. In a cab on his way home to the Keio Plaza, he jotted down “Day for Night,” his final poem of the day: “the streets are blankets, / the dawn is my bed. / The cab rests my head. / I'm on my way to dreams.”

For two days in the second week of June, Richard wandered about Tokyo with a broken clock belonging to Takako Shiina, trying to find its exact replacement. Brautigan had destroyed the clock during a moment of drunken excess. The Cradle was decorated with many beautiful antiques, and the clock had been part of Takako's collection. “He had to go all over to find one just exactly like it,” Don Carpenter said, remembering the story Richard told him, “and bring it to Shiina.” Two poems resulted from his quixotic clock quest, both dedicated to Takako. By mid-June, Brautigan had completed nearly forty poems.

One drunken incident at The Cradle never became a poem. On this night, a young Japanese musician played the guitar Takako provided for her musically inclined customers. Richard stood at the bar, getting “drunker and drunker.” Reaching over, he took the guitar. Strumming in his plink/ plunk fashion, Brautigan sang an off-key version of “Oh, Shenandoah” over and over. Takako thought it was the only song he knew. When the Japanese musician tried to take back the guitar, Richard flushed with drunken anger and hurled the instrument into the fireplace, reducing it to kindling. Takako was furious. She told Brautigan he could never come back into The Cradle until he bought her a new guitar, “exactly like the old one.”

Richard pulled out his wallet and asked, “How much do you want?”

Brautigan told a friend he broke the guitar because the unnamed Japanese troubadour played songs with “anti-American sentiments.” He had to hunt all over the city to find a replacement guitar that matched the one he destroyed, a repetition of his previous clock search. His nightly forays to The Cradle became an integral part of his life in Tokyo. No poem recorded the moment, but Richard found the exact instrument and was soon back at his favorite spot at the bar.

During the early morning hours of June 12, Brautigan stayed at The Cradle well past closing time. The day before, he wrote six poems. He felt so proud of this accomplishment that the sixth was a commemoration of the previous five. It was a night to celebrate. Richard drank and talked, hanging out with Takako as the hours slipped away. Their conversation touched on Japanese history. The emperor Meiji began his rule in 1867 at the age of fifteen and brought Japan into the modern world, taking it from a medieval nation where samurai fought with swords to a world power that, by the time of Meiji's death in 1912, had defeated both China and Russia in major wars. Japan went from feudal armored knights to battleships and locomotives in a single generation.

The talk got around to the Meiji Jingu, the shrine devoted to the deified souls of the emperor and his consort, Empress Shoken. Built in 1920, and situated in a 178-acre park in Shibuya-ku in central Tokyo, the Meiji Jingu served as both a Shinto spiritual center and a recreation and sports area. When she learned that Richard had never been to the shrine, Takako proposed a late night reconnaissance. Fueled by drink, Brautigan agreed.

An hour before dawn, Richard and Takako climbed over a stone wall, sneaking into the gardens of the Meiji shrine. They were both drunk, falling down “like comedians” as they staggered through the cultivated forest. They wandered under a forty-foot wooden main gate (
torii
), the tallest in Japan, built from ancient
hinoki
tree trunks in the shape of a rooster's perch. Legend said a rooster's crow woke the sun goddess and first brought light to the world.

At dawn, Richard and Takako came to a small meadow, grateful they had not been spotted by the police. They lay down together fully clothed on a bed of sweet green grass. Brautigan cupped his hand over Shiina's breast and kissed her. She kissed him back. “That's all the love we made,” he wrote in a poem (“Meiji Comedians”). As day broke, fearful of getting caught, they left the shrine garden and went their separate ways.

When Richard woke up alone that afternoon in the Keio Plaza, the first thing he saw were his mud-covered shoes. This last trace of his amorous exploration of the Meiji Jingu made him feel “very good.” He did not sleep with Takako, but felt OK about it. Seeing his shoes pleased him so much he wrote another poem, “Meiji Shoes Size 12.” Brautigan wrote two more poems that day, both tinged with doubt and sadness. The next day, Richard Brautigan wrote another poem in his
notebook. “Tokyo / June 13, 1976,” mourned his departure from Japan in sixteen days. No mention of Curt Gentry and Gail Stevens's marriage on the same day, Curt's birthday, on Oahu. Curt had written Brautigan about his Hawaiian trip and impending nuptials, but Richard had other things on his mind.

One morning, Brautigan sat in the cafeteria at the Keio Plaza having his breakfast when he saw the world heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali, stride like a god into the room. Less than a year after the “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali came to Tokyo for an exhibition match with Antonio Inoki, the top wrestling star in Japan. The champ was also staying at the Keio Plaza. For the next week, Richard saw him every day, “walking quietly around the hotel in the company of various people.”