Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

  I ate like a teenager.

  And I liked the small touches, the unexpected details. If I went out to buy a bento box for lunch from the nearby deli it would come wrapped in coloured paper with a bow. There were beautiful stone walls in Azabu, lining the hilly streets on which clusters of trees grew, evergreen. The walls seemed ancient, though they couldn’t have been very old, not even a century. They referenced a much older Japan that is no longer visible, that I couldn’t feel, or didn’t know how to feel. We started visiting apartments – you can’t stay in an apart-hotel forever, or can you? – and some had a view of Mount Fuji. Its proximity was confusing. Are we there, then?

  * * *

  Through the looking glass, I became a student of reversals. In the taxis, whose drivers wore white gloves and whose seats were laid with lace, the doors opened and closed themselves. On the metro, men with paddles pushed you into overstuffed carriages. What you can do for yourself is in one context done for you, in another imposed on you.

  * * *

  The months accumulated, and X stayed in Tokyo. I passed my orals in New York, travelled back to Paris, saw friends, tried to keep my life full without him in it. I looked at real-estate listings in shop windows, thinking of the flat we’d move into when he finally came back, a nice big one-bedroom, somewhere on the Left Bank (X hated the Right). But after hearing all his stories of Michelin-starred restaurants and titty bars with brokers footing the bill, it dawned on me that X didn’t want to come back to Paris. That, in Tokyo, French bankers were le shit. What I wanted really didn’t matter.

  * * *

  It was hot, so hot, the hottest summer I could remember, and that included those stifling drowsy summers on Long Island when the world swam in the heat rising from the sidewalks and the caterpillars dropped from the trees in exhaustion. The air felt pressurised, pushing on my skin from every direction, entering every pore. I bought a parasol to shade myself, like the women I saw on the street, but it didn’t help much and was just one more thing to carry. I sprayed myself often with a little can of atomised mineral water from the pharmacy in Paris.

  We moved to an apartment in Akasaka, to another Mori property on the other side of the Y intersection. This was not an apart-hotel but an apartment. But though the furniture was ours, it still felt temporary, an airplane-seat apartment like the ones I lived in in New York. For a short while you live the drama of your life in them, and then you leave and can barely remember them, since they have no particular attributes. Our new home’s neutrality, in its institutionality, its mimicry of home, made it not an apart-hotel but a hotel-apart.

  The hotel: the home of the foreigner, the misfit, the impossible-to-assimilate.

  I spent my days in the air conditioning, avoiding the soul-melting oven of the outside world, or, when I started to feel stir-crazy, went down to the Starbucks in the lobby of our building. I read Roland Barthes in a corner with an iced coffee, to a background music of baristas singing grande cappuccinôôô!, one to the other, until the precious drink was offered to the customer with both hands and a presentational arigatogosamaaaaaasu!

  By then I had that children’s song down pat.

  Barthes was fascinated by Japan, which he visited in 1966 and wrote about in a book called Empire of Signs (1970), a culmination of his work on semiotics, understanding language as a self-referential system with no concrete connection to the things it represents. Japan, and Japanese, marked for Barthes a system unto itself, totally ‘detached’ from our own, that does not yield to him any ‘truth’ about Japan, nor about our symbols for it, but rather the limits of symbols themselves. A lot like writing, which can only strain to describe so far, before the words themselves become plastic, and meaning is created on the page, not beyond it.

  Japan forced Barthes to confront the emptiness of language. The void. The absence of a transcendental signifier, or a way to break the code. ‘The dream: to know a (foreign) language and yet not to understand it.’ To be relieved of the burden of meaning. For the outsider, Japan is a proliferation of unreadable signs. The language, strokes of meaning organised architectonically, throws up a physical barrier to the Western tourist; trying to remember a kanji, for me, is like running into someone you met at a party years ago, trying to place them. I would confuse the kanji for Tokyo

  東束

  with the one for city

  市

  and sometimes even the simple one for person

  人

  I could not summon the ability to tell them apart. Not that I needed to. But I wanted to.

