The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  Akashi Shiga-nosuke stood well over eight feet and weighed four hundred pounds. Ume-ga-tani was only five-six yet weighed three hundred thirty-five. Nomi-nosukne stood seven-ten and Big Sky Ozora seven-foot-three.

  The main floor of this arena is partitioned into frames capable of seating several sumo fans, teapots and all. There are seats in the galleries and folding chairs ringside, for boxing. Now the main floor was filled by fight fans who sat cross-legged; not one had brought a teapot.

  The pageantry of sumo derives from imperial tournaments, held in temple compounds and witnessed only by kings, courtiers and high priests. The gods, whose favors ancient giants sought, show up today in boxing rings as commercial sponsors, blessing all contenders. The ancestral ceremonialism has rubbed off onto modern Japanese boxing.

  Tasseled banners, once borne by priestly corner-men assuaging The East Wind as well as The West, are now admen presenting gift boxes accompanied by a plug for the company. I had a hunch that the goody in Nicolino Locche’s box was a nicer goody than the one Takishi Paul Fuji would open before the night was done.

  This hunch had been provoked by the Japan Times, Mainichi Daily News, the Ashai Evening News and the Honolulu Advertiser, all of which agreed that Fuji was a lead-pipe cinch to knock Locche out within five rounds. One writer did concede that, if, by chance or luck, Locche should last eight rounds, he’d have an outside chance of still being on his feet at the end of fifteen. They were trying to reassure Fuji was what it sounded like. It sounded as though they were worried about Fuji and that Fuji was worried about Locche. It sounded like the buildup Chicago papers gave Chuck Davey the week before he had to go into the same ring as Kid Gavilan.

  Everyone present who’d been bom in the United States and had had his hands inside a pair of boxing gloves, had to be introduced before the main event. I was glad that none of them were given boxes. That accomplished, a gallery group began chanting ‘‘Fuji Fuji Fuji!’’

  There were about twenty of these enthusiasts, each draped in a white robe with a rising sun emblazoned on the breast, and a cheerleader, equally draped and emblazoned, to keep them from charging. I hadn’t known the national honor was going on the main event.

  But it convinced me. I asked Terayama, who knows everybody, to get me down for ten thousand yen—twenty-eight dollars American—on Locche.

  “Betting irregal in Japan,” he assured me.

  “Betting also irregal in Chicago,” I assured him.

  He got me down at one-four. And when Fuji came out and threw a right hand, intended to end the fight right there, I had a moment of apprehension.

  If Locche felt a wind go by, he gave no indication. He simply stuck a short left into Fuji’s face, moved to the right, stuck it in again and then let the wind go. He let Fuji bull him into the ropes until he felt the top strand against the small of his back. He tested its leverage lightly while counting the house. The crowd began shouting to Fuji to go in and finish him, but Fuji sensed the danger; he didn’t go in. Locche stuck the left in Fuji’s face and walked away. The fight was in his hands.

  He never let it get away from him. That was the whole fight: Fuji throwing those big rights and lefts, sending the gallery group into the perpetual chant of “Fuji Fuji Fuji!’’—the crowd coming to its feet wondering how Locche could take such punishment, and Locche letting everything bounce off his elbows and shoulders. The crowd saw it as Fuji driving Locche into the ropes. It looked to me like Locche was suckering him in there. Locche looked, to me, more dangerous in that corner. Fuji acted like it struck him the same way. Locche began looking more and more like Willie Pep, the way he kept sliding Fuji’s blows. And the way Fuji began punching himself out, he looked more and more like Don Hayakawa.

  That’s how it looked to the Argentine radio announcer, too, who was trying to drown out the cries of “Fuji Fuji Fuji!” by shouting “Locche Locche Locche!” into the mike. He got help from a small group off the pampas.

  By the eighth round Fuji was so wearied out that he put his head down against Locche’s chest and wearily flailed the air. While the gallery group continued their chant that now sounded like “Onward Christian Sol-diers/Marching as to War.”

  “Fuji isn’t going to last,” I told Terayama in the middle of the eighth as though he couldn’t see it for himself.

  “Why you against Fuji?” Miss Kanno asked suspiciously.

