Tokio Whip

by Arturo Silva

  (Those exploits, by the way, do not form a part of the Japanese files. Local authorities seem to have been more than amused by her. As for the Japanese authorities, they figured that well, no real or serious crime had been committed – putting one over on the public … hell, what had that damned war been anything but? – and too, Hazuko had provided the public a sentimental diversion in their time of strife. And then, they had all those photographs! Too, for all the pleasures she had indulged in, so that many were shared. She had shed a certain gay light when all was said and done. And, as mentioned at the beginning of this tale, it was a time of hysteria and fear and mass manias. Within a few months the “brave, little, country girl” was forgotten, and replaced with someone new, another victim, another actress or religious fanatic who could shoulder the nation’s burdens.)

  Yes, Hazuko Hata, had gotten what she’d wanted. And like many another Japanese woman who causes a scandal, she knew she could not live long in Japan where she would only become a comic figure. But in Paris things could be otherwise! There she opened a bar, “The Lair of the Lustful Monkey,” and entertained customers with saké and good cheer for four more decades – until she passed away, embracing her simian, and dressed in goldleaf and gossamer.

  ***

  Coincidence is an extraordinary thing only because it is natural.

  – The Earrings of Mme. D. … (Max Ophuls, 1953)

  ***

  Ah, this city, kilometers of area to cover. Let’s see. I like the boys in Aoyama, certainly. Nice clothes – that boy stuff, Batsu, Melrose, Lautréamont – of course they can’t afford the more masculine Commes des Garçons and Ys – but then neither can I – and, oh, I’m tired of thinking, Hiromi admits, I have to get dressed, go out – what to wear? Sadistic Mika or Hysteric Glamor?

  ***

  Why has no one wondered what happened to Virgil after he could go no further? What did he do?, feel – write? Did he really make it back, and was he able even to tell the others? I’d like to write a Borgesian piece, “Virgil: Author of the Divine Comedy.”

  ***

  –You know, few people ever notice or much less remark on the real charms of the Yotsuya, and Shinjuku 3-chome areas.

  –Yes, Lang?

  –Well, look, the Park is unfairly associated with Prime Ministerial garden parties, 3-chome with the “gay area.” But Inez used to go to the park all the time with her kid, and I know straight men and women who feel perfectly comfortable in 3-chome’s bars, as if it should matter.

  –But feeling comfortable does matter.

  –No, I meant as if one’s sex should matter.

  –Oh.

  –There’s delight too in the long broad streets, the clean sightlines evenly blended with the usual mazes, and some decent bars and restaurants.

  –Such as?

  –Well, Bé, for one; that second floor Jazz place with the long windows; that restaurant that charges whatever the day’s yen rate is. And then, just to know that you’re on the edge of Shinjuku, that you can see it beckoning, just over there – look!

  –Roberta!

  –Soon!

  –And the choice is yours!

  –Choice of what? – bar?, sex?

  –Those too!

  –What time to go home tonight?

  –Or wherever.

  –Whatever home.

  –Whenever.

  –Whichever clock.

  ***

  She was conceived in Kyoto, but born in Tokyo. He the reverse.

  ***

  –As Brian said, “let’s drink to the good and the evil.”

  –Hurt me now, get it over.

  –Later.

  –As Minnie Pearl said of Hank Williams, “the most haunting and haunted eyes I’d ever looked into.”

  ***

  SPANISH JOYS

  Lyrics that seem to lie

  flat on the page

  unfurl and float legs

  that curve and beckon

  skeins of language.

  (and)

  JAPANESE SORROWS

  The thick black line

  describes an arc

  a woman’s mouth curves

  and from out emerge –

  the serpent.

  ***

  Toes shine in cowboy belts.

  ***

  I saw this, a child lost in the Asakusa festival – what’s the name of it?, Roberta remembers, and a hundred people converged around her – to console her, to find her parents, as if she were their own child – and in a way I guess she was. (I saw too, in Beijing, a child who had been naughty or disobedient in a way I had not seen. The father walked up behind the kid, and in one move, a single instant, tore its’ toy out of its’ hand, and smashed it on the sidewalk. The child immediately got into line.) The Asakusa mother finally turned up, mother and child reunited, the crowd dispersed, chuckling. All one happy family.