  The character for woman, onna, is supposed to be a figure with breasts sitting down.

  女

  For Barthes, Japanese was a protective veil against all the ways people present themselves through language. But these illegible signs came at a moment when I was trying so hard to become myself in Barthes’s language, to situate myself within it, to prove I could do it. And now this new language, in which I could not get a foothold.

  * * *

  I signed up for intensive, one-on-one Japanese classes at a language school in Meguro. My teacher, Hayashimoto-sensei, was a proper Japanese lady, impeccable in her silk twinsets and pearls. Lauren-san, she called me, rolling the r. I liked her very much.

  The logic of Japanese: every part of speech followed by its corresponding preposition, or rather, postposition. Subject followed by subject preposition. Direct object followed by direct object preposition. Verb. I learned to build sentences the way I used to play with those stackable logs as a kid. This one layers this way, this one fits on top.

  Watashi wa Roppongi ni ikimasu.

  I am going to Roppongi.

  Watashi no kuruma ga akai desu.

  My car is red.

  ‘Yo!’ they add at the end of a sentence, for added emphasis. Watashi no kuruma ga akai desu yo! My car is red, you know it! Or they say ‘ne’, to express doubt, or the wish for agreement. Watashi no kuruma ga akai desu, ne? My car is red, no? (If there were other inflections, I didn’t catch them.) I would sit and puzzle over the word order, trying, and failing, to commit it to memory.

  I did my homework at the second-floor terrace at Tully’s Coffee on Akasaka-dori, across from Biz Tower. On the street the people went by. Pretty girls in frilly dresses and espadrille wedge heels. Junior high school kids with their uniforms untucked. Women of all ages carrying parasols to shield themselves from the sun, even at five in the afternoon. (And … there’s the song.) Middle-aged men in Hawaiian shirts with interesting facial hair. Dehydrated-looking young men in suits. Stylish women in tight black trousers with Dean & DeLuca tote bags. Workers in blue jumpsuits with Aladdin cuffs coming out of the konbini. Young guys with messenger bags slung across their torsos and blond patches in their hair. Women wearing lacy half-socks with sandals.

  * * *

  I think, in retrospect, it was too much all at once.

  (God, I can’t wait to go back some day.)

  * * *

  It seemed as if everyone walked as slowly as possible. Like the street scene was in slow motion. My life slowed down with it, as I tried to think of the right preposition to follow the right part of the sentence.

  Hayashimoto-sensei was very encouraging, but I could only stumble over my words, trying to match nouns to prepositions. Watashi wa boyfurendu to Kyoto ni Shinkansen de ikimasu. I am going with my boyfriend to Kyoto by high-speed train.

  Most of the sentences I could say featured the word boyfurendu.

  * * *

  What bothered me most was the certainty I felt that there was a great city out there, full of places I wanted to discover, but I didn’t know where to look for them. I didn’t know what there was out there. I didn’t know where to go, where to walk.

  * * *

  We spent our weekends buying furniture at Bo Concept.

  I decided what kind of chairs we should have. He liked the tables with drawers in them but we couldn’t afford those.

  Then the week would start, and he would go back to
work.

  * * *

  I googled ‘interesting things to do in Tokyo’.

  I googled ‘English-language bookshops in Tokyo’.

  I found one in Nakameguro called Cow Books.

  I drew a map.

  I went to Nakameguro and I couldn’t find the bookshop.

  I went home frustrated and overheated.

  I headed out the next day and hailed a cab.

  I showed the address in Japanese to the cabbie.

  He didn’t know where it was.

  He plugged it into the GPS.

  GPS didn’t know it either.

  We drove around and around for a while. Forty euros later, he found it. Cow Books was nice.

  I have gone somewhere.

  * * *

  Barthes had the same problem I did, but he was more willing to accommodate himself to it. Tokyo is just a different system. It could be learned ethnographically, he says. ‘You must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing.’3

  Roland, you scoundrel, if I could walk this city I would.

