Hey Mortality

by Kinsella, Luke

  I found it strikingly ironic that Yakuza Guy was the only person with a No Junk Mail sticker on his letter box, and it made me wonder where exactly he got all of the newspaper to paste across his windows. Regardless, it was learning this information about the man in 505, that led me to even more distraction from losing Liar, and from being so alone and lost. Obsessing still about the red box, but now a new obsession had crept into my mind. But it would not be ending there either.

  It was on the suggestion of Canadian Guy that I should go outside and take a look around Tokyo. He was right, and being holed up in the house with only alcohol as my friend, and paranoia as my enemy, was a good enough reason for me to start doing something that would help to distract my mind. I decided to start, as anyone would, with the area around my house. The unusual arcade.

  3

  As one obsession becomes suppressed, another one creeps to life, and it is with this new obsession that I find myself on a late warm July afternoon with a pen and paper in my hand, as I map out the arcade to the finest of detail.

  The arcade contains a total of forty-four shops, and is dedicated to a cartoon character. At the top of the arcade sits the Plum Ship, and directly outside the front of the steps there is a statue of this character. Often, I have seen people taking his photograph or posing with him as he interrupts their walk. The name of the statue is Rocky Joe, a boxer in a story that takes place in the slums of Tokyo. Almost a copy of the movie Rocky; the character goes from poverty to become one of the most famous boxers in Japan. It is this character that is decorated and celebrated so highly along the arcade, with posters, paintings, statues, and even wine sold from the bakery depicting his image.

  The statue of Joe looks incredibly pretentious. A boxer with a slick black quiff hairstyle, red shirt, and brown jeans. His hands in his pockets and a carefree look to him that makes me annoyed. He has two plasters on his face to hide the cuts, presumably following a fight, and he stares. He stares with his painted eyes that look directly at the space where I sit on that third step. Always watching me. Always staring at me. The statue is so incredibly shiny that I am under the belief that somebody around here polishes him on a weekly basis. Maybe that is the job of someone, or maybe the area of the Nihonzutsumi take incredible pride in this image; a cartoon immortalised in statue form.

  There was a time once when I saw one of the homeless men of the arcade, drunk, shouting at the statue, and making fists at Joe. He looked genuinely annoyed, and perhaps in his drunken state, believed that the statue was an actual person. I would feel the same anger toward the pretentious statue if I too were homeless and drunk.

  As thoughts of loneliness and sadness penetrate my mind, I wonder if I am in any better situation than that homeless man fighting with a statue. I am almost with nothing too, and consume perhaps the same or more alcohol than he does on a daily basis.

  As I wander the arcade, I start to map. From the forty-four shops, only a few have their shutters up, the others remain ever closed. What lies behind those closed shutters, who knows; and perhaps there was a time when they would be open to reveal wonderful stalls selling food, alcohol, or clothing. These days, the shutters are sprayed with amateur graffiti and covered in dust that suggests they have not been opened in years.

  At the top of the arcade is a police station, and around it, six homeless men drink from cans of cheap beer. As I walk through the arcade, of the first sixteen shops, only three are open; two that sell second hand clothing, and the Katsu Dental Clinic. Crossing the road from there, there is a medical centre to assist in walking for the old, a tobacco shop, a store offering miscellaneous cleaning products, such as tissues and shampoo, and a Bread Studio with the name Takumi. A bread studio is in fact a bakery, so I have no idea the reason for the confusing name.

  In the next section, amongst closed shutters and sleeping homeless, is a shop called Sunny Cleaning, it even has a tag line: Fresh as a flower in just one day. Beyond that is a store that sells only pyjamas and linen, which makes a mockery of the homeless here that have no need for either, or any money to buy them.

  One of the most surprising shops in the arcade is a food store specialising in Bento Box meals, lunch boxes that contain a selection of rice, pickles, and meat. This shop is called Usaga, and boasts: Since 2011. A strange location to open up a shop just four years ago; but business looks good, and the food seems to be reasonably priced and made from ingredients that were perhaps bought in this very arcade.

