Tokio Whip (17 page)

Oh, I lost a pen today. That nice matte black, heavy Ohto pen. Only a thousand yen, but I liked it. But I still have another 'cos I'd ordered two just in case (ah, prophetic me!). Better hightail it to Ad Hoc or Maruzen and order a slew of 'em. Not to be confused with a brace or a gaggle. But possibly a giggle.

What did Bakin say when he was travelling? (No, it's not a riddle.) Nagoyans “follow Osaka in custom and costume, Kyoto in stinginess, and Edo in literary taste. The women are pretty, but thick-waisted. There is not a single slender woman. I wonder if it's the climate?” Looks like we got off best.

Bought a penlight today. “Lost a pen, but gained a light.” You tell me what it means.

***

It's gotten to the point now where when I go into a shoe store before even asking where the large sizes are I first ask if they honestly think they might have anything that would interest me.

***

In the basement there is a train set. A boy of about six years old is playing with it with his friend. The boy wears braces on his weak legs. The friend is Hiro. Occasionally, the boy's mother comes down and gives the boys sweets and riceballs. And as this is a Saturday, they leave the basement – Hiro holding his friend's hand as he struggles up the steps – and the three of them drive to Machida in Southern Tokyo to buy extra train parts. Hiro is in the back seat and as he feels the breeze across his face, he looks at his friend's face and sees that the boy seems to be feeling nothing, his face is a blank. All the while, the mother is talking about nothing and the radio is playing “Walking Blues,” by Son House, “I Shall Not be Moved,” by Charley Patton, and other Blues. When they arrive, there is a tremendously long overpass they must cross in order to reach the department store. Hiro holds on to his friend's hand, but the walk is so very long, the friend so slow and heavy, he fears what might happen should he let go. Hiro wakes in a sweat. Vaguely he remembers his friend from so long ago; he does not know what ever became of him. “Poor kid, we were friends. Maybe I was his only friend. Me and his train set. Can't remember his Mother ever saying much. And that music, what was it? Something from very far away. Don't ever want to hear a voice like that again.” Hiro doesn't know what to do with his emotion, his very real fear. He feels restless all that day and all of the following day.

Kazuko dreams that her father is reading a letter and frowning slightly. Then he calls her downstairs. This makes her feel very heavy, in a way she can not define, heavy, but not unhappy. A Blues is playing; she likes it somehow, though she's not even sure she's ever heard a Blues, the deep stuff. They are in Machida. The letter is in
katakana
, all borrowed western words. She thinks it's French, her father German. The more they transcribe it into the alphabet the less it looks like either. Her father had thought it had to do with her studies, a note from one of her professors remarking on a certain recent distraction in her he'd noticed. This was around the time she'd met Kazuo. It was true, she'd been slightly distracted, but never at the expense of her studies, her filial duties, “Oh, no, Father, never!”, she wants to scream but the music's power takes over and she and her Father all their attention wrapped in it holding hands now the way they did when she was a child and together they look out the windows of the station coffee shop and Machida has vanished, all those shops, schools, the station itself, there is only the Musashi Plain now, Father and Daughter, and a Blues.

***

He needed to speak with her; grabbed her hair and pulled her head back. – “Listen, man.”

***

The costs of confusion notwithstanding, Kazuko ponders, this is Japan, and Edo presents no challenge. I know by now the train and subway systems – why aren't they joined on maps?, after all they are all of a piece. But they are all either priced so high, or one line is in conflict with another. Why can't they all be harmonious, provide the same comfort? Just be a normal city, like any other.

***

–
What's a what?

–
What's an anus but a sun spelt backwards? To walk into the sun, a view of Fuji. You and I reamed by light. The mellowest hours. Gotta remember to sort of stick near the Ome Kaido, veer right or the other way, but stick close. At least there's a bar every thirty minutes or so, “always happy to serve a Western lady.” You could count down the stations, Nakano, Koenji, but what for?

–
What for what?

–
What's a station spelt backwards? A long walk. But a good one. No Fuji, but the immediate prospect: the wood fence with torn posters for local politicians; the weeds or should I say the bits of pavement interrupting the growth of vegetation; the dirty stucco, white or pink or turquoise for a season; the opaque windows with their silhouettes of Minnie Mouse or Marilyn Monroe in 'em, or a poster of an “idol,” totally untalented but an idol nonetheless, cock sucked for three months and then a has-been, a wash-out, a distant memory without prospect, or a warrior-robot-weapon, a boy's idea of cuddliness when Mama's tits aren't around, though they usually are. The prospect, immediate: my own visible breath, my feet preceding me, time, all of it in an instant – the prospect of myself, the Marianne I become in Tokyo.

