Tokio Whip

by Arturo Silva

  –From things, I suppose.

  –One thing leading to another. It’s kind of nice when you think of it.

  –Yeah?

  –You know, a deep look into the eyes, a smile, a kiss, here, put your hand here, then another kiss, ya’ get me? – one little thing lea-ding-to-a-no-ther …

  [FADE]

  ***

  HE SAID / SHE SAID

  She said she loved his voice; it was deep, all of him, his passion, experience, his fears and hopes.

  He said that with all the women in his life he had loved he had first fallen in love with their voices.

  He said that he loved her breasts, that they excited him even more perhaps than the excitement she felt when he felt and kissed them.

  She said she loved his chest; it was so smooth, the few soft hairs, the vastness of mutual sensation, the heart beating underneath, the map of kisses.

  He said that she had to leave.

  She said she did not.

  He said he loved her walk, cool, long strides.

  She said she admired his, steady, with an occasional indecisive jerk, a mis-step.

  He said, between her, that he was straddling values.

  She said, straddling him, that there was no between, that she had sight now of the once-distant shore.

  He said that having lost so much in love that he was afraid now to love.

  She said that to love was to suspend one’s fear, that having lost everything, well.

  He said that all he had learned he had learned from her.

  She said that all she knew she had learned from a few magazines.

  He said he did.

  She said she did.

  He said he didn’t.

  She said she didn’t.

  He said there was only one moral choice.

  She said there were two, maybe three.

  He said his life in this city was a constant bereavement of memory.

  She said her life in this city was one of a constant renewal of the will.

  He said he loved her blouse.

  She said she loved his shirt.

  He said that if they had met thirteen years earlier they would have destroyed one another.

  She said that that they could have created one another.

  He said that her blue dress deserved a poem.

  She said he should get rid of his blue suit.

  He said the greatest director was Mizoguchi.

  She said her favorite film was L’Atalante.

  He said he had performed a massive act of forgetting and that his earliest memories could not be reconstructed except in dreams.

  She said that her earliest memory came to her in a dream about eight years ago and that it was of her birth.

  He said that he wished she spoke English better.

  She said that she wished that he spoke Japanese better.

  He said it was all so hard and takes so long to live an honest life in a world of pain.

  She said yes it is hard and yes it does take a long time but, hell, it has to be attempted, that was all.

  He said he did not believe in God.

  She said she believed in the gods.

  He said she was his man.

  She said he was her man.

  He said they should have some champagne.

  She said that she usually preferred saké but yes, champagne would be nice.

  ***

  AUGUST

  –Tell me again.

  –What? That I love you?

  –No, silly! The line from the movie.

  –Which line? What movie?

  –Oh, the one you were talking about the other day. What was it …? Comeon, you know. Don’t you remember?

  –I didn’t take notes, sorry.

  –Ok. But wasn’t it about love?

  –How should I know? Probably. Aren’t most movies about love – in one form or another?

  –Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, if you remember it, let me know, ok? Or write it down for me.

  –Ok. If I remember it – and I have no idea what you’re talking about.

  –Yes you do; yes you will.

  –Anyway, what’s the big deal?

  –Oh, nothin.’ It just sort of struck me, and I wanted to remember it, you know, write it down, think about it.

  –Alright, maybe you’re right and it will come back to me.

  –Like you came back to me?

  –But I’d never been here before!

  –You know what I mean.

  –Ah, ok. But did I ever leave you? You left, after all.

  –I didn’t go anywhere. I only came to my Tokyo. You came to yours.

  –Hmm, maybe I came back to myself.

  –Too heavy for me right now. Let’s just say you arrived.

  –In time.

  –In time.

  –But let’s get back to this leaving. I seem to recall that, regardless of whether or not you came to your Tokyo, you also left – me.

  –But I had a ticket and everything, what was I to do, cancel?

  –That’s your excuse? Now wait a minute, you aren’t going to get out of it by –

  –– and it was an expensive ticket.

  –And it was a one-way ticket!

  –Of course it was, you yourself just the other day said you couldn’t imagine leaving Tokyo for quite a while yet, and I’ve never heard of plane tickets that are good for five or ten or even fifteen years, have you?

  –But that’s not the point!

  –Oh yes it is, I worked hard to pay for that ticket!

  –The point is that you left me!

  –I got on the plane without you – you didn’t have a ticket!

  –But you never told me you were leaving!

  –You never asked. And anyway, you should’ve known.

  –Then you admit that you left me?

  –I admit that you stayed behind.

  –You’re too much.

  –Ain’t I though? Now, tell me again.

  –But I can’t remember the line from the movie.

  –No silly, that you love me.

  ***

  He loved her so much that he agreed to visit her for a month in the country where she’d gone to observe “the local ways.” “But Tokyo’s are the ways of the world,” he protested to no avail, and so went down.

