The Tokyo-Montana Express (4 page)

The bars are closing in Shibuya on a
Friday night and thousands of people are pouring out into the streets like happy
drunken toothpaste, laughing and speaking Japanese.

The traffic is very heavy with full taxis.
It is well known that Shibuya can be a very difficult place to get a taxicab on
a Friday or Saturday night. Sometimes it can be almost impossible, only fate
and the direct intervention of the gods will secure you a taxicab.

I stand there in Shibuya in the middle of
this gigantic party of Japanese. I feel no anxiety to go home because I am
alone. When I get home an empty bed in a hotel room waits for me like a bridge
to lonely and solitary sleep.

So I just stand there as peaceful as a
banana because that’s what I look like in this all-Japanese crowd. Every taxi that
comes by me is full in the traffic that’s barely moving. Ahead of me I can see
empty cabs, but they are seized instantly as soon as they appear.

I don’t care.

I am not really going anyplace that counts,
not like the many young lovers that I see around me who are on their way to
happy drunken fucking.

Let them have the cabs.

They are a blessing from me to them.

I was once young myself.

Then I see an empty cab headed toward me
and for some strange reason all the lovers look away and I automatically raise
my hand beckoning toward the cab. It is not that I want the cab. It’s just done
out of unconscious habit. I have no interest in stealing their cab.

When a person feels like that, of course,
the taxi stops and I get into it. Kindness can only go so far. It is a
privately-owned cab because its interior reflects the personality of the cab
driver and shows the professional pride he takes in owning his own cab.

I tell the driver in Japanese where I am
going and we start on our way. Still surprised by the cab stopping, it takes me
a minute or so to become totally aware of the contents of the taxi. When I get in
I can see that something is very unusual about the cab, far beyond the obvious personality
touches that driver-owned taxis have.

Then, as they say, it dawns on me in the
bar-closing traffic of Shibuya where I am actually at. I’m not in a taxicab. I
am in a shrine of carp. The taxi is filled with drawings, photographs and even
paintings of carp. In the backseat there are two gold-framed paintings of carp.
One of them is beside each door.

Carp are swimming everywhere in the taxi.

“Carp,” I say in English to the driver,
hoping that means something to him. I don’t know the Japanese word for carp.

“Hai,” he says in Japanese which means yes.
Then I have a feeling that he knows the word for carp in every language on this
earth, even in Eskimo where there are no carp, only icebergs and such. The man
really likes carp. I take a good look at him.

He’s a happy and jovial man.

I remember that carp stands for good luck
in Japanese and I am in a moving shrine of carp, going in and out of the Japanese
love-traffic. It all makes sense. I see young lovers in cabs all around us on
their way to pleasure and passion. We are swimming among them like good luck.

A man is staring at meat. He is so
intently staring at meat that his immediate surroundings have become the shadow
of a mirage.

He is wearing a wedding ring.

He is perhaps in his early sixties.

He is well dressed.

There simply are no clues to why he is
staring at meat. People walk by him on the sidewalk. He does not notice them.
Some people have to step around him.

The meat is his only attention.

He’s motionless. His arms are at his side.
There’s no expression on his face.

He is staring into the open door of a meat
market locker where whole sides of beef are hanging from hooks. They are in a
row like cold red dominoes.

I walk past him and turn around and look at
him and then want to know why he is standing there and I walk back and try to
see what he is seeing as I walk past him.

There has to be something else, but I’m
wrong again in this life.

Nothing but meat.

I have never been able to understand
umbrellas because I don’t care if I get wet. Umbrellas have always been a
mystery to me because I can’t understand why they appear just before it starts
to rain. The rest of the time they are vacant from the landscape as if they had
never existed. Maybe the umbrellas live by themselves in little apartments
under Tokyo.

Do the umbrellas know that it is going to
rain? because I know that people don’t know. The weatherman says that it will
rain tomorrow but it doesn’t and you don’t see a single God-damn umbrella. Then
the weatherman says that it will be a sunshiny day and suddenly there are
umbrellas everywhere you look, and a few moments later, it starts raining like
hell.

Who are these umbrellas?

There is not much to talk about today
here in Tokyo. I feel very dull like a rusty knife in the kitchen of a weed-dominated
monastery that was abandoned because everybody was too bored to say their
prayers any more, so they went someplace else two hundred years ago and started
different lives that led them all to the grave, anyway, a place where we are
all going.

A few moments ago somebody died in their
sleep in Canada. It was a very easy death. They just won’t wake up tomorrow
morning. Their death will not affect the results of anything going on in Japan
because nobody will know about it, not a single person out of 114,000,000
people.

The Canadian corpse will be buried the clay
after tomorrow. By any standard it will be a modest funeral. The minister will
have a hard time keeping his mind on the sermon. He would just about prefer to
be doing anything else than giving this sermon.

He is almost angry at the corpse lying a
few feet away in a cheap coffin. At one point he feels like grabbing the corpse
and shaking it like a child that’s done a bad thing while his voice continues
droning out: “We are all but mortal flesh on a perilous journey from birth to…”
he looks over at the corpse he has to refrain from keeping his hands off… “death.”

A few hours after the corpse is safely in
the ground, he will be home drinking a water glass of sherry in his locked-door
study.

None of this will have any effect on Japan.
No one will ever know about it.

This evening somebody will die in their
sleep in Kyoto. They will turn over in bed and just die. Their body will slowly
grow cold and Canada will not declare a day of national mourning.

Time to go fishing…

It is October again in Montana and I have
been away again, Japan, etc., but I am back here again in the Rockies. As I am
writing this; I’m thinking about the word again. I am thinking that it is a
relative of the word rain. They have so much in common. When it starts raining
it is a process of again and again lasting for minutes, hours or days.

For my autumn’s fishing I will need a new
license and some flies and leaders, so I go to a fishing tackle store and renew
myself again as a fisherman.

I love fishing tackle stores.

They are cathedrals of childhood romance,
for I spent thousands of hours worshipping the possibilities of rods and reels
that led like a religion to rivers and lakes waiting to be fished in the imagination
where I would fish every drop of water on this planet.

The next day I am getting myself ready to
go fishing. I select a 7½ foot rod to try my luck with on a spring creek. I get
my hip boots and fishing vest.

I plan the flies that I will take with me.
My Japanese wife is carefully but casually watching my preparations which I
perform with an obvious enthusiasm.

When I am ready to go, time to go fishing,
she says, “Don’t forget to take some KIeenex.”

“What?” I ask, startled because I have been
fishing for over a third of a century and Kleenex has not played a part in my
fishing.

“Take some Kleenex with you.”

“What?”

I am definitely on the defensive, trying to
deal with a brand-new aspect of fishing, something that had never crossed my
mind before.

“You might sneeze.”

I think about it.

She is right.