Tokio Whip (23 page)

I've stayed all this while and you've managed to maintain two homes though the time spent in Europe has decreased noticeably as of late and ... it's written all over your face you can't quit the place it's not me you can't quit you're free to stay or go I can take it can't you still not see that I've been able to for quite awhile now even before I came here – but you didn't see that then never did its ok stay or go just make up your own mind – but as I said only a few hours ago this really is the last time together or not however it's to be it will really be irrevocable our permanency will no longer be a matter of when you or I decide to stay or when to wander it is time for me to stay in one place and to choose how many pillows are to be on my bed no more design changes thank you – I'm in Tokyo for now, where are you going to be?, that's all there is to it – the city has come between us –she walks and talks with me – perhaps he will with you – (and by the way no the sex of the city doesn't matter if it is a city it's all sexes or any as it chooses) – I have a present is what Tokyo gives me a present of myself to myself and the chance to create whatever time I want to stay or to leave as I like ... but no I don't want to talk your kind of Tokyo talk – I've done my own Tokyo research and been about the place in my fashion it just doesn't all of it interest me – and that you can't stand either – but you know I know that whatever Tokyo becomes yours mine will not mine will remain mine – oh I'm talking about me now as much as you whom I want to talk about – god I love sunsets – god – like Aunt Patsy, no softie – what would she have to say about all this – “It's the bunk” – what lead to it all – oh I think we both know – your widening circumferences increasing overlapping – the films the essays the music the shirts – and I was pulling back in content with one film every week or two a slow read old familiar clothes the repeat button leftovers – it's ok it really is nothing was not against you it was for me and I'm proud I did the right thing by me and now get some proper pride yourself – it's all ok – boy the way people fight the thought of someone wishing them well – I can't stand striped furniture, gotta get the chairs repainted soon – friends consolation – why is it friends have always been easier to communicate with than lovers – I remember the night I went out and got drunk – O was that needed – just three friends women – why do I still specify – that's when I began discovering Tokyo on my own – little by little narrowing it down – Kunitachi was nice yes and Yotsuya the house-sitting in Azabu and then a bit too far up there across the river the Edo living in “a poorer thing than the public latrines of later years” and then finally my own Yanesen – a few friends – a city of women having a good time – until that too began to get out of control – but this time I could see it coming and knew when and how to withdraw – knew Arlene had a crush on me – I know in time I can get along – what is it Zasu and Zonar, Gypsy and Jezebel – no now what is it ah yes Mona and Cheri no I mean Maxine great names actually – they're not always silly I've seen that – that always may be small but let's hope we can expand it – and so what if I shouted at VZ the man deserved it his movie simply did not move and again I say goddammit it did not move and maybe now he is – oh dammit these leftovers of your talk – hey I can even talk sense with Marianne – usually – oh but she's a delight – if she stays here long enough I think I can learn quite a lot – and even if it's all only about her that's guaranteed to be some something nonetheless – but how long can we expect her to stay – she must wander – O Marianne what ghosts what ghosts – and sweet Cafferty now there is a real education the old hand – oh but the cities we all have walked – all the women I have known and their trajectories – a catalog of cities, an atlas, we have covered continents, A Woman's Guide to the Globe …– all those cities – why can't there just be one or two – Tokyo – Hollywood, for the first time since the ancient rule of the Amazons, a colony of economically independent women – Carole, actress, producer, businesswoman and more, “the complete filmmaker” – when it comes to engraving the saints names you and I are low on the list and these are at the top – these few, and a very few more– is this how Marianne survived too? – those who gave me a place to stay to rest my weary head – I was never but a temporary permanent guest – gone now but a home – for a girl – a girl, can you imagine me one – I was always theirs, will always be – coming and going, leaving soon enough – a faith in love, no distance to overcome – that even parents don't have – alright then – no I don't want to talk about you I want to talk about me – I like the smell of a good cigar you smoke ‘em I'll smell ‘em – the few who supported me without questions – said ok go, Europe, Japan, here's a place to rest to return – but I don't want to talk about leaving because the home there is gone and I can not ever go back and I need to make a new home here – we both know this world without memories is all – no not without memories but a world all leaving – oh I so want to talk about so much else and all of it entertwined – what did Arlene say – you listen you hope you listen to the crap you hope there's someone behind it you take a chance having decided that the crap is tolerable because there are so many other redeeming factors you open up you screw like gods the first night like titans the second and then the age of iron sets in the real bullshit that's been there all the time makes itself known and you finally see it there in the kisses and in the fucking and in the talk it permeates but we put the blinders on – well that's one way of looking at things – your
Gertrud
another – “I have loved,” “Amor Omnia” – but not on my tombstone – though yes I have and you have not seen – baroque flowering splendiferous surrounding … suffering in the best saints senses ... you think you can talk of thighs let me talk of thighs – no only two lips a word a kiss – a Lang once and perhaps no more no longer – no langueur –so be it – it's a love and a life I can live with – I am a thousand palms a blue dress blue eyes and sometimes red underwear long white legs black short hair sometimes long red eyes crazy hair wet dry a cunt moist spring fingers don't talk to me about thighs about blondes and smiles I cannot account for them myself lips all over and all over again – no, no space – you if you're willing – and if you're not – I am only beginning to imagine to talk to myself as much as I do – lips, as they say – it's in the kiss – and here the kiss is mine – mine me where you haven't come yet – me inside.

