A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  Anzu in the dressing room of the striptease theater

  We took the train to Kawasaki, an industrial slum inhabited by poor Koreans. The streets were shabby and smelled of fermented cabbage and open sewers. But the laws were looser than in Tokyo, hence the many strip clubs and sex shows. Our destination was called Yamashita Paradise, misspelled as “Paradize” in flashing neon lights. A young man with frizzy permed hair and tattooed eyebrows, a not uncommon look among low-ranking yakuza, ushered us inside. Since this was not a kinpun show, there was no need to be covered in gold paint. For my number with Anzu, the female half of Dance Love Machine, all I needed to wear was a tiny scarlet jockstrap. Anzu, in a minuscule bikini bottom of sparkling silver, told me not to worry about a thing. She was a skilled modern ballet dancer as well as a Butoh performer. She would do all the work. All I needed to do was to catch her in my arms at the end of the dance.

  The stage felt clammy. There was a smell of stale beer and cigarettes. I could hear the men in the audience chatting loudly but could not see them because of the colored spotlights shining in our faces. Tom Jones began to sing “It’s Not Unusual,” I struck up a manly pose, a bit like Charles Atlas in the bodybuilding ads, and Anzu started her sinuous dance around me. Everything seemed to be going fine; I felt almost relaxed. I could get used to this kind of thing. Alas, relief can turn to complacency in seconds. My attention flagged just at the wrong moment. Anzu flung herself into my waiting arms, Tom Jones sang his last notes (“It’s not unusual to find out that I’m in love with you, whoa-oh-oh-oh”); I was taken by surprise and made the only mistake I could possibly have made: I dropped her onto the stage floor.

  There was no booing from the audience—just a stunned silence, which was worse. It was as if my embarrassment filled the dark void, like a ghastly miasma. Nothing was said in the dressing room, as we hastily put on our clothes for the trip back to Tokyo. Once again I apologized to Anzu in the train. She smiled thinly. I never performed in a cabaret again.

  * * *

  • • •

  HAVING SPENT MORE THAN two years at least nominally as a film school student, and spurred by Maro and others that I should do something, make something of my own, I decided it was time to try my hand at making a short movie. The resulting script of First Love, or Hatsukoi in Japanese, showed all the marks of a young man who had seen too many roman porno films. Even the irony of the title itself was heavy as a sledgehammer.

  My friend Tsuda played the leading character, a solitary figure in the big city craving a woman’s love. One day, walking the streets, he is approached by a young woman who promises to show him a good time. They go to his tiny apartment, shot on location in my living/bedroom in Mejiro. He believes that he has found a girlfriend at last. She asks him for money when the good time is over. In a blind rage, he kills her.

  Kin-san, my friend from the Nichidai film school, shot the movie on 16mm film. An apprentice dancer from the Asbestos Studio, called Miho, whom I was madly in love with, played the girl. Small and lithe, Miho was studying French literature and performing most nights at a large burlesque theater near the Ginza, where Ri Koran, the Manchurian movie star, gave concerts during the war, before turning into Shirley Yamaguchi after Japan’s surrender.

  I cannot blame Tsuda, Miho, or Kin-san for the failure of this morbid study of alienation. The story was full of unearned darkness. I cannot even claim that it was a true expression of my own deepest feelings. The film might have been more interesting if that had been true. It was just a pale reflection of the ero, guro, nansensu that I had been lapping up in Tokyo. Others had expressed the same sort of thing with more wit. Hatsukoi should never have been shown to anyone.

  And yet it was. Perhaps gaijin’s privilege kicked in once more. Kawakita Kazuko, the daughter of Kawakita Nagamasa, the film producer in wartime Shanghai, ran a film distribution company called Furansu Eigasha. She had handled films by Visconti, Fellini, Wim Wenders, and Godard. Outside Japan she had introduced audiences to Oshima’s work. Kazuko was one of the most attractive and important figures in the movie business. She was also unfailingly generous. And so she offered to screen my movie at her company, in the same room where films by Oshima, Chris Marker, and Godard were shown.