  * * *

  When I did venture out I stuck to nearby places like the Tokyo Midtown mall, or the Roppongi Hills mall. Of course the American girl heads to the mall. But these are super-malls, not only in size but in concept, with a variety of things to do and see and buy all under one air-conditioned roof. Roppongi Hills (pronounced Roppongi Hillis) and another Mori-porium, Tokyo Hills, include parks and museums, high-end restaurants, shopping, art exhibits (we saw one by Ai Weiwei – the entrance to Roppongi is guarded by a Louise Bourgeois spider), hotels, offices, a movie theatre. They are enormous, temples of consumption of the very highest quality. But with all the rain-walls and Zen gardens and wooden walkways mimicking a provincial onsen, it all gets a bit tacky, as if Fifth Avenue mated with one of those malls in Miami filled with expensive bars and restaurants and had a monstrously oversized Japanese child. I couldn’t afford most of the shops, so I lingered in Muji, buying attractively simple things made of clear plastic and wood, things in which to put other things.

  Occasionally I got stuck behind a pair of girls walking stiltedly, without bending their knees, their feet slightly turned in towards each other, knock-kneed. They didn’t seem to have any kind of actual physical impediment causing them to walk that way.

  I asked some expats about it. ‘It’s because they learn from a young age to keep their knees together to keep perverted men from looking up their skirts,’ said one. Another blamed it on the formal Japanese way of kneeling on the ground, called seiza. But her friend refuted this right away. ‘No one can sit like that for very long,’ she said, ‘and in any case it makes no sense that it would make them unable to bend their knees when they walk.’

  It’s supposed to be cute, someone else told me. They call it x-kyaku, or x-legs. Kawaii (cute)! Japan outdoes all other cultures in cute. For most women kawaii dictates a certain performance of giggly femininity that I find grating. They dress themselves like porcelain dolls, all lace and ruffles, their eyes wide as they clomp pigeon-toed down the street. At a party we went to, I watched as X opened a bottle of champagne surrounded by Japanese girls. Eeeeeek! they squealed in anticipation as he eased the cork out. A few covered their eyes; one clung to his arm.4

  I knew I was coming up against my own cultural prejudices, but, like Barthes, I couldn’t ‘read’ Japan, and was left feeling foolish for even trying, and hating myself for hating it there.

  21/03/08

  I am trying to listen. To let it signify. What it signifies I can’t understand. I study the language but it’s like studying a few grains of sand to imagine the ocean floor. I give myself over to fragments; what else can I do?

  28/03/08

  I refine my maps. I go to random places. I go to Starbucks.

  * * *

  Japanese has three alphabets, not counting borrowed Roman letters: hiragana, katakana and kanji.5 The first two are created of syllables rather than letters; kanji are the pictograms borrowed from Chinese. The 46-syllable hiragana (ひらがな) I learn diligently, but by the time we get to the 48-syllable katakana (カタカナ) I am exhausted. I didn’t think I could commit to more than one alphabet, so I decided I would be a hiragana-only girl. It was once the language for women, who weren’t taught the classical learning necessary to read kanji, and though things have changed, I wasn’t planning on sticking around long enough to learn the 50,000 kanji that are said to exist. I would be a medieval Japanese woman, reading and writing in hiragana. Many of the great works of early-Japanese literature were composed by women in hiragana – The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, The Confessions of Lady Nijo. It was called onnade, women’s writing. Occasionally they would throw in some kanji to indicate their learning, and references to classical Chinese poetry. Virginia Woolf called for a woman’s sentence ‘to hold back the male flood’;6 for centuries in Japan the shape of a woman’s sentence was columns of hiragana.

  Some days the world got the better of me and I was too depressed to go to class. ‘Please tell Hayashimoto-sensei I am ill and cannot come to class today,’ I would tell the receptionist on the phone. It’s hard to articulate why I wanted to stay home. The heat, yes. A headache. But often nothing tangible. The woman in the kanji is stuck inside because when kanji were invented, that is where the woman belonged. I am not trapped inside; I trap myself. I could go outside but I can’t. I shower, I put on make-up, I put on my shoes, but I cannot bring myself to open the door and walk out of it.

