Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan

by Unknown

  You already had to listen to me pester you all about it. But even though they know better, we humans will always end up doing something we’re not supposed to without thinking it through. Reflexive actions—well, deeply ingrained habits, that is—are frightful things. So that’s why I’m going to make this perfectly clear one more time. In short, whatever you do, don’t do that.

  You all got it? One hand is bad enough, but if you do it with two, they will get you 100 percent of the time.

  Hey, hey! No, no, no, no, no, noooooo. You there. You just started to do it, didn’t you. I’m telling you you can’t.

  You didn’t mean to, you say? That’s precisely my point. There’s a lot of people like you.

  It might be a simple, careless act, but you’ll bring upon yourself an irrevocable fate. If things go wrong, you could get all of us sucked in.

  No, I’m completely serious. I mean it.

  Look, to them, nothing is more important.

  What you have to understand is the weight of it is different. The significance of the meaning.

  Yes, right, I’m talking about their scissors. They perceive that outline as scissors.

  And if you do that with both hands … no ifs, ands, or buts about it, they will perceive you as something with two scissors for hands.

  That’s their nature. To them, that’s everything, their entire world. It’s their computational unit. And they’re always computing.

  Yes, always and everywhere, they’re computing.

  We don’t know what they’re computing. But we do know they are.

  What we do in our brains, they do in great number, within this whole muddy expanse. From what we’ve been able to observe, they seem to be performing complex computations. Some say that if that’s the case, then what they show us is no mere illusion, but rather a calculated projection of the future.

  Yes, a computation.

  They are always computing.

  I’m sure that to them, the computations they make together are very important.

  How do they perform computations together, you ask? Well …

  Well, they have those two crab-claw scissors, right? Yes, the ones that open and close. This “open” and “close” is like a computer’s “0” and “1.”

  They use combinations of these to perform computations.

  That’s what we think.

  Like I just said, with one scissor, they can express 0 and 1, right?

  And each of them has two scissors.

  Let’s call them “Scissor A” and “Scissor B.”

  When they pinch something between both A and B, they can open up either A or B, as long as the other remains closed, and the state of the pinched object doesn’t change. In other words, they can express a state of “A or B.”

  Now, imagine A and B connected to each other, two closed scissors touching at the tip. In this case, if either A or B opens, the state is lost. In other words, they can express a state of “A and B.”

  Through combinations of these simple states, you can construct logic. Just like computers, right?

  That’s only the simplified version. In reality, they have many more factors at play: differences in the sizes of each scissor, differences in pinching strength, and it’s not limited to the scissors themselves. For example, pinching something by the torso, or the reverse, being pinched by your torso, and so on.

  In that way, by pinching each other’s scissors, and pinching things that aren’t scissors, they construct a giant spatial structure.

  You could call it a giant thought.

  A thought translated into form.

  And this structure of infinite, many-sized scissors doesn’t simply remain motionless.

  They alter the states of their scissors to respond to input. As the structure changes, it loses stability. To regain balance, the form shifts, and the stability is lost again, and so on.

  The entire structure continues to react in this manner, and a new equilibrium is found.

  This is happening all around us in every part of this muddy expanse.

  And the new structure birthed from this balance of various powers is the answer to the inputted value.

  In other words, they performed a computation.

  No, each crab isn’t thinking about doing all that. Just like how each electrical element in a computer doesn’t have an intent to compute.

  That’s just the result of their system.

  To begin, they construct a giant structure within the soft mud.

  This structure has a delicate balance, and then, following a new input, they alter their configuration, introducing instability, and they form yet another new state to eliminate that instability.

  None can see all of the movements, and none are in control of the entire structure.

  All they do is respond to the introduced forces with their scissors. But some researchers say the way their vast parallel processes converge into a single system are like quantum computers the likes of which humans have not yet attained.

  Whether or not that’s an overly grandiose comparison, the fact that they perform incredibly powerful computations is indisputable. On that point, the experts are in agreement.

  So, with that, what do you think would happen if they mistake you for one of them? Obviously, they would respond. They would try to make calculations with you. In other words, you’ll get sucked into their computations.

  And what that means is this: you’ll become part of their calculation formulae.

  What specifically, you ask?

  You’ll get pinched.

  In their scissors, yeah?

  They’ll pinch you tight.

  Just like that pinched person over there.

  No, no, it’s not an attack. It’s not like that. They don’t even know what we are. All they recognize is another individual’s scissors.

  So why do they pinch you, you ask?

  That’s right. You got it!

  Computations. They pinch as part of their calculations. They don’t mean harm. They pinch as a fellow constituent of the computations.

  That’s right, that’s why you need to be careful. That brings us back to my warning.

  That’s what I mean.

  If you want them to show you the future …

  If you want them to compute the future …

  They have to enter inside you, right?

  You don’t need them to calculate with you, you need them to calculate for you. They have to perceive you as having the perfect kind of holes.

  Wait quiet and still until they enter you. And when that time comes, and you do that …

  Right. Anyone who does that, they’ll believe is one of them.

