Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  After a page and a half, Brautigan set the letter aside and went to his favorite sidewalk café to write in his notebook. At 7:30 pm he closed up shop and headed for The Cradle. Nobody was there at that early hour. Richard sat at the bar, sipping brandy as he continued writing. Around nine, he had something to eat. By 10:30 the joint was jumping. Interesting people began to arrive. Brautigan gulped his brandy as the conversation grew more interesting. Brautigan didn’t get to sleep until eight on Sunday morning.

  Aside from a “two hour get-up,” Richard slept for seventeen and a half hours. He climbed out of bed at 3:30 am on the twenty-fifth. By four in the morning, he was drinking coffee, watching the rosy fingers of dawn and completing his letter to Barry Hannah. He didn’t have much to say aside from describing the mundane details of life in Tokyo. At four handwritten pages, it became one of the longest letters he’d ever written. Brautigan never mailed it. He kept the letter among his papers for the rest of his life.

  Richard got back in touch with Masako Kano. Because of her job at Motorola, she could only see him in the evenings after work or on weekends. Brautigan told Kano about his assignment for German Playboy, a project he called “Fate of West German Models in Tokyo.” He worried how the research needed to be done. Without being asked, Masako volunteered to help, offering to be his research assistant. She told Richard the Japan Times advertised “all the time” for Japanese women to act as “managers” for foreign models and suggested answering such an ad and interviewing for the job. Kano explained that she’d go undercover and “find out all she could about managing the models and what this entailed.”

  Masako was twenty-seven but could pass for seventeen, “a pretty, innocent-looking and clever girl.” She would make a perfect spy. Delighted by the idea, Brautigan thought of her as his personal ninja, one of those legendary covert mercenaries of feudal Japan specializing in espionage, sabotage, and assassination. Kano never performed any cloak-and-dagger work. Her day job didn’t allow the time, but Richard cherished the image of her as a ninja.

  On the fourth of May, Shūji Terayama, the avant-garde Japanese poet, writer, dramatist, filmmaker, and photographer, died from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty-seven. He had met Brautigan in San Francisco during the spring of 1976. Later that year they reconnected at The Cradle, spending many nights there together, drinking and talking. Terayama had founded Tenjō Sajiki, an experimental theater troupe, in 1967. He named it for the 1945 Marcel Carné film, Les Enfants du Paradis, a title with a double meaning. {“Children of heaven” was a slang term for the audience sitting “the gods,” the cheapest section in a theater’s highest balcony.)

  In 1979, Shūji introduced Richard to composer, Michiko “Michi” Tanaka, who worked as the secretary of Tenjō Sajiki and was also an executive producer for Terayama’s 1971 film, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Earlier in 1983, Michi wrote to Brautigan (“Dear Richard with cow-boy hat,) asking him to participate in “Questions,” a one-hour video about writers she was directing and producing as personal project, “not a commercial one.” All she requested was that Richard answer a number of questions on tape and send her “about ten photos.” Many years later, Tanaka made Questions, a seven-minute film which did not include recorded answers from authors.

  Terayama’s death struck a chord in his American counterpart. Shūji was almost a year younger than Richard and shared his fondness for booze, dying from a lifetime of alcohol abuse. Terayama had published close to two hundred literary works and made more than twenty films. Now he was dead. Brautigan could only wonder if he’d be next.

  Drunk in his hotel room, Richard tried to jot down memories of Shūji Terayama on a Keio Plaza notepad kept by his bedside. “Unfortunately, memory is never accurate,” Brautigan wrote, enumerating a short list of his earliest recollections of his friend. They ate breakfast in a restaurant in Chinatown and had coffee afterward at a North Beach Italian sidewalk café. Terayama drew Brautigan a map of Tokyo on a paper napkin, telling him the city was actually “five major cities and ten thousand villages.” Richard kept this crude map and followed Shūji’s instructions during his first trip to Japan.

