Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Knowing his daughter loved to swim and the hotel had no pool, Richard arranged a pass for Ianthe at a neighborhood health spa. The seventeen-year-old found Tokyo empty and dreary in the daytime. With a confirmed night owl father, Ianthe was often alone early in the morning and spent her time either swimming in the health club pool or exploring the enormous Keio Plaza, riding up and down in one of the twenty-five elevators, wandering among its twenty restaurants and nine bars and lounges, peeking into the two wedding halls, hanging out in the bustling lobby.

  Ianthe discovered her father was on a “drinking jag.” Even so, he gave his daughter the “Brautigan tour” of Tokyo. This included playing pachinko (Richard teased her on their second night together when she won a pair of socks playing pachinko and had to carry them around for the rest of the evening), admiring the realistic plastic food displays in restaurant windows, watching karaoke singers at midnight under a pink canopy of cherry blossoms, touring an area Ianthe thought of as “the Tokyo equivalent of Times Square,” where every movie marquee under the neon aurora seemed to advertise Barbra Streisand’s film A Star Is Born, and dining on never-ending portions of sushi, “pretty much all we ate.”

  During the “tour,” they ate at a restaurant with low tables and little benches. Brautigan instructed his daughter in chopstick etiquette, how to place them properly on her bowl. “Never put them this way,” he said. “It means death.” That night, they were served a whole grouper “lined with sushi.” Another evening, Richard brought Ianthe out to the Tokyo suburb where Len Grzanka lived. On Brautigan’s previous trip to Japan, Len took him to his favorite neighborhood sushi restaurant. Grzanka told the proprietor, Kiamatsu Soji, a third-generation sushi chef who lived upstairs in the building with his family, that Richard was “a famous American novelist.”

  Soji immediately hung a closed sign the door, brought his wife and daughter downstairs to meet Brautigan, and proceeded to serve his honored guests a fantastic array of piscatorial delights, all without charge. So much sake was consumed that Richard couldn’t make it home and had to crash at Len’s apartment. Memories of that evening prompted a return visit with his daughter. Once again, Soji closed his place down for a private party, slicing up sushi of the highest order while Grzanka served as translator. As before, the entire feast was on the house.

  Len Grzanka was writing a (never-published) novel at the time. He asked Richard to take a look at the manuscript, and he “gave it a cursory glance.” Brautigan also gave his friend some advice. “Len,” he said, “you’ve got to write what you know about. If you don’t have fun writing it, nobody’s going to have fun reading it.” Richard elaborated on his point, trying to explain how personal experience might be shaped to serve one’s fiction. “I’d like to write something about putting on a Donald Duck suit and robbing the Bank of America at high noon,” he said, “but, I could never put on a Donald Duck suit.”

  Most of Brautigan’s activities were nocturnal. Occasional daytime excursions broke the pattern. Once, Richard and Ianthe took the bullet train down to Kyoto, where they “spent a long quiet afternoon at the Moss Temple,” a place of incredible beauty, the eighth-century temple sitting within a lush fourteenth-century garden where forty varieties of moss had been carefully cultivated to create an idealization of the natural world. Ianthe so enjoyed crouching beside her father, watching the splash of a waterfall over moss-covered stones, that she bought a poster at the temple’s gift shop. She kept it for years until it was torn and tattered.

  They picnicked at another park. Richard tried to convince his daughter that one of the warning signs actually said watch out for monkeys. She “had a hard time believing that there were wild monkeys on the loose.” Ianthe made a wish at every temple they passed that day. Kyoto, Japan’s former capital, a beautiful city of many ancient temples, repositories of untold forgotten hopes and dreams, had long inspired the wishes of those in need. Back in Tokyo, when her father bragged to his friends about her wish-making, Ianthe was surprised to discover he had noticed the secret supplications.

