Harajuku Sunday (22 page)

"I was an only child..."

Speak ecstatic shiverence upon that yielding body, though our circumstances are straitened, and we live in a barely habitable LDK.
 
In one dusty corner, I once find photographs of prewar military exercises, schoolboys training in the snow.
 
In another, wood carving marks date to the eighteenth century: it is 1941 now or 1921.
 
Upon this blasted geography I superimpose my own history; Hisako in pretended indifference works away on a sketch, I creep upon her onto her.

“We can go to Fuji-rock next year. Or
Aomori
.”

Hasegawa’s giddy enthusiasm drops down a notch after she gets to know us better.
 
We have plans; we have dreams and ambitions.

“Cosmo-K will sell DVD 500 yen only. 500 yen stores have everything you need.”

Chinese-made goods streaming into the countryside, sold for 500 or even 100 yen; prices slowly climbing down, unemployment not a concern.

“Take a picture of me; check out the store, the magazine, the ‘gravure’ shot.”

Exactly the thing about her is that she has little personality to begin with: one imposes something on her.
 
Your dream, your fantasy, your memory.
 
I grab the camera; I shoot.
 
Photographer is linked to subject of the photo; the relationship is a social relationship itself.
 
There is something frail about her; in our first years she is often sick, but still of course there is some kind of vitality here, we can't just talk about trees and highways and decaying cities and wrap it up all like this; modernity.
 
Click: girl amidst dead trees.
 
Hisako is a girl who could have been pretty ordinary; she could have been wistful Mrs. Watanabe in a concrete grey apartment complex, she could have been Shibuya AX dancing away in Ebisu.
 
But then, maybe this isn't even true, the birth rate goes down and down.
 
In some sort of half-way snuggling down bedding meeting of young lovers whispers, one's younger sister is getting married, but although Toru is only a high school graduate, he has a lifetime employment job, he can provide for the family.
 
Click: girl in pink dress.
 
Confessions a meeting of mind; the bright winter sun a foil to conversation I cannot understand nor even try to understand, the confidences of a sisterhood closed to men.

Something occurred when she was in sixth grade, about to be pulled into the ‘yanqui’ (delinquent girl) life and all the teachers surrounded her in a group discipline session that was her last chance to be straight and narrow.
 
It was Hisako’s true last chance to stick it out to the normal and bourgeois, for the factory-job lifestyle that entailed, the apartment that I eventually forced her back to (ironic), but of course under her name, her impetus, and the drear that was her destiny regardless.

Her mother, naturally, doted on her, but as she grew up I guess it was impossible to control that wild child, a single mother with few economic possibilities of her own.
 
What occurred was that lack of sibling drama she could never really understand others.
 
The world was something that happened to her; she selected from her options.
 
Second, her father, before he died, was Soka Gakkai; he brought the whole family into the group.
 
It's a new modern religion that isn't quite cult and isn't quite mainstream.
 
Society was sufficiently well attuned that it wasn't made a huge deal of, but the disconnect with mainstream values was the beginnings of estrangement from the cultural norm.
 
Among all the characteristics that flowed through a youthful personality, there is distinctly a streak of narcissism.
 
But even this within bounds; there is no sickness, no simplistic answer that left you doomed.
 
Patty Hearst pointed guns at police officers and lived to tell the tale; Leila Khalid was the sole survivor of an El-Al hijacking.
 
Our Western female antiheroes are people of action.
 
But in the minefields, the poor and dispossesed marched towards paradise; canapes and champagne are consumed at the Paris Air Show; the divide between the Third and the First Worlds is uncrossable.
 
I walk about the city and fail to attain enlightenment or even some Tom Cruise-version of the Japanese countryside as refuge and retreat.
 
The grandmothers of Kitakata are so old, their skin almost seems to exude dust.
 
Big piled up stacks of daikon lay at the shop, searching for a hopeful buyer, blue plastic tarps and bamboo-frame construction, the thin, almost imperceptible fabric covered what attempts there were to put up new buildings, and at the town edge, the land slopes down to a river that is already too polluted to swim in, and the effluence of sixty thousand souls makes it genuinely reek.
 
Yet the road behind the main strip: here parking spaces can be found; the shocked faces of townspeople hide behind metaled doors, and geography has once again triumphed; fate interceded only insofar as the absence of happening could itself be defined as a happening.

She tells me early on that she had a "bad personality," and I come to understand this, I come to see what she is talking about, all though that is a simplification as well.
 
It was just somewhere early enough the idea of
Japan
as exoticism had been implanted, and everything else was cheap and humdrum by comparison.
 
Greek culture culturally related to Japanese, the strands of mother-love, Oedipal complexes and primordial father conflicts, primitive mythology imposing itself on our decision-making, but that, after all, is so-much philosophical claptrap: we are here.
 
None of this works without understanding her.
 
There is no more family here for her.
 
My half-assed personality can't cope with all this cheapness, we furnish the apartment in plastics and hundred yen store manufactured goods; the old culture is lost, therefore; the old ways are swept aside by the new.
 
American, crass, suburban, I resented what came out of my own culture: I am just the only one willing to admit it.
 
The old hags at the cosmo mart or iida k do not even acknowledge her presence.
 
Tokyo
's hectic ceaseless beat gives away to utterly silent winter nights and the cold crisp mountain air.
 
The thought will come, this was, after all, proper and normal.
 
It is the normal way of living.
 
It is the city that was abnormal and psychosis inducing.
 
