by Sarah Sheard
I waited.
I think you should go to Japan.
There it was. Staring up at me. The New York Times. Entertainment section. The black box on the bottom of the second page announcing that Akira was taking his orchestra on tour to Japan. Sometime in early spring. The itinerary listed the major cities but gave no exact dates. April. I’d have to work to get my money by then ...
Oh, you’ll do that, don’t worry, Marjorie said. Call the orchestra. Find out the itinerary. Hell. Call Akira himself. It’s been three years. He’s probably dying to hear how you’re doing. You wait much longer, the guy’s likely to have forgotten you completely.
I decided to make the call with cash at a quiet hotel lobby. It was easier than having to explain long distance to Berlin on my parents’ bill. Marjorie waited for me in the bar. Information gave me the symphony office number. All I had to do now was pick up the phone, ask for Akira’s secretary and explain that I was an old friend. Which I was, wasn’t I? I picked up the receiver. Put it down. What would I say? What if they didn’t give out that kind of information? What if they put me through to Akira? This was ridiculous. I felt fourteen again. This should be as easy as – this couldn’t be harder than going backstage ever was. Plus how else was I going to find out. What if I went all the way over to Japan and couldn’t find him?
I dialed the number.
There was a crackle. The operator’s voice.
Please deposit three-eighty.
I fumbled with my stack of coins and dropped them. You idiot.
There was a scriitch and then a voice in German said something to my operator.
Go ahead please.
My throat was dry. A-Akira Tsutsuma’s secretary please.
Long pause.
I’m sorry. Could you repeat that?
I spoke up, glancing around the lobby. Akira Tsutsuma please – I mean his secretary please.
May I help you? It was a woman’s voice. Smooth. American-sounding. Yes, I’m an old friend of the Maestro’s. A-a neighbour from Toronto. I heard about his Japan tour and I happen to be going over there around that time – I paused and wiped my hand on my shirt, ready for more coins – so if you could give me a sense of his itinerary I’d be able to, to ...
Are you connected with the symphony in Toronto?
Ah no, it’s strictly a personal ah –
Are you connected with the press in any way? No, as I said, it’s a personal connection only.
I’m sorry, I’ll have to check with Mr Tsutsuma first. I can’t give out information without permission.
I understand. Can I call back? It’ll be kind of hard for you to reach me.
If you wish.
I hung up.
Two days later. Same time, same place.
Hello, it’s me again. I called earlier about Mr Tsutsuma’s itinerary. Did you get a chance to –
Just a moment. She was riffling through paper. Did that mean?
She was back. Yes, I spoke with the Maestro. He has given me permission. I’ll put something in the mail to you. Your address please?
He remembered me! He remembered me! My voice wobbly as I dictated my address. Thanks very much. Wonderful.
She hung up.
I dragged Marjorie off her bar stool in a bear hug.
It worked. I did it.
*
I got to the mail before my folks could and picked up the envelope. A fat one with the orchestra’s logo in black and gold at the top left-hand corner which I recognized immediately – and remembered with a guilty start, why. The day after Akira moved out, I had gone back to his house. Bags of garbage were piled up in the back yard. I went through them, rummaging for souvenirs. I couldn’t stop myself. I turned up a mass of crumpled correspondence, envelopes with the black and gold logo, love letters in Japanese, signed in English by someone called Makiko, a worn-out pair of conducting slippers, empty cigarette packages, sake bottles, magazines, an old turtleneck.
I took the envelope up to my room and tore it open. The itinerary fell out, along with the most neutral of cover letters, signed by his secretary. Enclosed, please find Mr Tsutsuma’s itinerary, as requested. Best regards, Ms. J. Appleberg. No message from Akira. No little P. S. Oh well.
Eight pages. He opened the tour in Tokyo, at the – Concert Hall, on April 3rd. Two nights in Tokyo. April 5th. On to Hokkaido. I scanned the place names. None I recognized. Then Bejing, China! A week there. Then back to Honshu. Okinawa. Big hops. He was on the road or in the air virtually every day until the beginning of May, when he returned to Tokyo for two days before flying back to Berlin.
