Tokio Whip

by Arturo Silva

  ***

  Faye’s idea of a “Post-Whip.”

  ***

  –Gorgeous!

  –Wonderful!

  –Marvelous!

  –Smashing! – Would Audrey say that?

  –Don’t you mean Arlene?

  –No, Audrey. I watch the classics, you know.

  –Oh. Yes, yes, I think she would.

  –45?

  –No.

  –Sadistic?

  –Guess again.

  –Pimpness?

  –Oh, you’re too smart! Smashing!

  –That’d be a nice name for a line.

  –“Smashing.” Ooohh, it would. I wonder if we can copyright it.

  –We’d better act fast. The walls have ears, you know.

  –Don’t they?

  –Don’t you love Van Zandt’s ears?

  –God, they’re so small and squiggly. My tongue ...

  –Oh, I know, and one hand … and the other ...

  –Oh god. I can see him now. And those rough hands.

  –Terrible on my nylons. But then he always buys me extras.

  –Yes, he is a considerate boy.

  –Man. Don’t forget, those westerners like those adult names.

  –Right. Man this and woman that. Why can’t they settle down?

  –Or why can’t we grow up? Oh, what a laugh!

  –So, how’s Arlene?

  –Oh, you know, she really is so square.

  –Oh, comeon! She may be, but isn’t that her charm point? I happen to think that she’s also a sensitive and intelligent woman. Whether or not she wants to go out and have fun with us.

  –Well, you can have her. Actually, I don’t think she likes me.

  –Well, you are rather pushy, Mona.

  –Yes, but it’s always served me well, so far.

  –Perhaps, but she is a westerner, after all.

  –Yes, but I’ve done alright with VZ.

  –But that’s not saying much. And besides, he hardly talks, not the way Arlene does.

  –But I don’t want to talk with VZ.

  –I do. I like a little conversation. Have you ever talked with Roberta?

  –Talked with Roberta? You mean the Holy Nun of Mount Yanaka?

  –Mona!

  –Well, she’s hardly ever said a word to me. And besides, do you know that there is a Salon de Mona in Yanaka? So who needs nuns in my pleasuring district?

  –I don’t – .But, in fact, she’s hardly said a word to me either. But that’s not what I’m saying. She does speak; the trouble is, when she does, no one listens.

  –Oh? And what does she say?

  –Oh, she speaks about many things. About her neighborhood mostly. She even told me how she and Lang first met. And she cooks! She makes a better hiyayakko than you or I.

  –That’s not really an accomplishment, Maxine.

  –That’s not the point. She’s told me a lot about herself and Lang; and why she likes Tokyo so much, especially shitamachi – I can say she’s even given me some appreciation of the place I come from.

  –But not, pray, the place you want to end in.

  –I really don’t know, Hiromi – uhn, sorry, Mona.

  –Has she told you about the big crisis with Lang? How he came and couldn’t stand her and dumped her?

  –Really, Mona! I wouldn’t put it so harshly. And yes, she did tell me. I can’t understand why.

  –Maybe she just needed to speak, and thought I wouldn’t listen. Which I did. How did she put it? Oh yes, she said that he didn’t like her friends and after a while he moved out. But there was more to it than that. She said, that it wasn’t easy but eventually she had to ask Lang to leave and that he was glad to go, glad to get out, and to get away from her – for a while at least to clear the air. And then he found a place for himself in Kichijoji, which he didn’t like either – all those foreigners, and the discomfort of the easy living of it all, you know – or so he thought at first – thought he’d be west of everything, even of her, or at least the Tokyo she represented, but eventually, soon enough really, he came to like it, he even came to praise what he called Joji’s “charms” – god he can be so condescending! – and in the end, he came to see something of all that she’d been telling him. Yes, she said that in the end, now, that is, Lang came to like Tokyo – it was cool being here.

  –Roberta told you all that?

  –More or less, yes.

  –Gee, so now he’s in Kichijoji.

  –Yes.

