Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

  Ponyo ponyo ponyo sakana no ko!

  Aoi umi kara ya ate kitta.7

  I couldn’t understand much of the trailer, which was in Japanese, but I could make out that it was a Japanese retelling of The Little Mermaid. Ponyo is a little goldfish who wants to live on land. She swoops up out of the sea during a storm and becomes a little girl, and makes friends with a little boy. Her parents – some kind of giant mer-queen, the other a human with magic powers who lives underwater – discuss whether to reclaim her or let her stay. Meanwhile she frolics on land with her new friend Sosuke. Paku paku chu-gyu! Paku paku chu-gyu!8 Ponyo gets to stay a girl instead of a fish because she’s so damn kawaii.

  It was the first thing in Japan I felt unadulteratedly happy about. I can sing a song in Japanese! And I’m enchanted by a little fish-girl called Ponyo.

  * * *

  So so la so so so mi do do re mi re

  Mi mi so la do do la so so la so do!

  * * *

  After years of passing, or trying to pass, for French, I found it psychologically difficult to be openly American again. This was in part because of the expectation, in France, that immigrants will assimilate. Whether or not this is a good immigration model is beside the point; the point is, after years of practising my r s and making other, more subtle adjustments, I could just about pass for French. Whereas in Tokyo, there is no way either of us would blend. But X didn’t have to; French bankers were highly valued. Had I been his wife, raising our internationally schooled child, there would have been a community of wives in place for me. But there is less respect for the non-wife, the one with no place to go all day. He didn’t expect me to blend, but he made it clear I was a problem.

  He was extremely concerned about the way we stood out. The way I stood out. In the winter my nose is always running. He got embarrassed whenever I pulled out a tissue. Either you’re not supposed to blow your nose in public, or you’re supposed to excuse yourself before you do, I never learned the exact protocol, but sometimes I couldn’t wait or there was no one to apologise to. I dabbed at my nose as delicately and unobtrusively as I could. Dirty gaijin, he called me.

  Pretty early on it became clear that it was not going to be easy being a woman in Tokyo, especially a non-Japanese one. I signified in a different way. I was either invisible – men bumping into me in the street, or brushing my papers off my table at Starbucks with the back of their coats – or I received a distinctly negative form of attention.

  X had a habit of pulling me into his lap on the metro, so we used up only one seat. He thought it was considerate. We were going to Yodobashi to replace the lens on his Nikon. I was planning to see how far I could get us with my Japanese. I was wearing a skirt. My legs were crossed. I didn’t even see the man until he had already slapped me.

  His hand connected with the inside of my thigh. It was swift and authoritarian and made what was, I’m sure, a very satisfying sound. It stung like hell.

  A diminutive middle-aged man, mostly bald, wearing a navy-blue windbreaker, was halfway down the carriage, walking away as if nothing were out of the ordinary. I swore at him, but he didn’t turn around. The episode was finished; the day closed over it.

  ‘Did he really just slap me?’ I asked in disbelief.

  ‘You shouldn’t have had your legs crossed,’ X said. ‘Your leg was sticking out into the aisle.’

  My fault, then, for sticking out.

  * * *

  Best to stay in.

  * * *

  In Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johansson plays a familiar figure in American literature. She is the culture-shocked American abroad, trying to connect with the local culture but unable to. Like me, Charlotte has come to Tokyo with her partner, and is left to her own devices while he goes off to work. Like Charlotte, I would spend my evenings staring out at the Tokyo nightscape from our apartment on the twenty-sixth floor. There was something lofty and unconnected about my life there, much like Charlotte’s life in the Park Hyatt.

  Charlotte needs a project, a direction, but has none at hand. She wanders around her hotel, listens to self-help tapes, tells herself that her life is now, that it is happening now, but that she can’t connect to it.

  Neither could I. I was depressed. A fish out of water in the land of raw fish. I couldn’t rally myself to find a university library where I could research my PhD thesis. I just sat in our apartment, flâneuse-ing around the Internet, longing for Paris.

