However, if you ask you will be helped. A druggist got me from the Monzen-nakacho subway station to the Koishifuru district, and a woman at a tobacco counter got me to the Kachidochi Yakuin, and there a florist pointed out the Bunka Senta—people all just as friendly as they are in Ozu’s films.
A small exhibition, but it held his favorite tea cup, his reading glasses, a fan he was fond of, some of his art work, gouaches, and a number of school exercise books, including one used for English study. I looked at it and remembered the English lessons in What Did the Lady Forget, Record of a Tenement Gentleman, Tokyo Story, and doubtless other films as well.
Ozu was born in Fukagawa, which is near here and in prewar Tokyo was even nearer. There is a map that shows the location of his house back then, his school, even the sites themselves—long gone, since Fukagawa was one of the places destroyed during the fire-bombing of Tokyo.
There are pictures of him, a young man just back from the provinces, now making his way in the big city, working in the movies. A kind of quizzical optimism showed in his blunt and honest features, his hands folded as though they have just completed some big job. There is also a photo of a new bridge—Ozu Bashi—but I do not know where it is.
10 february 2003. Older women on the street, standing by a certain corner, smoking, talking, a bit too made up. A flower arrangement group, a gaggle of prostitutes? No, something even more specialized. These older women are companions. At least that is what they might call themselves. They gather here of an early evening because just down this alley is the Cat’s Eye, that new establishment that requires men to have women before they may descend the stairs into those darkened rooms where they sit and drink expensive coffee as they watch other men and their wives or friends screw. These older women rent themselves out so that the single men can go and sit in the dark with them. So far as I can ascertain there is no screwing—they simply sit and sip their coffee and get paid for it.
What a curious profession, I think. And an attractive older woman catches my eye and makes an unmistakable motion with her hand. She is willing to do more for her fee. I smile and she approaches. More pregnant hand motions. She is deaf, and it is her words that I am watching as her nimble fingers spell out messages I am unable to read.
11 february 2003. Standing by the pond is a good-looking young student, in his twenties, probably ready to graduate, already searching perhaps for the means to make a life of his own. I look at him and begin, as always, to make up a life for him—inventing stories to explain where he is from and where he wants to go; fleshing out an emotional life—who he likes, who he doesn’t; descending to the hobbies—pachinko? Proust?
I know he is a student because he is wearing a uniform—one I know well: black serge, celluloid collar, and brass buttons with school insignia, a late-nineteenth-century Austrian model miraculously unchanged after more than a hundred years of use.
And as I gaze I remember what that serge smelled like when wet with sweat, and I recall the slippery feel of the collar when I unbuttoned the hooks that held it closed. And under the uniform, perhaps no longer the loincloth, now probably Calvin Klein, but still redolent of dank boy.
Such thoughts, shreds of memory, froth on the surface of my curiosity, but beneath these is a more serious inquiry. What identity has he chosen? Who does he think he is? I regard the eyebrows—maybe he is from Ibaraki. I notice the stance—maybe Kyushu. These are his givens but he is now in the largest city in the world and far from where he was born. He is offered here a freedom he never had back in the paddy. How will he take advantage of this? Did the boy from Lima?
Manhood (or womanhood) in formation is always fascinating. I stand and stare, ever watchful, wondering at an outcome I will never know. Occasionally I strip the subject naked in my mind and find holes in the socks, but at the same time I think about what he himself wants.
I could do this anyplace in the world, including the United States of America, and often have. But how much more interesting to cast about in the future of an inhabitant of another land, an admitted exotic, someone supposedly not of my race, certainly not of my place. To this is added the allure of learning.
Flaubert lends a hand—something read last night: “If it is true that love is a pursuit in others of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another country, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.”
Perhaps that is why I now stood for a long time and imagined a life for the good-looking young student in his twenties. That I did nothing further, made no overtures, did not attempt to mine him, was because I am near eighty to his twenty, and am not unmindful of the ludicrous, but also because I now know the proper rejoinder to the great riddle of life—there is no answer.