***

The costs of confusion notwithstanding, Hiromi carefully considers, I'll have none of it. I live here; he and he and he live there. The last trains leave then and then and then. So: no cost, no confusion. I know where I am going, and who's coming with me.

***

The coffee was awful. We should have gone to Doutor.

– Cathy O'Donnell,
They Live by Night
(Nicholas Ray-Silva, 1948)

Chapter 8

TAKADANOBABA–MEJIRO

Lang came to love Kichijoji, but it was only his own, he felt only more distant from Roberta, isolated, and after all he'd come here for her for them to see how or what they were, what they were going to do and there she was an hour's train ride away and she happy rarely leaving her home her neighborhood – and so he became jealous of it all, jealous of the city for what it had done to her – had done to him.

***

I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived for a few weeks while you loved me.

– Bogart,
In A Lonely Place
(Nicholas Ray, 1950)

***

–
Went book shopping today.

–
Anything good?

–
Some great book covers. “Real men wear black,” ya' know.

–
A book?

–
Should be. No, a shirt.

***

R'n'L!!!!!!!!

I remember knowing truffles first as chocolates before I knew them as mushrooms. But when was the last time I ate either?

The other day there were these three Indian kids on the train beating each other against the head with their shoes. All the other passengers (except me, of course) were aghast.

How can I die with my boots on when I don't have any boots?

Jee-zuz what a Tokyoite. I got three DVD players.

Saw that new Proust in Kitazawa today. Remember that great clerk they once had, Junko? She wound up working for
Eureka
. Also taking classes with Akira Kasai.

Oh yeah, but the best was that after years – hard, miserable, lonely years, my friends, years that you or anyone could or would only ever understand if you had been born in the very same circumstances as myself, only if, you had ... yikes!, enough – after years of looking I finally found a copy of
Notable Names
in Dante. A great book, an encyclopaedia. Yes, at Kitazawa, and yes, at ¥25,000.

The day I broke the record.

I beat my head against the wall remembering all those years reading newspaper items about Elvis being on tour and Elvis canceling the tour and Elvis checking into a hospital for exhaustion or to lose weight or whatever and Elvis and Elvis and oh
why didn't I or any of us see
what was happening, why didn't we storm the Colonel's gate, talk with, implore the King, kidnap him if need be and snap him out of it? (And then I have to ask myself, honestly, darkly, what if we had done all that and he'd listened to us and then after a moment of silence he'd turned to us and said, “Ah 'ppreciate your concern, kids, but ya' see, I kinda like the way things are goin' right now.”)

I once had a liquor store lady who was an absolute shrew; her husband was like the delivery boy, always moving crates around. She wouldn't let him near the cash register. Next place I lived in the local store was run by a family. Big macho guy; his mother who was old but happy to be working; and his big macha wife who had this long gorgeous hair. God was she sexy, like a Japanese version of a Fellini woman. Now the current place is also run by a family, same set up. Kindly old grandma. Nice husband. But I was wrong I admit now about the wife. She at first seemed to me to be resentful at being in this liquor store situation, as if she deserved greater things. Her hair done up tight, the shaded glasses. But then after a while I realized that what seemed to me to be a fake smile was in fact her real smile. And that she was always smiling, a real smile. And then the other day when it was raining and I had a paper bag of stuff, she went out of her way to unpack it for me and put it in a plastic bag. Very sweet. She's great. I love her. So: never prejudge, lest ye be so. I learned my lesson, Lordy me.