  Kazuko, Donald Richie, and I settled into our seats for the screening. When the lights went up after fifteen minutes, there was a short silence. “Well,” Kazuko said brightly, “I think it’s time to go for dinner.”

  * * *

  • • •

  NOT SO LONG AFTER THAT, Maro decided that I should be in the next Dairakudakan show. But perhaps with my cabaret performance in mind, he would mercifully spare me the embarrassment of acting as a dancer. We would embark on a short tour through Japan, first to Nagoya, then to Kyoto. My simple role, Maro reassured me, was to stick my head through a window onstage and imitate Adolf Hitler. The title of the piece was Arashi, meaning “Tempest.” The show lasted about as long as Ravel’s Bolero, which was played at high volume throughout, as Maro’s star dancers, including Amagatsu, Anzu, Murobushi Ko, and “Carlotta” Ikeda, squirmed and cowered and silently screamed in the requisite Butoh manner, their bodies coated with rice flour and streaks of bloodred paint.

  There was little point in rehearsing an improvisation of the Führer’s tirade, and so I, too, did the same physical exercises as the dancers. This made me feel fitter without necessarily improving my proficiency. Ravel’s Bolero is not an easy piece to sit through once without getting restless. Hearing it over and over can become a torment. But the spectacle of cadaverous bodies straining to come to life in different variations, and Maro’s solo dance as a swaying mummy with black eyes in a chalky face like some creature of the night, was, to say the least, arresting.

  We traveled to Nagoya in a large van. Everyone was in good cheer. Amagatsu cracked jokes. Maro’s mournful features creased with laughter as memories of former tours were recalled. It was one of those brisk sunny Japanese fall days, when everything looks sharply etched like a woodblock print. Even Mount Fuji, which is usually hidden in clouds, stood out like an ice-cream cone against the almost cobalt-blue sky. One of the male dancers rather ostentatiously turned his back to the window, exclaiming to no one in particular that there was nothing pretty about Mount Fuji.

  Fuji, as much of an icon of Japan as the Eiffel Tower is of Paris, has a peculiar status, with right-wing connotations. In the world of Shinto, many rocks, rivers, and other forces of nature are considered to be divine, but Mount Fuji is the most sacred of all. When Shinto, which began as a form of nature worship—with rituals to ensure fertility and good harvests, and so on—became a state cult in the late nineteenth century, it came to be associated with militarism, ultranationalism, and worship of the emperor, until this type of thing was banned under the American occupation after the war.

  I don’t think the dancer who turned his back on the holy mountain did so as a form of political protest against the icon’s chauvinistic history. Fuji is now a harmless symbol anyway, a popular decoration on the tiled walls of public bathhouses in the days before such bathhouses began to disappear, as more and more people were able to take baths at home. More likely, his gesture was a proper Butoh-like disdain for conventional beauty. Authenticity lay in deliberate ugliness. It is true that Hijikata was inspired by his childhood in the rural northeast, but the dance pieces he created didn’t celebrate the splendors of nature. They were more redolent of backbreaking work in the rice fields and bodies shrinking from the icy winds of endless winters.

  Nagoya is the neatest city in Japan, and perhaps the most boring. Like almost every other place, it was pretty much destroyed in the last years of the war. But unlike Tokyo or Osaka, whose rebirths were as capricious as human life, Nagoya was the only city to be rebuilt according to a carefully worked-out plan. It is a city of straight and wide avenues, as rational as a mathematical equation. Nagoya’s main distinction is the invention of the pachinko pinball machine
, which was ubiquitous all over Japan. There were many more pachinko parlors than cinemas, let alone bookstores. In the 1970s you could hear them from a long way off, the noise of cascading silver balls combining with the deafening background military music—the Imperial Navy’s “Warship March” being especially popular.

  But not everything in Nagoya was soulless and new. We were to perform at a tumbledown old theater, mostly used by traveling groups like the one I had photographed near the old execution grounds in Tokyo. It has probably been pulled down by now. The wooden building had a musty odor of tatami mats that hadn’t been replaced often enough. The stage was on the ground floor. We all slept on the ratty tatamis in a large room above the theater. At night that is also where we ate, sang songs, and drank too much.