  ***

  That endless, lolling boat ride out of Shanghai and across the open sea, then the long train ride up from Yokohama – and then, well, admit it, old boy, this half-dilapidated town, then confusing as anything but Alighieri’s hell (but isn’t that all order, in fact?), a horrid mess, really, all that sheer naked poverty, and yet the eyes were so alive, so bright – and I was home free. Sweet home Tokyo. Cafferty, old man, your bones will become ash here, become a part of the soil at last. A long long way from – from where? Like Orson Welles, I was conceived in one city, named in another, and born in a third. Young parents on the run. From? Towards? Only further into themselves. And I became a young kid on the run. Rejecting the hot-rods of the Midwest for Los Angeles and a bit of script doctoring, small bundles of cash, never even any sense of waste or disillusionment; call it Hollywood, call it New York, that other coast, the glamor mags, captions, copy, filligree, a manufactured poetry at most. So much for the homeland. Europe was a pleasant base for a time, but I needed to rid myself even of that, the “old world,” if I were to wholly reinvent myself. I needed something even more unknown, strange, welcome, whatever age, new and yet seeming ancient. Desperate, expectant, I was coming close to arrival. It was the hottest day of my life, never been another. The haze, the humidity, the sun so low you could almost reach out for it, such exhaustion after that boat ride, wondering why the hell I’d ever bothered to come to this country I’d never had any real interest in, and had only a head full of clichés. Never really wanted to come to Japan; oh, but once I got here, well. And I landed, sank to the balls. I once was lost, and then was found, ready now to discover whomever I might be – so here I am, and here I have.

  ***

  It’s a story of a story being taken over by another story. You move West, bringing the East with you, making the old West the new East.

  ***

  –How much? How many again?

  –502 pages, seven chapters, thirty-nine sections and areas, four four-stars (Kabuki-za, Sensōji, the National Museum, and Meiji Jingu), 24 three, 43 two, 53 one, and three with question marks, and 527 years. I’ve read it two and a half times now, and made my way through – visited the sites, that is – more than half of it, it’s become my “bible.”

  –What’s it called again?

  –Tokyo Now & Then, An Explorer’s Guide. Paul Waley. But then I have to wonder about tourism in Tokyo. I’ve read a couple of proper guide books – Waley – yes, he’s a relation – is too deep, too brief even, to qualify; Judith Connor’s first edition is wonderful, but of so precise a time; the others – what do they amount to? On one hand they all admit that there isn’t really much to see in Tokyo, the sites being so new; and those worth seeing are all in the old part of the city, and old in Tokyo equates with boring, so skip those, for the “real” Japan you’ll be going to Kyoto anyway. I mean just look at the four-stars: Kabuki is hours and hours long, so skip it; Sensōji is just a temple, which means better Kyoto; the National Museum is old and musty and in the city’s only proper park, but in shitamachi, so skip it; and Meiji Jingu will also be bettered by Kyot
o. There is no Ryoanji or Golden Pavilion or great stroll garden here. So, what’s left? Ginza, but it’s glorious name has long faded. Shinjuku, but with all the new skyscrapers, it resembles New York or any other anonymous big city. Where’s that leave us? All the neon, I suppose. And the Shinkansen, but it too will soon be dated as other countries have their own versions. (Of course I’m leaving out students here, of architecture, for one, or people who come here for a specific purpose, a conference or a business deal.) So, in a word, there’s nothing to see here, and there go the tourists.

  –Strange idea, Lang.

  –On the other hand, there is everything to do. And so any decent Tokyo tour-guide would skip all the normal front-section stuff, all those sites, and only keep to the back-section stuff: where to stay, how to get around, what to eat, and especially where to shop, hell, even where to get laid, or where to take your partner to make love, even where to get drunk, and where next to get drunker, and where to take a bath, and where to whatever.

  –Maybe not so weird.

