Tokio Whip

by Arturo Silva

  ***

  This waitress is too old for Hiro, that one too young, this one too skinny, and that one too fat. This beer is too cold, and that one not cold enough. This fish overcooked, and that one under. This colleague too silly, and that one overly serious. This office lady too demure, and that one too brash (that loud laugh). This manager too ostentatious, that one too faux modest. This saké too sweet, and that one too dry. This morning too cold, this evening too warm. This restaurant too loud, the one before too quiet. It is the third of the evening, an akachochin, its outdoor paper red lantern a bit battered. It is a dive, the type of place Hiro used to take a certain delight in. But tonight he is all unvoiced complaints. Why won’t his boss – the ostentatious fellow with the green bow tie with polka-dots – trust him with a decent expense account? Does he think he’ll waste it, not use it properly and on the proper clients? All he wants is a break, just one decent chance to prove himself capable – and on and on so he begins to sound like a parody of some American melodrama. Damn!, he’s burned himself holding a match too long while he was lost in this reverie. Now everyone’s laughing at him. Ok, force a smile, Hiro, show them that you aren’t over serious about yourself. No one bothers to help him. Why not? Not even that nice new office girl, the one who dropped out of Waseda. What did she say she studied? French literature? American? Why not Japanese? Doesn’t she have any patriotic feelings? Is she ashamed of our literature, our hard-working writers? But when he thinks about it a few seconds more, he remembers that he hasn’t read a Japanese book in quite a long while. In fact he can’t even say he’s read a real book in quite a long while. Comic books, weekly magazines – that’s his fare. Why did he sit so near the boss, anyway? This means that he can’t make much conversation of his own, has to pay attention to what the boss says, and pour the man one drink after another. Shouldn’t the new girl be doing that?

  Two dives later, finds Hiro in a bar that looks like a concrete garage with a few stools and formica tables strewn about. He doesn’t care that the sleeve of his suit is lying in spilled saké, that there are whisky stains on his tie, and that at the previous bar the new girl had clearly rejected his advances – but then he can’t even remember what he said to her; he only has a vague idea that while he tried not to be rude he did want to make his message clear, apparently the wrong strategy – but then what would he have done if she had consented to come home with him – pass out in her lap? No, he‘ll have to make up for this lapse some time. But then, he asks himself, what’s been eating him so recently? Why all this anger and resentment? It can’t just be on account of an expense account?

  A half-hour later, having walked in the door and telling himself that this kind of nightlife has to stop, and just as his head is about to hit the pillow, Hiro’s breath stops as he foresees a life like this, an eternity of boredom and resentment, of pettiness, and unfulfilled desire. “Fuck it” (or it’s Japanese equivalent), he mumbles to himself as the lights go out.

  ***

  Shores of Aldeberan, Clouds of Magellan.

  Boiling blood, the great god descends. Post-murder, he falls back on to the red satin sheets, yellow-eyed. Once omniscient, sputtering now how he no longer knows. What kind of god is it who can “no longer know”? Spitting blood – “Keats’ black mouth blood” – the American, orphaned, strides the streets and elevators of his adopted city.

  He walks alongside you, Arlene, blood-caked, Memphian, blonde.

  Roiling.

  ***

  The costs of confusion notwithstanding, Van Zandt. I’ll figure it out. Haven’t I already? I mean, I got my canals – is that what he calls ’em? – corridors, whatever, I know how to get from here to there – and to get laid – isn’t that enough? What cost? What confusion? Dammit, Lang, stop upsetting me with your shit.

  ***

  Cafferty is back at his old job in New York. The fashion magazine of which he has recently been promoted to assistant editor will hit the stands in seventy-two hours. Suddenly he realizes that not only has an important advertiser been indirectly insulted in a humorous piece that Cafferty oversaw, an equally important credit has been left out, and there is a perhaps too explicit homosexual reference in another piece. He tries various ways to halt distribution, to explain the situation to his boss, to save his skin. He calls a friend, the “friend” has no sympathy. Another suggests a double martini. A third talks on and on about the possibilities of new careers, how to get out of the jam, how to place the blame on someone else. Cafferty is in a great panic. And what happened to the office muzak? Why is it playing that Negro religious music? (It is the mighty Ira Tucker and the Dixie Hummingbirds having their church – “In the Morning” – that our man is unaware of.) Cafferty goes to his window to further think through his situation – and he looks on the mountains and hills and rivers and valleys of the Okutama and Chichibu regions of Tokyo.

