Tokio Whip

by Arturo Silva

  –And you can’t stand that? Well, my man, as even Arlene would say, you’re going to have to take it like a man. Ohh, what ever’s happened to my speech? No, I don’t mean that, of course. If it weren’t for my foreign friends I feel sometimes I’d leave next time for good – back to Kyoto – or to Lang’s Vienna.

  –Ah, Kazuko, your “always elegant speech is only enlivened by the occasional slip into the vernacular.”

  –?

  –It is one of your “charm points.”

  –I hope you don’t expect me to say naughty things in bed!

  –No, Dear, I do not. Another drink?

  –You have one. I’ll have a coffee.

  –So what shall we do?

  –What do you mean? I just decided to have another drink, and you a coffee.

  –No, silly, I’m referring to your plan to fix the universe in a permanent state of love.

  –Oh, stop it now. ... Well, we just, uhn, we ... why, we ... establish ourselves in a state of benign benevolence! And, uhm ...

  –Ohh, it sounds very easy, very clear, my General. Our divine love sets an example for all to emulate. Our divine, platonic love, I might add. Ha!, our example would lead the human race to extinction.

  –Kazuo! Living with my aunt is not conducive to ...

  –Kazuko: the city provides means.

  –Means that I do not, uhn, that I …uhn ...

  –Too high-bred, eh? Well, what if I rented a tea ceremony room?

  –Oh, Kazu, stop it. I’m sorry. And stop that high-bred talk, please. You know that I’m not, and that that’s not the reason.

  –But you are, and yes, I am sorry. I just wish we had more time – time alone, I mean.

  –Oh, Dear, we have time, will have ...

  –I know. Anyway, back to our benevolent society.

  –Yes. Well ... uhm, well, why we just – oh, you know what to do! We talk, we take walks. Oh, maybe I am being unrealistic, “as unrealistic as Shakespeare,” as Marianne might say, but I believe that, that ...

  –That our love for each other and our love for them shall lead them into loving one another again.

  –Well, I’d hardly put it into a formula, but yes, something like that.

  –Easily done. Perhaps we should start by taking advantage of the city’s provisions.

  –Ka – ... perhaps that wouldn’t hurt –

  –And perhaps it might.

  –Kazuo! I mean that it might help.

  –It certainly shall. Finish up.

  –I already have. I’ve been waiting for you.

  –Kazuko?!

  ***

  Fifty, sixty, seventy years old, the red and white ribbons get larger, the magnifying glasses and rulers more useful, he’s the third man to thank everyone for taking time out from their busy schedules, to congratulate the happy couple, the graduate, the new president, the budding author, the elected official; the waiters bustling around now, refilling glasses, must be the last speech, getting ready for the toast. Hiroko lights cigarettes, makes polite conversation, giggles when it seems appropriate to do so. Three or four nights a week like this, six to nine, gives her her spending money, though she still hasn’t yet mastered her kimono or her hair style. The hotel provides old women to help her get dressed. (The women help young girls too on mornings after so that they’ll look just the way they did when they left home when they return home.) She glances across the room, notices Hiromi accepting a namecard; “no wonder she has twice as much money as I do!,” Hiroko pouts. Maybe two hours more to go, a quiet night. When she wonders at how smoothly these parties go – a few broken glasses at the most, a foreigner acting silly – they never realize how silly they really are – the whole point is to be polite, to see that nothing goes wrong; it’s certainly not to have a good time, to party as a verb – she happily recalls the day when Roberta had called her to help her organize a party she was going to give Lang and VZ. Her husband – was that right? – had been staying with her awhile, and was now going to stay in Japan longer, but on his own; and then there was something about making peace with VZ; she never got that right either. They were passing acquaintances, parts of overlapping circles, she figured Roberta’d noticed her with Van Zandt, knew nothing of her hotel and hostessing job, but called her nonetheless. She said something about getting to know her better, knew she’d grown up in shitamachi. Those few days were pleasant, but the subsequent events of the party itself had sort of put a halt – over now, it seemed – to any further friendship. There’d been a lot of coordinating to do, especially of schedules, messages going back and forth, maps – Roberta had made an excellent one, simple, and fun what with the tofu and soba shops marked – and last-minute phonecalls. She and Roberta together had made the food; the neighborhood liquor store brought over the beer, wine, and saké. That certainly didn’t help matters, too much too soon, and then another phonecall just before closing time. The day itself was wonderful, uncommonly warm, the windows open and Roberta singing to herself. A mood all too brief.