  ***

  “I can’t believe I’m still wearing long-sleeve shirts.” That’s the only phrase I remember now from that evening before the scandal broke and I quit her. She and I had walked home in a rather quiet rain a Friday night wondering just when summer would arrive. The rainy season had gone on as far as the end of July, the longest in 55 years; the sun had not been seen in Tokyo in 18 days; and over the weekend there were scores of earthquake tremors centered around Izu, and quite palpable in the city. When we awoke Saturday, summer had arrived. Hot, bright, clear, hot. Summer in Tokyo. I had to wander Ginza that day, paying some bills, picking up a Tokihiro Satoh photo, one of his rare color views of all the hideous building projects that were going on in Tokyo Bay, and getting a few books for her. She’d chosen to stay home and listen to the Japanese Punk stuff that didn’t really interest me. That Saturday was also the night of the annual fireworks display on the river and we hoped to see them. By early afternoon my shirt and jacket were sweat-soaked. I finally finished my errands and, in the heavy heat decided to head home, far too west of the river. As much as I would have enjoyed myself alone at the fireworks, for this occasion, I wanted to be with her, to see them with that child of the city I was then just discovering and letting go, as I am now discovering it all anew and all alone. The reduced amount of clothing, the constant secretions, the general abandon: the feeling that your body had abandoned you, that it really was not your own reminded me of E. G. S.’s phrase: “The eroticism of summer nights in the great city.” (And what’s that other phrase: “Lost his collection of erotica, and so, they say, came the eccentricities of old age.”) I thought I should be alone because I wanted to go over the argument I’d had earlier that week with Cafferty about nostalgia for the city. He defended it; I said it was antithetical to the nature of the city. He said that if we consider ourselves a living part of the living thing, well then, what is memory about? I had to finally concede that he was right. (And now I was beginning to have a sense of the past, too. Just look at me and my own nostalgia for the Eighties, hardly one of the more exciting or creative of the city’s decades.) Not only did I want to review the talk, I was already bolstering his arguments like any new convert. I had told her that I had learned so much from him about how to write about the city and she took me to mean a manual. “Well, you begin with the seasons and with what has been lost; don’t forget the legends and place-names; the women, the fashions ...” What could I say? Perhaps she was right; perhaps it all does read like a manual. But before such thoughts could develop any further, the heat had come in full force, though it did not dissipate those late rains.

  Nor has her heat and rain left my bones. She was as much an early morning surprise as a typhoon that I was not prepared for except in my best moments, moments that are leaving me by now as I find myself moving ever deeper and willingly so into the past, the city’s heat – wet, lingering, exhausting: and purifying: if you are prepared to surrender yourself to her.

  ***

  Dolls without hair

  cracked fingers

  faded brocades

  their lonely eyes

  blessed

  ablaze!

  ***

  Roberta and Lang: arm in arm, hand in hand, eye to eye, mouth to mouth.

  ***

  SCENE FIVE: A HOME

  She is in Kichijoji, just outside a typical family home: stucco, blue roof tiles, shutters on some windows, the others shoji. No doubt, a “Western room” (chairs) and a “Japanese room” (tatami), appliances and comic books piled high, some cheap gee-gaws here and there (Edo courtesan in glass box; Roccoco ceramic copy, young woman at piano, lap-dog, suitor). She’ll be greeted, be persuaded to stay, served tea and sembei, and all the while lose the scent. But enter she must. Suddenly, it is vast, palatial, huge! – she’d never expected to find such a place in Tokyo. Has she confused outside and in, did she judge the building’s size right? Is this a dream, a movie, a drug experience? Endless rooms, like Lubitsch, Busby Berkeley, Jean Arthur in Easy Living. Men all over the place: sipping champagne, seducing women; half a dozen tongues, and she can speak them all.

