“But at least it's going to be brilliant.”
“Un-freakin' believable.”
We pile out of the buses; Tucker and I organize the foreigners and associated Japanese so everybody knows what is going on.
“Okay, come here; that is where you get your lift ticket. That is our lodge…”
I catch sight of some beautiful Japanese girls; I take note of the breathtaking scenery. But then I pull away from the group. I am a much better snowboarder and this trip, this trip, I have no feeling of sociality in my heart. It’s really falling apart now, and I need to renew myself with pure sport.. Somewhere, elevation 4000m, the sight lines are totally open, the heart thrills at the grand vistas that unfold from ridge unto undulating ridge, a veritable sea of mountains stretching as far as the eye can see. And this also—the crystalline perfection of winter air, the hoarfrost, the icy damp of snow crystals that have worked their way between jacket and ski pants. “A dagger in the heart” one writes of cute lost blonde girls small as a button; “a knife down one's throat”--the sensation of countryside opening up before one as one leaves the city—all of its history and baggage—behind; the pain that is so deep, so fundamental, that one is incapacitated and speechless—such terminology can only be reserved for communion with nature, so terrible, so unforgiving, against which our measures of human lives are so frail.
Is there any other way it would happen? The storm hits me at the top of Flattern Peak 2, and here is total white-out; here is visibility two point five meters. Siberia! Stalingrad! The nightmares of winterbound soldiers thousands of kilometers from home. Only indistinct shapes can be seen in the distance; the ropeways mark the path to trails, but whether one returns to the main gate, whether one skis deeper into the park—this is unknown. I am susceptible, of course, to the glorification of the inaccessible and luxuriant where words else fail. Do we read Hemingway because the trauma of senseless slaughter has given him highest wisdom? Or are we voyeurs (and not even so much as our parents' parents' generation) to bohemian Paris, Duisburg limousines, the Crillon, laughing rotund Greek counts both superior and beneath us? These thoughts race through the mind of a snow-bound skier, though practicality returns with the strapping of boot to board, inches off the cliff wall. And then, with heart pounding, to leap off; to jump into the void, and be consumed instantly with the immediate task of meeting the onrush of terrain with a skilled and practiced eye. A sloosh here, and a slash there; a long slide down one gentle incline to fishtail against the sudden approach of tall fir-trees. And then suddenly air where ground is expected; an only subconscious noting of a buried flagline; one is off-piste now, one is off-piste now, the snow is two feet deep and utterly ungroomed. Losing velocity is equal to suicide.
[Okay this is what happened. I have already lost. They came over to me at workplace (and of course a they, no Japanese person ever dares confront an American one-on-one) and told me I wouldn’t be here next year.]
In pure powder, one is weightless. There are over thirty commonly used words to describe various types of snow, but the best, the very best, is champagne—a frothy light nothingness that melts beneath one's skis, that offers minimal resistance yet effortless support. To crash into a bank of champagne is to sink into a perfect pillow of utterly ethereal fluff. In World War II an Allied pilot fell six miles from the sky and landed in a bank of champagne—he survived, whereas any other surface then known to man would have spelled instant death. Flip-turn, flip-turn, flip-turn. In a cloud bank now, I slide through acres of champagne without the slightest expenditure of energy, sense of time, or sensation of gravity. This goes on for seeming eternity. But as quickly as it begins, the trees are now starting to creep in close, we're out of the fog now to noticeably lower terrain, and finally, in a little valley with a melting stream at the bottom, I slush out of snowboardable terrain to collapse, exhausted, into a convenient bank, and seek to take my bearings, knowing a long trek now awaits, if only that much, to return simply to the place I began.
[I wouldn’t weep before them. It was all going to happen anyway. I did great work. Towards the end when I was sensing the movement, I went from sixty hours a week to seventy. But I had disturbed the ‘wa,’ the Japanese harmony. It was simply unseemly to have a twenty-something pushing around a middle-aged man. And the apparent police record; all the rumors of outside trouble—these didn’t help.]
Is this all metaphor? Maybe. Maybe I'm writing this just for you, maybe I can't stop. But I know the tears, then, are real, the salt water blur behind complete opaque gold-mirrored lenses of my ski goggles, and the central, central pain, a pain like a sensation of freezing—although I am not cold—that burns to the very core. This is the end; this is the end. Winter is here. In my heart had been borne a hatred so intense that my face became a smiling mask. This isn't “Fear and Trembling;” this isn't about grudges or vendettas or counterstrikes delivered decades later. Rather everything happened the only way it could have happened, and I knew who was behind it, and it was only hours before I returned to the lodge, the sky already evening and twinkling with stars, and trip-mates worried but relieved at my safe return, but everyone already gossiping I'm not going to be renewed on contract next year. It has a strange feeling this time; those events that had disrupted into non-linearity, as compared to the instant 1-2-3 of the precipitating crisis. Heady days and strangely totalitarian skies; the autumnal and spring winds, the winter that melted away; transition Tokyo.