  Since the local press or radio stations wouldn’t take any notice of a Butoh troupe arriving in town, we had to do our own publicity, which meant driving our van through the main streets, advertising our performance through a megaphone. I had often been annoyed, as were most Japanese even if they rarely showed it, by the ubiquitous sound trucks in Tokyo of uniformed right-wing fringe groups, mostly small-time gangsters, bellowing militaristic slogans and playing wartime martial songs. But I enjoyed addressing crowds in this manner. It felt good to hear my own amplified voice booming at the modern buildings.

  We parked the van near the front entrance of Nagoya’s main railway station, where Amagatsu, Carlotta, and the others startled commuters by doing a half-naked Butoh dance, while I used the megaphone to invite people to come see us perform at 7:30.

  By 7:15 the theater was so full that it felt dangerous to me. This was not an unusual situation. I had been to performances inside small wooden buildings, packed with people, with kerosene stoves to keep us warm and no fire escapes. For a highly organized society, with rules for everything and an almost universal fear of the unexpected, there was a curious recklessness about the way some things were done. It was as though without clear rules, people felt no need to use common sense. I was surprised at first to see how nobody would jaywalk, even without a single car in sight, but would think nothing of walking straight through heavy traffic in the absence of a red light.

  Our performance in Nagoya was a success. Death and rebirth were painfully reenacted to the sounds of Bolero. Even though only my face was seen, peering through a window, around about the time when the trumpets come on, I was still fully made up in white and wore nothing but a jockstrap. Pulling Hitler-like grimaces, I did my rant in cod German, as Maro swayed back and forth in a tattered red kimono, and the entire group danced for the finale, with lots of dried brown fish attached to red cords, like arteries or intestines, dropping to the stage.

  The party afterward was held upstairs in our sleeping quarters, where long tables were laid out, covered with plates of delicious raw fish provided by a local Butoh fan who happened to be a fishmonger. All that remains in my memory is a blur of florid faces, singing and drinking, and laughing. One of the dancers climbed on the table and did a slow grind, while three of the women dancers improvised a kind of French cancan to the sound of our rhythmic clapping. A friendly jazz drummer tapped along furiously with chopsticks on his beer glass. Nobody got hurt. We rolled out our bedding at around three in the morning.

  The venue in Kyoto, called the Seibu Kodo, was even more remarkable than the old theater in Nagoya. It was a huge barn of a place with a traditional Japanese-style roof, on which there were still traces of the three painted stars of Orion’s belt. Frank Zappa had performed in this hall the year before and declared that it was the craziest place he had ever played in. That must have been an exaggeration. But the Seibu Kodo’s history was indeed curious. Built for Kyoto Imperial University in 1937, the year that Japan invaded China, to commemorate the birth of Emperor Hirohito, it was taken over in the early 1970s by student radicals and had since become a venue for rock-and-roll and theater groups.

  After the rehearsal, just as the sun went down, casting a burnt-orange glow on the yellow-starred roof, naked dancers in rice flour and ash stood around the palms and cypress trees like figures in a fairy tale. I could only gaze in wonder at the beauty of the scene, made more surreal by the faint sound of Bolero drifting from the hall, when my girlfriend in the black leather trousers, the one who liked Roxy Music, said she was going back to our dormitory. She had come down from Tokyo especially to see us perform. Her name was Chieko. She wasn’t feeling well.

  The dorm was in a rather dilapidated prewar university building. When I caught up with Chieko a few hours later, she was clearly upset by something. She wouldn’t tell me what it was. Only weeks later, when we met up again in Tokyo, she blurted out that in my absence, one of the dancers had tried to push her onto the tatami. When she protested, he said: “You do it with a gaijin, so why not with one of us.”

  The show went even better than in Nagoya. The dorm had been cleared for the party. Amagatsu was being his amiable self, moving around the room, pouring drinks and telling jokes. Maro was beaming, as though on a high. We sat in a large circle, passing around beer and whiskey and flasks of sake. A fish stew was boiling away in a braiser. Chieko appeared to have recovered. We sang old high school songs, of which I never learned all the words, like students around a campfire. There was dancing. Urged, as is customary on such occasions, to contribute to the entertainment, I sang the theme song from a well-known yakuza movie called Theater of Life: “Throw away our chivalrous duty, and the world will go dark . . .”

