by Tim Anderson
Then there’s Australian Mark, who recently had the brilliant idea to teach a lesson in impenetrable, slangy Crocodile Dundee–inflected speech, because “they’re gonna have to deal with it if they ever come to Australia.” I watched from my classroom as his three mid-level students had three separate mid-level nervous breakdowns.
Not that I’m any kind of Einstein. I’ve made my share of idiotic remarks in class. Sometimes it’s unavoidable when your job is to talk all day and try to maintain enthusiasm. Recently I was teaching two men, both engineers and advanced-level students, and we were talking about Japanese electronics, architecture, and design. At one point I proclaimed in a commanding tone, as if I were saying something really quite unprecedented and insightful, “Japanese engineering is just, like, totally amazing, and, you know, the architecture and, like, electronics, I mean, you know, my God…” I wanted to die even as I rambled on, and from the look on my students’ faces, they wanted the same thing.
I decide to use the whole Ron thing as an excuse to finally make the big move to Tokyo. It’s time to move on, to head north, onwards to the city to take a large, sloppy bite out of the Big Rice Ball.
I find a room in Minato Ward, South Tokyo, in what is called a guesthouse. There are two showers, two toilets, two sinks, and one tiny hot plate in one tiny kitchen.
I’ve made the unlikely and not altogether fabulous transition from living with two gaijin to living with five. There’s Talvin from England, a MOBA teacher in Tokyo; Amelia from Australia, who hates her job at a gimmicky “English Through Drama” language school for kids; Hans, a banker from Germany; Chain-Smoking Jerry, a freelance English teacher (yes, I said a freelance English teacher) from Canada who, though he’s got to be nearly sixty, hasn’t let it keep him from snagging a beautiful young Japanese woman (in this case, the lovely Keiko) and getting her to cook for him. They’re all pretty nice.
But my new best friend is Rachel from California. She’s the girl next door. Not in that bobby sox–wearing, let’s-go-to-thehop kind of way; she lives in the room next to me. I loved her immediately because, since she’s from California, she has a disposition at least as sunny as mine. She is an ex-MOBA teacher who now works at Lane, a school with four branches in Tokyo.
When I move in, I have to pay a deposit and a month’s rent in advance, but thankfully no “key money,” which is a customary monetary gift of at least three months’ rent that new tenants in Japan offer their new landlord just for being such a great guy. I avoid this odious practice by going through an agency that specializes in finding housing for poor, helpless gaijin. Unfortunately, I am also paying for my Fujisawa apartment, so right now, I’m paying two rents. And eating lots of Cup Noodle.
Because of my lack of cash flow, I had to move all of my stuff myself using only my hands and the train. A sane and more financially solvent person would have loaded all of their stuff into a cab and put any of the overflow into boxes and had them sent through his local convenience store delivery service (because there is absolutely nothing you can’t do at a freaking convenience store here). But all of this costs money, and I have zero disposable income. I’m borrowing money from teachers at the school just to eat, and if I could have gotten away with it, I would have walked around Fujisawa Station with a cane, a pair of Speedos, some dark glasses, and a coffee cup made of tin begging people for spare yen for a few hours a day. Unfortunately, if you’re a white man in Japan—even one with a limp and a vision impairment—you are (correctly) assumed to be making the big bucks, because more likely than not you are an English teacher. So that shit wouldn’t fly here. I simply had to bite the bullet and move everything myself. And though I could’ve done without having to wheel my TV/DVD player behind me on a little trolley down a five-lane city street from Shinagawa Station to my new place, I got through everything all right, and the TV only fell over twice.
Soon after I move in, I’m hanging out with Rachel on the couch in the tiny sitting room/kitchen while Chain-Smoking Jerry gives Keiko a lecture about the first Thanksgiving and what it means to Americans and Canadians alike. As he exhales a huge plume of smoke in our direction while relating the history of maize cultivation in North America, Rachel tells me that her language school is looking to hire a few new teachers.
“I’m such a dork, I totally forgot to tell you about it,” she apologizes.
“Oh my God, get me a job! Get me a job immediately!” I demand.
