Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Brautigan wrote, “There is a sunken living room with a fireplace and comfortable couches to encourage pleasant conversation while eating and drinking good things.” The walls of the bar were covered from floor to ceiling with theatrical posters, the majority advertising plays by Wesker, along with framed photos of Shiina’s father directing his films. A piano and a guitar stood available for anyone who wanted to make music. Recordings of every sort provided good listening, everything “from jazz to classical to country and western.” When no music played, “there is much sound of laughter, but sometimes there is just the silence of people thinking.”

  Much later, Richard observed, “The Cradle cannot be described in common terms. It is not a restaurant. It is not a living room. It is not a bar. It is not a home. But it is all of these things created by one woman . . . Shiina Takako. The Cradle is her vision of how life should be as a gathering place for people. It is designed totally for pleasure and creative exchange. We need all of that we can get in the world.” The Japanese always placed the family name first. Although he spoke virtually no Japanese, Brautigan adopted this tradition right from the start, a pretention he clung to while never making any effort to learn the language.

  Kazuko Fujimoto introduced Richard Brautigan to Takako Shiina, and they became friends immediately. The editor Kaitaro Tsuno was an old friend of Takako’s. She had met the Goodmans through him. This was the first time either Brautigan or the publisher of Shobun-sha, had ever come into her bar. Richard launched into a tale of woe about his shabby treatment at the Imperial. Takako suggested a solution. One of her regular customers managed the first-class Keio Plaza Hotel in the Shinjuku District. She called, and he agreed to give Brautigan a 50 percent discount, “the best discount rate they ever gave.” After that, Richard “was at The Cradle every night,” Shiina recalled.

  Forty-seven stories high, the Keio Plaza (built in 1971) was the world’s tallest hotel. A short walk from the Shinjuku Station among a cluster of other towering buildings, it was described by the Tokyo City Guide as a “concrete and glass skyscraper of the most undistinguished kind. Interiors are more of the same.” The hotel made up for a lack of charm with impeccable service and a very convenient location. Brautigan wrote a postcard picturing his slablike hotel to Gatz Hjortsberg shortly after arriving, describing Keio Plaza as “a typical Japanese inn” with “an excellent view of Los Angeles.”

  Richard Brautigan checked into room 3003 on the thirtieth floor of the Keio Plaza. It was “a very long room, cheery and bright.” On a clear day, the view from his huge window took in Mount Fuji, the sacred Fuji-san, forty miles distant. It was the rainy season, and the iconic volcano was often obscured by clouds. One morning, after spending the night drinking, Richard returned to his room at sunrise. Very drunk, he took off his shoes at the door, a Japanese practice he thought was “cute,” and walked to the window. There stood Fuji in all its snow-capped glory, “absolutely clear like a crystal vision of itself.” Brautigan felt he could have touched the mountain had been able to open the window. He lay down on his bed and fell asleep. When he awoke in the early afternoon, the clouds had rolled back in and Mount Fuji was gone. Richard wondered if he would ever see it again.

  Brautigan resumed his ambulatory explorations in his new neighborhood. He made sure to take along his passport, his small leather-bound notebook, a ballpoint pen, an English-Japanese dictionary, and a little card with the name and address of his hotel printed in both languages, available at the front desk and very useful late at night when dealing with cab drivers. Bit by bit, Richard filled his room at the Keio Plaza with “plants and wall hangings, all objects that I would find in the course of a day’s wandering.”

  Curt Gentry occasionally accompanied Brautigan on his urban adventures, observing later that “Richard made no effort to get to know the Japanese or to visit the country. I tried and tried to get Richard to come out, to go with us down to Kyoto. To go somewhere. Richard just would not leave Tokyo.” Gentry observed that Brautigan “had some overinflated ideas of his own importance. We’d be walking down the street in Tokyo. Richard looked particularly strange—out of place—tall, blond, with that mustache, a Levi jacket. The Japanese would turn and stare at him and kind of laugh as he went by.”

  Brautigan’s ego went into overdrive. “You know,” he told Gentry, “everybody in Japan recognizes me from my book jackets.”

