Tokio Whip (13 page)

–
Oh, D–

***

Gotta get to Kamakura, there's a bell I wanna see.

***

Rich and strange, Kazuo regards Kazuko's friends Lang and Roberta. They are rather superficial, really, in spite of all that earnestness. I suppose they say the same about us, but in reverse. Ah, but we are all – what? Rich, open to change. Strange, alike. Ah, but Kazuko's parents?

***

“Hagiwara [Sakutaro] himself explained his especial liking for beer as permitting long arguments about poetry as one proceeded slowly toward incoherence.”

***

Just so, relax, hang out. Talk, laugh, smoke, drink, eat, in any order – and no speeches, thank you, no beribboned magnifying glasses. “Hi, my name's Marianne, and I want to fuck your son's brains out.” “Hi, my name's Marianne, and I think your article was shit.” “Hi, my name's Marianne, and I saw your scumbag husband with a high-school girl yesterday.” “Hi, my name's Marianne, and your wife just went down on me.” “Hi, my name's Marianne, and guess what? You're Korean.” Oh god, here comes that horrible art critic. She smiles politely, and turns quickly to the man at her side, a scruffy looking, photographer whose work she likes: people-less black and whites, just the massive jumble of Tokyo. The most honest photos of the city we have, she feels. They begin to talk about music; his taste runs to Iggy Pop and the Clash, hard Blues, Otis Rush and the Wolf. He's never heard Monk, never heard of Hawk – which reminds her of how things really started to go wrong at Roberta's party, how Roberta wanted to play Monk, solos, clear enough, tasteful certainly, who could possibly argue? But Lang had other ideas, suddenly insisted on hearing Hawk, the European stuff with Benny Carter, which Roberta didn't even have, and Lang was sure he'd seen it in her collection, couldn't find it, of course, which only pissed him off more, so he yanked the Monk off, and put on – in a complete switch in direction – Dwight Yoakum real loud, which really annoyed everyone, and then what was it, the Mississippi Sheiks, which only made things stranger, not exactly party music. Oh, Roberta was fuming, and she knew she was powerless to do anything about this husband of hers that had such a gift of being an asshole at the worst moments – at least she knew she would be powerless for only a little while yet.

***

Fiction a verb, an improvisation. “Ask Lester Young,” a song.

***

R'n'L!!!!!

Wireless, wireless! Whatever happened to coils and cables, springs and connecting rods – the stuff automata's dreams are made on? Bah! “My Last Sony.”

Randolph and Cary, Cary and LSD, Cary as a wife-beater ... jeez.

Isn't it terrible what happened to Veronica Lake? And then to wind up waiting tables? I mean is fate cruel or what? Why didn't someone know beforehand, why didn't someone go to her? I know I would have, and I know you would have too, and I know that that's one of a zillion reasons we're friends. Ohh, Veronica!

And whatever became of Teresa Wright? Ya' know she had this great contract that went, “The aforementioned Teresa Wright shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in the water. Neither may she be photographed on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: In shorts, playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the Fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at a turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf; assuming an athletic stance while pretending to hit something with a bow and arrow.” Anyway, whatever became of her? But would we have wanted to see her “mature”? This is the question. Perhaps the studio was wise and said to itself (assuming for the moment that a studio has 1) the ability to talk; and ((even more grandly metaphysical (((if we can apply the term to anything that came out of Hollywood – and we can))) )) 2) the ability to converse and interlocute ((if we can put it that way)) with itself; and ((here we really go, we're talkin' stratospheric (((if the stratosphere ((whatever that may be)) is part of the metaphysical, of course))) now)) 3), the ability to carry out the results of that self-dialog into action), “No, this kid's just too good; give her a couple of superb roles, create that effect, that age, that just-in-betweenness of innocence about to see the other side – and then, in the nicest way, of course, get rid of her.” By the latter I mean like did she become a nun, or return to Nebraska and finish college and become a pharmacist or something good, or meet and fall in love with a nice guy who really was a nice guy and rich to boot and he did his business while she did her charitable work? E-nough! Phew, I don't know where all that came from. Like VM, I even drive myself crazy sometimes.

