On the appointed evening, Akiko drove to the Keio Plaza Hotel. She brought a stack of Brautigan’s books in Japanese translation with her, hoping he might sign them, but took only Trout Fishing when she rode the elevator to the thirty-fifth floor, leaving the others in the car. When Richard opened the door to his suite, the famous author greeted her wearing the summer kimono called a yukata. “Kind of bizarre,” Aki remembered. “Unusual. So, I thought, hmm, strange.” In spite of his unorthodox dress, Brautigan was gracious and polite. He immediately offered Akiko a drink and some appetizers. She recalled smoked salmon on plates decorated with a trout pattern.
Aki noticed something else. In one corner of the room, Richard had assembled a makeshift altar to himself, arranging several of the Japanese translations of his books into a personal display. “Like a little shrine to worship his own book,” Akiko thought.
Later, Brautigan removed the yukata. Clad in his typical blue jeans, he took Akiko out to dinner at Szechwan, the Roppongi District Chinese restaurant Kazuko Fujimoto brought him to the previous year. Afterward, he brought her to The Cradle and introduced her to Takako Shiina. By this time, Richard was very drunk, having alternated between whiskey and sake all evening long. Aki had never known an alcoholic. “That’s the tragedy, I think,” she said in retrospect.
They quickly became lovers. Richard’s courtship ritual had long included preparing an intimate spaghetti dinner complete with his famous sauce. He soon stirred up something al dente for Aki. Tracking down Italian ingredients was no problem in cosmopolitan Tokyo. The logistics of finding a place to prepare the feast presented a far greater obstacle. A two-burner hot plate in his suite at the Keio Plaza was out of the question. Asking Kazuko or Takako to use either of their apartments eliminated any possibility of romance. Brautigan played his ace in the hole and called Len Grzanka, a bachelor who lived alone.
Grzanka agreed to let Brautigan use his suburban apartment for the planned pasta tryst. Richard wanted privacy, so Len generously vacated for the night. When Grzanka returned the next morning, “the place was a disaster.” Not only did he find the unmade bed a tangled testimonial to a night of passion, but Len also observed that Richard “didn’t wash a single plate. He burned sauce in a bunch of pots. There was sauce all over the place.”
Around this time, Delacorte sent the uncorrected galley proofs for Dreaming of Babylon to Tokyo. Brautigan went to work on them with his usual obsessive concern for detail. Daytime hangovers and night owl habits dictated an eccentric schedule. Richard’s most productive time came in those predawn hours after he returned to his hotel suite from The Cradle. As always, he depended on his friends to supply advice on the fine points of grammar and vocabulary. Len Grzanka’s position as an English professor elevated him to the top of Brautigan’s local list of potential advisers. “He had a habit of calling me up at about 2:00 or 3:00 am to look up words in the dictionary for him,” Grzanka said. “He’d keep me up for hours.”
This didn’t sit well with Len, who had to rise at six and take a long train commute to get to work at Tsuda College by eight. He repeatedly explained his situation to Brautigan, pleading with him to call during the day. It didn’t seem to make any difference, and the late night phone calls continued. “Richard basically had no consideration for anyone else,” Grzanka observed.
As Richard’s relationship with Akiko intensified, he became increasingly emotionally dependent on her. “We thought we could stimulate artistic creativity together,” Aki recalled. While she regarded herself as basically a positive and optimistic person, she recognized Brautigan’s inherent negativity. “Every minute he always had some kind of negative energy kept within him,” she said. Because she was interested in his mind and loved his work, she wanted to give him all she had, both mentally and from her heart. “I was small, but I was open,” Akiko observed. “And he was touched by my openness and my small things.”
One night, Richard cried bitter tears. “I never thought I was loveable,” he told her. “I was abandoned by my mother. I was abandoned by my first wife. And so, I thought I [would never be] loved by any women anymore.” Aki realized “he had some big complex about women.” She knew Brautigan believed she was the one who could give him everything. For a time, she believed it, too. In spite of her imagined role as a liberated woman, Akiko understood how much she relied upon her husband. “So, I was not independent at all,” she said. “I was dependent.” In Richard, Aki saw a way out of her predicament. Richard represented freedom from all the traditional restrictions of Japanese culture, from being the daughter in the box. She didn’t understand how completely he wanted to possess her.
