Jubilee Hitchhiker (188 page)

Brautigan considered this a symbol, “a premonition of where I have been led step to step to this place.” The place he referred to was the void. Richard wasn't afraid of peering over the edge into the abyss. “My god-damned personal life is not important,” he wrote in his notebook. “It will always be around until I'm dead. I don't believe in afterwards so I think death will pretty much close down my personal life. Bring an end to it. And the pleasures will even out like a placid stillness suddenly settling over a wind-ruffled pond.”

Brautigan mentioned none of this in his letter to Barry Hannah. He detailed his morning schedule, drinking coffee at 4:00 am, going down for a “little breakfast” when the sun came up at 5:00. After eating, Richard liked to wander about the Keio Plaza, a hotel so huge that he compared it to a city-state. “It's fun to watch the hotel wake up.” At 6:00 am, an English-language newspaper slid under the door of room 3705. After reading it and checking the yen/dollar exchange rate, Brautigan went grocery shopping for “milk and juice and snacks.” Richard had a refrigerator and a hot plate in his room, so preparing simple meals was no problem.

After a page and a half, Brautigan set the letter aside and went to his favorite sidewalk café to write in his notebook. At 7:30 pm he closed up shop and headed for The Cradle. Nobody was there at that early hour. Richard sat at the bar, sipping brandy as he continued writing. Around nine, he
had something to eat. By 10:30 the joint was jumping. Interesting people began to arrive. Brautigan gulped his brandy as the conversation grew more interesting. Brautigan didn't get to sleep until eight on Sunday morning.

Aside from a “two hour get-up,” Richard slept for seventeen and a half hours. He climbed out of bed at 3:30 am on the twenty-fifth. By four in the morning, he was drinking coffee, watching the rosy fingers of dawn and completing his letter to Barry Hannah. He didn't have much to say aside from describing the mundane details of life in Tokyo. At four handwritten pages, it became one of the longest letters he'd ever written. Brautigan never mailed it. He kept the letter among his papers for the rest of his life.

Richard got back in touch with Masako Kano. Because of her job at Motorola, she could only see him in the evenings after work or on weekends. Brautigan told Kano about his assignment for German
Playboy
, a project he called “Fate of West German Models in Tokyo.” He worried how the research needed to be done. Without being asked, Masako volunteered to help, offering to be his research assistant. She told Richard the
Japan Times
advertised “all the time” for Japanese women to act as “managers” for foreign models and suggested answering such an ad and interviewing for the job. Kano explained that she'd go undercover and “find out all she could about managing the models and what this entailed.”

Masako was twenty-seven but could pass for seventeen, “a pretty, innocent-looking and clever girl.” She would make a perfect spy. Delighted by the idea, Brautigan thought of her as his personal ninja, one of those legendary covert mercenaries of feudal Japan specializing in espionage, sabotage, and assassination. Kano never performed any cloak-and-dagger work. Her day job didn't allow the time, but Richard cherished the image of her as a ninja.

On the fourth of May, Shūji Terayama, the avant-garde Japanese poet, writer, dramatist, filmmaker, and photographer, died from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty-seven. He had met Brautigan in San Francisco during the spring of 1976. Later that year they reconnected at The Cradle, spending many nights there together, drinking and talking. Terayama had founded Tenjō Sajiki, an experimental theater troupe, in 1967. He named it for the 1945 Marcel Carné film,
Les Enfants du Paradis
, a title with a double meaning. {“Children of heaven” was a slang term for the audience sitting “the gods,” the cheapest section in a theater's highest balcony.)

In 1979, ShÅ«ji introduced Richard to composer, Michiko “Michi” Tanaka, who worked as the secretary of Tenjō Sajiki and was also an executive producer for Terayama's 1971 film,
Emperor Tomato Ketchup
. Earlier in 1983, Michi wrote to Brautigan (“Dear Richard with cow-boy hat,) asking him to participate in “Questions,” a one-hour video about writers she was directing and producing as personal project, “not a commercial one.” All she requested was that Richard answer a number of questions on tape and send her “about ten photos.” Many years later, Tanaka made
Questions
, a seven-minute film which did not include recorded answers from authors.

