Something Strange Across the River (7 page)

Whether it be Tokyo, or overseas, it could easily be said that I know essentially nothing of society other than prostitutes and their world. I would rather not speak of the reason, nor do I suppose I need to. The interested reader may find his interest sated by certain inferior works from my middle years, among them “Early Afternoon,” the essay “House for a Mistress,” and the story
Unfinished Dream
. All of them are poorly composed and overwrought, and I could not, in good conscience, ask the reader to search them out. Therefore allow me to quote here a passage from
Unfinished Dream
:

He made his visits to the pleasure quarters with such fervor that ten years passed as if they were a day. He knew very well that the quarter was home to darkness and unrighteousness. Had the city come to praise the profligate, to call him a just and pious son, he would have refused their praise even to the extent of selling all of his property. Indeed, it was his outright indignation at the hypocrisy of the world and its proper customs that had sent him to the quarters in the first place, in search of unrighteousness itself, the darkness that had never affected any other air than what it was. There was far more joy in discovering a beautifully patterned cloth cast out among the rags than, by analogy, finding stains on a wall that had been declared immaculate. Even in the halls and mansions of the righteous once can find the droppings of crows and rats. So too, in the depths of corruption, one may find the blossoms of human sympathy and perfumed tears. Gather them up.

Those who have read this passage will no doubt understand why I felt no revulsion at the dirty ditch and the women who lived among the mosquitos—why, indeed, I felt a certain closeness to them.

To facilitate a friendly relationship, and so that they would not draw away from me in awe upon learning of my person, I thought it best to hide my identity. The last thing I would want is for them to turn me away, or for them to think I was condescending to their lives, as if observing a play. To have an honest relationship with them, I had to lie about who I was.

Once I had actually been told that I was not the sort of person who had any buisness visiting the quarter.

One night, near the bus garage on the “redone street,” I was stopped and questioned by a policeman. I genuinely despise announcing myself as a writer and a man of letters, and it stands to reason that I also despise being perceived as such. Being the case, I told him that I was an unemployed vagrant. He quickly took my coat and began to rummage through the pockets. In case of just such an event, I always made a point of carrying my seal and its registration, along with a copy of my family register. Aside from those things I had also been carrying four hundred yen in cash, as I needed to pay the carpenter, gardener, and bookseller for certain services they had rendered me. Upon his discovery of said items the policeman labeled me a landowner, and proceeded to tell me that “a landowner had no business in a place like this. Go on home before you meet with trouble. If you need to be here, come some other time.”

I hesitated and he noticed. He quickly took it upon himself to hail me a taxi, open the door, and put me inside. I had the driver continue down the new street and drive a circuit around the entire district before dropping me off and the Fushimi Inari Shrine. Later, I bought a map and studied the layout of the streets so that I might avoid passing a police box in the future.

Just now, when Oyuki mentioned the day we met in that singsong voice of hers, I’d made to answer her but couldn’t find the words, and the overwhelming desire to hide my face behind a wall of smoke overtook me. I took out a cigarette. Oyuki, her black, black eyes staring at me, said, “You really look just like him. When I saw you from behind that day I had to catch my breath.”

“You don’t say. Lots of people look alike from the back,” I said, trying to fight the feeling that was overtaking me. Then, “Who? Your old patron? The one who passed away?”

“No… It was when I’d just become a geisha. I thought I’d kill myself if we couldn’t be together.”

“A rush of blood to the head. I imagine it’s happened to everyone.”

“And you? You never feel that way do you?”

“Cold as ice, am I? You might be surprised, appearances often deceive, you know. Don’t act like you’re better than me.”

Oyuki just smiled and flashed her dimple. She said nothing. The dimple, deep seated to the right of her pouting lower lip, lent a freshness to her face, like that of a young girl. But it was filled with sadness, it was a dimple she’d forced there by will alone. I quickly tried to change the subject.

“Is your tooth bothering you again?”

“No. They gave me a shot so it’s fine now.”