“Totally, yeah, I’ll put in a good word for you.”
And with that brief exchange I am on my way to a new teaching position at two of Lane’s schools in Shinjuku and Ginza. I send in my résumé, and a few days later they call me in for an interview.
This interview is a little different. While Drew, the head teacher, does ask me about my interests and hobbies, the Lane folks seem a little more preoccupied than MOBA with their teachers having a decent command of the English language. To that end, there is an hour-long, ten-page exercise that tests my knowledge of English grammar, from comma splices to misplaced modifiers to restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses. Although it’s a bit of a harrowing experience struggling to recall how affected and effected are different, and although I seriously doubt the need for the general Japanese population to know what distinguishes a simile from a metaphor, it is comforting to know that the school is interested in hiring me for my thorough knowledge of the language and not just my American passport, valid working visa, and jazz hands. Still, I’m more than a little worried about how I’d performed on the test.
I get a call the next day from Craig, the other head teacher, offering me a job with the school.
“Really?! Did you not look at the grammar test?” I say.
He says no, they did, and that I made a pretty good showing, actually. In fact, I received the highest score they’ve ever seen. Those Latin classes served a purpose after all.
I am ecstatic. Not only because I will be working in central Tokyo, but because I will be making more money, have more vacation time, have all national holidays off (at MOBA, national holidays have been our busiest days), and, most importantly, I will never ever have to see or hear Jill again, ever, as long as I live, ever.
“You bitch! You’re leaving me alone with that cow?!” Donna says after I sing her the good news to the tune of “America” from West Side Story during one of our after-hours drinking binges. We’ve grown very close in our time at MOBA together. We’d initially bonded out of our mutual loathing of Jill, only later discovering we also had a mutual love for text messaging, sukiyaki, and men in uniform.
But she wishes me well, and we promise each other that our life together is not over. Sitting at our favorite Kamiooka izakaya bar getting sloppy on foamy mugs of beer, we make a solemn vow that we will, as Donna put it, “go somewhere fucking fabulous on holiday together and be complete pigs.” We toast to it, clinking our glasses together and spilling beer onto our tiny plates of complimentary pickled relish.
All settled in Tokyo now, I decide it’s high time I hatch the next part of my big “I’m Waking Up to Myself” party: yes, it’s time to go out in public with my viola. I place an ad in the English-language Metropolis magazine looking for people to play music with. It would be nice, I figure, to have a regular quartet, marching band, or heavy metal orchestra to meet with, and it’s been a while since I last played music with other people, considering I typically play by myself in my apartment when nobody else is home with the shades drawn and a rolled-up towel pushed up against the bottom of the door. But even though I’ve played for years, I’m still a little lacking in confidence, and this insecurity may have seeped into the wording of my ad:
AMATEUR VIOLA PLAYER, AMERICAN
SEEKS OTHER AMATEUR MUSICIANS TO PLAY MUSIC JUST FOR FUN.
MUST BE AMATEUR. FOR FUN.
I think my ad also suffered from bad placement, since it was positioned right under an ad reading:
HI! FEMALE SINGER/DRUMMER HERE!
AUSTRALIAN, BLOND, EARLY 20’S
SEEKS PATIENT, UNDERSTANDING GUITAR TEACHER FOR PRIVATE INSTRUCTION.
I CAN TEACH YOU ENGLISH!!
I’d guess 99 percent of the people looking for musicians to work with that week answered her ad. But I do get a few responses:
Hello,
I’m writing to your ad. I like viola player. I sing, but not so well.
Let’s make a music!
Hide Saito
Dear Mr. Viola,
I play the bass and like a rock music. You like a rock? I’m not sure viola okay for this kind of style music. Maybe we try. You e-mail me.
Kenji
P.S. You like the Genesis?
Hmm. Not too promising. I’d sooner peel off my own face than play Genesis songs on the viola. Then I get an e-mail from a piano player named Toru in Yokohama.
Dear Tim:
My name is Toru and I play the piano. I saw your ad and I would be very interested in playing music with you. If you are interested, please write. Thank you.
