Tokyo Decadence

by Ryu Murakami

  Gotcha, I said, and got up off the bed.

  “I’m going back to Fussa.”

  She nodded.

  I got together with Yoko again twenty-four years later, in Los Angeles. We met at the bar in a hotel in Century City. She was still very thin and wore little makeup, and her loose-knit dress looked good on her.

  We were there till they closed, talking about all sorts of things.

  “That was the most sex I ever had in my life,” she told me after her seventh cognac. Same here, I said, and a smile lit up her pretty and virtually unlined face. “Well, one thing hasn’t changed,” she said. “You’re still a liar.”

  La Dolce Vita

  I was twenty-three or so.

  Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure why I chose to enroll in a college of fine arts. It’s true that my father was an art teacher and I’d grown up watching him paint, but I’d never even considered following in his footsteps.

  I guess I just wanted to keep the money coming. If I hadn’t entered some college or other I’d have lost my allowance. For two years I had been what people here call a ronin, but the life I’d led was worlds away from that popular image of the student as a masterless samurai, cramming for his next crack at the college entrance exams. I’d been living with an older woman next door to the American air base at Yokota, hanging out with GIs, doing every drug known to man, and getting myself arrested on suspicion of various crimes. As lifestyles go, it was fairly decadent, but I can’t say I ever derived much pleasure from it. I simply seemed to always make, with unfailing precision, the worst possible choices.

  The woman’s name was Kimiko, and she was married when I met her. I was eighteen; she was about six years older. We met at a rock café in Kichijoji, with the Doors’ Morrison Hotel booming over the sound system. I’m the one who made the first move, of course.

  “I’ve got a little grass and some Nibrol. Interested?”

  Kimiko was drinking a cocktail—a Sidecar or a Moscow Mule, something like that, I suppose. It wasn’t a drink I or any of my friends had ever even seen before, much less tasted. We tended to stick to coffee or cola, and we viewed cocktails as something only Establishment types would indulge in. Kimiko had her hair done up and was wearing a dress, stockings, and genuine leather high-heeled shoes. None of the women I hung out with dressed like that. They either cut their hair super short or let it grow wild, and they favored T-shirts and jeans or something sari-like, with sandals or patent leather boots. Sneakers were unheard of for everyday footwear. It was only after the word suniikaazu arrived from America that people began wearing them regularly. If we’d gone on calling them undo-gutsu (“exercise shoes”), I doubt they ever would have caught on.

  “Grass” was American slang for marijuana, and Nibrol was, after Hyminal, the most sought-after sedative. Kimiko, who’d never heard of either, peered at my long hair, my T-shirt, and my black leather jacket and asked:

  “Those things you just said—they’re drugs?”

  Some friends of mine were watching from a table across the room. I had bet one of them, a guy from Yokosuka, that I could pick this woman up. I stood to win three caps of mescaline or to lose three grams of hash. Apparently the guy had sized her up as irredeemably straight.

  I explained what grass and Nibrol were. Kimiko smiled and said, “You’ll really let me have some?”

  Later, so loaded on pills and booze and pot she could barely form words, she fell down in the street a few times, puked a few times, and ended up spending the night at my apartment. I won my bet, but the next morning, when I learned she was married, I panicked a bit.

  “Not to worry,” she told me.

  Her husband, it seemed, was a meek sort of guy in his thirties who worked in a jewelry store in Ginza. The two of them shared a condo in Mitaka, but from then on Kimiko spent most nights at my place. When her money ran out she’d go get some from her husband, then come straight back to me. Once, after about a month of this, she asked me to go with her to Ginza. “Lately he won’t give me any cash,” she said. “Let’s go to his store and shake it out of him.” When we walked in with our arms around each other, the husband looked at us as if we’d stepped out of a spaceship.

  “You wouldn’t want us to keep coming here like this, would you?” she told him, and relieved him of all the ten-thousand-yen notes in his wallet. As soon as we left the jewelry store, she grabbed my arm and said, “Now let’s go score some acid!”