Even as their affair grew in intensity, Richard and Akiko spent more time apart than together. She still had her day job and a husband at home. He retained a loner’s instinct for solitary nocturnal wandering. These aimless evenings often ended at The Cradle. One night at the bar, Brautigan encountered Ryu Murakami, who had just finished his second manuscript (War Begins Beyond the Sea) and was in “a dreamy mood,” almost as if intoxicated. Meeting Brautigan, Murakami told him, “I’ve just done my writing that’ll be published soon as my second novel.”
“Hmm,” Richard mused, turning his head away.
“What a fellow!” Ryu thought. “He didn’t even congratulate me.” Brautigan struck him as being in a bad temper.
Suddenly, Brautigan turned back to face Murakami. “The important one should be the third,” Richard told him. “You can write your first novel based on your experiences. And the second should be done using the technique and imagination which you’ve learned from the first novel. The battle for the writer, just to begin after using up his experience and imagination.” Richard’s words shook Ryu out of his happy, dreamy state.
Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, an older and more respected Japanese novelist, also became acquainted with Richard Brautigan around this time. Born in 1923, Yoshiyuki was the oldest child of author Eisuki Yoshiyuki, who died in 1940. After dropping out of the University of Tokyo without a degree, Junnosuke began working as a magazine editor but devoted his leisure hours to drinking, gambling, and consorting with prostitutes. His novels included the City of Primary Colors (1951), Sudden Shower, (1954, winner of the Akutagawa Prize), Room of a Whore (1958), and The Dark Room (1969, winner of the Tanizaki Prize). Prostitution and sex provided a constant theme in Yoshiyuki’s work.
Akiko recalled that Richard “had a very good relationship” with Junnosuke Yoshiyuki. Richard’s interests in soft-core pornography and his great affection for the writing of Junichiro Tanizaki certainly helped form a bond between the two men. According to Aki, they saw each other several times while Brautigan was in Tokyo.
One nameless night, back at the Keio Plaza, inebriated on love and booze, Brautigan placed an early am phone call to Don Carpenter in Hollywood. “Four o’clock in the morning,” Carpenter remembered. “Drunk as a fucking goat.” Richard wanted to tell Don about his newfound love. “I’ve met the most beautiful woman,” Brautigan stammered. “We’re going to get married as soon as she divorces her husband.”
“Oh, god,” thought Don Carpenter, struggling to clear his sleep-clouded brain. For the first and only time, he told his old friend an unpleasant truth he knew Richard did not want to hear. “If she’ll leave him,” Don said, “she’ll leave you.”
Akiko’s husband suggested she marry her lover. When she told Yoshimura about her involvement with Brautigan, he took the news with equanimity. “Well, you better ask him to marry,” Yoshimura remarked to his wife.
“Why?” Akiko was amazed.
“Because marriage is to protect the woman,” he said. “And without having that I won’t divorce you.”
Caught up in the stress of the situation, Brautigan suffered a severe attack of herpes. A sexually transmitted disease never enhanced a new love affair. Condoms offered no protection from embarrassment. Desperate, Richard called Helen Brann for help. Brautigan had only recently received an extension permit for an additional sixty-day
stay in Japan, and he had no intention of returning to America for treatment. His agent consulted with her own physician, who suggested a doctor in Tokyo. Richard sought an immediate appointment.
Brautigan got a call from Dan Gerber, in Tokyo with his Zen master, Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi, and Bob Watkins, a friend from Montana. They planned on spending a few days in town before heading on for a longer stay in Kyoto. Dan had been studying Buddhism and sitting zazen for about four years, since the depression he felt following the death of his father in 1973. Kobun, Dan’s teacher, was born in 1938 and raised in Jokoji, the Soto Zen temple in Kamo, Japan, where his father had been chief priest. He came to America in 1967, invited by Suzuki Roshi to help establish the Tassajara monastery in Carmel Valley.
Kobun read Trout Fishing in America not long after its initial publication by the Four Seasons Foundation. Much later, Gerber gave him a copy of Kazuko Fujimoto’s translation, and he “was amazed how different it seemed to him in Japanese than it did in English.” Dan remembered his master “sort of laughing” at “what a different book it was in Japanese.”
