With Christopher Blasdel. anzai shigeo
12 november 1995. Rummaging through old papers I come across Al Raynor’s translation of the Noh Atsumori. I didn’t know I had it. Looking at the careful pencil notes, I again see Al licking the point nearly fifty years ago before changing a word. I will send it back to him—his last letter was full of the troubles of his children and grandchildren and bad Blyth translations. This will cheer him up.
13 november 1995. I call Tani in Osaka, not having talked with him since his wife died. His daughter answers, her mouth full of supper. “Oh, Papa? He moved. Here’s his number.” I called the number and there is Papa. What happened? Why did he move? “Memories,” he says. “That house was full of memories for me.” And I think of him, so undemonstrative with his wife, so unfaithful, and now he misses her. I ask him to come see me in Tokyo. I will take him to dinner at the Press Club. He likes that. Tokyo high life. “No, I am too old,” he says. “Tani-san,” I say, “you are ten years younger than I am.” “That’s just what I mean,” he says with that laugh I so well remember.
20 november 1995. A call from the Grand Chamberlain. Her Imperial Highness wishes to thank me for so kindly remembering and sending her the cassettes of the new films (Okaeri and Maboroshi) of which I spoke. She is looking forward to viewing them. My suspicious fears she would not get them nor be even told of their arrival are laid away—if he is telling the truth.
25 november 1995. Sawada Ichiro gave a party last night in honor of Mishima Yukio and Eric Klestadt, one now dead for twenty-five years, the other, one year. I think of them beyond the pale—Mishima probably knows his way around well. Hope that he has taken Eric under his arm and shown him about.
Guests were those who knew them and whom Ichiro still likes. Ishiguro Norio the designer, Japanese dance iemoto Umezu, Paul McCarthy, a man named Oikawa whom we refer to as the “Unagi King” since he runs a profitable chain of eel shops, and me. We naturally speak of the dead for a time.
I wonder if the regulations on Mishima are going to be lightened now that the widow is dead. No, not at all, says Norio. The daughter, now married and herself a mother, is maintaining the widowed line: only father as litterateur is allowed, not father as bodybuilder, much less anything else. And no showing of that movie [Patriotism], either.
At the same time, they have shut up the big house. The copy of the Apollo is dank in the deserted garden, that absurd staircase which went nowhere is even now more absurd with no Mishima, nor anyone else, to come down it. For a long time the widow kept everything as it was. The pen was still on the open notebook, says Norio. Now only darkness and the mice.
Where is the son? I wonder—that unhappy child. Norio tells me that he is a jeweler right here on the Ginza. We speak of the possibility of all of us going to look at him, and then decide that it would not be polite.
While we are appreciating Yukio for his own sake, two other memorial dinners are taking place. One, in Kudan, is a large one, vaguely political. The other is somewhere else, very political indeed—Revere the Emperor. I doubt that Mishima would appreciate being taken up by rightist thugs.
7 december 1995. Pearl Harbor Day, and not one newspaper mentions it. The ghost has been laid to rest by last year’s anniversary, during which the media spoke of little else. As always, they overfed—now, upset tummy. No one wants to touch the wretched anniversary of the Day of Infamy.
In the evening Chris [Blasdel] and I go to Teshigahara’s annual year’s end party. [Kanaseki] Hisao appears, looking frazzled—chemotherapy, cancer. [Takemitsu] Toru, puffy, wearing a cap now that he is bald—chemotherapy, cancer. Akiyama Kuniharu there, all over his own cancer it seems. [Kobayashi] Toshiko very friendly, hugs, a hand on my aged rump. Thinks we ought to get together, “for old times sake.” Oda Mayumi comes late, is pleased that her charity sale made lots of money for the cause of a nuclear-free environment. “And we stopped Monju,” she says triumphantly, in reference to the accident at the nuclear power plant. At the raffle I win a lady’s embroidered bag.
