by David Rakoff
Yanaka cemetery is as crowded with headstones as Père Lachaise, only the markers, rather than being adorned with crosses, are festooned with sotoba, wooden pickets painted with the decedent’s Buddhist name in kanji. The lanes are sodden with rain, the paths muddy. Huge ravens, oily black, sit soaked and spindle feathered in the bare trees. It is blessedly still, inordinately peaceful, and contemplative. I am alone here, even though I am in central Tokyo, a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks of the train station, a short ride from my hotel. A good thing, too. In ten days I never manage to sleep more than four hours at a time, so I return to the hotel each afternoon for a very necessary rest and some even more necessary TV watching.
Television is good practice for my remaining Japanese, a mere fingernail paring of comprehension and conversational ability. TV is also my only indication that Tokyo is no longer Fat City. I see a number of new shows concerned with “bargains.” The camera careering through a grocery store as the hostess holds up packages of sea urchin for only ¥350! She is amazed! A restaurant in Nagoya serves curry rice (a Japanese staple: a brown, curry-scented gravy of dubious provenance served over rice) for only ¥1! The patrons shoveling the mess into their mouths are most definitely getting what they pay for. On another program, a housewife economizes by making everything by hand: the family tofu, the potato chips. She has ledger books and calculators. I watch her attend a pot luck, having managed to keep the cost of her ample contribution down to ¥30. At the end of the taped sequence, in the studio audience with her husband and two children, she is presented with a certificate of accomplishment. Her nerves worn filament thin from her labor, she bursts into tears.
There is also the equal and opposite reaction to all this frugality. High Life programs with host after host going to hot springs hotels. After being shown in the bath discreetly naked, they lounge in cotton yukata robes by a hibachi. A large clam is placed directly over the flame and pops open, the rilled edges of the creature furling in succulent demise—a time-lapse flower in reverse. I see this image at least three times.
The only person with whom I have maintained barely sporadic contact in the decade-plus since I lived in Japan is Kyoko Makino, with whom I worked at the art publisher. When I go to pick her up for dinner, I feel none of the anticipated trepidation as I walk into the office. I know almost nobody still working at the publishing house, and I, in turn, am barely remembered. The new publisher is the son of the man I worked for. When he was nineteen to my twenty-two, I tutored him in English. Even though it is quite clear that I am there to see Makino-san and not him, he sends her off to get me some coffee that I do not want. After ushering me into the conference room, he shows me the company’s newest project, a magazine devoted to oenophilia in Japan. (This will prompt me later over dinner to teach Makino-san the term wine bore.)
We have come to a restaurant in an old house at the end of a long, shaded walkway, lit with glowing braziers. We sit on tatami, an ember-filled grill in the center of our table. A seemingly endless variety of beautiful dishes emerges from the kitchen, starting with three small rectangles of tofu on bamboo skewers, each block enameled with a puree of a different color—green pea, orange squash, and a vermilion sweet miso—and ending some two hours later with a chilled slice of Japanese melon, dark jade and nearly translucent. The meal is extraordinary, and we spend a great amount of time talking about how good everything is. “Isn’t this sort of the same thing as a ‘wine bore’?” Kyoko asks. “Are we being a ‘food bore’?” Scandalized by such a ridiculous suggestion, I assure her we are no such thing.
Night falls. I look out through the shoji into the central courtyard. There are two smaller teahouses, used as private dining rooms, the stone steps up to each of them ensnared in wisteria roots. It is a perfect evening. For many reasons, actually. Japanese is the unbicycle of languages: you never remember, and I had been fearing that my speech, unpracticed for over a decade, coupled with stereotypical Japanese reserve would confine Makino-san and myself to such conversational gambits as “Oh, look, beer!” and “Yes!” But I have remembered a great deal more than I thought. We talk about former co-workers, marriage and singlehood, aging parents, all of the things I might talk about with friends in New York.
