Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  In his search for West German models, Brautigan spent an evening with “a beautiful Japanese porno star” at The Cradle. Earlier, he’d attended the premiere of her latest “soft core” film, watching her naked as she performed simulated sex on the big screen. “She was so beautiful.” Richard was a fan of this kind of movie. In person, he found the star shy and demure. Brautigan spent half an hour teaching her to pronounce three words with sounds difficult for the Japanese. Staring at her lovely lips, he made her say words hundreds of times until she pronounced them perfectly. Richard thought of her inaccessible beauty, watching the delicate star repeat over and over and over: “Already . . . I love you . . . River . . .”

  This all went into the handwritten manuscript Brautigan now called “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo.” Eventually it filled two complete notebooks, 179 manuscript pages, nearly the length of one of his novels. Little of the text involved modeling or models. West German women turned out to be in short supply in Tokyo. The narrative became a quasi journal about his relationship with Masako Kano, whom he referred to only as “the Ninji” throughout his meandering discourse. Whole paragraphs described his arousal upon seeing her take off her watch before getting into bed (no mention made of Marcia Pacaud, the girl who never took off her watch) and when showering together, the pleasure of soaping down with a beautiful unselfconscious young Japanese woman.

  Brautigan continued this project until the end of July. What he didn’t mention proved of greater interest than his meticulously recorded amorous details. He didn’t include the many trips and local excursions made with Masako or Shūji Terayama’s funeral or an uncomfortable meeting with Masako’s mother (“the Japanese Sophia Loren”) when she backed him into a corner or the night he and the Ninji stargazed from the roof of the Keio Plaza, sneaking up the back service stairs. Due to Richard’s “rather big tummy, he could not catch me easily running up the stairs,” Kano recalled. “I think I was too much for him physically.” On their next attempt at rooftop astronomy, they were caught by the hotel staff and “shooed away.” This episode never made it into the manuscript.

  Brautigan finally made contact with a genuine West German model in Tokyo. He spent an evening talking to her and taking notes. What he gleaned from their interview became a six-page piece, also called “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo.” Never published in English, it was one of his most powerful short stories. Like “The World War I Los Angeles Airplane,” written more than twenty years earlier, it took the form of an enumerated list of quotes, all in the voice of the expatriate model.

  Richard used nothing from the two notebooks he spent months compiling. It was all art and instinct now. What made the piece potent and poignant was the unknown model’s repeated, enumerated assertion, “I am not a prostitute.” Using his long-standing habit of list making, Brautigan keyed into the emotional heart of the story. A lonely young woman adrift in a foreign capital where she can’t speak the language, sleeping with men who aren’t attractive to her in a desperate attempt to bolster an already faltering second-rate career: “I am not a prostitute.”

  Masako Kano had her day job. Richard Brautigan had his nightlife. Often, after she left his hotel room, he headed out to The Cradle for a long night of the unknown. One early morning after the bar closed, Richard and Takako found their way to the Golden Triangle, a section of narrow lanes and ramshackle two-story buildings in Shinjuku, where “thousands of little tiny bars [were] beautifully tucked next to each other.” A final remnant of the old Tokyo now lost forever in the wake of Japan’s postwar “economic miracle,” the Golden Gai provided a popular meeting place for artists, writers, musicians, and actors.

  Brautigan and Shiina went into “a small but very elegant bar.” Although dark and disreputable in appearance, the Golden Triangle was not a cheap area to find a drink. Certain establishments catered to celebrities and welcomed only regular customers. Takako proved the perfect ambassador, guiding Richard into unfamiliar territory. A stranger sat talking with a woman at the back of the pocket-sized bar. He was Kōbō Abe. Brautigan had long admired Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes and was a big fan of the movie based upon it. The two internationally known authors were quickly introduced. Neither knew the other’s language. Abe’s companion volunteered as a translator.

  Richard wanted to tell Abe a story. It took place in the Colorado summer of 1980, when Brautigan first met Masako Kano. She was not in the story. Richard rode in a Jeep with two other men, driving up a steep, remote dirt road to visit a ranch. From out of nowhere, around a narrow bend came “an extraordinarily beautiful young Indian girl” mounted bareback on a galloping horse, her black hair “streaming in the wind.” She was barefoot and wore fringed buckskin, a look of ecstasy on her face as she galloped toward them.

