The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  Shinjuku is the lives played out in the clubs of Kabukichō’s quarter mile by quarter mile; in West Shinjuku’s towers midway between peak and pavement; in the bars of Golden Gai.

  Shinjuku is the limit of my knowledge, the future city where I am already a ghost; unknowable and unknown.

  帝

  国

  ホ

  テ

  ル

  ‘The Imperial Hotel’

  At every turn, it is possible to leave the major spaces for minor ones. There seems always to be another turning into a farther space; volumes interlock, and short runs of steps lead up to new outlooks. There are constantly changing perspectives of the interior, and through openings at unexpected places come views of the gardens.

  To enter this hotel is to become involved in space whose very nature is limitless and unending: there is no certain point to be called beginning; there is no ending either … The shape of the Imperial’s space is the shape of life, without origin and without end.

  Cary James

  Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel

  Hibiya: The Imperial Hotel

  Art, Mishima Yukio once wrote, is a colossal evening glow. The burnt offering of all the best things of an era.

  Mishima put those thoughts into the mouth of a grubby Japanese tour guide eking out his living in Bangkok just before World War Two, but the words, detached from their speaker, have a weight and symmetry:

  Even history, apparently destined to endure for ever, is abruptly made aware of its own end. Beauty stands before everyone; it renders human endeavor completely futile. Before the brilliance of evening, before the surging evening clouds, all nonsense about some ‘better future’ immediately fades away. The present moment is all; the air is filled with a poison of color. What’s beginning? Nothing. Everything is ending.

  I remember that passage whenever I look at Miyajima Tatsuo’s art installations. I dreamed about Miyajima before I met him, or saw his face. I had the dream just after I saw his 1997 show Time in Blue, with its scattered glowing networks of red and green and blue LED numbers that counted down

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  and up

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  The countdowns finished and restarted. Finished and restarted. Finished and restarted. Restarted and finished.

  Some of the LEDs were mounted on toy cars that veered in arcs around a room; others twined in spirals that rose from the floor to the ceiling; or were fixed into lattices. And there was a clock that changed its number just once every seven days.

  Inside the glassy darkness, the LEDs glimmered and ticked away to themselves. Radiant vertigo: I was a number.

  I got lost in blackness, unable to see anything except for the lights, which wavered and vanished, then blinked on again. There were no stable bearings, and no sense of why the countdown began or why it ended; why some numbers ran faster than others.

  And there was no Zero. Not ever a Zero.

  In a dream I had after seeing the show, I was kneeling in a wooden boat. The boat was drifting through an ice field, and I was pushing floes away from the prow. Overhead the stars were LED counters. I watched the counters rise in the east, although crumbling seastacks eclipsed them while they were rising. A man was reclining there, among the stones. The keeper of the gate, I dreamed. Miyajima.

  Later I thought that vision – the numbers arcing across the sky, the oceans, the seastacks – was an electronic portent, a premonition of my move to Japan.

  One critic has said of Miyajima’s LEDs that ‘the fusion of extreme electronics with extreme sentimentality is typically Tokyo’, and in the city, Miyajima’s creations are everywhere: his numbers are embedded into staircases, or curved around Roppongi skyscrapers, or stuffed in coin lockers.

  Miyajima has said: Time is not what we think it is. We are alive, therefore time exists. We animate time. We invent it.

  Miyajima had in some way brought me to Japan, so I wanted to meet Miyajima before I left Japan.

  The question was how to find him. In London, I might have rung his gallery, but in Japan, even more than elsewhere, introductions are everything, so I sifted through people I knew, wondering who would know someone who would know Miyajima. Unlike the near-infinite labyrinth of Tokyo itself, the city’s expatriate community is small. I finally asked Caroline Trausch, a Frenchwoman who introduced Japanese artists to Parisian galleries. Like Miyajima himself, she worked in the chasm that lies between Tokyo and the West.

  I asked Caroline at a drinks party for a young artist, Nishino Sōhei. Nishino makes cityscapes from contact sheets he cuts up by hand and then pieces together, creating vast dioramas that are true, yet not correct: an imaginary city that doesn’t exist in the world.

