The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  ‘I’m writing a book about Tokyo’s coffee houses. But this place’ – he broke off and looked around, reverent – ‘is in a class of its own.’

  ‘You must have to drink a lot of coffee. For your research.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew someone who studied the effect of caffeine on monkeys. Apparently caffeine didn’t keep them awake longer than normal, but it did confuse their sense of time.’

  Across the counter’s long wooden wave, Daibo was listening. He looked blank. I tried to explain again, and again, in Japanese and finally – to the coffee otaku – in English. Both men looked puzzled, and even worried.

  ‘But how,’ Daibo asked finally, ‘… can a monkey tell time?’

  I thought of the animals and their testing chamber with its computers and press plates and indicator lights for correct and incorrect answers; the banana-flavored pellets that were rewards, and how they would clatter into little troughs when the monkey got an answer right.

  Time for the monkey would perhaps have been the gaps that elapsed between banana pellets.

  赤

  坂

  ‘Akasaka’

  Rat Mountain amazed no one for many ages.

  Then the bull king appeared – Buddha’s virtue triumphed.

  Tigers and other beasts grew violent, and greed spread,

  But stories, like horned rabbits, explained the dharma.

  In the dragon king’s undersea palace Buddha’s bell boomed,

  Snakes in their rooms woke and were enlightened.

  A horse suddenly grew pregnant with a Buddhist prince.

  Let the rumbling of goat, deer, and ox carts stop.

  Monkey cries and frost in the pure moonlight,

  The rooster-man still silent as visitors head home.

  Dogs do not bark at night in sacred Rājagrha,

  Wild boars touch Gold Mountain, making it even higher.

  Inscription on the Entsūji Bell of Time

  Translated by Chris Drake

  Akasaka: The Invention of Edo

  The smallest Bell of Time hangs in Akasaka. The bell has disappeared and reappeared twice, the last time during World War Two, when it was almost melted down for scrap in a junk yard.

  Wandering through Akasaka just before his death, the writer Yoshimura Hiroshi experienced a sensation of vertigo; the buildings seemed to fly toward and away from each other at the same time. The hills below the buildings crashed into each other and fell back again. If you talk about the mathematical concept of ‘chaos,’ he wrote, there have to be rules. But in Akasaka, you don’t know where to start. It’s unbelievable to imagine how remote this place once was.

  I wondered if Yoshimura wrote that as he was considering the graceless Tokyo Broadcasting Service headquarters, TBS Biz. When it opened, TBS Biz housed a fifteen-meter replica of the anime Space Battleship Yamato, which blazed away with its ‘Wave Motion Gun’. Outside, giant yellow parakeets, made of resin, glowered side by side from a metal perch.

  And, up a steep slope, at Entsu-ji temple, stands the Akasaka Bell of Time. Entsu-ji is hemmed in by office blocks and houses, by a parking lot and overhanging power lines. The bell is faint green in places and dark in others, where a poem is inscribed. There are twelve verses, one for each of the Chinese Zodiac animals. The words make up a labyrinth, a secret code.

  The poem opens with Rat Mountain, a mythical place in ancient China, famous in folktales for nests shared by birds and mice. A wild place: the earth at its origins. The poem ends with Gold Mountain, a Buddhist symbol for perfect wisdom. In between the beginning and close of things are horned rabbits – creatures that do not exist in this world – and an underwater bell in the dragon king’s palace; there are snakes that wake from dreams and into enlightenment. At last the world leaves time itself, after the keeper of the hours (‘the rooster man’) falls silent: the earth at its end.

  The first description of Akasaka’s bell, and the poem inscribed on it, appear in Toda Mosui’s A Sprig of Purple, written in the late seventeenth century. Toda’s political patron, the son of the second Tokugawa shogun, was forced to commit suicide by a jealous brother, and afterward Toda never held high office again. His connections were still good, though, and his family wealthy, so he was able to devote himself to literature. And since he knew the city ‘inside out, down to its most intimate corners’, he was perfectly placed to invent a literary identity for Edo. Earlier writers had mapped Kyoto landscapes onto the shogun’s new city in the east; before Toda, no one had written about what actually existed there.

