The Sea Came in at Midnight

by Steve Erickson

  But for the plane ticket in Yoshi’s truck, it never would have occurred to Kristin to go to Tokyo. For the first few days she lives in the small ryokan near the wharf, her window looking out toward Tokyo Bay. She sleeps on her tatami mat behind the sliding paper door and leaves her shoes at the inn door. Every morning at ten o’clock the maid chases her out of her room, every night at ten o’clock the innkeeper summons her to the lobby downstairs to watch his son perform a traditional lion dance, complete with ferocious growls and coiled attacks. It seems to Kristin that the son saves his most hair-raising antics for her in particular, and bows a little lower to her when he finishes, upon emerging from underneath the lion mask.

  In Ueno Park the trees shed their cherry blossoms. Teenagers sit drinking on the wet ground, under the white rain, mourning the passing of the blossoms almost before they have been born, the bloom immediately scattered in the collision of seasons. For a few days she falls in with a group of Japanese kids who speak broken English; one of them, a photographer for a music magazine, tries to convince her to take a job in Asakusa with a theatrical revue of naked girls. But Kristin has now outgrown trading on her nakedness. In the week of the cherry blossoms when Kristin first arrives, Tokyo irrevocably roots itself in the present, before the rain of springtime capitulates to the ongoing drizzle of Tokyo timelessness; she prowls Ueno Park in the hail of the dying blossoms unaware that this is the rare Tokyo moment when yesterday, today and tomorrow are clearly delineated by the explosion of trees. Cauldrons of incense fill the air with scent. Several months into what now outdated Western calendars quaintly call “the third millennium,” Kristin has arrived not only in a blizzard of cherry blossoms but atomized time; on the Ginza a panorama of small dancing white dots stretches out before her. The entire city is garbed in surgical masks. Everyone wears these masks on the train, in the streets, along the docks, at the park, so as not to breathe in the epidemic of demolished time that fills the air like pollen. Everyone in the city wears surgical masks except Kristin, who flaunts some unconscious arrogant conviction that she’s beyond the reach of time’s virus.

  In her ryokan near the bay, she doesn’t have much in terms of possessions. There are only some books, the Occupant’s coat and some clothes, including a blue dress that fits a little better now. On the walls she’s tacked some of the news clippings she brought with her from Los Angeles. Every day she returns to her room to find that the maid has taken them down and stacked them neatly on the small ankle-high tea table in the corner of the room, and every day Kristin tacks them back up. Clearly the maid’s aesthetic sense is offended by the clippings on the walls. Since she is a maid, it’s not her place to protest, but since she is Japanese, it’s not quite possible to acquiesce to the Western barbarity of news clippings tacked to the walls.

  At twilight, from the window of her room, Kristin sees the pixeled black waves of the bay rolling in. At night, she sees a beacon out over the water that’s too bright to be a window but too close to be a star. She can only assume it’s a lighthouse of some kind, except that when she walks down to the wharves in the morning and looks out over the bay, there’s no lighthouse to be seen anywhere, or, for that matter, anything that might make such a light. Every night she stares out the window trying to figure out what this light is. Every night she finally falls asleep a little after midnight, waking three hours later to the sound of foghorns from the ships sailing into the bay bringing the fresh tuna for the morning marketplace. In the morning she walks down to the docks and to the huge open market where she eats fresh sushi for breakfast and, barbarous Westerner that she is, offends the stall vendors by asking for too much wasabi, the strong green horseradish that she actually prefers to the fish.

  One morning while standing out on the docks looking out over the water, her eyes still peeled for the source of the night’s bright slashing light, eating her rolls of tuna and her eyes tearing up at the rush of wasabi in her head, Kristin suddenly remembers something. She suddenly remembers being a little girl back home in Davenhall and standing with her uncle on the banks of the river, staring across the water as she’s staring now. On the other side of the river was a woman waiting for the ferry, too far away for Kristin’s little eyes to make out distinctly; Kristin might even have taken her for a man, at first. The woman was staring back at her. From time to time, her uncle waved to the woman.