  On the steps she admires the doorman’s livery, those ever-so-tight tights. In the foyer, she hands her fur to a maid, asks for a light, and immediately a Spanish grandee appears. In a drawing room she has a brief tête-à-tête with a French diplomat from whom she declines another glass. In the library she rebuffs the overture of a Czech businessman. In the grande salle, and sipping another champagne, she tells the Argentine beef billionaire that she is on the side of the children, and if she were Eva Peron, why she’d knock his block off! He exeunts ever so politely, all the while complimenting her ankles, while whispering to an aide to “shoot that woman!” The aide approaches her and offers to shoot his boss in exchange for – . In the dining room, a woman holding in one hand a long mother-of-pearl cigarette holder, and in the other yet another glass of champagne, and a fox slung over her right shoulder, unsuccessfully attempts to seduce her with the promise of “explosive passions” which comes out as a spluttering burst of sibilants and plosives. She merely replies that the local fireworks are probably more exciting. Seated at dinner, the gentleman next to her, a Malay refugee millionaire, shows her his “ring,” and confides in her that should she join him the ring will reveal to her the “unutterable secrets of love.” She says she’ll “consider it.” In the smoking room, a retired Japanese general lights her cigar. He says nothing to her. Could this be her man? But what of the Malay millionaire? On the verandah, an overly smart girl of twelve tells her she knows who she is looking for. “I doubt it.” In the garden, she overhears two exquisitely dressed lesbians cooing. Back in the foyer, the Japanese general and the Malay millionaire are wondering who is to escort the “ever so charming” young lady home, when suddenly she sees a car driving off, and glimpses, in the window – her Man!

  She bids them all a heartfelt goodnight, quickly slips the liveried doorman her address, and has her car “follow that man!”

  ***

  Tokyo tires me out; can’t figure out why people think it’s so thrilling, Kaoru typically complains.

  Chapter 6

  HARAJUKU–YOYOGI

  It wasn’t easy but eventually Roberta had to ask Lang to leave and he was glad to, glad to get out, glad to get away from her for a while at least, at least to clear the air; so he found himself a place in Kichijoji, which he didn’t like either, all those foreigners, the discomfort of the easy living of it all, he thought (at first), at first he thought he’d be west of everything she or at least her Tokyo represented, but eventually, soon enough really, he came to like it, came to praise the place’s “charms” as he said – god he can be so condescending! – he came to see something of what all she’d been telling him: ha!, Lang came to like Tokyo – Tokyo was alright.

  ***

  doo lang

  doo lang

  doo lang

  ***

  Loves the city, d
oes he? And they all call him insane for it? Perhaps. But look at me. My love has always only been modest and from a distance. I’m sure I’ve only survived the way I have because I’ve never allowed myself to become absorbed in and by the big bertha, the great mother, the enormous uterus we call Tokyo. No, I’ve worked rather relaxed, I’ve gotten out and come back. Time and again. Shall we call that love? Perhaps. A certain fidelity. But again, to be distinguished from he and his claims. But we are kin in our ways. There was a time I was close to what he feels; but I didn’t allow myself to go that far. I figured that if it is a true love then we must mutually get to know and respect one another’s habits and rhythms and thus maintain a love to last – as it has, these decades already. Yes, he and I are kin; along with a few others whom I have known, lesser men and women and greater too whom the city has, well, not destroyed, we should not say they were destroyed so much as ... well, they were forever transformed in ways that they had not only not anticipated, but in ways they had never wished for, never imagined the possibility of. Now there’s another story to be written: the wasted in love, the failures. Who are these people for whom love – is, does such different things? The ones who just did not have enough, once having declared their love, to respond to and to match their partner’s own responding love. Cafferty wishes Lang well.

  ***

  When I was young I could feel the earth revolve under my feet the sky above, center of all what beauty and why should no one believe me? I stride forward amongst the unbelievers.

  ***

  Ah, this city, Hiroko thinks for a moment, how to get from home to Roppongi, much less Shibuya, and worse, Van Zandt’s Shimokitazawa? Shit! (oops!), but it is hard to get around. Well, maybe I’m complaining. The trains are alright. They just don’t run long enough, you can’t always afford a taxi, they aren’t what you’d call cheap, and only an idiot would walk all the way home. And if I don’t find a nice guy – oh, where was that hotel, it wasn’t that far? But I really do thank van Zandt for what he calls his “contributions” – anyway, why couldn’t the trains run all night like I’ve heard they do in Paris?