by Tim Anderson
Final Summary:
Total # of pairs of chopsticks used (for eating): 1,261
Total # of food items dropped on floor (while eating): only 19!
Total # of times waitress brought me a spoon or fork unasked: only 3!
Total # of visits to Tokyo Disneyland: only 2!
16
In which our hero’s adventure reaches its musical climax and then everyone goes home with their ears bleeding.
–
Concert for Viola and Piano
Music by
Johannes Brahms
Tim Anderson, Viola
Toru Miyazaki, Piano
Sunday, July 22
3:30 p.m.
Steinway Salon, Tokyo
1-6 Kanda Surugadai, Chiyoda-ku
–
The flyers are all printed; the studio space rented; the sheet music dog-eared, ink-blotted, and bloodstained. It’s time for my great Tokyo debut-as part of a recital given by my friend Toru and me. It took a fair amount of cajoling on Toru’s part to get me to agree to this public performance, as standing on a stage in front of a roomful of sober people ready to get all judgy gives me the flopsweats under normal circumstances. Standing on a stage trying not to drop my viola in front of a roomful of blank-faced Japanese people who are probably expecting a competent viola player, having seen the fancy font on the flyer-now this really puts the fear in me. And facing these same people after I choke, throw my viola onto the floor, and scream, “I can’t do it! Everyone knows it! My thesis advisor was right! I’m a fraud!” and then jump stage left, get tangled in the curtain, fall over, and pee in my pants-this could be a real career killer.
But one evening as we drank Asahi beers in his neighborhood in Yokohama, Toru had somehow convinced me that I should just go for it and not worry that the entire audience would be silently judging me and wishing I’d taken a few more years to rehearse. At first I was absolutely against it.
“Don’t get me wrong, Toru,” I explained. “I loooove playing the viola. Love it. But only in a room by myself with the shades drawn and sirens blaring outside. Or in a fifty-piece orchestra where the sound of my playing can’t possibly be heard.”
Toru’s brow furrowed.
“Or, you know, with a guy going to town on a gigantic grand piano right next to me.”
“What means ‘going to town’?”
“I absolutely can’t be the only viola player in the room. I need a buffer.”
“What means ‘buffer’?”
“Besides, you don’t want me publicly embarrassing you, do you? You’re a great player! What if the wrong person should see us playing together? You could be ruined. Ruined, I say!”
“You are so afraid,” Toru laughed. “Why is it? You are American. Americans aren’t afraid of what other people are thinking.”
He’s right. After all, we did invent the deep-fried Twinkie.
“All Americans are not the same,” I said, enumerating in my head all the differences between myself and the Olsen twins. “Do all Japanese people have black belts?” I asked Toru.
“Yes,” he replied. “Anyway, it not important, the concert. We can play fine at performance, and besides, no people will come.”
“Do you really think so?” I said hopefully. I do love Toru’s streak of negativity whenever it comes to his own musical prospects.
“Yes, we will invite people and no one will come to see. It will be fine.”
He’d said the magic words.
“Oh, OK, I’ll do it. But nobody better come.”
So now here I am, sweating bullets as I prepare to fool the world (or at least a dozen or so people) into thinking I have musical talent. I’m tempted to make some amendments to the flyer Toru designed, in order to lower folks’ expectations just a little. A few that come to mind:
Concert for
Piano and Cheap Secondhand Chinese Viola
and
Tim Anderson on Viola,
In His First Public Performance
Since the Accident
But Toru won’t give his consent to these changes, so instead I’m going to make my grand entrance by walking onto the stage with a limp.
The studio space has a maximum capacity of fifty people. Toru, in spite of his earlier declaration that no one would come, thinks we should plan on having about twenty.
“You think we’ll have that many?!” I stammer, panicked.
“Just in case,” he says. He has invited his family and some family friends as well as his piano teacher and some of her other students. And me? Well, despite my mortal fear of playing the viola in public, I decided that, screw it, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do my best to make people that I know sit through it. So I post flyers at work and give a few to friends.
