The Tokyo-Montana Express

by Richard Brautigan

  Last night before I went to bed at one o’clock, I could see them fishing for squid. Their boats were anchored down below on the Pacific Ocean and there were lights shining from the boats. They used the lights to attract squid. The four boats of the Japanese squid fishermen were arranged perfectly like stars in the sky. They were their own constellation.

  That’s why I forgot the bottle. I thought about them fishing until dawn and maybe having a drink or two before going to sleep. I should have been thinking about the bottle instead of sleeping Japanese squid fishermen.

  I brought the bottle to Japan with me a month ago.

  Its history is sort of interesting. One night a few weeks before I left San Francisco for Japan, I was sitting in a bar with some friends and we came up with the idea of writing little messages and putting them in a bottle that I would take with me to Japan and throw into the sea.

  The bartender who’s a good friend of mine got a very solid empty bottle whose previous occupant had been some Drambuie and we all started writing messages but we didn’t show them to each other. As each person wrote a message, he kept it to himself, not showing it to anyone else and then put it in the bottle and after a few hours there were maybe thirty-five or forty messages in the bottle. It resembled the cross-section of an evening in an American bar.

  My bartender friend put the cork back in and sealed the bottle with a very sturdy wax that he had with him because he is also a calligrapher and uses a seal to sign his name in wax on the beautiful words that he makes. It was a professional job of bottle sealing. I took the bottle home drunk and happy.

  A few weeks later I brought it to Japan with me to throw into the sea where it would drift with the tide and maybe all the way back to America and be found three hundred years later and be quite a media curiosity or just break against a California rock, the pieces of glass sinking to the bottom and the released messages floating a brief lifetime before becoming an indistinguishable part of the tide’s residue stranded anonymously on the beach.

  So far, so good, except that I forgot the bottle this morning because I was thinking about the sleeping Japanese squid fishermen and walked out of the apartment where I am staying here at Ajiro with friends who had rented a boat, so that we could take the bottle out a long ways and throw it into the sea and then do some fishing.

  My Japanese friends liked the story of the bottle and looked forward to their part in its voyage. When we arrived at the dock and the waiting boat, they asked me where the bottle was.

  I looked very surprised and had to say that I had forgotten it, but the truth was that the bottle was with the sleeping Japanese squid fishermen. The bottle was on a table beside all their beds, waiting for the night to come, so that it could join their constellation.

  The Smallest

  Snowstorm on Record

  The smallest snowstorm on record took place an hour ago in my back yard. It was approximately two flakes. I waited for more to fall, but that was it. The entire storm was just two flakes.

  They fell from the sky in a manner reminiscent of the pratfall poignancy of Laurel and Hardy who, come to think of it, the two flakes resembled. It was as if Laurel and Hardy had been turned into snowflakes and starred in the world’s smallest snowstorm.

  The two flakes seemed to take a long time to fall from the sky with pies in the face, agonizingly funny attempts to maintain dignity in a world that wanted to take it from them, a world that was used to larger snowstorms, two feet or more, and could easily frown upon a two flake storm.

  After they did a comedy landing upon snow left over from a dozen storms so far this winter, there was a period of waiting as I looked skyward for more snow, and then realized that the two flakes were a complete storm themselves like Laurel and Hardy.

  I went outside and tried to find them. I admired their courage to be themselves in the face of it all. As I was looking for them, I was devising ways to get them into the freezer where they would be comfortable and receive the attention, admiration and accolades they so beautifully deserved.

  Have you ever tried to find two snowflakes on a winter landscape that’s been covered with snow for months?

  I went to the general area where they had landed. I was looking for two snowflakes in a world of billions. Also, there was the matter of stepping on them, which was not a good idea.

  It was only a short time before I gave up realizing how hopeless it was. The world’s smallest snowstorm was lost forever. There was no way to tell the difference between it and everything else.

  I like to think that the unique courage of that two flake snowstorm somehow lives on in a world where such things are not always appreciated.

  I went back into the house, leaving Laurel and Hardy lost in the snow.

  A San Francisco Snake Story

  When one thinks of San Francisco, one does not think of snakes. This is a tourist town and people come here to look at French bread. They do not want to see snakes in San Francisco. They would stay at home in the rest of America if the loaves of French bread were replaced by snakes.

  But visitors to San Francisco may rest at ease. What I am about to relate is the only San Francisco snake story that I know.

  Once I had a beautiful Chinese woman for a friend.

  She was very intelligent and also had an excellent figure whose primary focus was her breasts. They were large and well shaped. They gardened and harvested much attention wherever she went.

  It is interesting that I was more attracted to her intelligence than I was to her body. I find intelligence in women to be an aphrodisiac and she was one of the most intelligent people I have ever known.

  Everybody else would be looking at her breasts and I would be looking at her mind, which was architecturally clear and analytical like winter starlight.

  What does a beautiful Chinese woman’s mind have to do with a story about snakes in San Francisco you are probably asking about now with a rising temperature of impatience.

