Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  This was Richard Brautigan’s fourth trip to Tokyo. He had been there every season but fall and was looking forward to experiencing a Japanese autumn for the first time. He would have to wait. Mid-September remained hot and sultry. Richard resumed his old habits in Tokyo, moving in to a room on the thirty-fifth floor of Keio Plaza and heading out to The Cradle every night.

  During his first couple days in the city, Brautigan visited his in-laws, promptly writing Aki that everyone was taking good care of him. He asked his wife if she missed him. Not that Richard lacked for company. Bruce Conner had been invited to Japan by the ICA to host a presentation of his short experimental films. He arrived for a month’s stay. Brautigan got him a room on the same floor of his hotel. “They gave him a good price,” Conner recalled, “and I got the same kind of price.”

  Richard offered a bit of advice about what to expect as a first-time foreigner in Tokyo. “When you go to Japan, Bruce,” he said, “just imagine how people would relate to you if you were a giant cactus on roller skates rolling down the sidewalk.”

  Conner felt this attitude provided “an excuse for Richard to be a little obnoxious.” Brautigan brought his friend to The Cradle “many times,” reintroducing him to Takako. Bruce observed that the bar “was like in a way a second home for [Richard]. He expected everybody to speak English. He didn’t make any effort to speak Japanese other than, at most, two dozen tourist phrases, and he pronounced them just horribly.”

  Brautigan claimed “it didn’t make any difference,” confiding to Conner that “the proper behavior in Japan is that it doesn’t make any difference what you do in Japan. You are a barbarian in their eyes.”

  Spending time in a bar with Brautigan provided Conner with another insight into Japanese customs. “They have a different attitude toward drunks,” he recalled. Drunks were taken care of kindly. No one roughed them up or tried to steal their money. “So, this is heaven for Richard.” One evening, his role as Brautigan’s drinking buddy backfired on Conner. Richard had a fearsome capacity for holding his liquor. Trying to keep up with him was an exercise in futility. Out for a sushi dinner with Brautigan and some of his Japanese friends, Conner made the mistake of attempting to match him drink for drink.

  By the end of the meal, Bruce was sloshed. When the bill arrived, Richard asked Bruce if he’d like to help pay for the dinner. Deep in his cups, Bruce offered some pocket change. Richard felt this to be an insult to his friends but bottled up his indignation until later that night when they were back at the Keio Plaza. He phoned Conner’s room in a fit of fuming anger, threatening to come and beat him up. Drunk enough to take Richard at his word, Bruce slid his security lock into place just as Brautigan came lurching in a fury down the hallway. Unable to gain entrance, Richard hurled himself at Bruce’s door, cursing and screaming. He kicked and pounded with his fists, creating an enormous disturbance.

  Bruce Conner thought being in Japan with Brautigan “would be a splendid opportunity. I could make contact with people through Richard and [he] could show me things about Japan.” Conner and Brautigan had planned back in San Francisco to work on a screenplay together. After making a number of short experimental movies, Bruce wanted to direct a feature before he turned fifty and “felt that because of Richard’s involvement it would be easier for me to see about getting funding for the film.” Living on Brautigan’s floor in the hotel seemed ideal to Conner. “This is great,” he thought. “We’ll have breakfast together.”

  Things didn’t work out that way. “I didn’t see [Richard] for days at a time,” Bruce remembered. “He’d lock himself into his room, saying he was busy writing. Or he had an appointment, or he was doing an interview, or I couldn’t get him at all.” Conner kept busy. Brautigan had introduced him to people he knew, and Bruce worked with a film crew he’d organized before his arrival. Every time Bruce mentioned the screenplay project, Richard said, “Oh, I don’t want to talk about that now. I’ve got other projects.”

  Brautigan finally found time to talk with Conner about their proposed script. Bruce recalled “his premise and concepts of the film were so completely the opposite of any ones I had because what Richard came up with was a bunch of guys planning a bank robbery and virtually everything was taking place in one room. There were seven or eight people, and all they did was sit and talk and play cards and drink. All of the humor was verbal. All of the action was verbal.”