So proper here to leave space for the cry of the baked yam seller wending his way through summer nights, the wordless camaraderie of people hiking together on cold February weekends, and the change of the seasons to even springtime's raw molting awakening of the earth, moist, birthing, insolent.
 
In rude health the power of the mountain itself could be heard; no symbolist or analyst can decipher it.

“Maybe we should take a boat out on the lake.”

Here in snow-bound Kitakata valley I eke out a one-and-a-half thousand a month existence on dispatch work proud of a paycheck I earn myself, proud of a sort of parody of middle-class existence, not unaware of the parodic prospects of this characterization (here, now); now unaware of the thin underlying tendencies here recorded; an abomination in my own mind.
 
Youngsters.
 
Weekends with Eri; mountain-climbing trips; walks through ancient forests; vistas from incredibly high.
 
Stimulation is so intense in these modern times that we have to resort to superlative; it seems truly apocalyptic these mountain ranges stretching away as far as the eye could see; it seems the end of the world.

“See we rent the boat here; we can take it out as far as that island, or maybe just a bit further.”

Something is degenerating the whole time as the months pass, I collect my pay in my bank account every month, slowly start accumulating cheap plastic goods in that prefab apartment.
 
It is not the glad cries of children I do not know nor the mind-stultifying tasks of resentful countryside Japanese managers.
 
Aleks is off to
Alaska
; Tomas opens up a café.
 
Little by little the domicile becomes home.

“Let's boat out to the island; to the far shore; the water is sweet.”

There is the main sequence of events and then ancillary ones, foundering listless directionless one is easy prey for any adventurer or casual wanderer.
 
But this is just possessive metaphor again, falsehoods, dream sequences and representations of representations.
 
If none of it mattered, then what of high speed car races through dark Japanese nights, near shattering accidents, screaming shouting cutlery and cookingware thrown against the wall.

[Say if you really loved her, you would have married her; one can't possess a person, this is what we all learn our teenage years mostly, and what happened in the end...]

“It is beautiful, the line of the cloud above the circular lake.”

Or...'of course if you leave
Tokyo
, you lose your way, you no longer have definition in your life.'

Eri, the young twenty-something Japanese of that small town into our lives and broader social circles to come.
 
Hisako says she sleeps with Tak's friend Jun just out of a sense of sympathy, and this is something about historical tradition as well.
 
But she does, or she doesn’t; it doesn’t matter anyway; Kitakata, the white snow-capped mountains so distant and now never to be reached, life as metaphor, the town of uncaring natural perfection.
 
The white birch forests, the cedar, the pine; the view of those mountains a dagger to the heart, and we grow for interaction with disappearing nature.
 
Hisako, so fragile, so pointless, when returned to her natural environment, somehow begins to conform more deeply with the values of the traditional town.
 
In time I begin to find her indistinguishable from the classical ideal; her clothing, her gait, her personal style become rustified, and she is beautiful amidst all that natural splendor.
 
At the end of the valley where it spreads out to the flatlands below the main road of the city meets the national highway and the bullet train line.
 
Here as if in monument to the construction, there is an old rusting TV tower, a 1960s creation that looked futuristic and modern at the time of construction but now is charmingly quaint.
 
Instead of being bold, minimal and evanescent, the techniques and construction style are so over-designed that the shape is that of a nub or squat peak rather than the ephemeral spire the designer it hoped it to be—or that modern methods now produce.
 
With metal that has been zinced and is thus stolid rather than radiant; dull rather than gleaming, the nub sits there, squat, uncommenting, easily forgotten.
 
I am writing not out of nostalgia for some 70s school architecture, the Japanese high school we all went to.
 
Rather it is a question of geomancy and alchemy, forgotten sciences of a more superstitious time.

This is the only possible vista into a place.
 
I put aside part of my paycheck; I accumulate things.
 
There is some kind of charm in this innocence, this boyish way of believing that a pile of sand on top of another will eventually result in a fully habitable castle.
 
But if Kitakata deserves something, it is this: this life is not unlivable.
 
Hisako is wrong about this.
 
It is totally possible to make the sunlit afternoon of a summer Sunday become the totality of a way of life.
 
Not that I am trying to live in some sixteenth century version of existence.
 
It is that this country life has its own consolations.
 
The sweet water of the caldera lake, Tazawako, is ever so much sweet to the spirit than all the neon dayglo of Shibuya or Ebisu.
 
Those rainbow-colored kids.
 
And even afterwards, even after things are impossible...

“So you want to live here for the rest of your life.”

“…”

“Eight hundred yen an hour, thirty thousand saved by the end of the month if we cut out all unnecessary expenses.”

Her mouth moves; she is animated, flushed.

“This dusty town; this minimal life.”

From the far shore, we can see Towada-ko, the perfect circular caldera lake, an extinct volcano filled up with rain.
 
This is it.
 
This is the full summation of two years spent in the far north, a futile escape from a city that was going to dominate every other moment, every other waking thought of an entire twenties of one life.
 
Eri eventually married her boyfriend, the American who wished to become Japanese.
 
Tak and Shino are still together, older, about to inherit the izakaya. I think the boys on the basketball team are still friends, and the city itself has shrunken slightly in population, a candidate to be merged with neighboring towns.
 
The most striking detail is maybe 100 yen DVDs at the 100 yen store; you accumulate a collection, you sink into suburban ennui.
 
You drive cars out at night, without particular destination in mind.