  Terayama’s funeral was held at the Aoyama Funeral Hall in the vast Aoyama Cemetery, about a kilometer’s walk from The Cradle. Takako Shiina insisted that Richard go to the memorial. He wore the gray Western jacket given to him by Becky Fonda. Takako fitted his right sleeve with a black armband and drew a simple map, marking the route in red from The Cradle down Stars and Stripes Avenue and around the corner to Aoyama Saijo. Brautigan thought he wasn’t properly dressed. “This is perfectly all right,” Shiina told him.

  “But I don’t want to offend anyone,” Richard replied.

  “You won’t offend anyone. This is all right.”

  “But I’m a foreigner.”

  “It’s all right.” Takako gave him a white chrysanthemum to leave in tribute.

  Brautigan followed Takako’s precisely sketched directions, walking in the hot afternoon to the first funeral he’d ever attended in his life. Long fond of visiting cemeteries, Richard had never been to a burial service before. As he turned the corner onto the street bordering the Aoyama Cemetery, Brautigan saw thousands of people dressed in black, waiting in line to enter the funeral hall and pay their last respects to Shūji Terayama. Richard joined the end of the queue under the broiling sun, moving slowly forward with the other mourners. During the long wait, Brautigan observed an ant crawling under the black shoe of the man ahead of him on line. A poem started taking form in his mind.

  Over two pages long, “Night Flowing River” became one of Richard’s most expansive poems, a rare example of his narrative poetry. Brautigan rented a typewriter and prepared a clean fair copy, which he gave to the Tuttle-Mori Agency, his literary representatives in Japan. He also gave a copy to his friend, poet Shuntarō Tanikawa, for him to translate into Japanese. When Shuntarō’s work was done, Richard asked Masako to read it before he submitted the poem for publication. Tanikawa invited Kano to his hotel room. She felt embarrassed, a “nobody” giving her opinion “to this wonderful poet.” After reading the poem, Masako said she thought it was more than a perfect translation. Shuntarō smiled and they bowed to each other.

  When Masako learned Richard had met previously with Tanikawa, “his quiet poet friend,” about her working for Motorola, she was furious. Brautigan had little interest in the world of business and couldn’t understand why Kano had to work for money when he believed her family was still well-off financially. Masako adored Tanikawa and felt Richard had no right to expose her personal matters to him. She worked to reimburse her mother for all the tuition fees sent to pay for her American degree, making monthly payments to her “mum.” Kano understood that Brautigan “respected and trusted Tanikawa San so much he wanted to share. Hopefully, he was not chatting to everybody who sat at the stools at The Cradle.”

  Richard’s mind brimmed with the images and experiences of Paris. He obtained a videocassette of Diva with English subtitles. Brautigan and Masako watched the Beineix film “again and again” in his hotel room when she came over after work. Kano was familiar with the novel by Delacorta (a pseudonym of Swiss author, poet, and screenwriter Daniel Odier) on which the movie was based. Richard loved the scenes of Paris in the rain and the relationship between Alba, a young Asian woman, and her older, platonic lover Serge Gorodish.

  One scene, where Alba roller-skates in Gorodish’s empty studio, delighted them both so much that Brautigan brought a pair of roller skates to his room. He wanted Masako to put them on and skate around his bed. She tried to please him, but the skates were too big and the thickly carpeted floor made skating impossible. “Anyway, we laughed our heads off,” Kano recalled.

  Richard also “forced” Masako to read Marc Chénetier’s book, which she felt “highly praised his style.” Brautigan brought several copies of the French scholar’s favorable critical study along with him to Japan and often had Kano read aloud from it to him at night, “as his bedtime sto
ry.” She suspected this was to “nourish his ego.”

  One evening, Masako lured Richard far from The Cradle to Bunkyō-ku in the north of Tokyo, a district antipodal to foreigner-infested Roppongi. She brought him to Totoya (literally “fish eatery”), a classic Japanese seafood restaurant. “We were eating in the hidden heart of Japan,” Brautigan observed, “a place concealed from the Western world.” Masako said, “No blond guy has ever come until I took Richard.” During the course of their formal dinner, an argument ensued, leading to “outrage after outrage.”

