by Arturo Silva
The woman enters the office that perfectly matches the one in the puzzle. Rows of desks, papers piled high. More noise it seems than is on the street: conversations, some loud, some whispered; electronics; a radio coming from one corner; little laughter; the constant pouring of tea and lips smacking (management only); the steady clack clack clack of outdated but still useful office machinery; paper being shuffled, torn, dropped, rumpled. One man is shining his shoes; two women are distributing tea; three men are at a table in a reception nook discussing something important; lots of cigarette smoke; a few partitions, but nothing to separate personnel by degree of authority, experience or salary. The only sign of such is that at the head of every two facing rows of desks is one set at the perpendicular. Bad travel posters are on one wall; lots of calendars, one or two from last year still (purely oversight, not for the pictures certainly); there is one rack of current magazines and newspapers; a very long set of shelves overflowing with professional journals; another shelf of documents, records. For all the seeming basic order – rows of desks in a neat arrangement – the woman still has to wend her way about: this person to avoid, that pile of old papers not to knock over, this flower pot not to bump into, and those computers on the floor (to be thrown out). She surveys the scene, takes a deep breath, and begins to walk, to inspect every face in the place; she begins at the left side of the room (the east side of the city), and goes on her way, up one aisle and down the next, determined to inspect every face, but how can she be sure that by the end of her route she will have seen every man’s face in the office as there is so much movement taking place? She is well aware of her predicament – but can’t just shout out, “Will everyone just stop!” In fact, she suddenly wonders to herself, isn’t it uncanny how she seems to have gone unnoticed? Wouldn’t she have expected to be greeted by someone and asked her business here? But no, nothing of the sort has occurred. But she is too busy to figure this out right now. As she has no one’s attention it will be that much easier for her to accomplish her task here. She has determined that if she walks the room two-and-one-half times, then the probability is that she will have encountered every face in the office.
She begins her careful, methodical walk.
She finishes, and alas, has not met her man.
She leaves, somewhat frustrated, but determined. Surely he can’t be purposely avoiding me, she wonders to herself. He has no idea of my existence. I’m only trying to help. And surely he does want his photos back. I wonder what they mean exactly to him. He can’t have any idea that all I want to do is return his portfolio to him.
Don’t I?
***
Marianne’s eyes were like JK’s, deeply set, the irises small and intense, the lids heavily and darkly made up, and in any variety of colors the effect was always the same; depth was also added to by the long thin bangs that seemed almost to sink into the sockets, that the wind waved this way and that never allowing one a clear whole view into her deeps and adding that much more to the changing, changeless mystery that was the ever changing Marianne.
***
You take a poor mid-western girl and put her in Tokyo and whadda’ya get? A poor mid-western girl in Tokyo. No big bones about it. Everyone says I’m so well-grounded, rooted. To what? Tokyo? Tokyo’s no vacation, and it sure ain’t no home. While I am here, I am here to ... well, do all that stuff a body’d do in any city where you have to make a living. Couldn’t I just not make a living for once in my life? Nothing exotic, just something interesting for a change? All I know of Europe is from what I’ve seen in the movies, the television ads, high-school history lessons. Let’s see, the Treaty of Westphalia, the Battle of Limoges – no, not Limoges, that’s a perfume I think, the Battle of Utrecht or Breda, no, that’s the surrender that came at the end of the Battle of whatever that kept the Turks out of Europe thanks to Velázquez. Kant was the city’s timekeeper. Pascal is a woman’s name, a film by Rossellini, who married Ingrid Bergman – is that circumferential? Was it a mole or a horse that drove Nietzche over the edge? The bakers of Vienna saved Paris and that’s where we get croissants from. Coffeehouses, little girls, and the assault on language: Kakania. Crêpes Suzettes were a burning failure that pleased the king’s niece. And polaroids were invented because Land’s niece asked him why it took so long to develop a picture. No, that’s an American story. Rembrandt’s wife was named Saskia which I hope I will be named in another lifetime. The stirrup. Amounts of rainfall. Vlad the Impaler. California grapes in France. Dreyfus. Blériot. People used to really riot at premieres. Hugo. Was it red caps they waved? A history of caps, or hats as history – as good as rainfall. Why not shoes (Dante’s sandals)?, or shirts? Or fans; Byron’s letters. Three poets dead of Roman fever. Well, more or less Rome. Italians no longer eat, or drink soup, and Italian men are the only ones who think they are sexy in a suit and no socks. “Thanks, Mama, for the one hundred lire, I’m on my way to America.” The Romans shaved, the barbarians did not. The Italians eat horsemeat, but we cowgirls don’t eat our best friends. The guy who loved Laura invented tourism. The Goths, great names, Visigoths, can’t remember the others. The Hun. “The Boshe are no man’s fools.” Foreigners working in Japan are the equivalent of the Greek slaves in Rome.
