That evening, Richard and Tadusu attended a performance of the Black Tent Theater Group in Gifu, a suburb of Osaka, on the bank of the Nagara River, where ukai (cormorant fishing) had enjoyed an unbroken thirteen-hundred-year history. The birds are controlled, several at a time, by handlers manipulating long leashes that prevent them from swallowing the salmonid aju they caught. Brautigan watched the fishermen on their boats in the river, blazing fire-baskets dangling over the bows. He saw fish rising and thought of the Yellowstone and the trout awaiting him when he returned to Montana in the summer.
Later that night, something grotesque and unpleasant occurred between Richard and Tadusu. The next day, they returned to Tokyo together on the bullet train from Nagoya, Japan’s fourth-largest city. Speeding through the Japanese landscape at 120 miles per hour, Brautigan, still drunk from the night before, ranted and raved about the events of the previous evening. He blamed all the ills in the world on his new friend, telling Tadusu to consider him dead. Richard took Tadusu’s hand, saying, “My flesh is cold to you. Dead.”
Tagawa’s eyes filled with sadness. Brautigan forbade him to read one of his books again, knowing how much he loved them. By the time the train reached Tokyo Station, Richard’s unwarranted anger had subsided. He took Tadusu’s hand again, saying, “I’m alive for you. The warmth has returned to my flesh.” Back in his room at the Keio Plaza that night, Brautigan phoned Tagawa. “Are you fine?” Tadusu said.
“Yes, I am fine,” Richard replied.
The next day, Brautigan awoke at 4:45 am, ate an early breakfast, and recorded the entire episode in a long poem, “Lazarus on the Bullet Train.” First light revealed another cloudy morning in Tokyo. A little before eight, he wrote a brief letter to Don Carpenter, addressing the envelope first, one of his old habits. Richard predicted he would have a long day and stay up all night. “I love Tokyo at night.”
Kazuko Fujimoto had had a serious abdominal operation six days before. On the evening of the ninth, Brautigan went to the Toho School of Medicine Hospital to see his recuperating translator. David Goodman accompanied him. “I don’t think he would have been able to get to the hospital on his own,” Fujimoto speculated. Richard watched Kazuko eat her dinner. This made him feel sad. She seemed so tired. Fujimoto remembered Brautigan as being very quiet and sweet. “I don’t think he said any jokes,” she recalled. “Usually he said some jokes and he is the one who is the most amused.” Richard’s discomfort inspired his poem “Visiting a Friend at the Hospital.”
Curt Gentry had been wrong about Brautigan’s willingness to engage with prominent Japanese intellectuals and misjudged his friend’s interest in traveling beyond the municipal boundaries of Tokyo. Richard, for his part, never brought Curt to The Cradle, his newfound hangout where he met local poets and writers. Brautigan fell back on his long-standing habit of compartmentalizing his friends. The Cradle was private territory he would not share with Gentry. Let his old friend think the Café Cardinale remained his favored Tokyo stomping ground. Curt and Gail left Japan in late May. Early in June, they traveled to Hawaii. On the thirteenth, Gentry celebrated his forty-fifth birthday by marrying his research assistant at the top of Mount Tantalus, overlooking the Punchbowl Crater, Diamond Head, and downtown Honolulu.
Brautigan spent more and more time downstairs in The Cradle. His friendship deepened with the proprietress, Takako Shiina. One night after hearing her sing, Brautigan wrote a poem for Takako. They drank through the night together, sharing conversation and intimate secrets, fellow travelers on what they called the “Calle de Eternidad,” an echo of Brautigan’s visit to Ixtlan, Mexico, sixteen years before. In the wee hours, Richard and Takako decided that they were brother and sister on a spiritual plane. Brautigan didn’t leave The Cradle until just before sunrise. In a cab on his way home to the Keio Plaza, he jotted down “Day for Night,” his final poem of the day: “the streets are blankets, / the dawn is my bed. / The cab rests my head. / I’m on my way to dreams.”