  ***

  Never felt so weak and alone. Went shopping.

  “It’s hard to fight after a Lubitsch film.”

  City only feels a bit crowded at rush-hour.

  ***

  Ah, this city, Kaoru pauses, thinks to himself, well, you put up with the commute, get to work early and leave late. Thank the gods for the drinking afterwards. Come home, the rice and dinner ready – and the wife, what’s-her-name. An occasional screw, for whatever that’s worth. Sleep and back to work. Good kids. It’s just a city. Have to remember O-Bon.

  ***

  –Eyes getting weak – want to see you.

  –Damn you.

  –Brain getting soft – have to talk.

  –Damn.

  –The soul freezes over – need to kiss you.

  –You.

  –Roberta.

  –Damn you, Lang.

  ***

  R’n’L!

  What did my brother say? That in a hundred years if all the numbers continue the same as now, a tenth of the world’s population will be Elvis imitators? So the world will become a better place, after all.

  Ach, I want to close my eyes and count to twelve and when I reopen ’em all the platform shoes in the world will have disappeared. Be warned: By their shoes shall ye know them.

  Yippie! I have found a way to unite the world. Or at least the quotable world. Start with a song, say: “Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust / show me a woman a man can trust / she’s gone but I don’t worry / ’cos I’m sitting on top of the world.” Which leads, of course, to James Cagney in White Heat, “Top’a the world, Ma!,” which in turn takes us to Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma.” Get it? And on and on and on. Wanna play? Anyway, it might cure me of all this constant quoting and name-dropping. But then what happens to all the quotes left out? Do they form a kind of “anti-system,” one that cannot be controlled or fit anywhere, all the loose miscellania? (Sounds great.) Does it all ultimately derive from my boyhood reading of Superman?

  Anyway, hope your August is as you like it – me, I like it hot as hell.

  And my dreams: First there’s an hysterical nurse, explaining she’s only so ’cos of her recent divorce, and why should everyone blame her? Then the school caretaker – a sort of sad guy whom I always remember; maybe he had a lowly job, but he was getting his daughter a good education – anyway, he comes in and starts shouting, “Goddam Catholics! They say they’ll leave but they never really do, the Catholics keep coming back, there’s no getting rid of them!” Why now, why back in school, now, just when I thought I was becoming an adult?

  Some people want to read all of Dostoevski. I want to see all of Carole Lombard’s films. Speaking of CL, you know that great Walker Evans photo – well, I finally found a reference to the film; it sounds ok, but the title apparently has zilch to do with the story.

  So, whadda’ya’ think – is it a pink city or a gray city? A pink and gray city? A light yellow city (like Baudelaire’s gloves –
he also had pink ones) or a sky blue city? A pastel city, to be sure. Blue roofs and vegetables. Serious supermarkets playing raggae for BGM. Pink and yellow supermarkets. I stopped wearing green and brown years ago, hate natural colors. Hey, my fave coffee shop – Ada and Eve, you know the one in Jimbocho I call the lesbian café – well, it’s gray! And all the gray boutiques in Parco that is a rainbow. The trains might be color-coded but they’re all green, like rivers. And kill the freeways that killed the real rivers sez I.

  “I Confess” Dept. I have come to think that Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Mony Mony” is one of the great jams. “I Need to Know” Dept. What the hell’s a “Shondell”, anyway?

  I gotta show you my fave public phone someday.

  I bought a pair of nail clippers today at the cheap Chinese shop on the Spanish Steps. Pink and black and with a green dragon on it.

  Met an air-head today. She denied she was one. Isn’t that cute?

  A thousand cities claim to be my birth-place! Ten thousand women die with my name on their lips!

  ***

  ARS AMATORIA / ARS POETICA

  For Vicente Aleixandre

  1.Being Spanish

  we cross the Bridge of Dreams;

  Japanese,

  we die for we do not.

