Thrilling Cities

by Ian Fleming

  ‘But it’s always best to travel on the 13th,’ Bond had explained patiently. ‘There are practically no passengers and it’s more comfortable and you get better service. I always choose the 13th when I can.’

  I felt I must try and keep up with my hero and it was not until dinner that night, when I mentioned the coincidence to Dick Hughes, that he looked thoughtful. ‘I suppose you realize,’ he said, ‘that you’ll be crossing the international date-line and running into another Friday the 13th. Double Friday the 13ths don’t sound so good.’ I laughed the detail away and forgot about it until the next morning at ten o’clock when I was waiting in the ante-room of the most famous fortune-teller in Japan, Seki Ryushi, with a charming interpreter friend of Tiger Saito’s called Chin Chan.

  I am not particularly interested in having my fortune told, but I am rather intrigued by fortune-telling and all matters connected with extra-sensory perception. Moreover, Dick had fascinated me with true stories of Oriental soothsaying and I was determined to see what it was all about. We were waiting in the sitting-room of Mr Seki Ryushi’s house. There were no tokens of his trade except a vast reading-glass in a wooden frame and one of those china skulls you find in junk shops with the brain-pan marked off in segments entitled Love, Future, Intelligence, etc. When, after a polite interval to show how busy he was, the soothsayer appeared, I was not greatly impressed. He looked far too happy and well-fed for a man who should be in communion with the spirits of darkness, and his eyes twinkled merrily from behind rimless glasses. We squatted down opposite each other across the inevitable low table and bowed as if we were about to start a wrestling match. I was asked to write down my name and age, and did so. The soothsayer gave the script a cursory glance and went into a long conversation with Chin Chan about how clever he was. He had forecast Eisenhower’s successes at the last two elections and also the outcome of his various illnesses. When the Duke of Windsor married Mrs Simpson he had prophesied that they would have a long and happy marriage. I said a mental ‘humph’, rearranged my already aching limbs and waited for him to start on me.

  In due course he picked up the large reading-glass, asked me to approach my face and examined it, inch by inch. At the same time, I examined his and saw nothing but happy birdlike eyes and evidence of a rather hasty shave in those difficult comers just below the nose. There was a lengthy exchange with Chin Chan, which in due course was interpreted, to the effect that I was a man of very independent spirit who should always walk alone and never go into partnership. This sounded rather like the sort of stuff I had told Garbo in the night-club in Macao. There was to be no improvement.

  It took nearly an hour and a half for the great seer to tell me that I was in a particularly golden period which would end around the middle of March, but that the whole of the next ten years was going to be quite splendid for me. I would live happily until I was eighty. I would certainly be back in Japan before next May (most unlikely, and I wasn’t), I must not be so ‘obstinate’ towards my wife, and I looked more like my mother than my father. There was absolutely nothing else that I can remember and the only piece of information for which I was grateful, with my double Friday the 13th round the corner, was the prognostication about the wonderfully lucky period I was now traversing.

  Rather pointedly perhaps, I asked Mr Seki Ryushi if he could tell his own fortune. He said he couldn’t. When he wanted to know anything he asked his close rival, Sozan Takashima, who always gave him the correct answer. I should have asked him if he could tell Mr Takashima’s fortune with equal success, because the fates were already plotting the terrible end to Takashima’s life which was just approaching. About two weeks after my interview, the following story appeared in the local press and I quote it in its entirety:

  FORTUNE-TELLER COULD NOT FORESEE OWN DEATH

  Tokyo, November 25th

  A famous Japanese fortune-teller could not foresee his own fate. He was surprised this morning by an assassin who stabbed him to death with a knife.

  Sozan Takashima, 71, Japan’s most famous fortuneteller, who has been doing a thriving business, was slain by a young colleague in the same profession, Toshiyuki Domoto, 24. The motive was professional jealousy.

  Domoto also stabbed the old diviner’s 40-year-old son, who is also practising the arts of divination, injuring him critically. – France-Presse.

  This curious coincidence, in retrospect, adds point to what was otherwise a rather wasted morning.

