by David Rakoff
TOKYO STORY
“There’s got to be lots of opportunities that we haven’t explored for the kinds of lubricants that you supply,” the American businessman on the bus from Narita airport says to his Japanese associate at the precise moment that we pass the sadly down at heel yet optimistically named Hotel Let’s, the merest look at which demands the follow-up “not and say we did.” With a sign that advertises different rates to “rest” and to “stay,” the Let’s is evidently one of Tokyo’s many “love hotels,” louche mainstays of both extramarital and connubial relations. Love hotels are looked upon benignly, as a fact of life in a city where living space is so limited.
Such oleaginous talk reminds me of the Tokyo of the 1980s, when I, with my college degree in Japanese studies in hand, moved there after graduation. It was at the height of Japan’s world economic dominance, wistfully referred to as “the Bubble,” although the epoch’s bounty largely passed me by. I worked as a translator for an art publisher, gamely staying in a tiny room in a dicey neighborhood of love hotels like Charme, Maîtresse, and Le Refrain and subsisting on a daily diet of Mild Seven Lights cigarettes and the two hundred-gram box of chocolate-covered almonds from the subway kiosk.
I haven’t been back since 1986 and haven’t wanted to go back. Tokyo is the scene of my first, abortive attempt at an adult life. It was in Tokyo that the small pea-size lump in my neck grew with steady and alarming rapidity over the course of three short weeks until it was the size of a rather juicy plum, necessitating my defeated departure. Scarcely four months after lighting out for the territories, I was forced to return to Toronto, vanquished and sick; the young Turk cut off at the knees. Understandably, there is a lingering Waterlooish feeling about Tokyo.
I have accepted this assignment from a travel magazine reluctantly—I even turned it down once. I was worried about reliving some old trauma. Worried about, not to put too fine a point on it, losing my shit and bursting into tears on some foreign street corner, thousands of miles away from my home. I was also illogically convinced that returning to the scene of the crime would somehow prompt my lymph nodes to bloom forth into malignancy once more.
Finally facing down that demon, I have decided to hope instead that this trip will prove exculpatory, putting to rest once and for all that sense of unrequited love between Tokyo and myself. I am also hoping this visit, coinciding with the newly tanking Japanese economy, will mean that I will finally be able, indeed am enjoined, to savor the city in a way unavailable to me at the green and miserable age of twenty-two.
I have been inundated with gloomy anecdotal evidence of Japan’s depression: tales of the legions of risutora (derived from the term restructured, the Japanese equivalent of our own oblique and sinister neologism “downsizing”), those individuals who, unable to tell their wives of their disemployment, daily put on their suits and leave their homes, only to spend the eight hours sitting in the parks or riding the subways. All of this has made my head swim with visions of a holiday spent like a pasha among scores of have-nots. Lots of opportunities for lubricants.
My abominable, grandiose fantasies are not remotely augured by my flight. Those of us in economy are so vastly outnumbered by first- and business-class travelers, they’ve curtained off the entire unused rear third of the plane. At least I have three seats to myself, all the better to watch a roistering comedy about a Tokugawa-period angling enthusiast, Samurai Fishing Nut. The hours pass like days.
Nor are Japan’s economic woes outwardly visible as I walk out onto the Ginza of a Saturday evening in spring. Tokyo remains the city lover’s paradise. The Ginza is still a vertiginous canyon of stores, blazing with neon in Angkor Wat profusion: Blade Runner directed by Dr. Seuss. The surreal quality is enhanced by having been awake for thirty hours, dropping my bags at my hotel, and taking a stroll in the purple twilight. On the front of the Warner Brothers store, a dubbed Tweety outsmarts Sylvester, only to be replaced moments later by quickly alternating images of Jennifer Aniston and the cast of ER. On another jumbotron down the block, a Godzilla-size Kim Basinger rubs some miracle emollient into her gargantuan pores. (The economy still seems strong enough to cough up sufficient mammon to pay American stars, too pure to do commercials domestically, to hawk wares in Japan. In the past it has been Woody Allen, Sylvester Stallone, and Kathleen Battle. On this trip, in addition to Ms. Basinger, I see ads with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kevin Costner.) The stores are full, the streets throng with young people. Even in the window of the Matsuya department store, the Issey Miyake Pleats Please sweaters, suspended on invisible wires, bounce up and down in accordioned, carefree bliss—so happy to be sportswear.