  When I finally made it back to class Hayashimoto-sensei would teach me the vocabulary for whatever ailment, real or hypochondriacal, I had claimed. Stomach ache. Harawoitameru. はらをいためる. Headache. Zutsuu. ずつう. Migraine. Henzutsuu. へんずつう. I like that the word for migraine is the word for headache with hen in front of it. Hen means strange, odd, peculiar, suspicious. As in, I don’t just have a headache, I have a peculiar headache.

  * * *

  I couldn’t make friends. I alienated myself from the kind of people who were supposed to be ‘my’ people – artists, graphic designers, editors – by complaining about how much I hated Tokyo, how I wanted to go back to Paris, how you can only emigrate and assimilate once and I already did it and it was hard enough and I want to go home.

  I was very boring.

  People who love Tokyo love Tokyo. People who love Tokyo are crazy about Tokyo. People are this way about their cities. They can’t understand how you could not love it there. If you don’t love Tokyo there must be something wrong with you, you have no eye for detail, no sense of humour, you’re too negative. For me, living in Japan was like writing with my left hand. I see some people do it fluently. But I can’t make anything legible myself.

  I resented X for moving there, I resented him for staying there, but you can only resent your partner so much before it becomes impossible to live with them. So the rest of the resentment I foisted off on Japan.

  * * *

  At Cow Books, they had a copy of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit book, initially published in Tokyo in 1964 and full of endearing instructions for better living, like her ‘Map Piece’ of 1962, in which she asks the reader to draw an imaginary map, mark a place they’d like to go, and then go walking somewhere using your imaginary map as a guide to the real territory. ‘If there is no street where it should be,’ she says, ‘make one by putting the obstacles aside.’

  I have an image of myself putting the obstacles aside in Tokyo. What would that even look like? I can’t identify what is obstacle and what city.

  * * *

  Living in Tokyo brought up all these feelings of powerlessness, of having to wait around for other people, as if I had no autonomy. It felt as if I were five years old again and antsy, on lin
e with my mother at Marshalls, trying to relieve the weight of standing for so long by leaning on, climbing on, wrapping myself around the sweaty metal railing that demarcated the waiting line. It felt like being stuck in the back of my father’s office while he finished up for the day, staring at the rolled-up blueprints and photographs of his buildings, organising his paper clips and staples and pushpins. It felt like sitting through breakfast at the diner, as the sun beat down through the venetian blinds onto the cheap pinewood windowsill, which smelled like earwax, and on which several fly carcasses were scattered. It felt like waiting for my mother at the dentist, in a pinewood-lined waiting room which smelled of antiseptic, where I was encouraged to play with a cardboard treasure chest full of cheap plastic toys. It was like visiting my great-grandmother’s apartment in Queens in the early 1980s. The same dimness, discomfort. The same feeling of needing to maintain a strict boundary between myself and the environment: I don’t want to eat that. I don’t want to drink that. I don’t want to sit there.

  I thought of Micheal O’Siadhail’s poems about Japan and learning Japanese. Tongues: Unless you behave / As little children / These kingdoms too shut their gates. It’s about learning a new place, a new tongue, as a child, open, absorbent. I resisted being a child again, so soon after leaving my French childhood, not long after leaving my own. Yearning towards adulthood, responsibility. And here, beginning all over again.

  * * *

  One day I discovered a canal lined with cherry trees. In season, the petals pink and white on the water, it must be so beautiful.

  I felt a longing for something I couldn’t put a name to.

  * * *

  Dum dum da dum dum dum dum dum dum dum da dum

  * * *

  While we were there, the legendary Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki released his film Ponyo. I hadn’t really seen any of Miyazaki’s films; I suppose I thought they were for kids. But we saw the trailer, and something about adorable Ponyo spinning in her bubble, or yawning sleepily in her bowl – struck me the right way. I asked Hayashimoto-sensei to help me learn the words to the very catchy theme song.