by Arturo Silva
one after another: the sheet of skin, the sheet of muscles, the sheet of
four or five noodles shops, there’s Hobos, where the woman sits at the
little house and shop, how do they do it? Those funny metal maps you
bones, the sheet of viscera. In my body-city we’d have the sheets of res-
spindle weaving. The kamameishi restaurant with the Klimt posters,
find every few streets – and people complain about no street signs; it’s an
taurants, of cinemas, of bookstores. The sheet of memories, and the sheet
and Hantei of course – you know, the Pond used to extend so far. The
easy city to find your way around in – or get lost in, but that can also be
of desires. The sheet of crime and assassination. The jizo sheets, and the
New Year’s walk of the lucky gods. That photo shop with the window
fun. Sort of. And the handmade maps, the type Barthes liked so much.
Yoshiwara sheets. The work sheets, dress well sheets, and the date sheets.
where he changes the display every three weeks. There’s always a callig-
Scraps of paper, matchbox covers if anyone ever uses them anymore,
The sheet of foreigners who got it wrong, and the sheet of those who just
raphy scroll, a small rock garden, a seasonal flower arrangement. I visit
chopstick wrappers, meishi, cutesey stationery, a variety of surfaces and
accepted it. The Cafferty sheet: half a dozen homes, as many loves and
once a month and take a picture. Oh, and there’s usually an insect, too.
scripts, each a map a kanji itself – what a jigsaw puzzle they could a make!
losses. And back to the spiral city, the book’s cover, the winding sheet.
***
–On occasion Hiroko simply likes to wander. She closes her eyes, lets her finger fall on the map, takes a train to the closest station, and from there hops on a bus. The custom comes from her childhood, when her grandparents were still alive; they’d take little Hiroko-chan on tour busses outside of Tokyo every few months. These days, she doesn’t really like to go into the country, so she maintains the tradition by exploring areas of Tokyo unknown to her, and most likely areas never known by her beloved grandparents either. Today her finger fell on Yoga Station (Shin-Tamagawa Line), and that’s where she got on a bus, having declined the Hanzomon Line, and so having willingly screwed up by taking a couple or triple of busses from Shibuya (the Toei 6), she first found herself in Shimouma, went back to Shinjuku and got on the 91. It all seemed so fresh and clean (and expensive, she was sure). She traveled farther afield. Baji Park to see the horses; an old man taking photographs from behind people. So many apartment buildings (on the bus trip back she looked up and saw the old man now shooting from his balcony). Back at the station she had some spareribs at Kenny Roger’s restaurant. Good, but a bit messy.
–Is that so?
–Yeah. Ya’ know her grandfather designed T-shirts. Taisho period. People were very fussy then.
***
Lang keeps telling me, “you must read Bernhard, Kazuko,” and I keep telling him to read Schnitzler. But he does seem pretty well-adjusted – to Tokyo, I mean. Oh, I’d love to be back in Vienna. When was it, three years ago? The Graben, the Belvedere, the Esperanto Museum. You go round and round, just like the Ring, the “girdle.” Walking, looking, shopping, stopping at a café; then you do it again; and then once more. The coffee might be a glass of wine, but the cycle remains true. What is it? “Situation desperate, but not serious.” We Tokyoites could learn a lot from the Viennese. That’s the city we should have a sister relationship with. But no, maybe we’re more alike than not, with our sentiments and silliness, our baby-talk and finger-food. Spoiled brats. The old and the new worlds meet and go crash, boom! Will I ever get out of here and back home? Will I ever see Vienna again? Maybe Lang is right, and I do find something of myself in the two cities. Shadows I’d never suspected before.
Oh, be careful, Kazuko.
And Joan Fontaine was oh so pretty!
