Tokio Whip (40 page)

***

Straddled thighs, bursts of lust – two cunts, four breasts, eight limbs – the infinite kiss.

***

Kazuko is blessed, a challenging job, international clients, good friends, and Kazuo. It's a sayonara party for a friend who is temporarily leaving the company cooperative to study abroad. While there are only women present, it's always been understood that women with serious male attachments can invite their partners. Kazuko mentioned it to Kazuo last week, but forgot to do so again. Oh well, he's probably forgotten. Maybe there will be a message on her phone machine when she returns home.

–
We all envy your going to Paris, Shoko, and we'll really miss you a lot. Please write us when you can, ok?

–
Can I write to you in French?

–
Not if you want us to understand your letters!

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But what if I forget how to write Japanese?

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Oh, that can never happen!

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Oh, don't worry, I'll write – and often.

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We know.

–
But you just have to make sure?

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I suppose.

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But don't let the company fall apart without me, hear?

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Oh, we won't let that happen. Now we'll have to work even extra hard without you. Right, girls? Everybody for extra overtime?

–
(Universal groans.)

–
I'm just sorry I didn't pull my own weight.

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What weight? You're going to look marvelous in those great French clothes.

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Oh yes!

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And live in a rue in an arrondissement.

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Oh, it's just a street and a ward.

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But they're in French!

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But without tatami!

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Oh, what a sacrifice!

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I'll bet the French have lovely stationery.

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But so does Japan.

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Too cute. Shoko, will you send me some French stationery?

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Yes, of course, Yoko.

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And you'll wear French lingerie.

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Shall I send you some of that, Miho?

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Would you?

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Uhm, I think you'd better visit me, and pick out your own, ok?

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I'll be there!

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And who are you going to wear it for, Miho?

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Now now, Miki, Miho will get her man yet, you'll see.

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Well, sooner or later.

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Let's order some cakes, shall we?

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(Universal agreement.)

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And French shoes!

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Red leather!

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Yellow!

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Blue!

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I hardly think I'll have enough money to be buying either French shoes or lingerie.

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Oh but your beau will.

–
Oh, now I have a beau, is that it?

–
Yes, and he'll set you up in a big lovely apartment where you'll give the most glamorous parties, and you'll be the envy of all the guests. The French women will study your Japanese grace, and the men will all be enthralled with your Japanese mystery, and –

–
Yuriko, I think you've seen too many French movies.

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Oh no, one can't see too many French movies!

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Ok then, she hasn't seen enough Japanese movies.

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Well, none of us have.

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And I think this “beau” you're speaking of is better called by another name.

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Oops, sorry. Well, you know what I mean.

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Uhm, sort of. But remember, I'm going there to study. So that I can come back and re-join the company, and make us even stronger.

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To make us strong, you mean.

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Stronger.

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Good for you.

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Do they really call the worst seats in a theater the Heavens?

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I really don't know, but if they're the cheapest, then I'm sure you'll find me in Heaven.

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The Opera!

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The Louvre!

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The Louvre doesn't have seats, silly.

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So? It is the Louvre, and she can see the Naked Maja, without her French lingerie.

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I think that‘s a Spanish painting, and it's not in Paris.

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Well, you know, that famous one, of some naked lady.

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Yes, but I think she's dressed – in a dress – and she's smiling. Or naked ... Oh, but there are so many women in Paris either naked or dressed!

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Oh.

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But you will go to the theater and the museums and tell us all about them, won't you, Shoko?

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Yes, when I have the time – and the money.

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…

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“Boulangerie!”

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“Patisserie!”

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Hey, they rhyme with “lingerie”!

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But they make you fatter, so they don't rhyme – not if you want to look good!

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(Universal laughter.)

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Ah, Gerard Philippe!

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Jeanne Moreau!

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Brigitte Bardot!

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Ugh.

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?

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Who's she?

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Before your time, Miho.

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Oh.

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Girls, I'll write you everything … promise.

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Will you? Will you?

–
(Universal smiles.)

And so the party goes on.

But Kazuko doesn‘t envy Shoko. She likes it here; she has come to like Tokyo very much – with a few complaints, but only a few and those mostly minor. Of course, she'd prefer to be home in Kyoto, but there is the company, her friends and colleagues, Roberta and the others. And Kazuo, who really can't leave Tokyo. And then the door opens and she sees him. So do the girls, and they look back at Kazuko and a few of them forget Paris for a moment and envy her.

***

No, perhaps it was really just in the nature and not necessarily the materials of the work, I convolutedly decided to myself: the city, my way of loving – I had tried to look
with
not
at
the lover – the language I have been fumbling with so as to speak with – well …

Lang had suddenly found himself in this cruel city – that is, it can sometimes appear to be cruel to one who is not prepared to see it on its own terms, terms that can also be very playful when not sticking to a schedule – so here he was, estranged more or less from Roberta and tossed between two or three choices that he wasn't really wholly aware of, and suddenly a man of few words, and most of those the same, repeated, unlike the even more self-convoluting VZ, or the delirious Marianne, or the more athletic dash dash dash of Roberta, or the ever-sober Arlene, or the careful, insightful Cafferty, and so he was, in a word, at a loss for them, but not yet happily so. He, I, could not yet feel as light as we felt bereft. So for that time then it was enough – enough! it was overwhelmingly consoling – to have these friends with and around us. But Kazuko, Hiroko and Kazuo, even Hiromi, Hiro and Kaoru, and their styles of talking? I wanted to consider them friends too, they were Tokyoites, after all, more or less, as were the others, or were becoming so, certainly … But could I ever become more than the material of the thing, more than the one who simply wrote the city?