  Kimiko’s parents came all the way from Okayama a couple of times to try and reason with her, but in the end she divorced the guy.

  “The stereo was mine, he won’t give it back, it’s really pissing me off,” she told me and a friend of mine one day, suggesting we break into the condo in Mitaka and make off with it and anything else that might bring in some money. We did. It was just after then that she and I moved to the place near Yokota Air Force Base.

  The breakup came a year and a half later. In eighteen months Kimiko had aborted three pregnancies, slashed her wrists twice, had sex with countless black GIs, and got herself arrested twice and rushed to a hospital with heart failure once. It was a similar tale for me, though I probably experienced only about half what she did in terms of drugs and sex, not to mention heaven and hell. Kimiko returned to her parents in Okayama, in broken little pieces, and I somehow wormed my way into college.

  I didn’t make it to the entrance ceremony; I was being detained by the authorities because of an incident that occurred during the breakup with Kimiko. Once charges were brought I was released on bail, and a month after the ceremony I went to my first class. In terms simply of age, there wasn’t much difference between me and my classmates, but they all seemed like children to me. Classes were painful, mainly because the lessons were excruciatingly boring, and listening to the other students’ conversations made me wonder what the hell I was doing there. They talked about drinking and skiing and sports cars and trendy discos. I didn’t think I’d be able to make any friends; nor did it even occur to me that I might be starved for friendship. Living in Yokota, I felt I’d experienced just about everything there is to experience. It was only a couple of years since I’d graduated from high school, but it seemed more like a decade.

  I forget whether it was during the lunch break or after school, but a group of my classmates were playing soccer. Not an actual match; they just stood in a big circle kicking the ball around. I watched them for a while. They were all terrible at the game, except for one guy. The circle was about twenty or thirty meters across, and people seemed to be joining and leaving as they pleased, so I stepped in. The ball didn’t come to me at first. When it did, I’d decided, I was going to kick it to the one guy who knew how to play. I’d been a midfielder in middle school, and my specialty had always been chipping. The ball finally came floating softly down toward me, and I made a neat thigh trap but muffed the chip. I tried to send a low lob at the guy’s head with my instep, but I lost my balance, lurched, and airmailed the ball out of the circle entirely.

  After a while the baseball team took the field to start their practice, yelling at us to clear out if we didn’t want to stop hardballs with our heads, and everyone left except me and the one good player. We went on kicking the ball around, looking up to follow the flight of the baseball whenever we heard the clank of a metal bat. The guy’s name was Wada.

  “You really only played in middle school, eh? So what’d you do in high school?” Wada was a little guy but a big talker. We were shooting the shit at a Chinese noodle shop in front of the station. When I ordered a beer, he looked shocked and said, “In the middle of the day?” I switched to a Coke.

  I explained that I’d wanted to play rugby in high school but found the practice too brutal and decided to form a band instead. He bobbed his head up and down, saying, “Wow, a band, that must’ve been fun, eh?” We slurped ramen and chop suey and talked about European soccer players like Vogts, Beckenbaue
r, Cruyff, and Neeskens. Wada liked to laugh as much as he liked to talk. At some point I realized that in the course of bullshitting and joking with him I’d completely forgotten about Kimiko. Up until then, no matter what I did or what was happening around me, I hadn’t been able to get her out of my mind for more than a few seconds at a time.

  Wada mentioned that he’d been a backup player on a pretty famous high-school team in Saitama. I know that’s a great team, I told him, but for someone with your ball control to be just a reserve... He straightened up in his chair and said, “Yeah, but there was something else I was really into. I’m a film freak.”

