Harajuku Sunday

by S. Michael Choi

  "Send me shooting into that murky stream." It calls me yet again, and so I plunge.

  Beginnings: on a clear cold September day a 747 plunges out of the leaden sky and lands at a rice-paddy airport. Everything is hushed and controlled: the people walk about with robotic precision, bowing in perfect servility. One is deeply impressed. The red carpet is brought out; the dignitaries, now local, make their speeches which we puzzle over, and do not know what to expect. Although everyone's experience is the same, everyone's situation is different. Or so they say. Actually it's with identical puzzlement that manic 72 hours pass, yet for a few individuals our faces are met with some amount of trepidation. We're known: our pictures posted on the Internet, the reputation of our six-week long battle with the anonymous authorities in Japan well-established. Yet engrossed in our own contests of will, we believe in the philosophy: "the tiger has been mounted; now ride it all the way through." This philosophy is later proven incorrect, but we don't know this yet. I don't know about the importance of a fourteen hour flight with a person whispering in your ear their anxieties. A soldier charged with cowardice in Iraq reported a similar factor to be of major importance. I do know that the inchoate anger is natural: it's the stuff of aggression and mammoth-chasing for the tribal good. We citizens of the empires idolize this quality, this masculinity. We would have been great officers in Roman times, and put many barbarians to the blade. But here in queasy silence and anonymous replies, the struggle between foreigner and foreigner takes on an edge of violence and genuine hatred we cannot direct towards our masters. Entire friendships are closed off, at minimum; the banal instincts of killing are given throttled-channel, and blood is almost always almost shed, (yawn).

  This relationship does not obtain with our cousins, the Japanese. Indeed, plunging into full love with one of them can occur in minutes, once you have accepted that you will live and sleep with somebody with whom you cannot speak. So, on that February when we first met, there were no need for needful questions: we simply began. I remember it well: the morning spent exploring the shopping palaces, the fine Japanese refinement of the American institution. Yukiko apparently did not get my text, or she kept me at the useful distance she preferred. I was half an hour early in any case; Hisa came over and stood next to and under me. I declined to budge. Through a hand gesture and the opening of her middle-school schoolbag to reveal condoms and cash, she in broad light proposed a financial exchange. I was mistrustful, of course, in ten minutes we were leaving together. She knew the way. In Yokohama's sleazy red-light district, certain proprietors made it their business not to know their clientele's names. The places were cheap: 4000 yen for two hours, and like everything else in Japan, cleaner that you could ever imagine.

  Did I have problems with performance that first time? Of course: she was only my second girl. But yet I completed the act, thinking of Alisa. She was businesslike, standoffish, and professional. She observed without emotion as I stared with hunger upon her body. She performed her tasks of ablution as if trained. And she did, upon request, leave her cell phone number, and I met her again the following weekend.

  The second time, and the third, fourth, fifth, and twelfth, were easier. Indeed, by occasion six, I had lost any sort of inhibitions, and gone over to the offense. I pinned her arms down as Alisa had liked; I fucked her without mercy. She was surprised at first, made some squealing noise, and then surrendered. It was an act of pillage and rape, one young man of a tribe having his way with the discarded female of another who was slowly dying of starvation. I bought her uniforms and came onto them. I came onto her hair and shot myself over her face. I tied her up and left her there while I went out for a smoke. I returned, recharged, inflicted violence upon her, and entered her yielding flesh again. She was pathetic; my heart thrilled.

  Most of the time, though, I let things develop in their languid way, and then I became her weekend companion. She had no more need for endless new toys since I kept her company during what used to be her dark hours. We watched videos together; I introduced her to Bjork and Smashing Pumpkins. How many people can you sit with for two hours listening to one song on repeat play? In those hours we were just orphans of the storm. Literally, also: both of our fathers were dead in childhood. Her only advantage on me, eight years her senior and her utmost social and academic superior, was the total control over life and death she held because she was always ready, on any day or hour, to leave existence. And when an individual reaches this stage, then you do whatever she fundamentally asks, because you enjoy her company, because you are lonely, and because death is final. So yes, I, too, am complicit, for insofar as I have a free will, I chose that path, time and again, bought the ticket, made the journey, rang that doorbell. I slid with her, except to the end, and that is not even certainly certain to not be not yet. I paid for her sincerity with my own, and put my life on the counter in exchange for hers.