  While she was away in Japan, half of Ianthe’s Hawaiian high school burned to the ground. The ensuing crisis extended her vacation by another week, unexpectedly giving her extra time with a father she seldom saw. Many of the hours spent together ticked away in bars. Brautigan “liked sitting around drinking until two or three in the morning.” Although Ianthe was underage, it didn’t seem to matter in Tokyo. Ianthe ordered screwdrivers, the only drink she knew by name. “I had learned firsthand that alcohol could cut my pain,” she wrote years later in her memoir. On the plus side, during her stay in Japan, Ianthe kicked a brief but short-lived “attraction” to Valium.

  The company they kept in these various drinking establishments consisted mainly of artists and writers. Ianthe paid scant attention to the frenzied conversations lurching forward in fits and starts as those capable of translating attempted to clarify obscure points in Japanese or English. The early hours of the new day nearly always found them at The Cradle. Richard was still going strong, but Ianthe “could hardly keep [her] eyes open.” Takako Shiina’s maternal instincts kicked in, and she found a comfortable couch where the teenager could lie down and get some much-needed rest.

  Brautigan surprised his daughter with the spontaneous gift of “a beautiful watch on a gold chain.” Probably intended as a belated birthday present, it was not offered to her as such. “This watch meant a lot to me because he thought up the idea himself,” Ianthe later wrote. “Most gifts he gave me were things he knew I wanted.” A promised trip to Fuji never took place because Richard was too hungover on the scheduled date, but he made things up with his daughter the next day with an unexpected trip on the bullet train to watch the filming of a TV series on location. Another evening, they traveled by cab all over Tokyo, one more example of paternal spontaneity. That night, Richard took Ianthe to an experimental theater performance, her first ever. “I remember they were eating a lot of cabbage onstage.”

  The most significant moment during Ianthe’s trip to Japan involved a meeting that may not have seemed all that important at the time. One night, Richard introduced her to “a spectacularly beautiful woman” who, as is customary in Japan, gave her a simple gift, “little paper birds.” Her father had been emphatic “that the relationship was important.” Ianthe had met many other girlfriends before and remembered the woman’s “small white car” best of all. The woman’s name was Akiko Yoshimura. Her relationship with Brautigan would change his life forever.

  forty-six: the paradise valley ladies’ book club luncheon

  WHEN BECKY DOUGLASS first encountered Richard Brautigan in the summer of 1973, she was twenty-three years old and still wore her hair in pigtails. Stuart and Judy Bergsma, a recently arrived young couple, were having a potluck at their Deep Creek ranch (later the home of Peter and Becky Fonda). Richard sat on the log cabin’s porch steps, head cupped in his hands, too drunk to enjoy the spectacular view of the Yellowstone Valley and the Absaroka Mountains spread in a Vista Vision panorama before him. Becky Douglass smiled as she carried her casserole up to the house. Richard tugged at her skirt in passing. “You want to fuck?” he inquired, matter-of-factly: the very first words she ever heard him utter.

  Over the next four years, Becky Douglass had ample occasion to observe Richard’s often eccentric behavior on display in many different party settings. She’d been introduced to several of his girlfriends, but most often he came by himself, catching a ride with the neighbors when there was no resident driver. Richard was always an enigma. His wry charm provided an easy drawbridge to casual conversation, spanning the deep moat of reserve enclosing his intensely private nature. He had a way of eliciting one’s darkest secrets without ever revealing anything intimate about himself. Quite naturally, the whole gang was curious when Richard showed up in Paradise Valley with a brand-new Japanese bride in the fall of 1977.

  The women in the community had started an informal book discussion club that met on a rotating basis for lunc
h once each month at the homes of the various members. It was a diverse group, numbering between twenty and thirty, ranch wives and their daughters, ranging in age from Madge Walker, who was in her seventies, to young Becky Douglass. Marian Hjortsberg was part of the group, as was Eileen Story, wife of a state senator whose grandfather trailed the first herd of Texas longhorns into the territory just after the Civil War.