  –Can you imagine anyone not liking Joji?

  –Not really. Or, maybe only Lang.

  –Should we visit him?

  –I don’t really think so.

  –Why not?

  –Really, Mona. You can’t have every man you want.

  –Oh, I don’t “want” Lang. I’d just like to “have” him.

  –Well, tell yourself “no” this time, ok?

  –Must I?

  –Yes, “Dear.”

  –Stop it.

  –You!

  –You!

  –No, you.

  –But, I didn’t say anything.

  –Oh yes you did. Really, you’re not in a movie, you know.

  –Yes, I am. VZ says I am.

  –Well, that’s VZ. And you are Mona. Maybe she’s the one in the movie.

  –Right. Thank you. So, what should Mona do?

  –Do? Why, do nothing.

  –Nothing?

  –Can’t you see? It’s like a comedy in its own way.

  –I suppose.

  –And the “nothing” we do is our “everything.”

  –Huhn?

  –I mean, we just talk and walk like normal people.

  –Really, Maxine!

  –Oh, really, you!

  –No, really – you!

  –You!

  –Us. Yes, let’s walk, and talk, as you say. Saunter. Practice the finer arts – after all, we are artistes, are we not?

  –Talkers –

  –– and walkers.

  –To the Max –

  –-ine!

  –My arm –

  –My Dear.

  ***

  All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capitol.

  – Tacitus

  ***

  –Take that long walk down – short by anyone else’s standards.

  –A few streets more and my history gets lost and confused here.

  –Bamboo kids, new-human kids, remember, Marianne.

  –They came in from the country for a few hours on the street, to dance and laugh, the chance to get some cheap geegaw that’d wow ’em back home –

  –And it would, I’ve been to Gumma –

  –They came to see – some boy, some girl, a style they didn’t have in the rice towns; they came to be seen: and seduced, or at least a quick kiss, a feel, enough to keep country conversations going for a week or more.

  –Nothing’s changed; Japan’s always been like that; read the classics; country bumpkin wowed by the big city; the provincial bringing back the latest styles only to discover they’re long gone.

  –To-ki-yo!

  –But that was then and it was never me. Yoyogi-Harajuku. What did I want from it, what did it give me? Cambodian food, architecture books. No, maybe the warrens and alleys; the concrete kids’ playground –

  –Concrete kids?

  –– the retro postwar apartment building, dirty stucco. You know, on the Champs Elysses.

  –No one would think of going near it in the 80s, but now it’s all boutiques. Oh, that memory of a sort of shitamachi here in what was making itself out to be the fashion capitol of the world.

  –That’s that Tokyo contradiction.

  –There was a style, you could see it, sure, but behind it lay centuries of peasant indigo. What’s a Tokyoite? A rice farmer. Pigeon-toed, feet clumping as they walk, sloppy at table, sloppy in bed. “Tokyo style” – those kids are just magazine articles. Concrete kids, pulp kids.
Give me something severe.

  –So, Shibuya doesn’t live up to its name?

  –Would that it would.

  –Severe.

  –Astringent Valley.

  –A highwayman’s name, wasn’t it?

  –Or, there’s an assortment of derivations. But that sounds about right, what with all the would-be pimps trying to pick girls up – pucker up – all over the place.

  –Yes, there’s more history here than one would think, ancient names, Shoto Tea, but no, not the elegance of shibui, something more out of town.

  ***

  Why!? Ya’ fuck ’em ’cos they’re there, man.

  ***

  Rich and strange, Hiro in a rare contemplative moment says to himself, an address book filled with bars and girls, and here I am spending the night alone. She had to cancel, alright a legitimate excuse, and she did say she wants to meet again soon. Half accepted. And then Kaoru-san had an important meeting, so I had to stay late in the office. Could’ve gone alone to a bar, but that would make it three nights in a row taking a taxi home. A night alone. That is definitely not rich, but it is certainly strange. Better be careful to not let it happen again.