  A clear cool autumn day, so sunshiny one is half-blinded; so crisp, one pulls one's windbreaker closer around one. The brilliant light of an autumn sky with a 60s temperature crisp but not cold. Coming down the street overpass stairs near our apartment, the one built in the 1970s, slightly cheap architecture, she catches me by surprise. In that moment she is somehow vulnerable yet confident: a smile is just about to erupt across her face, but in that half-second before she sees me the emotion is unmistakably of little girl lost.

  -Ritchie! Ritchie! Ritchie-kun!

  It is not a question of perfect balance or an idealized form; it is the knowledge that things are transient, that this beautifully perfectlly well-made girl is in love but that garish exaggeration of details or explicit self-expression is unthinkable. Everything is just on the cusp.

  -So, any information on the guy?

  -He's a senior official at the Ministry of Finance. Married, two kids.

  -Jun SHIBUYA, reads out Hisako from a screen. Okay, Ministry of Finance, 38 wow, looks so much younger. Todai, married, two kids, older one a girl fourteen, son ten. Department chief. We did it! We did it!

  Details across a blue LCD computer screen; lines of data marching upward as the cursor scrolls down. We get to work.

  -Oh, pardon me sir, how rude of me. This is yours, though, maybe? Maybe ten million? Phone number is in there.

  A deliberate bump on a Tokyo street.

  -Do you think he lost it or something?

  -What is taking so long?

  -Freakin' annoying!

  -Maybe we didn't write the email correctly?

  -Maybe it's the wrong guy?

  -Maybe he needs time to get the money?

  You can do the craziest things and still feel utterly banal; we watch television; we watch the clouds skidding across the sky; birds wheeling in formation outside a coffeeshop on a cold crisp day.

  -Ah forget about it. If he doesn't answer in two weeks, we'll repeat the drop-off.

  But silence doesn't mean inactivity. It's us who are burned; there's been a flurry of activity, we just didn't see it--until all of a sudden we see it.

  (Snow, imaginary snow, falls from the Tokyo sky. Everybody is walking about oblivious; it is amazing they do not see the ash and bone.)

  This is not a drug moment of cohesion, the coherent fundamental gestalt suddenly appearing to one in no special moment after so many samplings of detail. Rather, what is going on is a video still, an artificial suspension of the flow of time to mark the absolute peak of things inherent in the moment before complete reversal. In a still-frame frozen time moment, a young male sitting on the tatami leaning over, a girl at her computer, and all the apartment that surrounds them, perfect, motionless, unmoving time, even if such a thing is impossible in real life, the killers poised right outside the door, and one can almost imagine the projector whirring, the film flapping because a splice has come undone and a single frame is stuck in picture. There are parallels here; metaphors; metonymy, but what is key is not literary trick but memory in place, corrosion of time. In the bureau in the girl's room, there is a vanity with s
cattered cosmetics, paper shoeboxes, clothes strewn about, a wall decoration of a giant lotus, a sculpture of a Buddha, and heaps and heaps of fashion magazines, literally hundreds and hundreds of copies of Cawaii and Popteen, dating back to god knows when, dog-eared and much folded over. In the beginning, her possessions consisted of less; a temporary lived in place in the original Yokohama flat that seemed “just temporary moved-in to.” Here in Ginza, the decor of our new place is somehow that of a dusky rose, with old patterned blanket sheets and inherited furniture that that reflects the taste of a long gone grandmother, an amalgamation of the original flat, new possessions acquired from the interstitial period, new Western tastes. An old carpet. Yet she is unconscious of the dissonance, her head facing the computer screen and blued with the CRT light, she is concentrating intently on what is a business matter.