  Things began to wind down around one in the morning. One or two people were already curled up in their futons. Maro was smoking and chatting with one of the female dancers, Anzu perhaps. I saw Amagatsu staring from the other side of the room at a young male dancer sitting close to where I was. Amagatsu looked pale and wasn’t smiling. All of a sudden he grabbed one of the large empty sake bottles and flung it with full force at the man. The bottle crashed onto his forehead with a nasty clunk, like hitting a coconut with a hammer. Blood began to gush from his wound, splashing my shirt.

  I don’t mind violence in the movies but never fail to be shaken by the real thing. I wanted to leave. Whatever personal motives Amagatsu might have had, or whatever group dynamics I had missed, I didn’t want to know. I stood up and stomped out into the dark night, with Chieko, loyally, in tow. My blood-soaked shirt felt cold and clammy in the autumn chill. The stars were shining brightly, as we walked through the old streets of Kyoto, wooden houses on both sides, in search of a place to stay. As my shock wore off, I rather relished the romance of the situation.

  I don’t know what the keeper of the shabby little inn, whom we roused from her bed by knocking loudly on the sliding bamboo door, must have thought when she saw the foreigner in his bloody shirt with a young Japanese woman. But by some miracle she let us stay the night.

  Chieko went back to Tokyo the next morning. I returned to the dorm, feeling a little sheepish about my self-righteous exit. Maro, who had clearly witnessed such scenes many times before, was keen to soothe ruffled feathers. He said “I’m sorry” to me in English. There seemed to be no more ill feeling between Amagatsu and the young dancer, whose head was swaddled in bandages, like a turban. I explained how I felt about physical violence, how much I disliked it, and so on. Maro nodded, and said that violence was not good. But my physical squeamishness must have seemed at odds with the intense physicality of Butoh. One of the dancers made this clear when he turned to me and said, in a mixture of surprise and some disdain: “So, Buruma, you still believe in words.”

  SEVEN

  Like many great cities, Tokyo is really a collection of villages. Each district, every neighborhood, has its own atmosphere: the Ginza with its plush department stores and expensive boutiques; Ikebukuro, a little louche, with petty gangsters and transvestite prostitutes lurking in the backstreets behind the railway station; Harajuku, modish and full of teenagers; Kanda, literary, with the smells of old-fashioned Chinese restaurants and used books.

/>   By the 1970s, the artistic and cultural center of gravity had moved almost entirely to the west, away from the old popular areas in the eastern “low city,” the shitamachi, along the Sumida River. Parts of the low city still had some seedy charm, but the old striptease joints and burlesque houses near the temple to the goddess of mercy in Asakusa had become sordid relics, attracting a sparse audience of old men and bums looking for a place to nap. The Asakusa Opera, a beacon of modernism before the war, was long gone. Once-famous movie houses, like the Meigaza, had become shabby venues for porno films and endlessly rerun gangster pictures. There was still a tiny Korean area in Asakusa, where you could buy fermented vegetables pickled with red peppers kept in plump brown earthenware pots. Korean immigrants had been lynched there in 1923 by Japanese mobs in a murderous rage after the terrible earthquake of that year (Koreans, idiotically, were accused of poisoning the water supplies). The Arizona, a Western-style restaurant where the great literary flaneur Nagai Kafu would have his pork cutlet for lunch every day until he died in 1959, was still in business. And so was the line of stalls selling Buddhist trinkets, cheap kimonos, and sweet dumplings that led to the temple. But the erstwhile glamour of the shitamachi, celebrated by Kafu, only lived on as myth.

  The action had long since shifted to Shinjuku, especially the dense areas around the east exit of the main railway station. Shinjuku had a mythology of its own, as the capital of the counterculture in the 1960s. Hipsters, like the young Maro Akaji, hung out at the Fugetsudo coffee bar (gone by the time I arrived in Japan). Student protesters fought the riot police in the wide avenues running between the station and the former red-light areas of Kabukicho.