My list of places I most want to visit: Graceland, Monument Valley, Gettysburg, Vaux le Vicomte. Wanna come?

I have a red soap, a yellow soap, a pink soap, and a purple soap.

Further Inquiries into the Laws of Gravity Dept. Why every so often do I find a couple of pubic hairs on the ceiling of my bathroom?

Do you think dental assistants make good kissers?

What did Manu say as we crossed a red light? “It's more of a hint than an order.” And then she mentioned her “trail of debts.” God, could I mention mine. (Better not.)

Question of the week: what's Campari made of?

Reading Levinas. God, I wish I could talk with you about Minnelli!

Oh yeah, and my shampoo's blue.

***

She started moaning much too high, unnaturally. I told I her I never confused sex with seriousness.

***

–
If it weren't for the record shops, Euro-Space, and the Nepalese restaurant, could I kiss Shibuya goodbye?

–
Youth!

–
Money!

–
Swagger!

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Don't forget the cigar shop below the dog, and the used bookshop.

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And the best: Tokyu Hands.

–
Best non-clothes shop on the globe!

–
Hard to say. There are a few friends with offices here, too.

–
Oh, and Yagura, great
miso
, and Egg Gallery.

–
But Ebisu? Screw the Garden, a monument to the megalomania of money.

–
Bad taste – what the city excels in.

–
No Ebisu is for me only one thought, Yoko's office.

–
Two: that snowy day –

–
– the nice lunch restaurant –

–
and that guy –

–
– screwy guy –

–
– nice guy – and screwy –

–
– yeah, funny guy –

–
– bringing in snow-covered branches for all the women in the party.

–
Going out –

–
coming back in –

–
– out and in –

–
Flowers in winter.

–
Snow-flowers.

–
Nice guy.

***

The costs of confusion notwithstanding, Hiro quickly thinks, well, what do you need to know? I can always find my way in a Tokyo house. Not that anything corresponds, but just the fact that the piano is in the kitchen and the dish cabinet in the living room makes me feel comfortable, at home, she likes that, that I settle myself in, make the bath and bed for her. Too natural.

***

I couldn't see their faces anymore – but I could feel they were all men.

– Julie London.
Man of the West
(Anthony Mann, 1958)

***

Mmm, I'm not so sure. No, I prefer to “love” parts of the place. The whole things seems a bit too much; and frankly, it sounds both a little crazy and impossible. Unreal. No offense. Hmm, that soba shop in Kanda that Grandma took me to. That quiet tempura restaurant in the middle of Kabukicho that Father took me to that afternoon we saw
Sorekara
. The stationery shop in Kunitachi with that nice old man. Ah, then I suppose people like certain areas. But are shops places, sites? Do they qualify? Am I supposed to mean parks, or the air or mood of an area? The quiet of some temples, the buzz in Ameyokocho, which I don't really care for, but just to use it as an example. But they're all shops or parks in their own ways, aren't they? I remember a chair in a café, it was mass-produced. Can't I love that too as a “Tokyo place”? I don't care what Hiromi says, I still think Ginza is wonderful, and I hope that after I'm married I'll still be going to Kabuki and Fugetsudo for a snack afterwards. Ah, but tonight we go out, maybe run into those American guys again. Hmph, and if not them, some other Americans; there are lots to go around. The whole city? No, just the combination of places I call my home. Hiroko, has outdone herself.

***

HAZUKO'S HOAX

The immediate postwar years were traumatic ones for the Japanese people – the Tokyo air-raids, Hiroshima, the Emperor no longer a deity: complete loss, utter devastation, a nation and a people in ruins.

It was also a time of mass hysteria, a time when people were gullible for any sign of hope and promise. “New religions” abounded, the worst crimes easily perpetrated (as we have seen). Tokyo was a city ready to be taken in.