  2.I’ve read myself blind.

  Aleixandre is dead.

  An unknown woman

  pours too much saké.

  3.Calderón recites waka –

  turns away;

  rice-skinned women

  in red and black.

  4.Civil wars persist.

  I take three trains a day,

  a moment of peace – noon –

  an empty café.

  ***

  Downtown Hiromi is in her uptown element, Shibuya.

  –Here we go.

  –Ohh god all the way up this stupid hill just for some cheap Chinese food on ittty bitty plates. And the love hotels over there, “for after the movie” that jerkoff told me. No, for after the Nepalese restaurant – maybe, I told him.

  –You mean what’s’s-name?

  –So many accessories for a sexy young girl to buy! I can’t seem to can’t get enough – of accessories or boys.

  –But how little Hiroko spends – one CD and one new accessory a month? How’s a girl gonna get by on so little? I thought she believed in shopping.

  –One each a week for me. And the cheaper, at Dai-Chu. Why are Chinese things so cheap? I thought China was a big country.

  –Beats me.

  –I wonder why Shibuya’s so hilly. Is it supposed to be a charm point? If so, it’s lost on me. Why don’t they just flatten it all out, it’d make the shopping go faster.

  –Oh those tanned boys, all tanned so.

  –You mean those ones?

  –When I used to come here in high-school … well, I guess it was the same. Sort of. All those boys trying to pick us up, and all we could do was giggle. Silly girls we were. Till we gave in! You sort of graduate from shop to shop, from Marui to Parco’s basement, then to the upper floors, and then if you’re a real lady – guess that count’s me out – to Tokyu. But you graduate in price too, count me out, two. It’s like a ramen bowl. Yup, I’d flatten it all.

  –Would you?

  –Poor little Hachiko; what did VZ say? – that the story is all made-up, that he wasn’t really waiting for his master, poor dead man, poor dog, but that he was really just an unwanted pet looking for some affection, and everyone really hated him. How terrible! Well, then maybe he was better off dead.

  ***

  Gangsters in the early morning build the Third New World.

  The only intelligent cabbie yet: “Never heard of the place. Let’s go.”

  “Don’t cry, please. Here, have a cigarette.”

  ***

  We may not find happiness, but we have a right to live.

  – Sylvia Sydney, You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937)

  ***

  Triumphant, tripartite Tokio, we are one. – Lang to himself.

  Chapter 2

  YURAKUCHO–SHIMBASHI

  Roberta was already here, you know; she’d lived in America, had done Europe, she and Lang, they were going nowhere standing still and falling – he couldn’t see it– she needed a change – there was a job available – here – maybe: and so she came.

  Cafferty’d spent the morning at the German bakery in Ningyōchō, stocking up on breads and cakes. The pot au feu simmered the afternoon; it would be easy later to prepare the daikon steak, as well as his favorite, steamed, young eggplant smothered with purple Osaka miso. He had a quick sandwich – salmon and tuna, double lettuce, no mayonnaise – and espresso at Doutor, then stopped to pick up some “traditional Japanese ice cream.” Home, he cleaned house, an easy job as he was such a neat man, always picking up after himself – and no, the moral irony was never lost on him. He had four wines, two white, two red, and a few beers available in case his guest preferred that. Candles? Why not? At ten minutes to eight he remembered the genkan; he hurriedly cleared the area of his shoes and slippers, straightened the umbrellas, made the pile of old newspapers into a neat stack, and just as he was about to place a “fresh” flower (amazingly real-seeming) in the bamboo holder, the bell rang. He froze, could feel the sweat begin, froze again, and then relaxed because he knew it was all a signal that all was well, the old flame held, and it’d be a fine evening after all. He was ready to be witty, sympathetic, obscene, whatever his old friend needed, wanted. As he opened the door he briefly recalled Roberta telling him about her famous party, how she’d just finished dressing but hadn’t quite finished her hair – and wouldn’t have a chance the night long – when her doorbell rang, and how that nagged at her all evening and only got worse as the party got worse. He remembered her telling him so sadly, “Oh, Cafferty, I knew that if only my hair had been right, the way I wanted it, it would have been an entirely different evening. It should have been such a nice party, Lang and I should have been so happy – but ohh!”