This greater openness of feeling is true of almost all my encounters. The Bubble, with its influx of foreign business, has achieved what over a century’s passage—since Japan first opened up to the West at the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868—and even a postwar occupation could not accomplish: Tokyoites seem almost completely inured to Westerners, thanks in part to the scores of foreigners I see speaking perfect, unhalting Japanese. By the same token, the use of egregiously bad English is also far less in evidence, although happily has not entirely died out, as evidenced by the T-shirt on sale in the Melrose Boutique for Men that reads, simply: “Blow jobs $10.” At around 118 yen to the dollar, this would be one of the city’s real bargains. Actually the city’s real bargain is the once legendarily expensive Tokyo coffee. I keep reminding myself that it is we who have caught up with Japan, now that “Double Skinny Macchiato” has become global Esperanto for “Here’s my savings, where’s my breakfast?”
Here is the object lesson of room 201 of the Tokyo Station Hotel, my second place of lodging: the time that it takes to utter, in camp appreciation, “This room is like a set from a snuff film. It’s faaabulous!” also turns out to be the maximum amount of time one really wants to stay in same. It is another matter entirely to have to sleep there for two nights. It is very high ceilinged and enormous, but room 201 is the kind of sad interior where gamblers down on their luck live out their last days, only to end up drunkenly falling against the sharp corner of the coffee table, scattering their pills across the nylon carpet, and slowly bleeding to death. Not a happy place. Although clean, the place is grimy with disrepair and shabbiness: overhead fluorescent lighting, chipped wood veneer, and antimacassars on the armchairs, worn shiny with use and old pomade. And what can one say about a room where everything is so meticulously and ostentatiously wrapped for “your sanitary protection”? That old witticism of the schoolyard “Whoever smelt it, dealt it” springs to mind.
My previous hotel certainly didn’t feel the need to protest this much. Whereas at the Seiyo, in the dresser drawer, along with the stationery and room service menus, there was also, beautifully printed on vellum, a suggested jogging route around the Imperial Palace gardens, at the Tokyo Station Hotel I am provided with a long list of “Rules on Accommodation Utilization.” I am told “not to give annoyance to others by making great noise or disgusting behaviors.” I am forbidden from bringing onto the premises “things with loathsome smell” and, inexplicably, “materials in great quantity.” But for the omission of “Don’t Shoot the Piano Player,” it is a code of conduct straight out of Dawson City. I am also proscribed from “hanging up such items at the windows which will spoil the outside view of this hotel.” While it is true that the Tokyo Station Hotel from the front is a lovely red-brick-and-limestone building like the great railway hotels of old, should I choose to open the pebbled-glass windows of 201, which faces the back, I would be greeted with a view of the permanent dusk from the elevated track above, the hum of industrial air ducts below, and at eye level, not twenty feet away, a commuter platform, complete with salary man looking straight back at me. I have often wondered, when riding into cities late at night on the train, Who are the sad people behind those darkened windows that directly abut the tracks? Now, in some small measure, I know.
I couldn’t feel sorrier for myself. Don’t they know I’m fragile? After a scant four days of the betoweled lushness of the Seiyo, I have turned into the high-maintenance jerk of my own worst nightmares. Fleeing my room, I seek out the city’s nocturnal diversions.
I eat supper at an outdoor yakitori restaurant, a stall with chairs and two tiny tables, underneath the highway overpass near Yuraku-cho station. The sidewalk and traffic are barely masked by the noren, the abbreviated curtains that hang
down a foot or so. In the rain, right up against the traffic, both foot and vehicular, drinking my beer while I wait for my food, I am overcome with the urban romance of it all. How, I wonder, is it all that different from my high-ceilinged hotel room, disinfected for my comfort and protection, that sits right up against the railroad tracks, waiting for me?