  Wada had a motorbike and used to hang out at my apartment a lot. The place was small, but I’d brought Kimiko’s stereo and a fairly large collection of records with me when I moved in. Wada didn’t have a stereo; he was saving whatever he could from his allowance to buy a sixteen-millimeter movie camera. We listened to records and talked about cinema, and he taught me about a lot of directors and films I’d never heard of. He was also a huge Beatles fan, but after spending time at my apartment he got hooked on the Rolling Stones as well. When tickets went on sale for the Stones’ first concert in Japan, he and I were there, wrapped in blankets, having spent a day and a half queuing on the street. It so happened that Japan’s first McDonald’s was opening in Shinjuku just then and offering free hamburgers to the first five hundred customers. With twelve of the precious concert tickets warming our pockets, we wolfed down our free Big Macs and congratulated each other on our amazing luck. We planned to scalp the extra tickets and use the profit to help pay for the movie camera. But then, famously, the Stones concert was canceled because of their drug busts.

  At some stage, Wada and I started going to see films whenever we got together, by people like Fellini, Godard, Alain Resnais. Once, we rode all the way down to Shizuoka on his bike to catch an independent showing of Band of Outsiders. I was painting a lot but rarely going to class and eventually ended up having to repeat a year. This setback, however, was compensated by our finally getting hold of a sixteen-millimeter camera.

  It was after a screening of Resnais’s Stavisky. We went to a coffee shop where they played only classical music, and bumped into Kimiko’s ex-husband there. He came up and asked how I was doing, and seemed genuinely happy for me when I told him I was a college student now.

  “You know, I feel I owe you a debt of gratitude,” he said. “That woman is nothing but trouble. Anyone she gets close to she destroys, and I’m really, really glad I got away from her when I did.”

  He went on like this at some length. I wanted to defend Kimiko but didn’t have much to work with. All I told him was that she’d returned to her hometown and seemed to be okay. The truth was that she was in a mental hospital.

  The ex-husband paid for our coffee. He was with a man who worked for an ad agency and happened to have an old Bolex he wanted to sell. Give ’em a break on it, the ex told him, and Wada ended up agreeing to buy the camera for 180,000 yen. Outside the coffee shop, as we were parting, Kimiko’s ex turned to me and said, “Let’s hang in there, both of us.” He seemed to think we had this bizarre sort of bond—two men who’d both suffered from our involvement with Kimiko. Personally I didn’t think of her as being at fault in any way and just mumbled some ambiguous reply. He didn’t seem to recognize what to me was an obvious truth: that you don’t suffer because of someone else. There’s never anyone but yourself to blame.

  Wada didn’t ask me about my connection with this guy. Compared to the Bolex it was of no interest to him whatsoever.

  “Write a script for me, eh?” he said that night, after taking ownership of the Bolex. I had begun making notes, little by little, for a novel about my experiences living near the base in Yokota, and had let him read some of them.

  “You’re lucky, being able to write like that,” he said. “Me, I can’t write at all. They tell me I didn’t start talking till I was like three or four, and even now I don’t know that many kanji and things. But you can’t make a film without a screenplay, not even a documentary. Even War Is Over and Night and Fog had screenplays.”

  The script I wrote for him was titled A Shadow among the Ruins and went something like this:

  The protagonist is a certain MAN who never appears on the screen. All we see is what he sees—in other words, the camera captures his point of view—and occasional subtitles reveal his thoughts to us. The MAN lives in constant fear of a particular SHADOW that looms up in his field of vision from time to time. He’s beginning to believe it might be the shade of someone from his past who’s stalking him. He decides he needs to get away and spend some time by himself, and drives to an old, deserted coal-mining town beside the sea that’s inhabited only by wild dogs and crows. Among the ruins, however, he once again encounters the SHADOW...

  The location I had in mind was an abandoned industrial park, up the coast a bit. It was summertime. Wada borrowed his family’s Corolla, and a friend lent us a tent. We spent several days near the ruined site, camping on a vacant lot beside the sea, a short walk from where the waves crashed against the rocks. I did some diving there, collecting turbos and ear shells. Wada asked where I’d learned to dive like that, and I explained that I’d done a lot of it when I was a kid. Sitting by the fire, I told him about my hometown in Kyushu, and as I did so I realized I hadn’t talked about my childhood with anyone at all since meeting Kimiko.