  ***

  The nun carries a Prada bag.

  Melmoth-Lang roars Tokyo.

  ***

  The costs of confusion notwithstanding, Roberta has never really felt confused here – maps make sense – bus maps a bit confusing – but hey, what confusion? – feels like home – a system, maybe – I’ve made my own.

  ***

  SIR WILLIAM RUTLAND, MATCHMAKER

  As most Asians, the Japanese are known for having an especial respect and fondness for their elders, whether they be ancestors, wise men, or teachers. An English teacher or an ecologist, a military strategist or an instructor of Western table manners – whomever – if they share with the Japanese something of their special knowledge and skills, they are never forgotten. Examples abound in Japan: Dr. William S. Clark who encouraged the young men of Meiji, “Boys, Be Ambitious!” (his statue can be found in Sapporo); W. E. Deming, the creator of “Quality Control,” which method revolutionized Japanese industry and proved no small contribution to the Japanese “economic miracle” (and who, it needs be said, died a near-forgotten man in the West, while in Japan he was universally mourned when he passed away in 1993). The list could easily go on.

  Another such gentleman was Sir William Rutland of Great Britain who was there at the beginning of Japan’s – and the world’s – electronic revolution, that is, the invention of the transistor. He was a dear “friend of Japan,” and after having made his crucial contributions to the nation was always received carte blanche whenever he visited his much beloved second home. (The reader might think here of Nixon’s later visits to China.)

  A serious and dedicated businessman – whose later life was spent representing a major cosmetics firm – Sir William – we’ll call him “Rutland” from here – was also something of a wit, a bon vivant, and an incurable romantic. (He shaved before showering.) His more than readable memoirs tell us less about his scientific researches than the amusing episodes and events of his much-blessed
life. Among his many visits to Japan, he recounts one particularly memorable event: that time when he was inadvertently forced to spend a week as a boarder in the home of a resident foreigner, and was cast in the unexpected role of matchmaker – and almost instigated an international incident.

  It was October, 1964, only a few days before the Tokyo Olympics were to begin – that event that Japan took such great pride in, symbolizing as it did the nation’s post-war recovery (and the symbol of the symbol of which became the Shinkansen). Rutland’s reservation at the Hotel Okura was for opening day; it hadn’t occurred to him that the city would be over-filled with visitors. In a word, the ever-accommodating hotel was reluctantly forced to inform him that they were fully booked: there was no room at the inn. Checking at the British Embassy (where he was rudely interviewed by the Second Secretary of Protocol, who did not recognize Sir William until after the bad impression had been made), he chanced upon a notice board advertising a room to let. The room in which the apartment was located was being rented by a Christine Easton, a young woman working for a local firm. Rutland drove over immediately, announced himself, charmed his way in, and before Miss Easton knew it – she had a roommate. At 6,800 yen a week. (A comparably-sized apartment would cost six or seven times that amount three decades later.) If the attractive and charming Miss Easton could be said to have had one fault it was her being overly fussy and precise. She informed Rutland that she would shower from 7:15 to 7:20; that would be followed by breakfast; at 7:32 she would then brush her teeth for two minutes; and then the bathroom would be his; but from 7:42 to 7:54, she would need it again to put on her make-up and do her hair. Complications reminiscent of a Mack Sennett comedy ensued the following morning.

  The next day (keeping to the memoir, we revert to the present) is filled with the usual business appointments and conferences; in passing we are informed that Rutland was working on remote control devices. Leaving his host (most likely Sony), Rutland observes a young man taking photographs of the corporate headquarters. This is Steve Davis, an American architect, who is accompanied by a Russian friend Yuri (recall, this is during the Cold War). And here again we have prophecy in that Davis seems to be keenly aware of what would become that other – and far more valuable – Japanese “miracle,” its great architectural achievements of the 1960s and 1970s. Davis is, as it also happens, an Olympic athlete. Rutland takes a liking to the young man. He writes, “He reminded me of myself quite a few years ago, only I was much taller.” Moreover, they have something else in common: Davis, having arrived early in order to look at the city’s architecture, is without a room.