by Marc Horne
***
We transferred trains twice to get to our final destination, Koiwa. Honda helped me carry my bag: insisted on it.
I noticed that he looked a little different from other Japanese men in their thirties. His skin was tan and smooth, like someone who exercises outside a lot, but not like some weather-beaten sailor. I also noticed that the mask of his suit was occasionally threatened by bustling muscles. He actually had a muscular head, once you observed it, most noticeably two powerful muscles set perpendicular to the line of his mouth that looked well positioned to drive his long slabs of tooth through rope, planks and any other minor restraint. His face was relaxed and long; his manner was confident and ready for a minor challenge such as a punch in the stomach or a request for an explanation of his apocalyptic beliefs.
For he was a member of "The Path of Forgetting", the obviously dangerous Japanese Buddhist sect who felt the end of the world in every moment and that was why he was helping me with my suitcase.
Chapter 4
Honda was quiet on the whole, and didn't look at me much. I expect he didn't want to draw too much attention to us. But before we left Koiwa station, he asked me if I wanted a Pocari Sweat. "It has high levels of isotonic elements such as Niacin: it's a real pick-me-up," he explained. "Isotonic elements sound good to me," I replied.
I decided that even if he came back with a can of Pocari Piss I would just drink it and not ask what a Pocari was.
Koiwa station platform was a good 100 feet above street level. In fact, beneath us was the beginning of a four-mile long department store. So I could see a lot of what Koiwa was. In front of the south entrance to the station was a small plaza, and several arcades split off from it. The Plaza showed signs of being a political speaking place as there were posters of boring looking people scattered around it. There were two tall buildings on the south side. One was very close to the station and I judged it to be one of those capsule hotels that had fascinated the Western media in the eighties. In fact it looked somewhat run down, as if that fascination were the only reason it was still around. The other, more distant, building looked newer, more curved, and had some colorful artwork that I couldn't appreciate as yet.
On the north side were a big supermarket called Ito Yokado, more shopping streets and, in the distance, the bruise-colored Edo river.
The rails throbbed like electric heating elements. No doubt in the summer people incinerated themselves on the rails, flashing away before the train even touched them. It might be beautiful: the yellow train of the Sobu line bursting through a small pink cloud.
Honda returned with a can that looked like a slim blue Coca-Cola. I opened it up and downed the slightly milky, slightly salty, damn good soft drink while Honda looked on with a note of worry on his face that disappeared when I wiped my hand across my mouth and said "aahhhh!"
He then gestured to move down the stairs and we were soon out of the station. The Pocari was making it bearable: I estimated that I had twenty minutes walking in me before I had to tear my shirt off and burst a water melon on my head.
Slowly and softly, Honda began to talk as we walked down a covered street full of small shops, mainly fruit and veg.
"This is Koiwa City, on the eastern perimeter of Tokyo Prefecture. It is part of old Down Town… very old-style."
I couldn't see the old style, unless 20 years after the fire-bombings constituted old. Maybe it did. Tokyo was destroyed in cycles and, as Honda and I were particularly aware, it was currently overdue.
"We will be staying here as our country facility has been under heavy surveillance recently. Our headquarters here is positioned near a fish market and between several karaoke bars, including a Korean bar and a Chinese bar, so we have good cover for smells and sounds."
"Excellent," I noted. With no irony, such was my dedication at that time.
I noticed, as we passed another store that sold large roots that were floating in liquid, that my presence was causing none of the hem-grabbing attention I had expected. Honda explained to me that there were several large chain English Conversation schools in the area, and that people who looked like me were common here. That is why they had suggested I wear a micro-fibre shirt and "shocking" tie on the flight over. I saw myself on a smudgy mirror in the fish-store and could well imagine standing with ink stains on my fingers explaining the word 'surveillance' to appreciative hordes.
We turned right at the biggest fruit and veg store, the one that spilled onto the sidewalk like a father spilling from his arm-chair, confident of no opposition. We were at the foot of the other building I had noted from the station. It didn't make full sense: was it a bath house, a movie theater, a kabuki theater, a brothel. a corporate headquarters, a karaoke bar, a restaurant or what? Outside the door was a large sign of a man with a large dragon tattooed on his back trapped inside a "No!" sign.
Within a minute we were at our destination, a small coffee shop that in England would specialize in greasy chip sarnies. It was on the ground floor of a three story, gray tiled building that was too sloped to be new but too ugly to be old. Next to the coffee shop was a slim steel door that I hadn't even noticed at first.
"The shop is ours too… the people who run it are… mutant?"
I peeked through the window to look at them. They seemed no more mutant than the rest of us: a particularly aggressive mid-sized mammal with a brain that couldn't rest (even when it should) and that shivered in the night when the true intelligences ran their inventory on us.
So I just nodded and followed Honda up a narrow staircase. I didn't notice the sign above the door that announced the building as a tele-sex shop so I won't get into it just yet.
