Tokio Whip

by Arturo Silva

  And whatever became of Teresa Wright? Ya’ know she had this great contract that went, “The aforementioned Teresa Wright shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in the water. Neither may she be photographed on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: In shorts, playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the Fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at a turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf; assuming an athletic stance while pretending to hit something with a bow and arrow.” Anyway, whatever became of her? But would we have wanted to see her “mature”? This is the question. Perhaps the studio was wise and said to itself (assuming for the moment that a studio has 1) the ability to talk; and ((even more grandly metaphysical (((if we can apply the term to anything that came out of Hollywood – and we can))) )) 2) the ability to converse and interlocute ((if we can put it that way)) with itself; and ((here we really go, we’re talkin’ stratospheric (((if the stratosphere ((whatever that may be)) is part of the metaphysical, of course))) now)) 3), the ability to carry out the results of that self-dialog into action), “No, this kid’s just too good; give her a couple of superb roles, create that effect, that age, that just-in-betweenness of innocence about to see the other side – and then, in the nicest way, of course, get rid of her.” By the latter I mean like did she become a nun, or return to Nebraska and finish college and become a pharmacist or something good, or meet and fall in love with a nice guy who really was a nice guy and rich to boot and he did his business while she did her charitable work? E-nough! Phew, I don’t know where all that came from. Like VM, I even drive myself crazy sometimes.

  My list of places I most want to visit: Graceland, Monument Valley, Gettysburg, Vaux le Vicomte. Wanna come?

  I have a red soap, a yellow soap, a pink soap, and a purple soap.

  Further Inquiries into the Laws of Gravity Dept. Why every so often do I find a couple of pubic hairs on the ceiling of my bathroom?

  Do you think dental assistants make good kissers?

  What did Manu say as we crossed a red light? “It’s more of a hint than an order.” And then she mentioned her “trail of debts.” God, could I mention mine. (Better not.)

  Question of the week: what’s Campari made of?

  Reading Levinas. God, I wish I could talk with you about Minnelli!

  Oh yeah, and my shampoo’s blue.

  ***

  She started moaning much too high, unnaturally. I told I her I never confused sex with seriousness.

  ***

  –If it weren’t for the record shops, Euro-Space, and the Nepalese restaurant, could I kiss Shibuya goodbye?

  –Youth!

  –Money!

  –Swagger!

  –Don’t forget the cigar shop below the dog, and the used bookshop.

  –And the best: Tokyu Hands.

  –Best non-clothes shop on the globe!

  –Hard to say. There are a few friends with offices here, too.

  –Oh, and Yagura, great miso, and Egg Gallery.

  –But Ebisu? Screw the Garden, a monument to the megalomania of money.

  –Bad taste – what the city excels in.

  –No Ebisu is for me only one thought, Yoko’s office.

  –Two: that snowy day –

  –– the nice lunch restaurant –

  –and that guy –

  –– screwy guy –

  –– nice guy – and screwy –

  –– yeah, funny guy –

  –– bringing in snow-covered branches for all the women in the party.

  –Going out –

  –coming back in –

  –– out and in –

  –Flowers in winter.

  –Snow-flowers.

  –Nice guy.

  ***

  The costs of confusion notwithstanding, Hiro quickly thinks, well, what do you need to know? I can always find my way in a Tokyo house. Not that anything corresponds, but just the fact that the piano is in the kitchen and the dish cabinet in the living room makes me feel comfortable, at home, she likes that, that I settle myself in, make the bath and bed for her. Too natural.

  ***

  I couldn’t see their faces anymore – but I could feel they were all men.

  – Julie London. Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958)

  ***

  Mmm, I’m not so sure. No, I prefer to “love” parts of the place. The whole things seems a bit too much; and frankly, it sounds both a little crazy and impossible. Unreal. No offense. Hmm, that soba shop in Kanda that Grandma took me to. That quiet tempura restaurant in the middle of Kabukicho that Father took me to that afternoon we saw Sorekara. The stationery shop in Kunitachi with that nice old man. Ah, then I suppose people like certain areas. But are shops places, sites? Do they qualify? Am I supposed to mean parks, or the air or mood of an area? The quiet of some temples, the buzz in Ameyokocho, which I don’t really care for, but just to use it as an example. But they’re all shops or parks in their own ways, aren’t they? I remember a chair in a café, it was mass-produced. Can’t I love that too as a “Tokyo place”? I don’t care what Hiromi says, I still think Ginza is wonderful, and I hope that after I’m married I’ll still be going to Kabuki and Fugetsudo for a snack afterwards. Ah, but tonight we go out, maybe run into those American guys again. Hmph, and if not them, some other Americans; there are lots to go around. The whole city? No, just the combination of places I call my home. Hiroko, has outdone herself.