18 december 1995. Noisome Roppongi now much subdued. No money. The employees of the various discos, clubs, and bars are on the street handing out advertisements, soliciting. Many are foreign. Big, jovial blacks from Senegal, Jamaica, and Alabama; pale, supercilious blonde models from Sweden and Minnesota; Middle-Eastern men in turbans; Mexicans in sombreros—all handing out flyers to the passing crowds.
A pretty girl with big eyes and a ponytail offers me one on which is printed: Club Pretty Girl, One Hour, Only ¥10,000 [$100], Including First Drink. “You people must be hurting bad,” I say. “They’ve put you all out on the street.” She smiles and says, “That’s right, but you know what? I’d rather be out here catching cold on the street than in there getting felt up. And the pay’s the same.”
24 december 1995. Cora [Rosevere] and I go to the Shoto Museum in Shibuya to see movies filmed in the Meiji period [1868–1912]. There are only two made by Japanese—one is the Kabuki Momijigari (1896), a famous one. The other is one I have never seen: a group of oiran [courtesans] doing their procession in a Japanese garden. This unlikely event is interrupted by a peddler with his pack, who gets in their way. They avoid him, and he is then attacked by a man dressed in a dog suit. Strange.
The rest, one long program—some thirty films, each about 30 seconds in length—are Japanese scenes photographed by whoever the Lumières sent over to do it. Geisha and swordsmen, lots of genre scenes (La famille à souper), but for me the most interesting were the street scenes. A Ginza corner (impossible a century later to determine just which), and anyone who happened by was immortalized. I particularly enjoyed a scene taken at Ueno (Un parc japonais)—in the foreground a young man drinks something from a bottle, has trouble, looks in at the neck, and laughs. What could he have found funny? The bigger joke is that all that is left of him now is that unconsidered act on that forgotten day.
Though Richie was working on the Lafcadio Hearn anthology, as well as on his newspaper column and numerous essays and articles, the journals continued to be his major creation. He kept adding to them, and at the same time began to prepare them for eventual publication. This meant cutting them—and putting the rejects into separate files. In this way Richie was shaping this long, accidental work—finding themes, motives, noting reoccurrences, and being careful to chronicle them in the life he was describing.
1 january 1996. Dae-Yung and I went to Fumio’s elder sister’s house for New Year’s with the whole Mizushima family—forty people in all. The celebration was held in a big country house in the far suburbs, over an hour from Tokyo, near the Hakone Mountains. Everyone was gathered at a long table on which were slabs of tuna, pots of hot oyster stew, trays of winter vegetables, and plates of pickles. People drank beer and shochu and sake and orange juice and Pocari Sweat.
All the brothers and sisters of the Mizushima family were there—and the long-missing father. I had not seen him since Fumio’s wedding—now he is eighty-eight, a ruddy old gent with white hair. His daughters wanted to forgive him for running out on his wife and family forty years before, and now invite him to family events.
Though I had usurped his place at the wedding he is friendly, or has perhaps forgotten. The family has not, however. They address me, with smiles, as the alternate father, and remind the old man of the wedding, when he had to go and sit in the corner. He nods and smiles.
I find admirable the open way that Japanese often bring out what is hidden. Though there is a lot of covering up in public, in private—like now—everything is taken out and aired. “Remember when Mr. Richie here was the father and you were just a bad old man who kept getting in the way, remember that?” the father is asked and he nods in pleased recollection.
More family members come, children and children’s children. Then comes otoshidama time. This is the money given children at New Year’s—it comes in pretty little envelopes. Since all the relatives give something to all the children, each one ends up with quite a bit. They usually
bank it, or their parents do. Fumio surprises me by giving me an envelope, too. It contains ¥10,000 ($100)—quite a lot. He surprises me even more by giving one to his father, a man to whom he has barely spoken for forty years. His father is astonished, gets on his knees, and bows.