  This is Ginza, the richest part of Tokyo. We ended up here. How do two youngsters live there? It is the question that hangs in the minds of many of the fellow apartment dwellers, but decorum prevents coinhabitants any direct inquiries, the stern faces masks as they trundle into the elevator every morning to go off to their jobs at the Ministries or the banks. It is happiness of a sorts, divorced as it from any notion of progress, change, or evolution. Hundreds of thousands of people at least wanted to live in this place; perhaps hundreds of thousands were not willing to do the things required or to wait the lifetimes of patience involved; in addition to temporary literary conceits, the people inside are also timeless, mindless of the future, of consequences, that they are living in existential despair. The precarious balance is so infinitesimally small in duration, even to look at it is to disturb the balance and miss the point. Maybe it didn't. Say that the girl is defined by her love of pop fashion culture ever so occasionally dipping into French haute couture (foreign influence? Self-driven? East meets West? A progression of taste?). Say the boy is foreign, bleached brown hair hanging loosely over his forehead in locks, some sort of Mediterranean European, too thin to be American, he looks almost Japanese. DVDs are strewn across the room, most pirated, but the surrender to this lifestyle evident in even more cheap metropolitan youth fashions, a half-assed clash of cultures, an unsettled youthful ferment of thousands of things but no one thing, undeveloped. The kitchen shows signs of being used, persistent grease stains the boy leaves on the wooden in-set counters that the girl decries, but there are also piles of delivered food, luxury, a tiny alcove, every square foot of cabinet space stuffed with plates, cutlery, dry food. Samsung microwave, Mitsubishi range-unit, toaster, set of Porsche knives, absolutely packed cabinets of Italian pasta, imported olives. The square footage is necessarily small, but the land location is so utterly perfect because it is the innermost of many concentric circles. Thousands wish to live here, one can. The rice mats are sweet to the smell; the walls are clean and well-kept, and the building is a rare architectural gem in a block that verges from the pre-war stone to the modern forgettable. Prewar. Tokyo, the center of everything. Tokyo, where dreams died. Tokyo, where all the rest could be forgotten, a new self emerging from the old.

  The corridor door opens to a small entrance hall; this is always unnaturally hot without explanation (hot water pipes were routed nearby). Two more brown wooden doors open to a dining room dominated by a white-tile table that was not quite a perfect fit for the room, which being centrally located, open to the two bedrooms and the kitchen. This being a re-modeled building affecting 'Western' touches, two white columns open to the second bedroom, which was originally a living room but now the boy's part of the apartment and two steps down, [only in some past decade would they waste space so extravagantly as this], today including a more measured collection of items, a television, a DVD player, bookshelves of DVDs, a futon, a laptop, and very low warmed table. Piles of paperbacks and an own collection of laundry hampers and clothes outfits. Without its own closet, wooden furniture not quite up to the task are pressed into service, but the room retains a sense of its original purpose, made up for by the fact that the small balcony was accessible from this room. Wooden parquet floors covered by expensive rugs. Casement windows completed the 'pre-war' feel; this gave the sense of 1920s elegance so lacking in modern apartment design. The rug is of a Persian design; the overall decade balance is 70s pushing back to pre-war pre-war.

  Perhaps the faint sound of a distant ambulance is caught in this frozen moment. (Is the sound of sound in one moment of time a continuing buzz or total silence?) Two closets open out from the main room; one the 'fish' closet for a mysterious smell that is never quite strong enough to attach itself to the clothes; the other the 'security' closet, with double bolt-locks, an aftermath of the previous inhabitant, an Eastern European diplomat.