Wow. He writes English better than I do. I write him back, and we strike up an e-mail friendship. A few weeks later we meet in Shibuya for coffee to get to know each other and discuss what music we should play. I learn that he’s been teaching himself English for about twelve years, starting when he was thirteen, and he’d improved by practicing on his foreign friends. He suggests we try the Brahms sonatas for viola and piano. Blissful in my ignorance, I quickly agree, and we are off to the Yamaha store to buy some sheet music. Toru already has the piano music, so we just need the sheets for viola, which he quickly finds among the thousands and thousands of papers on the shelf and hands to me with a smile.
I hesitate to look at the music as an old demon creeps into my consciousness: Though I’d started playing violin when I was seven, switching to viola in my twenties, I don’t sight-read music very well. When I took up the violin, I learned via the Suzuki method, which emphasizes ear training at the expense of music reading. Though I later learned to sight-read, it was always a struggle for me, and my natural tendency was always to ignore whatever sheet music my teacher had assigned for the week and just pick things out that I wanted to play (“Edelweiss,” “You’re the One that I Want,” the themes from E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, The Golden Girls, or L.A. Law). Once I knew what a piece was supposed to sound like—either by listening to my teacher play it or by obtaining a recording of it—I could rattle it off with relative ease. But given the same piece of music and no assistance whatsoever, I’m doomed. Doomed.
Long story short, I am a string player deathly afraid of sheet music.
This phobia would’ve been my undoing had I been playing in the era of Mozart, when rehearsal time was extremely limited and most people sat down and just sight-read their way to riches, glory, and designer pantaloons. Had I had the gall to ask Wolfgang before a performance to just hum a few bars of what I was meant to play, I would’ve been laughed off the stage, my fluffy white wig a web of tomatoes, eggs, and spittle, my legs beneath my secondhand pantaloons lashed repeatedly by violin bows, my fluffy blouse ripped to shreds and set on fire, my head nearly split open with an almond cheese log.
Thankfully, I’m living in more liberated and patient times. I have a look at the first movement, and it seems pretty manageable. Then I turn to the second movement and nearly faint. The notes are crowded together on the page like, well, like Tokyoites of all shapes and sizes standing, sitting, swaying, knocking about, picking fights with each other, and looking up each other’s skirts on a rush-hour train. I stare at the two pages comprising the movement and panic, feeling like a complete phony, desperate for Toru to just agree to play sitcom theme songs and familiar show tunes and let me off the hook.
But then I think, “Hey, I never shy away from a challenge.” But then I think, “Actually, Tim, you ALWAYS shy away from a challenge. I’ve never seen you NOT shy away from a challenge.”
“This looks fun,” I say to Toru, trying to wipe the fear off my face, and we make a date for me to come to his house in Yokohama’s Higashi Totsuka area and give Brahms a whirl.
Meanwhile, I get this intriguing reply to my ad:
Hi, My name is Nabe, I saw your ad in Metropolis. I am interested in your viola to join the project that I and my freinds are doing. The project is a kind of a musical community. We have not given name for. But, the main idea or theme of this project is making music with others who have totally different background each other, but nobody force nobody. In the other words, it could be expressed as “Encounter with others through music or sound.” Well, all you need is enthusiasm and free mind about sound. So, if you are interested in our project, give me a e-mail. Of course, you can ask me any question about the project, I also got a lot of things to tell you about it. Maybe, to begin with, we should meet for each other and share the idea. In addition, I play the guitar (both electric and accoustic), didgereedoo, harmonica, termin, etc. I am looking forward your response!?
This sounds great. It is exactly the kind of laid-back, creativity-friendly atmosphere I am seeking. Just people playing music for fun. Although the project sounds like a glorified jam session, and I can’t really picture myself “jamming” on the viola, I figure what the hell, at least I won’t have to read music. I e-mail him back, saying I’d love to join his group.