  The night before, Dick and I had consumed large quantities of raw fish in a restaurant off the Ginza, which is one of the great pleasure streets of the world, and even larger quantities of sake, a heated rice-spirit to which I took rather too enthusiastically, and now, nursing something of a hangover, I was looking forward to the healing properties of the most famous Japanese bath-house, the Tokyo Onsen. We went there after another delicious meal which included quails cooked in raw quail’s egg (Mrs Elizabeth David, please note!) and it was indeed a remarkable experience.

  Many Japanese have no baths in their houses and the two or three bath-days a week at the public baths are great occasions. I can now well understand why. At the desk on the first floor of the large, rather drab, building, I paid fifteen shillings and was then taken in hand by the prettiest Japanese girl I was to see during the whole of my stay. Her name was Baby and she was twenty-one. She had the face of a smaller, rather neater, Brigitte Bardot, with black hair in a B.B. cut. She wore nothing but the shortest and tightest of white shorts and a white brassière.

  She led me by the hand down a corridor to a small room divided in two. The ante-room contained a dressing-table laden with various oils, powders and unguents and a chair for my clothes, which she prettily asked me to remove. It was obviously no good being demure about this, so I obeyed her and she took my suit and brushed it and hung it up on a hanger. She then took me by the hand into the interior half of the room, where there was a large wooden box with a hole in the top – a one-man Turkish bath-into which she placed me. She then closed the top and, after some pleasant but rather stilted conversation, coquetted with her hair-do in a looking-glass. After a quarter of an hour in the very hot box, she raised the lid and helped me down on to the spotless tiled floor, and bade me sit beside a sunken blue-tiled bath on a small stool, when she proceeded to give me an energetic shampoo and scrubbed me with soap and a loofah from top to toe. Well, almost, that is. She avoided the central zone and handed me the loofah with a dimpling, ‘You do body.’ She then poured wooden pitchers of water over me to clean off the soap and guided me down the two steps into the deep, oval bath, the very hot water in which comes from natural hot springs.

  Ten minutes of this and then, when she had towelled me down, I was bidden to lie on a high massage table where she proceeded to massage me thoroughly and expertly – none of that effleurage, but the really deep massage for which the Japanese are famous. I may say that any crude Western thoughts I might have entertained during these processes were thoroughly washed from my mind by the general heat and exertions I was put through, but that is not to say that I was not vastly stimulated and intrigued by the whole performance. Thinking that she might find my reserve rather ungallant, I asked her if she didn’t occasionally have ‘bad men’ who suggested ‘bad things’ to her. The message, not perhaps unexpected, got through. She answered with a bewitching but quite neutral politeness that such people went to other places, places on the Ginza. The Onsen was only for ‘gentlemen’. There was no hint of a rebuke in her attitude.

  In the East, sex is a delightful pastime totally unconnected with sin – a much lighter, airier affair than in the West, where I fear that this account of my Japanese bath may shock. But in fact there was nothing in the least shocking about it, and when we went to the desk and said a happy and friendly goodbye, there was already a slim, serious-looking Japanese waiting to take my place. It was really rather like going to the dentist. Pleasanter, of course.

  I spent the afternoon walking the length of the Ginza, window-shopping a
nd wondering, as I do whenever I walk down a great shopping street, who buys all the cameras, sun glasses, wristwatches and fountain pens that seem to infest the world. But I hate taking photographs and, having taken them, hate looking at them, and since I already possess a wristwatch and a fountain pen, my purchases were confined to one dramatic Kabuki print of a man being beheaded. Mostly I just walked and looked at the people, and repelled the ubiquitous pimps offering me a variety of pleasures down to one or two that I couldn’t even understand.

