Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries (12 page)

We listen to our thirty-three-minute opus, which in all honesty really starts to drag after the first five minutes. As the music continues, Nabe and Kawano have a discussion in Japanese, their heads nodding and brows furrowed as if they’re talking about something very grim, like Japan’s strained relationship with China. Then their faces brighten into toothy smiles as if they’ve just figured out how to fix it.

“Tim-san,” Nabe says, “you wanna be a band?”

“Yeah,” I say, flushed and feeling as if I’ve just been asked to the prom. “We should give it a try.”

Nabe and Kawano further discuss China and then move on to the demilitarized zone of the Koreas. Then Kawano smiles and nods his head again, clearly having solved the problem of how to deal with Kim Jong-Il. He tries to say something in English to me.

“We…in…band. I…
…friend…have…girlfriend. She work…
…live house…”

I nod and smile, having just gotten to the bottom of the West Bank issue, and consider Kawano’s words. What do they mean, exactly?

“Kawano-san has a friend,” Nabe explains. “He knows guy who has friend who have girlfriend who work at live house. He say maybe she can help us get gig there.”

It sounds so complex, but we are all so full of enthusiasm that the odds don’t matter.

And after a number of beers, we come up with a name, inspired by our love of the Absurdists, our passion for the free-form ideals of the Beats, and most importantly the bilingual magazine that is sitting on Nabe’s floor. Our name: Thighbone Trumpet Ikiru, which translates roughly to, um, Thighbone Trumpet Living. (Better not to translate, I think.) Now, what should our first album be called, and what will I wear on the CD sleeve?

The next week we get together at the same practice studio in Koenji to rock the roof off the fucking place. We try to play the song we recorded the week before, but none of us can really remember it, so we just jam for a while, taking a journey through a rock and roll wonderland, traveling to the ends of the sonic universe, riding the gargantuan waves of human drama and emotion one can only experience when beating things with a wooden stick or screaming an imaginary language into a microphone.

As I sit at the drums, pounding away and imagining my image plastered on teenage girls’ rooms across Japan, I start writing our rock bio in my head, from our humble beginnings at a Koenji practice space to headlining at civic centers across the country. I have our band member personalities all figured out. Nabe will be the cerebral one, the real musical backbone of the band. In interviews, he will be soft-spoken, his words carefully chosen. The girls will really go for his smoldering, reserved sexuality. And he will, naturally, really go for the girls. Kawano will be the eccentric lead guy who will be just as likely to play the Burmese flute as strum a guitar and who will lie his way through interviews, saying he was raised by she-wolves on the northern tip of Hokkaido, where he lived until he was eighteen when he went south to Tokyo to study mapmaking. And I will be the big, weird, foreigner guy who in interviews always comes out with controversial sound bites that will fascinate and electrify the Japanese tabloids, statements like, “Any person who has bought an Alanis Morrissette album should be completely stripped of their human rights. Period.”

One day after completing our first national tour, during which we will have played in front of sold-out crowds from Fukuoka to Sapporo, we will come back to Tokyo a full-on phenomenon, and when asked about our early days in television interviews, I will explain playfully in a British accent, “It was quite lovely, actually, the way it all came about. I’d done something bloody stupid and left my viola bow at home, so Nabe, silly old tart that he is, suggested I pop behind the drums and, sort of, you know, give it a go…”

The next record will be moodier, with more keyboards and guest appearances by Lou Reed and Chrissie Hynde on backing vocals, Stevie Nicks on timpani, Siouxsie Sioux on eyeliner, and David Lee Roth on spandex. There will also be a massive viola solo that I will perform wearing only a sweater vest and some boxer briefs. We’ll branch out into different forms of music, ignoring the record company’s preferred pigeonhole for us and following up a platinum-selling ska disc with a brassy show tunes record. Then, when we start laying down tracks for our flamenco-flavored German rock opera…

“Tim-san!” Nabe says, waving his arms at me. He and Kawano are starting to unplug their guitars and pack them up.

“Time is over. We must to leave.”

Even though I leave my viola in its case during my jam sessions with the Ikiru boys, I don’t forsake it altogether. Under the influence of Thighbone Trumpet Ikiru, my practices with Toru become a little more spirited. My playing is less measured, I’ve developed a certain swagger (if a viola player can be said to have swagger), and I’ve begun to play like a man unafraid to make mistakes and let what happens happen. Even if it sounds like a bird being strangled by a piano wire. Toru appreciates my enthusiasm, though he really wishes I could play the damn third movement without getting to the end of the piece before he does. What he doesn’t know is that the reason I’m playing so fast is because I’m trying to resist the urge to swing my bow and hit something, like this stack of magazines or that potted plant or the grand piano over there. I’ve got drum fever in me, and like the Hulk in Bill Bixby or the gay in Tom Cruise, it’s desperate to get out.

