Tokio Whip

by Arturo Silva

  Curious, she wonders, we’re the most literate country in the world, but does the world have any idea of what we actually read? If literacy were gauged by quality as well, where would we be on the list? But then she notices – or does not notice but rather becomes aware, for after all how can one notice what is not there? – that there is no section of what the country most enjoys reading: Maruzen is devoid of manga. Uncanny, how can it survive? After all, Kinokuniya bookstore devotes an entire floor to the stuff.

  Finally, she purchases a volume on architecture and photography, figuring she ought to know more about the double subject. Resignedly, she admits that once again she has missed her man.

  ***

  I am in thralldom, in throes, Tokyo – are you?, Hiroko wonders.

  ***

  –I came in here for a drink, and –

  – … and found a memory. What else are we here for – but to remember?

  – Ruthless (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1948)

  ***

  That great exchange of telegrams – that mutual utter incomprehension! – remember? The former mayor Goto Shimpei, now in charge of reconstructing the city after the earthquake, fires one off to his friend, the city planner Charles Beard, “Earthquake fire destroyed greater part of Tokyo. Thoroughgoing reconstruction needed. Please come immediately, even for a short stay.” And Beard responds: “Lay out new streets, forbid building without street lines unify railway stations.” “Lay out streets”! “Even for a short time”! What tenderness!

  Chapter 11

  NISHI-NIPPORI–NIPPORI

  And then Lang had to return to Vienna for a few months, there was no choice, an unfinished job, a previous commitment, I forget what but there was no choice– we all felt sorry about it, not knowing what would develop – Roberta seemed to take it alright, and I emphasize the “seem”– apparently they wrote and spoke regularly … but she was never sure if he’d return– and then she surprised us all, she visited him, they got away and were together – wherever they were.

  ***

  He described to me his reunion with Tokio. Like a cat who’s come back from vacation and as soon as he’s back immediately starts to inspect familiar places. He ran off to see if everything was as it should be – the Ginza owl, the red “Tokyo” neon sign in “Asian lettering” just up the street from Ark Hills, the Shimbashi locomotive, the English books section of Maruzen bookstore, the Temple of the Fox at the top of Mitsukoshi department store, which he found invaded by little girls and Rock singers. He was told that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars, that producers shuddered before them. He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passersby and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful. Everything interested him. He who didn’t give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant or about the results of the Daily Double, asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done in the last sumo tournament. He asked for news of the Imperial family, of the Crown Prince, of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly on television to teach goodness to children. These simple joys he had never felt – of returning to a country, a house, a family – but twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.

  – Chris Marker-Silva, Sans Soleil (1982)

  ***

  I remember seeing my parents making love, Hiroko recalls. That’s when we lived farther out, all in that cramped room. My father on top and then my mother, and she just sounding so delirious and happy and he so happy in making her happy. And I just watched. I couldn’t really see much, they were under the covers. I was happy to watch; I didn’t want to say anything, I was just happy to see them happy, my parents. And they still seem happy. I saw myself make love once. In a hotel. I guess I seemed happy to myself too.

  ***

  Kaoru has a day off. He wears only his underwear. He is sitting on the floor at the table, with a large can of beer. The floor is covered with newspapers, weekly magazines, and comicbooks. His wife has gone shopping with the kids. This Sunday he is too tired to accompany them. “I’ll see the kids next Sunday,” he says without either contempt or apology. After another, smaller beer, he is bored enough to go for a walk. He walks down the five flights of stairs to the street. He sees the Christian neighbor who takes her wheelchair-bound husband to church everyday, their two boys following. He sees the young girl with large breasts talking with two boys on motorbikes, and wonders when she’ll turn eighteen so he can see her in a porno video. He sees a couple of American soldiers from the nearby Yokota airbase. They are laughing, and he is sure the joke is on him. He silently curses them. A couple of Americans in the local liquor shop are singing a Country song that he vaguely recognizes. He thinks America must be a wonderful place if it can produce such music. He sees other families, apparently happy. Finally, he runs into his own family, and before they can say anything, he suggests they go out for spaghetti and ice cream tonight. He is in America, on a bus. An American acquaintance – some guy who works in the International Section – is a few seats before him. The bus stops. There’s a bar. The American gets into a fight. The American is now black, he’s fighting with a white guy. A knife, a death. Kaoru is in the car with the white guy whom he hardly knows but who seems to know Kaoru well. There’s an exchange of knives. Kaoru is in a car in America with a knife in his hand, the murder weapon, wondering how he got here. He awakes in a sweat, his wife stirs for a moment. He goes to look after his children, sweeps the dream away, walks back to bed.