  “Because he’s a bum,” I had to tell her.

  The seat cushions, tangerines and half-eaten sandwiches that showered the ring, when the referee held Locche’s hand up before the bell for the tenth, weren’t protesting Locche’s triumph. The goodies were all for Fuji. It was the first time a Japanese titleholder had surrendered his title in the middle of a fight. And a world title is much more important to a defeated nation than to a victorious one. It took a cordon of police to protect Fuji from being mobbed.

  “Surrender” was also the word the Japanese press employed the following morning. Fuji lost more than his title to Locche.

  Fuji’s dressing-room comment, “I quit because my face started getting red,” left him wide open to let the press redden it more. “Surrender” has a more bitter sound in Tokyo, Vicksburg or Berlin than in London or Chicago.

  Yet Fuji had his defenders.

  “Locche win only because he fight Western style,” Miss Kanno perceived. Fuji should have kicked Locche in the teeth was what she meant.

  The day after the fight an old man sat down, cross-legged, in front of the Shinjuku Station with a sign around his neck:

  Please talk to me

  A man of the middle class begging, not for money, but for words.

  He sat there three days. Of all the multitudes that hurried past, not one stopped to speak one word.

  On the third a young man sat down, cross-legged, across the street from the old man, wearing a sign which said:

  You say something first

  What words can one say to a stranger? How is your father? Do we have mutual friends? Remember me to your mother?

  The old man got up and went home.

  Arigato gozaimasu.

  LETTER FROM SAIGON

  Mr. Joel Wells

  The Critic/ Chicago, I11.

  Dear Joel Wells:

  Living on Saigon’s Milwaukee Avenue—the Tran Hung-Dao—at the point where Saigon becomes Cholon, is to live with one foot in Vietnam and one foot in China. Cholon is the Chinese ghetto, whose government is run by black-marketeers. Saigon is run by the old French elite, the Vietnamese whose training and schooling is French. Cholon’s first language is Chinese; Vietnamese its second. Saigon’s first language is Vietnamese; its second language French. English is spoken nowhere; not even among GIs.

  There is a third tongue common to Cholon, Saigon, Thai, Filipino, Korean, Taiwanese, Australian, New Zealanders, and American soldiers —the one by which most business in this Babel is conducted. I myself have mastered it so you see it is fairly simple. It goes like this:

  What nem you? You speak me how much? Five hundred P? You Numba Ten, me give one hundred P. No swat. Two hundred P. Okay, you Numba One. You like nice gel, twelve-year old, Numba One? Me bring by your hou’. No swat. Sorry ’bout that.

  Anyone who is unsure, for a moment, whether he is speaking to a Vietnamese or a Chinese, won’t have to wait long to be certain. If the other’s eyes are curiously dull, if he has a listless, dispirited air, fingers your watch and asks “What tam?” or pats your wallet pocket, he is Vietnamese. If the other person responds naturally, seems to know you’re an individual like himself and doesn’t seem to have some mischief in mind, he is Chinese.

  If he rubs his stomach, puts his finger in his mouth to indicate hunger (even though he has a toothpick sticking in his teeth as he pleads), he is Vietnamese. If he puffs an imaginary cigarette, simulates drinking a soft drink or lays his palm open and says “kendy?” he is likewise Vietnamese. (I’m not speaking of children, cripples, or professional beggars, but only of your man-and-woman-in-the street.) But
if he acts like he knows who he is and has some class about being who he is, he is Chinese.

  The Vietnamese vision seems to be normal, but they don’t seem able to visualize. I’ve watched a motorbike rider making 60 mph down a street that curves blindly into oncoming traffic; he makes the turn without slowing down a fraction and meets another bike-rider, doing 65, whose vision is also okay; but he didn’t visualize anyone coming around that curve at the same speed as his own, either. The traffic speeds on around the two tangled bikes—one rider with his head nearly decapitated in the spokes; the other lying doubled up where he’s been thrown—until a policeman or soldier strolls over, studies the damage for a few minutes and ambles to a telephone. After a while an ambulance comes and scrapes them up. The traffic moves on. If one of the riders survives, the first thing he’ll do will be to get another bike and make the same curve at the same speed. I don’t think the Vietnamese are fast learners.