Not ready to go back there just yet, I hop the train to Ebisu, Tokyo’s youth Mecca ascendant. The holdup at the door to Milk, one of the city’s most popular clubs, is not so management can verify ID, frisk for weapons, or confiscate drugs. It is due to the many umbrellas being checked by the young, young crowd. Sporting my natural hair color and not wearing white-framed Lina Wertmuller sunglasses makes me stand out almost as much as my being one of the only Westerners on line, not to mention being a good ten years older than everyone else. Upon entering, a nineteen-year-old girl in baby barrettes, a T-shirt worn over a sweater, and orange canvas clam diggers presses something small and round into our palms. Ah, I think, holding the disk-shaped freebie, good old condoms. I look down and see that we have been handed not rubbers, but rather six plastic bookmarks printed with the prim slogan “Yes, I do, but not with you.”
Milk doesn’t seem all that much different from most clubs I’ve been to. It is loud, dark, crowded, underserviced by toilets. A Japanese thrash band plays, the lead singer adorably shirtless and screaming. Young men boil around like piranhas in the mosh pit. I am no more inclined to join them now than I was a decade ago, but I can always use a good bookmark.
Returning late to room 201, I muster sufficient Japanese to say to the night clerk at the hotel, “My room is making me very sad. I would like to kill myself. May I have a different one tomorrow, facing the front, perhaps?” And so off to bed, feeling spoiled and venal. The room is quiet and dark, at least, the platform outside my window silent and closed for the night. I bless the fact that the city’s mass transit stops just after twelve, with the exception of one night a year, December 31, when they run all night.
On New Year’s Eve the already mythically crowded Tokyo subways are exponentially more so. During normal rush hour the tsukebe, Tokyo’s storied subway frotteurs, can at least find enough space to get their grubby hands on the nether parts of some poor unsuspecting girl; on New Year’s Eve you literally cannot move. You just hope you’ve gotten on the same car as enough people going to the same stop as you; otherwise you will have to wait until the river of humanity decides to disembark.
Early on January 1, 1987, my evening’s celebration concluded, the dawn of a new year breaking, I stood on just such a train. It was a function of how blitzed I was from the night’s revels, traveling from shrine to temple to club, drinking all the while, that I didn’t experience a complete agoraphobic attack. As we approached my stop, I looked over to my right. There, not eight feet away, was a young woman, jammed up facing a man about a head taller than she. He began that unmistakable wet-mouthed, lip-smacking, compulsive swallowing that indicates the impending need to vomit. His upper lip shone with perspiration, and his eyes were closed. The woman had nowhere to go—indeed, there was nothing she would be able to do until the train reached the station, and that might not be in sufficient time. If the first thing you do on the first day augurs the spirit and tone of your new year, this woman was in for a very bad 1987. She began to cry.
In one of those vodka-pure moments of proof that laughter is often nothing more than anxious release—I, on the other hand, began to giggle uncontrollably. The joke was on me, of course, because I ended up having the shitty year.
The Hotel Alcyone, next stop on my ever-downward spiral, is scrupulously clean. Even the carpets in the elevator are changed daily, because like the panties from Bloomingdale’s 1970s Forty Carrots heyday, they are printed with “Sunday, Monday,” and so on. My room is undeniably monastic, however. Small and Spartan, and again, while clean, it seems academic if one can’t actually distinguish between something that is dirty and something that merely looks dirty. But at under $100 a night near the Ginza, it is an affordable, well-located bargain, if not a tad gloomy. Sitting on my bed before I go out for my last evening in Tokyo, I experience the first earth tremor of the trip. As much a feeling as a noise, a deep, all-encompassing, almost electric rumbling. It lasts only a very few seconds, but I think, How perfect to buy the farm here at the Hotel Alcyone, flattened and crushed, this sprung mattress with its Hollofil polyester bedspread my funeral bier.
Later that evening I eat roasted eel in the top-floor restaurant of a department store in Shinjuku. The restaurant is famous for its eel. The traditional accompaniment to unagi is green sansho (mountain pepper) powder. I have been warned that taking too much will make my “tongue go to sleep.” I take too much. It tastes of concentrated citrus peel with an intermittently forceful salty note and something green underneath, like hyssop. Sure enough, my lips start to buzz, my tongue and throat feel as if they are lined with Velcro. The sensory strangeness is amplified terrifyingly by the evening’s second earth tremor, stronger than the first and eight seconds long. Try it right now: sit for eight seconds and imagine the very ground shifting, unstable, threatening immediate and lethal liquefaction. But the eel is really delicious.
