The Condimental Op

by Andrez Bergen

  But in the half-light it could easily be home.

  Almost forgotten —

  A silo in the middle of a sun-drenched field;

  The deserted tin mine

  From a long-lost boom,

  And the crumbling chimneystack.

  Forgotten, cauterized memories struggling now

  To resurface. Of home, of family, of friends,

  Of childhood and living and breathing.

  Things that are so alien now; foreign and Tormenting to revive.

  He huddles there on the rotted floorboards,

  His head propped up on an empty wine cask,

  His eyes transfixed by the image splashed upon the

  Fallen drape, where no image but emptiness should be.

  It could easily be home. The home he’d deserted in

  His blind rush to live and experience.

  Home created by the neon of the street outside;

  Cold, austere and colourless, just like the city.

  The image is the past, and just as irretrievable.

  This is his reality, around him: the squat, the poverty,

  The meaningless existence, the broken furniture and

  The ruin of human frailty;

  Valeska curled up beside him in a ball,

  Unconscious and oblivious in a blur that will soon be his.

  The needle, in his shaking hands, promises that —

  An escape from the awful memories that rear before him,

  Of vitality and warmth, love and sheer joy of living —

  Unbearable thoughts now! —

  It could so easily be home.

  He couldn’t stand that; not knowing what he now lived.

  With one short manoeuvre, home vanished and reality

  Passed out in a welcome coma.

  PART 4:

  RANSACKING THE ARCHIVE

  (ii) Japan

  So that was 1989. Done. Honestly? I feel like gluing those pages together.

  Much later on, for a few lucky years in the early to late 2000s, I worked as a freelance journalist at the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and as the Tokyo Correspondent for a swag of overseas magazines, doing commentary on things Japanese.

  Easy.

  This was before Internet killed the biz, but I love the ‘net so the murder was okay.

  The upcoming articles were originally put together for Geek magazine in the @#1@U.S. in 2008-09, and reprinted in British magazine Impact.

  If you have a keen eye — and have read One Hundred Years of Vicissitude —you might notice that some of this hoo-har filtered across into that novel.

  Chanko-nabe: Food of the Sumo

  Sumo is one of Japan’s more internationally famous sports, probably because the spectacle of two exceptionally fat men — in a nation of exceptionally skinny people — wrestling one another, clad only in loincloths shaped like sexy G-strings is, well, hilarious.

  What most accidental spectators don’t realize is that there’s so much more to the sport than its remarkably hefty rikishi (wrestlers).

  Behind the bulldog bravura of cataclysmic grappling that goes on in the ring are centuries-old traditions like the Shinto-related throwing of salt (that one’s for purification).

  And sumo competitors’ hair, which is precision-slicked into top-knots, is coiffed using a waxy substance called bintsuke abura, the main ingredient of which comes from the berries of the Japanese wax tree, Toxicodendron succedaneum — a member of the same family as poison ivy. It’s been used cosmetically and in hairdressing in Japan for around a thousand years, and is also used by geisha as a waxy base for their makeup.

  Incidentally, this July [2008] the Japanese newspaper, Nikkan Sports, reported that a 15g container of the oil rose from ¥685 to ¥735, prompting sumo stars to demand a pay-rise.

  Even that remarkably revealing loincloth, known as the mawashi, has a story: it’s made of silk, approximately 30 feet long, weighs up to 11 pounds, and sometimes bears the name of a sponsor.

  Ryogoku, located here in Tokyo near the historic centre of this monolithic metropolis, is the home of the sumo. Right outside the west exit of Ryogoku JR station stands the mammoth Kokugikan, the Sumo Hall, with a capacity of 13,000 people. Three of the six national Grand Sumo tournaments happen here.

  Unlike ogling geisha in Kyoto, trainspotting sumo sorts in the streets around Ryogoku is relatively easy, especially since the practitioners of the sport aren’t exactly the waif-like types that geisha or maiko typically are.

  But sumo wrestlers would be nothing without their diet, and — yes — we dangle the word “diet” here in its most strictly ironic sense. You want find these people anywhere near a Diet Coke or low-fat mayonnaise.