  One day we went to a store that sold snakes. It was some kind of reptile gardens and we were just walking around San Francisco with no particular destination in mind and we happened upon this professional den of snakes. So we went in.

  The store was filled with hundreds of snakes.

  Every place you looked there were snakes.

  Alter you noticed, and I might add very shortly after you noticed the snakes, you noticed the smell of snake shit. To my recollection, which cannot be taken as gospel if you are a serious student of snakes, it smelled like a sinking dead lazy sweet doughnut about the size of a moving van, but it somehow was not bad enough to make us leave the place.

  We were fascinated by this dirty snakehouse.

  Why didn’t the owners clean up after the snakes?

  Snakes don’t want to live in their own shit. They’d sooner forget the whole God-damn thing. Go back where they came from in the first place.

  The dirty snakeshop had snakes from Africa and South America and Asia and from all over the world lying there in shit. They all needed one-way airplane tickets.

  In the middle of this snake horror there was a huge cage full of very calm white mice who would all eventually end up as the smell in that place.

  The Chinese woman and I walked about looking at the snakes. We were appalled and fascinated at the same time by this reptilian hell.

  We ended up at a case with two cobras in it and they were both staring at her breasts. The heads of the snakes were very close to the glass. They looked just like the way they do in the movies but the movies leave out the smell of snake shit.

  The Chinese woman was not very tall, 5-1 or so. The two stinking cobras stared at her breasts that were only a few inches away. Maybe that is why I always liked her mind.

  Football

  The confidence that he got by being selected all-state in football lasted him all of his life. He was killed in an automobile accident when he was twenty-two. He was buried on a rainy afternoon. Halfway through the burial service the minister forgot what he
was talking about. Everybody stood there at the grave waiting for him to remember.

  Then he remembered.

  “This young man,” he said. “Played football.”

  Ice Age Cab Company

  These mountains of Montana are endlessly changing, minute to minute, nothing remains the same. It is the work of sun and wind and snow. It is the play of clouds and shadows.

  I am staring at the mountains again.

  It is the time of another sunset. This one is muted. I expected to watch a different sunset when I left the house and came out here to this room sitting in the top of a red barn with a large window facing the mountains.

  I expected a clear sharp sunset, analytical in its perception of this the first snowy day of the autumn down here in the valley:

  …October 10, 1977.

  We went to sleep last night with it snowing, hut now the sunset is changing again, minute to minute, taking on a different character. The mute quality is giving way to a vague sharpness like a knife that can cut some things but can’t cut other things. It can cut a peach but it can’t cut an apple.

  There was a great old woman who used to run the taxicab company in town which was only a little more than one cab. You might say that the whole cab company was one cab+ and not be far from the truth.

  Anyway, last year she was driving me out here and high white clouds had gone into partnership with a sharp June sun and their business was rapid, dramatic light changes going on in the mountains.

  We were of course talking about ice ages.

  She liked to talk about ice ages. It was her favorite topic. She finished saying something about ice ages by changing the subject to the light patterns going on in the mountains.

  “…ice ages!” she said, dramatically bringing to an end the conversation about ice ages. Then her voice softened. “These mountains,” she said. “I’ve lived here for over fifty years and maybe looked at the mountains a million times and they’ve never looked the same way twice. They’re always different, changing.”

  When she started talking about the mountains, they looked one way and when she finished talking about them, they looked another way.

  I guess that’s what I’m trying to say about this sunset.

  “Different, changing.”

  Shrine of Carp

  The bars are closing in Shibuya on a Friday night and thousands of people are pouring out into the streets like happy drunken toothpaste, laughing and speaking Japanese.

  The traffic is very heavy with full taxis. It is well known that Shibuya can be a very difficult place to get a taxicab on a Friday or Saturday night. Sometimes it can be almost impossible, only fate and the direct intervention of the gods will secure you a taxicab.

  I stand there in Shibuya in the middle of this gigantic party of Japanese. I feel no anxiety to go home because I am alone. When I get home an empty bed in a hotel room waits for me like a bridge to lonely and solitary sleep.

  So I just stand there as peaceful as a banana because that’s what I look like in this all-Japanese crowd. Every taxi that comes by me is full in the traffic that’s barely moving. Ahead of me I can see empty cabs, but they are seized instantly as soon as they appear.

  I don’t care.

  I am not really going anyplace that counts, not like the many young lovers that I see around me who are on their way to happy drunken fucking.

  Let them have the cabs.

  They are a blessing from me to them.

  I was once young myself.

  Then I see an empty cab headed toward me and for some strange reason all the lovers look away and I automatically raise my hand beckoning toward the cab. It is not that I want the cab. It’s just done out of unconscious habit. I have no interest in stealing their cab.

  When a person feels like that, of course, the taxi stops and I get into it. Kindness can only go so far. It is a privately-owned cab because its interior reflects the personality of the cab driver and shows the professional pride he takes in owning his own cab.