***
Kazuo is in the San Francisco apartment of a friend. Or, rather, he is in a dream-combination of familiar apartments, rooms that he or friends have inhabited, both in San Francisco and even a few rooms from back in Japan, rooms he’s seen in films perhaps, and that have obviously made a deep impression. Three women are cooking in the kitchen; in one corner a man and a woman are breaking up, laughing hysterically one moment, silent or sobbing the next. Kazuo takes the stairs that lead from the kitchen down through a bedroom, where the woman who was just breaking up is now sleeping peacefully. He descends finally into a large living room dominated by a grand piano in one corner and a bar in another; a party is going on. Country music is playing in the background: Roseanne, Iris, Dwight, Lucinda. There are no arguments here as to what constitutes this music. (Do people tap their feet in dreams?) He is not dressed for the occasion, and his embarrassment shows immediately. He tries to move to a corner where he will not be noticed, but an American (whom he does not know) comes up to him and begins asking Kazuo about “the market.” Kazuo detests this type of person: smug, successful, superior – superficial. Always speaking in initials (“Read DR in the JT today?”), or reciting statistics (“53 out of 89, I tell you, no less than 53 out of 89!”). But he can laugh to himself because the Yuppie is rapidly losing his hair, and growing stupider with each day. The woman who had broken up and then slept it off now comes over to Kazuo. She takes his arm and leads him away, saying, “I could see you weren’t comfortable. Let’s go over here and talk.” They walk off into the small garden of a danchi where a barbecue is taking place. They are in Funado, Itabashi Ward. Kazuo is drinking champagne, enjoying talking with the woman. He compliments her on her Japanese, but then learns that she is in fact half-Japanese. She tells him that she knows Kazuko, and knows what she is doing right now.
In Hiromi’s dream she opens the door of a large auditorium, where she sees people milling about, drinking, small-talking. A band is on stage playing Country music (Dwight, Roseanne ...). Later in the evening there is to be an awards ceremony. Hiromi has no idea why she is here. She walks around and around the auditorium. Sometimes she takes an exit, but that too just leads around and around, from one snack bar to another. There are conventioneers sporting happy-face name-tags; sports fans with megaphones and pennants; kids dressed for a Rock concert, like in the magazine cover-story on London she once read. All she can do is continue looking for an exit. Finally one appears; she takes it. Funado, Itabashi Ward, another area of Tokio that the economic miracle passed by. If Nakano is the 50s, Funado is the 60s. Makeshift houses all falling apart now; factories with tall chimney stacks; rag-and-bone men. The nation’s Self-Defense Forces has a large dormitory here; so too are there numerous schools for the mentally and physically handicapped. And danchi after danchi: those long, multi-building apartment blocks; 2 or 3LDKs, with whole families in them, everything falling apart, and no funds to fix any of it. Hiromi is aghast; Funado is not the Roppongi and Shibuya she hangs out in. When did she ever visit here? What’s it doing in her dreams? Why can’t she wake and get out of here? And besides, she doesn’t even like Country music!
***
Everything changes. What’s the rest of the line?
The escalator of the Edo-Tokyo Museum is out of order. She climbs the hundreds of steps, and wonders, “What did people do before escalators? Maybe the world really was flat.”
***
I’d found a new way around the moat one early winter evening and decided to try it – there was so much I needed to mull over – to walk it over to Hibiya where Arlene was working late. (I used to love coming into San Francisco across the Bay Bridge. The slope, the ascent, the towering pillars and then the cityscape and skyline the ocean beyond and above and between and below it all the setting sun. But it was all anticipation and no fulfillment. It made no sense as to what a city might be; I knew the people to
o well.) Tonight, however, circling the moat counter-clockwise (without a sunset, happening in some other city perhaps) and thinking about all the changes that were to come in all of our relationships – the storm ready to burst, the chill to follow – I was suddenly lifted and briefly felt blissfully light, empty even: it did not matter what became of us here – what was this sudden glimpse of the city? – a corner turned a shot of light and we all forgotten against that silver wall – it wasn’t the sun and it wasn’t the moon, merely an effect of light, Tokyo light – that others too may discover going round the moat.
Or exiting a station, kissing goodnight, asking the operator for a phone number, a stranger for a light.