“It’s always been a dream of mine to one day wake up and be able to play the viola,” my colleague Udo from South Africa says to me as I hand him a flyer.
“Oh God, me too,” I say. “Wouldn’t that be awesome?”
On the big day, we arrive early and set up all fifty chairs, and it turns out that the good Steinway people weren’t lying with the “fifty person maximum” line. We would’ve had to tear down a wall to get a fifty-first chair in there. We warm up on our instruments and wait for the people to start trickling in. Toru’s mother and sister arrive quietly and sit down in the front row. A few minutes later Toru’s piano teacher walks in and sits in the last row, increasing our total attendance to three.
Once we’re all warmed up and loose, Toru and I hop off the small stage and mingle with our public. Toru talks to his piano teacher, and I engage in some Japanese small talk with his mother.
Me: Hi, how are you? It’s been a while since I’ve seen you.
Her: Fine, thank you. Your viola playing sounds nice.
M: No, it sounds horrible. I need to practice for five more years.
H: No, it’s very pretty.
M: No, you’re wrong. My viola is a disaster. A musical earthquake.
H: [silent smiling]
M: Do you like my necktie?
Rachel and Tami, her clubbing sidekick, waltz in with water bottles and bug eyes, proving to everyone in the room that I do in fact have friends-sweaty friends hopped up on drugs, but friends nonetheless-and saving me from having to come up with another way to insult myself in Japanese.
“Did you guys get in really late last night?” I ask.
“We just left the after-party about an hour ago,” Rachel says, her kaleidoscopic eyes blazing. And now they’re at the after-after-party.
A few others show up in the next few minutes: my housemate Akiko and her friend, Kenji and Midori from my work, and an employee of the Steinway Salon, who gives us our receipt for the rental before politely declining my kind invitation for her to please please please have a seat and join in the fun.
Since we only have the place reserved for a few hours, Toru and I decide we should go ahead and start playing, even though our audience is only ten strong. I get up on stage, start the show with a few words in Japanese and English-thanking everyone for coming, inviting them to enjoy the show, and requesting that they please not throw anything-and then Toru and I launch into our Brahms sonatas.
People say that when you’re nervous on stage, you should simply imagine the audience in their underwear and it will calm you down. Or people always say that people always say that, but anyway, I decide it’s inappropriate to imagine Toru’s mother, sister, and piano teacher in their underwear. I find I always respond much better to imagining Marky Mark and the lead singer of A-ha lying on a double bed in their underwear. So this is what I do. It relaxes me and strengthens my bow stroke.
Now, I’ve also found that playing the viola on a bare stage with piano accompaniment and a silent and respectful audience is quite different from playing drums in an experimental rock trio with no discernible song structures and a singer who wouldn’t know a melody if it kissed him full on the mouth. For one thing, if you make a mistake in the latte
r, it may be noticeable, but it’s also the nature of rock and roll to take mistakes and run with them. Further, you can blame it on the booze and the drugs. However, if you make a mistake on the viola, there’s nothing to cover you. You are left naked and neutered in front of an audience that wants every note to be precise and clear; that counts on the steady harmonic cooperation between viola and piano; that is not likely to readily accept that you fucked up that high C because you were doing Jaeger shots before the show or because you are still reeling from the cocaine you had one of your roadies inject into your anus before you came onstage.
It’s the expectation of precision that scares me. One’s ear need not be classically trained to hear a stringed instrument falling far short of the intended note. But, thankfully, Rachel, knowing I’ll be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, gave me a Xanax yesterday, which I downed about twenty minutes before beginning to play, so instead of fearing that every note I hit is being ruthlessly judged as hopelessly deficient by the audience, I’m floating on a cotton-candy cloud, playing my golden viola flawlessly for an audience of young virgin males in tunics. Drugs make everything so much easier!