  In Sprig of Purple, two friends wander through the great avenues and little alleys, getting into fights and visiting brothels. Toda gives one companion – his alter ego – the pseudonym ‘Iitsu’, whose characters can mean ‘passed over but not bitter about it’. Not a bad name for a writer.

  Toda describes the Akasaka bell as ‘an upside down, V-shaped gong, empty inside’. Its voice was a voice of shadows; that sound ebbed away like a setting sun.

  * * *

  Tokyo is a city of darkness, a city of light. Each melts into the other. At its center, the city of light blacks out, and at bridges and crossroads, at the margins around train stations, the city of darkness shines, gleaming.

  In that other city are love-hotel rooms laid out like train carriages where men brush against women pretending to be commuters. And the (now almost extinct) No Panty coffee houses, which appeared overnight and disappeared as quickly, once Tokyo tired of their mirrored floors and the waitresses who served terrible overpriced coffee, wearing short skirts and nothing else. Before the New Public Morals Act outlawed certain excesses of bad taste (such as revolving beds and oversized mirrors), there were cabarets near Shinjuku where women stood behind chicken wire as clients poked fingers through the mesh, straining to touch a rib, a wrist, or whatever they could reach. Rooms where adults could suck on a pacifier and wear diapers. And – most infamous – Lucky Hole, a bar where a man could push himself through an anonymous plywood board while someone invisible on the other side sucked or stroked him. ‘I thought it was sex for the future,’ wrote one aficionado wistfully of the time before the act came into force and the red light district’s seedier establishments – including Lucky Hole – were shut down.

  The two cities blend one into the other in Minato ward: at the Ritz, and in cheap karaoke bars. The American embassy, and the head office of the Tokyo Broadcasting System. The glass funnel of Roppongi Hills, and the towers of Midtown. The steel and glass ripples of the National Art Museum, and the hostess bars that cluster the crossing near where Expressway Number Three turns into Route One.

  * * *

  She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was lithe, her body like a wand, with silky blonde hair slipping over and around her shoulders in sheets.

  She was dancing alone in Wall Street, a shot bar in one of Roppongi’s long narrow basements; so graceful that no one would come near her because anyone dancing beside her would look clumsy. Empty space fanned around her legs, her arms. The other dancers shook themselves a few feet away. They were all a little off rhythm, watching her move.

  ‘She’s – radiant,’ I said to the man beside me, almost shouting because the music was so loud. Indifferent, he looked over his shoulder at the dancer.

  ‘That’s a prostitute. From somewhere in Eastern Europe.’

  The bar had walls of unfinished concrete. What lighting there was, was dim, except for a muted glitter under the bottles of vodka and whiskey and the massed empty tumblers and champagne flutes standing upside down on the bar. Like the glass, the dancer drew light to herself; to the lines of her shoulders and wrists, her hips.

  I wondered if she had once trained at the Kirov or the Bolshoi. A tall girl, golden, who might have been a principal dancer in Europe, but who had ended up a few thousand kilometers to the east, a figure priced in yen on somebody’s timesheet.

  * * *

  The Japanese language has a modest number of words for the En
glish word penis. There’s ‘robust individual’, and ‘life-giving sword’, after the spear used in the creation myth when the islands of Japan arose out of chaos. Blue-green snake and mythical serpent. Eel, turtle, cucumber. For monks, the penis was ‘demon of worldly cravings’.

  But where the words for the male member are either playful or grandiose, the Japanese vocabulary for female genitalia is whimsical, extravagant, and rococo.

  The most common equivalent for vagina is asoko: ‘there’. Female instrument, muscle, money box. For really large parts, ‘the ultimate depth’, and soshiki manjū, those sweet doughy buns served at Japanese funerals. There are terms imported from American English: rose, canoe, beaver, crevice, crater. Cherry blossom and the flower pink, for virgins. Secondhand for ones that are not. From the floating world of Edo’s Pleasure Quarters, there is the antique language still sometimes used by older yakuza: teabowl, teapot, mortar, utensil, box. Inkwell. For loose vaginas: large basin, rice tub, bathtub, enormous plate. The garden has been scavenged for words (peach, watermelon, chestnut, fig), as has the sea (night clam, crab, and a wealth of different shells – raven, baked, freshwater, living, new). For monks who misbehaved in the so-called willow and flower world of Edo’s pleasure quarters, religious terms in Sanskrit: sudden enlightenment. Lotus shell. And – harder to explain – ‘straw sandals’.

