Tokio Whip (10 page)

Or Zen, Blaise, we ought to try some sitting. Take Roberta's advice, visit the temple, live like that.

Love. Purely. Do not think.

No, no, think, man. You are leaving her – you've been asked.

(“Leaving? Who's leaving? Who said anything about leaving?”)

No, Lang.

The times are very different. Indeed.

Lang … Lang …

Sorry, Blaise, but nothing happens to you when you're standing still. Not to me at least. I don't have that kind of Zen. You've got to move.

I need to re-enter the world.

This is it, for our exhausted hero, as he summarizes the end of a near-year-long meditation, a meditation that had begun with the Chinese silencing.

A sudden screech, a wing glimpsed, a woman's opened speechless mouth – The city is a skull where all the voices resound in words and notes repeated forever in each friend and lover's specific articulations, and all their images flash in instants fixed forever in single takes; it is here I encounter myself my destiny alone – and where I meet it hand in hand
with Roberta
both of us with eyes wide open, all pain forgotten, disappointed love forgiven, where my friends are forever present, conversing, we walk through backstreets or across boulevards, meet simply to wander, or linger in cafés and bars, we recommend books and records, participate in the quotidian, glory in it all, and at night when the bars have closed, the lovers returned to one another's arms, the children's terrible dreams undone with a parent's unseen kiss, we each in our own ways return home to dream, reminisce, make a late night phonecall – or write a few notes.

My room, skull, city is bare – perhaps a print or postcard on a wall: Bernini's Teresa, Fischer von Erlach's Karlskirche, something by Sesshu or Lee U-Fan, something perfect, hard and yet all emotion; no more than one shelf of books, a few pens and paper; the gray tabletop stripped but for the keyboard and monitor … the drama of lovers –
Roberta and I
– and others too, friends, the family drama – all played out – an inner struggle of gestures, journeys that end either in death or go nowhere at all, pleas that no one listens to, murderous loves that are endured … for what? … sisters and brothers all of us understood finally in our tragic fullness that turns too late to grace and splendor – they become one, friends, couples, more – finally, union, the misremembered dream of life.

The body is restored and the soul rediscovered – sea and sky! – the mind is as fast as the hand as immediate as the writing – here: desk, skull, city – Tokio,
Roberta and I,
where all these wanderings end.

What more can I say, Roberta?
– Lang now out of his delirious access, letting go the weight of doubt the burden of questions, the spirit and flesh raised, standing once more prepared to speak with the sun behind and the moon above – sunrise and sunset reconciled! –
Roberta? With Aretha then, “I love you. And I love you! And I love you too!” A world of you inside me – and I failed us both. (And you love me too!) Union, yes – but not now, not just yet. No second chances for fools like me. Go your way in this city that belongs to you. If there is a Tokio to be mine too I'll find it. In time, I pray, for us to rediscover one another. You leave me, stay where you are. And I'll stay with you – by going. And as far as you are I shall be near.

Inside.

Lang then in a moment of self-candor that was so much like the May-June events in China, 1989. A decade and more of frustration, inaction, the gathering finally, discussions with some few friends, forays into action, and then the gush, the relentless holding on, the demand to be heard, the flood, and in it finding oneself again among friends, thousands, hundreds of thousands and more, across generations and places, classes, the great criss-cross, the multiple antagonisms for a moment swept over by something even more essential, permanent, valuable, and no violence. An insistence on love – what's so funny? – the voice, its place. For a week (for his and Roberta's many years) the most exciting place in the world – until the fist.

But this time no sullen disillusion; this time his body shook, reawakened with a sobriety he had almost forgotten himself capable of. No mere “clarity,” but a shimmering of the flesh, a trembling of the spirit, a determination body and soul that things this time could be accomplished, the defeats accepted, retreats regained, the landscapes reworked, and earth, all of it, this one, Tokyo – he, Roberta – won.

Lang's Meditation then, a wish for union, his usual wish for his life, despite the theme of separation, a life where finally all would be one: beauty and sadness, body and soul, memory and desire, poetry and the city, China and China, in a word, Roberta and Lang.