  Upon waking – all asweat, shaking – Cafferty will shower and wonder why this dream recurs every six months or so. He’ll also recall the various events that lead to the actual circumstances of the dream, the circumstances under which he did leave the magazine, of how it all lead eventually to his arrival in Tokyo, and the friend who betrayed him. He will curse for a moment, and then he will thank what he can only call Fortune.

  Kaoru is reporting for work at the mountain resort hotel. Suddenly there is an earthquake. The hotel manager rushes out to calm the nerves of his guests and employees. Frustrated, he shouts, “This is my house and you will behave as I tell you to!” Kaoru goes to the locker room to put on his uniform. Naked men. Gospel music in the background? Why not. Then to the cafeteria to have lunch. The line moves slowly. All the food is Japanese Western: strawberry and cream sandwiches, puddings, waffles, weak and overly sweet coffee. There are large pitchers of water on all of the tables, at none of which does Kaoru sit because he is new on the job and shy about introducing himself. He puts his tray away, and reports for work, but he opens the wrong door and comes out onto the stage of the ballroom where a banquet is being held. Then the hotel changes to a mountain spa where Kaoru recently stayed on a work holiday with fellow office employees. Now he is a guest, getting drunk. The hostesses are old, dressed in yukata, their gold teeth flashing, and telling obscene jokes. He grabs one by the ass, and unlike the actual occasion, this one lets his hands go farther.

  ***

  PURGATORIO MONOGATARI

  Cimabue’s out

  the Gion Bell

  A boy

  thrown from a boat

  A nun

  – Fortune’s wheel –

  sword at throat

  ***

  Down down the round we go. Let’s say it is an erotic universe, or better, city, as Araki and I would have it: then what of that waste, all that life, lost for the city? Yes, I am lost for the city, like Patti sings, “Oh God, I fell for you.” A little bit of life destroyed in just a word from a friend. Arguments among us soon come to resemble a state of drunkenness. You can’t resist the impulse for just one more remark, drive it to an excess, and wake up the next morning feeling lousy and aware of the time you’ve wasted. Arguing in Tokyo: two steps back. Life fails, falls friendship.

  The memories the city is constantly evoking, not just the name of a bridge or a slope – that’s a history I want to live with – I mean the name of a magazine or a stationery company or some random sight: these remind me of him, her, you, me. The whole place can be a city of pain for me some days, and yet I must live with that pain, and trust that the cure is in the poison, trust the city to sustain me. Sublunary: that’s the word usually applied. Sublunary in mid-August when all my sins pore from me. The Sublunary City of the Sun. The sun goes down, the moon comes up; the moon goes down, the sun comes up. Memories die – where do they go?

  “Why be bored, who scared you?,” as Iggy says. The City of the Moon and the City of the Sun: they shall be One. Or we perish, outside of time, day or night. For example, my conflicts of walking – in my case wandering the city, u
sually in search of a book, a record or a shirt. Is it a waste of time?, an avoidance of responsibility? Or a delirium?, a plunge into the plenitude of the written/walked city? “Oh, it’ll only take a short time,” I always tell myself, and it winds up devouring my day, as some small sight, more often commonplace than not – a skirt, some silly young couple, an ad – leads me forward. And me wondering who has co-opted who – the city or me? But the answer is already there: my time has been taken, all spirit exhausted (exalted?), and my flesh swept into a vacuum: and no time to write it. The cafés are not attractive and hardly conducive to writing (or reading for that matter); I write very little each day, a fact that gnaws at my conscience; my social life – women, friends – demands that I be away from home at least four nights a week. And when I am home, what? There is the mail to read and respond to; the day’s notes to look over and organize (for what?); another drink or two (or too often more); and then finally into bed, exhausted. Where I find myself unable to fall asleep. The mind is free to roam in its own mode of walking over the day’s events, the people, the women, the places. More notes need now to be taken; phrases reworked. I get up from bed half a dozen times – paper, water, find that article. Friends who know I am rarely home before midnight begin to call. No matter the physical or mental conditions, going to bed never relaxes me – even alone, it excites me. I never fall asleep from physical exhaustion, horizontality has nothing to do with it. Rather, body and soul mutually work themselves through until they are satisfied that the day’s work is accomplished, and the night’s can begin. And then I wonder: have I walked it as I have talked it? And I wonder: will I – in dreams?