For two days in the second week of June, Richard wandered about Tokyo with a broken clock belonging to Takako Shiina, trying to find its exact replacement. Brautigan had destroyed the clock during a moment of drunken excess. The Cradle was decorated with many beautiful antiques, and the clock had been part of Takako’s collection. “He had to go all over to find one just exactly like it,” Don Carpenter said, remembering the story Richard told him, “and bring it to Shiina.” Two poems resulted from his quixotic clock quest, both dedicated to Takako. By mid-June, Brautigan had completed nearly forty poems.
One drunken incident at The Cradle never became a poem. On this night, a young Japanese musician played the guitar Takako provided for her musically inclined customers. Richard stood at the bar, getting “drunker and drunker.” Reaching over, he took the guitar. Strumming in his plink/ plunk fashion, Brautigan sang an off-key version of “Oh, Shenandoah” over and over. Takako thought it was the only song he knew. When the Japanese musician tried to take back the guitar, Richard flushed with drunken anger and hurled the instrument into the fireplace, reducing it to kindling. Takako was furious. She told Brautigan he could never come back into The Cradle until he bought her a new guitar, “exactly like the old one.”
Richard pulled out his wallet and asked, “How much do you want?”
Brautigan told a friend he broke the guitar because the unnamed Japanese troubadour played songs with “anti-American sentiments.” He had to hunt all over the city to find a replacement guitar that matched the one he destroyed, a repetition of his previous clock search. His nightly forays to The Cradle became an integral part of his life in Tokyo. No poem recorded the moment, but Richard found the exact instrument and was soon back at his favorite spot at the bar.
During the early morning hours of June 12, Brautigan stayed at The Cradle well past closing time. The day before, he wrote six poems. He felt so proud of this accomplishment that the sixth was a commemoration of the previous five. It was a night to celebrate. Richard drank and talked, hanging out with Takako as the hours slipped away. Their conversation touched on Japanese history. The emperor Meiji began his rule in 1867 at the age of fifteen and brought Japan into the modern world, taking it from a medieval nation where samurai fought with swords to a world power that, by the time of Meiji’s death in 1912, had defeated both China and Russia in major wars. Japan went from feudal armored knights to battleships and locomotives in a single generation.
The talk got around to the Meiji Jingu, the shrine devoted to the deified souls of the emperor and his consort, Empress Shoken. Built in 1920, and situated in a 178-acre park in Shibuya-ku in central Tokyo, the Meiji Jingu served as both a Shinto spiritual center and a recreation and sports area. When she learned that Richard had never been to the shrine, Takako proposed a late night reconnaissance. Fueled by drink, Brautigan agreed.
An hour before dawn, Richard and Takako climbed over a stone wall, sneaking into the gardens of the Meiji shrine. They were both drunk, falling down “like comedians” as they staggered through the cultivated forest. They wandered under a forty-foot wooden main gate (torii), the tallest in Japan, built from ancient hinoki tree trunks in the shape of a rooster’s perch. Legend said a rooster’s crow woke the sun goddess and first brought light to the world.
At dawn, Richard and Takako came to a small meadow, grateful they had not been spotted by the police. They lay down together fully clothed on a bed of sweet green grass. Brautigan cupped his hand over Shiina’s breast and kissed her. She kissed him back. “That’s all the love we made,” he wrote in a poem (“Meiji Comedians”). As day broke, fearful of getting caught, they left the shrine garden and went their separate ways.
When Richard woke up alone that afternoon in the Keio Plaza, the first thing he saw were his mud-covered shoes. This last trace of his amorous exploration of the Meiji Jingu made him feel “very good.” He did not sleep with Takako, but felt OK about it. Seeing his shoes pleased him so much he wrote another poem, “Meiji Shoes Size 12.” Brautigan wrote two
more poems that day, both tinged with doubt and sadness. The next day, Richard Brautigan wrote another poem in his notebook. “Tokyo / June 13, 1976,” mourned his departure from Japan in sixteen days. No mention of Curt Gentry and Gail Stevens’s marriage on the same day, Curt’s birthday, on Oahu. Curt had written Brautigan about his Hawaiian trip and impending nuptials, but Richard had other things on his mind.
One morning, Brautigan sat in the cafeteria at the Keio Plaza having his breakfast when he saw the world heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali, stride like a god into the room. Less than a year after the “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali came to Tokyo for an exhibition match with Antonio Inoki, the top wrestling star in Japan. The champ was also staying at the Keio Plaza. For the next week, Richard saw him every day, “walking quietly around the hotel in the company of various people.”