I folded up the letter. What a life. Not much playtime inside that tour. I could try to meet him at the beginning, in Tokyo, but right after that he flew off to Hokkaido. If I missed him in Tokyo, which was entirely possible given the hoopla that usually opened big tours like this one, I knew I couldn’t afford to go chasing after him by air. No, Tokyo at the end was my best bet. If I began my trip to coincide with the end of his, I missed the cherry blossoms and risked running into the rainy season. I had just enough money to last me five weeks if I lived on rice and noodles.
I decided to go over at the beginning of April.
Start off in Tokyo, resist the impulse to look him up then. Go on to Kyoto, Nara. See the blossoms. Undertake my pilgrimage properly. Then return to Tokyo. Meet him in that first week of May. And come home.
Already I visualised the backstage entrance of the concert hall, began to rehearse how I would slip through Security, describing myself in terms Akira would recognize when word was carried to him. He was a lot more famous now, but I was older. Authority didn’t rattle me quite as much as it had when I’d been a kid. I hoped.
I picked up the phone and began dialling Marjorie. Such decision-making demanded a celebration.
I am in Tokyo. It’s the night of our reunion. I am going backstage to meet Akira at last. I head down a long corridor that twists and turns like the contours of an amphitheatre. At last I find the dressing room door with his name in Japanese characters. I knock and then comes that magical moment. He opens the door and his face lights up with joy. We rush into one another’s arms. We talk for a while and everything seems to be going well but the way he looks at my face is odd. He keeps glancing over at me and then away as if embarrassed slightly. People come by to pick him up so I say goodbye and leave. On the way out I touch my face. Something’s wrong. I dash to the bathroom and discover my face is covered in characters painted in mud. I can’t read them! There are weeds in my hair too, as though I’ve been dredged up from the bottom of a pond. How could this have happened to me today, of all days? I am in a panic to know what the characters mean. And furious that my friends could have let me go backstage looking like this. But I have this terrible feeling that I’ve done it to myself and forgotten.
The Bridge (O-hashi) of Dreams.
The preparations for flight, extricating myself from my life were a test of my desire. Organizing the money, tickets, clothes and saying goodbye took almost as long as the trip itself would.
I finished my forty-hour evening course in conversational Japanese, quit my job, bought yen, lost my passport, found it, lost it, found it, packed my bags, updated my address book, took a last look around my room, wondering what I’d forgotten. After fantasizing about this trip, eating and breathing it for so long, I was finally only hours away from it at last. My father was rewiring the electricity throughout the house so it was difficult to see during those days. In pure nervousness and haste, I fell down the pitch-dark stairs, carrying my bag to the front door.
Marjorie’s cup clinking against mine in the airport lounge. Her toast – ‘to the heart.’ I remembered all the times I’d heard planes flying overhead and longed to be on one headed for Japan. And now I am strapped into my seat on April Fools’ Day, flying to Vancouver. Tomorrow, Japan!
Stewardesses in sarongs, hummingbird bright, pin orchids to our lapels with delicate fingers before turning to push heavy food carts up the
aisles like stevedores. Their sarongs are invisibly pleated for ease in bending over us. Everyone drinks non-stop until the artificial night falls and then the stewardesses pull down the blinds and pass out thin blankets.
The plane is descending. Below us, palm trees, flat roofs, bevelled streams, tailored countryside. A dark, unfamiliar green. Even the sky has a green tint to it.
I have landed on Akira’s planet.
Narita airport. An hour later I am through.
*
Absolutely stunned with fatigue. My balloon head is attached to my body by a little string. The shops and restaurants are so narrow and only one storey high. I pick up my bag and walk down into the subway. The signs are in both English and Japanese. When the train comes in I am shocked by how small it is inside, rather like a British train, with velour sofas. It is rush hour and I’m packed in with businessmen, wearing identical, old-fashioned pinstriped suits with cuffs, who steal glances at me. No one sits beside me. My shoes are scuffed. I count the stops, three, four, five. This is mine. Roppongi. I make up my mind I won’t ask for help until I am desperate. Akira. Where are you?