Hazuko Hata was nineteen years old in 1948. Her father had been a radical labor organizer in Tokyo, and in order to avoid imprisonment, in the mid-1930s, had taken his family to a village outside of Sendai where he quietly worked on a farm. Hazuko grew up resenting the government, and longing to see the capitol. In 1946 she saw how she could make her move. Health scares were numerous, and many of them real. With her doctor (and lover) she invented an incurable illness – “radium poisoning eating her bones,” said to derive from malnutrition and the noxious air-raid fumes that had spread over Sendai – and with the aid of another lover, a newspaper man, she saw to it that notice of her fatal disease was placed in a Tokyo newspaper, where – again, as she'd planned – an “enterprising” editor (who was also in on the hoax; and yes, he too became her lover) saw the chance for a sensational and melodramatic story. He invited “brave, little Hazuko, who'd never seen Ginza, the Imperial Palace, or the brave, little people of the capitol struggling their way back up from the piles of ash,” to come and see just those fabled sites and more in her final, miserable, pain-wracked days.

And so she came. She was given a suite in the Imperial Hotel and immediately became the pitiful toast of the town. She refused any expert medical attention, proclaiming, “If you can't trust your own hometown doctor, who can you trust?” Her suffering visage was to be seen on magazine covers and billboards (“Hazu-chan, May merciful Kannon [the Buddha of Compassion] grant you a painless death, and Miroku [the Buddha of the Future] embrace you in eternity”). Interviews appeared in newspapers (“I'm only sorry to put everyone to so much trouble; but soon they will no longer have to put up with me”). And there were radio appearances (“Tonight, a special composition, “Sendai Drapes Itself in White for Hazuko” [white being the Buddhist color of mourning]). Meanwhile too, the newspaper editor saw to it that she had one last chance to “live it up”. Besides an audience in Parliament, she went dancing at the Ginza Gazebo, took a tour of Toho studios, posing with the famous film stars (including the young Mifune, with whom more than glances were exchanged), and walked among her devoted “little-but-really-oh-so-big people.”

And in between and throughout there took place the infamous sexual escapades.

No one knows how she did it. Could there have been a Hazuko double? Experts estimate (how?) that no single person could have performed all the
documented
acts that Hazuko – the “human heatwave” to those in the know –performed in her two short weeks in the capitol before she “departed,” as her dwindling believers still call it, to the “other city.” (Hazuko's defenders scoff at the ‘experts' and their estimates; they claim that time has no measurement when the spirit is in its ecstasies.)

A brief list includes the following. For convenience's sake, they follow the order of the authorities. Of course, anyone versed in the combinatorial arts -- they can sometimes resemble a perverse marriage between the arts of Busby Berkeley and Raymond Queneau -- would have more than a holiday in devising other systems for them.

G
ROUP 1: “
N
ORMAL” (
T
HE AUTHORITIES COMMENT THAT THE FOLLOWING ACTS MIGHT BE EXPECTED BY MOST SEXUALLY WELL-ADJUSTED PEOPLE.
T
HOUGH TOO, THEY ADMIT, THE NUMBERS AND OTHER DETAILS MAKE EVEN THIS CATEGORY SUSPECT.)

–
There are twenty-one files for the daily – and separate – servicing of her doctor-lover, her reporter-lover, and her editor-lover.

–
Many files show her in tandem with groups of men and women, and occasionally, boys and girls dressed in an array of costumes: school children, kamikaze pilot, farmers from Sendai.

–
One file contains photographs of her with two or three men, being penetrated wherever possible. (Interestingly, many of the police files contain thick envelopes filled with photographs; visual documentation seeming to have been another of her predilections. In fact, many of the photographs contain mirrors in which we can even see Hazuko taking the photo while simultaneously being gratified.)

–
A moderately sized file contains documentation of her providing her pleasure herself – manually.

G
ROUP 2:
M
ECHANICAL (SELF-EXPLANATORY)

–
Another group of files represents acts in which a range of objects are employed to achieve carnal satisfaction. These include marmalades (black market?),
wasabi
and other cylindrical edibles (
daikon
, etc.), as well as esoteric religious implements. In many of these, depending upon the object employed, an appropriate costume is donned.