  The first thing that struck me was how gay and purposeful the young Japanese are, and how healthy a rice diet must be. They move at an astonishing speed compared with the easy stroll you will normally see in the comparable Piccadilly or Champs-Elysées crowds. And how bright all their eyes are, with the sort of intelligent brightness you see in small animals! Very few of the men wear hats and would look rather foolish if they did so, and yet you never see a man with a hair out of place or with curly or unruly hair. It is all a sea of black shiny heads upon which, Gulliver-like, the Westerner looks down. They are rude and rough to each other on the streets, in sharp contrast with their good manners when at rest. They bump and jostle without apology and apparently without offence. The eyes of the women are not almond-shaped. It is the tautness of the Mongolian fold of the upper eyelid that appears to slant the eye, and I learnt later, from Tiger Saito, that facial surgery to remove the Mongolian fold and widen the eye is immensely popular all over the country. The girls are aping the West in countless other fashions. Long legs have become desirable, and those hideous wooden clogs have been exchanged for stiletto heels. The Eastern hair-dos, which I find enchanting, are going out in favour of permanent waves and other fuzzy fashions. Traditional dress – the kimono and the obi, the complicated bundle of silk in the small of the back – is disappearing fast and is now worn, so far as the towns are concerned, only in the family circle, together with the giant cake of hair and monstrous hair-pins in the Madame Butterfly fashion.

  The Japanese are not, in fact, yellow-skinned. The colour ranges from ivory to a light sunburnt brown, and many of the women have natural pink in their cheeks. The men and women are specklessly clean and so are their houses and belongings, though how they manage it in Tokyo, amidst the blown dust of the ubiquitous construction work, I cannot imagine.

  The endless taxis drive like hell, particularly the small Renaults, known as Kamikazes. But the taxis are well driven and I never saw one even graze another. They are the only taxi-drivers in the world who do not expect, or get, tips, and, in fact, there is practically no tipping whatsoever in Japan, though in hotels ten per cent is added to your bill. Dick Hughes was firm with me about this and insisted that we should always tip modestly. The tip, he said, was, in most cases, the difference between whether a man could have one or two meals a day, for in Japan the fight for existence is quite terrifying. Walking down the Ginza and occasionally going into a shop was evidence of this – a plethora of shop assistants. At least one, and often three, bell-boys to open the doors in hotels. Ten pimps where, in Paris, there would be one. This is due to the appalling over-crowding in the country, which has a population of ninety million with the lowest death-rate in the world – a population that increases at the rate of a million and a half a year, despite the number of recorded abortions (which are legal) of about the same number annually. This density of population was certainly brought home to me that afternoon on the Ginza, and finally, battered and exhausted, I repaired to my dainty inn to complete my toilet for a night out with the geishas.

  I should at once make a point clear about geishas and I will quote from an official guide-book to make it: ‘Most foreigners do not have a correct understanding of the geisha,’ says the guide. ‘They are not prostitutes.’ I will quote again, this time from Dick Hughes, who warned me, ‘To tell you the truth, the whole of this geisha business is a bit of a bore.’

  ‘Gei’ means art and ‘sha’ person, and a geisha is, in fact, a form of artist, meticulously trained in dancing, playing a kind of flute and drum, conducting tea ceremonies and arranging flowers. In addition, she should be good-looking, vivacious and an expert conversationalist. She usually has a wealthy protector, whose mistress she may be, but she lives in a geisha house, which is a kind of seminary in which half a dozen girls live, supervised by a kind of Mother Geisha. You do not go to a geisha house to be entertained by geishas. You go to a private room in a restaurant – in our case a fish restaurant hard by the Shinbashi Bridge over the Sumida River, which, to my surprise, as I did not know Tokyo was on a river, bisects the town.

  Tiger Saito, our host, had chosen a beautiful room, similar in most respects to my hotel room, looking over the river and, shortly after Dick and I had groaned and creaked ourselves into a near-lotus position, the three geishas trooped in in full regalia, knelt in turn at the head of the table and bowed first to our host and then to us. Then they sat down between us and set to pouring egg-cup-sized bowls of hot sake for us in a never-ending succession. I say ‘never-ending’ because, as soon as you put your little bowl down, it has to be filled again. Short of throwing the bowl out of the window, there is no way of halting this chain delivery until the flagon is empty or you fall over.

