Brautigan worked on his short story sequence. Reading his work aloud to his wife started Richard thinking about a framework for his new fiction. He determined some of the stories should have a Japanese focus, deciding to return soon to Tokyo and write about life observed there. “There should be a book of short stories about life in Montana and Tokyo. I thought the contrast would be interesting and dramatic.” Brautigan planned on traveling alone to Japan. He explained this to Akiko, telling her she couldn’t go with him for “residency requirements.”
Many evenings were spent drinking and carousing. “We had some good times,” Dingman said. Warren Oates stopped by to join in the fun whenever he was up from L.A. at his place on Six Mile. One time, a San Francisco friend of Tony’s sent a lid of grass in the mail. Dingman smoked the weed, and his whiskey consumption tapered. His friend said it was Mexican weed. Brautigan read a magazine article about the U.S. government’s drug policy of aerial spraying marijuana fields in Mexico with a dangerous chemical herbicide called Parquat. Richard pointed this out to Tony, who started coughing. Soon, he coughed more and more.
“It’s the Parquat,” Brautigan insisted. “It’s the Parquat!”
Dingman’s cough worsened. Finally, he flushed his stash down the toilet. “Richard loved it,” Tony remembered, “he thought that was the greatest.” The cough went away. Tony learned later that the marijuana had been grown in Sacramento. “It was psychosomatic, man,” Dingman said. “There was no Parquat.”
Bourbon-infused evening conversations ranged freely from country music to politics to literature to girls and back again, but one topic generally remained off-limits. Brautigan never talked about his childhood. “I never asked, and he never volunteered,” Tony recalled. “We had a truce at that level.” Richard did briefly mention he had lived in Great Falls for a time as a child. Akiko was curious, wanting to know more about her husband’s early life.
To please his wife, Brautigan planned a return trip to Great Falls, the only time he ever deliberately revisited a scene from his childhood. They picked a bright sunny day for the six-hour round-trip drive, setting out in “White Acre” with Tony at the wheel and Aki entranced by the sprawling enormity of the Montana landscape. Reaching the little city on the Missouri River, their first destination was the Great Falls grade school Richard attended for a few months when he was nine. After a bit of driving around, they found the old brick building. Brautigan got out and walked to the entrance, taking hold of the doorknob. “He remembered sticking his tongue on this doorknob,” Dingman said. “It froze, and they had to come out and pour warm water to get his tongue off.”
Akiko told the same story six years later to journalist Lawrence Wright, only from a different perspective. “It was so cold,” she said. Richard “put very great stress on the coldness of the doorknob. He was scared of it. He would touch the doorknob and go home again.”
After finding his old grade school, they searched out the establishment where Tex Porterfield had labored as a fry cook. Tony recalled it as being “a kind of a hofbrau.” Brautigan stared at the building where he had once lived, a place he hadn’t seen in thirty-four years. “One of my stepfathers used to work here,” he said. “After he got off work, he used to come upstairs and beat me.” Richard’s stories of his hardscrabble youth varied, depending on his audience. He once told Rip Torn he was only four when the fry cook tied him to the bedpost while away at work, saying, “He gave me enough slack so I could get to the can and, more important, so I could get to the corner and look out the window.”
His long-distance trip down memory lane finished, Richard said, “Let’s go,” and Tony Dingman drove them back to Pine Creek.
April drew to a close. Brautigan made plans for his trip to Japan. He wanted to leave at the beginning of June. Aki mentioned that her mother was celebrating her sixtieth birthday right around that time. Richard wrote to Fusako Nishizawa, telling her of his intended itinerary, saying he hoped to see her on her birthday. Brautigan and his wife headed back to San Francisco at the end of the month. They discussed traveling on to New York for a week in the middle of May. Richard reasoned such an excursion might take the onus off his upcoming solo jaunt to Japan.
