Tokio Whip

by Arturo Silva

  –Well, you can swing a leash – but this city’s no place for dogs.

  –Yes, it’s a cat city. “My Pussy,” like the bar. But no, not a leash – or sort of.

  –“The hills are alive …” From the rafters.

  –You –?

  –Yes, “swinging in the …”

  –All, all knotted and bundled like a package from Kyukyodo?

  –Like twelve layers of incense. My pussy, indeed.

  –Well, uhm … uhm …

  –Oh my ankles are still a bit sore, and around my arms. I mean, after all, you are suspended. But you know what I discovered, the body takes care of these things for you, it, what’s the word?, it compensates. Take a little pain, get a little pleasure. Your juices flow. Liquid incense. I can’t wait to see the photos.

  –The photos! Hiromi!

  –Well, I’m not going to do it everyday, and I would like to have some proof, something for my scrapbook. And yes, you’ll see them.

  –Something tells me it wasn’t just the two of you.

  –Oh no, there was a whole crew. Someone for the knots, someone to test the ceiling, make-up and creams. And he wanted me in a kimono – actually we did it twice because the second time he wanted me in another kimono, something more for Spring.

  –Winter and Spring bondage sets?

  –Something like that. Actually, it’s sweet when you think of it.

  –Oh, I couldn’t agree more!

  –Well it is. You’ll see.

  –Perhaps. But you, you …

  –Yes, I know. I have to try everything once. And sometimes often! Christ on the cross. Christ in kimono. Is there a difference, really?

  –You didn’t!?

  –No, but I thought of it. Anyway, I like our incense better. And we’ve got thousands of gods! Can you imagine, three gods in one? Isn’t there some movie about a woman ...? Oh, forget it. But you know, my Christianity is purely decorative.

  –A way to get boys.

  –Or men.

  –And the difference is …?

  –Oh, ask me some other time. Look!

  [They too sit with the other three women. Marianne begins.]

  –Hiroko, Hiromi. Hi. Sit down, we were just talking about sex.

  –Oh. We were talking about Jesus Christ.

  [Roberta and Marianne stare speechless at one another. Then Hiromi.]

  –His Passion, I think it’s called.

  –Ah, yes. Anyway, take a look at these photos.

  [Hiroko takes the portfolio, and studies the photographs closely, seriously.]

  –They’re like a dream, some strange story where you know everything’s connected but you can’t figure out how, and you feel your very life depends on it.

  –Straight out of the textbook. Ok, yes, but don’t you notice anything else about them?

  –Let me see. Yes, they’re only buildings, only exteriors, and there are no people. But they were all taken in Tokyo, and –

  –– right –

  –There are no places without people in Tokyo.

  –None.

  –None.

  –None.

  –Can’t think of one.

  –So how did he take them? Or she.

  –That’s what we can’t figure out. That, and how they’re connected.

  –Well anyway, seeing as you can’t figure that out, what were you saying about sex?

  –Oh, yes, Hiromi, of course, sorry to distract you. Well, Roberta here thinks that our lives here are spent in some sort of gigantic masturbatory ritual in which we only ever fondle ourselves and never connect with anyone else really, the city doesn’t allow for any sort of outward, other amative gesture.

  –Ohh, that’s sweet. Gee, Roberta.

  –It was just an idea I tossed out – speculation, conversation.

  –But if everyone’s doing it, what sex does that make the city? Is Tokyo bi?

  [As the five women begin to discuss the question, we cut to Arlene and Kazuko, walking, talking.]

  –Which means the French, the Chinese, and the Turks make the best lovers? Not in my short experience.

  –No, let’s look at it in reverse. No food culture, no erotic culture.

  –The English!

  –Everyone’s first choice.

  –Go on, please.

  –Well, the Austrians are all front, all frills. Sweet cakes and wine half water, frills and lingerie. Mere teases, and the main courses mere meat and potatoes. They only thrive thanks to overlayerings of other cultures.

  –This is good. And the Americans?

  –They can’t decide what an authentic American cuisine is, and likewise, they’re wholly confused about sex. Sandwiches.

  –I always think weak coffee.

  –Who do you like?