–
What?

–
What's Tokyo spelt backwards?

–
Wait, you can't
spell kanji
. The same thing. East Capitol, Capitol East. Not very glamorous.

–
Ah, but that's why we love ya', Tokyo, we know who you really are. And you us. Ok, ok, veer, but stick close.

***

The money never mattered. All I wanted was you. Now I walk the streets of strange cities thinking about you.

– Burt Lancaster,
The Killers
(Robert Siodmak, 1946)

***

The ordinary saint. The wife of the recluse. His small hands; eloquent, really.

***

The Cranes of Tokio

Lithe, they stand on one tall, thin leg; in groups, singly, underground, above the city, in the sky itself they stand. (I see one now from my window-screen.) All peace, they stare ahead unmoving, their heads swaying in gorgeous arcs (arc after arc ... ((themselves not arcs but all angles like girls on the verge of womanhood, on the verge of becoming arcs)) ), they begin to describe an arc and then of a sudden swing round and stop again to stare, stare at something or someone that intrigues their gaze for a moment. All gaze. But in their care for us they turn again. White markings, red flashes of light in the evening, and fiery orange bodies, they are in their own way emblems of a sexual paradise (and so many other paradises that we work on together). Androgynes, they reserve a small space for the little-egg-men that would pretend to direct them, but they, we know, are mere adjuncts that would readily could easily scatter like crows with the slightest gesture of a lover's hand. These cranes are not symbols of longevity, but of a single time, the present, which is to say the future, which is to embrace the past.

(Some years ago an American friend living in Gunma prefecture visited me in Tokyo. As we emerged from Shibuya station I remarked that we were still yet within the station, that the moon the sky the stars were simulations, that yes, thirty-story buildings were contained within the station. “And those cranes?,” she asked. “Building the station ever higher, the city ever wider,” I replied. “In fact, they're connected to even larger cranes outside this false canopy; those cranes – which we can't ever see – are less angular, and make very delicate arcs that join the whole city – as far as it extends so far, that is. I'm surprised you haven't heard of them out there on the skirts of the Kanto Plain. After all, Gunma is just the next suburb that'll be incorporated into the city.” “Uhn, noo, no I hadn't heard anything at all,” she embarrassedly admitted.)

In ponds and pools and stunted lakes, also called construction sites, their legs stand firmly in the ground – how deep, we do not know. (For that matter, has anyone ever seen them arrive? Just as one day we notice a new building on a previously barren plot, so one morning we notice the cranes in their familiar stance, working, gazing, in the thick of things. ((Nor for that matter, has anyone ever seen them leave.)) ) And their heads – joint, gaze, beak, desire – are in the skies.

The Skies of Tokio

(Why did they stop building the new City Hall? God, how we loved it as the buildings were a-building, growing ever higher, strange towers topped with swaying cranes, red lights flashing, regal cranes all presence making a claim on the future that entails the past as sure as anyone's grasp, cranes to rival any city or future. And then the towers were finished. Visit them now at night, a Spielbergian light show and no more – hope, desire, imagination: abandoned for a spotlight.)

A male sky over a female city. (Yes, yes they change sexes on occasion, as they choose, but largely remain thus. ((And, as this text is restricted to the skies, so the sexual discussion must be set aside for now.)) ) A gray sky with the occasional white or black rubbings, chalk. A dark gray sky or a light gray sky, with scoops of foam, seed, cream. A black sky – black on black, matte. A steel blue sky with shafts of white. Yesterday, a dark blue sky with flames of orange outlined in gold, and a blood red moon going down. For one week, a brilliant blue sky one wanted to soar into, a death-bliss sky with clouds one felt one could grasp, lift oneself onto, and find angels there to converse with, the two or three wings we desire (the angel's, the lover's, the poet's). Black and white skies, mournful Araki skies. Minimal skies; skies of a severe desire, an austere need (Baudelairian Dandy skies). Skies brooding on evil, Melmothian skies, wandering sorrowful skies. And skies all passionate joy. Skies all excess. Unrivalled skies that no other city possesses imagination enough to love. (Not to make other cities uptight, but just to state a truth. ((And we are, after all, only speaking of love – for the city, for its skies, for its cranes.)) )

The Skies and Cranes of Tokio

Marina Vlady glances East and West; she sees me, smiles. Columbo walks up to me, shakes my hand: “compañero.” They too are cranes of a sort (and so too poor Marion): eyes fixed firmly in the present, which is to say the future and to incorporate the past, the changing (changeless) city, and so the changing man the changing woman. Deep deep in the earth (concrete, pool, construction site, as you like), high high in the heavens, we build ourselves one another, man and woman, sky and city, we become cranes, firmly joined, canopy to mattress, lover to lover, we gaze, sway, shudder, and move on, recreating ourselves lovers cities.