  Shoe shops, butchers, tissue shops, more tobacconists, and an electrical goods shop sit along a stretch of arcade. Fujiya Dry Cleaning has four clocks on the wall, and strangely, the optician here has eight clocks. One shop boasts three services, bar, souvenir, and massage, while another shop, which looks like a coffee shop, has a customer sleeping beside a wall that features sixty-six photographs of other customers taken next to flowers.

  At the end section of the arcade, furthest from the Plum Ship, are two broken rides for children; a race car and a horse. The coin slots look to have been smashed off. In the area around the rides, three elderly homeless men sit, waiting for time to remove them from existence. It makes me wonder how they ended up like this, how their lives reached a point where they had nothing at all, and how the government did nothing to save them, or to help them. Maybe the government tried, and maybe this is all of their own making; but I am curious to find out exactly what happened.

  Closest to my house is another bakery, a small liquor shop with vending machines for beer and nihonshu outside the door, Ichiyara Photo Studio, a tobacco and magazines shop, a video game centre with three machines that time has clearly and perhaps cleverly forgotten about, and finally, the Chinese restaurant below my house.

  The arcade plays some lovely music as I wander its length taking my notes. I hear a piano version of Bridge Over Troubled Water, some tune that sounds like battle music from a video game, and, to at least keep the music of an eclectic variety, some composition that sounds like Johann Sebastian Bach.

  After mapping the arcade, I head back for one last look, before turning right at the broken rides. Here I find two rival coin laundry shops next door to each other. Oddly, they both choose to close on a Thursday, which to me seems as broken a concept as there can be.

  On the corner sits a Family Mart convenience store, and is generally the supplier of my wine. And, tucked behind Family Mart, in the tightest of alleyways, sits a small red shrine that houses a fox god. The shrine doesn’t appear on any maps, and doesn’t have a name. It is painted as red as the box at the sushi restaurant, and the alleyway it is located inside would remain hidden from anyone. Even if actively seeking out this location to speak to the god, nobody would find it. Even the cats don’t sleep here.

  The shrine isn’t protected by a deity, it seems, but instead, a padlock and an old rusted bicycle lock keep everything tied up and safe.

  I am not a religious person, but neither are most people in Japan. Instead, they worship gods’ only to hold on to the traditions that the country has. And even though I would refer to myself as an apathiest, someone that doesn’t care if god is real or not, I would admit now that every time I pass this shrine, I walk up to its tiny door, and through the red wooden gate, throw in a single coin, and pray. Perhaps this god can only understand the language of foxes, or doesn’t understand my English thoughts; if I even think in English, that is. My brain perhaps thinks in a different language that cannot be understood by anyone, or doesn’t allow communication with all beings or imaginary deities. Still, I make my wish, and wait for it to never transpire, as is always the case, and perhaps always will be.

  As a blanket of darkness settles on the slums, I decide to put an end to my exploring and note taking, and walk back through the arcade toward my home.

  Outside, I see the housemate that lives in the room next to mine, Prostitute. An attractive young woman smoking a cigarette. The cigarette though is so thin that it can’t possibly provide any nicotine or satisfaction. She smiles at me as I
approach, and I nod in return as I pass her at the bottom of the steps.

  4

  Just a one minute walk from the Plum Ship sits the government owned legal red light district of Tokyo, Yoshiwara.

  Smaller in size now compared to the olden days, and once surrounded by a black ditch of water stained by teeth dye, Yoshiwara was a place for sex slaves. The ditch was designed to keep the women trapped inside, and black because of ohaguro, the custom of dying the teeth black with a lead based ink so that the young women slaves of Yoshiwara could look like the black-toothed married women of Japan.

  It is strange to think that the slums and the red light district are just a ten minute walk from the old town of Asakusa; which serves today as one of the most popular tourist destinations in Tokyo, and famous for a temple that is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Japan. So many people visit Asakusa each year, but are blissfully unaware of Yoshiwara or Nihonzutsumi.

