The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  We passed a clay kawara roof tile fused with a blue and white porcelain plate; coins that the fires had transformed into bubbling lava that cooled into a single lump that looked like black petrified coral, or a sponge. A bottle, tortured out of symmetry into a glistening mass.

  Another case held objects that had survived. In that room of damage, those things had perhaps the weirdest shapes: their perfection was almost sinister. There was a complete dolls’ set for the March Hina Matsuri Dolls’ Day festival, which had been celebrated a few days before the bombing.

  The tiny emperor was perfect, without a single stain or singe mark on his gold hat, his golden cloak or violet trousers. The empress and ladies-in-waiting, too, were pristine, and their miniature sweets looked so fresh, ready to eat, even after seventy years.

  ‘All my dolls burned,’ Mrs. Nihei said, softly. She was standing behind me. ‘And my friends died, and every single one of our neighbors. But my family survived. All five of us.’

  Our house was completely burned down, except for a single waterpipe. I turned on the tap, and water flowed out of it. We scooped it up with our hands, and drank, and drank, and I tasted grit in my mouth. The water was cold, and delicious.

  ‘You found somewhere safe?’ I asked.

  ‘Nowhere was safe!’ she said, fierce. ‘You couldn’t go anywhere safe!’

  ‘But – everyone in your family lived?’ I asked, looking at a map of Tokyo, which was spattered with red circles. The bigger the circle, the more casualties: Mukōjima, Honjo, Asakusa, were vast stains against a white background. ‘All of you? How was that possible?’

  Mrs. Nihei was almost eighty, but when I looked at her I saw my daughter, who was only a little younger than Mrs. Nihei had been the night of the Great Air Raid. I saw my daughter weaving among the ruins of a burning city; looking for me, looking for her father. Lost.

  ‘How?’ Mrs. Nihei asked, her face crumpling. ‘… How? – I don’t know. I don’t know.’

  * * *

  The easternmost Bell of Time is gone, its three rivers under concrete.

  The East Bank’s teahouses and ferries, its shrines and its carp restaurants, the archery stands at the Hall of Thirty Three Bays. The lantern-maker district. The network of canals and their pleasure boats, and the groves of ancient cherry trees. Yoshimura Hiroshi, in Edo’s Bells of Time, wrote: When everything else has vanished, even the name becomes precious.

  Today the Sumida’s banks are scattered with new-fangled architecture from the 1980s Bubble and the so-called Lost Decades afterward. The Egg of Winds, a huge glowing metal capsule with liquid crystal screens whose images change when the wind blows. The Tokyo-Edo Museum, which looks like a giant walker out of Star Wars. And, to the north, the Skytree tower.

  I walked along the narrow park where the bell had once tolled the hours for the craftsmen and lumberyard workers and drunks, for the eastern bank’s prostitutes and musicians – when suddenly, up a few shallow tiled steps, was a monument to the Yokokawa-Honjo Bell of Time: a tower with a model bell inside. It was the size of my head and stuck in place. The bell couldn’t move, much less ring. Its granite tower was shorter than I was, and not much wider.

  The bell was there and yet it wasn’t. Like Yokokawa-Honjo itself.

  Back in England, the postcard fell on my doormat. It read: Daibo Coffee will close, after thirty-eight years in the same place. The postcard read: Daibo has no hair. The postcard read: Daibo hadn’t decided what to do next. I studied the words and studied the words, and finally decided that there had been a mistake, that I must have misunderstood.

  A friend visited Daibo Coffee, and phoned me. ‘You were right. Daibo really is bald. He has absolutely no hair. And yes – sorry – but his cafe is shutting, too. Why are you so upset? Things get knocked down in this city all the time. The building doesn’t even fit in with Omotesandō. It’s practically the only place that’s over ten years old.’

  I wondered if Daibo was sick. I wondered what had happened. Daibo Coffee would close on New Year’s Day, 2014.

  Daibo had created a village inside one of the world’s biggest cities and that village was like something built on a cliff by the sea. It was being washed away.

  I bought a plane ticket for Tokyo, and rang Daibo before I flew.

  ‘This is Daibo.’

  ‘Daibo? It’s Anna. Good morning!’ It was night in Japan.