My feet, through some unconscious memory, lead me to the fondly remembered Ginza Lion Beer Hall. It’s just as I recall, a lovely Teutonic vaulted interior in honey-colored glazed ceramic tile. It’s like the clattery cafeteria at Valhalla. Over the bar is an Arcadian mosaic of Rhine maidens at harvest: toga-like garments, sheaves of grain, blond hair. The clientele is a mix of generations, from the very young to the youngish. I nurse my beer as I scan the crowd with rapidly dwindling comprehension, now thoroughly in the fugue state of jet lag. Is it really possible that they all have cell phones? (Yes, as it turns out.) The overriding sense of Tokyo—and I don’t think an inaccurate one—is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future.
Not that I would know anything about the future. I seem to have a negative aptitude for prediction. My first job in Tokyo in 1986 was one I held very briefly—twelve hours—with an advertising firm that was starting up a “computer network” where English-speaking expats could “log on” and “talk” to one another or get useful information from a “newsletter.” This was all explained to me by Jeff, the only other Westerner in the company, a Montana native. Jeff sat me down and, with Pentecostal fervor, tried vainly to explain the mechanics of computers, drawing incomprehensible diagrams on a legal pad. I could not feign interest; indeed, I could barely stay conscious. I knew at that moment that this job would not work out. Talk to one another on the computer? I thought. What a bunch of losers. In my diary from that time, I find the entry where I talk about this “network”: Who needs something like this? Strictly for those comic book enthusiast weirdos who actually take the advice of those little boxes that read “for more on the Green Goblin, check out Spidey #137—Ed.”
Trying to make conversation, I pointed out how strange it was that on some level the newsletter didn’t really exist.
“What do you mean?” Jeff snorted defensively.
The term virtual had not yet been coined then, at least not for the general population. This was the only remotely intelligent thing I said that day.
I was to spend my time looking at back issues of the publication, to get a feel for its readership. I was seated at a long table of computers beside three other Japanese men. Using my very first mouse, I moved it to the edge of its pad. The cursor shifted about three inches to the right across the screen and no farther. Rising from my chair, I continued to move the mouse down the table. On the screen, the cursor crawled another three inches to the right. Now at the elbow of the man beside me, I wordlessly showed him my screen, my stalled cursor, and pointed beyond his shoulder farther down the table, indicating my manifest destiny ever rightward.
Gently he picked up my mouse and showed me how to move it along and pick it up incrementally. “You must uplift the mouse,” he said. Uplift the Mouse! This mouse, I decided, would never master it. It was time to free myself from the shackles of the job before things got ugly. I quit the next morning.
Walking out of that office, as buoyant as someone who’s had his Titanic reservations canceled, I said to myself, Sayonara, suckers. Good luck with your network. Weeks later I was relieved to be making a barely living wage in book publishing.
Getting it slightly but disastrously wrong was my specialty that year. At the only wealthy expatriate party to which I was invite
d, I stood talking to a small circle of investment banker types, when the subject of the Mormon missionaries came up. One used to see them all over Tokyo, traveling around in pairs on bicycles, with their initially-handsome-and-then-not-really-on-closer-inspection blond faces, short-sleeved polyester white dress shirts, and dairy-fed fat asses.
“It seems unfair,” said a young woman with Crédit Lyonnais. “Everything is so crowded in Tokyo, and they have no private space at all. I heard they even make them room together.” We were in an apartment in the Akasaka district that was huge even by New York standards.
Her British Lazard Frères boyfriend explained, “Well, they do that so they can watch each other in case one of them is tempted to have a wank.”