  Richard and Curt’s adventures together in Tokyo were mainly nocturnal. “[We] did quite a bit of drinking and playing around,” Gentry recalled. Brautigan’s preferred nighttime playground was the Roppongi District, and the Café Cardinale became another of his favorite hangouts. It was the sort of place where all the male customers were foreigners while the women were all Japanese. Gentry recalled Richard talking “about the ugly Americans and such,” at the same time he eagerly joined in the gaijin barroom mating dance at the Café Cardinale. “American Bar in Tokyo,” a poem Richard wrote early in June, summed the place up in ten deft lines: “young conservative snobbish / American men, / drinking and trying to pick up / Japanese women [. . .] It is very hard to find any poetry / here.”

  The funniest moment Curt Gentry recalled occurred around four in the morning after a night on the town. Richard insisted on walking his friend back to the New Otani, the largest hotel in Asia, sprawling across a ten-acre traditional Japanese garden. Both men were quite drunk. They staggered into the entrance area, where an escalator carried guests up to a more formal lobby. At the bottom of the escalator, Richard and Curt discovered two well-dressed hotel employees staring down from above.

  “Assistant manager and bus boy,” Gentry remembered, “and they are bowing, and we’re down at the bottom of the escalator, and we’re bowing, and they’re bowing, and we’re bowing, and this kept going on.” Brautigan whispered to Gentry that Japanese culture dictated whoever bowed last lost face. “So we had to bow last. We’re standing at the bottom wondering why it’s taking so long to get to the top,” Gentry said. They failed to notice that the escalator had closed down hours before. “The Japanese are too polite to tell these two drunks that we have to walk up.”

  Curt Gentry believed Richard “didn’t explore Tokyo that much,” but Brautigan’s poetry notebook told another story. The poems Richard jotted down during his first couple weeks in Japan ranged over a diverse swath of Tokyo real estate. He wrote of winning a can of crabmeat and a toy locomotive in a pachinko parlor and the triumph of ordering his first meal, “curry and rice,” in a Japanese restaurant. He described watching a fly on a red brick in Mitsui Plaza in Nihonbashi in the Chūō District close to the waterfront. Other poems described an “Egyptianesque” Japanese model (“Her lips are so red / they make blood / seem dull, a / useless pastime”) and the signs on shuttered bars in the Ginza on a rainy afternoon (“brightly-colored / kites”).

  Brautigan’s poetry notebook became an emotional diary of his first exposure to Japan. He wrote of small details, off-kilter and obliquely observed, recording drunken observations of the nightlife and his difficulties with the language. His more bizarre misadventures often went unobserved in his poems. One such incident involved an excursion Richard took with a couple friends to the nearby port city of Yokohama, a half-hour’s train ride from central Tokyo.

  Brautigan traveled to Yokohama to visit the “floating world,” where he sought out The Nunnery, a notorious whorehouse he’d heard about in Tokyo. All the prostitutes here dressed as nuns, adding an element of mysterious blasphemy. When the girls came downstairs, charms hidden beneath chaste black habits, the “nuns” guided their clients first to a steaming bath, next to a massage table; serene sisters of pleasure ushering the devoted supplicants on to private cells in the cloister.

  Along with discovering exotic brothels, “Richard had this thing about finding out that the liquor was cheaper if you bought a bottle,” Curt Gentry recalled. The customer purchased a full bottle, and the bartender wrote his name on the label, pouring him drinks until the booze was gone. If not,
he was free to come back another time and claim what remained. One night, Gentry and Brautigan bought four bottles, each in a different bar. The bartenders wrote their names on the labels in flowing Japanese ideographs, which neither Richard nor Curt could read. All of their booze went unfinished, and neither could remember the locations of any of the bars.

  The poetry Brautigan wrote during this period described aching loneliness. His poem “The 12,000,000” started with the lines, “I’m depressed, / haunted by melancholy” and concluding “I know I’m not alone. / Others must feel the way / I do.” Two days later, a new poem, “A Study in Roads,” began, “All the possibilities of life, / all roads led here.” Richard listed all places he had lived or visited in his life and concluded: “Having a drink by myself / in a bar in Tokyo before / lunch, / wishing there was someone to talk / to.” Brautigan often spent the night alone in his hotel room listening to the whisper of rain against his thirtieth-floor window. “I love the rain [. . .] / I’m slightly drunk: / people walking by in the street, / a bicycle.”