  ***

  Spent an hour choosing paperclips. Tokyu Hands, a sort of bliss.

  ***

  Arlene’s going dancing! Someday. Or, actually, she is dancing, with herself, for herself, perhaps even to herself. Remember that scene in The More the Merrier when Jean Arthur puts on a rumba record and dances to it alone there in her room, and Joel McCrea’s in the hallway and he hears it, and he starts to dance himself to it, and then later they’re at the nightclub, and Charles Coburn’s arranged it so that they can flirt together – and all those girls (“eight to every fella!”) flirting with McCrea – and that short chorus line, that first blonde girl with that wonderful smile, and the woman drummer in the background, all those extras, all that flirting ... and Arlene thinks now of Roberta’s party, how after the fight about the music – what was it they wanted, Jazz or Country? Who wanted which? Never can figure out their taste, their secret codes. Maybe that’s what love is. But I thought the Wiener was into American music, and Roberta strictly modern; she was listening to Berg and Webern for ages, I recall. – Lang had to up the ante, had to!, damn him, and that only made Roberta even more angry, disappointed; jeez, it was her party for him and VZ and he so ungracious; and how he started flirting with everyone, even poor Kazuko – Kazuo was so good, so clear and steady, Kazuko’s little samurai ready to strike at the precise moment, and none sooner – the two girls went along with it, they hadn’t a clue, though Hiroko stood a bit off, Hiromi all too ready to dance with Lang in a tatami corner, stumbling – he even made a pass at me, but I set VZ after him. Let them both know their place – it was enough with all those Japanese guys ogling me. Enough to watch out for Roberta. He walked all over her; hope she got hers back. If not that night, later sure enough.

  ***

  Reject the art world the fashion world the music world the novel world the so-called thought and beauty worlds, whoring worlds all. You must reject them all – and still live the city.

  ***

  The Loves and Death of Ōsugi Sakae

  The encyclopaedia tells us in reference to the end of his notorious four-way love affair, that one woman stabbed him, another divorced him, and a third married him.

  Ōsugi Sakae (1885-1923) was a lover; a dandy (indeed, his prison nickname was “ohai,” derived from “haikara” ((“high collar”)) ); perhaps a masochist (he was fascinated by the idea of crucifixion; prophesied not inaccurately the manner of his death; as a child he enjoyed being punished by his mother); and was in other ways a sadist (or if that term is too strong, let us just say that he tended to either hurt or dominate others ((he was always ready for a good fight; spat in his teachers’ faces, tortured cats; and then simply look at the way he tried to handle the affair with the women: they would abide by his rules of freedom)) ). He seems to have had little gift for friendship; he opened Japan’s first Esperanto school (1906); was involved in nine different magazines; and like his father, he stuttered. His biographer tells us, “A more willful, independent, unpredictable, intriguing – in short, charismatic – Japanese is hard to imagine. One is either attracted or repelled by him, but never left indifferent.”

  Contradiction and the lust for freedom define him. It is a shame that the Surrealists were unaware of his existence for they would surely have embraced him as one of their own, not only for his outrageousness and spontaneity, but especially for his defense of a love as free and mad as possible. In a lovely phrase, he wrote that the end of capitalism would release the “high scent of love.” “Hands off love!,” indeed.

  And too there are the spiritual and artistic sides of the man (if we can separate them from the amatory). His flirtation with Christianity. His rebuke once to someone: “Historical materialism?,” he retorted, “Don’t talk rot. This is a spiritual matter.” His remark that “Freedom and creativity are not outside of us nor in the future. They are within us now.” His sketches – especially that lovely self-portrait, some calligraphy, and the “Red Skull” – certainly reveal an imaginative hand.