  It was a perfect Richard Brautigan story. No characters or plot, only a sudden moment of unexpected beauty. It took Richard “an unusually long time” to tell his story because he wanted to communicate it exactly, to “get the feeling of what happened.” Brautigan and Abe parted company around 5 AM. Takako headed for home. Richard returned to his room on the thirty-seventh floor of the Keio Plaza.

  Throughout his four-month stay in Japan, Brautigan depended primarily on the mail for conducting business. Long-distance phone calls were too expensive, and the time difference didn’t align with office hours. Joel Shawn wrote to Richard, explaining the high cost of sending correspondence ($29 per mailing) to Tokyo by express mail. Shawn proposed sending Brautigan’s accumulated letters via air mail on a weekly basis.

  Helen Brann sent Shawn copies of recent translation rights contracts. In a curt, businesslike way, she pointed out to the attorney that, over the years, she had mailed Richard copies of all his contracts. It was unnecessary now for her to send duplicate copies to him. It was Brautigan’s responsibility to keep a complete record of his publishing career. Helen insisted it was Richard who had left her, not the other way around. She offered to be cooperative, suggesting Shawn “tactfully” point out to Brautigan his own responsibilities in the matter.

  Helen made no mention of any of this when she wrote to Richard on the same day, sending along a contract for the Greek edition of Trout Fishing for him to sign. Becky Fonda wrote to Brautigan on the eleventh of May, mostly local news seasoned with a dash of Hollywood gossip. She reported that Nicholson and Ashby had asked for fifteen to twenty million to make Hawkline. Their take would total seven to eight mil in salary. Universal declined, budgeting eight million with Michael Haller in the director’s chair. “No star cast as of now,” Becky wrote. “Gatz (regardless of personal diffs.) who is so capable will be working on the screenplay.”

  Brautigan returned the signed Greek contracts on “a beautiful spring day in Tokyo.” A couple days later he wrote Brann again. This letter was more concerned with finances. He asked about his English Trout Fishing royalties and if Helen had heard anything about the Hawkline film project. Richard mentioned that Becky told him “Universal Pictures had allotted $80 million for a production,” a gross exaggeration of what Fonda had actually written and wishful thinking of the most desperate sort.

  The June 6 evening edition of Asahi Shimbun published Shuntarō Tanikawa’s translation of “Night Flowing River” (Yoru ni nagareru kawa) on page 5. Brautigan sent a copy to Jim Sakata in San Francisco, along with a request to help him work out a deal for a one-way ticket back from Japan. When Sakata wrote back to Richard, he promised to get the best possible price on China Airlines. Jim concluded with the news that Tony Dingman had just left for New York to work on Coppola’s production of The Cotton Club.

  On the eighth of June, Richard had lunch with Donald Richie, a noted expatriate author described by Tom Wolfe as “the Lafcadio Hearn of our time.” Ten years older than Brautigan, Richie had lived in Tokyo since 1947, returning to the States only occasionally over the years. Fluent in Japanese, he had published fourteen books by the time he met Richard Brautigan, including two classic works on Japanese cinema,
treatises on the film work of George Stevens and Yasujirō Ozu, along with studies of ikebana (the art of floral arrangement) and The Japanese Tattoo.

  They drank sangria and ate seafood soup. With his love of the movies and all things Japanese, Richard was fascinated by this erudite polymath. Their conversation focused on literature. Learning Brautigan had been in Paris six weeks earlier, Richie discussed French writers. Both men esteemed the work of André Gide, talking at length about The Immoralist. Richie mentioned a recent translation of Corydon, a series of Socratic dialogues on homosexuality published earlier that year, saying they “offered new insights into that admirable novel.” Shortly after winning the Nobel Prize and just before his death, Gide had called Corydon the most important of his books. The next day Richie sent Brautigan a polite letter of thanks signed “Donald,” along with a copy of Richard Howard’s new translation of Corydon.