  ‘I got your letter.’

  ‘What do you want me to bring you?’

  ‘Just bring yourself. And, Anna…’ He waited so long that I thought we had been cut off. ‘You understand that…?’

  He used a word I didn’t know, though I wondered if I might have heard it before. And the last word: did it mean died or didn’t exist?

  ‘… When?’ I asked, cautious, trying not to commit myself.

  ‘Four or five months ago. And, Anna…’ Again the long silence, the echoing line.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t be surprised.’

  ‘I won’t be surprised.’

  ‘Don’t be surprised.’

  After we hung up, I realized that he had said, The shop will close. Shut down was the word I hadn’t immediately understood. But why, I wondered, should I have been surprised about that? He had already said so in his postcard.

  * * *

  In the cafe, an assistant was pouring coffee. He was intent, and didn’t look up; I didn’t recognize him. Daibo wasn’t there. The assistant finally motioned me to a seat at the counter’s end. I had come straight from the airport. My eyes felt dry, as if the cavity behind them were filled with sand.

  ‘Milk coffee,’ I said.

  Then the bathroom door clicked open and an old man came out. He might have been one of Daibo’s customers; someone who had been coming to Omotesandō Crossing to drink coffee since I was born. Then the man looked at me, and started, and I saw he was Daibo. A Daibo who looked like an overexposed photograph. He had hair, but it had grown back pure white, a soft halo of down.

  Daibo rounded the counter slowly until he stood beside my chair.

  ‘Well, it’s been a while since I last saw you,’ I said, using the formula. When you don’t know what to say in Japan, there’s almost always a script, words to plug into almost any gap.

  He ignored set phrases. ‘Aren’t you jetlagged?’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  Daibo pointed to his luminous corona of hair, wincing. ‘My hair,’ he said. ‘It’s…’

  ‘You always look great to me.’

  ‘I got these glasses…’ He took them off and without the horn-rimmed frames, I thought his face reflected blurred light the way stars do in photographs. He put them back on. ‘It gives an accent to my face.’

  ‘I like your spectakers…’

  ‘Spectacles.’

  ‘… You look like a Taishō intellectual.’ Daibo winced again. If the 1920s meant glamor to me, to him the decade meant old. I wanted to say edgy, but I didn’t know the word.

  ‘I have to go home now,’ he said. ‘Because I have a cold…’

  ‘Because of the winds?’ Flu and winds sound the same in Japanese, though of course you write the words differently. A typhoon was moving toward Tokyo, and I thought he meant weather.

  ‘No, because I’m sick.’ He paused. ‘Will you come in tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ll keep coming back until you’re here again.’

  Daibo stood, bowed to me, and took his fedora off its hook on the wall. He snapped it over his bright hair. Then he left.

  * * *

  For my last milk coffee in his shop, Daibo chose a dark bowl, one I had never had before. It was matte black like a go piece, the colour you take if you’re the weaker player.

  Fifty days later, the cafe shut, and then the next year, bulldozers pulled down its walls and rolled over what had been the ceilings.

  That Daibo Coffee closed was not a surprise in a city of new places and novelties. The surprise was that it had ever existed at all.

  芝

 
; 切

  通

  し

  ‘Shiba-kiridoshi’

  At Zōjō-ji in Shiba Park is the largest of all the bells in the capital. It was cast in 1678. It was originally called ‘the One-Ri Gane’ because people believed the sound that followed each stroke would linger for the time it took a traveller to cover the distance of one ri: that is, for two and a half miles.

  S. Katsumata

  Gleams from Japan

  Shiba Kiridoshi: Tokyo Tower

  A vermilion gate. A warped pine tree in the rain. An undulating swell of lotus leaves and flowers crowds a wooden bridge; there is no earth, no sky, only the flowers opening out.

  Kawase Hasui, whose six hundred woodblocks invented an idealized mid-century Japan, was an unlikely artist: near-sighted and raised to be a shopkeeper, he began formal training only when he was twenty-five. His prints, too, are reveries at odds with an age when firestorms burned the capital twice. Kawase’s Tokyo is a city of cherry petals, willow trees, stone embankments reflected in water. The charred wreckage of the twentieth century is entirely absent in his work.