  Ōsugi was not born in Tokyo, but in then Kagawa prefecture in 1885. He came to live in Tokyo in 1902 after having been successfully expelled from Cadet School for fighting (and receiving his first stab wound), and for homosexual behavior. (A contradiction: his father was an army officer, and Ōsugi apparently wanted to follow in his footsteps – this from a man who obviously was unable to brook any authority throughout his life. ((There is a famous story – one that reveals more certainly about the Emperor than anything else – that one day the father fell into the castle moat and emerged all muddy, making the Emperor giggle with delight, “Monkey! Monkey!”)) ) Ōsugi’s first arrest occurred – in true and proud Tokyo fashion; would that others might follow his example today! – when he joined in protests against a rise in trolley fares. (The author recalls that in the 1970s Italians rioted over an increase in cinema prices.)

  When not borrowing money, his main source of income came from translating (for example, the work of the French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre), or writing articles. What writer would not be proud to have this said about himself: “His writing is usually simple and plain, true and coherent, open and aboveboard. Then again, sometimes he writes unexpected rubbish.” He also had the good sense to say that the intelligentsia had been co-opted by the ruling class, and if they really were intelligent they would play a receptive part in any workers’-instigated revolution. More interesting, and more in the spirit of this book, he has this to teach us: “Listening silently to a person’s long speech is only to be swept up in a marching song: it is what is done vis-à-vis upper-class people. Among people of the same class, long speeches will disappear and short dialogues will succeed. From long monologues to short dialogues: this is the evolution of conversation. This is the evolution of humanity.”

  Of course, the greatest contradiction of the man with his theory of the ever-expanding and creative and willful ego was how to reconcile it with the will and desires of others. But perhaps, in a world where conflict is all, the question must necessarily remain unresolved.

  While married to Hori Yasuko, he began his affair with Kamichika Ichiko when he appeared one day at her doorstep saying, “I’ve lost my shadow today. It’s alright if I stop in.” While he was most probably referring to his police “tail,” it is nonetheless a wonderful line for a seducer. Kamichika was called “the first adulteress.” Itō Noe, the third woman, was dubbed “the southern beauty.” When the affair exploded with Kamichika’s stabbing of Ōsugi, so notorious had he become an advocate of free love that he was even blamed for other person’s affairs, including that of Countess Yoshikawa with – so unimaginatively – her chauffeur.

  The end is sudden and well-known. On September 16, 1923, in the wake of the fears aroused by the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, and while people were mercilessly killing Korean
s whom they accused of looting, Ōsugi Sakae, “the foremost anarchist of the Taisho period,” along with Itō Noe and his six-year old nephew Munekazu, were arrested by the military police, beaten and strangled; their bodies were then wrapped in tatami coverings and dumped into an abandoned well. It has never been established from how high up came the order to have Ōsugi killed.

  ***

  They have debased that supremely mad metaphysical color, pink. But you, Arlene, have not forgotten. I know, because I can see it in your eyes, and yes, I can see it in your lips.

  ***

  –What if I go north – disappear? Would you come after me?

  –Yes, but not to Gumma Prefecture.

  –Say: Kiss me.

  –Kiss me.

  –Say: I want you.

  –I want you.

  –Say ...

  –No. Put your arms around me.

  –There’s only two of us now.

  –Then we’re stupid and we’ll die.

  –We die then in Tokyo, stupidly or otherwise.

  –I have seen the Tannhauser Gate, the Shores of Aldeberan, and the fires of Orc, Roberta – and still you refuse to speak to me.

  ***

  That particular sort of scruffiness that accompanies that particular sort of neatness and epitomizes the Japanese landscape, be it urban or rural.

  – Paul Waley

  ***

  –God what a long, long walk.

  –What film is Kazue in? La Jetée or the Wenders thing on Ozu? You know, where she’s mixing her famous Margarita.

  –That she learned from her teacher in Ginza?, that bar behind the primary school behind the Imperial Hotel?

  –Right, that one.

  –Which one? There’s a million bars in Ginza.

  –The one we’re talking about, the one we know.

  –Ok, ok.

  –The city is a park writ large, a home writ large, Golden Gai writ large. A bar for every activity – one for journalists, one for communists, one for filmmakers, one for – whomever.