  A tropical depression spawned ten days earlier in the Pacific east of the Philippines grew to typhoon strength and hit Luzon with winds exceeding 115 miles per hour. For the next week, Typhoon Olga drifted across the island like a psychopath on a rampage, leaving two hundred people dead, thousands homeless, and most of the sets for Apocalypse Now destroyed. Jack Thibeau had already shot his brief scene (“soldier in trench”) before the typhoon shut the production down at the end of May. When Tony Dingman told Jack that Richard Brautigan might be in Tokyo, Thibeau got a three-day government pass allowing him to travel to Japan without a visa and caught a flight from Manila as soon as the airlines resumed operation.

  Thibeau had been drinking hard for days and continued on the plane. Drunk when he arrived in Tokyo early in the morning, Jack knew only that Richard might be staying at the Keio Plaza. Thibeau caught a cab around four AM. The ride from Haneda to Shinjuku took a long time, and Jack didn’t reach the hotel until nearly six. He wandered into the restaurant, where numbers of Japanese businessmen were having breakfast. They looked on in disbelief as Thibeau knocked back bottle after huge bottle of Asahi beer. “Just to build up the courage to find out if in fact Richard was in the hotel.”

  Fortified with Asahi, Thibeau collected his bags and made his way into the lobby. Picking up one of the house phones, he asked to be connected with Richard Brautigan’s room. After several rings, Brautigan answered.

  “Richard, this is Jack Thibeau.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the lobby.”

  “Come right up!” Brautigan roared.

  Thibeau arrived at room 3003, and the two old friends stared in disbelief. “We were both two hallucinations looking at each other,” Jack said. Richard had been up all night, drinking, his table littered with bottles. They drank and talked for another couple hours before Brautigan phoned the hotel manager and got Thibeau a room right down the hall. “We both felt that we saved each other’s lives at that time,” Jack recalled.

  The next three days were a perpetual party for Brautigan and Thibeau. Richard “was very free in Tokyo,” Jack recalled. “He was like a child bounding around in some marvelous newly designed playground. He loved it there. He just thought that Tokyo was the erotic capital of the planet Earth.” Thibeau felt his old friend “was in some kind of medieval frame of mind.” Richard delighted to know Shinjuku, the area where he lived, was a red-light district, “the floating world.” He told Jack there were illicit love affairs going on in every room in every hotel in the city. “I’m staying in the foremost love hotel in Tokyo,” he boasted.

  Brautigan and Thibeau partied nightly in the bars of Shinjuku and Roppongi. Jack noticed Richard was having difficulties with the language. “He had about two phrases in Japanese that he knew,” Thibeau said. One was “dozo,” which meant “please.” The other, “sumimasen,” meaning “I’m sorry” or “excuse me.” These had to work for all forms of communication with non-English speakers. “And the more he got drunk, the more they got blurred together,” Jack remembered. “It was just a series of “sumimasen . . . dozo . . . sumimasen . . . dozo. He had no ability whatsoever in the language.” From Thibeau’s point of view, Brautigan “just walked around like some kind of orphan. ‘Can I have a beer and that girl over there?’ Sumimasen.”

  Observing this behavior, Jack asked Richard what he planned to do about it.

  “I’m thinking of writing a book,” Brautigan replied. “I’m going to call it, ‘How to Learn Japanese . . . In One Million Years.’”

  Richard brought Jack to The Cradle and introduced him to his friend Takako. One “crazy” night, Brautigan invited Thibeau out to dinner. The plan was for Jack to meet him at The Cradle, where Takako would join them for the evening. Somehow, they all got their wires crossed, and Takako had gone on to the restaurant ahead of them. After several confused telephone calls, a beautiful “young” woman sitting at the bar took charge of the situation. Thibeau remembered that she wore what he called a sloped English hat. The woman phoned Takako at the restaurant, telling her she would bring the lost boys safely to their dinner date.

  They all hopped in a cab. It was an extremely foggy night in Tokyo, and the driver got lost. Frustrated, the trio left the taxi and found a public phone. Their benefactress called the restaurant once again. The proprietor said he would send some of his waitresses out to find them. By this time, Brautigan had “taken a fascination” with the mysterious woman in the sloping hat. As the three walked along, the waitresses came running through the swirling fog.