  What more appropriate gathering than a ladies’ book club for a writer’s wife to get acquainted with her neighbors? On the afternoon in question, the luncheon was being hosted by Deane Cowan Bischer, in her double-wide under the cottonwoods at the lower end of her parents’ place on Mill Creek. The title of the book under discussion has been long forgotten, but what happened that afternoon burned indelibly into the memories of everyone present. Akiko Brautigan certainly had not read the designated book. Her knowledge of English was still limited. She was not going to the Bischers’ place to talk about books.

  Aki wanted to make a good first impression and chose her outfit with great care. Elegantly stylish, she wore a trim gray suit with a straight skirt, high heels and hose, matching hat, white gloves. The effect was sleek and sophisticated; above all, Western not Asian. At the Bischers’, she couldn’t have looked more out of place had she arrived naked. All the other women were casually dressed in jeans, denim skirts, whatever felt comfortable. Mrs. Brautigan’s formal attire looked distinctly urban, with nary a nod toward cowboy chic, making her appear all the more alien. When a local gal wanted to put on the dog, she came dolled up like a rodeo queen in a purple pantsuit and matching high-crowned Stetson.

  All the women welcomed her, trying to make this frightened beautiful stranger feel comfortable. They assumed everybody dressed this way in Japan. Deane introduced Akiko to the book club as a “guest,” and she stepped up to meet them all in turn with a sweet polite smile highlighting her delicate face. As she took each woman’s hand, looking straight into her eyes with the utmost sincerity, Aki repeated the same greeting, every word clear and precise, the polished result of much careful practice. “How the fuck are you?” Akiko Brautigan said sweetly to the book club members, one after the other, holding their hands, meeting their gaze with forthright candor. “How the fuck are you . . . ? How the fuck are you . . . ?”

  It was obvious that she didn’t understand what she was saying. Aki’s kind and gentle manner belied any profane intentions. Becky Douglass took her aside and did her best to explain the mistake. Akiko’s face hardened into fury as she understood. How carefully Richard had coached her on exactly what to say. What an apt pupil she had been. Her anger burned within, fueled by the thought of the sly smile on her husband’s face as he enjoyed his little joke back at home. The buzz of conversation resumed, ending the embarrassed silence. Everyone did her best to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Literary chitchat would never seem quite the same again.

  forty-seven: aki

  AKIKO NISHIZAWA WAS born in 1944 in a Sapporo military dormitory on Hokkaido, the northernmost of the Japanese islands. An American invasion of the homeland seemed inevitable. Okinawa had not yet fallen, and its amber grain fields seemed a world away from the sparsely populated, forested wilderness of Hokkaido, home of indigenous salmon, bear, and the “hairy” Ainu, Japan’s unique white-skinned aborigines. Two years later, when Aki left Hokkaido, the war was over, the atomic age had begun, and the American army occupied her country.

  The Nishizawa family moved to the small fishing town of Ishinomaki in the northern Tōhoku region, about a two-hour train ride from Tokyo. Her father worked as an engineer at a pulp factory splintered off from a large conglomerate that had been broken up by antitrust action. The company opened a new plant in the Inland Sea area to the south. Like gypsies, the Nishizawas made another move.

  Both Akiko’s parents were very traditional. The factory where her father worked was called “a society factory.” Every family employed there became part of a rigid class structure, common laborers at the bottom of the ladder, each successive corporate position ascending from rung to rung into the stratospheric realm where the president of the company presided like a minor god. As Akiko’s father worked his way up to president, her family’s social status rose along with him. “Living in that sort of society,” she recalled, “everybody treated me as a special kid.”

  On the surface, Akiko behaved like a typical “daughter in a box,” the Japanese term for a young woman from a good family who remained modest, chaste, and above all, obedient. Beneath her demure surface, Aki was a rebel, the “black sheep in the family.” While her sister agreed to an arranged marriage, a “photo marriage,” and she considered her brother to be a “very square guy,” Akiko became argumentative and affected an interest in Communism.

  After graduating from high school (a three-year course in Japan), Aki attended a university in Tokyo. Her parents considered her a traditional girl and made sure she roomed in a private all-female dormitory. She studied English literature, but her grasp of the language remained poor. “I never study anything in the university,” she said. What interested her was personal freedom, “real life and with boyfriend.” Dropping out before graduation, Akiko went to work for “some cultural organization” involved in music and the lecture circuit.