  Watching the film again, in Japan, I was struck by the institutional quality of Charlotte’s hotel. I thought I remembered it being more chic, but it looks like any other hotel in any other city in the world.

  Different from my own, my hotel-apart. It is home but not my home. It is not meant to be a home but a temporary home, a mimicry of home, a promise of what home could be like in Tokyo, that is, certain kinds of homes, the kinds of homes foreign banks pay for traders and their wives to live in.

  I am not a wife and this is not a home.

  The Tokyo setting intensifies the familiar story of the American abroad, and gives it an arrestingly contemporary cast. If Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century and New York the capital of the twentieth, Tokyo is the undisputed capital of the twenty-first century; but it is alienating in its contemporaneity. It’s too contemporary for Charlotte, who realises, as she looks out in scene after scene on the Tokyo night, where red lights blink in an announcement of their own presence.

  The hotel should be the refuge of the flâneuse. A place to rest your weary dogs. Or it is a trap, to keep you from walking and exploring. Stay in, have room service, take a bath. To sit in the window and look out, contemplative.

  From my hotel-apart I can’t get a read on Tokyo. I can’t find its topography with my feet, and there is no skyline I can see. I live plunged into the middle of its needling black buildings with their twinkling red lights stretching on into the infinite city.

  Writing on Lost in Translation and the final episode of Sex and the City, in which Carrie, defeated by an afternoon of attempted flâneuserie foiled by dog shit and violent French children, falls asleep (or pretends to) in her hotel room waiting for her artist boyfriend to get home from work, Maggie Lange blogged for the Paris Review that ‘The cities outside the lodgings are an afterthought’ to ‘putting their men on imaginary trial’. This isn’t true. The city is unsurmountable. The city is antagonistic. If anything the girl is confined in her hotel room by the city: it holds her in. The man is the reason she’s there. If he is on trial, it is for bad partnership.

  All my walks have led me to this space, these sixty square metres.

  * * *

  According to the beliefs of Japanese folk religion, your spirit can go walking while you sleep. In the ninth chapter of The Tale of Genji, the Lady Rokujo – Sixth Avenue Lady – goes and kills the Lady Aoi while both women are asleep.

  Mono no ke, they’re called, these spirits. Like the Miyazaki film I watched at home one night while X was out carousing, Princess Mononoke.

  And that night while I slept my spirit walked out of Akasaka, clear out of the city, boarded a plane, and went and curled up in my bed in Paris.

  * * *

  Charlotte acts the tourist in an attempt to connect with Japan, or at least with its past. But Japanese culture does not come neatly wrapped up for her consumption. It is incomprehensible, unreachable. ‘I saw these monks today and I didn’t feel anything,’ says Charlotte, after a day trip to Kyoto, on the phone to someone at home who doesn’t understand. She listens to the self-help tapes, she reads philosophy, but nothing gets her any closer to connecting with her own life. Japan, too, provides a variety of models of people searching for true meaning: the Zen practice of flower-arranging, the traditional wedding in Kyoto, the kids playing video games in the game centres, even the American actress in Tokyo at her press conference, promoting her latest action film (‘I really believe in reincarnation, so that’s part of what drew me to Midnight Velocity’).

&nb
sp; Charlotte and I differed in one big way. She was lost in general, unsure what she wanted to do, or be. I was older, more sure of myself. I had already learned that self-discovery is a lifelong experiment. It doesn’t happen in one trip to a city. But unlike me, Charlotte makes a friend in the blurry city. That last scene in the film when Bill Murray whispers something into her ear that the audience doesn’t hear is genius. Whatever there is to be ‘learned’ from travelling and wandering can’t be summed up in a film or a book, but whispered from one person to another, when they have unexpectedly broken through the selves they thought they were, alone together in an unfamiliar city.

  * * *

  My work suffered. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t accept not knowing what was going to happen, when X would quit his job, when we would move back to Paris, both of us, full-time. I obsessed over this unreachable resolution.