For the next month, the three of us—Nabe, Kawano, and I—become a kind of posse, going around town together after rehearsals, hanging out at rock shows, drinking a lot, and passing out in Nabe’s room. We have nothing in common but a love of music, Beat Takeshi movies, and Kirin Ichiban beer. And yakitori. But it is a bond strong enough to hold us together at least through each weekend. I never ask much about Nabe or Kawano-san’s personal lives, and they remain ignorant of my history of manic pole-smoking, but these gaps in our awareness of each other’s lives create a healthy tension that feeds our music. Or something. That’s how I explain it to myself, at least.

It does start to bother me a little that, though we’ve been rehearsing for weeks now, we haven’t written a proper song yet. And we do have a tendency to practice for three hours, record our sessions, go back to Nabe’s place with a bunch of beers, and listen to what we’d recorded without gleaning anything more from it than that we really should start to think about adding a trombone somewhere. Sure, Kawano’s psychotic singing style has started to grate, and yeah, maybe Nabe’s guitar playing could use a little variation. But the drumming is perfect. And the backbone of any band is its drummer. Just ask Ringo Starr.

One night we go to a used bookstore/clothing boutique in Kichijyoji, west of Koenji, where Yu, the bassist from the very first music session who is a sort of punk rock performance artist who also dabbles in apocalyptic woodblock prints and illustrations, is holding court. In a small, unfurnished room off to the side of the main merchandise area, Yu kicks her drum machine on and begins maniacally strumming her guitar strings, creating a cacophony of blistering noise that she then hollers on top of. This is no verse-chorus-verse arrangement. It is more scream-strum-stomp-kick the wall-scream. While it isn’t something I would choose to listen to while, say, house cleaning or curling my hair, her performance is brilliant as pure spectacle. The ten or so people in the audience watch with rapt attention as she takes one of her guitars and starts beating it against the drum machine, shutting it off. She then moves on to the wall and the floor, smashing that naughty guitar until it’s a gangly mess, all the while screaming into the microphone, which she is holding like a phone between her head and shoulder. All the while, a tall, lanky guy dressed in black with an art house goatee and librarian glasses sits on a stool off to the side quietly strumming a mandolin with his eyes closed. At one point, as Yu is slamming her guitar against the wall, he answers his cell phone and talks for a few minutes.

When Yu is satisfied that she’s proven her point, she picks up another guitar, which is wrapped in a leather jacket and fastened with a black electrical cord, unwraps it, kicks the drum machine back on, barks three times, and starts over.

I take a break and walk around, checking out the merchandise. There’s a lot of local art, zines, self-released CDs, and photographs, plus locally made clothing, shoes, hats, scarves, and washi paper. I pick up a few things that look interesting—a yellow sticker with a radiation symbol on it that says “BIG DRUNK PIG” and a homemade manga graphic novel with a picture of a young guy on a subway reading the newspaper dressed only in tight underwear—pay, and make it back to the other room just in time to see Yu commence the destruction of some of her own giant woodblock prints.

“Damn, I would have bought that one,” I think as she jumps repeatedly on top of a print depicting two lovers making out in front of a towering inferno and then picks it up and throws it out the window.

So much destruction. A metaphor for something. But what? Is it a symbolic breaking out of the box that Japanese society has put her in as a woman with an asymmetrical haircut? A tirade against the sociocultural stoicism she sees around her? A bold, tragic statement on the ephemeral nature of art? Is she just a good old-fashioned psychotic deconstructionist? What?

The next week I have to cancel a practice at the last minute, and then the week after Kawano is a no-show. I don’t hear from Nabe about when the next practice is. I e-mail and call him several times, but he never gets back in contact with me. He has disappeared.

About a month later I run into Kawano-san at the Tsutaya video shop in Shinjuku where he appears to now be working. He is dressed in the standard blue Tsutaya collared T-shirt and carrying a stack of videos, on the top of which I see
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
We have a very difficult discussion, me speaking in my broken Japanese, him in his broken English and, I think, bits of his imaginary language:

“Why do we not meet anymore for play our song?” I ask in Japanese.

“
You no can tell…we don’t have never think to be indygooten,” is his mysterious multilingual reply.

“Ummmm. Yeah, so Nabe did not to call me very much,” I say, again in Japanese, trying to keep the conversation monolingual.

“
playing guitar
…cannot to be showing faces to phsnraaaanksu…”