I go outside and hail a taxi. I show the driver my map and the address of the hotel but he seems confused. I was warned that in Tokyo addresses only give a general indication. The street numbers do not relate to one another but rather to when the building was constructed. Streets are under constant reconstruction so maps continually go out of date. The cabbie studies the map for another minute and then gets out and disappears. Leaving me sitting in the cab with the motor running. Fifteen minutes go by. I begin wondering whether or not he’s been too shy to ask me to get out and has run off to hide from me, gaijin woman, but I am too tired to get out again. Suddenly there he is, back again. We set off. A few minutes later, he pulls up in front of my hotel. The taxi door and the trunk both swing open automatically and the concierge appears at the curb with a clipboard. I carry my bag after him. Arriving. Always arriving and never quite getting there. I am so tired. But I’m in downtown Tokyo at last.
I’m in bed, floating out my window into the Tokyo night sky.
*
I memorized each corner as I turned it and strolled up and down a dozen blocks as strange as Mars. The streets, the stores, the curbs were out of a dream I’d had a hundred times but never with accuracy. No westerners, no blacks here. An old woman, clutching her shopping bags, passed me in traditional geta and kimono. I was too shy to go into a restaurant yet but I passed a stationery store and then backtracked and looked through the window again. I wanted to write letters and keep notes. I went in. Much bowing and greeting by the elderly man behind the counter. I picked up a pen and a notebook and held them up. Ahhh, he said. Pen! Pen! I echoed and waved the notebook. Ikura desu-ka? How much? Ahhh, he bowed and wrote the price down on a tiny slip of paper and held it out to me. 250Y. I had used money for the first time.
I traced my way back to the hotel, noticing that some of the morning’s landmarks had disappeared and new ones had taken their place. The rain had got heavy and my head felt thick. I took a hot shower and fell asleep by nine but hunger woke me up again and I went downstairs to the hotel coffee-shop to eat dinner. The western knives and forks on my table were the largest I have ever handled. Like salad tools. They must think gaijin are huge-mouthed giants. I went back to my room and finally fell asleep at five a.m. According to my guide book, nose-blowing is unspeakably offensive in this country. What am I to do with this head cold?
I dropped a 100Y coin into the slot on the TV in my hotel room. The commercials hooked me. I flicked the dial until I found more of them. They ran in a bunch for twenty minutes or so and then didn’t come on again for another hour. Technically they looked to be state-of-the-art and much funnier than our own. Famous North Americans were endorsing Japanese products. I saw Andy Warhol, John Travolta and Pat Boone doing spots for videotape, soft drinks, pudding cups. Some of the ads were confusing. Even after several viewings I couldn’t spot the product. The best ones combined real with animated: cats on trampolines, penguins weeping from train windows shouting ‘Suntory Can Beer-u!,’ soya-bean weightlifters heaving an entire baseball team over backwards. A girl in a fluorescent kimono and hi-rise American sneakers, holding her chin in her hands, repeating a nonsense syllable, ‘Unh-hunh-hunh-hunh!’
On the street I’ve been passing teenagers wearing t-shirts chastely printed with English phrases like: ‘Just good. Just now. Freckle.’ Or, ‘Always being high spirits. Anytime keep lively.’ Or, ’Impudent Company.’ ’Assort, persist, contact.’
In my room I found a magazine with a photograph of a woman in a kimono and voluminous obi. It is nightfall and she is stooping to enter her car. There is rain on the windshield. Her face is in shadow except for a disc of light that illuminates one cheek, leaving legible only an expression of attentive patience with her own awkwardness, caught between two cultures. The photograph draws me back to the day I first imagined myself coming to this place.
A few days later, on the train to Kyoto, I study her face again. She has not changed her expression with time. Even slightly.
I have been trying to leave behind one-yen pieces. They are almost worthless and take up pocket room. I left a stack of them on the ledge of a public washroom only to have an elderly woman come hobbling after me to return it. I let one drop while standing to catch a bus and two people instantly stooped to retrieve it for me. Little, sticky things. I gave up and threw them into the temple boxes.
A slight hesitancy in speech. I’ve taken it on to some degree. As though the words get turned around once before finding their way out.