***
I have heard the cicadas in Meiji Jingu, Kazuko ruminates. And I have seen the irises in Kameido, and wisteria and plum and cherry blossoms. But why would the morning glory be the city flower? Why not the iris or the wisteria? Oh, maybe it’s the name: sunrise! And the remaining marshes and reeds of the Musashi Plain. I have also seen the hundreds and thousands of small gardens or plants in windows and verandas. Yes, I have seen this green Tokyo.
Chapter 10
SUGAMO–KOMAGOME
Lang was changing, it was clear to us all, and Roberta liked it, liked this Lang, a Lang she’d always suspected; and Lang liked her: she was an unsuspected Roberta, a neglected Roberta, and a Roberta she too acknowledged she had neglected … a Lang and a Roberta they both needed to know, to acknowledge, and more – a Roberta he’d long refused to see and one he now had no choice but for now they stay united on separate sides of the city – they have no choice but.
***
Oh, baby, don’t you want to go? California, and our sweet home, Shi-
-nagawa
-mbashi
-mokitazawa
-nsen
***
I can see myself in six months, Hiromi projects. And I have an idea of what I’ll be wearing. But who will I be with? And I can see myself in ten years. A mansion in Setagaya perhaps. And I want to have two vacations a year. Oh, nothing excessive, but I have certain needs. One in the summer to a beach, Okinawa, Hawaii, wherever, but a nice, cool beach. And in the Spring or Fall to Europe to buy clothes. And one of them I will take alone, or with Hiroko, but definitely with my husband. Children? Well, I guess I’ll have to do my duty.
***
THE FLOWERS OF EDO
All this love this city all surprise and each of us a village a poster (a face, a machine and a landscape and a face reprised) concentric rings blazing together into a love mad drunk pronouncing the word as we wander the city – the very moment! – a boy and a girl their mouths from which fires pass through one another linger and again pass into you as you through me – you! – this inferno-city ablaze street-level.
***
HIRAGA GENNAI AND “DUTCH LEARNING”
What do we not owe to the Dutch? Friendship, the air of freedom, the fullness of the flesh, the openness of the mind, the expansiveness of the spirit – what it is to be human demonstrated everyday at what seems, from the perspective of our depravity and poverty, a more than human level.
And what does Japan not owe to the Dutch?
Knowledge – moral or intellectual, botanic or cartographic – sometimes seems like a fit, St. Vitus, a stepping forwards and back in starts and stutters, a pulling oneself together and continuing on or giving up and embracing the ghost. Sometimes it seems that people – (al
most) all people – prefer to remain stupid. Something compels them to put on their blinders and walk backwards. A classic case is the one that begins, “Whatever happened to China?” (referring to its developing science suddenly stopped in its tracks). Another – the will to ignorance personified – is Japan during its two and a half centuries’ period of isolation.
But some small spark of the will to knowledge lingered, and its center was the tiny island of Deshima in Nagasaki Harbor. Here began that peculiarly Japanese romance and flirtation with the “Southern barbarian,” and that ensured that Japan was not wholly unprepared when the Black Ships of Commodore Perry – representing in time the entire compass of barbarians – came knock-knock-knocking in 1853.
It was called “rangaku” – or Dutch Learning (the “ran” coming from the middle syllable of the corrupted “Holland” – “horanda”), The 16th century had seen an influx of Portuguese and Spanish visitors to Japan. The Shogunate did not take a liking to them, however, what with their proselytizing and that message brought in by the Jesuits and so antithetical to the homegrown pantheon. Persecutions soon followed, and then complete isolation. Almost – Deshima, where a few Dutch were allowed to trade, and to talk (and to walk – biannual visits to Edo). The Japanese appreciated the Dutch for their lack of missionary zeal.
Trade had brought in clocks and firearms, eyeglasses and tobacco, but soon enough interest grew in Dutch – Western, really – learning in every field: chemistry, botany, mathematics, astronomy (a revised calendar) and geography (maps, atlases and gazetteers of the world), medicine (the first human dissection), and in the arts, the study of perspective, and oil painting. The Meiji Revolution was being well-prepared for.