  I tell the driver in Japanese where I am going and we start on our way. Still surprised by the cab stopping, it takes me a minute or so to become totally aware of the contents of the taxi. When I get in I can see that something is very unusual about the cab, far beyond the obvious personality touches that driver-owned taxis have.

  Then, as they say, it dawns on me in the bar-closing traffic of Shibuya where I am actually at. I’m not in a taxicab. I am in a shrine of carp. The taxi is filled with drawings, photographs and even paintings of carp. In the backseat there are two gold-framed paintings of carp. One of them is beside each door.

  Carp are swimming everywhere in the taxi.

  “Carp,” I say in English to the driver, hoping that means something to him. I don’t know the Japanese word for carp.

  “Hai,” he says in Japanese which means yes. Then I have a feeling that he knows the word for carp in every language on this earth, even in Eskimo where there are no carp, only icebergs and such. The man really likes carp. I take a good look at him.

  He’s a happy and jovial man.

  I remember that carp stands for good luck in Japanese and I am in a moving shrine of carp, going in and out of the Japanese love-traffic. It all makes sense. I see young lovers in cabs all around us on their way to pleasure and passion. We are swimming among them like good luck.

  Meat

  A man is staring at meat. He is so intently staring at meat that his immediate surroundings have become the shadow of a mirage.

  He is wearing a wedding ring.

  He is perhaps in his early sixties.

  He is well dressed.

  There simply are no clues to why he is staring at meat. People walk by him on the sidewalk. He does not notice them. Some people have to step around him.

  The meat is his only attention.

  He’s motionless. His arms are at his side. There’s no expression on his face.

  He is staring into the open door of a meat market locker where whole sides of beef are hanging from hooks. They are in a row like cold red dominoes.

  I walk past him and turn around and look at him and then want to know why he is standing there and I walk back and try to see what he is seeing as I walk past him.

  There has to be something else, but I’m wrong again in this life.

  Nothing but meat.

  Umbrellas

  I have never been able to understand umbrellas because I don’t care if I get wet. Umbrellas have always been a mystery to me because I can’t understand why they appear just before it starts to rain. The rest of the time they are vacant from the landscape as if they had never existed. Maybe the umbrellas live by themselves in little apartments under Tokyo.

  Do the umbrellas know that it is going to rain? because I know that people don’t know. The weatherman says that it will rain tomorrow but it doesn’t and you don’t see a single God-damn umbrella. Then the weatherman says that it will be a sunshiny day and suddenly there are umbrellas everywhere you look, and a few moments later, it starts raining like hell.

  Who are these umbrellas?

  A Death in Canada

  There is not much to talk about today here in Tokyo. I feel very dull like a rusty knife in the kitchen of a weed-dominated monastery that was abandoned because everybody was too bored to say their prayers any more, so they went someplace else two hundred years ago and started different lives that led them all to the grave, anyway, a place where we are all going.

  A few moments ago somebody died in their sleep in Canada. It was a very easy death. They just won’t wake up tomorrow morning. Their death will not affect the results of anything going on in Japan because nobody will know about it, not a single person out of 114,000,000 people.

  The Canadian corpse will be buried the clay after tomorrow. By any standard it will be a modest funeral. The minister will have a hard time keeping his mind on the sermon. He would just about prefer to be doing anything else than giving this sermon.

  He is almost angry at t
he corpse lying a few feet away in a cheap coffin. At one point he feels like grabbing the corpse and shaking it like a child that’s done a bad thing while his voice continues droning out: “We are all but mortal flesh on a perilous journey from birth to…” he looks over at the corpse he has to refrain from keeping his hands off… “death.”

  A few hours after the corpse is safely in the ground, he will be home drinking a water glass of sherry in his locked-door study.

  None of this will have any effect on Japan. No one will ever know about it.

  This evening somebody will die in their sleep in Kyoto. They will turn over in bed and just die. Their body will slowly grow cold and Canada will not declare a day of national mourning.

  Autumn Trout Gathering

  Time to go fishing…

  It is October again in Montana and I have been away again, Japan, etc., but I am back here again in the Rockies. As I am writing this; I’m thinking about the word again. I am thinking that it is a relative of the word rain. They have so much in common. When it starts raining it is a process of again and again lasting for minutes, hours or days.

  For my autumn’s fishing I will need a new license and some flies and leaders, so I go to a fishing tackle store and renew myself again as a fisherman.

  I love fishing tackle stores.

  They are cathedrals of childhood romance, for I spent thousands of hours worshipping the possibilities of rods and reels that led like a religion to rivers and lakes waiting to be fished in the imagination where I would fish every drop of water on this planet.

  The next day I am getting myself ready to go fishing. I select a 7½ foot rod to try my luck with on a spring creek. I get my hip boots and fishing vest.

  I plan the flies that I will take with me. My Japanese wife is carefully but casually watching my preparations which I perform with an obvious enthusiasm.