Jo and Grant sneak in at the tail end of the first sonata, bringing the audience total to twelve and giving me that extra burst of adrenaline I need to attack the furious climax of the piece before bringing it to a soft and sweet, if slightly squeaky, conclusion.
The rest of the show continues without a hitch, except for a few problems with the high notes that make me sound as if I am strangling my viola rather than playing it. Strangling it real good. And my cell phone rings during the somber and romantic fourth sonata: Shunsuke, calling because he’s lost and can’t find the studio. Thankfully, though, he arrives in time to see Toru and I take our bows and leave the stage.
“Oh my God, Tim, that was great!” Rachel and Tami say in unison as they each hug me.
“Oh, please. That’s the drugs talking.”
“No, seriously,” Rachel says, petting me on the shoulder and taking a swig of water from her humongous plastic bottle. “I really don’t think it is. Tami, is it? It was good, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tami smiles, trying to stop her legs from moving to the beat inside her head.
Toru introduces me to his piano teacher. We exchange greetings in Japanese, and she lies through her teeth about enjoying the concert.
Her: I enjoyed your playing.
Me: No. It was horrible. I’m very sorry.
H: No, the music was very pretty.
M: My viola sounded like a…a car accident. Like a car accident.
H: No, no.
M: But Toru played very beautifully.
H: [silent judging of Toru]
M: Do you like my necktie?
H: You are so tall.
I’m thrilled that my Tokyo debut wasn’t a complete disaster. This concert will be my goodbye kiss to Tokyo, for I have decided that I must soon take my leave of the city and return to my home planet. Or, rather, Jimmy has threatened to divorce me if I don’t come home within the next month. So, because gay divorces can get really ugly-especially when there is a cat and a treasure trove of pop-up books, drug paraphernalia, and David Bowie CDs involved-I must return.
I came to Tokyo to wake myself up, to force myself into uncomfortable scenarios, to go record shopping. After two years, I feel the need to return home, to come back to earth and try to relearn its language. I’ve spent too much time away from the natural flow of my mother tongue. I see Japanglish phrases on T-shirts or advertisements, and they’re making a little too much sense to me these days. I saw a shirt on a young girl the other day that read:
I squint my eyes and pretend I’m snow board as I bosh the lip off double overhead power pump.
Melon Papa
I know exactly what that means.
Not that I’ve totally figured things out. Even the seemingly straightforward T-shirt messages are getting lost in translation: look at that ratty rock and roll hipster chick in the T-shirt that reads “Pretty Stupid” or the Harajuku chickadee whose black tee has “Cum Dumpster” painted in blood red on the front. Funny! But wait. Are they being ironic or brutally honest? Am I meant to a) wink, nudge, and laugh, or simply b) laugh? What used to make sense doesn’t anymore, and what didn’t does.
Sitting at my laptop one recent night trolling the Internet for cheap music, I came upon a listing for the 1988 Siouxsie and the Banshees album Peepshow that is shamefully undervalued. On seeing that there are forty-two used Peepshows available-some for as low as forty-five cents!-I remarked with petulant exasperation to myself, “That a great album, why it used so much?!”
My language skills are compromised. I need to go home.
And besides, the culture wars are in full swing back home in the mighty USA, and it would be a real shame to miss out on that festival of Christian love. My country needs me.
A famous traveler once said, “He who is tired of Tokyo is tired of not being able to get a decently sized pan pizza for under thirty bucks.” I’m sure someone said that. And I would have to agree, but I must say, my love for a big fat cheesy pizza notwithstanding, I’m far from tired of Tokyo. Like any great city, it sucks the life right out of you on a daily basis. But it also offers a multitude of small treasures to enjoy as it pummels you into submission: the reliable promptness of the reliably color-coded trains carrying reliably daft young creatures of fashion to their favorite two stops on the Yamanote train: Shibuya and Harajuku; the clash of the old and the new, like when you see a ninety-year-old woman literally fight a teenager for a seat on the train; the takoyaki octopus balls; the unintentionally existential English-language signs you see in random places, like the one I saw at Mos Burger that read, “Always close a door behind you.” Or the one on the door of a restaurant in Ikebukuro saying, “We are looking for our staff.” How sad. Where on earth did their staff go, leaving them like that?