Dae-Yung sits, looking at all this. No matter how badly he might (being a Korean) have been treated outside the sacred Japanese circle, once inside no discrimination is permitted and he is welcomed as warmly as they welcome each other. He is plied with food and drink, and when singing time comes he is given the microphone first and encouraged to sing one Korean song after the other. And he, an orphan who has never had a family, is moved by this. He is smiling, but his eyes are glistening and during a rendition one small tear rolls slowly down his cheek.
10 january 1996. On the street I see an acquaintance of some years standing. We always nod and sometimes talk. Usually he is looking around the theater, sidling up an aisle searching for someone to sit next to. Tonight he comes over, shaking his head. “Gone,” he says, “absolutely no one. And it has been this for months now.” I suggest the winter weather but he shakes his head bleakly. “No, they buy a tape, or rent it, and take it home and lock the door.” His gesture—a clenched fist moving up and down—completes the thought. I sympathize and continue on my way home.
As I walk, I think about what he had said. He is right, of course—ministrations such as his are no long needed. It is easier to do it yourself, and these self-centered youngsters are now typical in yet a larger sense. Brought up with little curiosity, and with a much-exaggerated idea of the dangers of their world, they are encouraged, boys and girls alike. Going into their rooms and shutting their doors is to be thought virtuous.
There they can study their brains out or beat themselves to death, the result is the same: a single person operating singly—no communication, no wish for, and eventually little ability for any contact.
I think of these solitaries and then look up into the evening sky where the e-mail courses and the internet surfs. Here, like modern sorcerers, fly the young, each alone, to type his or her way into what must pass as communication—but of a strange, limited kind: one where you must draw little faces with smiles or frowns to show what you feel—an analogue system of emotions, either yes or no, but nothing in between.
Here, it is said, a kind of dialogue takes place. But it takes place between two keyboards in two rooms in two cities or countries or continents. And the hands on those keyboards fabricate the person—he or she is arbitrarily created according to wishes or desires or compulsions of the moment: a protean creature, which can change into any self. It is not communication but imposture.
In a further sense as well—this is a universe of words, only words, and words are only agreed upon signals to denote a reality, not the reality itself. They are notoriously clumsy; they are coarse compared to the real. It is the real that is excised in this modern mode.
At the game center I stop to watch a young man standing in a simulator. Lights flash. He is wearing a helmet that hides his most recognizable part, his face. And a glove hides his hand. As I watch he seems to be fighting something. His weight shifts, the hand moves, the head dodges. It is probably a monster. His track shoes scuffle, he is perhaps running, like a dog asleep. I see a trickle of sweat run down his neck. He is perhaps afraid.
Alone he is indulging in the ultimate masturbation—that of person. He has voluntarily deserted the real for the fantasy, and pornography is one of the results when you do this. He is indulging in the pornography of fear, and his self is frozen in cybernetic attention.
A bell rings, the lights stop, he takes off the helmet. A young worker of some kind, he is smiling, the kind of weary smile the movies put on their actors when they want to indicate that a night of passion is over. He takes off his glove with what seems a practiced ease. He is back to himself.
But who is this? He has had an experience with no one, about nothing, and he is satisfied with this. If I, a real monster, were to walk up and spout flames of English, and put out a claw of companionship, he would be truly afraid and would turn his back upon the awful reality of me as he never does upon the comforting monstrousness of simulated reality.
I look and multiply this smiling young man by one hundred million. He is the future.
11 january 1996. At the International House, a reception for the visiting young artists, I give the toast and later am talking with Chris [Blasdel] who points out a short, bespectacled man and tells me that he is the leading hichiriki player in the Imperial Court orchestra, just as my friend Ono [Tadamaro], was the leading sho player—or had been. Did I know that he’d died last fall? Cancer.
Fifty years vanished and I again saw Ono as he was then, as he had been on that day in 1947, in his Bugaku costume and for me the very personification of the country. Since I never saw Ono again, he has remained always as he was then.