  Early in June, after the attorney mailed a current financial report, Brautigan wrote back to Joe Swindlehurst. Richard worried about past-due rent owed on one of his Livingston properties, amounting to a couple hundred dollars at best. He also wondered about a plan to rent his Montana “ranch,” guessing “nothing has happened.” Brautigan asked Swindlehurst to send a monthly $115 payment to Army Street Mini-Storage in Frisco. “Japan continues to be Japan and I’m getting a lot done here,” he concluded, adding a mention of his upcoming lectures in Osaka and Kyoto.

  Richard’s “lectures,” consisting mainly of questions from the audience and his answers, were called “A Conversation with Richard Brautigan.” He traveled down to Kyoto on June 20, appearing at Doshita University, and continued on to Osaka the next day. Brautigan was not happy with his performances, sensing in advance that they weren’t going to go well. “Sometimes one cannot always be on,” he observed. “I did the best I could.” Almost all the questions from the audience concerned his early work, written two decades before. Richard hadn’t read the stuff himself in years. He floundered. The audiences in Kyoto and Osaka knew more about his books than he did. “I’m not interested in reading my own writing once it’s done,” was his candid assessment. “I was sort of bored.”

  Brautigan was back in Tokyo on June 22. His lectures had been recorded. Richard planned to listen to the tapes and see if he was right about his lackluster performance. He probably never did, not being fond of revisiting past work. The day after his return to the city, Brautigan typed a letter to Helen Brann in his hotel room, pressing her to organize his foreign contracts and send copies to Joel Shawn. “There seems to be some confusion among subagents about your still representing my work,” he wrote. “For instance, Mohrbooks agency in Zurich still thinks you are acting as the agent for my books that have been published so far, and Tom Mori here in Tokyo has never heard directly from you about our parting.” Richard wanted “the subagents to be aware of our new situation.”

  Brautigan didn’t understand he was the one who was confused. All commissions for the deals Brann had negotiated for him continued to be paid to her agency and remained part of their ongoing mutual business. This included all of Richard’s books that were still in print. Only An Unfortunate Woman and any future work would become the responsibility of Joel Shawn. Helen had explained all this to Brautigan when she sent him the Greek Trout Fishing contract a month earlier. As usual, Richard interpreted events to suit himself.

  A more pressing problem confronted Brautigan. He feared his teeth were falling out. He had not had a proper dental cleaning in quite a while. Every time he brushed his teeth, his gums started bleeding. Richard became preoccupied with aging. When he wrote about his relationship with Masako, he said he was fifty years old, adding a year and a half to his actual age. Brautigan’s worries had a lot to do with Kano. As a proper, traditional Japanese woman, at twenty-six going on twenty-seven, Masako was supposed to be married. In bed with his Ninji, Richard didn’t “feel 50 years old.” Brautigan once discussed with Greg Keeler “the question of whether or not to marry Masako and have a hit squad of Japanese-American kids.” Putting fantasy aside, he knew this was an impossible dream.

  To distract himself, Richard “followed so many different drummers into the glories of the abyss.” It rained all through June. “Not a pleasant month [. . .] either too cold or too mucky.” Brautigan distracted himself with “a couple brief love affairs that led to nowhere” and watching “a lot of stupid television.” He couldn’t sleep and felt “tired all the time.” Richard knew Masako wanted a permanent place in his life that he was “not willing or able to give her.” Brautigan daydreamed about this possibility and found himself “drowning in ambiguity, temptation and collapsing fate.”

  The cold rainy Tokyo spring burst at last into full-blown glorious summer. Richard and Masako took full advantage of the good weather, heading out for sunny adventures like lovers the world over. One afternoon they went to visit the Hanazono-Jinja, an early Edo-period shrine just west of Shinjuku’s Golden Triangle. Prayers offered at the shrine supposedly brought prosperity in business. It’s more likely Brautigan sought absolution in his favorite tiny bar, Shinya + 1 (Midnight + 1), hidden on a narrow cobbled lane in the Golden Gai.

  Named for Midnight Plus One, the 1965 British thriller by Gavin Lyall, the cramped little taproom was decorated with model war planes, tattered movie posters and assorted memorabilia. Chin Naito, a 43-year-old actor, writer and comedian, whose work appeared in Japanese Playboy, owned Midnight + 1 which served only cold beer and bourtbon. Richard liked sitting at one of the seven stools crowding the dilapidated bar, getting drunk on whiskey while scrawling poetry on cocktail napkins. Naito sealed his friendship with Brautigan late one night at the end of May by giving him a signed copy of Yomazunishineruka! (Can’t Die Before I Read [Those Books]!), an anthology of his Playboy essays, adding a manga-styled personal caricature to the inscription.