  Together we looked at Nishino’s Tokyo. An azure sea ringed the city, and the tiny torn squares overlapped like scales on a sea serpent. Close up, I could see a traffic sign, a tower, a miniature person small as a brushstroke. It was like looking at Tokyo with the prismatic eye of an insect, or an angel.

  ‘Why don’t you just phone SCAI the Bathhouse? The gallery that represents him?’

  ‘I can’t just call them! That’s crazy! That would never work.’

  So Caroline introduced me to an art collector who, she said, would know how to find Miyajima. He knows everybody, she said cryptically. And everybody knows him.

  The Collector was a tall man, and most of the room, even the artists – especially the artists – was in awe, even afraid of him.

  I tried small talk, asking how many generations his family had lived in Tokyo. To be a true Edokko, or child of Tokyo, you have to go back three generations.

  ‘Seven generations,’ the Collector said, pleasantly. ‘My ancestors ran soaplands.’

  I laughed at the old-fashioned word for ‘brothel’. ‘That is patently not true.’

  ‘They were in the business of bathhouses.’

  I raised my eyebrows to show that I wasn’t taken in. The Collector laughed.

  ‘… My great-grandfathers were samurai doctors for the shoguns.’

  The Collector’s ancestors had acquired Dutch texts on anatomy, during a time when contact with foreigners was forbidden. For over two centuries Japan closed itself off from the West, with the sole exception of the small Dutch trading post on Dejima, the artificial island off Nagasaki, in the far southwest of the country. Edo’s doctors taught themselves medicine in defiance of the shogun’s restriction on Western books, and also despite the hostility of Nagasaki’s doctors (who wanted to protect their monopoly on the so-called ‘Dutch learning’). The Edo doctors had to work in isolation, entirely from books, like codebreakers. It was, one scholar has said, ‘one of the most extraordinary chapters in cultural interchange in world history’.

  The Collector’s great-great-great-grandfathers translated the Dutch medical text Ontleedkundige Tafelen, known in Japan as Tafel Anatomia, with its charts displaying and identifying the parts of the body. One eighteenth-century doctor wrote: ‘Gradually we got so that we could decipher ten lines or more a day. After two or three years of hard study, everything became clear to us; the joy of it was as the chewing of sweet sugar cane.’

  The Collector had a steeliness about him, a scrutiny, which fitted the descendant of men who had acquired first-hand knowledge of the body’s machinery. His people were mavericks, driven – to learn and to heal – by intellectual hunger.

  I asked the Collector if he knew Miyajima, or knew how I might meet him.

  ‘I know the work, but not the man,’ he said, fixing his gaze on me. He smiled. ‘Call SCAI the Bathhouse.’

  Finally, with my days in Tokyo running out, and no other options – the weeks I had left dropping from four to three to two – I rang the gallery. I offered references, explained why I wanted to meet Miyajima, described my ideas about time. But in the end, for all my scheming, nothing mattered but that I loved the LEDs. That was enough.

  The manager of SCAI the Bathhouse arranged for me to meet Miyajima the day b
efore I left Japan. She asked that I go to the Imperial Hotel, in Hibiya. I should wait for Miyajima in the lobby’s Rendez-Vous Bar.

  The moving company came and packed everything away: books, papers, clothes, plates and cups. Our beds, chairs, tables. Almost nothing was left. In my empty closet, the clothes I would wear to my interview with Miyajima floated alone, animated even without my body inside them: a dark cotton skirt, an organza shirt the color of a seashell.

  I had visited the Rendez-Vous Bar my first night in Japan and then never again. I remembered almost nothing about the place.

  The lobby’s inner wall soared two stories upward. Thousands of tiny tesserae crossed that wall almost like strata in an eroded canyon: gold, sand, opal and one thin line of celestial blue.

  I was looking at the wall when Miyajima appeared, suddenly, next to me. He didn’t look like a magician, a craftsman or an artist, but like someone I might have walked past in Omotesandō, or sat beside on the Yamanote Line without really seeing: a man reading a manga, or playing a game on his phone, or sleeping on the train. He had rimless spectacles and wore jeans and an Oxford cloth shirt. There was a stillness about him; a lightness.

