Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

  Greg makes phone calls to other women periodically throughout the trip, and sponges money off her to fix the car. In one scene he asks ‘Are you OK?’ and she nods without saying anything, without blinking even, for about ten seconds, as rain falls down the window and someone plays the harmonica on the radio. She’s not acting.

  It’s hard to see someone you revere heartbroken over some guy who bites the hair off his hands and arms.

  * * *

  This is the story of how Calle ended up in psychoanalysis. When she was thirty, her father said she had bad breath and told her to see a doctor. He made the appointment but when she got there it was a shrink’s office. Calle told him there must be some mistake, her father was supposed to send her to a doctor for her bad breath, and the shrink said, ‘Do you do everything your father tells you to do?’ That was when she decided to be his patient. It was a way of following, and not following, her father’s instructions.

  The project of following Henri B. is a tug-of-war; sometimes she relinquishes control; sometimes she grabs hold of it. There’s no knowledge at stake, no information to be gleaned, except about Henri B.’s daily existence. She plays the detective, but there is no crime, no reason to survey. She would play with this idea a few years later, when she would hire a private detective to follow her throughout Paris. Secretly, she follows the detective.

  By then she is better at following. Or at least so we assume; we don’t know if the detective ever figures out she’s been tailing him. Henri B., however, does. The day after she has waited for hours outside the antiques shop, he spots her following him inside the hospital of S.S. Giovanni e Paolo. Her eyes are what gave her away, he says. He recognised her eyes. She should have disguised them better.

  Just before this, Calle has been almost giddy with joy, with nervousness, with triumph. ‘I’ve diverted him from his course,’ she writes. ‘He’s intrigued.’18

  It makes me think of another man Calle ‘targeted’ with one of her projects, called The Address Book. In 1983, after finding an address book lying in the street in Paris (the rue des Martyrs, around the corner from where I was living at the time I started my own Venetian project), Calle undertook to call all of the people listed in it, trying to get an image of the man who had lost it. She made little articles out of these conversations, and published them in Libération. The man in question was not pleased, and tried to sue Calle for invasion of privacy. He also tried to get Libération to publish nude photos of Calle. That was the one time, Calle admits, that she went too far.19 She also, as with Henri B., claimed to have fallen in love.

  Some people don’t like being followed.

  Does it come with too much responsibility?

  * * *

  She manages to get to Paris by a different train, via Bologna, five minutes before he does. She watches him and his wife get off their train and struggle with their baggage, walking very slowly. One day they will have wheels on their suitcases, and they won’t have to struggle. But then, one day they’ll all be taking easyJet, and the romance will be gone.

  I wonder where Henri B. is now. I wonder what he thinks of Calle. Does he own a copy of her book? Has he been to Venice since, and is his city now transformed? Has he found someone of his own to follow?

  CDG> NAR two-hour bus to ANA Hotel, get off in the underground parking garage and take the elevator up, up, up

  TOKYO

  INSIDE

  A good many of the ordinary ways of living go when people begin to live up in the air.

  – Maeve Brennan, New Yorker

  In November 2007, my boyfriend at the time (I’ll call him X, like Sophie Calle) was informed he was being transferred to the Tokyo office of the bank where he worked, effective January. The discussion went like this:

  __ No.

  __ …

  __ Quit your job. Find another job. You hate being a banker anyway.

  __ …

  __ We can’t move to Tokyo. How can they just move you to Tokyo?

  __ …

  __ How long are they moving you there for?

  __ Indefinitely.

  __ No. No.

  My reasons were many. But above all, I didn’t want to leave Paris. I had worked so hard to get there, and stay there, every year was a new fight to renew my visa, to get teaching work to support myself, to balance teaching with research, with writing. Then there were the professional challenges facing me that year: I had to study for my orals exams, which would take place in New York in May; this required reading and taking notes from the roughly seventy books I had on my lists. I needed stability, I needed continuity, I needed a reference library. An image flashed through my mind of me lugging seventy books onto an airplane.