  Wada did most of the camerawork while I drove the Corolla or cast the SHADOW. On the afternoon of the fourth day I found an odd-looking sea anemone while diving. Wada was fascinated by it. When he inserted his finger into its feeler-rimmed mouth, it contracted around it, which made him think of inserting something else. I warned him not to, that it might be poisonous or something, but he went ahead anyway, several times, and sure enough that evening he began to complain of a burning sensation. I found a weed I recognized as one my grandmother had applied to a rash I got on my forehead as a kid. I pounded the weed into mush and gave it to Wada, telling him to smear it on the place that hurt. Whether because of the weed-mush or not, the pain seemed to subside later that night. We were both pretty tired by then, however, and got into a brief argument about the film.

  “I know I’m just watching from the sidelines,” I said. “But I have to wonder if anyone you showed this footage to could tell you what it’s supposed to be, or what it’s supposed to mean.”

  Wada snapped that I didn’t have a proper understanding of how images work on film. I thought about that for a minute. Wada was from Saitama, and Saitama was, after all, right next to Tokyo. He was the one who’d grown up watching Godard films and Polish films and ATG films. You couldn’t do that in my little hometown on the western edge of Kyushu.

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” I said, speaking quietly and slowly. Living with Kimiko for a year and a half I’d developed the habit of speaking in a calm, reassuring voice whenever there was trouble of any sort. If I lost my cool I never knew what she might do, though I could be sure it wouldn’t be pretty. But then again, Wada and Kimiko were completely different types.

  “I haven’t seen as many films as you have,” I granted, “and I don’t have your knowledge of directors and cinematographers and everything. But I know that movies aren’t only about tracking shots and panning techniques. There’s no point in just taking pretty pictures of flowers and waves and mountains. Pretty is good, sure, the prettier the better, but you can get fed up with that kind of shit in about ten seconds if nothing else is happening. You’ve got to know what you want to shoot before you start worrying about how to shoot it. In other words: What do you want to say, and how do you want to say it? I see what you’re filming, but I can’t figure out what it is you want to say.”

  Wada clammed up. He looked to be on the verge of tears.

  “I have an image in my head,” he said after a long silence, “and I want to get it on film. But that image, if you think of it as a plant, for examp
le, well, it’s just a seed, or a bud. I know I have to develop it, make it grow into a story, but I can’t. I can’t do it, even though it’s all I’ve thought about since I was a kid. I guess I just don’t have the talent, eh?”

  He was very close to blubbering now. I remembered something Kimiko had once said: “I hate people who break down crying when you’re trying to talk about something important. Men and women both. You can’t trust weepy people. They think they’re the center of the world, and that their tears can absolve them of anything.” I had to agree with her. Thankfully, Wada didn’t cry.

  “You shouldn’t say things like that,” I told him. “You don’t know what sort of talent you have or haven’t got till you’ve tried. We’re only twenty-two, man.”

  Wada thought this over, then grinned.

  “Nobody ever told me anything like that before,” he said. “It sounds crazy, but it sounds right too. You know, all the people I’ve hung out with till now, everybody acts like it’s not really cool to do anything, it’s cooler just to give up. Remember that painter who lived way out in the sticks up north and said he was going to become another van Gogh? Imagine a kid in school saying something like that nowadays, eh? People would think he’s an idiot, or insane. It seems like whoever you turn to—your parents, teachers, TV, magazines—they’re all just telling you to give up.”

  Inside the tent it was hot and muggy; outside, angry mosquitoes buzzed and swarmed. I made a big bonfire to keep them away, and we drank warm beer and listened to the waves.

  “You don’t need to announce what you’re up to,” I told him. “Even the guy who said he was going to be van Gogh, he didn’t go around telling all his friends that, did he? All you have to do is know it inside yourself.”