A peevish five-page letter from Helen Brann, written on her new stationery with the letterhead “THE BRANN-HARTNETT AGENCY, INC.,” reached Brautigan soon after he returned to San Francisco. (John and Helen established a partnership at the beginning of 1978.) “I have tried to reach you several times in the last couple of weeks leaving messages on your answering machine or with Aki, and you have not returned my calls.” Brann got to the point by page 3: “On a larger issue, Richard, I am very distressed that the spirit of cooperation seems to have gone out of our relationship; I cannot work with a writer who avoids talking with me, who communicates with me through a lawyer, or who seems to take offense when I cannot take a non-emergency call long after my office has closed.” Helen clearly felt her professional and personal relationship with Richard was coming apart at the seams. She ended, “I only know I will not continue as things are now.”
Richard read Helen’s letter several times. He underlined key passages with a pencil. On the first of May, Brautigan wrote Brann a formal typed reply. Half as long as Brann’s, his letter was a lengthy message for a terse correspondent. Richard addressed the matter with cold logic. He agreed their ten-year relationship was too important to throw away “because of a misunderstanding,” and that unless they reestablish that relationship “on a professional footing,” it would be best to “each go our separate way.”
Brautigan wrote a note to Seymour Lawrence a week later. There was “a good possibility” that he and Aki would be in New York the following week. Richard promised Sam to “bring the seagull,” continuing a shared private joke. The next day, Brautigan visited Marcia Clay. She’d moved to a new and larger apartment on Stockton Street. Richard “snailed his way back into my secluded circles,” she wrote in her diary. Clay felt “inspired” after Brautigan’s visits but did not “particularly appreciate his sexual advances,” calling his tongue probing between her lips “a lugubrious eel.”
Richard brought books of poetry along when he visited Marcia. “Elizabethan poetry,” she said. “Japanese poetry. We would read poetry together.” Brautigan read Clay’s writing and offered suggestions, helping her edit. When he didn’t come around, she wished to “spend more moments of complicity” with him. Marcia felt Richard one of the “rare men” who loved and understood her. “I don’t particularly mind his drunkeness [sic],” she confided in her diary, “but do find it distasteful to consume his kisses.”
Another evening early in May, Richard sat down at the end of the bar in Enrico’s. The conversation touched on messages sent in bottles across oceans. Brautigan was leaving for Japan in a few weeks. The crowd decided to experiment. Ward Dunham produced an empty Drambuie bottle and soaked off the labels. The regulars were invited to write private messages on little slivers of paper and slip them inside.
A couple hours later there were almost forty messages in the bottle. Along with Brautigan and Dunham, other secret-message writers were Dwain Cox, Tony Dingman, Donna Galloway, David Fechheimer, and Ward’s wife, Marian. After all the messages had been inserted, Calligrapher Dunham sealed the cork with red sealing wax, adding a wax seal on the side of the bottle. “It resembled the cross-section of an evening in an American bar,” Brautigan wrote, describing the bottle’s contents.
Mrs. Nishizawa, Akiko’s mother, responded to Richard, her “barbarian son,” on May 12, saying she was “deeply touched” by his letter and was “happy to be with you on my Kanreki day,” when all the members of her family planned to gather together to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. She had picked two days after Brautigan’s planned arrival in Japan as the date for the celebration. No mention was made of her daughter’s absence. The Nishizawa family accepted Richard’s explanation that immigration regulations prohibited Aki from leaving the United States.
Richard and Akik
o did not travel to New York in May. Before leaving for Tokyo, Brautigan spoke with Helen Brann about using a new photograph of himself with the June 30th, June 30th ads. He told Helen about the Tokyo monument to the faithful dog. Richard wanted his picture taken there by a top Japanese photographer within a week of his arrival, stipulating Delacorte provide a fee of $500 for the project. Sam Lawrence received Brann’s letter, circling the amount, writing $300 in the margin. Richard had design approval, but Sam controlled the purse strings.
Brautigan arrived back in Japan on the first of June. He always traveled light, with minimal luggage. He made sure to pack the sealed Drambuie bottle full of messages from Enrico’s, and Hello, I Must Be Going, a 586-page book about Groucho Marx by Charlotte Chandler. Akiko sent him off with a small gift for her old friend Yoko, married to Hiroshi Yoshimura, a music scholar and composer known for his “sound chaos” theory. She hoped Richard would get together with them during his stay.