And so began Lang's long meditation – it continues in its way – as he walked the city in that long stride of his, down his lost highway, following whichever alley in the old part of the city, or cycling around Shinjuku, or trying to avoid the too many foreigners in Aoyama, or straight-arrowing his way through Shibuya towards a cinema, or even a humble walk through Inokashira Park, near home, or the long walk across Zempukuji, these thoughts would come to him, memories, dreams, trying as ever to comprehend his life, where he and Roberta had gone wrong and why he had not stopped it, knowing all too well that the fault lay in him, that she was all love and its readiness, the whole giving believing thing, while he held on to his infuriating and often terrifying, impossible dreams, memories – and meditations.

But we fear, fear there is so much more to his fear, and so fear for ourselves.

But for now, alas, an end, an end to Lang's longish meditation.

***

A moldy fig, a hard fart, a cool piss in the grass.

***

–
Sony-dori should've been the lowest loop of the Yamanote, VZ declares. I mean, what do you get instead – Osaki? Has anyone ever gotten off there? I've seen 'em get on, but off – no way, man.

–
What's down there, anyway – some of the old canals?

–
Maybe.

–
A mall, or something like one.

–
Sony spillover probably, a perfect set for William Gibson.

–
And Gotanda's mini sex street –

–
But oh what those tall thin buildings hold! – the tales they could tell! – at least from the looks of all the posters.

–
Ya' know, I never did make it to the, what was it, the Emperor love hotel? –
the
hotel of the 80s, eh?

–
Right next door to the hundreds of Buddhas.

–
Lots of old money around here – the Teien and the Hara mansions, but sprawling houses too. Second homes maybe a hundred years ago, like in that doctor novel, a second home in Shibuya, you can imagine it once was “far,” almost countryside.

–
Right, and now your family home comes three-generations after you.

–
The three-generation mortgage!

–
Do you even live long enough to see it?

–
“Here's your graduation present, son.”

–
“Gee, thanks, Dad.”

***

To haunt the great city and by this habit to penetrate it, imaginatively, in as many places as possible –
that
was to pull wires,
that
was to open doors,
that
positively was to groan at times under the weight of one's accumulations.

– Henry James

***

Ha! He says he loves it
all
– even Sanya? Dream Island? Edogawa Ward? Keep me away from there, Master, and I'll do my best by you. And, please, let me roam the few places I really enjoy. Shibuya, Jiyugaoka, you know. And those few nights when I can go out with you-know-who for an expensive meal in Aoyama or even Kojimachi. And a real hotel afterwards. I don't mind. A man with skin like a woman's. Maybe Hiroko is right and I should have taken some business classes. I could talk with him more then about his work, and then maybe I could see him more often. But do I really want to see anyone regularly? Keep 'em on a string and your profits run higher. That's all I know about business. Ah, but now I have to get that fancy watch repaired, and it's too late to ask him to do it for me. I'll have to pay for it myself. I guess that means I am taking a loss. Is that called a debit? But hey, why did the watch screw up like that? ... No, he wouldn't give me a fake, even something Korean as a gift, would he? The food's not fake, the hotel's the real thing, so why should a present not be? Or would it be? Well, anyway, it is a good-looking watch, and if it is a fake, then it's certainly done a good job of fooling a lot of people. No, he's not fooling me – at least, no more than I'm fooling him. But isn't everyone trying to fool everyone else almost all of the time? Gee, it gets a little confusing sometimes. My parents never fooled me. And I know I can trust Hiroko. I'd better call home one of these days soon. What if he told me he loved me on April Fool's Day? Then we'd really have to stay in a hotel so I could hear him say it again the next morning. Hmm ... Let's see: Get the watch fixed. Call home. Pick up the dry cleaning. What else was there? Something about the city. Well, later.

(Uhn, well, that
is
Hiromi, she too a Tokyoite.)

***

Oh, you tantalizing, transparent Tokyo, I could just kiss you!, Roberta exclaims.

***

The eclectic and uninhibited Yoshiwara way seems the genuine Tokyo way.

– Edward G. Seidensticker

***

THE TEIGIN INCIDENT

You can pass today by the little corner in Nagasaki, Toshima Ward (a photographer friend lives nearby) and never suspect that it is the site of the most infamous of postwar Japanese crimes. Everyone is implicated, and only hosts of questions (and rumors, scandals!) remain. And they reverberate still.

Just as most of our “Stories and Legends of Tokyo and Edo” are simple enough – summarized in a few sentences – their meanings speak the proverbial volumes.