  Faces. Words. Lies. Invariably. They will bring you down. You have devoted yourself to them, and yet, your friends will bring you down: will encourage your every weakness, encourage you to encourage theirs. “Multi-cultural” Tokyo, and suddenly the Brits are proud and complaining about the French who are proud and pissed at the Greeks who are superior in every way to the … and everybody has something awful to say about the Japanese. There is a bad joke waiting here somewhere – and you will laugh with them (you might even make up the joke). Down. All sinking. Reclaimed land and what we hoped were our reclaimed lives, all come here to drown. The city is a cruel Master/Mistress (What is the sex of this city? Why can I not determine it?) – a great Seducer, Corrupter. The city will bring you down. We come here having experienced all corruption, viewing all the possibilities of pleasure and innocence regained within it all ... only to discover we have been had, the City has deceived us, and one day we look into our souls and see there all corruption, like a Dorian Gray portrait multiplied beyond even Wilde’s vision of corruption; Oscar again teaches us to look and look again until a new angle is revealed and all the world is undone. Malebolge.

  Look at Lang, if ever there was a wasted soul. And he says he knows what he’s doing. Not the Poe Man of the Crowd he pretends to be, but to be pitied. And Roberta buoyed by our false faith that she does know. And perhaps she does – if she’s smart enough and lets go of us. Or “Van Zandt and the Abuse of Women.” The man is just unconscious and unconscionable, and will never become aware of himself. The New Man is the Old Man. Arlene – yes, let’s go through the list then – Arlene, all complacency. She must make her move, but expects it to come to her. Will she ever see? Kaoru: a pure contempt for life and even a man I detest. But pure in something at least. Intolerable his intolerance. Kazuo: a graced man perhaps and without a worry – and that should worry us. And his girlfriend, well, Kyotoites do tend to live in a cloud. Hiromi is just another all-too-common loss, not even counting as a casualty. Her pal Hiroko, so much potential – the city is sure to devour her; she’ll wake up someday next to her salaryman and kids and three-generation mortgage never knowing what hit her. She’ll have the occasional dying memory of better times and write it all off as a dream. And Hiro. Guiding the nation forward falling. Cafferty. a “stringer,” a cowardly streak, wary that his greatness here might have been a mediocrity there. And Marianne. Mad, surely, but not mad enough to be the saint she fools herself into thinking she is or might be, I’d hate to have her dreams. That leaves the author. “They shall bring you down”? No, I shall take them all down with me. The Sleep of Reason. I shall be some Goyesque imp forever shitting on the pile of my characters’ corpses.

  I no longer know, and so I walk the city, howling silently, and have made that walking enough for me, a way to avoid myself and all of my responsibilities, half a man inside, walking and talking to myself. Malebolge.

  ***

  R’n’L!!!!!!!!!!

  Would you buy a samurai helmet or a sword hilt? How do you choose good calligraphy? I saw some Beardsley’s for sale recently.

  Just Asking, or Ignorant Medicine Dept. Can you get a headache from the arms of your glasses? You know, as the metallic covering rots away. Can it affect the brain?

  Did you ever notice how much Wladi reads labels of whatever’s in front of him?

  Remember JG saying to Chris when CT said a novel should be encyclopedic, “so why don’t you write an encyclopaedia?” Need I comment?

  Maybe I’ll die of passive smoking; what a death rattle that’ll be.

  Speaking of which, I wonder who buys the good cigars at my local tobacco shop? I’ve n-e-v-e-r seen anyone smoking cigars around here. And I’ve only seen two pipe smokers in all these years, and no one who rolls their own – and yet all that stuff is available, and apparently someone is buying it.

  The little black cat lost one if its eyes (is that a blues?). Susi picked it up – the cat, I mean – and plucked out a thorn, looked for the eye – and it was gone! Just all this flesh, no lens. Yuck. The cat was ok, though; a little wobbly as it ran to its food.

  I think that Hagiwara line applies to almost any situation. Eg, Wladi has been talking for the last twenty minutes about his dog and after a while one feels his poetry getting crazier as his intoxication rises.

  But wait, the beautiful Agnese approaches. I am unable to write in her presence.

  As per yer inquiry, yes, Elvis and Gladys is a good read.

  Remember Miss Imbrie in The Philadelphia Story? “I can’t afford to hate anybody. I’m only a photographer.”