  * * *

  A film called Tokyo! came out, three short films about the city.9 I liked the first one best, ‘Interior Design’, by Michel Gondry. It was a bit like Lost in Translation, actually. A young couple comes to Tokyo. He’s a film-maker. She doesn’t know what she’s going to be yet. He says she lacks ambition, but that isn’t quite it. They have no money and they’re staying in a friend’s tiny one-room apartment – with the friend, and occasionally her boyfriend, still in it.

  Everything is untenable. But the film-maker boyfriend shows his film, and everyone loves it, and soon the young woman gets left behind. Jobless, ambitionless, she visits depressing apartment after depressing apartment. ‘No boyfriends, no pets,’ says the owner of a cube. Another has a dead cat outside the window and still another is full of cockroaches.

  Then the film takes a weird turn. As she looks in the mirror, she notices her torso is gone, supported only by her spine. As the day wears on, her legs turn to wood, and she limps down the street, more than knock-kneed, de-kneed.

  Suddenly, she stops walking altogether.

  She has turned into a chair.

  女.

  But that’s not where it ends! She can turn back into a woman – a naked woman – when she runs.

  Earlier in the film, back when she was all woman and not part chair, her boyfriend told her about the spirits that emerge from cracks in the walls and run around the city, flat as a board, after dark.

  In a postmodern take on the mono no ke, she has become the spirit of the chair – or her spirit has hardened into a chair.

  Someone brings her home off the street, thinking she is only a chair, and when he is at work she sleeps in his bed, waters his plants, plays his banjo, bathes in his tub. She seems happy.

  When the guy comes home, he finds the chair in the tub, full of bathwater. He calmly dries it off. When he works at the computer, she peeks over his shoulder. When he looks behind him, she ducks, and is a chair again.

  * * *

  Sophie Calle did a project in Japan called Douleur Exquise. Exquisite pain (the French kind). She was awarded funding by the government in 1984 to study there for three months. She didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to leave behind a relationship. She was away for ninety-two days. Then he left her. She writes, in her notes, ‘I decided to make the project about my pain, rather than my journey,’ and structured it as a series of photographs stamped with the countdown from when she arrived in Japan to when he jilted her. The pillow of one side of a hotel-room bed, made, unslept-in. ‘67 days to unhappiness.’ The slept-in side: ‘66 days to unhappiness.’ A photograph of a blue dress and a pair of jeans. ‘7 days to unhappiness.’

  This part of the project is followed by a photo essay, in which she and several others recount the moments they were most sad. It begins with a sad twin bed in a hotel room, with a red telephone on it, the kind they had in the 1980s, with the dial face and the handle you pick up, with a spiral cord you twirl nervously in your fingers as you talk to the man you love. He was supposed to meet her in India at the end of her trip. Instead she received a message at her hotel in New Delhi that read: ‘M. cannot meet you. Accident. Paris. Call Bob.’10

  Bob knew nothing of any accident that would have kept M. from travelling. M. had gone to the hospital for an infected finger, that’s all.

  It turned out he had met someone else.

  98 days ago, the man I loved left me.

  The 25th of January, 1984. Room 261. Imperial Hotel, New Delhi.

  Enough

  * * *

  And yet over time – surprising everyone including myself – I grew to love Japan. On my last visit I stepped outside the airport and it was as if the world had shifted into high definition. So crisp. Had I really looked at it before?

  It took some time to find places I could connect with. The temples around Asakusa. The parks, Harajuku, with its cosplay characters, or Ueno, where I saw a giant statue of a fat man in a kimono with a dog, a bonsai exhibit, and a tabby cat asleep in the sun, lying on a pavement clean enough to eat off. A temple where there were hundreds of little wooden signs hanging from a fence, onto which people had written their prayers. In Kyoto the palette made me feel deeply calm, all deep greens and greys, the opposite of Tokyo with its harried pace and bathroom-tiled buildings. (To-kyo restated as Kyo-to, and vice versa.) There were bathroom-tiled buildings in Kyoto, too, but there was so much else that it didn’t matter. The Kamo River quietly moved through the centre of the town, its banks lined with walking paths and restaurant terraces. Kyoto was livable, manageable, aesthetically interesting, and, most of all, a place to walk. I never saw it during cherry-blossom season, but I hope to one day. I lost myself on the grounds of the temples, endlessly photographing the details on doorways, the fish in the water, a cobweb on a tree, trying to capture the exact quality of the light.