  After several meetings that went nowhere, Conner said, “Look, Richard, there’s nothing really here to do a movie about.” Bruce had a concept he thought might save the day. The idea was to focus on the artificiality of filmmaking. A boom mike would hang down in the middle of a scene. Actors might talk directly back to the director. The clapboard marking each shot would not be edited out of the final cut. Both men wanted Robert Mitchum to star. Conner proposed having the bank robbers plan to meet at a movie theater. The final scene would show Mitchum standing in a queue outside under a marquee bearing the picture’s actual title. The lead actor turns to the camera and delivers a final line: “This better be a good movie.”

  Bruce championed this concept. They had a beginning. They had a punch line. Richard couldn’t grasp a visual approach, remaining locked into his dialogue-heavy structure. Bruce gave up. “I think you ought to write it as a book,” he said.

  On a warm Monday evening, the first of October, Brautigan presented a program he called “My Life, My Book,” at the Tokyo American Center under the auspices of the recently reorganized United States International Communication Agency (USICA), a branch of the State Department established to promote educational and cultural exchanges between the United States and foreign nations. A week or so earlier in September, he gave a similar presentation at the American Center in Sapporo, his wife’s birthplace, on the northernmost island of Hokkaido.

  Takako Shiina was in the audience along with several members of Aki’s family. Richard brought Akiko’s mother a special present from Hokkaido. After the American Center reading, Mrs. Nishizawa wrote her daughter a four-page letter describing Richard’s “lecture” as “unique, humorous and delightful, with dignity.” She enclosed a clipping from the Weekly Asahi Magazine about the event.

  The next night became Bruce Conner’s turn to take the stage at the American Center. Both Richard Brautigan and Takako were in attendance. The films screened included Cosmic Ray (1961), Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977), Mongoloid (1978), and Conner’s most recent production, Valse Triste (1979). After the screening, Takako took Richard and Bruce to an old traditional Tokyo sukiyaki restaurant. Bruce Conner assumed that Takako Shiina was Richard’s girlfriend.

  During their meal, Brautigan remarked to Conner, “Whenever I think my mind’s going, I’m going to get rid of myself. I could blow my brains out.” Richard made a gesture with his forefinger, miming a pistol barrel inserted into his mouth. “He also said he’d never told anybody that before,” Conner recalled.

  “Why would you want to do it that way?” Bruce asked. “Can you imagine what a terrible mess this is for somebody to clean up? How disgusting it’s going to be?”

  “Well, I won’t be there to do anything about it,” Brautigan replied. “Why should I care?”

  “Hey, man,” Conner said, “your mind is going already. What’s the big event?”

  After their planned film collaboration crashed and burned, Richard and Bruce continued to lunch together nearly every day. “He would talk about how he couldn’t find a sock in the morning,” Conner recollected. “How he looked all over the place for it. He talked about his tax problems or any number of mundane and stupid things.” These trivial subjects were the basis for much of Brautigan’s short fiction and had a creative importance for him that was lost on his listeners.

  Bruce Conner had long been interested in the country music from the thirties, forties, and fifties that he’d listened to as a kid in Kansas. He liked all the old-time stuff, hillbilly music, Western swing, rockabilly, and had collected “dozens of records.” He made tapes
of some of these and brought the cassettes along with him to Japan and played them for Brautigan, a big fan of Dolly Parton’s more commercial country music. Richard didn’t care for Conner’s tapes. “He said that it reminded him of when he was a boy,” Bruce reflected, remembering their conversation. “He didn’t want to hear those songs because he was living with his mother and there would be these men that would just sort of come in and carry her away. He’d be abandoned.”

  What “impressed [Brautigan] was the interviews, the publicity, the publication,” Conner observed. Richard enjoyed being perceived as “an important artist” in Japan “because an artist who is recognized is respected much more in their gestures than many other people. The social relationship is quite different.” One night at The Cradle, Brautigan used his cachet to benefit his friend. Richard and Bruce were drinking and schmoozing with several corporate executives from NHK-TV and Brautigan was “badgering them into giving Bruce Conner an exclusive tour of their most recent Samurai production.”

  Early in October, Bruce went to dinner with Richard and Akiko’s sister. Richard told Bruce about visiting his wife’s family “a few times” and that “things were a little bit awkward.” Even so, he felt “everything was going along fine.” This evening proved otherwise. Bruce remembered “the sister was as combative and irritating and insulting as you could be.” She spoke English well, making it impossible to miss the point. Conner felt familiar with the refinements of Japanese etiquette and understood “that she was obviously not being very nice.” A few nights later, she had an opportunity to up the ante.