  Years ago, a small stream ran from the nearby Sumida River, behind the famous temple of Asakusa, Sensō-ji, and toward Yoshiwara. Boats would stop in Asakusa full of sailors stationed on the river. The sailors would tell their wives that they were taking a boat ride to the temple to pray, but instead, they would continue on, arriving at the entrance gate to Yoshiwara.

  Nowadays, the women here can choose their fate. No longer slaves or sold into prostitution by poverty stricken parents. Back then, there was only one entrance and no escape. These days, the area is wide open and the black ditch is gone.

  Having read the famous book Takekurabe by Ichiyō Higuchi—one of the most important female authors of the last two hundred years in Japan—I am aware of some of Yoshiwara’s past. Ichiyō’s story took place within the darkness of this night-time pleasure town, an area where she herself grew up before her untimely death.

  I have wandered through the streets of Yoshiwara ever since I made the move to the slums. Today, I feel like really exploring the area in detail, finding out more about its history, about why the government is more interested in maintaining a legalised pleasure district, rather than protecting the old, the poor, and the most vulnerable people of Nihonzutsumi.

  I wander to the Shell petrol station that sits on the same street as the Plum Ship, and is a thirty second walk from my home. There is a shiny silver plaque next to a tree. The tree grows silently in the forecourt, a massive weeping willow tree; weeping like the slaves of the past.

  The plaque tells me that the tree is called Mikaeri Yanagi, which translates into English to provide the meaning: Looking-back willow tree. The reason for this name is that the tree marks the entrance to Yoshiwara, where the entrance gate and guard tower once sat. It is said that when people left Yoshiwara after a late night of adultery or debauchery, they looked back at the tree feeling painful reluctance at having to leave.

  As I walk through where the old gate once stood, I see that even though it is broad daylight, many of the establishments have men in business suits wearing earpieces standing outside, and all the neon signs are lit up; needlessly wasting electricity.

  “Sex?” a man outside an establishment called Silky Doll says to me with a grin. I shake my head and continue my walk.

  Smaller willow trees line the length of the road. After about ten minutes of walking past the various high priced establishments, I arrive at Yoshiwara Shrine.

  It is strange to think that at either side of the licensed red light district, there is something of interest that perhaps shouldn’t exist. At the entrance where the old gate used to stand, sits a police station, and at the exit, where the moat would trap the women inside, is a shrine that houses a goddess that protects women. Next to the shrine, a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases marks an ironic end to the pleasure district.

  At Yoshiwara Shrine, a woman dressed in knee high boots and the shortest leather skirt I have seen in my life is standing before god, she bows to signify the end of her working day, and leaves. A regular occurrence perhaps for these women, praying for safety as they leave and return to their boyfriends or heartbroken husbands that cannot bear the thought that they are sleeping with random men for a living; if they even knew.

  Inside the shrine is a signboard featuring a map of the old Yoshiwara; a grid-like area that has diminished over the years, and is no longer surrounded by black moats or guarded by watchtowers. It is interesting to see the scope of this area, how huge it was just a few hundred years ago.

  Next to the sign is a strange image of a face. Black eyebrows, red cheeks, and a red mouth that depicts a frown. Eyes missing; frightening.

  As I wander back through the red light district, I decide to look at a township guide map. I notice a few points of interest that I had never previously given much thought to. The first is the Toden Arakawa Streetcar, the last remaining streetcar that still operates in Tokyo. With a neon headache, I decide to leave Yoshiwara for now, and walk off in the direction of the streetcar.

  After twenty minutes I arrive, following the gentle hum of silent electricity, until I see the old tracks.

  At the streetcar depot nobody is waiting to ride. The only sign of life here, other than the subtle movement of old trams, is a superabundance of starving pigeons waiting for their next meal.