  From the scuba fins representing a few desultory attempts at that hobby, to the life jacket that was actually used for a few Tokyo Bay excursions, to paintings and tapestries and expensive Oriental rugs and rice mats assembled in the motley yet consistent fashion ensuing from random acquisition but ready willingness to discard, syncretism of East and West, the DVD collection, the plants that were watered exclusively by the girl, history, family lineage, and social and economic connections to the city at large were present, and as a culmination of so many desires, some jumble is inevitable. Histories radiate from so many objects, yet defy quick capture of things. On substructures new structures are built; on those structures, yet new superstructures arise. So it is here, where a crystal Swarovski dish is once used as a puppy's drinking water dish. Discarded golfclubs suggest a half-pursued hobby. The clash of cultures and histories is integral; without some reference to a fold-away futon, a couch covered in sheets inherited from childhood, these again are pointless to the main line sequence.

  In all the manifest unfairness of the world, hundreds of millions lived without even a ghost of a chance of ever living here. If we are defined by our domiciles, if we say we come from a place and of a place, that apartment defined a section of life, a half-flicker of a flame that blew out faster than can be said and would in other hands be the foundation for an entire understanding of man. So much useless money was spent; human potential was not developed, and a ready supply of cash and the little medallions and tokens of frivolous purchases are like useless trinkets, tokens of a social structure seemingly impossible to penetrate for reasons of provenance. Outside the door the assassins crouch. In a split second, the assault, swift, complete, devastating, indefensible will begin. Sixteen million dollar apartments. Either by itself is unremarkable.

  VIII.

  The third year together I propose to Hisako that we go up north and what is motivating this is a sort of stupidity, a naïve, immature, childish view of the world that entails such ideas as “moral redemption” and “reform.”

  "Look why don't we go north, escape this city, start something up there."

  Hisako knits her brows, looks cross and thinks it's a stupid idea, but things are listless, things are restless, and this idea is a fixation of mind; under such singularity of purpose, driftlessness cannot resist. Driven by a sense of proportion and childhood values; a somehow clear distinction between right and wrong.

  -There is nothing up there. Why do you think I left?

  “I don't know. It's just that we have to try something new; something about the way things are is wrong.”

  Winter's first snowflakes are falling when we pack up a white kei car in a parking lot of gravel near Ueno, brown-cartons of so many useless possessions, a completely filled vehicle, snowflakes so abnormally large. In that moment before our big move, there is the expectation heavy and hanging in the air of a great responsibility and a time of trial ahead. In the passenger seat, Hisako sits, eighteen, checking her lipstick with her careless black hair tossed idly back behind her ear. I get into the car; I start it. Hours of a national route 1 snow-bound and countryside exerting itself finally gives way by evening to a dusty valleytown forgotten by time. It doesn't take long to find the apartment arranged weeks before by telephone; the first impression is of disappo
intment, a slapboard shack of four stories, on the second of which we have one railroad flat.

  That night, I take a walk around the neighborhood to get my bearings. In this dark, dark utterly silent night there is just wasteland. Even blasted earth would in some ways been more desirable, if only for the interruption of pitch darkness. The skies had cleared by the time we reached the place and gotten the key from the superannuated landlord, revealing a night sky that was somehow completely inky blank. Kitakata: a first impression, inky nothingness.

  In the first night's darkness, electricity not even hooked up yet, we pile up together under a wool blanket and the world seems entirely still. Here is a gravel parking lot to match the one in the city we have left; here is a town set in a valley that the traditional character of the people had left untouched by the national railroad, leaving things unchanged since that dusty day in the 15th century when the town had been founded. The next town over got the railroad; it developed into a fair-sized city. Kitakata remained terraced farming plantations and small. It was one valley, the opening end of which had a rusting metal broadcast tower, pod-shaped and oddly oblong as a sole concession to modernity. Our apartment is located about a third of the way deep into the valley, right at the meridians of power-lines and mountainside stream, a deep and tremulous location. That earth throbs that very night, the deep and buried shock too deep to send dishes crashing to the floor; we awake and stir, ascertain no imminent peril, and then sleep again, without dream.