  There must be fifty thousand motorbikes racing down the Tran Hung-Dao at any hour between ten and ten. It is the only big city in the world without public transportation. There is a cop for every bike. And every cop watching for Americans riding in a taxi with a Vietnamese woman. That, like dancing in public, is a civil offense here.

  It’s easier now for a civilian to shop in the army commissary (where goodies are varied and prices are lower) than for soldiers. The Embassy people dislike having to wait in line behind a queue of GIs to get canned milk-shakes, colored Kleenex, Zippo lighters and chocolate macaroons vacuum-packed in Brooklyn. So the GIs are now barred from the Cholon PX.

  There are still a lot of soldiers barring my view of the Johnny Cash record selection, however: the Thai, Filipino, Korean and Australian soldiers still get in. It makes a patriot like myself wonder, having dedicated six months of my life to seeing that Salem cigarettes get into the hands of the poor people of Saigon, whether I’m really appreciated back home.

  Another disturbing aspect of life here is the reluctance of American GIs to salute me. My ID card very clearly states that my status is equivalent to that of a major, yet not one of those rifle-carrying bums stands up when I go into a mess hall! They just go on eating.

  So I just say “At ease, men,” and let them go on eating.

  It was different in my time, I can tell you. When I was a private, at Fort Bragg and Camp Maxey, we jumped to attention when an officer entered the barracks. First thing you know they’ll be billeting the Negroes with US. I thought you ought to know this.

  Another thing you ought to know is that I’ve had it in this slobbovia, namely Saigon. It isn’t a war-town, it’s a boom-town. There’s occasional firing on the periphery, I read in the papers, and at night the flareships light up the river to see what Charlie is doing. Nobody thinks about the war. What people think about is what they’re going to invest in here. Because what American business is doing here (with Japanese, Korean, Republic of China, Filipino, Australian, Indian and French business) is to use the armies as a holding operation until a firm economic hold on Southeast Asia is obtained for Western money.

  By “Western” money I mean Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Filipino, and Australian money, too. In short, I don’t mean “Western,” I mean “Free Enterprise” money. The “Free Enterprise” Grocery Store has it made here: there won’t be any Dienbienphu. The hold that the French once had has now been extended, so that everybody has a piece.

  The only ones who won’t get any are the Vietnamese.

  The S. S. Moon of the Orient, which I boarded in San Francisco on Nov. 14, turned out to be a water-borne nursing-home. I was the young-est passenger. The crew was of my own generation. Which partly explains why it took us seventy-two days to make the crossing. The crew wasn’t altogether to blame. East of the West Hebrides we ran into a sixty-mile-an-hour headwind, which would have backed us up clear to South Senility, Utah, had it not been for a tailwind of equal velocity. The captain maneuvered his craft sidewise but we were still in peril of being smashed in two until I advised him to try being becalmed. To show him what I meant, I went down to my cabin and lay becalmed. When I got up the sun was out, the seas were running smooth, and the captain was still running the vessel from an astrology handbook bought in Walgreen’s.

  “Guess weatha cwear up, guess choppy weatha, guess wain cwear the weatha,” was all I could get out of that one. The only thing the captain didn’t seem to be guessing about were the birds that kept following us. He kept going around the deck telling tax-paying Americans, “That bird are arbatross.” Who ever heard of an albatross with a thirty-foot wingspread and webbed wings? Fortunately, most of the passengers died en route.

  South of the Lower Northerlies we ran out of sailcloth. By good luck I’d brought along an extra roll of waxed paper just in case we ran out of paper napkins. When six more died the waxed paper gave out. We let the arbatrosses have them.

  Well, I told you they weren’t albatrosses.

  It wasn’t the storm that did most of the passengers in. The majority of them died simply because they were that old when they came aboard.