Terayama's death struck a chord in his American counterpart. Shūji was almost a year younger than Richard and shared his fondness for booze, dying from a lifetime of alcohol abuse. Terayama had published close to two hundred literary works and made more than twenty films. Now he was dead. Brautigan could only wonder if he'd be next.

Drunk in his hotel room, Richard tried to jot down memories of ShÅ«ji Terayama on a Keio Plaza notepad kept by his bedside. “Unfortunately, memory is never accurate,” Brautigan wrote, enumerating a short list of his earliest recollections of his friend. They ate breakfast in a restaurant in Chinatown
and had coffee afterward at a North Beach Italian sidewalk café. Terayama drew Brautigan a map of Tokyo on a paper napkin, telling him the city was actually “five major cities and ten thousand villages.” Richard kept this crude map and followed ShÅ«ji's instructions during his first trip to Japan.

Terayama's funeral was held at the Aoyama Funeral Hall in the vast Aoyama Cemetery, about a kilometer's walk from The Cradle. Takako Shiina insisted that Richard go to the memorial. He wore the gray Western jacket given to him by Becky Fonda. Takako fitted his right sleeve with a black armband and drew a simple map, marking the route in red from The Cradle down Stars and Stripes Avenue and around the corner to Aoyama Saijo. Brautigan thought he wasn't properly dressed. “This is perfectly all right,” Shiina told him.

“But I don't want to offend anyone,” Richard replied.

“You won't offend anyone. This is all right.”

“But I'm a foreigner.”

“It's all right.” Takako gave him a white chrysanthemum to leave in tribute.

Brautigan followed Takako's precisely sketched directions, walking in the hot afternoon to the first funeral he'd ever attended in his life. Long fond of visiting cemeteries, Richard had never been to a burial service before. As he turned the corner onto the street bordering the Aoyama Cemetery, Brautigan saw thousands of people dressed in black, waiting in line to enter the funeral hall and pay their last respects to Shūji Terayama. Richard joined the end of the queue under the broiling sun, moving slowly forward with the other mourners. During the long wait, Brautigan observed an ant crawling under the black shoe of the man ahead of him on line. A poem started taking form in his mind.

Over two pages long, “Night Flowing River” became one of Richard's most expansive poems, a rare example of his narrative poetry. Brautigan rented a typewriter and prepared a clean fair copy, which he gave to the Tuttle-Mori Agency, his literary representatives in Japan. He also gave a copy to his friend, poet Shuntarō Tanikawa, for him to translate into Japanese. When Shuntarō's work was done, Richard asked Masako to read it before he submitted the poem for publication. Tanikawa invited Kano to his hotel room. She felt embarrassed, a “nobody” giving her opinion “to this wonderful poet.” After reading the poem, Masako said she thought it was more than a perfect translation. Shuntarō smiled and they bowed to each other.

When Masako learned Richard had met previously with Tanikawa, “his quiet poet friend,” about her working for Motorola, she was furious. Brautigan had little interest in the world of business and couldn't understand why Kano had to work for money when he believed her family was still well-off financially. Masako adored Tanikawa and felt Richard had no right to expose her personal matters to him. She worked to reimburse her mother for all the tuition fees sent to pay for her American degree, making monthly payments to her “mum.” Kano understood that Brautigan “respected and trusted Tanikawa San so much he wanted to share. Hopefully, he was not chatting to everybody who sat at the stools at The Cradle.”

Richard's mind brimmed with the images and experiences of Paris. He obtained a videocassette of
Diva
with English subtitles. Brautigan and Masako watched the Beineix film “again and again” in his hotel room when she came over after work. Kano was familiar with the novel by Delacorta (a pseudonym of Swiss author, poet, and screenwriter Daniel Odier) on which the movie was based. Richard loved the scenes of Paris in the rain and the relationship between Alba, a young Asian woman, and her older, platonic lover Serge Gorodish.

One scene, where Alba roller-skates in Gorodish's empty studio, delighted them both so much that Brautigan brought a pair of roller skates to his room. He wanted Masako to put them on and skate around his bed. She tried to please him, but the skates were too big and the thickly carpeted floor made skating impossible. “Anyway, we laughed our heads off,” Kano recalled.