  –The Dutch are curious. So many shapes to the people, pointy noses on the roundest heads, peasant faces on their royalty. Hearty meals, simple meals, tough –

  –– but cozy.

  –But cozy. And I like them. But this is silly, really.

  –Well, of course it is! Now then, you Japanese.

  –I was afraid of this. Well, if you can afford it, you can have the most exquisite meal.

  –Perfectly trained chefs, perfectly trained women.

  –Yes, we have done our studies. But we have our simple meals too, noodles, green tea over rice, miso soup and tofu.

  –“Wham bam.”

  –Uhm, yes.

  –The men don’t match the meals.

  –No. But we women do, I think.

  –Too late to change either?

  –Ohh … oh, look!

  [Naturally, they join the others.]

  –But what were you saying about Jesus?

  –Oh, something about seeing him in a kimono or something.

  –Weird. But, tell me, Kazuko, does being wrapped up in one of those things give you an erotic charge, or do they turn you into something even more demure?

  –Oh, Marianne, you’re embarrassing her.

  –Oops.

  –But it is a real question. And so is ...

  –The underwear question? Uhm, not so real.

  –Ok, ok. Yes and no.

  –??

  –Or no and yes.

  –Ok, so much for Jesus and kimonos. Where were we?

  –Sex, photographs, an empty city.

  –Ok, one at a time.

  –Or maybe not. Look at it this way. We’ve nearly agreed the city is or can be masturbatory – or orgiastic. It’s the collection of villages and the anonymous in a crowd of twelve million. One or all. Little deaths, little Buddhas.

  –Ohh, those red shawls.

  –Bibs, meals never taken, love never experienced.

  –And couplings, you know, Roberta, like “normal” sex?

  –It’s not a normal city. But they occur, yes. You just have to decide which sex you are, Arlene, and which you want the city to be.

  –?

  –It’s you, it’s your lover, the lover you want, the lover you want to be, the lover you’ve lost, the lover or lovers that you will meet –

  –In a gesture, a word, a turn around a corner.

  –In a photograph.

  –Of a building.

  –In an empty city.

  –You’re making me wet, girls.

  –Hiromi, control yourself, this once, ok?

  –Ok. This once. So, who’s the lover? Who’s missing?

  –Take a look at these. Arlene, Kazuko, you too.

  [The portfolio passes hands, the pages turned, the photos seen from various angles. We hear indistinct comments, what might also be the sounds of a woman masturbating, or a couple of any sex making love, or more than a small group – or the relentless round of the Yamanote line.]

  At the end of this sequence, our six women having left, the Woman seems to see a figure – her Man? – pass the corner of a building and she rushes up from her seat after him. But [zoom in] she has forgotten the portfolio on the table! Time passes, it sits
there, until a waiter comes, picks it up, looks through for a name or an address, but finding none, props it up on a nearby window sill. Time passes, night comes, the café closes, the portfolio remains on the sill. Time passes, the last stragglers head for Shinjuku Station, a light breeze passes over the volume. Time passes, stillness (or as much as there can be in Shunjuku), and we hear footsteps. It is the Woman; she finds the portfolio, picks it up, and smiles to herself, her confidence assured that lost objects in Tokyo are rarely stolen, but far more often than not their owners find their way back to them.

  SCENE SEVEN: FASHION STORE

  The labyrinth is multiple. Parcos 1, 2, and 3, separate buildings; and between them siblings, or offshoots, wayward paths, dislocations and distractions, which, once inside, one can sometimes regain one’s focus and actually find a way into a Parco; and within these – both the neighboring shops and the Parcos – the very small shops like homes in shitamachi, bars in Golden Gai – or equally enormous competitors, Tokyu this, Tokyu that, or from on top of the hill of Koen-dori you can look down onto a Marui (oh yes, there are others), the zigzag pattern of the visible escalator, hive; all those windows and yet all those racks of clothes, racks of shoppers – a variety of boutiques, some repeated or affiliated, some permanent or temporary; restaurants and art galleries; the usual array of stairways and elevators and escalators, some stopping only at certain floors; the basement levels invariably given over to the least likely to succeed and yet these become the most popular, the Yamanote version of Ameyokocho’s food casbah. And the labyrinth of money. And the labyrinth of fashion itself: mix and match or miscarry; this week’s in and last’s out and next’s to be – and as soon vanished.