  Remembering this now, Kristin feels fairly sure this was her mother on the other side of the river. But whether her uncle actually told her this or it was just some idea she got in her head on her own isn’t clear. The ferry lumbered through the water toward the small dock on the other side, but when it reached the dock, the woman hesitated, and soon the boat embarked again without her, sailing back toward Kristin. Kristin remembers her uncle seeming as confused by this as the little girl was, and nothing is more terrifying to a child to realize the grown-up she is with is as confused by something as she is. On the other shore, as the ferry glided back across the river toward Kristin and her uncle, the woman’s shoulders seemed to sag. Her head hung in something even a little girl could recognize as defeat, and then the woman turned her back and walked away.

  As the last of the cherry blossoms dies in Tokyo, Kristin buys a blank journal from a small bookshop. She begins to write what she calls the Book of the Falling One-Winged Bird, named after the scorch mark that the lightning made on the Occupant’s time-capsule that afternoon in Black Clock Park when she and Yoshi dug it up. She might have called it the Book of Millennial Memory, but it sounds too much like the Occupant, and it’s also a title that would have no meaning anyway in the place she’s in, since in Japan the Western notion of a millennium has no meaning. In her book she records everything she remembers, beginning with standing by the river as a little girl looking at her mother on the other side.

  Her second week in Tokyo, Kristin is sitting in a fast-food restaurant full of Japanese teenagers, writing feverishly in her book, when two young women next to her strike up a conversation. They are both Japanese. The one who speaks a little English seems a few years older than Kristin; the other is probably in her late twenties, maybe thirty, and asks Kristin many questions, using her friend as an interpreter. Kristin might be suspicious of all the questions except that the two women seem so guileless and pleasant, and the older woman is most fascinated with the memoir that Kristin is writing so intensely. It turns out that Mika was a geisha in Kyoto some years ago, before deciding—as she puts it to Kristin through their interpreter—to come “out of the shadows and into the light.” Now she is madam of the Ryu, one of the rotating memory hotels set amid the bars and brothels and strip joints and massage parlors and pornography shops of Kabuki-cho.

  This is how Kristin gets her job as a memory girl at the Hotel Ryu, on the “Avenue Shimada” that is informally named—since none of the streets in Tokyo have real names—after one of its most persistent and dangerous visitors. Gleamingly modern, but punctuated with old photographs and disenfranchised mementos, the Ryu waits at the top of an anonymous flight of metal stairs, a sepia light shining above the door. Within its outer shell, the hotel is a large three-story revolving cylinder whose doorway, at certain times of the day or night, slides into alignment with passages that open up into various entryways and exits to different parts of the city. Inside the hotel the memory girls assemble for the customers, who make their choices and disappear with the girls into private booths lit in the magenta or marigold or pale blue colors of twilight and morning, and cordoned off by curtains or sliding doors. The tiny booths are just large enough for a love seat and small table for two, on which sits a small vase with a single white rose watched over by the serene porcelain mask of a woman’s face above the doorway, placed there to transfix the customer and arouse old, impotent recollections.

  In the Hotel Ryu, Kristin’s dirty-blond hair, undistinguished in America, is very popular with the Japanese businessmen. But more than the hair, it’s her empathy that attracts them; because she is not Japanese, her memor
ies are considered more likely to be authentic, rather than the prefab memories found at most of the other Kabuki-cho establishments. Kristin recounts for her customers her recollections of Davenhall and Los Angeles and all the memories the Occupant spent inside her, sometimes embellishing them slightly with other recollections she’s picked up along the way, though she’s careful not to steal any of the other girls’ material. If a dream is only a memory of the future, in Tokyo she finds one has no need of memories of the future: memories of the future are the only kind they have in Tokyo. Memories of the past are Kristin’s stock-in-trade. Unlike those at the love hotels on the surrounding streets, the transactions inside the memory hotels do not involve sex. As she talks, old Kai-san, or Doctor Kai, her most loyal customer, just puts his hand on her knee, listening in quiet reverie.