Brautigan checked into the Keio Plaza Hotel (room 3324), bringing a bottle of imported cognac from the duty-free shop as a gift for the manager, ensuring a continuation of his discount. On Saturday, Richard attended his mother-in-law’s kanreki celebration. In accordance with tradition, Mrs. Nishizawa wore the symbolic color red to mark the occasion. The Japanese word for baby means “red one.” At sixty a person is reborn, completing the twelve-year Chinese zodiac five times, once for each of the five elements. Richard greatly enjoyed the party but never wrote a word about the event.
Brautigan resumed his familiar routine in Tokyo. He woke up late in his hotel room, ate some breakfast, wandered about the city, pausing to write a story or two in various cafés. After dinner with friends or a double feature at a soft-porn movie, Brautigan ended the night at The Cradle, returning very drunk to the Keio Plaza, where he fell asleep with the television set on and the sound turned down low so the musical Japanese voices murmured “like the sea at descending tide.”
Richard had met the photographer Shimpei Asai when he took some pictures for the Japanese edition of Sombrero Fallout, published the previous year. Two years younger than Brautigan, Asai had received a prize from the Japan Advertising Photographers’ Association in 1965 and had photographed the Beatles during their 1966 visit to Tokyo. The second week in June, Brautigan and Shimpei traveled to the Shibuya Station. Brautigan wore jeans, a denim shirt, and a cowboy hat. Asai posed the author by the bronze statue of Hachikō, holding on to the pedestal, the faithful dog standing a foot taller than Richard’s ten-gallon headgear. Shimpei took his pictures from an angle. It made for an interesting composition, yet Richard seemed diminished. After making a final selection, Brautigan asked Asai to send copies directly to Sam Lawrence and Helen Brann.
On June 12, the 7.4-magnitude Miyagi-ken Oki earthquake trembled through Tokyo for thirty terrifying seconds. The capital suffered slight damage, but the city of Sendai, 180 miles to the north, took the brunt of the quake. Twenty-eight people died, 1,325 were injured, and 1,183 houses collapsed. The night before the temblor, Richard got very drunk. Akiko teased she’d heard a rumor that he was “swinging” with an 8.5-magnitude hangover.
Several days later, Richard had dinner with Japanese novelist Kenzaburō Oe (Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids; A Personal Matter; The Silent Cry), who won the Nobel Prize ten years after Brautigan’s suicide. Oe and Brautigan had much in common, both being born in 1935, both growing up poor in rural forested communities, both experiencing World War II from the wide-eyed perspective of small children. Richard had long admired Oe’s writing. On this occasion, Richard’s new friend Kenzaburō pulled a pair of goggles from the bag he carried and put them on.
The other customers in the restaurant stared at them. Brautigan acted as if this were perfectly sane and rational: lots of well-dressed Japanese men wear goggles in fashionable restaurants. The latest fad. All the while, he kept thinking, “Please take the fucking goggles off.” Perhaps Oe was a mind reader. After a couple minutes, he removed his goggles and replaced them in the bag.
Brautigan felt a surge of relief. The night returned to a semblance of normality. The two writers talked about the earthquake. Oe’s firstborn son, Hikari, had been born with a cranial deformity and suffered from a mental disability. (Oe’s 1964 book, A Personal Matter, dealt with this family tragedy.) Oe told Brautigan he was trying to explain to his son about earthquakes in a way that Hikari could understand so he would not be afraid. Kenzaburō told Richard he’d been unable to find the right words.
“Does he understand what the wind is?” Brautigan asked.
“Yes,” Oe said.
“Tell him that an earthquake is a wind that blows through the ground.”
Kenzaburō Oe liked this suggestion. Richard Brautigan was pleased that his companion didn’t put his goggles back on.
Akiko had gone to visit friends in Seattle, which she found “too quiet,” missing “something crazy, or energy.” “I miss you crazy man,” she wrote her husband. “Living away from you, I realized how special person you are.” Aki used her time in Seattle fabric shopping for the house in Montana, a place in dire need of a woman’s touch. Northwest Airlines was on strike, and Akiko took Amtrak back to Montana at the end of June. Waking up in roomette 5 at 8:00 am, she saw the wide Missouri outside her window surrounded by “amazing green” bright with yellow wildflowers. Throughout the day, the Missouri seemed to appear at least a hundred times. “I sang a song ‘Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you . . .’ in my heart.”