  To cap things off, Brautigan insulted Kano’s family. She slapped his face. “A hard samurai slap. Whack!” Masako did this in front of the restaurant’s owner, his cook, and their customers. This sort of thing might happen unnoticed every night of the week in the gin joints of Frisco. In the formal seclusion of Old World Japan, it was tantamount to the roar of a gunshot. Richard and Masako “decided to make it an early evening.” They agreed not to see each other for a week or longer. “Let things cool off.”

  After Kano went home, Brautigan headed straight to The Cradle. At the bar, he talked with an attractive American model about West German models. The American said she’d help Brautigan with his quest and they agreed to meet again. When Richard returned to The Cradle with Masako the following weekend, he found a note from the American model saying she’d get in touch with him at the Keio Plaza. They returned to the hotel, and “there was no message from the American model.”

  After making love, Richard and Masako got into “a language misunderstanding” just as the phone rang. It was Takako calling to say that Francis Ford Coppola was at The Cradle and he should return. Brautigan said he’d call back. He walked Kano to the Shinjuku Station. Along the way, another language mishap occurred. Richard tried “to illustrate a point, a complicated but very sincere point of affection for her.”

  Brautigan said, “I’m interested in your mind and talking to you. I don’t want to make you into my whore.”

  Kano heard, “Whore!”

  Masako took off running “like a sleek horse.” Richard lumbered after her “like a ponderous turtle.” He caught up with her at the train turnstile and did his best “to turn the tide” of animosity. They parted when Kano promised to call during her lunch hour the next day.

  Brautigan walked back to the Keio Plaza though a gentle rain, pondering the intricacies of language barriers. Up in his room, Richard phoned The Cradle. Takako put Coppola on the line and Brautigan welcomed him to Tokyo. Francis had just arrived. Jet lag loomed. Richard said he had to get to bed early and couldn’t see him that night. He mentioned he “was writing a long article for a German magazine and had to get some sleep.” Coppola said he would be in Japan for a few days but also wanted to go to bed early. “We left it at that,” Brautigan recalled. They never got together on this particular trip to the Land of the Rising Sun.

  Sometime early in May, Judge Richard Hodge arrived in Tokyo for a three week visit. He remembered the approximate date because it was during the biannual World Table Tennis Championships, held that year in Tokyo between April 28 and May 9. Brautigan told Hodge to go to the duty free shop on his way through customs and buy a bottle of Napoleon brandy for the manager of the Keio Palza. The judge did as instructed and received a forty percent discount on his hotel room in return. Hodge wanted to see a lot of Japan, takinig trips to Kyoto and “down that famous peninsula.” Brautigan had no interest in leaving Tokyo.

  Their relationship had become “almost completely social.” Hodge was a Superior Court judge and no longer really represented Brautigan. “The way it turned out,” Hodge recalled, “was that he and I would go out in the evening and we would dine wonderfully and drink a lot and round about midnight, I’d come home. And at seven in the morning, Richard would be knocking at my door. He’d be coming home at seven in the morning and we would have breakfast. That was the time Richard would go to bed and then I’d go out and get on the bullet train. I did all my traveling, and then I’d come back and we’d have dinner and go out.”

  Going out meant evenings at The Cradle. Brautigan introduced Judge Hodge to Takako and they struck up a warm friendship. One night, in his element among a group of editors and writers, Richard talked about looking for West German models in Tokyo and showed off the notebook which recorded his search. Hodge went home early, as usual. The next morning, Brautigan appeared outside his door at the Keio Plaza in a complete panic. He’d lost his manuscript. Richard thought he’d put it safely behind the bar. When he looked, the notebook was gone.

  “He was quite desolate about it,” Hodge remembered. “Kicking himself for that being his only copy.” The judge was shocked and “feeling this great sense of loss.” Everything turned out okay in the end. One of Brautigan’s drinking companions in The Cradle had been an editor at Japanese Playboy. During the course of their conversation, he’d opened his portfolio, spreading papers and manuscripts across the bar. Richard’s notebook got shuffled together with the other stuff and packed away. When the editor discovered it a day later, he returned Brautigan’s work-in-progress to The Cradle.

  On another occasion, Takako brought Hodge and Brautigan to a film set to see a Japanese movie in production. The director was a friend of hers. They spent the entire day watching take after take of the same scene. For anyone not involved, watching a film shoot ranks just below observing paint dry as an interesting pastime. When the actors speak a strange language, the boredom factor dials up several notches.