  After a while Kristin moves out of her ryokan to live full-time on the third floor of the Ryu with the other girls. In her own tiny chamber she can put away her books and tack her newspaper clippings to the wall without the maid yelling at her, though she misses the mysterious beacon of light that shines in the night, and even the sound of the foghorns at three o’clock in the morning from the boats sailing in with their fish. Like the other girls, she learns the rotating hotel’s schedule and where the hotel’s exits will release her at a given moment; the Ryu is the hub of a wheel of memory on an amnesiac landscape, and the long shimmering tubular tunnels are spokes that lead out into Shinjuku and Ueno and Shibuya and Roppongi and Asakusa and Ikebukuro and Harajuku and the other neighborhoods of the city. Sometimes Kristin emerges at the core of old Tokyo near the Imperial Palace and its moat, sometimes on the monstrous boulevards beneath buildings that twist up into the sky as labyrinths of glass, with protruding translucent domes that are like cataract eyes, invisible by day and glittering at night. These boulevards and buildings approximate the way the city is gray in the sunlight—confounding and enervated, vanishing into the mist off the bay—and then takes on a different identity at nightfall: exhilarated and thrilling, the pachinko parlor of the Twenty-First Century, the funhouse of the soul.

  At these moments Kristin, her body humming for a release her mind is too exhausted to pursue, steps into the Tokyo borne of light and noise, the Enola Gay having been only the first and gaudiest pachinko parlor of all. In Japan’s nuclear birth and the subsequent announced death of its imperial god, the grit of the past has been liquefied and frozen into a million windows in which a million disconnected images and juxtapositions now flash, geishas and the Ginza, Buddhist shrines and beautiful bondage queens, serene tea ceremonies and crazed cabdrivers careening through the maze of Tokyo, windows full of images of the Tokyo soul. After she’s been in Tokyo a while, Kristin soon begins to notice everywhere the small gleaming time-capsules, in the larger temples like the Kobayashi Shrine not far from the hotel, and in smaller shrines in tiny homes—gleaming time-capsules smuggled in from the West with their dates of original interment. The entire city is littered with time-capsule shrines in homes and on the streets, in the ryokans and temples, each date constituting the beginning of a new age following the death of the old one on the first of January 1946 and the void of time in between, during which the Japanese Emperor was in free fall from divinity, and the Japanese empire in free fall from meaning. When the Emperor confessed to his people he wasn’t God, it blew them out of the Twentieth Century altogether, into the Twenty-First, well ahead of everyone else: after all, what did the Japanese need the Twentieth Century for anymore? What had it gotten them but Nagasaki and No God? Now a million new epochs and a million new empires fill Tokyo, and a million new emperors have been born from the time-capsules, in the form of a piece of rock with unreadable graffiti or a wristwatch broken at a particular hour, or a postcard of a showgirl in a Las Vegas casino. In one such epoch the emperor of the new age is a tiny black coffin that holds a tooth and a piece of charcoal and a single long, scrolled strip torn from a picture of a naked woman having sex. In another he’s a used condom.

  About the time she begins her journal—sometime around the death of the blossoms—Kristin knows she’s pregnant. For a while she’s more tired than queasy, but more queasy than she would have expected, having always thought of herself as having a stomach strong enough for anything. I’ll get fatter, she realizes gloomily, just when the blue dress she took from the Occupant’s closet that last night in L.A. was starting to fit. But my breasts will get bigger, she consoles herself. She admonishes herself that she should have been more careful.