Brautigan met them for lunch at their hotel. Afterward they walked about the city. Richard told Dan “how fascinated he was by the design of everything in Japan.” Gerber thought this was because Brautigan couldn’t read Japanese. “Everything was pure design.” Dan admired Richard’s quality, “ideal for any artist,” of being “a stranger in the place that you live. Richard had a wonderful ability to look at things like a child.”
As Brautigan and Gerber walked the streets of Tokyo in the company of a robed Japanese Zen priest, they attracted considerable attention from the passing pedestrian swarm. Both tall, blond, and undeniably Western, they stood out, head and shoulders, above the crowd. “I was quite a sight in Japan,” Dan remembered. “Everybody always asked if I was John Denver.” Gerber recognized this simple cultural misunderstanding. Brautigan attributed the crowd’s fascination with a pair of tall white strangers as a direct consequence of his own celebrity. “I’m very well known in Japan,” Richard commented smugly to Dan.
Another day, an angry Brautigan arrived at Gerber’s hotel by taxi, outraged because the cab driver had just pulled an “Amerigoo,” on him. “Amerigoo” was Richard’s term for the way Japanese took advantage of foreigners, thinking them dumb Americans. On this occasion, Brautigan’s cabbie took him the long way around to Gerber’s place. “He would be alternately delighted and then infuriated by what he called Amerigoo,” Dan remembered.
Brautigan complained of his recent herpes attack. He said it happened whenever he got upset. Richard wasn’t sure “whether the herpes had erupted because he had gotten upset” or if it was the other way around. “The two things coincided,” Gerber observed. Richard made no mention of Akiko by name. He told Dan about a “mysterious” relationship with a married Japanese woman. “She would appear on her terms,” Gerber said, recalling the story, “and make love to Richard and then disappear.” Brautigan’s emotions swung, week after week, from exhilaration and delight in everything Japanese to deep depression and disgust at the never-ending Amerigoo. Richard told Dan that “he was on an emotional roller-coaster within a roller-coaster. Lying in bed in his hotel listening to people fucking through the wall next door.” Hearing his friend’s story, Gerber thought, “Anybody would be unhappy living in a luxury hotel as a hotel guest month by month.”
Brautigan wanted to show his friends something special. After lunch, he guided them to a little plaza at the north exit of Shibuya Station, pointing out a life-sized bronze statue of a dog. In the early 1920s, Hachi (“Hachikō”), a white male Akita, accompanied his master, Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor at the Imperial University, to Shibuya Station every morning on his way to work. Each afternoon, the dog went back to the station to meet the professor when he got off the 3:00 pm train. On May 21, 1925, Ueno suffered a stroke and never came home again.
For almost a decade, Hachikō waited at Shibuya Station, rain or shine, day in and day out, for a best friend who didn’t return. The faithful dog touched the heart of Tokyo. His death on March 8, 1935, waiting in the exact spot where he’d spent so many devoted hours, made the front pages of every newspaper in the city. Funds for the chuken monument were raised by public subscription. Over time, the statue became the most popular meeting place in Tokyo.
Takako Shiina told Brautigan the legend of Hachikō and took him to the Shibuya Station exit plaza. Richard loved the story. They often visited the site together. Richard knew Hachi’s story would touch Dan’s heart and deliberately staged this poetic street theater to please his old pal. Curiously, Brautigan never wrote a single word about the faithful dog.
Gerber, Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi, and Bob Watkins left Tokyo the following day. Richard came to their hotel to see them off. With all the luggage, they decided to take two cabs to the station. Richard and Dan traveled in one; Kobun and Bob in the other. The two parties separated on the way to catch the Kyoto train. “One problem being in the Tokyo station is that everything is in Japanese,” Gerber recalled.
Lost, unable to either speak or read the language, Dan recalled running up a long flight of stairs, Richard huffing and puffing alongside him, both hauling heavy bags, only to find themselves on the wrong platform. “Richard took it upon himself,” Gerber said. “It was very important to him that I make my train.” They ran back down the stairs and raced to another platform, reaching the departing train with just moments to spare. Brautigan handed the last bag aboard as the doors closed on his red exhausted face. Gerber later joked that he expected to read a Kyoto headline the next day: american author dies on railroad platform. “This was the gracious host part of Richard,” Dan said. “I also think he was very happy to see somebody from home.”