  ***

  HAZUKO’S HOAX

  The immediate postwar years were traumatic ones for the Japanese people – the Tokyo air-raids, Hiroshima, the Emperor no longer a deity: complete loss, utter devastation, a nation and a people in ruins.

  It was also a time of mass hysteria, a time when people were gullible for any sign of hope and promise. “New religions” abounded, the worst crimes easily perpetrated (as we have seen). Tokyo was a city ready to be taken in.

  Hazuko Hata was nineteen years old in 1948. Her father had been a radical labor organizer in Tokyo, and in order to avoid imprisonment, in the mid-1930s, had taken his family to a village outside of Sendai where he quietly worked on a farm. Hazuko grew up resenting the government, and longing to see the capitol. In 1946 she saw how she could make her move. Health scares were numerous, and many of them real. With her doctor (and lover) she invented an incurable illness – “radium poisoning eating her bones,” said to derive from malnutrition and the noxious air-raid fumes that had spread over Sendai – and with the aid of another lover, a newspaper man, she saw to it that notice of her fatal disease was placed in a Tokyo newspaper, where – again, as she’d planned – an “enterprising” editor (who was also in on the hoax; and yes, he too became her lover) saw the chance for a sensational and melodramatic story. He invited “brave, little Hazuko, who’d never seen Ginza, the Imperial Palace, or the brave, little people of the capitol struggling their way back up from the piles of ash,” to come and see just those fabled sites and more in her final, miserable, pain-wracked days.

  And so she came. She was given a suite in the Imperial Hotel and immediately became the pitiful toast of the town. She refused any expert medical attention, proclaiming, “If you can’t trust your own hometown doctor, who can you trust?” Her suffering visage was to be seen on magazine covers and billboards (“Hazu-chan, May merciful Kannon [the Buddha of Compassion] grant you a painless death, and Miroku [the Buddha of the Future] embrace you in eternity”). Interviews appeared in newspapers (“I’m only sorry to put everyone to so much trouble; but soon they will no longer have to put up with me”). And there were radio appearances (“Tonight, a special composition, “Sendai Drapes Itself in White for Hazuko” [white being the Buddhist color of mourning]). Meanwhile too, the newspaper editor saw to it that she had one last chance to “live
it up”. Besides an audience in Parliament, she went dancing at the Ginza Gazebo, took a tour of Toho studios, posing with the famous film stars (including the young Mifune, with whom more than glances were exchanged), and walked among her devoted “little-but-really-oh-so-big people.”

  And in between and throughout there took place the infamous sexual escapades.

  No one knows how she did it. Could there have been a Hazuko double? Experts estimate (how?) that no single person could have performed all the documented acts that Hazuko – the “human heatwave” to those in the know –performed in her two short weeks in the capitol before she “departed,” as her dwindling believers still call it, to the “other city.” (Hazuko’s defenders scoff at the ‘experts’ and their estimates; they claim that time has no measurement when the spirit is in its ecstasies.)

  A brief list includes the following. For convenience’s sake, they follow the order of the authorities. Of course, anyone versed in the combinatorial arts -- they can sometimes resemble a perverse marriage between the arts of Busby Berkeley and Raymond Queneau -- would have more than a holiday in devising other systems for them.

  GROUP 1: “NORMAL” (THE AUTHORITIES COMMENT THAT THE FOLLOWING ACTS MIGHT BE EXPECTED BY MOST SEXUALLY WELL-ADJUSTED PEOPLE. THOUGH TOO, THEY ADMIT, THE NUMBERS AND OTHER DETAILS MAKE EVEN THIS CATEGORY SUSPECT.)