***

Nadar from his balloon sites Tokyo.

***

Lang says it used to be a canal city. You can see the signs everywhere in the traditional parts of the city. Even Jimbocho, Ginza. But what does that mean? What is a “traditional part” of the city? One that is up to date and without a hint of its past. That's the only possible answer. So what do we mean? The old part? No, all parts being equal. The low city? Presumably. But did their old houses match ours? Were they anything like ours in scale and beauty? No, completely different histories, cultures. Low city opposed to a soaring city. Amsterdam has its canals. And yet, why did they remain in contact only with us for two hundred years? What attracted them to this species of foreigner? Even still. Isabel toiling on that dictionary. A German guy applied for a job with Amro and was sure he'd get it, had some Dutch, figuring he'd pick it up fast enough – and then they had to turn him down because three Japanese applied and they all spoke Dutch! Why did they? Who but the Dutch should ever speak it? Ever be able to? Eight consonants in a row. Curious history between us. “Dutch learning.” And what's caught on? No two nations more unlike. Perhaps an unspoken longing between we two cities. Something hidden, unable to be articulated. A need to be spoken, a desire to be acknowledged. Two tongues to be desired. Ah, give me the sound of bicycles and everyone of all sizes and ages and sexes, all out at night, a white beer, a red beer, a blue beer. Young girls, cozy, and never lose sight of the edge. Amsterdam, home.

***

“Timeless. Temporary. Tokyo.”

– Kazuo

***

SCENE SIX: A TEMPLE

The Woman awakes, after a heavy night of furious and fantastic masturbating, and staggers on to the bus to Jindaiji, the city's second oldest temple, located, yes, near Kichijoji – the Western Kichijoji, that is. The heavy incense emanating from the old temple adds to her sedation. The many souvenir shops only annoy her; though she does make her annual purchase of a demon-dispelling votive charm. She barely notices the row of monks in procession (though normally, her sexual fantasies run along acolyte lines), the small garden, an especially enormous tree, and the
susuki
leaves, final remnants that once lavished the Kanto Plain, playground for the Shogun's horses. Nor, of course, does she notice the man enjoying his cold
jindaiji soba
at the table next to her.

***

MIROKU

Don't worry, Baby,

Everything's gonna turn out alright.

– Brian Wilson-Silva

PART TWO

TOZAI! TOZAI!

–
That's the shout, “Eastwest! Eastwest!” Everyone included. Good for any performance – going out at night, getting up in the morning.

–
And Northsouth!, Northsouth!? Shouldn't that be included? After all –

–
You're right, of course. And it is there, only more implicit. We go around the city, we go across, we wander all over – but one somehow doesn't feel that other pull. Just think of the Ginza line: the fun north end of it, and the dull commercial south. So, we'll follow the traditions in this respect, and keep that direction subtle. And, by the way, it should be “Southnorth!, Southnorth!” –
Namboku! Namboku!
I used to be able to get to
shitamachi
on the Namboku Line, get off at Todaimae Station. There's a decent wine shop near where you emerge with foreign wines, including one of the few places I could get prosecco.

–
But if it's all underground, then it's all subtle.

–
Not necessarily. We know all about the underground cities of the train stations, those elaborate malls and hotels, porn shops and tea shops. But they exist too in the subways, though perhaps not as elaborate, a salaryman or a girl can still get him or herself fitted for an evening. Yes, the sun exists underground too – as many names and myths, tragedies and romances – after all, the city's underground – just look at a map, think of the Yamanote as a circle, and the subway lines bursting out all around and within it – what do you see?

–
Uhm, ok a circle, squiggles, a rainbow of colors, the Tozai blue, the Ginza orange. What am I supposed to see?

–
A sun! And, considering that we're considering the underground – it's an anus. And after all, what is an anus but a sun spelt backwards?

–
A what sun?

–
Spelt backwards, an anus.

–
Uh … ok.

–
Comeon, let's walk.

–
What, along the Sobu, east, and then down the river, along the bridges, sort of southnorth?

–
You wanted every direction, sure, why not, a proper mix. After all, neglect the bridges and the subways, you do not do the city justice.

–
But we won't be taking a subway.

–
Oh we will – and we have quite a few choices: the Tozai, the Ginza, the Asakusa, the Hibiya, the Shinjuku lines, they all traverse
shitamachi
. And whether we do or not, the subway, as I've said, is implicit.

–
So, Tozai! Tozai!