Richard also “forced” Masako to read Marc Chénetier's book, which she felt “highly praised his style.” Brautigan brought several copies of the French scholar's favorable critical study along with him to Japan and often had Kano read aloud from it to him at night, “as his bedtime story.” She suspected this was to “nourish his ego.”

One evening, Masako lured Richard far from The Cradle to Bunkyō-ku in the north of Tokyo, a district antipodal to foreigner-infested Roppongi. She brought him to Totoya (literally “fish eatery”), a classic Japanese seafood restaurant. “We were eating in the hidden heart of Japan,” Brautigan observed, “a place concealed from the Western world.” Masako said, “No blond guy has ever come until I took Richard.” During the course of their formal dinner, an argument ensued, leading to “outrage after outrage.”

To cap things off, Brautigan insulted Kano's family. She slapped his face. “A hard samurai slap. Whack!” Masako did this in front of the restaurant's owner, his cook, and their customers. This sort of thing might happen unnoticed every night of the week in the gin joints of Frisco. In the formal seclusion of Old World Japan, it was tantamount to the roar of a gunshot. Richard and Masako “decided to make it an early evening.” They agreed not to see each other for a week or longer. “Let things cool off.”

After Kano went home, Brautigan headed straight to The Cradle. At the bar, he talked with an attractive American model about West German models. The American said she'd help Brautigan with his quest and they agreed to meet again. When Richard returned to The Cradle with Masako the following weekend, he found a note from the American model saying she'd get in touch with him at the Keio Plaza. They returned to the hotel, and “there was no message from the American model.”

After making love, Richard and Masako got into “a language misunderstanding” just as the phone rang. It was Takako calling to say that Francis Ford Coppola was at The Cradle and he should return. Brautigan said he'd call back. He walked Kano to the Shinjuku Station. Along the way, another language mishap occurred. Richard tried “to illustrate a point, a complicated but very sincere point of affection for her.”

Brautigan said, “I'm interested in your mind and talking to you. I don't want to make you into my whore.”

Kano heard, “Whore!”

Masako took off running “like a sleek horse.” Richard lumbered after her “like a ponderous turtle.” He caught up with her at the train turnstile and did his best “to turn the tide” of animosity. They parted when Kano promised to call during her lunch hour the next day.

Brautigan walked back to the Keio Plaza though a gentle rain, pondering the intricacies of language barriers. Up in his room, Richard phoned The Cradle. Takako put Coppola on the line and Brautigan welcomed him to Tokyo. Francis had just arrived. Jet lag loomed. Richard said he had to get to bed early and couldn't see him that night. He mentioned he “was writing a long article for a German magazine and had to get some sleep.” Coppola said he would be in Japan for a few days
but also wanted to go to bed early. “We left it at that,” Brautigan recalled. They never got together on this particular trip to the Land of the Rising Sun.

Sometime early in May, Judge Richard Hodge arrived in Tokyo for a three week visit. He remembered the approximate date because it was during the biannual World Table Tennis Championships, held that year in Tokyo between April 28 and May 9. Brautigan told Hodge to go to the duty free shop on his way through customs and buy a bottle of Napoleon brandy for the manager of the Keio Palza. The judge did as instructed and received a forty percent discount on his hotel room in return. Hodge wanted to see a lot of Japan, takinig trips to Kyoto and “down that famous peninsula.” Brautigan had no interest in leaving Tokyo.

Their relationship had become “almost completely social.” Hodge was a Superior Court judge and no longer really represented Brautigan. “The way it turned out,” Hodge recalled, “was that he and I would go out in the evening and we would dine wonderfully and drink a lot and round about midnight, I'd come home. And at seven in the morning, Richard would be knocking at my door. He'd be coming home at seven in the morning and we would have breakfast. That was the time Richard would go to bed and then I'd go out and get on the bullet train. I did all my traveling, and then I'd come back and we'd have dinner and go out.”

Going out meant evenings at The Cradle. Brautigan introduced Judge Hodge to Takako and they struck up a warm friendship. One night, in his element among a group of editors and writers, Richard talked about looking for West German models in Tokyo and showed off the notebook which recorded his search. Hodge went home early, as usual. The next morning, Brautigan appeared outside his door at the Keio Plaza in a complete panic. He'd lost his manuscript. Richard thought he'd put it safely behind the bar. When he looked, the notebook was gone.