  Hiroko is wandering around Yokota airbase in North-Northwest Tokyo. And then it becomes her old home in shitamachi. Her grandmother is adjusting the picture on the television. Her younger brother is reading a comic-book. Her mother is holding back tears. Her father is in the shop on the first floor. And Hiroko is supposed to be finishing her homework, but in fact she is daydreaming about a boy in her class and wondering how she can get out of the house tonight to see him at the school playground. Then, she has just said goodnight to him; she is restless. It is almost midnight. She runs to the station and gets the last train to Tokyo station. She walks to Hibiya, and wanders into the Imperial Hotel. She is fifteen years old, but she is a thinking woman. A businessman offers her a drink. She accepts. He invites her to his room. She refuses, but she does accept an invitation for a walk in Hibiya Park. There she allows him to fondle her, she gives him her panties. She accepts ten thousand yen for the twenty minutes. She returns to the hotel, and stays in the coffeeshop and lobby, reading Kafka, an author she’s chosen just because she liked the name, “kafuka.” In the lobby, Hank Williams’s “Lonesome Highway” is playing, again and again.

  Hiroko, awakes in a panting sweat, remembering the night.

  ***

  She sits dripping over his face, his eyes strain to still the image.

  ***

  Van Zandt, that coincidental man went walking. One step after another, steady, certain in their grip of the ground below, but uncertain of their destination. At the train station he saw a young, rice-skinned woman in red and black on the platform opposite, and thought. A few hours later in another of the hearts of the city – it doesn’t matter which – he saw her again shopping for a pencil. He was shopping for some paper. That evening in another – what we have called here – the “hearts” of the city, yes, he saw her again, alone, drinking, and he thought. One woman, three hearts; three hearts; one city.

  One man, one van Zandt.

  ***

  –Not quite your kind of area, Hiro?

  –What, why do you say that?

  –Well, I can’t really picture you spending too much time appreciating the finer delights of the older city.

  –Oh no?

  –Not really.

  –When was the last time you got stuck – I mean, you were here?

  –When we went to that all-tofu restaurant.

  –Oh yes, that was two or three years ago.

  –Excuse me, but I don’t think that was quite the last time, Hiro.

  –Shh!

  –Oh, come
on, no need to keep it a secret.

  –Oh, alright.

  –What?

  –What?

  –Well, what’s the main thing you notice when you’re on the Yamanote Line and it swings past these stations, Nishi-Nippori and Nippori?

  –Uhm, the signs?

  –The ravishing beauty of the view!

  –That one can see Mt. Tsukuba from here without interference!

  –The clean air!

  –The silence!

  –The luxurious housing!

  –All the greenery!

  –The cables and poles have all gone underground!

  –The happy faces!

  –Relaxed!

  –Loving!

  –Everyone speaking English!

  –Or French!

  –Or any language, as well as Japanese!

  –Ok, ok, comeon, seriously.

  –Ok, ok, the same thing you notice from anywhere along the Yamanote Line.

  –The filth!

  –The garbage!

  –The human degradation!

  –The meanness and sullenness of the people!

  –Their evil insularity!

  –The concrete and steel!

  –Alright, alright, seriously now.

  –Ok, what?

  –???

  –The love hotels.

  –That’s it?

  –Well, there are a lot in this particular area, don’t you think? Between Ikebukuro and Ueno, all the spillover.

  –Mmm, I’m not so sure.

  –But other in-between areas have lots of love hotels.

  –Maybe they’re just bigger here. Taller buildings, you know.

  –Maybe.

  –So, Hiro, what you’re saying is that this entire area – which does have personality, and a lot of important history too – of all of it, all it makes you think of is its love hotels?

  –Well, uhm, yes, or all I’m saying is that that’s what you notice from the train.

  –Not me.

  –?

  –?

  –?

  – I notice the light, endless. Look!

  ***

  My cunt lies to the east, rises for you, easterly. Talk to me, cunt of mine, I want to be the little man walking inside you as you walk – easterly.

  ***

  The costs of confusion notwithstanding, no place else I’d rather be, give me an address, make me a map on a scrap of paper, I’ll find you, discern the system, read the signs, chome, machi, whatever, gizmo shop, soba shop, no confusion, no cost, Columbus-Lang discovers the city the way he unravels a memory or dream!

  ***

  Baudelaire on the splendors and miseries of living outside the loop: “The complex elements which go to make up the painful and glorious decor of civilization.”

  ***

  Stop, enough! One bead of cum; licked away, the rest for breakfast.

  ***

  1657: The Fire of the Long Sleeves

  “In every look that comes my way, every woman says: within my sleeves the whorl of pain.”

  Tokyoites are not blessed with that capacity for memory that Kyotoites possess. In the ancient capitol, for example, if someone mentions “the war,”’ you will not be certain if your interlocutor is referring to the Second World War or to one that occurred in the nineteenth century, or even the sixteenth or twelfth! As for Tokyo, if one speaks of a fire, well, that would probably refer to one that occurred just last week. But if one were to speak of a “great fire,” then most people might immediately think of either the air-raids of 1945, or the earthquake of 1923. But if one were to press the point, then memory – or deep reading in history – might bring to mind the Yoshiwara fire of 1911, or the Kanda fire of 1881 (Kanda was actually said the be the “best place for fires” ((in what respect, having them or viewing them?)) ), or the Ginza fire of 1872, or the fires of 1834 or 1829. Going even further back, one might recall the fire of 1682 that destroyed a great part of the city. (And it too is a story for which we must make space in this book, for it involves love.) But for the true Edophile, the greatest of all fires occurred in 1657: The Fire of the Long Sleeves.