  On the other hand: Tokyo! I had never been to Asia; I didn’t know when else I would get there. I had always imagined that I would go there one day. I saw myself at some vague point in the future, as a middle-aged woman, there with my husband, our kids away at university. Maybe this was an opportunity I shouldn’t let pass me by. His company would pay for me to travel back and forth. And he promised he would look for another job in Paris as soon as he could, that we would enjoy Japan while we were there, and then go home.

  So I said OK.

  * * *

  Rumour has it there’s a mental ward in the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris for Japanese tourists who are catatonically disappointed to find the actual Paris is dirty and loud and rude, when they were expecting it to be all croissants and macarons and smelling of Chanel No 5. They call it ‘Paris syndrome’, and its physical effects are said to be comparable to what Stendhal described on his trip to Florence: ‘When leaving Santa Croce, I had heart palpitations, what one calls “nerves” in Berlin; life was exhausted in me, I was walking in fear of falling down.’1

  But there is no mental ward in Tokyo for Parisians light-headed at the hideousness of Tokyo. For the first week, I was convinced we were living in the shit part of town. They put us in Roppongi, the gaijin (foreigner) ghetto of flyovers and tunnels and steel bridges you had to climb to cross the four-lane highway of a main street. The buildings were almost uniformly covered in bathroom tiles which looked as if they haven’t been cleaned since they were thrown up in haste after the Second World War. It hurt. It really hurt. Our building was in a complex called Ark Hills, owned by the slick, wealthy Mori corporation, who own just about everything in Roppongi and its environs. Nearby there was a sad orange-and-white imitation of the Eiffel Tower that looked more like an oil derrick.

  As I began to venture into the city, I found most of it looked like this as well. Its governing aesthetic was pure functionalism. I don’t know what I was expecting, so I can’t say why I was disappointed. I was hoping for something different. Something – less industrial. A city I could feel at home in, even if only temporarily. A city I could explore the way I always do: on foot.

  But Tokyo is not a walkable city; it is too big, even neighbourhoods are too big to amble in. We lived at a Y-shaped intersection of two main highways (Y for yen, for money, for wealth), one leading to Shibuya, the other to the Imperial Palace. All the places I wanted to explore – Shinjuku, Harajuku, Nakameguro, Omotesando, Asakusa – lay beyond, far from us and, for the most part, from each other, connected by long stretches of pedestrian-unfriendly highways. We could walk to Azabu, an upscale neighbourhood full of embassies, but that was about it. After two weeks, I wanted to scream. But I didn’t.

  Hold it together. Give it a chance. Keep an open mind.

  We lived in one of those long-term business hotels, the kind they call an apart-hotel, in a sixteenth-floor eyrie with a view that looked like Midtown Manhattan. Every day at five o’clock a little tune like a children’s song would play on the loudspeakers attached to the buildings, wafting up from the canyon. As evening came on, the buildings captured the warm orange of the sunset on their windows, and at night they twinkled with protective lights, a million red eyes blinking in the dark. In the morning helicopters drifted across the sky like mosquitoes.<
br />
  Everything was automated. The flowers on the balcony watered themselves. If you were in the kitchen and fancied a bath, there was a button on the wall that would turn on the tub taps in the bathroom and automatically turn off when it was full. If the water cooled while you were lying in it, you could reheat it. The ‘shower toilets’ (as they’re called) had a whole range of functions that included seat-warming, arse-cleaning, music-playing, and self-flushing. Ours opened automatically when you approached it, which is a better idea in theory than in practice. Even if you’re just getting a towel from the cabinet, the toilet begins to beep and whirr expectantly, as if you’ve woken a sleeping dog. I was constantly setting it off. I would deactivate the cover-lifting function, and X would reactivate it, and so on and so forth. The banker’s life in Japan: the things that were nice were unnecessary, and the things you’d want to be nice were not.

  A week after we got there, the world financial markets crashed. A renegade trader at X’s bank lost all its money. From one day to the next it was la crise. There were no jobs to be had back in Paris.

  We were marooned in Tokyo.