  He endured the earth, the trees (clouds being enough for him in the city), the dearth of record stores and friends with espresso machines. The people were “close to the earth,” as the phrase would have it; it made him think they suffered a permanent diarrhea. He tried to begin a conversation with a goat, which was in no mood for talking, butting him away; followed the cow in its path, looking for signs of a latent street system; he visited the local school, and felt like weary Gulliver. He played sound effects tapes to the birds, in the false hope that they might learn and sing him back the city’s songs, the children’s cries, the lover’s shouts, the mothers’ lyric conversations, the office workers’ low hum, the machines’ fits and starts, the traffic of it all.

  He weakened. Lost weight fast. Neglected his usual fastidious habits; wore the same shirt the whole day long. (Long days indeed – in the country, he discovered, when the sun goes down the people go to bed. Did they at least dream?, he wondered.)

  She in her infinite wisdom and compassion, sent him, at the end of two weeks, home for the weekend, where, as Blake remarked upon his return from Lambeth, he was “back to display my giant forms again.” He arrived, read his mail – stacks of letters to answer!, books to be ordered!, invitations to turn down and others to accept!, familiar and new restaurants to visit!, and friends!, friends to speak with, see, encounter, to know.

  But first, he walked; and then, he called her. How, he wondered, could he love her in two places at one time? And, what did that mean in terms of the city? She as city, but city without her? He played tapes of her he’d made in the country; the birds responded, traffic stopped. Yes, it was her voice the city and he were one. And he visited her
again and he came back and then she came back.

  ***

  AUGUST

  Bliss

  Clyde’s voice

  Ada & Eve Café

  –That’s pretty. Who wrote it?

  –Yours truly.

  –Did you experience it, too?

  –I wrote it, didn’t I? … Actually, I’m not sure.

  –?

  –I mean, I imagine it to be a bliss – obviously I’ve experienced each separately – I seem to think I’ve experienced them together – but I couldn’t give you – or myself – the full assurance.

  –We could always go there and see if they have his CDs.

  –Nah, that’d be forcing things. Anyway, it’s better this way.

  –It’s very nice. Needs a stronger “d” sound though, don’t you think?.

  –Elide, Clyde.

  –Ah, yes. But I know what you mean.

  –Always?

  –Sometimes, usually, always.

  –That’s a lot of time – sounds like more than always if you add ’em up. Looks like I’d better catch up – start talking faster.

  –This speed’ll do.

  –Should I slow down?

  –No, no, your talk is wonderful, you know that, and I’ve told you often.

  –But not always. But often is more than sometimes, so, ok. But what do you know what I mean?

  –??

  –What you said a minute ago. What were you thinking of? Something made you think of something else.

  –I don’t know, can’t remember. Anyway …

  –Clyde!

  –Oh, yes – thanks. It was that I know what you mean regarding not being sure whether you’ve been to a certain place before.

  –You mean like déjà-vu?

  –No, I mean like your poem.

  –You called it a poem – thank you!

  –Well, isn’t it? What do you call it?

  –I call it … now let me see … [holding it away from herself] … I call it … a pyramid! … So, do you think you’ve been to Barcelona or Monument Valley or the Sea of Tranquility – even though you’ve never been an astronaut, but maybe you think you have been – though maybe in fact you’ve never been there? Places seen in movies or photo books, “gee, I feel I know that place” sort of thing?

  –Comeon, this isn’t a movie.

  –But I thought you said it was.

  –Well, it is and it isn’t.

  –But it’s like a movie?

  –Well yeah, sure.

  –Ok, it’s like a movie. I mean this is, not your movie-like experiences.

  –No – that wasn’t my point at all. I didn’t mean places like those, I meant places in Tokyo. Like you hearing Clyde in the café, or thinking you have.

  –Oh!

  –Me too, all the time.

  –That’s always, just like you said.

  –?

  –That you know what I mean. But please, go on.

  –? Uh, ok. Did I really see Blade Runner on a rainy afternoon in Shinjuku? Did I really have a good conversation with what seemed like a very nice guy only to find out that he was a yakuza at the end – he even showed me part of his tattoo – and to even half-drunkenly remember later that he’d invited me to his home, and then when I never went, wonder if I’d done the right or the wrong thing? And did I really myself experience some sort of bliss in Rikugien and reading Dōgen?

  –I don’t know, did you?

  –I don’t know. But like you, I think I may have, I’m not sure, but it all seems rather appropriate regardless.

  –Like a movie?

  –Like a pyramid.

  –You called it a poem – how sweet.

  ***

  I’d lost my way entirely. In the middle of my life I was caught between two or three homes – I could have settled on the west coast, in Amsterdam or Paris – and yet I insisted on Tokyo. I was not strong enough. I’d found a home that would take me years to feel completely free in despite those early positive reckonings. The city was free – had no need of me – disburdening would have to begin with me – you have to learn almost everything all over again.

  ***

  AUGUST

  –We walk all the time, but we never go for a walk.

  –What do you mean, we go for strolls, don’t we, what’s the difference?

  –They’re somehow not the same. We go for a stroll in the neighborhoods to get out of the house, to get some vegetables, to “observe the scene,” “life’s passing parade,” and all that. No, going for a walk is different somehow.

  –Why, how?