  When they see the hands in that shape.

  That’s right. They perceive the V sign as scissors. And they’ll pinch you. Yes, exactly. A Westerner doesn’t think the double-V sign looks like a crab, but they do.

  Yes, I suppose that could mean that Japanese culture is closer to theirs than Western culture is.

  Well, anyway, that’s what happened to that person. They saw the two scissor-hands as belonging to one of their number. So they pinched, just like they do to each other. That’s all it is. And once you’re pinched like that, you become a part of their structure. You’re forced to. You become a part of their immense numerical formula.

  What you want has no relevance. Right, obviously they wouldn’t let you escape just because you wanted to. They don’t have any wants themselves.

  You have no choice but to fulfill the same role as them.

  And then what, you ask?

  Once the calculation begins, most people are crushed. Our bodies aren’t as strong as theirs, you see. But it doesn’t seem to hinder their calculations. We’re just treated as random noise. It’s a pointless death. And who wants that?

&nb
sp; So, in order to avoid that happening to us, let’s please refrain from any potentially ambiguous behavior, all right? No, I don’t mind if you take a picture for this occasion. It’ll make for a nice memory. I don’t mind it, but just be absolutely careful not to do that.

  Even now that I’ve said all this, some people will still do it. When you point a camera at a Japanese person, they do it without any thought.

  That pose.

  That person doing it over there probably did it reflexively when someone pointed a camera their way.

  That’s what can happen.

  But that’s how it is. It’s not something unique to here. The place and the particulars might change, but it’s all the same.

  It doesn’t matter if you’re only a tourist. When somebody points a camera at you, you shouldn’t thoughtlessly flash the V sign.

  What meaning does that pose hold for the people around you? How will it be taken in the place where you are?

  Even among your fellow men, some will see it as an impression of a crab, and some won’t.

  What will you be communicating?

  You have to think about that. For cultural exchange.

  Right?

  Okay, that’s enough pictures, it’s time to become holes and accept them in.

  For the future.

  The curtain opens to the sound of clapping: wooden clapping, not hands. The air smells like sugar and you’re not sure why. Kairakutei, the Hypnotist, sits in the center of the platform, serene and fluffy as an enormous white cloud, a real Englishman in old Yokohama—which, in the year 1900, is New Yokohama still, a city that only recently bubbled up out of the swamp, dripping mud and slime from its outstretched arms like an undead Venus. Something smells fishy. The city spreads its legs. The curtain is all the way open.

  “Volunteers?”

  Raise your hand and a black-clad kuroko leads you to the stage, though you must pretend not to see him. This part is easy. If you’ve seen one stage hypnotist, you know what to expect. Instances of Victorian stage mesmerism fade one into another, variations on a theme; the English Hypnotist, who hates England, sees no need to trifle with the form, not when it is him they come to see. The public pays to watch a blue-eyed foreigner speak Japanese like a native (and why shouldn’t he, when he has lived in this country since the age of seven? Kairakutei, né Henry James Black—no getting famous with that name, no wonder he changed it—was raised in the same city as the rest of you, behind the moat that closes off the Foreign District; he is amphibious).

  His voice is as rich and cold as the ice cream that made you sick last week. A phantom hand caresses the back of your neck, though that, compared to the voice of the Hypnotist, is warm. Caught between extremes, you drift. The audience whispers. A woman in the front row eats sugar stars.

  The Hypnotist puts dreams in your head.

  I. Shizuko

  Run to sea? But I’m a creature of water, I was born among boats; the entry of our house flooded when the rains came. I stepped out to work and into water; the sailors yelled, “Hey, mermaid!”

  In the last decade of the last century, the rakugoka suggested we grow a third eye in the back of our heads: “That’s how you keep up with progress.” I touched the bump at the back of my head and waited for an eye to sprout like breasts. My friend Kazumi’s brother Shôgetsu, who worked on a steamer, said he met an island girl in Honolulu with eyes on her tits, “One where each nipple ought to be—more purple than brown, aubergine, knowwhatImean?”

  I didn’t.

  “It was intimidating,” Shôgetsu told me, “all those eyes staring at me. Puts pressure on a guy. I never knew where to look.” Would I take a walk with him, so he could tell me more about his travels? I was twelve.

  By the time my body completed its changes—by the time I learned to see through people—Kazumi and her brother were both gone, Kazumi to tuberculosis (with her mother, with her father, with her father’s concubine and both half brothers) and Shôgetsu to, where? He was canning pineapples in Oahu, then doing something unmentionable in San Francisco, and then no one heard from him again. I like to believe he kept going, crossed east over the Sierra Nevada like a cannibal who wants second helpings and rode the Overland clear through to Chicago, where he buried himself deep in the Levee District like a famished bedbug until winter cleared and he emerged, bloated fat with the blood of the unwitting, to finish his travels.