++++++++
I mentioned already that my mother died in Cambodia. This was my first trip to Asia and although I wasn't fool enough to confuse Pnhom Penh and Tokyo, memories were being juggled around by smells. Smells are bullies and able to vault all divisions of the mind. So as I followed Honda up the steps, watching his dueling buttocks effortlessly handle the gradient, I was at least partially back in the week of crying and throwing things, falling over and dragging things with you. The week of staring through, then at, then through windows (but never at the reflections that the windows were making.)
I think I only started doing these things after Father had been doing them for a while. The telegram made no sense to me. It said she had been killed in Cambodia but not how. I had heard of people being killed by cars or the flu, but not by a country. It was as if some spirit had risen from the soil and killed her. I asked my father what had happened and he could only answer "Everyone is dying out there… and worse. Someone is making them live through their sickest dreams. Someone is pulling down the crazy dreams that only people have and bringing them here where things are supposed to be just real."
This was not the last I would hear about the dream magic of mankind.
Chapter 5
A flimsy door divided us from them. Once I was inside, the same door divided a different us from a different them. That was true in all senses. That was the truth that defined my life in Japan: the flimsy door.
We had stepped into a large communal living room. The only windows in the room were two excessively high slots that grudgingly opened about an inch. They were streaming the bare minimum of light into the room right now. If there was a trade union of windows, these ones were in it.
The walls bore a uniform grayness; they had a texture that was close to random. They were different than the things humans had made before these days. All of the somewhat remarkable people I was about to meet were framed by these walls, and supported by a carpet that was as out of place as a gray carpet in a gray room can be.
There were three people in the room and they would be part of my team for the next several months. What I liked most about my meeting with them was that they all sighed when I came in the room because they knew that they had to take care of me and because of the fact that I existed. And people who wanted to kill and to die and who had a
lready taken the apocalypse into themselves still thought like this… that was what impressed me.
The first one to catch my eye was the fat one, as always. They sometimes have a very furtive look about them: skulking in shadows, swimming like all the fish in the shoal. They think. Unusually fat people are superb. Thin idiots and fascists and so forth can pass a whole life lubricated by the fat of the fat. The fat are allowed to be jovial about it or excel in some functional area of life, quietly.
The fat one was (eventually) Yosuke Kawabata, In addition to being fat he was a little hairy, a little tall, and somewhat speckled with objects of varying vintage and lifespan and color that made his facial movements seem daring, a little dangerous (especially if you were dressed in something nice when he made them.)
He had been alone when it had happened. He had taken the small alto sax that he had worked rather hard for down under the bridge near the river to play his haunting noises.
He had never even considered playing the sax back in the paper thin apartment building that his parents lived in with him. That would be like shitting in the living room.
He walked the five minutes to the enormous train bridge that brutally ignored the fairly wide and fast flowing river. He took his place, the least damp, least ratted, and pulled out his sax to make the noises of the various emergency services (for he was new at this game)
He began by just amplifying his breath and all the random trends that passed through his fairly random mind. Toots and hollers like those of a large game bird. Then he remembered this thing he had heard of: music, and tried to approximate that. Joggers passed by him with an almost perceptible relief in their step when they saw him:glad that no-one was being hurt up there in the shadowy nook under the bridge.
Then, across the water, he saw something. It haunted the step of an old man dressed in a kimono. The old man looked over his shoulder all the time. Yosuke's eye was fixed on the old man. The old man made a gesture in the air, like shooing away a bird. Then he fell to the ground with a scream. Yosuke knew that it would take at least fifteen minutes for him to get across the river and help the man, so he just sat and watched. When his watch got to about thirteen minutes and the old man was still alive it did indeed become necessary to stop looking at his watch.
Several hours later, after the body had been removed, Yosuke went home. He left his sax at the bottom of the river. He would no longer dedicate his life to making, but to searching. He was determined to see what the old man had seen but live to tell the world. That would be his performance. He would teach the world the nature of final things. And, sarcasm aside, the sax just wouldn't cut it.
Next in the room was a thin girl with a boyish haircut that spoke of enforced cleansing. Her eyes were unusually deep set for a Japanese person. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, even though doing so involved twisting her body slightly.
Honda introduced us: she was Junko Watanabe. I was dragging my bag in and bowing. There was no air conditioning in the room, the house, the street, except that big building, but it was cooler now. I was among my people.
For her, the moment of apocalypse came when she was at university. She was walking down the street to a class with a group of girls who looked a lot like she did and one who didn't. She was fully in tune with them and the tune they were making was the sound of talking talking about talking.
The one girl was discussing her future. Her name was Remi, after the brandy because her parents wanted her to have an international name. It was almost pronounced Lemmy, the leader of the metal group Motorhead, big in Northern Europe.
"I'll be a stewardess. I'll outsmile all of them, but I'll be tough too because safety is our number one priority and because that's what they want anyway… a firm hand."