–
Yes, appropriately. You know, the farther East we go, I see the West. It is implicit, always. The yellow Sobu grinds its way east. Here, Shōhei Bridge – these wonderful stone lamps, the thin river below – seen from the train it's exhilarating, and at ground level too. You know, you leave Kanda, no not the bookshops, but the students mixed with the salarymen, and suddenly these stone markers – you're not only entering Akihabara, you're approaching the River, the Sumida, not the Kanda. Walk through Akihabara, ignore the noise and toys, the Liebeskind lamp warehouse – or is it Eisenmann? – the River is beckoning. It's a hard walk, grimey, there are as many bill collectors as there are computer outlets, but the River is just a bit beyond, and that's where your focus should be. Yes, we can do this eastwest and southnorth, it makes no difference, this is the Center.

–
You think so?

–
I have to. If the River goes – and it is – then Tokio goes, no more.

–
No more Tokyo?

–
No. No more. All the conversations of all the people who lived here and loved here and especially the people who never gave it a good goddamn, and the few who did, who bothered to remember a name or some women who burned or drowned, or children who made it and moved out, or the few rebels, even the foreigners who wrote so much bullshit but nonetheless had a glimpse of willow – oh well.

–
Oh well!?

–
Well, the city endures.

–
But you just said – ?

–
Did I? Maybe I'm wrong on all counts. Oh, it'll endure – in its fashion. In memory. No, come back here in twenty years –

–
Only twenty?

–
You want thirty?, I'll give you thirty – but little more. No, I suppose I suffer the same Kafu-Seidensticker nostalgia. It's going – gone! How often can you write about “the stones underneath this shitheap of concrete underneath the next layer of dust under the following bag of bones” – what fire was it now?, what disaster? – well, anyway, under it all, they say, a certain legend is said to have occurred, though it cannot be verified because all municipal and poetic records were destroyed the last time a building to last for exactly three years was built on the spot, and on and on? That can not go on. Tokio does not want a memory – we know that. But by now it is so far gone that the memory itself has forgotten its job, forgotten to remember. What's that illness dealing with accelerated growth, quickening senility. It repeats itself all over the city. Something new, virginal is built or born, grows fast, and within a couple of decades all memory of its origins is lost. It happens all over the place, is happening in so many millions of versions. And no records are being kept. All those memories lost –

–
“Like tears in rain.”

–
Yes.

–
All gone?

–
All. Gone. But that's ok, as it should be.

–
No!

–
Yes.

–
But a new Tokyo – the spirit?

–
Ha! The “Spirit!” No, that's precisely the problem. The Spirit dies too. Yes, Tokio may be found West, as I've been saying. But it keeps going West, and, ok, might redefine itself, but in the process comes so far from the first, that, well, it's nothing like what it was. After all thirty million people – what balance can be found there? We've passed the Millennium, the subways are expanding –

–
Anus takes over the sun, and can't be said to shine?

–
Ha, yes! So, it all gets out of hand. When Roberta and I lived here, those many years, wonderful years, I was overjoyed by the idea of twenty-five millions, of all the human parts of the great machine that had found the proper balance of chaos and order, what a maze! So much fun to be a hamster – though I'd also almost intuitively, I suppose, favored the chaotic – that is how it is you know, living here, at first you see only the chaos, then begin to perceive the order, then to feel the balance, and then, finally, you see that chaos is the real order of things, but by then you have become so accustomed to Tokio, you far more easily accept the chaos, the miscellania, all that that does not seem to pertain to any certain order – you welcome it, revel in it. You are a Tokioite. But the last time we were here for a visit, it suddenly seemed to me that I'd never seen so many people, where were they all coming from, how was one to make any sense of this place? Or maybe I'm just getting older. Would I feel that way had we never left? Probably not; I'd have grown with the place, never noticed the greater numbers. But it's not my job anymore to help maintain the continuity and change – it's yours.

–
So, was there ever something you can call a “Tokyo spirit”? Surely, there must have been. That's what you've always been talking about, you and many others. Tokyo's ways are not Japan's, Tokyo's special character …

–
Good question. Open question. “Was Tokio ever the Tokyo we imagine it to have been?” And when been? That's the problem with we nostalgiasts. What Tokio are we speaking of? The night Kafu met so-and-so in Ogikubo? The morning of an execution along the river? That perfect day when the cherry blossoms …? The aborted coup? The lonely afternoon when the arrow sang? The 1927 opening of the subway? (The tickets were in four languages, by the way.) The fire – which fire? – the air-raids? The day Zonar opened? The day he arrived – and was as immediately swept away on the road to Gunma Prefecture only seeing the skyscrapers of Shinjuku, not even able to visit his grave in Zoshigaya, wondering when he would ever see the city he'd given so much thought to? The day she got the broke-heart letter? The day he finally lost his virginity?