It can be a fascinating story. The Japanese were so careful – paranoid in today’s parlance – that they had one of their own interpreters executed for suspicion of telling the Dutch too much (but what could he have told them?). The Japanese were of course fascinated by the foreigners. One poet wrote
Dutch letters
Running sideways
Like a row of wild geese
Flying in the sky.
The hosts at one time even came to believe that Dutch was a universal language! (The Dutch themselves once thought their’s was the first, the original language.)
On the Dutch side, the “Japon” – the kimono, or its lighter version the yukata – became a craze among gentlemen of means. Invitations were written with instructions to appear “in Japan,” or out. One historian writes of Dutch burghers being amused (or is it offended?) by this “foppishness and dandyish pansy frippery” (what a phrase!). (One might also reflect here on the history of the word, “Japan.” Here it is a noun for a dressing gown; elsewhere in Europe it was an adjective – “Japanned” – for something that has been lacquered; or as a verb, “to Japan something.)
There are many heroes in this story – Will Adams, Engelbert Kaempfer, Philipp Franz von Siebold on the Dutch side; Sugita Genpaku, Nishikawa Joken, Miura Baien, and many others on the Japanese. But foremost among them all is surely the man whom one encyclopaedist calls “one of the greatest figures of his time,” and a historian calls him nothing less than the “extraordinary man who seemed to embody the entirety of Edo culture.”
Hiraga Gennai (1728-1779) began life as head of a samurai household, renounced that role for that of ronin (masterless samurai), and ended it in prison. He began his professional life as a botanist – and throughout remained devoted to the art of classifying, with all of its imaginative possibilities. He also “experimented in making asbestos cloth, thermometers, and Dutch-style pottery, in addition to conducting surveys for ore deposits. He also tried his hand at wool manufacturing.” But even these do not begin to encompass the great polymath’s scope. He was also a philologist and compiler of dictionaries; he wrote on subjects as diverse as music, law and the martial sciences. He was the first in Japan to make asbestos and an electrical generator, and the first to paint in oils. He wrote satires and joruri (plays for the puppet drama). Pen names included “Dove Valley”, “Wind Rider,” and “Wanderer from Abroad” – all of which hint melancholically at his longing for something outside of the confines of his island home. Hiraga seems to have been drunk on knowledge – and to hate any restrictions put upon its pursuit. The works for which he is best known are biting, vicious satires with names the likes of “A Treatise on Farting” and “The Tale of a Limp Prick.” His masterpiece, FŪryŪ Shidōken Den (The Dashing Life of Shidōken – the “story” concerns one Fukai Shidōken, who learns to fly and thus visits all of the known world, and many parts unknown, including, of course, Holland, and a visit to the legendary Island of Women) seems a combination Gulliver’s Travels, Utopia, Impressions of Africa, a dash of Finnegans Wake. Along the way, he upsets every possible notion of truth, lies, fiction – language – the very bases of society, then and now. (In an earlier work, he writes of “the Buddha’s fraudulence, Lao-tze’s and Chuang-tze’s balderdash, and Lady Murasaki’s zillion lies.”)
It is said that frustration in various mining projects due to a rank-conscious society lead to mad fits of rage and despair. One such lead him to kill one of his students – for which he was imprisoned.
***
–This area must’ve suffered during the war.
–Why do you say that?
–Well, for one, you don’t see much of anything very old, only a couple of temples; and then look at the buildings you do see, built overnight, cheap materials, no character, no plan.
–Sounds like a lot of Tokyo.
–True enough.
–So, one area was saved by a few lucky winds – just beyond, Nezu and around there – and others, like here, were wiped out.
–That’s about it.
–And these buildings get built because no one expects them to last anyway?
–I suppose.
–What do they expect, another war?
–No, not that, but earthquakes, and, you know, natural disasters.
–And manmade.
–Definitely manmade – just look around you.
–Oh, that’s a nice attitude. Romantic, sick.
–That’s the trouble, it is romantic, all that sentimental gush over fires and earthquakes.
–Couldn’t it just be a sort of compensation to ward off the real depth of sorrow?
–Now, that’s romantic!
–Which means then that the whole city is in a state of mass delusion.
–Sounds possible.
–Probable.
–Like a Fifties horror movie.
–More and more probable.
–And what’s also manmade is to blame it on nature.
–You mean we can prevent earthquakes?
–No, but we can deal with them a lot better than we do.