  Born in 1883 to a family who lived in the temple district of Shiba near Zōjō-ji, where six of the Tokugawa shoguns are buried, Hasui was expected to follow his father in the family business, crafting and selling kumihimo, the fine braided cords used in traditional Japanese dress. Hasui’s father forbade him to attend art classes, and insisted that he study accounting and English instead. Unable to take up an apprenticeship with an established artist, Hasui taught himself to sketch by copying illustrations serialized in the newspapers and tracing over old prints.

  When his sister’s husband took over the kumihimo shop, Hasui was at last free to concentrate on sketching; he made a living designing magazine covers and advertisements. He also worked on his own woodblock prints: Twelve Months of Tokyo and Selected Scenes of Japan. When the 1923 earthquake hit, he had filled 188 sketchbooks, all of which burned in the fires that followed the tremor. Hasui’s Shiba, too, is gone: its green spaces and temples replaced by the Prince Hotel, a golf driving range, a bowling center and an ‘Eiffel’ Tower. Hasui’s sentimental prints are what remains of his old neighborhood.

  In Roppongi, I passed a stump painted blue, and buildings shaped like Tetris blocks built to fill in the space. A beggar with a blue towel tied around his head was dragging his belongings toward the bars and clubs of Roppongi Crossing. There were signboards: for Chinese soba, for the Hard Rock Café, for the Roy Building. A bar called Glass Dance, and vending machines packed with Natural American Spirit cigarettes. The logo featured a Plains Indian crowned with eagle feathers.

  The scrappy verge beside the road smelled like urine. In a flower shop, a crowd of ice-white orchids packed the space, almost wall to wall.

  I flagged down a taxi; a woman was driving. She had long, long hair tied neatly back. ‘I want to go to Zōjō-ji,’ I said.

  ‘Would you like to hear my voice teacher sing?’ she asked, jamming her foot down hard on the accelerator. We streaked down Torii-zaka.

  ‘His name is Koga Hisashi … he’s really amazing.’ She fumbled with her iPod: a man’s countertenor voice filled the cab. Ave Maria! Koga launched into bel canto trills until I thought the taxi’s window glass would shatter. The piece he was singing is an artful if overwrought fake, written in the 1970s by the Soviet guitarist Vladimir Vavilov. Vavilov thought audiences would appreciate a lost Renaissance composer more than a contemporary Russian one, so he pretended his own version of Ave Maria belonged to the repertoire of the obscure sixteenth-century composer Giulio Caccini.

  ‘I love this song,’ the driver said. ‘I’m practicing my English before the Olympics.’

  ‘This is Latin.’

  ‘Really!’ she said, shocked. ‘Latin! Where do they speak that?’

  Four white vans, with the imperial gold chrysanthemums stenciled on their sides, passed us. They were playing martial music from loud speakers riveted to their roofs: ‘Pray at Dawn’. ‘Encampment Song’: Stroking the mane of my horse, I wondered what tomorrow would bring. Among bullets, tanks and bayonets, we rested on pillows of grass in our field barracks. In a dream my father appeared to me, calling me to return to him when I fall. The war songs and the ersatz Renaissance harmonies struggled for supremacy.

  I left the taxi in front of the Triple Gate, the vermilion entrance to Zōjō-ji. Its three doors strip visitors of the three sins – stupidity, hatred and greed – that trap us and keep us from enlightenment. Called Sanmon, it was built to erase the world of illusion. Walk through it and know: nothing in this world has a distinct character. Nothing has a distinct form. There is nothing to be sought.

  The great Tōkaidō highway, which connected Kyoto and Edo, began and ended near Zōjō-ji. The temple was defined not only by its spiritual role, and its association with the Tokugawa, but by its proximity to the execution grounds at Suzugamori; to the pleasure quarters of Shinagawa; and the outcasts’ flophouse district. On the avenue down from the temple’s bell tower were drinking and snack bars; the music of jōruri ballads, the calls of street magicians and whores. The air was steeped with the smells of grilled rice, of incense drifting from temples and from the tea shops. This flimsy Shiba was thrown together at dusk, the hour called kuremutsu, and then taken apart again at dawn.