  Masako and Richard both enjoyed people watching, finding “a lot of tiny incidents” to amuse themselves while wandering the streets of central Tokyo. They always discovered “something funny” to look at. Kano later acknowledged that others “probably did not get [the joke].” Searching for a larger comedic public stage, Richard and Masako found their way one afternoon to Shinjuku Gyoen, at 150 acres one of the largest public gardens in Tokyo. Formerly the Edo-period estate of the Naitō daimyō family, the gardens were only opened to the public after World War II. The lovers enjoyed observing “young people practicing mountaineering” on a climbing wall and the antics of a foreign mime (“perhaps a drug addict”) performing and begging around family groups cooking rice in the park for their alfresco meals.

  Enchanted by the notion of a similar picnic, Richard and Masako returned to Shinjuku Gyoen, planning on cooking a meal of their own. They brought vacuum pouches of curry paste, two hundred grams of Japanese rice, and her brother’s aluminum cooker and camping stove. Just as Brautigan lit the fire, they were spotted by a park security guard, who “chased [them] down to the gate.” They planned to try again on a rainy day, when the guard would be off-duty. Richard said he’d borrow a large umbrella from Takako. Like so many well-intentioned schemes, it went astray and they never came back to the park.

  In mid-June, Brautigan gave a reading at the Tokyo American Center (“Literature as a Living Process”), followed by an informal reception. Around the same time, Richard and Masako traveled by train out to Kichijoji, a suburb of Mitaka City, itself part of greater Tokyo. Their destination was Inokashira Park, famous for its cherry blossoms. The park and its extensive walking paths surrounded a small lake, where paddleboats, some shaped like swans, were available for rent. Brautigan took Kano for a leisurely cruise around the pond, perhaps not knowing this was a famous way to tell your lover of an impending breakup.

  A longer weekend train trip took Richard and Masako to Azumino in the Nagano Prefecture. Situated between the Hido and Kiso ranges of the Japanese Alps, this tranquil mountain plain provided an Asian echo of Montana. Brautigan wanted to go to Ajiro on the Izu Peninsula, where he’d pre
viously spent time with Takako Shiina. Kano vetoed that plan. She insisted they go somewhere “farther away from Tokyo.” Azumino was “smaller and quieter.” To fortify himself against the unfamiliar, Richard drank beer all the way down on the train. Nevertheless, he “liked the place,” Masako recalled, delighted by the crystalline blue sky framing the snowcapped mountains.

  The best time Brautigan and Kano shared together that summer started with a search for the perfect soup. On a Friday late in June, they went to Harajuku, a district northwest of Roppongi centered around the Tōgō Jinja Shrine, looking for Eiichi Yamaguchi, the “soup king.” Richard and Masako found the modest restaurant and indulged in bowls of his wondrous concoctions while discussing Stephen Hawking’s black hole theory. Brautigan wrote two poems about soup before they left. The first, “If Spring Were a Bowl of Soup,” he signed, “Wishing Mr. Yamaguchi a beautiful spring.” “Cucumber Paradise,” the second poem, began by listing various vegetables, meats, and seafood, concluding, “ingredients but a dream, it is the cook that makes / the soup.” Before they left, the soup master gave them each a copy of his soup recipe cookbook.

  Around seven in the evening, Richard and Masako set off on a hastily planned adventure, traveling by the Keio Line and later by bus out to Tama City on the outskirts of Tokyo. On the trip they talked about Yamaguchi San and his dedication to soup. Brautigan explained how Mr. Yamaguchi had been a chef at the embassy. As a joke, Kano teased him about writing two poems for the soup master while he’d never written a single line for her.

  Richard and Masako’s destination was Tama Dōbutsukōen, a 128.5-acre zoological park at the foot of Mount Takao. When it had opened in 1958, as a branch of the much smaller Uneo Zoo near central Tokyo, Tama was intended to display wild animals in a more natural setting, running free behind moats separating them from the spectators. Brautigan had wanted to go to the more local zoo in Uneo Park, but it was much too small for what they planned.