Just then, luckily, as our conversation was running out of steam, a customer knocked on the door. Oyuki jumped to her feet and leaned out the window. She pulled aside the blinds and looked down.

“Oh! Mr. Take! Come on up!”

I followed her down the stairs and hid in the bathroom while the customer followed her back up. After I was sure the passage was empty I crept from the house, careful not to make a sound.

Chapter Eight

The expected rain never came. I’d left the room to escape the steaming heat and the clouds of mosquitos, but after a time I realized it was still too early to return. I walked along the embankment and through the alleyways until I came to a small street crossing a little plank bridge. It was lined on both sides by small shops of temple merchants, their businesses further narrowing the passage—already so tight that no vehicle could hope to pass through it. The walk degraded into an endless series of apologies as I brushed passed people coming from the other direction. Just over the little bridge was a small intersection, at which sat a shop selling horsemeat, a stone pillar indicating the entrance to a Zen temple, a torii for the Tamanoi Inari Shrine, and a pay phone. I recalled hearing from Oyuki that the temple held festivals on the second and twentieth of the month, and on those days the streets were filled with stalls and games and throngs of people who rarely ventured back into the alleys. The women working the area called it a shrine for the paupers. I made my way there, as I’d yet to pay my respects.

I’ve forgotten to mention something critical, so allow me to correct my oversight. Ever since I’d gotten accustomed, both physically and mentally, to making these nightly trips, I’d made a point to take note of the manner of the customers that ply the streets at night, and in doing so have altered the clothes I wear when I come to this town. It is not much trouble. Take the colored dress shirt with its stripes and leave the top button open. Do not wear a necktie. Carry your jacket instead of wearing it. Do not wear a hat. Tussle your hair as if it has never seen a comb. Change into slacks that are worn through at the knee and seat. Don’t wear shoes, find a pair of wooden geta that are worn down to the heel. Bring a lot of cigarettes. Et cetera, et cetera. It doesn’t require much thought. I simply change out of the clothes I wear in my study, the clothes I wear when I have guests, and I change into my spring-cleaning clothes. As for the geta, I can get them from the servant girl.

As long as you wear old slacks and see to it that your handkerchief is folded in the most haphazard manner you can muster, you can walk from Sunamachi in the south to Senju or Kanamachi in the north without fearing the odd gaze of passing pedestrians. One of the locals may pause in their doorway, perhaps preparing to go shopping, and without a second thought you can walk down their alley. Such slovenly clothes are perhaps more suited to Tokyo’s unbearable heat and astonishing cold than any other. As long as you dress the same as the taxi drivers, you can spit on the street and on the train, you can toss your cigarette butts and matchsticks and paper scraps and banana peels wherever you please. You can enter a park, if you so desired, and plop yourself on a bench or sprawl out on the grass and grunt and snore and act how you please. You can abandon yourself to the pulse of a rebuilt city.

My friend Sato Yosai has already written extensively on the strange summer custom women have developed of going out on the town in an nightgown-like piece of cloth. I have nothing to add to his evaluation.

I am not accustomed to wearing geta on my bare feet, so I have a tendency to slam them against things, trip over things, step on people’s feet, and so forth; I do all I can to avoid serious injury, and I paid extra attention to my feet as I pressed throughout the throngs of people on my way to the back of the Inari Shrine. The stalls continued all the way to the shrine, to the left of which stood a reasonably well-sized plot of land that a plant nursery had taken over, filling it with trees, chrysanthemums, roses, and potted out-of-season flowerbeds. In a corner stood the names of people who had donated money to the rebuilding of the temple. They were inscribed on plaques and lined up like a fence. Perhaps it had burned down, or, like the Fushimi Inari Shrine, had been moved from its previous location.

I purchased a pot of summer flowers, turned down another alley, and made my way back to Taisho Street. I found myself standing just to the right of a police box. I was dressed the same as everyone else that night, and I was holding a pot of flowers, so I thought it would be fine, but, deciding not to risk it, I backed down the alley and turned down another street hemmed in by a liquor shop on one side and a candy store on the other.