A man dressed as a doctor enters a bank at closing time; he tells the staff that the neighborhood water supply is polluted with dysentery, and they should take the serum he has brought. They willingly oblige – and within two minutes twelve people are dead, the bank is robbed of ¥160,000 (with another ¥350,000 inexplicably neglected). The police gather disparate files, desperate evidence (two previous similar incidents; a search for a name-card; a U.S. Occupying Forces jeep mysteriously parked nearby), and seven months later they have their man: a painter of some small reputation who'd lost the name-card he'd been given months earlier by the doctor whose name was used in the crime. The suspect had also long before been affected by the fantasy-inducing Karsakoff's psychosis, a condition that can sometimes lead its sufferers to agree to anything. He signs a dubious confession, and in no short time is sentenced to death. Justice is served. (On the strength of a lost name-card! Fortunately, this was the last case in Japan in which circumstantial evidence was sufficient to convict a man.)

But the sentence is never carried out. Articles and books are printed; appeals filed; petitions served. The suspect dies at the age of 95, joking about being freed and marrying a girl of 25.

Japanese justice. Rumors, scandals – such is the norm here. Name the last ten Prime Ministers. Name the last five who served more than six months. Name the death row prisoners who have been released – after serving a decade or more time – their so-called “confessions” now admitted by the police as having been forced upon them. Name the political and financial scandals of the past quarter-century – the scandals that make the front page of the morning newspapers such a bore to read. And name the names of the rich and powerful who have served time – the shortest list of all.

The Teigin Incident (the name is an abbreviation for
tei
koku, “imperial,” and
gin
ko, “bank”) has deep, unresolved implications. The principle thesis has it that the perpretator – an expert in poisons and chemicals – was a decommissioned officer of the infamous Unit 731, the chemical warfare division of the Japanese Imperial Army, which was located in Manchuria, and which devised the worst imaginable inhuman experiments. It is said that the Unit's staff was given their freedom by the Occupying Forces in exchange for information.

There are two points.

1. Corruption and complicity up and down. Recall the best scene in Visconti's
Götterdämmerung
: Dirk Bogarde lies in Ingrid Thulin's arms, whispering, “Complicity grows, complicity grows”– now translate it into Japanese.)

2. Gullibility. I mean, 16 people (four survived) just accepting the word of a guy in a white coat? A hundred million accepting another who says he's a god and telling them all to die for him? Could you or I go into a bank in Toshima Ward today, wearing some sort of uniform and tell everyone to lie down, take off their pants and, well, whatever? I hesitate to answer.

***

Rich?, strange?, Kaoru queries, no, steady. Twenty-seven now and everything going according to plan. Yes, rich someday, but strange, no, according to plan. Out of the Magazine Division soon enough, and then Books, preferably Classics and Bestsellers. And then I will astound them. My blurbs. Flaubert in three sentences! Balzac in two!

***

The waiter's vest slides across the waitress's breasts.

***

Fellini's
Satyricon
; Mizoguchi's whores pouring too much
saké
, pouting but in the end always putting out; a Butoh dance, dark, insane, the body ripped open; Marianne's laugh, the sudden shout that is a form of dance; those kids down the street always shouting, taunting their mothers to no end but they too in the end always rushing home to the tit; the cash registers in Seiyu: it's gotta be the noisiest city in the world. Well, one of the noisiest. What'd Richie write once, that “Nikko was a monument to the megalomania of the Tokugawa?” Whores, monks in gaudy makeup. One party, every party, yours ends where mine begins. Is everyone only talking to himself? “Talk to me, Roberta, goddamit! Say something nice! Lie to me!” What's everyone so afraid of saying? Don't be so nervous. Why should I want to make you feel uncomfortable? “Goddamit, Roberta! Here, have a cigarette. Oh, you quit?” Oh was I horrible that night of Roberta's party; just a few words and you could feel everyone tense up; by the end, I merely had to make as if to speak and you'd see their bodies stiffen up. And then VZ and Arlene trying to make everyone ease up – not their particular skill when also drunk. But what's curious is that everyone's conversation was dislocated, that night we all had a certain edge, a shrill stridency. We were all defensive, aggressive. But my mood prevailed – and look where it's got me.