  Their fun began when the day’s work ended. The director invited Brautigan and Hodge to his home for something to eat. “He was pretty famous, I guess,” the judge recalled. The director had an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs and on the way, they stopped off at a supermarket and bought a load of “Japanese goodies” and several bottles of Philippine sake “that everyone was very proud of.” The director’s party consisted of his lead actor and actress, the composer of the film’s score and the two Americans.

  They prepared sukiyaki, sitting around the cooking pot on tatami mats in the traditional manner. “Richard got drunk,” Hodge recalled. “Boy, everybody was drunk.” Gathered about the low table, the Japanese began singing. They favored opera and the songs of Stephen Foster, harmonizing on “Old Black Joe” and “Camptown Races.” This became one of Richard Hodge’s most enduring memories of Japan. “Every one of those people,” he said, “particularly the music director, knew all the words.”

  Later in the evening, Brautigan made a drunken pass at the leading lady. “Ticked off,” the film director asked his American guests to leave. Out on the street, drunk in the middle of the night, the two Richards had no idea in hell where they were. Hodge and Brautigan started walking, singing together off-key to keep up their spirits. “Doo-da . . . Doo-da . . .” They felt lucky to be in Tokyo where there was no chance of getting mugged at three in the morning. Sometime before dawn, they found a taxi and were safely delivered to the Keio Plaza.

  Richard Hodge felt troubled by the changes he observed in his old friend in Tokyo, “My relationship with [Brautigan] was one of gravity,” he said, remembering the years he’d been Richard’s lawyer, “so I probably saw him at his best, when he was really being intense and productive and careful and intelligent; a businessman. I never thought of him as an alcoholic.” There had been plenty of drinking together over the years but Hodge considered it fun, two guys socializing. What he “perceived in Japan was a change of mood about the drinking. It was every night. And there was a real sadness to it that I hadn’t seen before.”

  Around the end of May, a week or so after Richard Hodge returned to California, Brautigan received a letter from an assistant program development director for the United States Information Agency at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. Having received a cable from the USIA informing them of Richard’s visit, the Program Development office contacted American Centers all across Japan and received numerous enthusiastic replies regarding a Brautigan presentation. Kyoto, Osaka, Nagayo, Tokyo and Fukuoka all exten
ded invitations to Richard. Travel expenses would be paid, along with a $113 per diem payment and a $75 honorarium.

  Brautigan got in touch with the USIA people at the embassy, accepting their offer. He would travel to Kyoto on June 20th as requested, but wanted the Osaka date in July changed to June 21st, so he could do them both on a single trip. Tokyo in July was fine with Richard. Nagoya and Kukuoka both wanted him to come in September. Brautigan said that was too far into the future for him to make a commitment at the moment.

  Not long afterward, Richard prowled the interior city of the Keio Plaza one morning and came across an American television crew filming an episode of Love Boat outside the lobby entrance. He recognized Ted Knight and an actress whose name he couldn’t recall. Brautigan stood and watched them prepare to shoot another scene. Ted Knight waited next to the camera, getting ready. The actress who looked familiar walked past Richard to join Ted Knight. On her way outside, she said, “It’s freezing out there.”

  Looking on, Brautigan noticed John Ritter, a popular American television actor, having a conversation about stage makeup with a young Japanese woman ten feet away. Richard approached him from behind. “Excuse me, Mr. Ritter,” he said.

  The actor turned, “slightly surprised” at encountering Brautigan. “I evoke that sort of response in people,” Richard wrote later. “I’m kind of a strange-looking man, awkward, obviously uncomfortable in this world, not good-looking. I wear western clothes, Levis, cowboy boots, and a cap that I got at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, in the winter that says on the brim ‘Fighting Irish, Notre Dame.’” John Ritter regarded him curiously.

  “Is that actress,” Brautigan nodded his head at the scene underway outside, “Rita Moreno?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ritter replied, oddly charming and formal. “She certainly is.”

  “Thank you,” Richard said, and they walked away into their separate lives.