  Chanko-nabe is the food of the sumo — a huge, simmering hot-pot that’s chock-full of meat, fish and vegetables, best mixed with soy sauce, but sometimes also blended with mirin, miso, saké, and dashi stock (shavings of dried skipjack tuna mixed with edible kelp).

  Leftover broth is often then consumed with a hefty plate of noodles.

  It’s as highly nutritious (think protein-city) as it is gut-busting, and is the principle dish gorged by sumo wrestlers to extend their hefty waistlines and add to already-impressive girths.

  Some wrestlers enjoy the concoction so much that they quit the ring and instead become the chanko-cho, or chief chanko chef, for their wrestling stables, and eventually open their own restaurants — often with sumo memorabilia from their workhorse days adorning the walls.

  And, to my blinkered eyes at least, there’s no finer chanko-nabe to be had in Ryogoku, than at a fine establishment called Yoshiba.

  The building that houses Yoshiba was erected in 1948 as a prominent sumo wrestling club and practice stadium for the famous, 200-year-old Miyagino stable, and nine years later the premises were handed down to the stable’s coach, former distinguished yokuzuna (sumo grand champion), Yoshibayama, who passed away in 1977.

  After that, the building was recast as a restaurant (in 1983), maintaining the sumo ring and the practice rooms in their original state.

  Yoshiba, named after the aforementioned yokuzuna, is hardly a small place itself. The restaurant can seat up to 250 people, it boasts a sushi bar and a voluminous fish-tank, and while the place is invariably busy, the service from the staff is brilliant — so much so, it leaves you despondent that the custom of tipping is a foreign one in Japan.

  There’s also daily entertainment in the sumo ring in the centre of the restaurant, which veers from guys in yukata (summer robes) singing traditional sumo songs, to a group of rowdy musicians strumming away on a shamisen in a more quirky, contemporary style.

  But the focus here, of course, is the chanko-nabe, and the seriously skewed attempts to finish this herculean dish. Give yourself a day or two to recover — and try not to remember that sumo champions and their lesser ilk guzzle gallons of the chunky nectar on a daily basis.

  Ouch.

  Genji: The Millennium Man

  This month, I’ll avoid the slacker excesses of recounting my trips abroad, and get instead all scholarly. Think chalk and Harris Tweed jackets (harristweedscotland.com), then I want you to reflect back on dusty high-school history tomes, or literature classes, that dealt with the older-school inanimate; kick those frazzled Yuletide season brain cells back into gear, and try to recollect the few times you’ve surfed through Wikipedia with practical purpose.

  Then imagine me scrawling across a patchy-coloured blackboard, in pink chalk ‘cos I can’t seem to locate the cooler green one, this simple question: What is the oldest novel in the world?

  If you’re automatically toeing the Anglo-Saxon belletristic line (a lot of us here are native English speakers, so you’ll be forgiven), you may end up clutching at a name like Shakespeare. Hopefully you suspect his is the possible name of an author, not a novel or a fictitious romantic lead, but you’d be backing the wrong horse, anyway. He’s too new — by almost by half a millennium.

  Know the original, anonymous source mate
rial for Robert

  Zemeckis’s motion-capture action movie, Beowulf, which hit screens in 2007? Think that’s a contender? Well, it’s timely enough — put down on parchment at some stage between the 8th and 11th centuries — but it’s a poem, hardly a novel, and if the original inscription does fall into the 11th century, then it’s too late anyway.

  And while the earliest contestants for “prenatal novel” bounce between Satyricon, possibly written by Gaius Petronius in the 1st century AD, Daphnis and Chloe, written by Longus in the 2nd century, and a couple of other novels hacked together in archaic Greek and Latin tongues around the same period, these in no way relate to the modern “classic” novel, with more emphasis on character psychology — which is where Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji) slinks in.

  Composed by a noblewoman at the Japanese imperial court —Shikibu Murasaki — in the early 11th century, the vast opus has been anointed the first psychological novel, as well as the first full-length novel still to be considered a classic — although some cranky people decry the honorary status, and whether or not Murasaki wrote all 54 chapters.