12 march 2003. Everyday I pass a hip-hop clothing store. In front of it is standing a black man, his hair attention-getting—corn-row braids—wearing the latest in imported hip-hop wear: oversized jumpers and snow pants, the crotch to the knees. Though there are actually various black men (just one would get pneumonia standing there all day long in the cold), they seem all the same. They are supposed to. Not only are they models, they are also emblems. I am reminded of the blackamoors of eighteenth century, and little picaninnies, all togged up and advertising the colonial empire and, unintentionally, slavery. Red, gold, their livery advertising the Brighton Pavilion, they have now passed their profession down the ages to these Tokyo hip-hoppers.
The standing young men are surrounded by other evidences of their culture. The sound of rap rends the air. I stop to listen to the strains. The voice is always black, and always deliberately cultured as though it is the answer to false charges that blacks do not enunciate well. I think back to that ur-rapper Edith Sitwell and her pre-rap piece, Façade: “Though I am black and not comely . . . ,” she sang, but these rapping blackamoors are comely indeed.
20 march 2003. Today the U.S.A. invaded Iraq. I think of carnage but cannot see any since I do not have a TV. The newspaper has an Arab scene with somewhere in the back a red blast, like a sunset. America strikes. Lots of public protest, here and elsewhere, people marching and the like. It can mean nothing. People protest, then, having vented their discontent, get on with their lives.
I look for signs about me. None on the street. In the post office, one. I mail a package to the U.S.A. and the clerk says that it might take some time to reach its destination depending upon how the war goes. How the war goes—already it is a part of parlance.
21 march 2003. Today is a holiday, and down in the park, in the band shell below, much yelping. It is a punk rock concert, deafening. It is like having them here in my room, since sound amplifies as it rises. Nothing for me to do but live with it—no one ever complains. And so, knowing my neurosis about noise, my claustrophobia about immobilized suffering, I determine to do something—not about it, but about myself.
Consequently, I put my computer to sleep and descend. Wading through the racket, I approach the gates and ascertain that a group named Basilic Glance is in there with another group named Enemy Zero. (“Can You Feel Me?” is its motto.) They are presenting an entertainment called Misanthropy, featuring an all-boy band called Finsternis, the members of which have names like Dr. Sinky, Narciss, Sin, and Ba-C’la.
I go past two orange-headed young ladies guarding the gate (the entertainment is free but you are supposed to buy tapes and DVDs made by the boys), and glimpse a blondined young man in a ripped panda suit raving on the stage. Booming away behind him is a synthesizer and a man battering a drum kit. The man himself (surely this is Narciss) exposes his narrow chest, groans, screams, and drools.
Reacting to this is a clutch of girls who have crowded down to the front. They are all wearing manes and have kohl-blackened eyes. Shaking their shaggy heads they scream and press their thighs together. Narciss drools some more, and opens a safety pin on his slashed panda suit.
They all cavort for a time and then this “set” is over and the happy crow
d is verbally cajoled for a bit before the cacophony again commences. It started at 1:30 says the posting and warns that it will go on until 7:30. The girls look ready to stay to the end.
Not me. I go home, but what a difference my immersion has made. Having seen what the poor things look like, petting their paltry selves, screaming away to no possible avail, I find that they are no longer intruders. By experiencing, I do not have to imagine. Whatever I may have feared is no longer there. I can shake my head and get on with my work.
A part of this might be to inquire just what the cultural manifestations of this might mean, why something this helpless should be commonly thought of as dissident. Do these bleary little girls and boys really think they are rebelling against anything? Or has punk, like everything else, aestheticized itself out of existence?
22 march 2003. The first warm day. I walk in the park without my topcoat on and feel the spring warmth draped over my shoulders. Pad and pencil in hand I look for things to sketch, and settle on a leaf left over from last year.