On the train, Kobun reflected on meeting Richard Brautigan. “He’s incredible,” the Zen master said, laughing softly to himself. “What is he doing living here? Why does he stay in Japan? He is miserable here.”
Not long after his friends departed, Richard went to see the physician recommended by Helen Brann’s doctor. Things did not go well during the consultation. Brautigan suffered further “pain and mental anguish” after applying the prescribed medication to his afflicted member. Richard complained to Helen, who responded with an apologetic handwritten letter. “I feel that you are desperately unhappy,” she wrote, “and I’d give anything within my limited power to help.” Brann felt Brautigan should return to San Francisco, “where you are so loved and missed.” She wanted him to come back for the ABA (American Booksellers Association) convention being held in Frisco in May. Sam Lawrence thought Richard should be there to promote Dreaming of Babylon. Helen felt sure Dell would pay Brautigan’s travel expenses.
Richard did not return for the ABA convention. He remained in Tokyo, where the weather turned hot and humid. Knowing he would not be back in Montana for some time, he wrote to Gatz Hjortsberg, asking that he check on the placement of a new cattle guard on the road near his home and deal with any potential fencing problems arising from tearing down a nearby shed. About this same time, he shipped his corrected Babylon galley proofs off to Helen Brann in New York.
After three weeks, Dan Gerber returned to Tokyo and gave Brautigan a call. Richard said he’d take Dan out and show him the city’s vibrant nightlife. Brautigan picked Gerber up at his hotel in the early evening, a time the Japanese call “the hour of the pearl,” and walked him to a nearby park. It was one of the very few parks in Tokyo that did not close before five o’clock and had become a popular trysting place for young couples. Richard mentioned this to Dan, indicating all the paired-up men and women sitting primly on the benches. They waited for darkness, when they could make out in relative privacy. This discreet mating ritual charmed Brautigan. “These people would go to the park and sit there very dignified until it got dark.” What tickled him most were all the public signs depicting what Gerber described as “a bear in black, sort of like a ghost, lurking up out of bushes over benches.” The signs meant �
�Beware of Peeping Toms.”
Brautigan wanted to show Gerber the mysteries of Tokyo at night. He took Dan to the Roppongi District. Gerber considered it “the Via Veneto of Tokyo.” They went to a number of “very brassy bars.” Dan felt, “the Japanese had seen a lot of American movies of the forties and fifties of what American nightclubs were supposed to be like.” Gerber remembered Brautigan being amused by the sight of “these absolutely glorious, gorgeous Japanese women” fawning over groups of American and European businessmen. “Geeks and nerds who in a bar in the States would be lucky to find any woman who would give them the time of day.”
Brautigan insisted “there were two kinds of Japanese women in Roppongi.” Those interested in European and American men who wore their hair long and straight. The others, interested in Japanese men, had permed hair cut short. Gerber thought it was a “very innocent evening,” walking around, taking in the passing crowd and the bright flashing neon. In their ongoing conversation, Richard told Dan about the whorehouse in Yokohama where prostitutes dressed like nuns.
Asked if he’d been a customer there, Brautigan insisted he had never paid for sex in his life. Emphasizing his denial, Richard gestured in the air with his right hand, writing an invisible script. “Ink for the pen,” he said.
Brautigan told Gerber a story about traveling to Seoul, Korea, “with this mysterious woman that he was seeing.” Richard said he had to leave the country every sixty days to renew his Japanese visa, necessitating a “miserable” overnight trip to Seoul. None of this was true. Brautigan never journeyed to Korea. Not with Akiko, the mystery woman, nor anyone else. When he needed to extend his visa, Richard went to the Immigration Department and had a sixty-day extension permit stamped into his passport.
As Brautigan’s departure date approached, he tried planning for Akiko to come to America with him. Richard had given up his San Francisco apartment before leaving for Japan. Not having a permanent place to live provided additional complications. An incident late one night in Takako Shiina’s basement bar brought matters to a head. Inebriated when he wandered into The Cradle, Brautigan got increasingly more drunk. The American screenwriter Leonard Schrader sat at the bar talking in Japanese with Ryu Murakami and Kazuhiko Hasegawa, a film director.
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