Harajuku Sunday
Page 20
The countryside is slower. The salary measured out in differences of two point five or three thousand even would make little difference in final outcomes; the quiet girl ends up accumulating a small fortune; the one trying to go to advanced international studies comes back in the end and hides out of unnecessary shame.
POST SCRIPT
Why call me at 4am, ringing the phones in turn, until I grunted, and stumbled out of bed to pick up a buzzing phone. Afterwards I couldn't fall back asleep and lay there with eyes pointed at the ceiling I couldn't see, working on the next draft, until sleep finally did come again, to wake up to a Japan of 6:30am, a February, a stillness. In the pre-dawn twilight what I remembered was my arm sweeping open the window curtain in the Shibuya hotel, the sudden motion catching the eye of a girl in a building across: the strung telephone wires, and how the architecture of that particular building, nested gray ferro-concrete boxes looking modern and shabby at once, framed both the window and her for that instant. Tokyo. And do you remember the first day in Frankfurt? When we walked into the hotel room on a high floor, the television was going, making me think we had been given a room that had already been assigned. But afterwards what I felt was the cold sterility of the place: the blueness of the light which made things seem clearer and harder and people more vague. Light flashing across wire-framed glasses, trains with plastics in primary colors, the smells of unfamiliar cleaning products, and brightly-lit shelves of explicit foreign language magazines. The streets and public trams had been clean and orderly. I walked forward heedless and put our luggage on the bed.
This feeling, this dissolution of progressing thought, this fugue, this drowsiness, this letting-go: it exists only in motion and change; it is a truth found only in transit. Some quoted philosopher undoubtedly said that we invent ourselves as travelers. But to go back further into memory, it is possible that childhood itself or even the heavy red lidlessness of prenatal existence where we sway to the rhythm of our mother's stride and know of nothing else is just this also. The elderly and the young, we can see, rock back and forth. Long car trips on highways thus simulate this blue timelessness, until, finally, our destination, the city, rises up out of the haze. And in that impossibility, that airlessness is the only place we can find ourselves, the only now and I.
Years have passed since those days; by my side now sleeps Ace, who I have dragged out to the north country, but who still doesn't get it; who still doesn't see the way the light glitters on the sea the train from Akita to Kanazawa. In pre-dawn early morning, she is cocooned in the rolled-out bedding we sleep in on tatami floors, her small blonde Englishness a foil to the banality of so much time. I feel the wind gust in through cracks in the ancient dark wood timbers, I hear the sea roar in ceaselessly.
Who knows what it means? From childless loins, I achieve no immortality. Where is it going? I have no answer; have found no further point or agenda. They find her mannerisms charming; everyone says she's an ideal wife. Years have brought back stories: Melanie a forgotten artist disappearing into Taos. Julian, the one hit wonder. Concept act falling into the scrolls of history.
And yet......and yet it still feels all strangely otherworldly; a life not quite of this time. Tucker was not the subversive we thought him to be, and Gerry has done well in later years. Did Shan the Waseda scholarship boy die? He may have simply disappeared. Gustav still makes films, though the pranksters are a bit more aggressive now, hard-edged and political. Takashi still working and hanging out exclusively with foreigners; Herrera abandoning art to get into sailing.
Redd is a nobody at a nobody job. Liam went back and forth; I think still in Japan. LeFauve pere a minor political figure. Shibuya, you know, was okay; he was okay. No one, I know, will recall that place down the T-intersection from Roppongi; all the old places are gone. We had gone to Sapporo, actually; its snowbound majesties resound. And driving through a half-forgotten Japanese town, I had known the cross-over of centuries; I had known these deserted streets, these covered arcades that seemed anything but the decade we lived in behind a black-tinted motorcycle mask, years before the flood.
Afterwards, of course, nothing could be the same. The cataclysm, so profoundly troubling, so absolutely without cause, invited the destruction of all previous knowledge. And, immature, weak, we accepted the bargain; we got up and left the movie theatre though there was no other place to go. Moving forward, the filaments came forward; they extended their microphones and cameras like the probisci of insects, asking what we thought, and we affected indifference, we wore a mask and made banal responses. I never knew Julian. I never got to know Melanie. But they were part of the gang. And everything that followed, all those consequences like dominoes falling, happened exactly as they did...
“Where does it come from, evil?”
I don't know.
“How do we stop it? How can we make sure this can never happen again...”
We can't. Walking through the corridors of Aoyama dormitory, the radios were blaring.
Maybe Julian's film was right. The midnight ascent to the corridors of power: the revenge shot against the senior government officials who think they are beyond the force of law itself. The mast from the sailing boat would rise; the city would be distantly seen from the bay, and everything would be salt-water, fluttering winds. Blinded by sun, I could not see any pattern in the pure digital static that ensued, the crowd moving, the smell in the air, the taste in one's mouth. I loved Hisako. Or no, I didn't. It was a television show playing out before my eyes. She was a drug-crazed vision or a perfect maiden of northern Japan. I was Julian or I was Jim. This was allegory, or all purely naturalistic…but now. 6:30am, south of Akita, the shore still ceaselessly rolling. Writing in one's head a voice that never ceases. Waking from a half-forgotten dream, there is only a sensation of illusion and elusive just-of-the-verge-of recall. It's cold. The wind comes in from cracks and ill-fitting joints. Wisdom coming, as always, too late, revealed that doing nothing was the best possible choice.
All possible sources of resentment dissolved into nothingness in the end, swept away forever. My efforts came to naught. None of this really happened except in film. Yet something endured, merely for the sake of endurance, to record, to write down, to hope others would learn from the mistakes made. In this possible nothingness upon nothingness the waves still roll in. Farmers’ wives and fishermen’s daughters; the poverty that went unremarked ‘til now. Nothing was accumulated and lack of offspring was a blessing. And yet the wind feels like something; it drafts in, it asks no quarter. Cold, unforgiving: a recollection. I had forgotten something, yes; I had missed the main chance. Otherworldly, implacable, waiting still for full and compete consummation, a girl’s voice from beyond, something that I