***
I have seen the traces of the city, Lang drunkenly boasts to himself, have traced the outlines of its stories and legends and multiple names. I have followed the rivers, eaten and slept in the black, long, low houses of the powerless, and bathed and made love in the mansions of the powerful; have seen Utamaro with hands bound, and seen him watch the naked pearl divers; have seen Taisho Tokio, mingled with Modern Girls and Marx Boys and ridden the trams of Ginza, and seen Sakae Osugi carted off to his terrible death. Can any other man say the same?
***
I can’t afford to hate anybody. I’m only a photographer.
– Miss Imbrie, The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)
***
the poet
alone with his word
in the crowd unknown
you take the train with your last goodnight
I wait for the cab by the station side.
Chapter 3
HAMAMATSUCHO–
SHINAGAWA
Lang never wanted to come here; he had a passing, a professional interest in Japan, but winters get pretty gray in Vienna, or so I’m told, and the few letters from Roberta only added to things being that much more up in the air, too far for his comfort and he couldn’t abide that couldn’t abide being the vague-gray Lang at a loose end, and so he had to find out, to settle all one way or the other – and so he came.
What bell, Bashō, was it, Shibuya?, Shinjuku?
Dutifully, she burst into tears.
***
A certain superficiality of expression in order to reveal the nature of the void hidden beneath.
– Toyo Ito
***
–Lang, you said you loved me.
–I did I do love you.
–Lang, love is strong, isn’t it?
–Isn’t it?
–Why did you come to Japan, Lang?
–I hadn’t wanted to come, Roberta.
***
Coming out of the World Trade Center, where they’ve bought some art books at the annual sale, Cafferty and friends decide to visit one of his favorite galleries – Gatodo; spacious, separate, and tasteful, it reminds him of those in New York – and then to avoid at least some of the noise and traffic by strolling through the Hama Gardens.
–So few people visit here, one of them remarks, but no one bothers to pursue the question and wonder why.
–Let’s –
–– walk along the Bay –
–– see how the construction’s going.
–Why not?
–It’s going to be an all new city.
–Once again.
–Kids are going to grow up knowing less and less of what came before. My wharves gone for bad or plain mediocre restaurants that’ll thrive for six months and then the whole shebang’ll be as shabby as, well, as shabby as my wharves are now. Damn the 80s, and all that money.
–Horrible buildings.
–I give ’em twenty years. It’ll serve ’em right.
–That Satoh kid’s photos hit the right note – the glare of a city being raped –
–Our typical Tokio attraction-repulsion effect, eh?
They decide not to avail themselves of the Keio University library; pass the Shibaura offices of The Japan Times where they run into Donald Richie, a passing acquaintance, and who’s come to deliver an article. And further on.
–Trudge on, you old Cafferty.
–Donald was looking perky.
–Yes, I was glad to see that; heard he’d been ill recently.
–Well, I for one am beginning to feel the walk now. Are we really going as far as Shinagawa?
–Look – pilgrims on their way to Sengakuji.
–Well, 47 ronin or not, this pilgrim’s of another sort – taxi!
***
Hiromi is in an automobile. A Western woman unknown to her is driving. They are passing through Shinozaki-cho, heading east and about to cross the Edo River, and thence across the border. This area, so deep a part of Tokyo’s past now represents its future: warehouses, bed towns, convenience shops; total, pristine anonymity, with dilapidated postwar housing still hanging around, forgotten (and looking like munitions warehouses); this Tokyo is a combination of Blade Runner and Alphaville. Van Zandt too is in the car, is in the rear, speaking to Hiromi. But the radio is too loud for her to hear what he is telling her. (It is playing a frenzied Clara Ward, live, moving up higher and higher yet.) She keeps trying to turn it down but it won’t go; she keeps trying to point the driver’s attention to this, but she seems to be totally incognizant of Hiromi’s presence.
Arlene is dreaming of a woman who wants to sleep with her, but Arlene is not ready yet. She is at the woman’s apartment; she looks out briefly as the view is so uninteresting, Shinozaki. Now Arlene is sleeping; she is in bed with two other women whom the first woman has chosen for Arlene to sleep with. The woman is watching, disinterestedly, not quite voyeuristically. Later, Arlene walks around Shinozaki, and revises her earlier opinion, having found some small interesting shops, an attractive office block, small children on tricycles. It is Sunday morning, and softly, the radio plays some Gospel, arousing, caressing.