***

His bulb in my mouth, my petals in his.

***

URBI ET ORBI

Amsterdam, a song

Brussels, a bar

Cahors, some photographs

Dublin, a bar

Easter Island, an ad

Frankfurt, a newspaper

Ghent, Lang's shirt

Hollywood, a hair salon

Istanbul, a menu

Jena, a bookstore

Kamakura, Ozu's train

Lima, DR's home

Mariannas, her islands

Napoli, an ice cream

Oberlin, a school

Paris, a boutique

Quebec, a sculptress

Shanghai, a visit

Ùstica, the sun-god

Vienna, a woman

Warsaw, a record shop

Xian, a source

Yorkshire, a friend

Zürich, Marianne's photo of me at Joyce's grave

***

–
And so what's new?

–
We haven't spoken in so very long.

–
Only so many?

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Ah, your Italian accent!

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On whose account?

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Who's counting, indeed?

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Indeed, Lang?

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Inaction, indeed.

***

Buddha's balls, Buddha's cunt.

***

–
How long do you think it would take us to walk all the way there from here, Otemachi to Shibuya?

–
Why would you even want to? That's what the subways are for, and the busses, and taxis.

–
I know, I know, let Lang walk all over the place if he likes. But how long would it take, do you think? Let's say I aim for Ginza first, twenty-five minutes at most; then Kasumigaseki, twenty; then Roppongi, maybe forty, that's an hour and twenty-five minutes; then Shibuya, forty, that makes two hours and fifteen minutes. Could that be right? I'd have thought about three hours. Hey!, we missed my station. Oh well, we may as well walk to the next, eh?

And he does, and does, and does; on to the next, and to the next, and to the next. Hiro's instincts were right, and a surprise to us all – and then he tried it again, Aoyama to Shinjuku; and yet again, Shinjuko to Ikebukuro. He began to discover another Tokyo, and reported it all back to us. Some months later he started a club of “Tokyo Walkers” – he may even have met a girl.

***

As reading becomes writing. Some years ago reading heavily in a subject and projecting a two or three years' reading schedule ahead. A curious allusion lead him on to what he thought would be a short detour and while on that track he was lead further again astray on one more digression of reading (to which of course his whole interest was given) which, it goes without saying, lead him ... and lead ... and ... Needless to say, that initial reading is years behind him now; as much perhaps as he has tried to keep the whole and origin in mind, and even managed on occasion short trips back to various crossroads, which naturally entailed their own new detours until these many directions swept him into the whirlwind of an unimagined reading where all these echoes (with their own multi-directioned ways) of books read, unread, to-be-read – the whole a part the parts a whole: all of the innumerable books, the read and the unread now bound in him as he walks the library of Tokyo.

***

Her small breasts surmounted by nerve ends – meridians of the compass rose – his hand under her blouse, the moon silvered under the stars.

***

Tragic, trivial Tokio, Cafferty says.

***

–
Where is it, Kaoru?

–
Takasaki? It's in Gumma, one of the prefectures bordering Tokyo. Perhaps we are becoming a suburb, but we have our own culture, our history, our uniqueness. I know Lang and Van Zandt say they hated the place, but they only spent one weekend there, how could they appreciate Takasaki?

–
What did they say?, they said it was either an overgrown village with a department store or a stunted city that was pockmarked with rice paddies. VZ said there was no talking to be had with farmers' daughters whose teeth were either gold, missing or black, not blackened. And as for the men, well, the leisure suit has a permanent home in Takasaki. Lang said that the only local traditions were to be found inside a whisky bottle in an ersatz 1946 Ginza nightclub, or siting on mildewy tatami so as to give the all-weather insects easier access to one's already weak blood. And that the children had all just emerged from the forest, their parents not having had the wisdom and compassion to strangle them at birth. And that as for –

–
Enough. They cannot appreciate Takasaki. They are so, so wrong.

–
Really, Kaoru?

***

Coming up for air, wiping the hair from her tongue.

***

SCENE ELEVEN: SOBU LINE

The train is a piece of mobile architecture, yellow, cutting east-west across the city – whoosh! under the bridge at Ochanomizu – they say there is an Aleph there – and as it moves east to west she walks backwards in time; she walks through the train to the end; when it reverses directions, she does likewise. But within each train car she needs to inspect every face of every passenger, and so accordingly as she walks one way in reverse to the train's direction, she also describes a squiggle as she weaves in and out of the standing passengers. And of course, these various motions and directions and feints as the train lurches or comes to a halt or as passengers jostle against one another and against her, are all again repeated when the train itself reverses direction on its way, well, no, not “home” – what is a train's home but the track?, or the “yard,” cold, dark, and anonymous (see
Human Desire
for this). But then too it is a part of a train's function to allow ingress and egress at each stop along the way (she
would
have gotten a local!), and thus we find her also moving in a direction perpendicular to her movement in time (double: the train and she on it moving forward, she walking towards the past, ground already covered), perpendicular too to the circles and weaves she describes, like a bloated crucifix – or in fact, like a … well, a train track, ties and all.