[All those English teachers on their programmes; their ready-made friends; their two thousand a month. How fortunate they are and not even knowing who did everything for them. And me and my savings and built-up infrastructure, and relationships that all depended on continual high salary (how could I maintain ties with the clubs if I didn’t have four thou in discretionary spending a month at the very least?)]
And even Tucker is falling behind as I become an eater of pure light and a drinker of mere energy. I will lose my job. But who cares? I will cease all contact with everyone else, but what to matter? The dizzying faces of other human beings, agents of a LeFauve who is actually doing nothing; the workplace conflicts that make us too aesthetically or intellectually outraged to even bother with this thing called reality; I am now infinitely beyond the reach of any other human being, and I can’t be bothered with your commonplace concerns. The crash is coming. The crash is coming. Like a dizzying ride down a mountainside of pure, pure snow, I know that I have exceeded all safety boundaries years or eons ago, and the city is conquered, supplicant, legs spread and yielding before my sarcastic, unaccepting, coldly assessing eye. Goodbye Charis! You leave after I yell at you in a fit of rage, calling you a whore. Goodbye Tucker! Your mercilessly bottom-line personality annoys me, and I don’t need you as much as you need me. Goodbye Shan! You are destined to be judged by the merciless policies of the Tokyo Metropolitan Criminal Court and deported back to Chinkyland. We should have had deep conversations. We should have talked about Life and Despair and Fate and History, but face it, we’re all too well-off and beautiful to really ever care. I wish I could be deep. I wish I didn’t have to spit in your eye.
That night, the last night in Fukushima, my eyes suddenly open in the darkened room, and I am instantly awake. In the dim light from underneath the door to the hallway, I can tell that nothing is amiss, but I rise up anyway. It's as if something other than the fully conscious decision-making part of my brain is deciding something. Intellectually, I rationalize that I want to take one last dip in the rotemburo, the outdoors bath, so long as I have the opportunity, and I do gather up the materials for this task and then ever-so-gingerly open the door. The hallway is quiet. There might be the faintest of buzzes from the fluorescent lights that line the hallway, but otherwise the silence is only broken by the occasional creaking noises of the wooden building. Through dim corridors and down the stairs I walk and then approach the door to the outdoor bath. Once again the antechamber is unoccupied. I grab one of the plastic hampers to toss my clothing in, and wearing nothin
g but a friendship bracelet on one wrist, walk outdoors into a cold winter night.
My feet curl about the stones set into the ground, and I make my way to the pool. As I dip into the water, it engulfs me in viscous warmth. Then I am submerged, and then I am bubbling air out of my nostrils as I surface a good ways out towards the far edge of the pool. I look up at the sky and my breath is taken away. A trillion little flakes of snow are falling from the sky, and an owl's low hoot provides the only possible counter-point. The scene is of utter tranquility.
--Beautiful, ne?
The female voice, though low and controlled, startles me, but when I turn in the water, it's none other than Tomoko, without a stitch of clothing and completely non-chalant. She has a thin, slender body, with large almost aureole-less nipples on the barest bulge of breasts and her sex covered by a neatly trimmed thatch of dark hair. Somehow I keep my eyes locked with hers.
--Tomoko, what are you doing up?
--I guess same thing you are, hmm.
A sudden splash of water alerts to the presence of the other two girls as well.
--Eiko. Shiori! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to intrude.
--You're not intruding.
I look back. There's no wavering.
--Well okay.
--Don't even talk.
--But I'm sinking to the bottom of society. Why is this happening?
--Don't worry.
Not sex. Actually we know each other so well that I know that there isn't even a possibility of it. Eiko draws her long wet hair out of the water, Shiori measures hers with a turned forearm, and with a mock bringing together of two fingers, Tomoko gives me the most curious of all possible smiles.
HARAJUKU SUNDAY
SECTION II
VII.
Nietzsche: "If you stare too long into the abyss, it will start to stare back at you." The abyss started to stare back at me that day, in the low-slung, sleazy light of Hisako's apartment, distorted by chemicals. The abyss was the burnt residue of heroin in metal cans, the haze that came across us, sinking us into timelessness, and the hunger for more that always came. "No wait," I said, in hour twenty-three of a near-sleepless weekend, and pushed for an interruption in our downward spiral. We toked instead; or took pills. There are the psychotherapeutic claims made about it. I never "rolled" myself, felt that oft-reported giddiness or euphoria. I merely understood. The Japanese fear this stuff. Their entire cultural edifice is built on command and control. Smoke up, madchen: (we did).
"Etchi shitai?" she asked. Do you wanna do it? OK, I replied. And I removed her clothing, piece by piece until her thin adolescent body lay on the sheets bare and nude. She never moved a muscle to help us: she lay perfectly still, and suffered me to move her limbs. I thrust myself upon her: under drugs we lasted for three hours and both cried out. Thus an entire weekend could pass, lost in our dream world. When hunger came, we checked first if it were light, and walked out for fast food or Yoshinoya. Shibuya, under chemicals, seemed more glossy and normal. Everybody streamed about: they had their agendas.