  And so, trembling, she enters, on the scent of her vanishing case. The BGM – from Bob Marley to Strauss to Roy Orbison without a blink – is not noticed by her. Could he be buying himself a white shirt, or some lingerie for a lover? Perhaps the latest photography books, or some jewelry for a lover? Maybe he is ordering new bookshelves, or buying a favorite wine for a lover. A sweater for the approaching Fall, one for himself and one for a lover. Lingering over some magazines, and ordering flowers to be sent to a lover. New stereo equipment, and a CD for a lover. Eating sushi, before he meets his lover.

  Perhaps the BGM itself – from “Sukiyaki” to Haydn to Buddy Holly without missing a beat – conceals a code that predetermines all his and her movements – how else to justify this maddening order? Is it earthquake-sensitive? Can it predict the winds? Where a man goes, what shirt he chooses, whom he falls in love with? Who is responsible for selecting the music and its order? Will I find happiness?

  ***

  A complete blank. The moon-face of Hiroko – “I can feel it. Something special is about to happen!” – Yakushimaru, star of Satmomi Hakkenden, stares at me meaningfully from a poster as I cross the road.

  ***

  Osen and Sōkichi

  We turn to fiction for the truth of events – events which more truly lie in the scarlet of a crêpe undergarment, a sudden rainstorm, a style of hair-do, some stolen rice crackers. They also lie in the associative techniques of fiction: how a vision of a prostitute’s white face will suddenly coincide with the moon, and that – the ever-sliding signifier – with the Buddha, and then as suddenly the memory of one’s mother’s breasts. Feelings, visions, memories, names – strung together they form a rosary whose beads we tell in honor of the love suicides of Myōjin Hill.

  Tokyoites live bifurcated in time and space. We live here in the immediate present – and in the previous decade. We live here in the great city, this secret capitol of the world, and in the city or town from whence we first came.

  How many tens of thousands of today’s successful businessmen, doctors, entertainers, and other professionals had not too long ago arrived in Ueno or Tokyo stations, their long journeys from Sendai, Akita, Fukuoka and smaller cities over, their heads aswirl at the immensity and jumble of the city where they, only seventeen or eighteen years old, are to begin in two week’s time their university studies, and yet for an instant they are babes again ready to rush back to Mama’s loving arms – and yet within six months they adopt the city as their own, call themselves Tokyoites, and visit Mother but once or twice a year?

  As for the double time we live, it seems that we all succumb to a certain nostalgia for something we never knew, we feel as if we have missed out on or been deprived of some essential experience, one without which we can never call ourselves whole – for we have all arrived too late. It is a sort of secular original sin. I arrived in the Eighties, and have a great regret at not having been here in the Seventies. I am also intensely envious of those of my friends who were here not only in the Seventies, but also the Sixties and even the Fifties. I feel I will never truly know Tokyo as a result of not having been here then. (Or I will only know a half-Tokyo, that of the immediate present and prospect.) Oh, I know I can turn to films and prints and photographs, and yes, they may give off certain airs, but they jealously maintain the secrets of their time. Fiction is another matter: nostalgia burns brightest there (and much of the prose is at boiling point). The Master of course is Nagai Kafu, whose works are filled with regret over a passing Tokyo, and especially for an Edo he never knew. This decade before nostalgia can also be seen as a complex temporal-urban variation of the furusato (hometown, invariably rural) nostalgia that the Japanese like to indulge themselves in. The latter is easily satisfied: twice a year you take a train to your family’s ancestral home (and where no doubt you are officially registered; the state makes it hard for one to become an official Tokyoite), visit your parents, relatives, old schoolmates, as well as the actual ancestors, in the local cemetery; and three days later you rush back to your home in Setagaya or Suginami or Nakano Ward. But the true Tokyoite’s longings can never be satisfied: having renounced former cities to wholly embrace Tokyo, he can never go home again, never resurrect time.