  * * *

  Well, not marooned. I came and went, as planned. But his absence transformed Paris, made it temporary, instead of the place I lived. When I was there, I wanted to be in Tokyo, and when I was in Tokyo, I wanted to be in Paris. I had been split between New York and Paris, but now I was strung across three continents, and unhappy in all of them.

  * * *

  I kept a journal.

  22/01/08

  The day after a massive downturn in the stock market. I study the faces of the be-suited people surrounding me at Starbucks, who consult their laptops on their coffee breaks, but I see no trace of the previous day’s catastrophe on them. Is it imperceptible to the untrained eye?

  The impact has yet to reverberate across the ocean to America, where the markets were closed yesterday (today for them) in observance of Martin Luther King Day. Tomorrow we will know more. The American credit bubble is responsible for this mess – how will it play out over there?

  * * *

  I emailed my sister.

  23/1/08

  I am daily frustrated by not speaking the language, although I’m learning little phrases and taught myself the numbers. I think I will enroll in a language class. I miss Paris a lot – it’s so ugly here. And I miss you guys. I spoke to M&D on the phone the other day and it was so nice to hear their voices. Paris feels like the next town over from NY compared with Tokyo – I feel so far away. But this is a once-in-a-lifetime and never-in-most-lifetimes opportunity, so I need to get everything I can out of it, and be here for as long as it makes sense for us. And hey – if ever I fly from Tokyo to NY I will have flown around the world.

  * * *

  I made a Dada cut-out poem out of an article in the FT.2

  led markets about close. rally

  Japan no Asian cuts, surprises

  recession optimism a buying no drew

  eco- interest investors sprang figures

  already further Tokyo

  * * *

  I felt the distance in my bones. All those hours spent flying over Siberia. The trip took me so far from where I’d started; it was the wrong way round the globe. I should have flown to Tokyo from New York. Maybe with a stopover in California. NY> LAX> Tokyo.

  Everything was drab in the winter light. The sky looked dingy, like a white towel that got washed with the darks.

  And out in the streets of Roppongi, dense crowds of people in puffer jackets, ads for whisky and beer, a shopfront for a business called Brawny Weeds. ‘For rent an apartment, call Brawny Weeds.’ Hello Storage. Someplace called the Birdman. A café called Almond with a sickening pink-and-white candy-striped awning. Everything was covered by a canopy of highway. There were lovely ornate street lamps, and trees that did try; and I tried in turn, to find scraps of beauty, you can see it in my photos. I would zoom in on details – that’s where they say God is, right? I was trying to surprise a little Shinto god, dwelling in the city.

  * * *

  I wrote in my journal.

  13/02/08

  I don’t want to be here. This is wrong.

  * * *

  Ark Hills describes itself as a ‘multipurpose city complex which fulfils work, play and relaxation, all the elements of urban life’. And it’s true, there was everything you might need: supermarkets and specialty food shops (selling grapefruits and melons on satin beds in boxes, like precious jewels, selling for one hundred dollars each – cheap for jewels, dear for melons), everyday things like a pharmacy, a doctor, a dentist, several banks, a heliport, a concert hall. There was a barbershop called Angel Foot that advertised all manner of hair-removal services. I took a picture of a picture of a Japanese woman tending to a Japanese man on a sign that read EAR HOLE. I bought French Elle at a bookshop called Maruzen, and sometimes books in English, mass-market paperbacks of Murakami and whoever had recently won the Booker. There was a fake French café called Aux Bacchanales where all the French traders went to drink, where I sat and tried to pretend I hadn’t left. But it felt less like a Parisian café in Japan and more like a Japanese imitation of a French café in New York.

  The synthetic, corporate environment felt constricting. It didn’t feel like part of Tokyo. Tokyo was out there, I was sure of it. But how to get at it?

  * * *

  I learned to conjugate where we were in space based on the history of the neighbourhood. Ark Hills was at 1-12-32 Roppongi, Minato-ku. The first part of the address corresponds to the ‘chome’, or arrondissement, in Minato prefecture. The chome is then divided up into different sections, of which we lived in the twelfth. The third part of the address specifies the building is the thirty-second to be built in that section.