Then there's the rice lady next door. Always amused as hell that I order brown rice. I asked her the last time I was there, and she told me that all of 2 – t-w-o – people in the neighborhood eat brown rice. Amazing. She's very cute. One day in one of our wandering conversations I mentioned Araki to her, and she said she didn't like porno. Too bad, because I lust after her. Anyway, so one night I was home playing some music; about 1AM the doorbell rings. It's her! I think, “her husband's out of town, and now she's ready to surrender herself to me.” No way: she asked me to turn the music down.

“Oedipus, schmoedipus, just so long as he loves his mother!”

I gotta go out and take some photos. / “We'll master the keyboard yet!”

***

The costs of confusion notwithstanding, Hiroko confusedly says to herself, what a phrase. Yes, it does cost a bit to get confused when I go out. I become late, my make-up isn't perfect, the lighting is always wrong. No, no withstanding about it at all. Perhaps I should study my map a bit more.

***

“Years, punishing years.” Good years too. Let all these cities claim themselves for my birthplace! I was neither conceived nor born: I appeared one evening from out of the shadows, sexy, speaking five languages, and with all my papers intact. Like Melmoth needing to undo the bargain she tramps across Europe, from Lisbon to Berlin, from Palermo to Paris, with stops in Vienna and Nice, Copenhagen and Madrid, and all other points in between. Picking up the languages, the men and women, a great variety of eating and drinking habits. Picking up everything but herself, wandering and getting nowhere. Unable to create, unable even to destroy. What's Lang say Jimmie Stewart says, “Oh, just wandering.” And look where it got him. Occasionally leaving things with my mother in the hills. Visiting her for a while, two old women speaking of the different centuries they've lived in. The occasional job or performance. Money never seeming to be a problem; can't say where I picked up that survival technique. A lucky inheritance and an apartment in Paris I still call a garage. A base, a bed, a place to lean. Is that what keeps me from complete craziness? Did my parents see the potential and put me through the fast survival program: money sense, gardening, music lessons, languages. I am more process than product. “Oh for sure,” as Arlene says. How'd she do it? Never been anywhere and she's rock-solid. Could I have ever remained home? No, I was born to wander. And how did she and I come to be in Tokyo? And me with all these languages and about all of a hundred words in this one. But I don't think Tokyo quite matches up to my madness. It's mad but it's not me. And that's how it is.

***

–
Isn't that great O-bon sequence from
Sans Soleil
taken here?

–
Is it? I'm not so sure.

–
Could be Anytown, Japan.

–
“The beat beat beat of the
taiko
…”

–
Golden Globes.

–
??

–
Don't you remember, that sumo wrestler and the busty naked woman wrestling?

–
What, on TV?

–
No, they were this display on top of, I don't know, maybe it was a pachinko place, and they went round and round like on a music box, but it was the roof of a building, and you could see it from the train. I don't know why they took it away.

–
That's like the Statue of Liberty on top of the New York love hotel in Kichijoji; you'd actually see train passengers do a double take as they saw it all lit up as the train zoomed by.

–
I don't think the Statue of liberty is at all like a sumo wrestler and a naked lady.

–
I'm not so sure.

–
No, Roberta, I mean in that they were both on the tops of buildings, they could be seen from trains, and now they're gone.

–
But the Statue of Liberty isn't gone. I saw it last week.

–
Did you go in?

–
No.

–
Alone again.

–
No, you're right in that neither can be seen anymore – some new buildings in Kichijoji have gone up, so it's been obscured, you can't see the statue anymore – or from the train, at least.

–
So, why'd they take away the naked lady?

–
I don't know. It was more fun than, than what, pornographic, I suppose.

–
Yeah, I suppose someone got uppity.

–
But Takadanobaba is sort of pornographic, isn't it?

–
Is it? It's a student area.

–
Well, they got crazy glands.

–
Yeah, but why call it pornographic? It's just a hard working class area that happens also to have a university in it.

–
It's not exactly non-descript, but it's got some color.

–
Right, it's where it's headed along the Yamanote where the porno begins.

–
Mejiro pornographic?

–
Well, let's say it skips a beat and then.

–
Hmm, maybe.

–
Doesn't Araki have his studio around here?

–
So why do the Waseda guy students have uniforms, but the girls don't?

–
Good question.

–
Anybody got a good answer?

–
Wait a minute, Mejiro is more nondescript than porno.