–Isn’t that what Shinto priests are for?
–Hardly, I’m afraid they more often call up the earthquake gods than quiet them.
–Kazuo, do you really believe –
–No, silly.
–Nice name, Sugamo.
–An artist’s name.
–A sumo wrestler’s.
–Komagome.
–Sounds like a ketchup.
–One of Godzilla’s kids.
–Magomeko.
–But it’s not all so dull.
–No, not at all – no place in Tokyo is.
–After all, Rikugien is here.
–I know a good tempura restaurant nearby, eel.
–And one of the Kichijojis is here too.
–Some hilly paths.
–Nao, wood front and pure fiber within: a great washi shop. And, all these blue-and-white buildings and suddenly one a fiery red sun – a red hat shop.
–My grandfather loved Rikugien, used to come here on holidays; he knew all the Chinese literary references, which flowers would blossom when.
–Was he a Sunday painter? A calendar photographer?
–No, not at all. Just a salaryman who loved this park.
–Sounds like a nice guy.
–No, not at all. I think he cheated on my grandmother, probably should have been put on trial after the war, was a lousy investor and lost the family fortune … and worse –
–What?
–Yes?
–He had a romantic notion that Tokyo would rise again like the phoenix!
***
A tree-lined street and cinema.
Ginza, spring, twilight.
The quiet rhythmic world.
Business and pleasure.
A blue-gray shirt, a gray-blue sky.
***
Rich and strange, Cafferty muses, a resplendent richness matched by sensuous strangeness that I have made my own. In an appropriate manner and measure. The city I found myself in and in which, in whom, I continue to discover and create myself. What measure of happiness. But apart from a few select passages, have I ever really been able to communicate it to another? A boy briefly, a woman once. Ahh.
***
The bees got in from somewhere and then knocked themselves silly and then dead banging against the window. Then the ants came in from somewhere and ate the bees. “I’m spending a month in a castle in Northern Italy.” I couldn’t believe it either. Roberta, you lucky woman. And then I tried to draw the castle, an outline, to orient myself, all those staircases going this way and that, and I just had to get a penlight to find my way back to my apartment at night. That night we came home from dinner at Maddalena’s – and that funny story about her son-in-law who thought he was going to lord it over all and now he’s bussing tables – and that night coming home and crossing the courtyard and the leaves on that tree I swear were white. And then everything became green. Driving around Costigliole d’Asti and to Torino all those greens, that deep dark violet with even a hint of a red but it was all a green, and a gray green and a golden and a yellowy and a silvery green and everything was one shade or another of it, green. God it was ... Marianne was right, it is part ruin, part très moderne, post-mod before the term, oh this section from that century and this tower from such a period (the six-cornered tower, bricks and granite). Getting lost, discovering the white room, the wine cellars so cold in mid-August, the big round room in the basement, ought to be a cabaret. The cobwebs. I swear it was haunted that one day the bathroom door opened as I approached and then slammed after me. Andrea suspended his big TV from the ceiling in an hour and watched all of half. The green room with the neon beam. The pink stairwell with some of the older decorations. Quiet, water-drinking Ernst, until he makes a quick remark, and then the sharp, short laugh, self-amused and self-aware. A cat named Telemaco. The view, just hills and houses and vineyards, and I thought the castle was kind of smallish and then driving back from town there it was, looming. And the peace. (And in the town meeting Rita, pretty, forensics, inviting me to an autopsy. Must do it someday.) The peace. Solitude. The Day of Creation. Didn’t read a newspaper for two weeks or listen to a piece of music – finally put on some Glenn, Bach and Schoenberg. The mind so solid, deep like the high ceilings, all that space it could wander in and always return focussed, solid. Hours and hours alone in Irene’s apartment, free to read and write, you could go a day or more without seeing anyone. One day three people are staying and another twenty – handsome, happy and hardworking Giovanni; Christine of the ripe flaxen hair and perfect smile; redhaired Susanne, the actress teaching philosophy. Intensity, calm. To work – a perfect environment. And all left in peace and all there to work, to repair a roof or an apartment or prepare a performance for Hamburg or Sardinia; but then we would meet, friendly, kind, and usually but not necessarily everyone assembled at dinnertime and those wonderful dinners – increased my working recipe book a hundred percent – and the wine and talking late, or not. And then the kids returned from summer camp, Zora and Ivan, and Wladimiro joked “la vita tranquilita è finita,” and it was not. Couldn’t be. Peace – Burio.