–
Hold on.

–
No. I can't. Do these make a Tokio? That's what I have to wonder.

–
Well, do they?

–
I'm not sure. Maybe this is it. You lose your virginity, you die in a fire, you hear an arrow zing by, whatever … what makes it Tokio? What is a Tokio-specific experience? Not so much that you happened to be here, but – what?

–
That you associate the experience with the time, with the place?

–
No. That's not it. But it's close.

–
??

–
Maybe … that you associate, but you also realize – realize deeply – that while it may have occurred in almost any other place, there was also something eerie, uncanny, in that it could only have occurred here. Some special knowledge and association. I'm sure lots of people have lost their – what is it, “cherries”? – and I'm glad for 'em – well, when you've lost it here, you know there's a difference, there's a memory that includes Tokio.

–
That's it?

–
Isn't that enough?

–
Uhm …

–
No, you're right. Maybe it isn't enough. But you get the idea – ?

–
Yeah …

–
Ok, good, Then it's enough for now. That'll give you something to go on.

–
??

–
But you have to go with it.

–
But where's that leave the future of Tokyo that you were speaking of?

–
Was I? Oh, well, I'll be gone before that occurs. I have no doubt that the city will survive in one form or another; I wonder if I will like the changes, but I hope to be able to appreciate them. As for the rest, the real future, that's up to you. Try to maintain a bit of the old and the new Tokios. Try to remember a few of the stories and legends. And add more! I'll be leaving – with my Tokio – you're staying, make your own.

And so they talked, and so they walked, easwest, southnorth, the bridges and stations. He took his notes, brief, barely articulate, but he was grateful for the names and memories. He might look them up in a spare moment, but was only too aware that they were not
his
Tokyo – he kept to the conventional spelling – and while he was new at it – even his “cherry” intact (he liked that, that his cherry might blossom here) – he knew too that this Lang that he was speaking with, this foreigner who seemed now such an old-hand, had occasionally referred to a man named Cafferty, who Lang admitted that he had had briefly to rely on in the forms of some brief conversations (though it seems they were never really very close), a walk or two, and a small sheaf of notes:

“Dear Lang:

I'm too old and too used to my paths to help you now. I hear from Roberta that you've taken an interest in my beloved city, this old Tokyo I can barely discern now. Good for you. She further reassures me that your interest is serious.

I trust her.

I liked you from the first time we met – liked you, I should admit, from a distance. But, I have to admit, that I found you then too excitable. What was it? Why? That you seemed to need to intimidate her at the same time that you humbled yourself to her? Frankly – I'll keep this short – that put me off from you. It was only her reassurances to me that, well, you were confused about being here, that lead me to let up on my earlier judgment of you. In time, of course, I saw you shake that silver mane of yours, and snap yourself out of it, saw the side of you that she treasures, the whole man, or almost all.

And then we met casually a few more times.

You are fine. (I've suffered the same way that I saw that you did.) I only wish the best for you and my own beloved Roberta, who will linger in my mind for a very long time – as long as I am given. She has told me that you have come to have a great passion for the city; not an ordinary passion, that is, as so many who come here experience and tarry, and then let go of. I suspect that you have also seen what it has come to mean to her – I mean the city, of course, but especially her few blocks of it. I trust now that you have come to respect that, those. She sees the whole city in those few familiar blocks– and you see yourself in, well, more. Both views are valid.

I will trust you, Lang. Perhaps years ago – many years – we might have become good friends and done a bit of “pavement botanizing” together. But no more, not now. I am leaving, slowly. I reduce my apartments year by year till they reach the contentment of that small pine box. No desire to speak – what could I say?, who would listen? – oh, I know you of all might, but to what purpose? – and besides, sight leaves too. (This might be my last typed letter!) But seriously: Pride, dignity, respect: what matter?

I lived in Tokyo.

Lang, surely, isn't that enough?

Therefore: I am enclosing a few notes – garnered from this and that, from a time I thought I could write – but then you read Hölderlin or Rilke, and realize the responsibilities of poetry, and it's better to simply walk away and not embarrass yourself. When you go deeper, however, you'll notice the small references. A little something to get you going – this city, unfortunately – perhaps – leads you straight into poetry; or so I have found. Maybe that is why I chose finally only to follow the city, and leave its poetry to others better than I. Can you do it? I wonder. Defeated by poetry, and won by the city, can not, certainly, be the worst of fates. I am sorry I have no more to give you – like so many lives in this city, mine too went up in flames. Long ago.