"Look, don't you wanna stop?" I would say this six or seven times. "Yamenai"
Why do we think sex degrading for a girl? I am no original artist of this question. There are those who don't, true, but the consensus is otherwise general. I felt she had sacrificed no purity for our love; I was the pure one. The thought itself compelled me across her body and onto her face. I thought hostile and degrading thoughts even in the act of love. I wanted to inject through action my scorn and contempt into her mind and thoughts as my body injected into hers. But this was impossible-this was childish thinking. And then, late on Sunday, the clock hands would march inexorably towards the last train, and I would be left, in passing lights, to ponder the meaning of life on a train heading north out of Tokyo.
I don't know if I would have "sunk," so to speak, into drug use if not for meeting Hisako. But with her ready supply (she traded her body for drugs, I'm sure) of a virtual pharmacopia, she kept me on heroin until I was a regular. Life became easier: I smiled more to my colleagues, never even thought about the environment of fear and loathing I had inspired through my own behavior, and I discovered new avenues for introspection. The first MDMA trip is like a door opening: you understand your own traumas. Every drug experience after that, once you have sliced open your glistening sac of mind-flesh, puts you on a firmer platform. You become more powerful than the uninitiate. With drugs, the very levels of your consciousness become separated. Those of weak character or timidity become frightened at this point, and have been known to have "bad trips." Hisako, after one very extended hash session, had one of these. They turn to those they need, and beg the protection of physical arms. Those who have lived through fire have no worries: they indulge in their psychopathy, the understanding that at the base of it all, we are not our personalities, we are not our voice, we are not our unvoiced thoughts. We are simply the thread of the Will. Having achieved this wisdom, decades of human experience are crossed in hours. Suddenly, we are hundreds of years old in our young bodies. And our abilities to manipulate less tutored brains becomes more refined.
Sometime in late winter I had asked Narumi on a date. She was thirty and beautiful. But in my mind was only the desire to punish: between the loss of Chie and the early hostility to Hisa, I was playing for cultural stakes. I advanced: chevalier avec fleur. I kept silent, as the joker laughed. Over the course of five days, I worked, in perfect honor, and at the right interval, sent over my number. She enjoyed every second of it; she lapped it up; her friend, at the end, withdrew uncertainly. When we met, I had taken a long voyage to go there. Her next chess move was including our ostensible group of friends. Joker was present: he changed the venue from the desired foreign to standard Japanese. I could barely touch the food. Narumi blushed, and played the bashful bride. Joker worked into me. I invited some other friends since it was going to be a group occasion. In the end, easy-going Trevor called her Naru-chan and got her phone number. None of this was outside the rules. But we were thinking the same thoughts, and when the moment was right, I had enjoyed my fill and backed away. I remember her face, torn up in sadness. Joker was not subdued, asking insistently what was wrong. Later I saw him, and finally he, too, had shut up. One thirty year old woman and one late thirty man: recognized experts in their field, fluent in English, yet I at twenty-three walked away with the sweet satisfaction; I was the teacher. In my defense, I played this game only to demonstrate that I knew the culture better than those who claimed to know me. But this knowledge did not save me from the relentless silence of the disapproving group, and I fell deeper into sickness.
For Hisako, the levers of control were ever more readily available because of her youth and complete decadence. By the time I first met her (October), she had become adept, through trial and error, at exactly how much push she could give one of her victims. Middle-management was her target of choice: men in their late thirties or forties, men who had families and reputations to uphold. She was careful to take only what she could: she was a tax. In the end, she overplayed one hand and accepted the consequences. This hidden brutality I deplore.
For my part, I am guilty, too, of course, but all I can report is that I met her on the way down, and "she seduced me." (All molesters say this.) In the new clear light, I made the choice to move on: I endured. I pondered, for less than a second, withdrawal. Breakthrough finally occurred only with continued drug use. I broke through mimetic consciousness, to inhabit others as more living and ideal than in reality; more powerful in their control over representation than even me. Planning out the scenario, I thought it would go this way: instead it went that, and demanded only minor future revision. They will invent new DSM categories for this; new philosophies must be constructed. But having returned now to the present-day, we have no choice but to spin back again.
"Send me shooting into that murky stream." What brilliance in adolescence. I wonder what has become of him: the poet of our teenage years. My own work, still competent, seems s
o much more immature. I hint at the dream of sex; he breaks through to the nihilism beyond. After sex with Hisa, there's nothing left to experience: I have done it all. All that remains is pure biological imperative: platonic forms of a young girl's body on primitive consciousness. This I abuse, insofar as pain itself is more than mere sensation.
"Send me shooting into that murky stream." This was childhood: a murky stream of undeveloped impressions. Examine the five-year old, her thoughts unformed; responding simply to kindness and laughter; she does not know of exploitation. With Hisa, I could only perform because she was a whore. There is no way I could deflower a young girl child short of being a faunlet of my own. But our investigations reveal this goes on all the time. Others are deeper into the darkness. It is a wonder all has not already been lost.
Harajuku Sunday Page 12