  On the night of October 10, Richard Brautigan was scheduled to give a reading at Jean Jean, a performance space housed in the Yamate Church in Shibuya-ku. Bruce Conner took the subway with Richard from their hotel. When they emerged from the station, passing the bronze statue of Hachikō, it started to rain, a gentle autumn sprinkle. Brautigan told Conner, “I’m gonna go across the street and pick up something at the drugstore.”

  “Take my umbrella,” Bruce said. He had one of those compact folding spring-loaded bumbershoots. “Here. I’ll open it for you.” Conner pushed the button, and his umbrella expanded with a snap, splattering water all over Brautigan.

  Delighted, Richard exclaimed, “This is marvelous! I like the rain.”

  Bruce loved his friend’s reaction, “like he had received a wonderful gift. It was a jewel-like event.”

  Takako Shiina and a large contingent of the Nishizawa family were also in the Jean Jean audience with Bruce Conner that night. Richard shared the stage with his friend, Japanese poet Shuntarō Tanikawa, a collaboration set in motion during Akiko’s visit to Tokyo the previous May. Tanikawa went on first. During a ten-minute break between readings, Aki’s sister inconspicuously slipped out of the theater.

  When the audience returned to their seats, Bruce Conner observed an empty chair standing alone, a deserted island in a sea of spectators. A dozen minutes or so into Brautigan’s presentation, after he read a new poem titled “The Link,” a member of Jean Jean’s staff came onto the stage, interrupting the proceedings with an important message. Word had just arrived of a medical emergency. Akiko’s sister had collapsed in a nearby department store.

  The entire Nishizawa clan, “all of Akiko’s family, mother, father, brothers, cousins, got up en masse” and walked out of the hall together without a word. Richard stood on the stage, watching in stunned silence. Bruce Conner felt it was all a stunt, “obviously a bad, naughty trick which [Aki’s sister] had planned ahead of time.” In his opinion, there was “nothing wrong with this woman. She hated Richard.”

  Afterward, Bruce Conner conversed with Shuntarō Tanikawa about Richard. Conner felt Tanikawa admired and liked Brautigan but was critical of him “in very small ways.” Takako told a story about a time when she and Richard and Shuntarō went out to dinner together and the Japanese poet said, “Richard, your problem is you don’t understand women.” Brautigan’s response was a nervous, high-pitched laugh, “Hahahahaha!” He dealt with Tanikawa’s remark by treating it as a joke.

  Takako Shiina took note of the Jean Jean program in her journal. She had no recollection of the Nishizawa family’s mass walkout. Shiina recalled Brautigan was “always complaining about Aki and didn’t get along with her family.” Bruce Conner later admitted that some of Akiko’s relatives “probably didn’t know what was going on” when they were informed of the department store emergency. Richard told Bruce that Aki’s mother and other family members came to his door at the Keio Plaza about four days afterward “with gifts, apologizing and tearful.”

  In mid-October, Aki left San Francisco on a trip to the East Coast with Marcia Clay, who was having an exhibition of her paintings at the Zenith Gallery in Washington, D.C. They stayed at a friend’s apartment in a building full of artists next door to the gallery. The trees had just begun turning color. Akiko was charmed by the capital city. “Lots of old buildings are made by brick like in Europe,” she wrote her husband.

  In Tokyo, “summer seemed to be going on forever.” In the middle of October, Richard Brautigan sat in a little student café and wrote “Tokyo Stories, Brautigan” on the cover of a pocket-sized notebook. He began jotting down short pieces inside, completing six that first day. He thought they might be an addition to the work he’d already done for The Tokyo–Montana Express. The subjects were mostly everyday and commonplace (crickets, leaves, a man measuring the Shinjuku Station platform), just what Bruce Conner complained about as topics of Richard’s conversation.