  This is my favorite game, this What-is-Shôgetsu-up-to? I revisit it when I’m bored, but more often when I’m lonely. Shôgetsu is rolling drunks on the Bowery. Shôgetsu joined a traveling carnival that worked its way up the coastline until a mill girl in Maine nearly made an honest man of him. Shôgetsu is hunting whales off the coast of Greenland and bunking with a seven-foot-tall Maori. I’m not sure where one goes after the Arctic; I’m not sure what’s left.

  It’s a useful thing, looking both ways, and not only because it allows me to believe in ghosts and the Union Pacific railroad simultaneously. Consider my father, who only made one journey, from his parents’ farm to the city, and that before the railroad existed, before we had steamers and factories and fire insurance. Now he could take the train, which must be why he’s never been back. My father moved to the city just as the city he dreamed of ceased to exist. My father is an invisible man.

  I’m not sure what sort of woman my father expected me to be, but then, neither did he. He learned life from rakugo, from kabuki. The stage was his school and his guide to the metropolis.

  Once, I screamed, “You want me to be a man in drag, is that it?”

  No, I would be no suicidal concubine, no tragic geisha. If anyone wrote me a love poem, I’d run in the other direction.

  The question was, run where? And run how? How to run, when every step was a misstep, when every joke I told, every nut I cracked with my teeth, every night I came home late and smelling like Namiko’s cigarette smoke cut fresh wounds in my father’s heart? How to run away, when already I walked on knives?

  II. Namiko

  Close your eyes, Namiko. You’re getting very sleepy.

  You should be sleepy; you’ve been up since sunrise, not because the café opens then—they’re French, or Francophiliac, anyway; they sleep in. The café, the Pantheon, is run by a Russian Jew from Geneva. You get coffee and croissants for free, but you won’t get them until nine, when the doors open and the customers trickle in. Nearly all of them are foreigners. Your French is getting good, but your Russian is better.

  You wake at sunrise, cursing, because that’s when the factory girls leave for work: nasal country voices like the cries of a flock of ugly birds fighting over the washbasins, fighting because some girl got called a whore (everyone in the dormitory is on the game one way or another; you can’t live on a woman’s wage and expect to make a profit), fighting over the single cracked mirror in the hall where they crane their necks and stand high on their toes or crouch low to see what they look like now. There are six women to a room, which is all right when the futons are put away, but at dawn there’s no way out without stepping over three or four bodies. If this place caught fire, we’d all be dead—that’s what you think when you smoke your good-night cigarette.

  It’s quieter outside. In the morning, the city is yours, salt air and rough edges and the ripe raw smell of the fish market where eels and mackerel lie coiled in slimy heaps. One of the fish vendors has a gold ring on his right middle finger that he dug from the belly of a carp. “Of course I won’t sell it,” he says. “It’s good luck.” Gold attracts gold, money prefers the company of other money; everyone knows that.

  You, Namiko, in your men’s trousers, in the slouchy hat that hides your small pointed chin and ghost-nose, are in love with money. But so is everyone else who loves the city in the mornings. The woman who walks the city at night is searching for trouble, but the woman who walks at daybreak has a fortune to make.

  Look at the bro
om vendor, wares bristling like spines from his shoulders; look at the shrunken peddler who hauls his daihachiguruma piled with baskets, ladles, sieves; look at the dead woman in an “empty” rickshaw who yawns, stretches, and spreads her phantom bulk across the seat until the runner gasps for breath, and looks back, and sees nothing: these are your co-religionists. The runner’s heart will give out before noon; the ghoul will eat his soul, and his wife and children will starve. Even the dead are a bright silver thread in the web of commerce.

  Ghosts are less subtle in the movies; you think you’d be good at dealing with ghosts if you lived in a horror movie. The first time you saw Bake Jizo, you barely noticed the audience, though they talked all through the film, and the ghosts talked loudest of all. The second time, an hour later, you saw an ugly girl in a lilac kimono; the delicate color threw her long nose and wide ears into sharp relief. You remembered catching a glimpse of that same lilac kimono in the earlier showing—you’d thought, My God, what a color! But you like the fact that she is out of place. You are attracted to strangeness, to Unbelonging.

  The next day, they showed the film again. You waited at the back of the theater until the girl in the lilac kimono took her seat, then took the seat directly behind hers. She nibbled sugar stars, white and pink; they smelled so sweet you were almost sick.

  On screen, the ghost revealed himself, but you were distracted by the sour taste of your own hunger.

  Shizuko’s hair was combed back high in the Sokuhatsu style. You tapped her shoulder and hissed, “Hey, you’ll have to tilt your head a bit; I can’t see the screen.”

  “You know what happens,” said Shizuko. “You saw it last night. I caught you staring.”

  “I want to watch it again. I’m studying it.”

  “Right, because you’re a student.”

  “I’m a freelance art critic,” you told her, enjoying the way her eyes widened. Shizuko pretends to be a philistine, but she’s her father’s daughter; she knows the plot to every play ever written. If she brags about her shallow sensibilities, it’s because her lack of education stings like alcohol on a scrape. You dropped the name of one of the bluestocking magazines out of Tokyo. “I promised them I would write a review.”