  It’s something most of us can relate to on some level.

  Armchair critics continue to insist that the real writer of 16th - century Britain’s best-known plays may not in fact have been John and Mary Shakespeare’s wee tacker, Howard Hawks never owned up to his directorial work on The Thing from Another World, and only recently was the mystery surrounding the “real” version of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner explained away.

  Last year [2008], November 1 was proclaimed Classics Day in Japan, at a ceremony in Kyoto — attended by the Emperor, his wife, and 2,400 other, lesser VIPs — that was held to mark the millennium of the Tale of Genji. At least, they were celebrating 1,000 years since Murasaki first mentioned the story in her diary, on an otherwise dull day’s activities, on Nov. 1, 1008.

  We have to wait another 12 years before we can celebrate the millennial end of the story, which is supposed to have been finished in 1021. Like the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe, this yarn took over a decade to complete, but the ink was dry 45 years before the Normans invaded England, “Harold Rex interfectus est”, arrow through the eye, and all.

  Yuki Shibamoto, the 25-year-old daughter of regular NHK actress Kyoko Maya, and herself a star of the new Toho movie, Watashi wa Kani ni Naritai (I Want to Be a Shellfish), was selected as the Genji millennium’s poster girl, and made a big speech at the Kyoto bash, garbed in contemporary wear snatched straight out of the Heian period — the era in which Murasaki cosied up to court.

  Picking Shibamoto was a canny decision, with respect to Murakami’s title character, Hikaru Genji.

  While he might be the devilishly handsome son of an emperor, for political reasons — namely that his mom was a low-ranking concubine — Genji has no hereditary title, and he instead ekes out life as an imperial officer. As the tale unfolds, we quickly come to realize just how much of a womanizing character this guy actually is, tempered with a debonair edge that leaves the womanized swooning.

  Unfortunately, the impact isn’t always mutual — Genji often finds the dalliances dull — and sometimes said romps are fatal affairs for his partners.

  In an iddish twist worthy of Oedipus and Freud, our hero also has a penchant for his dad’s new wife (the beautiful, responsive, Lady Fujitsubo), while having to deal with his own cold, haughty spouse, Aoi no Ue.

  The Tale of Genji is partially a mix of James Bond’s bedtime antics, with the costume dramatics of Richard Chamberlain and Yoko Shimada in the mini-series, Shogun (1980); a dash of Don Juan histrionics distilled into a Romeo and Juliet potboiler.

  There’s also kidnap, court intrigue, danger, sexual decline, chronic infidelity, more deaths, and other plot contrivances recently found in dramas on this side of the Pacific, like The O.C.

  Which makes Genji, even a thousand years later, more than just required reading at grade school. It’s prescient, psychological, seat-gripping stuff for people of all ages, instead of just teens.

  Take that, Josh Schwartz.

  What you’ll read next is pretty much self-explanatory in the title.

  I put this together while winding up my novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, and dove into the specifics of the March 1945 firebombing.

  I’d done a spot of research in the early days of the novel, in around 2008 — when it was nothing more than a notion — but this was a little too much and I needed to vent.

  My very supportive editor Stefan Blitz at Forces Of Geek provided the outlet valve, and this article went online there last year just before the novel was published. Which may explain why it starts out like a promotional leaflet before getting to the point.

  I skipped using the pictures here. I don’t think they’re necessary.

  If you’ve read One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, you may recognize some of the language and details, since the novel and the article cross-pollinated one another.

  Funnily enough, I copped a little flak after the publication of the novel, along the lines that I went too ‘soft’ on the Japanese, focused too much on their pain, and didn’t pay adequate heed to the Japanese army’s heinous crimes in China and elsewhere during World War II.

  ‘Scuse me if I’m wrong, but an atrocity’s an atrocity — doesn’t matter who the perpetrator might be.

  Apocalypse Then: How 300 B-29

  Bombers Burned Tokyo

  Over the past year or so I’ve been immersed in the writing of my second novel, this time with the focus on Japan from 1929 on.