  Even if their lives were bound by strict ancient rules, the monks’ sexual vocabulary could run wild: solitary pilgrimage, copying out a sutra by hand, and whipping, which meant caress.

  * * *

  You need no passport or luggage.

  Whatever the fantasy, whatever the desire, in Tokyo a love hotel exists for it and inside the hotel, a room. The themes change – merry-go-round carousel, medieval castle, galaxy far, far away, underwater grotto – but certain elements remain the same. A love hotel’s entrance is always hidden and deep, a recess that turns back on itself; the start of a journey. The main door stands behind a screening wall, and opens in response to automatic sensors.

  There will be no visible concierge, just a disembodied voice, saying, Welcome. A luminous wall of panels displays photographs of the available rooms. Choose REST (a few hours) or STAY (the night), and press the plate for the bedroom desired. Before magnetic cards, clear pneumatic tubes would deliver metal keys. Love hotels are designed so that guests never meet each other. In a hidden control room, glowing security screens cluster like an insect’s prismatic eye.

  Love hotels have variations on what the cultural historian Sarah Chaplin has called an ‘ur-code’. Tiny traditional noren curtains to hide a guest’s license plate. Enormous mirrors, everywhere. Ultraviolet lighting. Jacuzzis. Glass inner walls. The occasional cage. A costume rental service: Office Lady, Tart, Schoolgirl. A basic assortment of cosplay outfits.

  To enter a love hotel is to depart from everyday life, to escape the crushing weight of society and its expectations. It is a fantasyland for grownups: the chance to reinvent yourself, to disappear, if only briefly. More than quick sex, that is the promise of the shimmering door.

  * * *

  In the heavy air, smoke from grilling eels. A shrine to the Seven Gods of Good Luck, pomegranates and pears ripening on trees by its stone gate.

  I followed Kototoi dōri westward, through Matsugaya, Kita-Ueno; across Iriya and Shitaya, where the Black Gate of the old Yoshiwara district once stood. Yoshiwara, the nineteenth-century world of courtesans and Kabuki. At its height, a million men lived in Edo. Yoshiwara was the only legally sanctioned pleasure quarter: the nightless city.

  I inspected my Tokyo City Atlas; the area between Ueno and Asakusa was blanked out. The atlas’s mapmakers had severed Shōwa dori, the great arterial road that runs north to Nikko, and cut the thick weave of train lines that flow through Ueno Station. The missing crescent was crammed with love hotels; or would have been, if the Atlas had allowed it to exist. In guidebooks and atlases, love hotels are erased, absent. In Kabukichō and Shibuya, Gotanda and Uguisudani, love-hotel districts are shown as blank urban blocks on unnamed streets. The buildings of Tokyo’s High City, with its museums and conventional hotels, its embassies and temples and shrines and theaters, always appear. And maps of Tokyo’s Shadow City show love hotels, but not, for example, museums or even the nearest train station. The spaces that belong to the city of shadows exist only in the minds of people who visit, and know where to look for them.

  I passed Xanadu and Hotel Sting. Hotel Next and Ya Ya Ya. An old threadmaker’s. Hotel Ramses Joy. Urban Castle Negishi. Petticoat Lane.

  Once inside a love hotel, a guest can move only in one direction. A couple can enter as many times as they want, but they can leave only once. Further access is not allowed, so a guest must bring everything needed – food, clothes, toys – inside. Go out and the guest has to start all over again: the panel, the payment, the key. This is why foreigners are usually barred: Japanese guests understand the choreography, the protocols, where outsiders complain: what do you mean I can’t come back in, why don’t you have room service, can I have another room? A Japanese visitor knows that the love hotel is a theater of silence. Noise ruins fantasies.

  A love hotel almost never has windows. Where they exist, they are always opaque.

  Hotel Charme. El Apio. Hotel Crystal.

  Such an enjoyable place.

  You can spend wonderful time.

  Please enjoy your time.