In so doing I again notice that attractively odd memorial stone surmounted by a large granite fugu [blowfish]. I had thought that it was for the victims of this sometimes-fatal comestible. Today, however, having trained my eye, I paid attention. It is actually for all those victims of the fishmonger’s knife, for the departed fugu themselves. It is their memorial stone. And having learned this, I am struck once more by the acute difference of this land in which I live.
30 march 2003. Sunday, the blossoms out, the park full—as many faces as there are petals. I shuffle around the lake with them, wondering as always at the sadness of Japanese on an outing. While ruminating, I had a vision.
It took the form of a possible film. All one would need would be a degree of underexposure to whiten the image, and some slow motion to slow it down. The clothes were all right as they were—scruffy, between seasons, layered, as though just grabbed before the catastrophe. Those who sit cramped under a cold tree are those who do not quite understand the seriousness of their situation. Those walking do; they are looking for a way out, but there is none. The waters of the pond glisten, ruffled—a river, something like the Styx. I pass a public toilet with its line of patient women waiting to get in. Here are those who know the worst and prefer the gas chamber. These we will not see again. Equally poignant are the children turning their petal-like faces to the blossoms, all unmindful . . . etc.
These are the dead, and they are proceeding to they know not where. To make this completely believable one would need nothing else—maybe a serious close-up here and there of someone thinking. All else would be in our interpretation, how we see it, as I am seeing it now.
I think of the triumph of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where suggestion alone made ordinary scenes (vacant lots) vibrant with danger. And I think of Sokurov’s Russian Ark, that final dignified waterfall of contented middle-class persons descending the Hermitage staircases, never dreaming of the coming revolution—just hundreds going home on the one hand, an entire class going to extinction on the other. My walking dead still smile, but that is only because they, too, do not know where they are going.
Much satisfied and oddly cheered I return home, glance at the hordes beneath my balcony, and write up the vision.
Around this time Richie was writing The Image Factory and collecting the previously published reviews that were eventually comprised in Japanese Literature Reviewed. He was also preparing for the new edition of the translation that he and Eric Klestadt had previously published of Ozu’s Tokyo Story. During a lecture tour of the U.S.A. he suffered a heart attack, his second (the first was in 1983), which resulted in open-heart surgery and a quintuple bypass. He was not well enough to continue these journals until nearly six months later.
21 september 2003. I go to the show billed as Jintai no Fushigi [Mysteries of the Human Body], a very large assemblage of body parts from China. All liquids are pressed out of the cadaver, which is then re-moisturized with plastics and epoxies. The resulting figure, part flesh, part plastic, can then be sliced into CAT-like sections. One display is a body sliced like bread, crosswise, from head to feet, the results spaced out like dominos; another is a standing man with all the implements of surgery left in. Nothing sinister in all this. We are told that these were all volunteers who were dying of illness anyway—and they certainly all look very ill.
Interesting as this is, however, what truly compels my attention is the crowd I see the show with. Though it is Sunday and raining the place is packed, hundreds of people, and all of them behaving in a way distinct, I think, from like crowds elsewhere.
The crowd is, of course, curious, but this is expressed in such a different way. Quiet, serious, intent, and with no laughter—that defense in the face of death. And no mock indignation (Well, really!) in hopes of returning to restrictive normality. Also no blasé assumptions. To be sure, not much fellow feeling for the posed and manipulated corpses, but then I would not expect that anyplace. What I admire in this crowd is its seriousness, and its inquiring and interested behavior.
22 september 2003. To lunch with Paul [McCarthy] at Benkei, a Japanese restaurant in Ameyokocho, that section of old Tokyo that remains—pedestrian streets, no cars, shops spilling onto the pavement. We are attended by an elderly woman, a waitress, who in the most natural way talks with us, says the eel looks good today, that it doesn’t always, and she wonders about the typhoon said to be on its way. When she goes, Paul tells me what a wonderful neighborhood I live in. “Fat chance,” he says, “of our being included in the conversation in Shinjuku or Shibuya.”
With Peter Grilli, Nogami Teruyo, 2003.