  One Hundred Years of Vicissitude is a blend of historical novel, surrealism, a mystery and noir; there’s fantasy and a wee bit of romance in there as well, and I’m always ready for a hardboiled moment or two.

  Included in this mix is an homage to classic Japanese cinema by the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Seijun Suzuki, and Satoshi Kon, along with actors Toshiro Mifune and Meiko Kaji.

  There are nods to manga and comicbooks, medieval potboilers, Melbourne, Lewis Carroll, and Osamu Tezuka — along with the only visit to Tokyo by the Graf Zeppelin, saké, an eight-headed dragon, the sumo, geisha, James Bond, the Japanese Red Army, and a lot of other wayward stuff people might expect of me.

  Also included is a pivotal dramatic tipping point, one that relates to the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945.

  Not long after I first arrived in Japan in 2001, I remember an elderly student, a child in that firebombing of the evening of March 9 and the morning of March 10, 1945. He recounted a story that the Kanda River ran red.

  Whether from blood or the reflection of the fires all around, I was too timid to ask.

  For the novel I ended up doing a lot of research into that fateful night. After doing so, I abridged several pages to put together a three-page summation. I toyed with this as the prologue for One Hundred Years of Vicissitude — but ditched the notion and instead integrated most of the facts and figures into survivor Kohana’s diatribes about the event, early on in the story.

  Coincidentally, I was writing up the fictional account here in Tokyo this past March, around the same time as the sixty-seventh anniversary of the aerial strike — though I was too immersed in the yarn to notice.

  If you’re squeamish, you may want to bounce out now, in light of one of the final pictures here, which shows the aftermath of the March 9/10 bombardment.

  Disclaimers out of the way, let’s start with the B-29.

  You might recall the one from the opening credits of the Watchmen film, emblazoned with “Miss Jupiter”.

  The American B-29 bomber had every right to call itself a ‘Superfortress’, since the contraption was a flying stronghold.

  This was the largest aircraft inducted during World War II, a four-engine beauty flaunting a dozen 50-calibre M2 heavy machine guns mounted in five turrets, and one 20-millimetre cannon in its backside. All that was missing was a catapult.

  While the plane’s length doesn’t ring so impressive —99 feet, or just over 30 metres — the wing
span was 141 feet (43 metres) and it had an area of 1,736 square feet.

  The bugger weighed in at 33,600 kilograms, prior to cramming in its particularly lethal payload.

  The B-29 pushed the throttle to 357 miles per hour and it had a flight ceiling of 12 kilometres, making it practically immune to ground-based anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighter planes such as the Mitsubishi A6M Zero — which flew slower and lower.

  I don’t know how you feel, but all these facts and figures bamboozle me. In a nutshell, this was a huge thing that was well-armed, flew higher and faster than anyone else, and carried a lot of bombs.

  “The success of the development of the B-29 is an outstanding example of the technical leadership and resourcefulness which is the American way of doing things,” U.S. Major General Curtis LeMay wrote in the foreword to the airplane’s Combat Crew Manual, which also includes Disney-like cartoons and useful tidbits like what to do in case of snakebite.

  What the Combat Crew Manual did not discuss were the recurring engine problems and the crash in 1943 of the plane’s second prototype, killing its 11-man crew and 20 civilians as it narrowly avoided Seattle skyscrapers, finally hitting a meat-packing plant on the ground.

  The B-29 also acted as a high-flying postman, dropping propaganda leaflets that said things like “America is not fighting the Japanese people but is fighting the military clique which has enslaved the Japanese people,” alongside images of Japanese soldiers shoving civilians over a cliff.

  There were also happy-snaps of Japanese cities with the shadow of a B-29 looming across.

  Each Superfortress was crewed by eleven men, who typically tagged the forward fuselage with a kitsch painting of a half-naked pin-up girl, along with monikers like ‘Dauntless Dotty’, ‘Fertile Myrtle’ and ‘Jughound Jalopy’.

  However, unlike its successor the B-52, the B-29 never inspired a hairdo.

  Perhaps barbers remembered this was the same aircraft that did a fly-by in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, gifting each city respectively with atomic bombs named ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’.