  –There are twenty-one files for the daily – and separate – servicing of her doctor-lover, her reporter-lover, and her editor-lover.

  –Many files show her in tandem with groups of men and women, and occasionally, boys and girls dressed in an array of costumes: school children, kamikaze pilot, farmers from Sendai.

  –One file contains photographs of her with two or three men, being penetrated wherever possible. (Interestingly, many of the police files contain thick envelopes filled with photographs; visual documentation seeming to have been another of her predilections. In fact, many of the photographs contain mirrors in which we can even see Hazuko taking the photo while simultaneously being gratified.)

  –A moderately sized file contains documentation of her providing her pleasure herself – manually.

  GROUP 2: MECHANICAL (SELF-EXPLANATORY)

  –Another group of files represents acts in which a range of objects are employed to achieve carnal satisfaction. These include marmalades (black market?), wasabi and other cylindrical edibles (daikon, etc.), as well as esoteric religious implements. In many of these, depending upon the object employed, an appropriate costume is donned.

  –In another, during a reception with representatives of the nurse’s union, she was apparently servicing herself under the tablecloth with a dildo made in the likeness of the long-nosed god Tengu; the apparent moans of satisfaction were naively reported as the result of pre-death-throe visions.

  GROUP 3: ANIMAL. ANOTHER THREE PERCENT ENTAIL ACTIONS IN WHICH ANIMALS (NON-HUMAN, THAT IS) ARE INCLUDED. AGAIN, WE OFFER ONLY A BRIEF SELECTION.

  –At Ueno Zoo, in front of the tiger cage and dressed in a tiger costume, and what looks like her howling (or so we assume from her contorted mouth); we see her being serviced by a man similarly dressed, the long and mighty member clearly visible. Apparently, for three days afterwards, the tigers kept the neighborhood awake with their anxious growls. They eventually had to be shot, and their meat was then given to the appropriate official agency where it was mixed with the local available fare (already questionable) and distributed to the needy.

  –The next file, shows her after the tiger incident, grabbing a monkey and being serviced by him. (However, as a result of the intensity of their mutual pleasure, she broke the animal’s intercostal clavicle, this last seeming to be the only act she ever regretted in her life). (This event occurred apparently on her third night in Tokyo, for newspaper photographs from the fourth day on always show her accompanied by a small tiger monkey. This type of monkey’s thin pink penis was to become the principal amulet of those who later joined the Hazuko cult.)

  GROUP 4: PUBLIC

  –A small number of files show her under the Yurakucho girders servicing GHQ personnel. (The aptly named Yuraku – “where pleasure can be had.”) In this, she showed herself to be a real “woman of the people” – though, for obvious reasons, she was unable to identify herself (one naturally wonders what would have happened had she been recognized and exposed – joining in with the Pam-Pam girls and their famous blow-jobs for a quarter ((or stockings, or cigarettes, Luckies or Chesterfield being favored by all.)) ) Apparently too, this is where she gained her pungent lingo (oh those GIs!), her favorite remark to anyone being, “kiss my ass.”

  GROUP 5: SACRED

  –On one occasion she spent the night at a Buddhist temple in Kamakura. (Driven in an ambulance? There seems to be no record of this journey.) While there, she asked the head monk how she might best please the infinitely merciful Kannon-sama. He told her that she could consider fellating him (the priest, that is). She duly obliged the wizened old man who achieved a state of spiritual transport more sweet, he later remarked, than even satori. Upon recovering from his ecstasy, he is said to have asked Hazuko if she experienced the same sweet delight that he had, and she answered – “Kiss my ass!” (which, we might add, being poor in English, he took as a “yes.”)

  –The next evening she was back, but this time in the dormitory. (She had had, incidentally, her entire body painted in goldleaf and robed in gossamer – no explanation is given: was she posing as a Buddhist statue?) Finding her man – or boy, really – she thrust her ungilded pudendum upon the mouth of the youngest and most studious acolyte (asleep at the time), thrust her arm back to grab his erect member, and as he was initiated in the art of cunnilingus (he seems to have been a fast learner), she held him fast until the two, the semi-divine couple, simultaneously reached climax.