  I had expected an ascetic, a wizard; at the very least, someone gloomy. The art critic Waldemar Januszczak once wrote that Miyajima is driven ‘by a set of surprisingly glum motivations … his obsession with flashing numbers is ultimately an obsession with death. The way it keeps coming. The way you cannot escape it.’

  But the man seated on one of the lobby’s little couches did not look sorrowful. I remembered that his earliest works in the 1980s were mischievous one-off performances: in Ginza, he folded his own body into a cube, pretending to be a rock. In Shibuya, he stood in the center of the famously crowded Scramble Crossing, threw his head back and howled as the commuters around him scattered. In Shinjuku he lay down on the asphalt and waited for rain; when it fell his body made a dry silhouette on the ground. He stood up and photographed the outline as the shower erased it. Whenever he performed, he always wore the salaryman’s uniform: a black two-piece suit and a white shirt.

  Miyajima ordered a Darjeeling tea and, when the waitress left, asked what I wanted. I told him about Time in Blue, but not the dream that I had had about it: ‘Your work was…’ I said, halting, ‘… my doorway to Japan.’

  ‘Time in Blue was fifteen years ago! And you’ve kept thinking about it!’ he said, gleeful. ‘Incredible!’

  I wondered why Miyajima had chosen tea made with a teabag rather than something from Shizuoka or Kyushu; in a white cup, those teas shine an almost unearthly green, as if the cup itself is glowing inside. I wondered if paying a lot of money to drink bad tea was a cultural experience for the Japanese, who could pretend they were somewhere else without actually leaving the country. The foyer of the Imperial didn’t even look like Tokyo. We could have been anywhere.

  ‘What was your first memory of time?’ I asked.

  ‘I was twelve years old. That was when I first understood that time existed.’ Miyajima sipped his muddy tea, smiling. ‘I was very ill, hard sick, after a stomach operation, and spent three months in the hospital. I read many books while I stayed there – books about why and where people came from. Like that Gauguin painting: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

  ‘… I had caught fear,’ he said, so quietly that I could barely hear him over the room’s echoing noises: the clatter of silverware and cups on saucers, the thousand voices. ‘I had nothing to do but think about my life, and on my ward, the friends I made kept dying.’

  Miyajima leaned back, and looked toward Hibiya Park, where taxis were arriving, with almost monotonous regularity, to drop guests off and take others away.

  I’d assumed Miyajima chose the Rendez-Vous Bar because he wanted somewhere anonymous, somewhere formal, and it was true, the Imperial was nowhere you would meet a good friend, or anyone intimate; but it was a place that preserved within itself the city’s modern history. Even the name was a relic of a time when the country was building an Asian empire. The hotel’s glory years came after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, when Frank Lloyd Wright was invited to build an edifice that would proclaim Japan’s place as an equal to the European powers and the United States, countries that had tried to dominate and subdue it. Then came World War Two, and the firebombs, which the hotel mostly survived. And in 1967, Lloyd Wright’s ōya tufa blocks and bricks, the infinity pools and the Peacock Room and the heavy Chinese lanterns, were all razed to give way to a seventeen-story block that no architect would admit to designing, the one where Miyajima and I were drinking tea.

  But if you wanted to think about time and Tokyo, the Imperial was a good place.

  ‘What I decided was,’ Miyajima continued, ‘I am training for death, every day. Just now – this moment – is very important. Many people think, “I have time. I have twenty or thirty years left.” But what if you don’t? What if this is all there is?’

  Beyond Miyajima the tesserae rose glittering toward the ceiling’s distant lights. I noticed a thin band of emerald green among the layered sand and stone colors. Five hundred years before, the place where I was sitting would have been under the sea. Hibiya was just an inlet of Tokyo Bay, a place where fishermen harvested oysters and seaweed.

  ‘And you?’ Miyajima asked. ‘What’s your first memory of time?’