  Otherwise, she’s so sanguine about the prospect of having a child it confuses her a little. She can’t imagine being less prepared for such a thing. But almost immediately, before it even evolves into a decision that has to be made, she has made it, she has decided to have the baby, and while at first she resists the impulse to name him, she decides to name him Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard Blumenthal. Or, if he should later so prefer, finding the full name cumbersome or, more important, deciding Kierkegaard was full of shit, Kirk Blu. In the mornings she opens the window of her room at the Hotel Ryu and bares her belly to the city, disturbing people in the streets. Having grown up in the dead silence of her Chinatown back home, she means to toughen up little Kierkegaard by exposing him early to the din of reality. The world isn’t going to whisper for you, little boy, she whispers to him, her hands on her stomach awaiting a response.

  In her bath at the Hotel Ryu, she soaks in the warm water, staring at her stomach, thinking more and more about her own mother waiting for her on the other side of the river, only barely noticing anymore the date that the Occupant wrote on her body, 29.4.85. Having left the Occupant because she would not be the vortex of chaos, Kristin now refuses to acknowledge that everywhere she’s gone and everywhere she goes, in a city where time is atomized, everything breaks down. She refuses to acknowledge how she’s become a conductor of chaos since she left the Occupant, beginning with Yoshi’s rather electrifying end on the knolls of Black Clock Park, and continuing with the key to the truck and the key to the San Francisco penthouse that she had taken from Isabelle and Cynda and left—on purpose? by accident?—on the small table next to Louise that last night they slept in the Occupant’s house. Kristin has refused to acknowledge the way she sets into motion pending cataclysm, the way she makes all the monitors and compasses go haywire; on this matter she is, as she herself would put it, a point-misser.

  If nothing else, she might at least wonder how it is she alone walks through Tokyo without a surgical mask, inhaling without consequence the time-contaminated air. As she walks through Ueno Park, she doesn’t see how the cherry blossoms shake loose from the trees in panic; as she rides the subways she doesn’t realize that it’s not typical for every subway train in Tokyo to break down all the time, that in fact in Tokyo the subway almost never breaks down, except when she’s on it. As she walks through the deranged electronic Vegas of Akihabara, with its hundreds of open electronics shops and stores and stalls of televisions and stereos and computers seeming to topple over one another, she takes no note of the televisions crazily changing channels, the stereos suddenly blasting songs no one has ever sung, let alone heard, the computers crashing in homage to her. She doesn’t even fully grasp the situation the night she rises wearily, nauseated, from her tatami mat to go downstairs and meet her best client. Straining to put on her blue dress, fastening the last button, she finally takes note of the 29.4.85 on her body and realizes with a start that today happens to be the twenty-ninth of April, the fifteenth anniversary of the fading date. She counts on her fingers the time difference and calculates that in L.A. at this very moment the twenty-ninth of April is just beginning to dawn, and then she goes downstairs to meet Doctor Kai, only to find him sitting in their booth, eyes peacefully closed, literally as still as death.

  Doctor Kai had just gotten to a particularly important and difficult part of his memoirs. As it happened, the old man was actually from America, or at any rate had spent a great deal of his life there, which might have accounted for his
special rapport with Kristin. By the time he returned to his Japanese homeland some ten years ago, after more than forty years of living in the States, his wife was dead, his disgraced and disowned daughter Saki had once again dropped from sight, and so all Doctor Kai had left was a memory so American in content and process, he explained to Kristin, that few Japanese girls understood.

  Kristin understood. I can see the nuclear halo of Nagasaki across the bay—she recounted his words later in her journal—from my hometown of Kumamoto that August morning in 1945, around eleven o’clock, like the neon halo of Las Vegas: a great glowing star: I was twenty-six then. That was how Doctor Kai began. Over the next several weeks he returned every evening, distraught on the occasions Kristin wasn’t available, patiently waiting for his time with her on the occasions she was occupied with someone else; he had just gotten up to somewhere around 1988 or ’89, a particularly painful recollection of the last time he saw his daughter and exiled her from him forever with his silence, when Kristin said, We’ll finish tomorrow night—and reserved him a slot in her schedule.

  Racked with nihilism, choking on his words, the old man had said to her, “We are living in an age of chaos.”