Whenever Brautigan switched on the television in his room, he’d see Ali, hyping the upcoming bout “on just about every program.” Always an astute observer of popular culture, Richard paid special attention to the champ’s appearances. “The most interesting thing about the whole affair was that there were two Mohamid [sic] Alis,” he wrote later in a notebook. “There was an extravagant one who was clowning and jumping around on television and there was a quiet sincere almost shy one that I saw every day in the hotel.”
During his remaining two weeks in Japan, Brautigan’s poetry, written daily in his notebook, recorded his life like a diary. “The Red Chair” reported an erotic film Richard went to see one evening. In the poem, Brautigan used the noun “voyeur” as a verb, (“feeling, voyeuring every detail of their passion”). This species of neologism has become commonplace. The newspeak of television, politics, and the military altered our language, transforming transition, scope, parent, text, and leverage into verbs. Back in the 1970s, it was an almost unknown practice. Brautigan, always a stickler in his careful use of language, deliberately chose “voyeuring,” knowing the word would make his reader feel uncomfortable, wanting just that reaction to the perverse decadence of the soft-core porn he had seen.
During Brautigan’s last week in Japan, Tony Dingman traveled up from the Philippines and hung out with his old pal in Tokyo. Typhoon Olga halted the production of Apocalypse Now for four weeks. During the hiatus, Dingman was out of a job. Detouring to Japan on his way back to the States seemed like fun. Richard brought Tony to The Cradle twice, the second time on Dingman’s last night in the city. They had a wild time together. Brautigan wrote almost no poetry during his friend’s visit.
Awake at five on the morning of June 25, unable to go back to sleep, Brautigan went downstairs to the Keio Plaza cafeteria for an early breakfast. As he sipped his first cup of coffee, Richard was surprised to see Muhammad Ali come into the room. “There were very few people in the cafeteria at that hour,” he observed, “but they were also startled to see Mohamid [sic] Ali there because everybody in Japan knew he was going to fight that morning. Mohamed [sic] Ali acted as if it were any other morning, anywhere at any time.”
An attractive young Japanese woman sat at the counter. Without saying a word, Ali approached her and began massaging her neck. Taken by surprise, she turned and stared at him. The champ smiled down at her, his big powerful hands kneading her shoulders and neck. No words were exchanged. Ali massaged her neck for another ten seconds or so and a smile spread across her pretty face. “Then, he stopped and continued to his table. The Japanese girl did not turn and watch him.”
The big fight was broadcast on national TV and shown on 150 closed-circuit locations in the United States. Ali, described as out of shape for his victorious match in April with a “tough young brawler” named Jimmy Young, threw fewer than a dozen punches in his fifteen-round bout with Inoki, who had recently defeated Olympic Judo Gold Medalist Willem Ruska. The rules for their fight had been radically changed two days before the match. Inoki could kick at Ali only if one of his knees remained on the ground. Still, the Japanese wrestler and martial artist hammered away at Ali’s legs with his feet, lying on his back for almost the entire fight, which ended in a draw. Muhammad Ali left the ring with damaged, bleeding legs (he later suffered blood clots), pocketing more than $6 million for his pains.
As Brautigan’s time in Tokyo drew to a close, he reacted emotionally with a final burst of new poetry. He wrote four poems on June 28, three of them about different aspects of love. Richard spent his last full night in Tokyo at The Cradle. He got “very drunk” and wrote an odd poem, “Stone (real.” It compared his inebriated condition to Bee Cave, Texas. All the while, Takako Shiina sat silently watching him. Richard left Japan on June 30, flying out of Haneda at nine thirty at night. Traveling east into the sunrise, he jotted a final poem in his notebook. “Land of the Rising Sun” noted that as he crossed the international date line high above the Pacific it became the thirtieth of June all over again.
Tony Dingman left Tokyo two days earlier. He met Brautigan at the airport and drove him into San Francisco to Curt Gentry’s house. Richard stayed with Curt and Gail for a couple days before heading up to Montana for the summer. During his visit, Brautigan read the Gentrys the entire manuscript of the poetry he’d written in Japan. He did so without a stop. Once finished, he confessed he had no title for the book. With the final poem fresh in her mind, Gail Gentry suggested he call it “June 30th, June 30th.” “There’s no other title that fits,” she said.