Toward the end of June, Takako Shiina’s younger brother, the stage actor Keisuke Nakai, drove Brautigan a hundred kilometers southwest of Tokyo down to Ajiro, a small fishing village on the Izu peninsula. Takako owned a condominium in Ajiro, a place renowned as a hot springs resort and fishing spot. Nine months pregnant, Takako came along on the trip with her brother’s wife. Richard brought the sealed Drambuie bottle.
Takako’s condo faced west, overlooking the Sagami Gulf. Unable to sleep the first night of his visit, Brautigan stood at a window around one in the morning, looking down at the lights on four squid-fishing boats anchored below on the dark surface of the sea. The fishermen used their lights to attract squid. Richard thought they looked like a constellation of stars in the night sky.
The next morning, Takako rented a boat to take everyone fishing. Richard had planned to bring the message-filled bottle and launch it into the unknown, but he accidentally left it behind because he couldn’t stop thinking about the squid fishermen “fishing until dawn and maybe having a drink or two before going to sleep.” When Brautigan realized his mistake, they returned to shore, setting back out to sea not long afterward with the bottle in hand. After setting it adrift, they spent the rest of the hot afternoon fishing. Takako caught a large octopus, which she cooked for dinner along with the rest of their catch. Exhausted from the struggle of hauling the big mollusk up from the depths, Takako rested her head against the gunnel, shaded by her broad-brimmed straw hat. Richard, who hadn’t been fishing, sat in the bow, staring back at the shore when Keisuke shot the picture of them that later graced the back cover of The Tokyo–Montana Express.
The episode of the squid fishermen and the forgotten Drambuie bottle became short stories that Brautigan wrote in his notebooks during two months in Japan. Richard also transformed an evening he cooked spaghetti for Takako into fiction. They dined with her husband and another Japanese stage actor in the kitchen of the Shiina apartment upstairs above The Cradle. Richard discovered a bucketful of dojyo, tiny live eels, a couple feet away from the stove, swimming “in circles like science-fiction children of spaghetti.” Takako had bought them fresh to make a special soup.
Another night out became “The Eyes of Japan.” This hot, humid June evening began when Richard and Takako had drinks at her father’s house with director Kirio Urayama and Choichiro Kawarazaki, a famous Japanese actor. After leaving her parents’ place, they all went to dinner at Kawarazaki’s “Western-style” home. Here they drank sake on the rocks. Choichiro’s wife, Eiko Ito, a
retired television star, prepared snacks. The actor exclaimed, “I am the lion of my own house.” Later, he helped his wife prepare dinner. Brautigan thought they made “a very efficient kitchen team.”
Brautigan wrote notebook stories about a wide variety of everyday subjects. One told of a tall young woman, “wearing a simple white dress [. . .] faded pink socks [. . .] very cheap white, plastic shoes,” who thanked Richard in English for offering a seat on the Yamanote Line train. Another was about a “beautiful and very sad poem” concerning unfaithful women by Shuntarō Tanikawa. Others described his dinner with Kenzaburō Oe and watching a Japanese stage production of My Fair Lady in Tokyo with Takako. There was even a story about a story Takako told him of why the bartender at The Cradle didn’t come to work one day (he was at the funeral of a young friend who committed suicide by jumping from a hospital window after his arm was amputated).
Shuntarō Tanikawa’s work eschewed haiku in favor of the sonnet form. He’d translated Mother Goose and Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, and was a poet Richard Brautigan much admired. He liked the man’s “quick and honest” intelligence. Almost the same age (Tanikawa was three years older), they were introduced at The Cradle. One evening, Shuntarō took Richard and Takako to the home of Thomas Fitzsimmons, an American poet visiting Japan with his wife. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1926, Fitzsimmons had gone into World War II as an underage merchant seaman shortly after Pearl Harbor. By the war’s end, after Hiroshima, he demobilized. In the years following, he worked as a writer/editor at the New Republic and the Asahi Daily News in Tokyo.
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