Chris, who knew him much later and studied under him, once asked how I could ever have been in love with him. I explained that I hadn’t been, that I never knew the man, and had only seen him twice. It wasn’t him with whom I was in love, but what I thought he embodied. I never made an effort to see Ono again, but I made many efforts to see the country within a single person.
Even now, when that kind of naturalness, that aesthetic sureness which I so admired is all but vanished, I still go around looking into tidal pools and turning over rocks, trying to find someone (preferably young, unformed, and handsome) who can stand for Japan. That I now find no such person does not discourage the search—it is, after all, its own end.
18 january 1996. After weeks of wondering how to do it, embarrassed city officials are going to move out of Shinjuku the homeless who camp out there in their cardboard city right along the tunnel that leads to the new city hall.
Now, however, the homeless have legal representation (moving them is against their human rights) and lots of “student” support. Still, I expect all of this will cave in under government pressure. The city has built homes for the homeless, camp-like structures in inconvenient places, which, say the homeless, will be closed in two months anyway.
Nothing is being done at all for the Ueno homeless (in contrast to the Shinjuku homeless), but then they are not organized, not embarrassing, just pitiful and tragic. A few evenings ago, standing by the edge of the pond, watching the ducks, I was approached by a woman I had seen often. Her white hair is like thatch and she wears a blanket as though it were a cloak. She asks, oddly, if I have any cardboard. On this she will presumably sleep.
I did not, but she did not expect me to. Her question is to elicit money, and it is pathetic to see her trying to retain her dignity by asking for cardboard, knowing I have none. Pathetic though this is, I give nothing. She singles me out almost every time I go to the park. I did give her some money once but I do not now.
20 january 1996. I awake to white, dead light, and know it has been snowing. Also, the edge of the cold is different, sharper. Opening the window I watch the falling flakes, gray against the oyster sky. Maybe that was why I was dreaming about a hospital, an operating room, and the cold odor of chloroform.
Why are waking moments, the hopeful beginning of a new day, so often filled with death, I wonder. My doctor tells me heart attacks very often occur in the early morning hours—looking at me meaningfully the while. But my desolate wakings predate heart concerns.
I think they are always there, for everyone. We see plainest at the first, for man is the only animal stupid enough to know he is to die.
22 january 1996. Two middle-aged women are talking on the subway. While I cannot hear what they are saying, I watch their nodding heads, their narrow glances, their conspiratorial airs. This is so common—women as conspirators. One leans over to the other as though repeating something spiteful and the other grimly nods. Then the first begins to tell something funny and laughs a lot during the recitation. The other cracks not one smile. This is the way it always is with some middle-aged Japanese women when
together—the talker always laughs, the listener, never.
I know why conversations take this form. It is because these women grew up powerless. Marginalized, their conversations are commiserations. Those narrowed eyes, the scandalized way of recounting, the lowered voices, the scornful agreements—this is something I remember seeing black women do when I was little, and effeminate homosexuals when I was older. Now the young Japanese women talk nothing like this. They are loud and often raucous, use man-talk and refuse to soften their voices in any pretense of gentility.
24 january 1996. Early this morning, six say the papers, the Tokyo police moved into Shinjuku Station and began evicting the homeless, those men who lived in their cardboard city in the sheltered tunnel leading to City Hall. Some two hundred homeless, some eight hundred police. It does not sound like a fair fight but, then, it was not supposed to be.
It was, however, a very Japanese one. It took years for the city fathers to act, and when they did they overacted. Yet those long months had not been wasted. The cops compiled complaints from nearby storeowners; they placated the public (what few needed it) with promises of a walkway, a people-mover, all the way from the train platforms to the very entryway of Governor Aoshima’s offices.
One of the bereft shouted (according to the paper) that such an attack as this should never have been tolerated in a democratic society. True, but what could have led him to believe that this is a democratic society? There will be no complaints. The man on the street (one such, interviewed by one of the papers, said that the homeless stank) believes it all necessary, and that is enough for most to rationalize, as does the governor, that “. . . the metropolitan government had no other choice than to mobilize the police.”
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 46