  Hotel Calico. Hotel Love.

  A wall of blue fairy lights, and a tiny pharmacy stocked with soaps, unguents, tissues, foams, plastic razors, white cloth face masks.

  Le Ciel, with a huge neon model of the planet Saturn shimmering over its entryway. Hotel Vogue.

  Rest ¥4500

  Stay ¥6500

  A glowing blue circle over OPEN. FULL was blank.

  Ribbon Hearts. Hotel Seeds. Hotel La Luna.

  The street was almost empty. Under the expressway overpass, steel girders and floodlights; shadows and iridescent reflections off the green paint.

  Invisible on maps is Uguisudani, ‘valley of the nightingales’. Uguisudani, where solitudes intersect, before veering away from each other again.

  The old man to my left was called Fukutani. He was a big man, with white sideburns. The rush-covered seats were too small for him.

  I asked how long he had been coming to Daibo’s.

  ‘Thirty-five years,’ he said. ‘Since the place opened.’

  ‘Has it changed?’

  Fukutani thought, sipping his coffee: a tiny cup in his huge hand. ‘Well, the counter used to be level.’

  I saw for the first time that the wood was warped.

  ‘I’m a copywriter. I first came here when I was just starting out. I used to work for American companies. Foreigners…’ He glanced at me, twinkling. ‘I hate ’em all.’

  I pretended to look angry. Fukutani was pleased.

  Over our heads stretched a collection of hard-boiled detective stories in a long row that had been yellowing year after year from the smoke of roasting coffee beans.

  ‘Oh, it’s not personal,’ he said. ‘I hate everybody.’

  Across the counter, Daibo was laughing.

  目

  白

  ‘Mejiro’

  The city plan of Edo was orientated on a spiral aligned with the cosmos, thereby establishing a direct equation between Tokugawa rule and the order of the universe.

  Naito Akira

  Mejiro: A Failed Coup

  On Tokyo’s clock face, Mejiro stands northwest, at about ten. The city here is anonymous: parking lots, alleys, a four-lane stretch of Meiji dori. Apartment blocks and offices crowd the ridge and its downward slope. Each concrete terrace, each rusting fire escape, blurred into the next. The landscape was like an unfinished drawing.

  Cherry trees in full leaf leaned down toward the Kanda River. The waters running through the concrete canal sounded like swimmers splashing each other.

  A peloton of nursery-school children passed, wearing fluorescent orange
caps. A policeman bicycled slowly along Meiji dori. I juggled an iPhone in one hand and my Tokyo City Atlas in the other, but couldn’t find the temple’s entrance: the high white wall followed the rise, and there was no gate.

  An old man waved me up the hill. ‘Konjō-in? Go up and then go down again. There’s no other way to get inside.’

  On Mejiro’s main street, a kimono shop, a boutique selling shoes from Italy. Across Mejiro dōri was Gakushūin, the Peers’ School, where the emperor once studied.

  I followed an arc that ran parallel to the Kanda River, until at last Konjō-in’s gate rose overhead, its name painted in gold: Mountain of the Sacred Spirits. The temple was new, although the upward sweep of its bronze roof gave it a gravitas that most of Tokyo’s modern temples lack. The roof looked like it might crush the walls holding it up.

  By the steps before the old gate stood Fudō: He Who Shall Not Be Moved, most powerful of the Wisdom Kings. Fudō had thin lips and high cheekbones; he looked more disappointed in the world than enraged with it. In his right hand he held a thick sword, the blade that slashes through ignorance; his left arm should have ended at his elbow in a burst of fire, though the burning arm had broken off, leaving only a stump. Behind Fudō’s back, the sculptor had chiseled a sheer wall of flame. The stone eddied into billowing smoke, and arced outward like a great feather.

  The temple’s inner court was empty except for three ancient pilgrims. They were touring every Fudō temple on the Kantō plain. Rough stone stairs curved up the hillside behind the temple, past sensuous stone bodhisattvas and carving after carving of the Three Mystic Apes, hands clapped over eyes, ears, mouth. See No Evil. Hear No Evil. Speak No Evil. Moss had turned the stones green, and some of the monkeys had eroded so badly that their faces and tiny hands were almost invisible.