  The story is a simple one and can be found in volume 20 of the Kyōka zenshŪ (that is, The Collected Works of the Great Izumi Kyōka), Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1973–76, under the title Baishoku kamonanban, one of those Japanese titles whose erotic pungency fades somewhat when literally translated: The Prostitute and the Bowl of Noodles Topped with Duck Meat and Scallions. Around the turn of the century, seventeen year old Sōkichi Hata arrived in Tokyo from Kanazawa, ready to enter medical school. A few youthful missteps – his first drunk, some missed classes, an expensive coat – and he was on the street, expelled. He fell in with the wrong sort – “shabby politicians, businessmen of the lowest order, charlatans, and a few who were working toward their goal of becoming policemen someday” – finally becoming a day laborer and acting as a sort of houseboy for the pimp Kumazawa and his mistress Osen. Penniless, helpless, ashamed, he was humiliated one day by Osen’s hairdresser who attempted to shave his eyebrows – the young woman came to his rescue – and then found out by Kumazawa and his thugs for having stolen some rice crackers. He decided to do himself in by taking the hairdresser’s razor and slitting his throat at nearby Kanda Myōjin Temple. Osen sensed what was afoot, and again saved the boy. Together they fled the house on Myōjin Hill and hid out in Okachimachi, where Osen continued to ply her trade in order to keep Sōkichi in school. Then one day, having just serviced a customer, she is arrested. While being lead away she folds a paper crane, kisses it (“the marks of her lips showing faintly red against the crane’s bluish-white body”), and hands it to Sōkichi telling him it contains her spirit. Unbeknownst to him, it truly does possess her spirit, for shortly thereafter she goes mad. Jump ahead to 1920. After having taken a five year sabbatical to further studies at Leipzig University, Sōkichi Hata, M.D., has returned to Tokyo to assume the position of head of internal medicine at Tokyo University Hospital in Ochanomizu. He boards a train, gets off at Ochanomizu Station when suddenly a furious spring rain-shower commences. He goes to a compartment to wait it out. Inside, “the first thing that caught his eye was the scarlet of her crepe undergarm
ent, bright as flame and dappled with cinnabar.” It is of course Osen. Two women are taking her from the brothel where she has served these two decades to a home for the clinically insane. She does not recognize Sōkichi. He introduces himself to the women, takes Osen to his office nearby – and there he draws a razor.

  That’s all, an all too common and trite story. (And one that was adapted by Mizoguchi, another feminist author – in the Japanese sense, that is, of making them his primary subject – and who we are never sure whether or not he truly likes and respects women.) But its significance lies naturally in the details, details too that make it a decidedly Tokyo story. These concern, as the reader has surely guessed, time, place, and those “superficial matters that compel us most,” the things of everyday life that contain the eternal truths. In the story, also known as Osen and Sōkichi, we are given two different times: circa 1900 and 1920, two decades to play with. They are contrasted by the shady Myōjin district of the earlier period and university area of the later; by the bright cheer of the young Osen and her later madness; by the despair of young Sōkichi and the successful man of the world of late Meiji. The dilemma of the Tokyoite split by space is “negatively dramatized” by there being no mention whatsoever of Sōkichi’s life in Kanazawa, or Osen’s in wherever she came from. (And that is quite another story, again all too familiar: the young girl who comes to the city filled with hope, works a week as a waitress, or even a DJ (see the Kuwabara pre-war photo), and is systematically, almost formulaically crushed by the city into prostitution. But even more than this is the generous sprinkling of details that evoke a specific time and Tokyo (and only Tokyo: my point is that no story of Osaka or Kobe would be written like this, no such loving attention paid to these kinds of details): the crimson crepe, a sash, the classic Shimada hairstyle, the seven sen for a bag of ricecrackers (“Sōma crackers that were made and sold in an alley in Miyamoto-cho, just at the bottom of the steep flight of steps running down Myōjin Hill ... salted and crisp, flecked with soy sauce, and marked with horse-bit patterns”), the brazier on the station platform (and the waiting booth), the red cap of the station master, the tissue thin paper that fans the coals in a brazier, the various blossoms of the various months and seasons, the far off views then available (Shinagawa, Kuramae, Asakusa). It is all a Tokyo that you and I shall never know, Reader, but one whose truths continue in their many ways in our own stories, our own fictions.