The more I think about myself the more distressed I become. All the more useless since I am so far away from home and I can only make things worse. Rolling matters around in my head just makes them misshapen.
Standing by the driver’s mirror, I see my shirt move. That’s my breathing! I discover with a pang of joy. I see my shirt move with my breathing. That’s me inside that shirt!
I wasn’t expecting this.
Almost full moon. I’ve been mute for days now.
The claustrophobia. A feeling of suffocation inside my own body. I roll around trying to pass this test, of my ability to remain calm, to sleep and breathe at the same time. Below my window, a man sings aloud in the street, his voice bouncing off the tiled roofs. He stops but a cat has found his way to my window and he too begins to howl. My room is a cage, too small to stand up inside, my legs stick out the window. Such cold air, I can see my breath.
I have ordered a bean mush with glutinous rice cake by mistake. My throat balks at the hot sweetness. The salted tangle-seaweed cuts it somewhat, clears my tongue. I pick up my hashi, plunge back in again. Salt and sweetness side by side like spring and fall in my mouth.
What is it I need to know? Remembering the translation of the tea scroll in Daitokuji temple: The flower is red, the willow is green. That is all there is to know.
The motif appears on the tea vessels. The red maple and the cherry blossom. Something dying away and something springing up. Spring and fall occur simultaneously in Japan.
Two days’ silence.
After dinner, I strolled through the Gion district to a junction of two historical streets preserved as national treasures. I stood on a bridge and all down the canal, as far as I could see, branches sagging with blossoms trolled in the current. A raft of petals, caught under the bridge, quaked below me. As night fell, the geisha began emerging, making their way to the nightclubs, their geta clip-clopping across the cobblestone bridges. Another living woodcut. I walked back to the main street where I passed two well-dressed young men lying face down in vomit. Their girlfriends were huddled together crying. As I walked up the steps to Maruyama Park to see the Weeping Cherry Tree, I passed more drunk couples. It was Saturday night, the last weekend of Hanami festival. People had been drinking in the park since sunset or so ... They were dancing in little groups, singing songs, falling down. They have brought tatami matting and portable
gas hibachis and jeroboams of sake and beer. I passed entire families dozing on their tatami in their party clothes, stretched out like corpses, white socks glowing in the dark.
*
An apparition under floodlights at the top of the hill, she’s surrounded by a bamboo fence – this grandmother of cherry trees, as tall as a willow. Among the pink blossoms, spikes of delicate green are just beginning to poke through. The trunk has been artificially twisted like taffy by gardeners to grow up in a tight spiral. A spiralled upbringing. Do I share that with her? The turns do give the tree more height somehow, more of a sense of having grown year by year. Couples emerge from the shadows to take pictures of the tree, then stagger off. Everyone is drunk tonight.
I walk back down the hill past the kiosks selling Fujifilm, sake, grilled octopus, decorative live carp and tea. There is a gentleness in the way people are enjoying one another’s company – not locked in intellectual conversation but engaged in something else quite subtle and different. They are enjoying the air, the blossoms, the food, their own civility. Petals clog the fountains, flutter over the revellers. I catch one in my sake cup.
On the temple steps going out, a couple stands with a remote-control microphone and a cassette deck. Passersby sing into the mike, accompanied by the cassette music. One man holds the book of lyrics up so his wife can read as she sings.
Over the heads of the people on the escalator, I see a poster coming towards me. Akira, hair flying, and the Tokyo orchestra. Flit. Gone.
I should try to call my parents today. I am reading Yukio Mishima’s book, full of masculine treachery and manipulative women. The writing has infected my mind with ugly voices and distasteful imaginings. Wanting positive action, I went out and bought my Bullet ticket to Tokyo. I booked a seat on the north side of the train, hoping to see Fujiyama this trip. After lunch I crawled up to the seventh floor of Kyoto Tower hotel to read the Mainichi, The Japan Times, The Asahi Shinbun in the coffee lounge. Shirley MacLaine and Robert Duvall have won the Academy Awards. Two days ago was Good Friday. Liberace is visiting China. Canada never makes the news.