  I looked away from the wall and back at Miyajima, startled. I had never thought of that, and no one had ever asked me. ‘My first memory of time was … I’m not sure. When I was growing up, we had no working clocks in our house.’

  Miyajima looked shocked. ‘Amazing! Not a single one?’

  ‘Not one,’ I said. ‘In the early eighties you could call the bank and ask for the time and the temperature. At first, a real person would answer the phone. They would tell you how hot it was, or how cold, and then what the hour was. When I was older, a recording replaced the person. I used to call the bank a lot to hear what time it was. It was a habit that annoyed my mother. Especially when she got the phone bill.’

  ‘No wonder you think about this question,’ Miyajima murmured.

  I poured more tea into Miyajima’s cup. It was stewed, and looked muddier than ever. ‘When you think of “time”, what word do you use?… Your language has so many.’

  ‘I’m not thinking of “clock time” at all,’ Miyajima said. ‘I’m thinking of an abstraction. Something from the language of physics, of mathematics.’

  ‘But your word for it is…?’

  ‘… Ta-imu.’

  ‘From the English word.’

  ‘Yes, but my sense of it isn’t Western. In the West, time is a line. In Asia, it’s a circle.’ Here Miyajima gently took my notebook, a small one covered in grey canvas, and drew a dial on the page, with numbers running counter-clockwise from Nine to One. He scrawled a swirling halo around the dial until rings danced around it. Between the Nine and the One he scored a black circle.

  ‘… The Zero!’ I cried.

  ‘The Zero.’ Miyajima smiled at me. ‘The Zero is Death, yes, but not Death as an ending. Death as the moment when we become our perfected selves. As the filmmaker Terayama Shūji said, We are growing into our deaths.’

  ‘So the Zero is a joke?’

  Miyajima laughed hard, a delighted bark. ‘It’s not a joke! It’s very serious!’

  I laughed too, uncertain. ‘Does that mean that for you, Zero … Zero is a joyful thing?’

  Miyajima once remarked that Zero originally meant not just nothingness but also plenitude, increase, expansion. ‘Avoiding Zero is a deliberate inclusion of a void – a rejection of the idea of nothingness … Taking out Zero focuses attention on Zero.’

  Miyajima handed me back the notebook. ‘Life is movement and color, while Death is darkness and stillness. I use that darkness … It may look like nothing, but energy is brimming, waiting for the next life. That’s the Zero. Just as sleep restores us for the next morning.’

  ‘How can you still feel like that, even
after the 2011 earthquake? A priest near Ishinomaki, that village where so many children were washed out to sea, said, “The flow of time has completely changed. Clocks have stopped.”’

  Miyajima took my notebook back again, and traced a horizontal line at the Four, the word that in Japanese sounds the same as the word for ‘death’.

  ‘Wars and natural disasters cut our natural spans…’

  ‘… which leaves a mark…’

  ‘… which leaves a mark. It’s never the same, but what’s lost can be recovered.’

  I thought of the people dragged by the 2011 tsunami out into the northern Pacific; those whose bodies were never found. ‘Can be recovered’? I wondered. What exactly can be recovered? The idea was, I thought, a joke; like Miyajima’s howl at Scramble Crossing thirty years before, or the vanishing silhouette of his body, erased by the falling rain. Shioda Junichi once said that the twentieth century was an era of revolution and war, of the massive exodus of refugees. ‘It is a period when all things were considered measurable and countable, and individuals were reduced to numbers. Production and consumption, the life and death of human beings, and everything else were reduced to numerical terms. Miyajima’s digital counters, coolly ticking away their numbers, seem perfectly suited to this twentieth-century context.’

  But no, I thought, no. The counters are – must be – Miyajima’s own joke. I thought of him painting random numbers on people’s faces in LED font, for his Deathclock series of photographs. His numbers repeat because nothing is repeatable. He turns people into numbers to prove that they are not numbers, that nothing can be counted. There are billions of stars in the galaxy, Miyajima has said, just as each person is made up of billions of cells. So the scale of the person and the universe is similar. ‘One person can represent the universe and the universe is not bigger than one person.’