Remi began to bounce in the sun. Her calves, which would take the immaculate sheaths of her space stockings like a suntan, sprang her through a tiny sphere… the remisphere.
All human life takes place within the earthpeel, the skin. Remi bounces within even less, the dew, the mold. She plans to ride at eight miles high and that's it. That's all the most beautiful (did we mention she is so beautiful) can do.
Of course she is stupid and the mind of the great physicists can soar in and out of the Event Horizons. But still Junko is troubled…
She is at home now, alone, in the dark, getting less naked, dressing in the dark as she cools and feels a little disgust at herself. She walks to the window. Outside there is the melancholy call of the roast potato seller. He sings
o-imo, o-imoooo
oishiiiiiiiii
jaga-iimoo
and when you look through the window of the van that carries the furnace you see a small family of small people inside living off the song. The potatoes alone couldn't do it. Seen it once, the song holds you forever. The secret charity of Japan, the guilt potatoes.
And so that song comes in through the window and it is full of something, of real-time, on-the-fly regret for each moment that smacks the potato man in the face. Tonight it is much too much for Junko. It is a reminder that life is going to be hard.
She starts to read a book, a pamphlet by a man called Ko Samsara. One look at his face, bearded and rounded and obscured, is enough to convince her that he is worth listening to: he could only have been published by people who believed in him as much as the happy young musician who pressed the pamphlet on her outside Shibuya station a week ago.
He simply explained the essential non-existence of the world, the demonic nature of the people-like forces that had been frustrating her. He explained how the world, as a created thing, couldn't really complain about destruction - which was just as well, since destruction at a very malicious and painful level was fairly imminent.
She decided to believe him, decided to forget the deciding and then was his and went to seek him out.
Finally the third new friend in the room: "Benny" Odajima. He was the only violent looking one in the room, even including Honda (who had actually killed people.) The violence manifested itself in his face and eyes. He had a very rough, scarred complexion like it had been much scratched and gouged over the years and even now seemed freshly shocked and thoroughly pissed off. But his eyes were as cool and flat as a sheet of glass shimmering off a cool stream of water. And that was so obviously a lie that you knew he was making plans.
For him it had begun while he was working as a scientist for the government nuclear project. For years he had studied very hard to learn all about the structure of atoms and how they worked together quietly and predictably to form a universe. He had managed to deal with quantum uncertainty quite smoothly… accepting that there is a bottom end to our absolute knowledge but we are big enough not to worry too much about that.
But something else was bothering him now that he worked at the research center, working out the best way to harness the atoms. He had this feeling that they were lying to him, that there was something inside the atom that they didn't want him to see. He began to smuggle data out in his battered old briefcase and he lined the walls of his small apartment with it and then the ceiling too. He looked at the data for a pattern, trying to intuit everything… not really doing any calculating. He began to get a feel for what was in there but he was still very far from being able to name it.
Then he started to experiment, letting things get hotter than they should, turning certain key knobs further than they had ever been intended to go. He did this at night at first and by the end he was doing it whenever he pleased, because safety limits in his business were defined as the point when the villagers see the smoke coming from the chimney. He had never really believed that, and finding it out really didn't help his state of mind.
So the hotter the atoms got the more data he got. Until one day he became convinced of it… the evidence was irrefutable… little men were inside the atoms. It could be proven by a complicated mathematical process that he had to invent essentially from scratch.
He realized that science would take him no furth
er, and was resolved to leave this in the hands of a professional mystic. He read around a little and found the works of Ko Samsara and was impressed by the clarity of his vision… he would see the unseen. For a few months after quitting his job he went through a bad period of depression that terminated in his beating a prostitute almost to death. Ko Samsara had to help him with that and so he was more than happy to reciprocate by entering Samsara's inner circle.
I had entered that circle. My reasons were more complicated. I had always been meant to do it, and was happy just to be there.
Chapter 6
I woke up in the middle of the night. Why?
Well, I've mentioned the heat enough that You know it was there, sitting like a vulture on my chest as my eyes opened. Also, I was on a wood floor on a futon about two inches thick, so all of my bones were getting to know the outside world much better than they had before.
Also it was no time at all, my body clock was in free float. SO a burp or an inch could have thrown me out of the castle of sleep. And finally, all the people around me, who I had never met before, were committed without scruple to the primacy of death. That knowledge will turn the scuttle of a cockroach into a stuka dive.
When I woke up the light of the world was four long rectangles, like glowing scarves of two very friendly priests. In moments I saw the bars on the windows.
I took a deep breath and then I was on the bars, couldn't keep my hands off them.
When I felt them give a little, like I could maybe tear them down, I could let go and remember that I had happily lain down before those bars to sleep as I had happily chosen to come to Japan, and Japan was the reason for the heat and that I should lie down. The moon berated me. I went back to the thin futon on the harsh floor to sweat and worry about whether I could breathe in my sleep when I was not there to force each gasp of the awful soup in and out.