  You know that Chinese restaurant in Ikebukuro? They get their tofu flown in from Shanghai every day. Try it, you’ll feel the difference.

  ***

  –Doesn’t Hiroko take tours of Tokyo, too?

  –How should I know, Kazuo? Who’s Hiroko?

  –She does, yes, but not the same kind I do. Where she takes random busses on her own, my company has the strange policy of entertaining out-of-town-or-country clients with rides on commercial bus tours of Tokyo, complete with tour guide girls in cute hat and white gloves keeping up an endless patter about Tokyo sites, history, legends, songs, which they warble so nauseatingly on.

  –Sounds –

  –No, it doesn’t. Any kind of bus tour in Japan is a distinctly Japanese experience which the Japanese or foreign visitor should try his or her damndest to avoid. I, however, can not. For some reason known only to my boss, this has become my special assignment. Oh I put up with it.

  –Maybe it’s just your good-nature.

  –Man, I’ve seen Tokyo by Night, Tokyo by Day, Tokyo through History, Tokyo by Waterway, the Shogun’s Tokyo, the Emperor’s Tokyo, Movie Tokyo, Architectural Tokyo, Legendary Tokyo, Archaeological Tokyo, Future Tokyo, Kid’s Tokyo, Eco Tokyo, Student Tokyo, Woman’s Tokyo, Computer Tokyo, Commuter Tokyo, Museum Tokyo, High-tech Tokyo, Crafts Tokyo, Garbage Tokyo, Paper Tokyo, Government Tokyo, TV Tokyo, Shinto Tokyo, Buddhist Tokyo, Foreigner’s Tokyo, Food Tokyo, Pensioner’s Tokyo, and so on and nauseatingly on.

  –Sounds –

  –Yeah, I suppose. It’s not always so bad.

  ***

  SCENE TEN: MARUZEN

  Having had an expert adjustment made to her favorite Waterman fountain pen, and picked up a new Pilot double-lock pencil – the forerunner and far superior version of what is u
nthinkingly referred to today as the mechanical pencil – she commences her investigation, in this the tenth photo-site. But first a quick coffee. She then passes the bespoke shirt department, declines to be fitted for a new blouse, glances at the traditional Japanese crafts, wants so to look at the display of maps but duty first, sweeps by the pottery sale, and finally the area devoted to various sorts of British sportsperson’s outfits and accessories and essentials. Where is she? This being Tokyo, why she is in a bookstore, of course. “Gee,” she wonders to herself, “did Soseki buy books here? And Tanizaki? Must’ve, they lived nearby, didn’t they?” But now the store is filled with salary-men and office ladies from the Marunouchi, Kyobashi, and Nihonbashi (finance, trade, steel) areas; clerks from Takashimaya department store, assistants from the many fine restaurants – this being after all, one of the more traditional areas of Tokyo, the very spot from which all roads lead away (“You are leaving the Capital” ((This the most decisive moment of all – and all it receives is this ordinary phrase? No danger sign, encouragement to reconsider. Is this all there is?)) ). Like the many people lingering at the magazine racks and bookshelves, she too will take her time here. If her man is half the one she thinks he is, he is an avid but careful reader, and will also be found to be lingering.

  The bookstore is arranged not unlike the city. And so she wanders among the shelves and sections.

  Politics (clean and dirty), economics (secrets to success!), serious literature (Dostoevski and Mishima), non-serious literature (Mishima), children’s literature (from Grimm to Atomu), theater (Shakespeare, the Chikamatsu of the West), history (the Decline of the West), Japanese history (What Nanking? What Korea?), philosophy (every latest trend!), technology (train lore, the wheel in Japan), women’s studies (what non-Japanese women want), art (pastels, pastels, pastels; Japan’s influence on van Gogh, hence, Japan, source of modern art), Nihonjinron (the theory of being Japanese: different brains and hence a different language known only to those with this sort of brain; a special stomach enzyme that weakens the system against alcohol), foreign languages (learn at your own risk!), reference books (train timetables of Meiji 18), religion (Christ died in Akita), crafts (Japan: at one with Nature), architecture (the Japanese house: source of the modern), film (Have you seen Ozu?), test preparation manuals (Warning: four hours sleep pass, five hours fail!), crime (the fish knife in contemporary murder), etiquette (must-reading for the modern female!), and so on and on.