  –Oh, on account of because of when you go for a walk … yes, there’s a bit of exercise involved; no, there is no particular scene to be observed, or at least that is not one of the primary objectives; yes, nature somehow is involved – the scene is the air, the sound of the cicadas, the cries of children not too nearby …. ah, I’ve got it – when walking, you don’t observe the scene, you take it in! … I suppose too that time is involved. Let me see … strolling is Japanese, the garden and all that, you know, everything unfolding, like Mizoguchi. Walking is Western, ruminating ... and then you expect people to break into dance like Fred and Cyd!

  ***

  1457: OTA DOKAN

  How do we picture him? Dressed in the silks of a court poet, the lacquered armor of the samurai? In the furs of a hunter? (As in the statue of him by Fumio Asakura, now in the Tokyo International Forum.) How did we ever come up with phrases like the “mists of time” and the “echoes of legend”? How did we ever come to think that someone can found a city?

  People had long lived, of course, on the site of what would become Edo, and later Tokyo. Presumably, there they could fish, live a decent life away from the turmoils of the capitol, the many warring factions that became history and popular drama. That stuff arrived in the twelfth century when a member of the Taira clan settled his family there, renaming it after the site itself, “mouth of the river.” That could also be considered a founding moment, all so literally so.

  In 1457, Ota Dokan – (or Sukenaga), a “vassal of the Ogigayatsu branch of the Uesugi family, who served the Ashikaga …”; well, the reader perceives how complicated these things can get – built a castle in the town of Edo. The legend has it that Benten, goddess of music and islands, took the form of a fish (a konoshiro) and guided Ota to the site where he should build “this castle” (kono shiro). In a word, Tokyo was founded on a pun. And immediately it became Tokyo (in character, that is; the name change did not come about, of course, until the 19th century): Ota set to changing water courses, and moving things about – temples especially – east to west. (Though during his time, and even that of the Tokugawa, his west was more to our east. In this regard too, the end really is in the beginning, for it has been a part of this book’s contention that the unpaved-over heart of Tokyo – commonly represented by the east, shitamachi – thrives today on the west side ((Ota’s very far west)), the other side of the Yamanote, similarly downhill and yet still in the plain.)

  Further, the facts are almost too good to be true. In a resolution of the Cervantian dilemma, Ota was both a warrior and a poet. The best legend is that of the yamabuki. Caught in a rainstorm, Edo’s founder approaches a hut and asks the woman there for the loan of a straw raincoat. She returns with a yellow rose (yamabuki). Puzzled, he returns to his castle drenched. One of his attendants tells him what any properly bred noble would have immediately recognized: the woman was speaking in the allusive way of the court (and she a peasant too! – what a wonderful ukiyo-e the scene would make!); in this case she was referring to a Heian period poem:

  Sad indeed am I

  That I have not one straw raincoat

  Like the seven-petaled, eight-petaled

  Blossom of a yellow rose.

  The warrior had received his comeuppance, and resolved to master the poetic arts too; which, apparently he did (though I have been unable to find any of his work).

  Ota lived in his castle
town for twenty-seven years. The end is all too believable. In an intra-familial conflict, he was assassinated at the command of his own master, after having been falsely accused of disloyalty (recall Sen no Rikkyu’s fate). That part of his legacy thrives too today in Tokyo, a place he would not, of course, recognize. In fact, it would probably drive him mad.

  ***

  AUGUST

  –A double espresso, a story by Dash – you’re the best.

  –Oh my, choo-choo-ch-boogie.

  –Whadda’ya’ wanna do today? Revisit the scenes of our youth?

  –These are the scenes of our youth.

  –Invigorated?

  –Re-re-re- –

  –– turning to the question.

  –Stay in? Flop?

  –Flop?

  –Stay in, do nothing …

  –[Gravely] “We do nothing,” quoth the Professor. [End of gravity.] I don’t know. Shop? You said you need a new shirt. No, you always need a new shirt. [Gravely] “How many shirts does one man need?” [End of gravity.] Wear one of your old ones today, eh? That Yohji with the zigzagging stripes, I like that one best, I think.

  –Really? Me too. I oughta confess, I bought two, anticipating the day –

  –– the first would get too old to wear and you’d miss it so, right?

  –Caught.

  –Well, I’m glad of it, it wasn’t a reckless moment.

  –Ok, ok, you’re fast.

  –Run you around the block?

  –More a trapezoid.

  –Which one’s that? What kind of angles and sides?

  –I mean our “block” that isn’t one. No, ours is more like a trapezoid.

  –So, “I’ve been around the trapezoid”? No, that doesn’t quite sound it.

  –Back to the question.

  –Ah, the day’s itinerary. Well, obviously, we ought to have zaru-soba for lunch.

  –Oh, I am crazy about you.

  –And oh but you are crazy.

  –Would you have me any other way? Ordinary?

  –Smith. Early ROT. And so, yes, you are ordinary.

  –Roberta!

  –Oh but you are, Lang. I am too. It’s an ordinary world.

  –And Tokio’s an ordinary city?

  –You bet. That’s why we’re here. Crazy-ordinary, ordinary-crazy.

  –Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?

  –You’ll take it no other way, Pal, and you’ll like it.

  –Ok, ok, you got me.