Close to midnight I find myself in a near empty plaza underneath an enormous outdoor television screen. I stand, rapt, among five or six homeless men and a small crowd of young people, their telephones quiet for the moment, as we watch an extended Nescafé commercial: a thrilling montage of people of various ages, races, and genders falling in love in fields, farmhouses, cafés, churches. “Open up!” sings the song, urging us to embrace the world in all its romantic, universal, caffeinated glory.
Perhaps “Open up” really means the ground will continue its tremors, forming fissures that widen and swallow whole this extraordinary, illusory city. God knows I once felt the specter of obliteration here before, a destruction from which I thought I’d never recover, and the ground hadn’t had to move an inch. For now, though, the only thing shaking is my two hundred-gram box of chocolate-covered almonds. I am becalmed by the sound that I have quite a few left.
I USED TO BANK HERE, BUT
THAT WAS LONG, LONG AGO
Hodgkin’s disease, the illness that sent me packing from Tokyo at the age of twenty-two, is a form of lymphatic cancer, common among young men in their twenties. Hodgkin’s is also highly curable. So highly curable, in fact, that I like to refer to it as the dilettante cancer.
An old Canadian joke bears telling here: A boss says to an underling, “I’m off to Sault Sainte Marie for the weekend.”
“Sault Sainte Marie?” asks the employee, incredulous. “But, boss, there are only whores and hockey players in Sault Sainte Marie.”
“My wife is from Sault Sainte Marie.”
“Oh. (beat) What position does she play?”
When I joke about Hodgkin’s being the cancer for boys who do things in half measures, it is invariably to someone whose husband or brother or son has just died from Hodgkin’s. I don’t mean to denigrate other survivors or less fortunate nonsurvivors. My inappropriate wisecrack only serves to prove a point about myself. On some level, despite the fact that I received both radiation and chemotherapy, I cannot escape the feeling that I was, at best, a cancer tourist, that my survival means I dabbled. Kinda been there, sorta done that. It has only recently occurred to me that perhaps I might stop glibly insisting that the cancer wasn’t real and the doctors popped me into an Easy-Bake Oven, where a forty-watt light bulb halted the metastasis in its tracks.
What remains, almost fourteen years after the fact? Four small tattoos, subcutaneous black dots, like compass points on my torso; near total numbness in the very tips of my fingers, as well as a palm-size area on my right inner thigh also without feeling; some dry mouth; and, most lastingly, three straws of my prechemotherapized sperm, in cold storage, somewhere in Toronto. Like millions of tiny Walt Disneys, they wait, frozen, until the day I will return and have them conjoined with some willing ovum and thereby
fulfill their zygotic destiny, growing into children who will eventually go on to break my heart and not talk to me.
I’m not entirely sure I even want children of my own, although I’d like to keep my options open. Being of a certain class and living in Manhattan, I have been led to believe that my life is nothing but an embarrassment of options. Parenthood frequently comes late around these parts. Go to any playground on the Upper West Side, and you will find that most of the grown-ups are fortyish, and among the children there is an overrepresentation of fertility treatment– enhanced sets of twins and adopted Chinese girls. Once, I watched as a twenty-eight-year-old mother arrived at the jungle gym with her toddler. Twenty-eight might even be considered late for a new mother elsewhere in these United States, but there she looked like some Appalachian child bride, ridiculously young for the burden of parenthood. Everybody was casting concerned glances her way, as if to ask, “Who is the brute who did this to you?”
So it’s more than a simple desire for kids—who can be fairly boring, truth be told. I just want to know where the sperm is. Easier said than done, as it turns out, because since that time, I have moved, my parents have moved, the sperm bank has moved, and the cancer hospital has moved. The traces have been thoroughly kicked over, which suits me fine. I’m not by nature terribly sentimental. I’m not a photo taker, I have no scrapbooks, I have attempted to never look back, until now.