  So if you’re walking down the street looking for a particular address, it’s unlikely you’d know where to find it unless you knew how the neighbourhood built up.

  How do you navigate a city where the streets have no names?

  * * *

  That five o’clock song implants itself in my head. So so la so so so mi do re mi mi re and what is the rest?

  * * *

  I wrote in my journal.

  16/02/08

  Today was a pretty good day. X took me to Yodobashi Camera and then out for katsu-don (pork cutlets and rice topped with a fried egg) and beer. Like a little kid he’s saddled with and has to please, except with alcohol. It was one of those Japanese-style Automat-type places where you pick out what you want from a sort of vending machine and pay except all it gives you is a ticket and then you pick up your food from the counter. Men on stools hunch over Formica tables and slurp up their noodles loudly and with great smacking of their lips. There was a man from the camera store wearing an armband that said ‘interpreter’.

  * * *

  There were other nice things. I found a street full of shops in Harajuku selling cheap women’s fashion, with names like Jet Lag Drive, Flower Monsoon, Kolor, all the salesgirls standing in the doorways singing their song of welcome. ‘Irrashaimaseeeeee!’ Shops full of little-girl clothes for grown women, round collars and frills. I bought a ruffled sleeveless top that I wore as a dress but back in Paris realised was far too short to get away with.

  Every now and then we heard of something that sounded so exciting, so fantastic, we wanted to find it at once and do it so that we could feel we were experiencing all the city had to offer. Like the kitten café rumoured to be located at the top of Isetan department store. We went up there one day and, needless to say, found no kittens, only boxes of dolls dressed like samurai.

  * * *

  It’s a Japanese folk song, I learned. It plays everywhere in the whole country, every day at five.

  * * *

  Food was a problem. I haven’t been a picky eater since the third grade, when my mother asked me to keep an open mind about a white substance that turned out to be mozzarella and on the whole keeping an open mind has generally rewarded me with some
thing delicious. But in Japan I realised my mind can only open so far. The highest form of Japanese cuisine, kaiseki, I found inedible. Everything had a strange smell, like the ground-up contents of a rabbit cage was made into a broth, and then the rest of the meal was simmered in it. The tea tasted like the air in a room that had been closed up for a very long time. There was one root vegetable, some kind of radish, which tasted like the underarms of an old man’s tweed jacket.

  I went to the supermarket and couldn’t read the labels. Is this brown liquid soy sauce or teriyaki sauce or some as-yet-undiscovered sauce? Is this bag of white granules sugar or salt? (With the predictably disastrous consequences in my cup of coffee the next morning.) Bags and containers of ginger-coloured stuff – gunk, paste. Made of what? good? bad? Bags and bags of dried fish (ugh). Rows of brown substances in jars in the supermarket. What are they? What could I have them with? It seemed as if there were some amazing culinary world right beneath my eyes but I couldn’t access it.

  We went to a French restaurant in the Roppongi Hills mall so often we made friends with the sommelier. For Valentine’s Day, X took me to a restaurant that specialised in tofu. There was only a tasting menu, and one of the dishes consisted of a white, tofu-like ball, in a little shot glass, which the English translation on the menu identified as ‘milt in an orange reduction’. ‘What is milt?’ I asked, regretting it almost immediately. Best not to know. Keep an open mind. X googled ‘milt’ on his phone. ‘Fish testicles,’ he answered. I spat mine out. He ate the pair.

  Through trial and error, I found that some Japanese food was really delicious. The aforementioned katsu-don. Okonomiyake: a kind of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink omelette topped with mayonnaise. We managed to find a really good curry house in Roppongi, where they serve skateboard-sized slabs of nan dripping with butter, and where the food was so good it almost didn’t matter that the restaurant was thick with smoke, it being illegal to smoke outside in Japan (except in appointed smoking shelters) but legal to smoke inside.