Change is in the air here, and not just for me. I’ve heard through the grapevine that my old bookish roommate Ewan is engaged to be married to a Japanese woman, with whom he’ll return to Australia and no doubt render his family speechless. Donna also has nuptials in her future, as she’s taking her love of a guy in uniform to its logical extreme and getting hitched to an American sailor. And those new Edwin jeans I bought the other day, vouched for in advertisements by Brad Pitt himself, were out of style by the time I squeezed myself into them.
So I’ve started making preparations to leave. I’ve sent boxes home, started packing up my room, and attempted to sell anything of value I don’t need. I went down the road to one of the consignment shops in Koenji the other day to see if I could get rid of my little boom box, hoping to trade it and use the money to take myself out to lunch. The woman didn’t seem too interested in buying it, and after a few unsuccessful attempts to pawn it off on her, I gave up and told her she could just have it. I started to set it down on the floor, but, waving her hands like a hummingbird, she explained that she really didn’t want me to leave it, that she would really just prefer if I took it the hell out of her damn store. So I left the store with my boom box after a few irritated bows, left it outside the shop on the sidewalk, and took myself out to lunch anyway. When I walked back past the shop on my way home, the boom box was no longer on the sidewalk. It was probably for sale inside for two thousand yen.
Since announcing my imminent departure, I’ve received many goodbye gifts from fellow teachers, students, and friends. The folks in my business class threw me a going away party and gave me a huge Japanese flag that they’d all signed. I received a wall hanging from a student and a CD of traditional Japanese music from the mothers of the kids I teach. I’ve gotten enough handkerchiefs to patch myself together a nice set of bay window curtains, and enough bottles of sake to render me legally blind.
So it’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in a massive field listening to a Japanese hip-hop band performing for me and hundreds of others at a music festival in the east Tokyo district of
Odaiba on Tokyo Bay. One of the main sponsors of the festival is Shane British English School, whose advertisements always show a dorky-looking and pasty-faced British guy hanging off of a double-decker bus, inviting you to study English the way it’s meant to be spoken: Britishly.
There are many foreigners in attendance, and all the Japanese bands on the bill have been making admirable efforts to use whatever English they know when addressing the audience. The shirtless rapper wearing a sarong on stage just said, “It’s a lock and loll liot!!!” to whoops and screams from the crowd.
I’m here with the usual suspects of Jo, Grant, Shunsuke, and Rachel. A few minutes ago, Jo and I joined the mailing list for one of the Tokyo bands that played called Ex-Girl. They’re an all-girl trio wearing dresses and wigs that wouldn’t be out of place in a Las Vegas revue, and they play a glammy tribal punk pop of sorts. For obvious reasons, I’m desperate to be friends with them. In the flyers for the festival, it says they are from the planet Kero Kero. I wonder if they have Diet Mountain Dew and wheat bread there. Do they need English teachers?
After chatting to the Ex-Girl girls until our Japanese and their English completely give out, we get some more beers and rejoin the others for a boogie. As we all dance and swig and chatter, I find myself thinking about what I’ve learned on my Japan odyssey. A cloyingly American thing to do, but I am what I am, and I’ve got to tie this shit up somehow.
I’ve learned that sometimes assuming does indeed make an ass out of you and me. When I’d first started teaching and asked my students what they eat for breakfast, many of them had replied, “Rice and miso soup.” I’d foolishly assumed that this meant they ate them together in the same bowl, like we Americans do with dishes like macaroni and cheese or Corn Flakes and ice cream. This is not so, as I found out when eating lunch with Shunsuke one day. He saw me empty my rice into my bowl of miso soup, looked around uncomfortably, making sure the waitress and surrounding customers were minding their own damn business, and said to me, “That like cat food. But it’s OK, you are foreigner.”