30 september 2003. Peter Grilli tells me that in this new age of poverty; the meager is fashionable. He attended an elegant wedding, an event where in the bubble days hundreds were invited and millions spent. Now there were just six people and one bottle of champagne. It was, he was told, the latest thing, a jimikon. The kon is from kekkon, wedding. And jimi is an aesthetic term meaning “plain, simple, in good taste.”
17 october 2003. People define themselves by their appurtenances. They once always had handkerchiefs, beauty spots, and smart pumps. Now, however, defining accessories are mostly electrical. In Tokyo Station I watch a man carefully put on his Walkman, then deposit his portable CD player in his cargo pocket and his digital camera in his backpack. Then he stops, looks like a man who had forgotten something, pats his pockets, and then locates what he missed. His cell phone. This he takes out and opens and stares at. It contains his address book, his e-mail, TV, the Internet, and much else. And he starts waving it in a strange but familiar fashion.
I identified the movement: He was fanning himself with his gadget. And I understood. All of this equipment was really but to satisfy a primitive social urge to keep the hands occupied, to appear busy. How many times upon enduring public or private scrutiny have we flourished our fingers? This not only accounts for the centuries-old Japanese cult of the fan, but also the ready acceptance of cigarettes, lighter, etc. Anything to keep the hands moving and to appear busy, distracted, already taken—no longer victim to the random gazes of others.
Thus all strangeness disappeared from the cluttered man in front of me. He was simply doing in the twenty-first century what his ancestors had in the eighteenth. Then it was the fan and tobacco pipe, now it was the Walkman and palm phone.
18 october 2003. Non-chan [Nogami Teruyo] takes Peter [Grilli] and me out to lunch—the Kurosawa restaurant. I had heard of this place, a kind of theme park based on the director and his work.
It is a large structure done in early Meiji style. It looks like the hospital in Red Beard but is much cleaner. You leave your shoes on too, and the Muzak, when we went in, was the sound track for Seven Samurai, but later on in the meal we were treated to Dodesukaden and gems from Dreams. The food is divided among courses arranged around a main dish, entitled with a famous cinematic name. Ikiru is pork, Yojimbo is gamecock, and Kagemusha is turtle. The most expensive of these is The Hidd
en Fortress, but I never learned of what it consisted. We have the soba course which is not, apparently, cinematically oriented. So we sat there in this ersatz film studio amid all the art (Kurosawa paintings) and kitsch (stuff in the “store” all clamoring for customers), and ate the mediocre food, unembarrassed. Upon my asking, Non-chan tells me that this restaurant is the idea of Kurosawa’s son, but that the money came from elsewhere. It is also apparently a big success; all rooms booked every night, despite the prices. What would Kurosawa have thought of it? I wonder. Well, earlier he would have torched the place, but he so mellowed in later years that he might well have enjoyed it.
31 october 2003. Motofuji [Akio], the widow of Hijikata Tatsumi [one of the founders of Butoh], died suddenly last week. Heart attack. And, I think, grief. Not at the death of her husband, that was years ago, but at the way she had failed to keep his estate. Overexpanding her theater, she eventually lost everything. Bankrupt, she had to entrust the Hijikata archives to Keio University, which, understandably, did not want her in charge. She devoted herself to Hijikata and his dancing. If she occasionally allowed herself to become a bit vainglorious, still she was sincere in keeping his legacy. And then to have it taken from her, and all her own fault—no wonder she died. She had no more reason to live.
1 november 2003. Strains of the koto, swarming cherry blossoms falling, Prince Genji as a large, stuffed doll, music by Tomita imitating ancient court music. This was the opening of the Tokyo Film Festival today. It was so kitschy that I began to think about what it could mean. Was this what foreign guests were being invited to think old Japan was like? Or was this kind of exoticism intended mainly for the home audience, the young sitting open-mouthed around me? If the Philadelphia Film Festival (if there is one) opened with powdered wigs and panniers and Betsy Ross embroidering the first flag, whom would the spectacle be for?
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 60