–
Oh, but it also has its elegant moments.

–
Isn't that where you saw Dominique Sanda?

–
You saw Sanda? You never told me.

–
You're right, where was it, Chinzanso?

–
That's not really Mejiro.

–
Well, I thought it was.

–
You saw Sanda? What was she doing?

–
Posing. Being beautiful.

–
Nothing pornographic about the place, then.

–
Not in your mind, perhaps.

***

Tortured, twisting Tokio, Kazuko ponders, we pray for you – but at what shrine?

***

At about eight that evening, work finished for the day, Kaoru joined a small group of coworkers for a typical evening out. That is to say, drink, eat, drink, talk, drink. The first place they went to was the nearby hostess bar his company frequently used to entertain clients. There they snacked on dried fish, nuts, and rice crackers, while drinking a few very expensive beers, as well as some Suntory whisky. (Kaoru had only had imported whisky once in his life, and it did not suit him. Too good, he thought.) While putting in a comment now and then to the conversation – the current job, the clients they had to deal with – he was more interested in observing the hostesses as they seemed to take shifts in their movement from table to table. His group was turn and turn about visited by an obvious novice to the game. Slender, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, she had already learned how to make light talk, light cigarettes, keep the men drinking – thus increasing the tab – and meanwhile pouring her own tea, disguised as whisky. Too thin for Kaoru, he politely but indifferently kept her busy hands at bay. It was the foreign woman who kept his attention. But she was in demand from the five or six tables of businessmen, and so she had little chance to converse with Kaoru and his friends. Her short skirt, low décolletage over what looked like large breasts, set his imagination afire. During the seven or eight times she sat next to or near him he was able to learn that she was studying anthropology at Tokyo University, and planning to study the folklore of Akita prefecture. While he could have maintained a conversation with her in English, she insisted on speaking Japanese with him, even tracing various
kanji
on his palm from time to time. It was exasperating. She knew that his view of her thighs and breasts would keep him in thrall to her, while at the same time he could only gaze – and converse. A third hostess was somewhat older, perhaps in her late twenties. She was adroit at all the hostess's arts, from cigarettes and drinks again, and especially to saying nothing while seeming to say everything – the promise of a night. A night, he knew, that would come to nothing. This woman was for him the best of all; while not young, she did have the figure he craved. Too, she knew when to be quiet, or better, when only to sigh and nod assent. Compliance was what he wanted. No one who would talk back to him, no jabber. He missed his wife back in Takasaki as much as he felt indifferent toward her. And she? No, he decided, only loathing. She had his steady income, their children. Sex had never interested her – or so he had convinced himself. While not an arranged marriage, it had come to be so, merely an arrangement between them to save their families' faces. Enough of that. Kaoru however had never had the nerve to pursue his sexual inclinations. An occasional flirtation, perhaps, but nothing ever beyond that. He had always hoped that somehow the woman – any woman; this hostess here – would make the overture, invite him for a private drink … and then the night. But no one ever had. He wondered why: I'm not bad looking, I present no risks, I may not be a great conversationalist, nor love-maker, but I am, well, steady, dependable, upright. Surely those qualities are attractive to some sexy women. (Yes they were – to his wife back in Gunma Prefecture.)

After a couple of hours, one of his colleagues suggested they move on to the next place, this being a
yakitori-ya
near Shimbashi. There they could converse more freely about the things that really concerned them: baseball, the office girls, the slow service at the local post office. Besides the
yakitori
, they ate ice-cold tofu, some fried chicken, a variety of vegetables and roots and radishes, and finally green tea over rice.
Saké
was the drink of choice, with an occasional beer. A group of young people was at the next table. They too were eating and drinking the same, but they seemed so much more lively. No displays of affection, but such zest in their gestures. Kaoru's fantasy mechanism began to run at full speed. He imagined the young men – so self-confident – easily taking the girls home, and then their sexual acts. His vision – he was easily half-drunk by now – kept blurring between sights of the young women – in t-shirts and slacks, sweat-shirts or short leather jackets – as actresses in the porno movies he occasionally rented from his local shop, going home with pairs of boys, sucking their cocks submissively, happily, them spraying their sperm on the girls' hair – and the actual women in front of him, going home with only one of the boys each, making some goodnight tea, watching television or reading a comic, and then going to bed, and at most, simply masturbating or fellating him because she was having her period, or he was drunk, or simply they were both too tired to even undress.