  “The Flowers of Edo” they’re called. Could any other city create such a festive name for those disasters that have so often – “no fewer than ninety-seven major conflagrations between 1603 and 1868” – brought devastation to the city? The author knows something of the spirit. In Spring 1994 a fire destroyed a home just two houses away from my own. While people were concerned and somewhat afraid, there was too a definite ebullience in the air: the whole neighborhood out in its pajamas, people scurrying here and about for a better view, the excitement at watching those quintessential Tokyo heroes, the firemen, at work.

  Edo was barely half a century old when it occurred; indeed, one might say that 1657 marked the city’s second birth so great were the changes the fire brought about. A site that had been constructed as a military fortification suddenly had to face the fact that it was indeed a city of people: over-crowded Edo had to be expanded; firebreaks and fire-brigades created; whole areas had to be rethought, rearranged, removed. It was a moral lesson too: out were the flamboyant mansions done in the Momoyama style; in was a greater austerity. In fact, large parts of the present-day city only came into existence because of the fire. What is now the great fish market of Tsukiji had never before existed. Tsukiji was founded on reclaimed land as a result of the pressing need to expand the city. Scores of shrines and temples were moved out to areas such as Asakusa, Yushima, Yotsuya and Azabu. And besides the new firebreaks, most importantly, the first bridge across the Sumida was built, Ohashi (the “Great Bridge”). (Simply read Waley: like a running theme in his book we keep coming upon phrases on the order of “this came about in the wake of the fire of 1657.”)

  And why “long-sleeves”? The reader might know that kimonos with long sleeves are worn by unmarried women. The legend is this: A certain kimono was worn by three separate young women all of whom lived in the area of Honmyōji in Hongō. The first woman died lovelorn; the other two both died after having just worn the same kimono. Before any more unfortunate deaths might occur, the priests of the temple decided to get rid of the kimono by burning it. While attempting to do so, however, a strong wind caught the flaming garment and whirled it here and there, to this roof and that as if it were the embodiment of the haunted, unsatisfied souls of those three young women.

  The kimono no doubt was finally devoured by flames – and so too was the city. Three-quarters of Edo were razed; more than 100,000 inhabitants died – one-quarter of the population. And a fifth of that number were to be found piled so high in the Kanda River that sight of the river itself disappeared. Even the gold in the castle keep melted.

  A more prosaic account of the fire would speak of eighty days without rain; tremendous winds sprinkling layers of sand and dust over thousands of already highly flammable thatch-roofed houses. And then the flames began. Three days of raging fires that only ended when finally it snowed.

  The dead were honored in a new temple, Eko’in, which also suffered its own horrors: it burnt down in 1916, and again in this century’s other two great disasters. But somehow it not only absorbed all this suffering, it dedicated itself further and drew into its embrace the memories of those who suffered in further disasters (more fires and earthquakes), the aborted, babies who died in childbirth, those who died in prison, even animals.

  We could go on, but enough horror. The only romance about it all lies in its name and the legend of its origin. Perhaps someday the “long sleeves” will be forgotten and the great disaster that recreated the city will only be recalled by its alternate, or “official” name, “Meireki no Taika,” the Great Meireki Fire (“Meireki” referring to the name of the period in which it occurred). Perhaps, but that is unlikely, this being Tokyo.

  Fires have no narratives – or none known to this author. Let us indulge ourselves though and simply create the space here and now for that other fire mentioned earlier. It is a
short, sad tale and again concerns the flames of unfulfilled passion.

  In 1682 a fire broke out, again destroying much of Edo (including Bashō’s hut). The house of a grocer in Komagome was among those destroyed. He and his family took refuge in a nearby temple. There his daughter, soon to turn fifteen, the young and lovely Oshichi, fell in love with one of the temple’s acolytes. But within a few days, the house was rebuilt and the grocer’s family returned home. Oshichi was desperate. So much so that she dared – so as to see the young man once more – she dared by her own hand to burn down her own family’s new home – and she was caught.

  The law was clear: Arsonists under age fourteen were banished to live on a distant island. “But when fifteen years of age and over: Burning at the Stake.” Oshichi was lead to the stake along with five other arsonists. As the wagon in which she stood drew past the crowd, all could see that the fair young girl was unrepentantly noble, self-assured and unafraid for she had done all for love. (One thinks of Anne Wiazemski in Bresson’s Joan of Arc.) And the city’s heart went out to her. She was memorialized at Enjōji, where, it was thought, the Bodhisattva Jizō elected to take on the burden of her sufferings. And even today people pray at her grave, laying flowers and other offerings. Before they play her role, Kabuki actors come, too. (Just as they also pray at the grave of Oiwa of The Ghost Story of Yotsuya, jilted and slain, forever haunting the man, her face horribly disfigured.) In his Five Women Who Loved Love, Saikaku too wrote of Oshichi.