  The stranger in the English hat, so helpful and friendly, suddenly ran off in the opposite direction. Richard chased after her, but she disappeared into the fog. Brautigan and Thibeau continued to the restaurant and dined with Takako Shiina. Later, all three returned to The Cradle for a nightcap. About four in the morning, when Jack was fast asleep in his hotel room, the phone rang. It was Richard. “That woman we were with tonight is sixty-five years old,” he said. “Good night, Jack.”

  One afternoon during his brief stay, Jack went with Richard to a pornographic movie theater, “this boring soft-core porno” Brautigan enjoyed. Richard bought the tickets and kept the stubs, mentioning they were “for the IRS.” Once inside, Brautigan sat Thibeau down. “I’ll be back to get you in an hour,” he said, returning as promised. “I knew better than to ask Richard where he had been,” Jack said, “because that would have ruined it. You never ask questions like that.”

  Another drizzling afternoon, when Richard and Jack stepped from the Keio Plaza to catch a cab, Brautigan took hold of Thibeau’s arm and hauled him out beyond the protective entrance canopy into the falling rain. “You know,” Richard told his friend, “you think you know everything.” He pointed up into the storm-tossed sky. “Those hawks know everything.” Riding a thermal, spiraling through the dark clouds, the twin silhouettes of gliding raptors turned above them.

  After Thibeau departed, Brautigan again recruited Curt Gentry for his nighttime barroom forays. Literary conversation occupied a good deal of the time that the two writers spent together. Curt Gentry had been friends with Yukio Mishima, the esteemed Japanese author, who had on three occasions been a candidate for the Nobel Prize and whose spectacular ritual death by seppuku six years earlier made headlines around the world. “Richard was fascinated with him,” Gentry recalled, “fascinated by his suicide.”

  Celebrated as a novelist, playwright, poet, short story writer, and essayist, Mishima created his own private right-wing army, the Tatenokai (Shield Society), and dedicated it to renewed nationalism and veneration of the emperor. On November 25, 1970, armed only with swords and daggers in the samurai tradition and dressed in uniforms Mishima designed himself, the famous author and four members of the Shield Society gained entrance to the office of the commandant at the Ichigaya Military Base, the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Jietai (Japan’s Self-Defense Forces), barricading the door and tying General M
ashita to his chair. Mishima went out onto the balcony and harangued the one thousand soldiers ranked below to rise up and overthrow the existing government. The troops drowned out his speech with jeering mockery. Mishima returned to the commandant’s office and committed ritual hara-kiri. After the author sliced open his abdomen with a dagger, his second decapitated him with a sword. A startling photograph of Mishima’s severed head on the commandant’s Persian carpet appeared in Life magazine, fascinating Richard Brautigan.

  Brautigan “really pushed” Gentry to use his influence to arrange an introduction to Yoko Sugiyama, Mishima’s widow, who lived under the protection of the Shield Society. “I went to some trouble to try to set up a meeting,” Curt recalled, “and I got her to agree to see him. Richard never followed up. And I’d keep reminding him of it, and he said he was too busy or he would always make excuses.” Gentry thought Brautigan was unwilling to “go out of his way to get to know the Japanese.” To Curt, Richard remained the eternal observer. “He wanted to know Mishima from a distance and not try and get closer to him.”

  Richard did meet a number of distinguished living Japanese writers during his first stay in Tokyo, mainly through his nightly visits to The Cradle. Shiro Hasegawa (described by Kazuko Fujimoto Goodman as “a writer of great integrity”), best known for his collection of short stories, Tales of Siberia, ran into Brautigan at Takako’s basement bar, “slumped against the wall” after a hard night’s drinking. Hasegawa wrote a poem for him, “Dickinson’s Russian,” a comic riff on Richard’s short story “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA,” about a man who replaced his plumbing with poetry. Brautigan used this poem, in its original form and in a translation by Fujimoto, at the beginning of his poetry collection June 30th, June 30th.

  The music critic and writer Tadasu Tagawa also met Richard at The Cradle. At the end of the first week in June, they traveled by car to Osaka, in the Kansai region at the mouth of the Yodo River on Osaka Bay. Created by the warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi in the sixteenth century as a commercial center separate from the imperial powers of Kyoto, Osaka gave rise to a merchant class at first despised by the nobility. The Toyotomi clan built the great Osaka Castle between 1583 and 1586.