***
The costs of confusion notwithstanding, Kaoru refuses to be confused, no costs, no confusion. Everything in order. Office-home-office-club-home. Business is done. How old are the boys now?
***
Passed the Chinese restaurant, you know, the one that caters to the theater crowd and the hostess always wears a different hat. It smelled like cotton candy.
He notices a passing woman and immediately starts thinking of how to seduce her when he almost as immediately sees a building and starts to film it – and loses the woman.
***
The Lady of Musashino (Musashino fujin, 1951)
The past and the present and by obvious implication the future, the east and the west sides of Tokyo are one, Mizoguchi seems to be telling us in that final shot, a masterful pan that begins with the tall susuki reeds of the ancient Musashino Plain, and concludes with a view – the very first in the film – of the city itself. Morally, it is as if Mizoguchi is saying that the young hero of the film, Tsutomu, will choose the city and its excitement and relative freedoms over the insidiousness of rural family life. Moreso, Mizoguchi is making a reversal here: one usually views the city from East (good, tradition) to West (bad, novelty and expansion). In making this reversal, he is deepening the argument of union, a view with which this author is in complete agreement; after all, he lives in Kichijoji, where once those reeds and marshes flourished (they are still to be found in pockets here and there), and which was founded as an extension of an east-side temple.
We see the Plain; the deaths of the parents; the distant air-raids; the discovery of a skull. Michiko is played by the “enjoyably plump and radiant” Kinuyo Tanaka. Her cousin Tsutomu (Akihiko Katayama) has returned from the war, from Burma. Young, restless, and good, Michiko allows him to look after her estate.
Complications arise: her cousin Ono (So Yamamura), who lives nearby, has lost his fortune, for which his wife Tomiko (Yukiko Todoroki) is ready to abandon him for Michiko’s husband, the unimaginative Stendahl scholar Tadao (Masayuki Mori), for whom, as Mizoguchi’s biographer says, “adultery signifies stimulus.” Worse, Tomiko spreads the terrible
rumor that Michiko and Tsutomu are having an affair. How absurd! They may certainly be fond of one another, but they could never even imagine such a thing. (Tsutomu’s modest aspirations are for a young fellow student whom he visits either at her home or at “La Vie est Belle” café in the city.)
Things get worse. Michiko and Tsutomu go for a long walk. A thunder-storm erupts; they must spend the night together at an inn. Chastely, certainly. (There is a tremendous long shot of them walking in the fields as the daylight sky is lit up by lightning. One must wonder how long Mizoguchi sat there waiting to get that shot. If for no other reason, the film must be seen for this and the final shot. ((Of course, the author does not dismiss the film as readily as the biographer does. Perhaps it is not a major film, but it is certainly worth seeing.)) Anyway, back to the story.)
And worse. Akiyama and Tomiko steal away with the deed to Michiko’s property. Tomiko obviously has no real interest in the weakling. Dejected, our Stendahlian returns home only to discover that – distraught over the rumor, Michiko has suicided!
And then Tsutomu takes that long walk east.
***
project myself into you
projector
seed city
bloom town
looking at ads rather than you
choosing a shirt in place of a word
***
–Oh it’s a nondescript area enough, I suppose, but I’m sure Roberta would have been charmed by it here.
–Well, tell her, next time you see her, do.
–Yes, I must.
–But if she’d seen Kagurazaka first, would she ever have found her Yanaka?
–Mmm, not likely.
–And, she’d have lived in so many times: the past, the Roppongi of the 50s; the present, the science students –
–The French students –
–The British English students.
–And the future: Yotsuya and all that that means just ahead –
–The Palace and Marunouchi, and all that they mean back over there.
–You think they’re part of the future? Let’s hope they’re a thing of the past!
–No, Kagurazaka would have been too much, not to her liking at all.