  Zōjō-ji purified and dissolved the social evils and defilement from the inner city.

  On the concrete steps in front of Zōjō-ji’s main hall a film crew was set up, its cameras trained on a manikin wearing a hat that looked like Mickey Mouse ears swathed in gold tissue. The statue’s breastplate was gold, and it had a red cape. The crowd were ignoring the proscription against taking photographs, and angling their phones at the impassive white face.

  Pink joss sticks blazed away in a bronze cauldron; I went into the Hall for the Safety of the Nation, where the Tokugawa genealogy, from the first shogun until the last, was inscribed on the wall. After the last shogun left the city, the sacred objects that had belonged in the shogun’s private temple were once collected here: sixteen statues of the arhats, beings who have achieved nirvana; paintings of hawks; and an eighteenth-century bronze image of Amida Buddha sitting on a huge many-petaled golden lotus.

  Monks were selling charms – for wisdom, for good health, for success in exams. The most expensive charm was for driving, at ¥700; wisdom was cheap, only ¥300. It came in a tiny sachet of purple and gold brocade, cinched with a white silk cord.

  Outside the main hall stood a Lilliputian shrine to Jizō, one of Amida Buddha’s attendants and a bodhisattva of compassion. It is Jizō who oversees life’s transitions, and the borderlands of life and death. For anyone traveling between those worlds, he is not just the guide to hell, but also the possibility of return. The shrine’s doors were shut, so whatever was inside was invisible. Chain-link rain gutters – kusari-doi – ran from the shrine’s eaves to the earth. Into each of the gutter’s links were angled little pinwheels; yellow and red, stamped with pink flowers. They spun wildly in the wind, clicking.

  The red-metal frame of Tokyo Tower loomed over the trees, the temple, the Tokugawa graves. It is a small quiet corner of what was once a vast space, the graves banished here in the 1950s. An old woman was selling admission tickets – ¥500 each – at a booth in front of the nineteenth-century gate, a construction of wood and hammered weathered bronze: sinuous Chinese dragons climbed through scrolled clouds. The woman handed me an entry ticket and a packet of ten black-and-white postcards: a bell tower and colonnades; gilt peonies and phoenixes. The old photographs had been overexposed, and the monochrome prints were flat, lusterless: the stone stairways, the raked pebbles and roof tiles bleached almost white, the shadows without depths.

  To see Shiba as it would have appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, the letters and journals of foreign residents are invaluable: they describe what existed without the desire either to restore the buildings and the dynasty that built them, or to tear those places down. For the newly ar
rived Europeans and Americans, old Edo might have been mysterious, its ruins picturesque, but the castles and temples had none of the emotional significance that they held for the soldiers and townspeople who had lived through the civil disturbances that preceded the country’s opening up to the West and the Meiji emperor’s restoration. And in some cases, restricted sites were opened for the first time; before the Meiji era, only the shogun himself could enter Zōjō-ji’s main hall. But after the last shogun left Edo for exile, anyone who could pay the entrance fee might visit, though foreigners were reminded to ‘leave your boots at the door’.

  In the first foreign guidebook to Japan, the British consul Ernest Mason Satow described the Tokyo of the 1870s. He began by setting out the limits within which the treaty allowed foreigners to travel: the Shin Tone-gawa (Yedo-gawa) from its mouth as far as the guard-house at Kanamachi, from Kanamachi to Senji, by the Mito Road. From Senji along the course of the Sumida-gawa to Furuya no Kami-gō. ‘From the latter place by a line drawn through the following villages…’

  Satow detailed passport requirements, gave advice on shooting licenses (‘This covenant expressly stipulates that the holder of the license shall not shoot beyond Treaty limits’). He listed clothes that would be required, beginning with a light flannel coat, made to hook up, and with pockets to button, ‘so that when you take off your coat and give it to someone to carry, the contents are not in danger of falling out’ and ran through everything from singlets, stockings and handkerchiefs to slippers and air pillows. The traveler should also remember notebooks and writing materials; pencils; cigars; flask; requisite medicines; knife; shoehorn; extra boot laces (‘hippopotamus are the best’); compass; traveling thermometer; books and maps, including a Japanese dictionary; and Persian insect powder.