The shops that lined half the street, and the alleyways behind them were a maze collectively referred to as District One. Oyuki’s house was in District Two, and the embankment that ran through it appeared suddenly at the end of this street in District One, where it bubbled past the entrance to a public bath called Nakajima before winding off through the pitch-dark streets outside the quarter. I thought of the canal, and how it appeared much dirtier than what once surrounded the north quarter. I could not help the sentimental sigh that overcame me when I remembered that, once, Terajima was just rice fields, the small river filled with water grasses, small dragonflies perched delicately on their leaves. It didn’t suit a man of my age. None of the festival carts were out on this street. I came out by a restaurant under its own flashing neon sign, which read “Kyushu.” Suddenly I could see the lights of the cars plying the improved road and I could hear the din of gramophones.

The pot was getting heavy so I decided to forgo the main street, turning right at Kyushu instead. The street was lined on the right by Districts One and Two, and on the left by District Three, making it not only the busiest but also the narrowest street. There were kimono shops, women’s shops for western clothing, and western restaurants. There was a post office box. The night I met Oyuki, when she ran up under my umbrella—I am pretty sure that was right around this post office box.

The remnants of an awkward unsettled feeling still clung to me in the wake of Oyuki’s implied confession, as if she were joking about her feelings towards me. I realized I knew almost nothing of her background. She’d mentioned being a geisha somewhere, sometime in the past, but she didn’t seem to know the various arts a geisha should—so even that was suspect. My first impression, based on very little, was that she had come from a fairly well-off house in Yoshiwara or Suzaki. Perhaps I had been correct.

She did not carry even the hint of an accent, but her face and her clear skin and body make it clear that she’s not from Tokyo or its suburbs, which has led me to imagine her the daughter born to parents that moved to Tokyo from somewhere far removed. She was a cheerful girl, and didn’t seem to be deeply upset by her current situation. Rather, I could imagine her as bright enough, optimistic enough, to see her current experiences as a way to build a path for herself out of her place in life. As for her relations with men, she listened without hesitation to the lies I issued forth, which made it clear that she was not yet jaded against the world. And if she was able to make me believe that was so, she must have been much more pure hearted and honest than her contemporaries at the cafes in Ginza and Ueno.

I was comparing a showgirl from Ginza to a woman at the window, the latter of which I found more lovable; I felt that we could speak of our feelings more honestly, but, much like the cityscape in the area, upon further reflection I realized she did not think with pride on her superficial beauty, and that there was probably very little chance of thundering disappointment at the gap between her appearance and her person. The street was still lined on both sides by carts and businesses, but here the drunkards did not band together to prowl the streets, and while bloody fights may have broken out in other places, one seldom saw them here. There are other sights to be wary of in Ginza. The middle-aged man, for example, in his perfectly cut foreign suit and distasteful countenance, his hair perfectly styled, his occupation nebulous, swinging his cane as he walks down the street and sings to himself, berating the young women and the children who cross his path. If one only changes into shabby dress and comes out to these outskirts, one is in much less danger, no matter how crowded the streets, than in those back alleys of Ginza, where one must constantly yield way to these distasteful sorts.

The small, lively street with the post office box reaches its height at the kimono shop, after which it continues with rice shops, a department store, fish-sausage shops, and so forth until you come upon a large lumber supply, its boards leaning against the wall. Whenever I get there my legs carry me on without consulting my conscious mind at all, due to the habit it’s become. They carry me out to the entrance of an alleyway that stands between the hardware shop and the bicycle parking lot.

Once inside the small alley you quickly come upon the dirtied flags of the Inari Shrine, and the pervasive waves of window shoppers all but disappear. Luckily for me. I sneak down the alleyway, and there are fig trees growing behind the houses and grape vines crawling over the railings, and I look back over my shoulder at the scene, so unlike anything in Tokyo, as I make my way to peer into Oyuki’s window.