  My geisha was called Masami, an enchanting girl of about thirty with straightforward good looks lit with that sincere delight in your presence and in the evening that, as I have said, one finds in Eastern girls. Dick’s geisha had neater limbs but was otherwise similar, whereas Tiger’s neighbour was a woman of an entirely different quality. She was perhaps forty years old, with an oval, heavily made-up face and the tower of black hair one knows from Japanese prints. She had a queenly poise, hooded eyes, and features of almost reptilian impassivity which occasionally dissolved into expressions of surpassing wit and malice. She was the most formidable feminine personality I think I have ever encountered. One’s eyes were constantly attracted away from one’s more conventional neighbour, for all her pretty ways, to this glittering she-devil across the table. She spoke no English, although she seemed to understand it, and I suspect that most of her rapier-like asides to Tiger, which always dissolved him in laughter, consisted of scathing comments on the boorish manners, uncultured habits and loathsome appearance of the two hulking red-faced pigs on the other side of the table.

  We consumed, in between gallons of sake, various enchanting fish courses, including a kind of thick eel soup that was out of this world. All Oriental dishes are made to look as delightful as they taste, and very often it seemed desecration to disturb the still-life arrangement on one’s plate with its minute attention to colour and arrangement. Needless to say, I had no hesitation in desecrating the lot.

  I am not usually considered to be a great hand at tossing the conversational ball around, but I think on this occasion I can justly claim to have made the party go. I achieved this miracle by challenging my geisha to choose from her limitless repertory, which, I told her, her intricate education must have furnished, one really brilliant remark. ‘That is what I have always understood geishas are for,’ I teased her. ‘I’ve come halfway round the world to hear what you are going to say.’ At this, our two geishas burst into peals of laughter and even the Empress opposite allowed herself a wry titter. ‘Come, come,’ I urged. ‘Just one brilliant aphorism.’

  I knew what was coming and my mind was working furiously. Sure enough, after a great deal of badinage, I was challenged to say something brilliant first. I held up a hand and composed my features into what I hoped was a Confucian pattern. ‘The only good chrysanthemum is a dead chrysanthemum,’ I intoned weightily. The giggles were doubtful and the eyes round and rather uncertain. In Japan, the winter is known as the Season of the Chrysanthemum and what I had said was a slap in the face to a great slice of Japan’s myth. The Empress, her eyes glittering, spat out some words at Tiger who translated: ‘She asks why you say this?’ I looked benignly at the Empress. ‘Because,’ I pronounced, ‘until the chrysanthemums die, the roses cannot begin to bloom.’ At t
his, I admit, rather elephantine profundity, there was a moment’s pause for station identification with the Empress and then, at her reluctant nod of approval, excited applause and expressions of admiration which culminated in my geisha seizing my hand and saying I might kiss her, which I did.

  Much gratified by a social success which had previously evaded me, I commanded our two geishas that they should now go through their paces, upon which they rose giggling and disappeared out of the room, Dick’s to return quickly with a drum and some sort of a triangle which she proceeded to clonk and ping in a corner of the room, while mine brought in a drawing-block and paints with which she executed a bamboo sketch. I asked her to balance the black bamboo with some profound saying in the blank space on the right. ‘You must paint it in your own blood,’ I said. ‘The red will complement the black.’ After more screams and giggling protestations she used a pale crimson to write in the ideograms which translate as follows: ‘The younger bamboo grows higher than the older bamboo, but the younger will sustain the older.’ We all applauded vigorously, but I privately judged myself the winner by a nostril.

  As a compliment to my dictum about the roses, Masami then painted a rose for me, upon which she wrote the pretty, if rather forward conceit: ‘My garden faces East but it is open to all.’

  All this, what with compliments and other miscellaneous graciousness, had taken longer than it sounds, and it was now time for the party to break up with expressions of esteem and affection and giggling kisses given and returned. (The Empress’s cheek was like ice, and the peck she returned was somewhere outside my right ear.) And then, as the fans fluttered prettily from the three butterfly figures, the elephantine Westerners, exuding sake and beautiful thoughts, were borne happily off into the night.