  One day, Akiko saw a big want ad in the Japanese national newspaper. Sony was preparing to buy Columbia Records and in the process of forming a new company. There were no age, sex, or education limitations for those seeking employment. At the time, this was rare. Until the passage of an Equal Opportunity Law in 1986, only a third of all Japanese corporations would accept job applications from women who had graduated from four-year colleges.

  Employment possibilities were even more limited for those without degrees. Sony required only that the applicants submit essays describing why they wanted to work in the new corporation. Figuring millions of people read the national newspaper and Sony would be deluged with applications, Aki sent in a radically brief essay simply stating her qualifications and declaring, “Why don’t you ask me to meet with you?” Sony liked this approach and invited Akiko for an interview with their top executives. They wanted to test her English language skills because the job involved working closely with their American joint venture companies.

  “But my English was so bad because I hate it,” Aki later confessed.

  Akiko got the job in spite of her obvious shortcomings as a linguist. She became part of the company’s international division, later known as CBS/Sony, working in what the industry called A&R (artistry and recording). Aki married an advertising man named Yoshimura. Female employment was uncommon at the time, and it was even more rare for a married woman to work outside the home. Aki’s English had improved, and one of her responsibilities involved showing visiting American artists, such as Pierre Boulez, Leonard Bernstein, and Isaac Stern, around Tokyo.

  Akiko worked mostly with foreign talent, but she sometimes produced the work of contemporary Japanese artists. This included public relations, and she had many contacts in the publishing industry. Promoting a record she was about to release, Aki met with an editor who frequently exchanged inside dope on what was new, hot, and hip with her. Aki saw a copy of a Richard Brautigan book in the man’s office. She had read Japanese translations of Brautigan’s work in university, first In Watermelon Sugar, later Trout Fishing and The Abortion. Akiko was excited. “Oh, did you read that?” she asked.

  “Yes. Very unique book,” the editor replied.

  Several months later, early in 1977, the editor came to see Aki. He spoke to her about Brautigan. “Do you know that author is in Japan right now,” he said “and is staying in Keio Plaza Hotel.”

  “Shall we call him?” she asked.

  The editor gave her the number. Akiko phoned the Keio Plaza only to be told that Richard had checked out. When the desk clerk heard the disappointment in her voice, he said, “No, no, he is supposed to be back again.” A week later, Aki called the hotel a second time. Again, she was told Richa
rd had left. “Mr. Brautigan is in the Gifu area to watch the ukai [cormorant fishing]. He’s supposed to come back by now.”

  Soon after, Aki tried the number again. This time he was there. The front desk connected her with Richard Brautigan’s room on the thirty-fifth floor. “And my heart started beating like some small girl talking with some superstar or something.” Brautigan spoke rapidly, excitedly, as if he’d tuned in to her own exhilaration. “I just talked with the telephone operator in Montana,” he said, “and asked what the weather looked like.” Akiko didn’t quite know what to make of it all. She felt perplexed. “That kind of conversation,” she remembered. “And blah, blah, blah . . .”

  Ice broken, Richard asked the stranger on the other end of the line three quick questions. First: “How did you get this phone number?”

  “Oh, by a certain way,” Aki answered coyly.

  Brautigan sounded pleased with her reply. “Are you a journalist?” was his second question.

  “No.”

  “Who are you then?”

  “I am working in the music industry,” Akiko said.

  “Oh, that’s okay.” The melodic voice was not a threat to his privacy. Richard immediately asked Aki for her phone number. And she gave it to him.

  Small talk can be difficult with someone you’ve never met. Brautigan launched back into his rapid-fire free association, talking about the Japanese television program he was watching, a detective cartoon.

  Akiko forgot about their odd conversation. She thought, “The famous author is never going to call me.” He did call and asked her out for dinner. “My god!” she remembered with a certain wonder. Although still married, Aki accepted Richard’s invitation.