  –That young man, upon receiving the tonsure, removed himself from the world to the shores of Shimoda. There he erected – it is the only word – a solid steel phallic image, so solid that the rushing, salt-sea waves are unable even to this day to wear it away. To this day too, pilgrims come to visit the image of the erect Avalokiteshvara – pilgrims, that is, who have problems with premature ejaculation. It is further said that from this acolyte’s experience comes the contemporary practice of mother’s masturbating or fellating their sons during the anxiety-filled time of their university entrance examinations.

  GROUP 6: DISGUSTING. A FULL TWELVE PERCENT OF THE FILES DEPICT FOUL ACTS THAT INCLUDE THE GROSSEST USE OF THE FULL RANGE OF BODILY FLUIDS AND SOLIDS. IN RESPECT OF HUMAN DECENCY, ONLY TWO – TAME, COMPARED TO THOSE NOT DESCRIBED – ARE PRESENTED HERE.

  –A photograph shows her urinating on a lover as he reaches climax.

  –In another she is suspended mid-air and showering upon a unit of rope-bound soldiers (privates), while from above another unit (officers) is masturbating over her.

  GROUP 7: MISCELLANEOUS

  –Another file tells of the time Hazuko was walking along the shores of the Sumida River. Spying a snake, she immediately grabbed it and thrust up inside herself. Not knowing where he was, the startled thing scurried about for cover. Equally surprised, Hazuko was at first quite happy, and then worried: she certainly didn’t want to die of something so common as snakebite! Given her excellent muscle control, however, she managed to expel it from within herself. A curio peddler, chancing by, picked up the reptile, and some time later took it to a taxidermist who was able to preserve it. The two, amazed at what they’d gotten, were, within a few years able to sell the skin at the then astounding price of ¥150,000 to a collector in Hong Kong. Why amazed? Because the snake had died with what believers claim is nothing less than a smile on its face! (The awe in which such objects are held reminds us of the early Meiji Period murderess Takahashi Oden, the “she-devil” subject of a Kabuki play, and whose sexual organs were preserved in the crime laboratory of the Tokyo Metorpolitan Police, as she was believed “to have been possessed of an extraordinary sexual drive.”)

  –In a private v
isit to a tattooist in Fukugawa, Hazuko had these emblems engraved on her body: a red penis on her inner right thigh; another, this time the palest blue, just below her lower lip; and, in an intense yellow dye, a sun burst around her anus (almost lending a sacral air to her favorite riposte); and finally – and – again, we cannot help noticing – the sacral note: weaving across, encircling all, labia majora and minora, the Nembutsu.

  –Numerous files show her body bound in ropes or wire or chains, suspended from ceilings, bound to trees, sunk into abysses (snake pits?). In a manner of speaking, these are the least interesting files of all, the national press showing greater creativity everyday in its regular pages of bound nudes.

  The files continue, 288 in all.

  The mystery of Hazuko Hata does not, however. In time – it was after all inevitable – the reporter, the editor, and the doctor discovered that they too – like the entire doleful metropolis – had been taken in. That is, they had each been played against the other. (What did the fools expect?!) After duly accusing one another of having “souls of eels, and brains of tarantulas” or being “foul botches of nature,” they made their way to Hazuko’s hotel suite. There they found her surrounded by a circle of nuns and monks burning incense and reciting sutras. There was no way through this gathering. So, they devised their own publicity stunt, and arranged for a special international group of physicians – Doctors Emil Maximilian J. Egelhofer of Vienna, Dr. Oswald Wunsch of Prague, Dr. Felix Marachuffsky of Moscow, and Dr. Friedrich Kirchinweisser of Berlin – to give Hazuko one last examination, “so as to bequeath our sorrow-filled knowledge of her pain-wracked, thin, but-oh-so-very-brave body to the other suffering creatures of the world.” How could she refuse? A quick glance and Hazuko knew the game was up.

  But she had one more card up her fertile sleeve. She had herself pronounced dead. (The Herr Doktors had been duly serviced, of course.) What could the newspapers do but print the story? The Japanese public bought the morning and then the afternoon souvenir editions, and then they mourned their “little country saint who’d only wanted a glimpse of the city lights.” Through the assistance of her ship’s captain-lover, Hazuko made her way across the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans. After some further exploits, she finally arrived in the City of Light, Paris.