  Typhoon Tip, the largest and most severe tropical cyclone on record, half the size of the United States (1,380 miles) in diameter, roared into Tokyo on October 19, 1979. With winds in excess of 80 miles per hour, the storm had diminished from its peak force of 190 miles per hour but still packed considerable punch, killing forty-four people as it careened across Japan. The nineteenth started out warm, clear, and sunny. In the late afternoon, Richard Brautigan went for a walk in the beautiful park surrounding the Meiji Shrine.

  Suddenly, the sky darkened and wind whirled into chaos. Rain sheeted down, debris went flying. Hit by the force of the typhoon, Brautigan braced himself between a tree and a park bench, hanging on with all his strength. The storm lasted about twenty-five minutes, passing away to the north around sunset. The air cleared. The evening light shone with an unearthly glow as Richard emerged, soaking wet and smiling, through the Main Torii, Japan’s tallest wooden Shinto gate, at the entrance to the shrine.

  Anita LoCoco, a young American woman who lived nearby in the Harajuku District, had been on her way to an acupuncture appointment, cutting through the park, when the storm overwhelmed her. Once the typhoon passed, she staggered on her way, a bit traumatized. She recognized Brautigan from his book covers, his face “kind of glowing.” They were both drenched, with the bewildered look of survivors after a catastrophe. LoCoco introduced herself and struck up a conversation.

  Brautigan and LoCoco walked around the park together, dripping wet. She told him how she’d grabbed onto a tree when the wind came up and had been lifted parallel to the ground, “like in a cartoon.” Laughing, feeling “exhilarated” from it all, Richard commented that the typhoon “was like a life/death experience.” Anita told him about coming out of a reading he’d given at Lone Mountain College, eleven years before, tripping on acid and seeing “the crescent moon with Venus in the middle.” Brautigan remained pleasant, though a bit formal, chatting amicably while keeping his distance. After ten minutes or so, they parted company and walked away into separate lives, never to meet again, a chance encounter after a storm.

  All along, Richard wrote new short stories in his little notebooks, working at sidewalk cafés and supermarket cafeterias. He finished four the day after the typhoon, another four on October 22, and an additional six the following day, when cold autumn weather finally arrived in Tokyo. Many of these brief tales involved going to soft-core porn movies. By his own admission, Brautigan watched “between eight or nine porno movies e
very week” while in Japan. “Richard had this absurd obsession with pornography and sex which did not involve very strong interpersonal relationships with women,” Bruce Conner observed.

  One evening, Brautigan took Conner along with him to the movies. The artist/filmmaker thought in Japan he’d see “worthwhile” work by great Japanese directors (Kurosawa, Inagaki, and Shindo), but “99 percent of the theaters seemed to be these porno movies.” The pornography presented was not the XXX features shown in adult theaters in the States. Certain cultural taboos prevented “kissing on the screen.” All the sex was simulated, “never too closely depicted,” Bruce recalled. Bondage and rape were popular themes in Japanese soft-core porn.

  Brautigan told Conner he was studying Japanese porn films because he planned to write a book about them. “Instead of sightseeing or going on the town to traditional sights like temples and parks, museums and nightlife,” Richard scrawled in his notebook, “I watch television and attend porno movies to find my Japan. This is the Japan of fantasy and imagination [. . .] I think that to come to some understanding of a country you must first try to understand its fantasies.” At porn theaters, he observed “the basic dream life of Japanese men at its lowest possible denominator.” Out of his seventy-six stories written in Japan, only ten were directly about pornographic movies. Others involved actors, models, and television commercials, all satellites orbiting his central theme, part of the book he planned in his mind.

  Sometime in mid-October, Brautigan met writer/singer/actor Akiyuki Nosaka at The Cradle. A hard-drinking brawler, Nosaka was a rebel hipster masked by dark glasses. He burst onto the scene in the 1960s with a series of poignant stories about adolescent youth adrift in the chaos of war. He was best known for his novels The Pornographers (1963) and Grave of the Fireflies (1967), a powerful autobiographical story about struggling to survive starvation with his little sister in the ruins of Kobe after the 1945 American firebombing raids. As a chanteur, he used the stage name Claude Nosaka. The two literary outsiders formed a drunken bond. Richard had a presentation scheduled in the American Center in Tokyo. Akiyuki was set to give a lecture at the Yonago hospital at the same time. They agreed it would be a fine idea to travel together and share the experience.