  Tokyo isn’t a city—it’s an explosion. It’s the most alive city I’ve ever seen. New York is poky by comparison. Twelve million people living elbow to elbow; yet maintaining individuality. They move faster than anybody—yet there seems no undue haste. Control—the traffic is controlled, the economic explosion is controlled; and the lives of individuals look controlled—I haven’t been hit by a single panhandler; nobody has yet offered to act as a guide or a tout or to introduce me to his virgin sister. The only beggar I saw was a tall man draped in the black of a Buddhist priest and tinkling a bell for alms. I peeked under his hood—it was an American!

  No tipping, no kissing, no handshaking, no hauling, mauling, yanking or back-slapping. It’s part of a very big thing about personal dignity here—sustained even in milling throngs.

  An incidental benefit of the incredible crush on the Tokyo subway is that it immobilizes pickpockets. If he has his hands up when he gets in, he can’t get them down to your wallet. If he has them down, he can’t get them up. Passengers’ pockets are thus automatically protected—but unnecessarily so: the Japanese don’t steal. I mean that. They don’t think in those terms. A Japanese bartender may shake you down outrageously for a drink; but he won’t go after your poke directly.

  At the racetrack they leave their binoculars beside their racing forms. That’s part of the big thing about personal honor, I suspect. Also everyone is working. Twelve million people—and there’s a labor shor-tage!

  Personal cleanliness is also striking. If you buy so much as a two-bit cellophane-wrapped sandwich out of a machine, there is a small, moist napkin for your hands enclosed. Immaculate people. And as courteous as they are tidy. By seven in the morning streets of even the poor sections are spick-and-span. I took a tour of what a Japanese friend here terms “a slum.” He don’t know what a slum is.

  The friend in the photo is Suji Terayama, a novelist and dramatist who, as far as I can figure it out, is a kind of Japanese Andy Warhol. This I gather, is because he has an underground theater. By “underground” I don’t mean out of sight. It’s a theater under physical construc-tion now. Terayama must be big around here, because newspapermen take his picture when he shows up at fights and at the races. He hasn’t been translated into English but probably will be. He’s only thirty-three; the son of a farmer of Northern Japan who was killed in World War II.

  The intensity of Japanese interest in writing, painting and the arts gives me the idea that Tokyo is going to be, in a time not too far away, what Paris was in the 1880s—the center of the arts for every country. It has all the feel of Paris now. It is so new, so fast and so joyous—an enjoyers’ city.

  The wonderful knack the Japanese have is for forever experimenting, trying to do things new ways—originating—and yet keeping their ancient forms. For example, the office building opposite my window here looks more like a gigantic tree than a business building. It has a central beam, like an eleven-sto
rey oak with a dark-green cast; and the offices cling to its trunk like foliage.

  Trees, water and rocks—these are the ancient forms in which the Japanese enclose new feeling. I saw Antony and Cleopatra, in Japanese, in a theater that made me feel I was watching the play in between great sea-walls. The play itself was good for the first three hours. But by the time Antony had died and been resurrected three times, I felt it was time to go. It may still be going on. It was too slow and obvious for my own taste.

  The impression the Japanese often give, of being cold, is misleading. They are a passionate people but with a controlled passion. On the stage they get wildly demonstrative; but not on the street. Except, of course, when it’s political, as in Shinjuku recently when the Shinjuku students —as well as workers—battled police for five hours trying to stop trains carrying American fuel through the area.

  I’ve always thought I could make it as a standup comic, and that suspicion is now confirmed. I don’t even have to stand up here. All I have to do is sit down in a snack bar with a sign in English outside—COFFEE & HOT DOG—and ask for coffee and a hot dog. The place breaks up. Apparently the “coffee” part isn’t hilarious. It’s the “hot dog” business. I’ve mentioned hot dogs to countermen and vendors in Chicago, but they don’t have the sense of humor of the Japanese. Curiously, if I say “Hawta dog,” all I get is a hot dog; and no laughs at all. Sometimes I don’t say anything and they break up. Marvelous sense of humor.

  A pretty twenty-two-year-old Japanese girl asked me, “You like to play patinko wid me?” I’d like to play anything wid her. Particularly patinko.

  “Pachinko is a monologue of the lonely,” Suji Terayama assured me. “The life here is outwardly joyous and full of amusements. But people are not amused. How sad their private lives are can be seen when young men stand for hours feeding small steel balls into a machine.”