  Opened in 1913, this streetcar somehow survived when all other streetcars were scrapped in Japan some fifty years ago. I consider taking the tram, but because there is no official timetable, I fear that if I do, I will end up in the middle of nowhere with no way of getting back. Perhaps this line was kept open to allow another way for men to access the Yoshiwara area, otherwise I can’t see any other reason for it to still be in operation.

  Close to the streetcar depot is Jōkan-ji Temple, a historical site and cultural asset of Arakawa. It becomes apparent as I enter the temple grounds that this area contains some rather dark history too. The temple dates back to 1665, and with such close proximity to Yoshiwara, it became known to the locals as the Throwaway Temple. A place to throw away unclaimed or discarded dead prostitutes.

  The building itself looks like any other temple, but beyond its shiny walls is a memorial to the unknown dead; and a hidden entrance that leads into a huge cemetery.

  The 1854 Tōkai Earthquake took many lives, and amongst them were young women who had been sold by their parents to the Yoshiwara district to live a life of sex, as slaves; imprisoned by the black water. Those prostitutes were often forced into this trade, and would consider themselves as living in hell, fated to eventually die, and join the other women in a mass grave at Jōkan-ji Temple. After their bodies were used up, when the diseases became too many, when lead poisoning consumed them, when they were simply bought outright by a wealthy man, and then killed to entertain some form of snuff fetish, they would always end up here, Jōkan-ji. Throwaway, Jōkan-ji.

  The dead women weren’t even privy to a proper funeral or burial, instead, they would be wrapped in a straw mat and left outside the temple gates for someone else to collect, burn, and add them to the pile of death and ash.

  As I wander through the cemetery, it becomes obvious where the souls of the twenty-five thousand dead prostitutes are buried. A small tomb is littered with artefacts pertaining to prostitution. “Birth is pain, death is Jōkan-ji,” says an inscription above the tomb. Cosmetic products, hair clips, and make-up sit atop, leaving a trace of death that hasn’t been forgotten. It is even possible to see inside the tomb through an overly exposed metal grate; offering no decency to the dead. Inside, a stacked pile of white urns stretches down into oblivion.

  I leave the tomb with mixed feelings. It makes me wonder why I even visited here. I should have just got on the streetcar and escaped the doom and gloom.

  Also in the temple grounds, a monument to a novelist who used these dead women as a source for his satire, Kafū Nagai. It makes me wonder who would write about such a macabre subject, then I realise that I am no better than him.

  I do take some solace though, as I leave Jōkan-ji Temple, that these women, somehow, despite being unnamed a
nd sharing the same mass grave, and perhaps sharing the same men when they were of the living world, that they will perhaps be remembered somehow; by the monks of this temple, or those interested, as I, in the history of the Tokyo slums.

  As I approach Minowa Station, I can hear the shrill sound of helicopters and sirens; more than one of each. In the distance, I see a pillar of billowing smoke which seems to be attracting the attention of five television helicopters as they circle around the black cloud like flies. An ambulance buzzes by at speed, its sirens adding to the cacophony of mid-afternoon racket. Around the station, there are at least fifteen fire engines. My perfect timing steals me the view of the body of a woman being carried out in a blanket.

  5

  The early morning rain taps at my window; a rain that would have been welcome yesterday in wake of the fire. I lie for a time with my face in my pillow, thinking about her, Liar, and wondering how I so often end up so very alone. I am distracted by things at times, but they, like happiness, fleet away, and my deepest love for that person comes back to my head.

  It feels now, that I have nothing to live for. Waking up is about as exciting as the nightmare that preceded the day of exploration; lonely drinking and paranoid thoughts. Maybe, it is the fault of Japan, a country that has completely broken me. Ripped me up and chewed me and spat me in the direction of the slums. For the moment, just listening to the rain, my only comfort when my life doesn’t feel worth living. Things begin to become too much again. I feel trapped, used, and worthless. I am in need of escape and new distractions. Right now I am empty, all used up, like an empty jar; the lid screwed on tighter than ever before; letting nothing inside, not even hope.