Back in Montana, Brautigan focused on revising his poetry manuscript. He made almost no changes, adding only a few words to a couple poems near the end of the sequence while also working on the galleys for Sombrero Fallout. Writing an introduction for June 30th, June 30th occupied most of Richard’s time in July. The subject was his uncle Edward, killed during WWII in Sitka, Alaska. Brautigan wrote how this caused him to hate the Japanese people when he was a child during the war.
The introduction chronicled Richard’s reading Bashō and Issa. After moving to San Francisco, Brautigan learned to love Japanese food and saw hundreds of Japanese movies. He “slowly picked up Buddhism through osmosis” by hanging out with poet friends like Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. Richard admitted the poetry in his book was “different from other poems that I have written.” Each bore a date. He acknowledged the quality of the work to be uneven but “printed them all anyway because they are a diary expressing my feelings and emotions in Japan and the quality of life is often uneven.” Brautigan’s stay in Tokyo brought the Second World War to an emotional conclusion. He finished his introduction in his Pine Creek studio in early August. His last sentence came straight from his heart: “May the dead rest eternally in peace, waiting for our arrival.”
Brautigan returned to San Francisco in mid-August, wanting some urban pleasure after mailing the completed manuscript of June 30th, June 30th off to his agent. John Hartnett, who took dictation and typed Helen Brann’s letters, wrote a personal note, saying he had never “read a more moving or evocative group of poems.” The poetry reinforced itself, and by the end of the book, Hartnett felt that “it was all—from the introduction to the last poem—one poem.” Hartnett concluded: “It’s an impressive, powerful, lovely work.”
Richard sent a copy of the manuscript to Jim Harrison, who shared John Hartnett’s enthusiasm. “What can I say?” Harrison wrote Brautigan. “It is your work that has touched me the most deeply. [. . .] It is not a succession of lyrics but finally ONE BOOK.” Jim concluded his letter with the highest praise. “I love the book because it is a true song, owning no auspices other than its own; owning the purity we think we aim at on this bloody journey.”
During the second half of August, Richard received a wedding invitation from Ron Loewinsohn and Kitty Hughes. They were getting married on the first of September at the Sebastopol home of London-born Canadian poet David Bromige and his companion, writer Sherril Jaffe. Brautigan declined, saying he had to fly back to Montana the day before the ceremony. Loewinsohn wrote Brautigan a sarcastic note, mentioning how many people at the reception had asked about him, wo
ndering if he was “going to show up.” Ron said he thought they all believed him when he explained his old friend’s need to return immediately to Pine Creek. Loewinsohn ended by saying “how touched & pleased Kitty & I were with the telegram of congratulations that your driver sent us on our wedding day.”
Brautigan’s stay in Montana was brief. With no driver in residence, life at Pine Creek felt fairly constrained, and it wasn’t long before he packed the place up for winter and returned to San Francisco. By the start of October, Richard was living again on Telegraph Hill. Anxious to be off to Japan, Brautigan lingered in the city, waiting for word from his agent regarding the ongoing contract negotiations for Dreaming of Babylon and June 30th, June 30th. His various behavioral excesses during this period (pushing Nic Roeg down the stairs, tearing up $20 bills in Helen Brann’s Stanford Court suite, moving in with Curt Gentry and his new wife under false pretenses) did not prevent Richard from keeping his nose to the grindstone. He stayed in constant contact with his agent, offering his input on every aspect of her deal-making.
Late in October, Takako Shiina flew to America. She was on her way to visit her young lover, Ryu Murakami, a twenty-four-year-old Japanese writer who published his first short novel, Almost Transparent Blue, earlier that year. Blue, written while Murakami was still a student, dealt with youthful promiscuity and drug use, and although some critics denounced the book as “decadent,” it went on to sell over a million copies and win both the newcomer’s prize for literature and the Akutagawa Prize (a pocket watch and 1 million yen) in 1976. Murakami was staying in Manhattan at the Waldorf-Astoria, covering the New York City Marathon, then in its sixth year, for a leading Japanese periodical.
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