  I had been trying to find the city on street level, but that’s not where it was. To flâneuse in Tokyo I had to walk up staircases, take elevators, climb ladders, to find what I was looking for upstairs, or on rooftops. You can’t just walk through the city waiting for beauty to appear. This isn’t Paris.

  It’s no place for the shy. That retiring kawaii thing is a surefire way to miss out on the best of the city, standing knock-kneed on the sidewalk.

  * * *

  As my relationship to Japan grew more and more rich, my feelings for X soured. As if I couldn’t love them both at the same time. We suddenly stopped functioning. He wasn’t the person I wanted to see those things with. All the resentment I had focused at Japan came sloshing out of place, and soaked him.

  We had a crushing fight at our French restaurant after I offhandedly gestured at a woman sitting a bar stool away from him. He got very angry that I had gestured at a stranger. ‘You don’t do that,’ he fumed, while I grew indignant and not a little confused. ‘First of all she probably doesn’t speak French, so she has no idea what I said, and second of all I don’t think she even noticed that I gestured at her because you are sitting in between us.’ The fight escalated and I left him there on his ridiculous bar stool. I walked home by myself, in my heels, so angry I couldn’t feel how much my feet hurt. When I woke up the next morning, I found him asleep under the dining-room table.

  I went over and over what had happened, trying to understand. He thought I embarrassed him so he made a scene. I made a scene because he accused me of making a scene. Barthes: ‘The scene is like the Sentence: structurally, there is no obligation for it to stop; no internal constraint exhausts it, because, as in the Sentence, once the core is given (the fact, the decision), the expansions are infinitely renewable.’11 And round we go. I did this because you did that because I did this because you did that. How to break out of it, except by leaving?

  We almost broke up then. But we didn’t. Instead we got engaged.

  * * *

  Then there were the earthquakes. He loved them; I feared up. He liked the idea that whatever was below the surface was forcing itself up into the world. I just wanted everything to calm down and stabilise. The first one we had, I ran to the doorway and sat down, and waited while the bui
lding creaked and swayed, as if we were on a boat. We were on the twenty-sixth floor of a building barely three years old; the foundation was constructed on springs absorbing the energy. It didn’t feel the way I thought it would because we were up in our high-rise boat in the sky, protected from the earth, its shifts, its caprice.

  He was giddy with the joy of it until we found out late how serious it had been. In the north of Japan, in Iwate prefecture, an onsen collapsed and three people died.

  * * *

  Dead words, dead tongue, dead of disuse, my mouth stuck shut. My withdrawal is in my posture, the articulation of my spine saying I have given up on you, I don’t care if you like me or not, I don’t like you either. I reject your codes, so dead, so exclusionary. You don’t belong to my world. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

  We are at a stalemate, we are at an impasse, I said in your language, which I have come to speak, ta langue, ta langue dans ma bouche, and you’ve brought me to this place where my new tongue lies flat in my mouth. A crack in the road, the sidewalk blistered, how long has it been since I left New York concrete for Paris cobblestones? Why am I here, where I can’t ask for aspirin or sleeping pills, where the yogurt aisle is a tofu aisle? I can’t think straight, I can’t make one thought lead to another, I just tell you I hate it, and hate it, and I mean you, and before we know it I’m breaking things and jumping up and down and screaming at you in your tongue, in my tongue, in my mother tongue. My mother spoiled me, you say. But you have spoiled us. I never thought we’d be here.

  * * *

  The thing about fault lines is that they are such a cliché.

  The fractures in the bedrock. The fault zone. The instability underneath it all. The shifting tectonic plates entirely out of anyone’s control. Too much tension builds, and we quake.