The next Sunday I show up at the practice studio Nabe has reserved for us in Koenji, an East Village-ish neighborhood full of college students and aspiring musicians and artists in West Tokyo. Assembled at the studio are two guitarists (Nabe and Ryunosuke), a drummer (Kiyoshi), a tuba player (Masako), a bassist (Yu), and a viola player (me). The studio, like every other place in Tokyo, is small and cramped, and since I’m the last to arrive, the only space left is that next to Masako and her tuba, so I squeeze past Nabe, Ryunosuke, and Yu and all their amps, stepping over the tangle of black cords on the floor, and pivot into an empty chair next to Masako after dropping my viola on her foot.
“!” I say to her. “Sorry!”
“!” she replies. “It’s OK!”
Nabe, ostensibly the leader of our band of misfits, had spent four years in Tennessee when he was younger, which is why he can speak English. Unfortunately, no one else does, so he acts as interpreter when my Japanese fails me, which is almost every time I speak.
He gives a short greeting to everyone and talks for a few minutes in Japanese, presumably about why we are here, what we are going to do, and who the handsome white stranger is sitting next to Masako and her tuba.
Then he switches to English and says to me, “I just tell them that we going to just plug in and play and jam for little while and see how we can make a music. Is OK?”
“Sure, sure,” I nod, wishing I had an amp for my viola.
The guitarists plug everything in and start some soft strumming, and Masako and I play some scales to get warmed up. It’s nice to hear the music bouncing around me, and everyone seems to be tuning in to each other and getting in the zone. Things go a little quiet as everyone decides they’re warmed up enough. Then the drummer hits his drumsticks together and launches into a mid-tempo beat. From there, everyone just joins in whenever they feel the urge. The result is a sound not unlike a car being eaten by a lawnmower. The drums bicker with the bass, the guitars vie for supremacy, and the tuba trudges along underneath like a tortoise at a NASCAR speedway. And me? My viola is buried far, far beneath all of it, gasping for air, begging for its life and the life of its strings.
Our noise lasts for a good fifteen minutes without pause. After the first few minutes, though, I just give up trying to improvise anything because no one will hear it anyway, and I don’t want any accidental genius to be wasted. I start practicing my scales and then launch into the first movement of the Brahms sonatas that Toru and I had picked out, figuring I could use the practice. It is painfully obvious that, as great and romantic as Nabe’s idea of having “free mind about sound” is, some type of structure and order will be necessary in order to make music that doesn’t make people vomit.
As each of us tire of playing, the noise comes to a gradual finish, the last sputtering sounds that of the rumbling snare drum and a lonely little tuba. We sit in silence for a few moments, not sure what to say. Should we apologize to each other? Shake hands and say “good game”? Sniff some paint thinner and try again?
We try again without any greater success, though Yu does mix things up by putting down her bass and yelping into the nearest microphone. This time I detect more of a reggae vibe, and my viola tries its best to fit in. Things shift gears several times before finishing semi-triumphantly with a standoff between Yu and Masako’s tuba bouncing atop Kiyoshi’s ominous drumbeat, which, if memory serves, is the same as that in the song “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. (Is there no escaping the Genesis?)
At the end of our session, Nabe asks me to meet again the next week, and I say I will, though I’m not sure anyone else will. Everyone says their polite goodbyes and we leave.
At work the next day, Eric, a teacher at Lane, asks me if I’m interested in renting a room in the house he lives in with a girl named Akiko, as their other roommate is moving out. The house is in Koenji, funnily enough, so I hop on it, move all my things again, and set about weaseling my way into the local scene, going to the Penguin Live House and hanging out occasionally at the Morgan Café, a tiny upstairs diner down the street from our house where the young husband and wife owners can’t speak a lick of English but love American indie rock.
The next week, we participants in Nabe’s music experiment meet in a different studio in Koenji. This time a guy named Kawano shows up, who is a singer and guitarist. There is also another bassist friend of Nabe’s, going simply by the name M. The guys plug in all their stuff and start playing, Kawano improvising some vocals. His singing style can best be described as “interpretive squawking.” Nabe tells me before we start that Kawano likes to make up his own language while he’s singing, which is fine by me, since it means I won’t be the only one who doesn’t understand him.