“Well,” say I, drunk, twenty-two, smart-ass, “it’s always better with someone watching.”
This was my first and final encounter with Tokyo affluence.
Until now. The Seiyo is the first of three hotels that I will stay in over the next ten days. I decided that it would be a really good idea for the story (italics and really stupid idea my own) to mirror the Bubble and its aftermath by staying in progressively cheaper hotels. Come see the Human Economic Synecdoche! Thrill to the sight of his declining fortunes!
The Seiyo’s quiet elegance, its second-floor lobby, subdued golden beige palate, is anodyne after the thrum outside. The intelligent, friendly, and bilingual staff keep their voices low, at the dulcet register of the museum gift shop. Even by Japanese standards they are solicitous. I ask one of the concierges a question in Japanese. He begins to answer me in English, then stops, apologizes, and switches to his native tongue.
My room is a riot of color: taupe, buff, sandstone, wheat, parchment, and cream. On the small side table sits a black lacquer tray with a small mountain of perfect strawberries, kiwi, thin-skinned oranges, and cherry-size plums, along with a personalized note of welcome. The toiletries in the bathroom are just the lubricants I was hoping for: the kinds of ridiculously silken unguents I would never buy for myself, including a cunning can of shaving cream the size of a piece of chalk. To merely say or even think the word towel at the Seiyo is to find one of the numerous huge bath sheets replaced. None of this should be a surprise, given the nightly expense of my room, which hovers somewhere around the monthly cost of my apartment. Although gratuities are not part of Japanese culture, I wonder briefly if the world of luxury at this level is beyond nationality, if the Seiyo, more than being in Tokyo, is some international principality, a consular outpost of the mythic land Affluencia, where tycoons and movie stars still “duke the help,” to paraphrase Mr. Sinatra.
Half a block away from the hotel one morning a doorman, out of breath, taps me on the shoulder and hands me a beige (of course) pearwood-handled umbrella. I have risen, falsely refreshed, at four A.M., the international dateline playing havoc with my circadian rhythms. At that hour in Tokyo there’s only one place to go: Tsukiji, the fish market where over 5 percent of the world’s seafood is sold daily. Immediately outside the market stands a three-story mountain of white Styrofoam boxes. If I squint through the rainy mist, this snowy mound is as close to a convincing view of Fuji as I come over the next ten days.
And how astonishing is Tsukiji itself! It is so vast, of such volume, the brawn and biology of it so daunting, that it’s like getting to see where they make air. Aisle after aisle of sea creatures: eels, octopi (in both charcoal and vivid carmine), cockles, clams, fish of all varieties, crimson roe, the tiniest fish I have ever seen—bright white, smaller than bobby pins with minuscule poppyseed black eyes—crabs, sea urchins, sardines, squid, which all give way to the open area known as tekka jigoku, Tuna Hell, where the prized fish are auctioned off. If unfathomable profusion be hell, then this Madison Square Garden–size, wet, sodium-lit garage, shrouded in the mist wicking off the frozen tuna, is it. Small circles of men gather every few yards, crowding around the auctioneers who stand atop one of the iced, rock-hard beasts. Nothing prepares you for how big a tuna is. Easily the size of an English teacher, each one is labeled with red paint directly onto its silver skin, indicating where in the world’s oceans it was caught. Near the tail, a small flap has been cut, to give prospective buyers a look at the flesh.
If you don’t work there, Tsukiji is an exercise in being in the way. The aisles are almost impossibly narrow, and men barrel through on little motorized trucks with oil-drum-like steering mechanisms, making no concession to space or speed. Those on foot carry long fish gaffs, big meat hooks on wooden handles. It’s amazing that the place isn’t littered with the walking wounded, the gored, the run down, or run through by one of the long two-person saws used to cut up the frozen tuna.
“Do you speak Japanese? Because we don’t speak English,” I am greeted at the sushi bar I enter at seven A.M. The only Westerner in the tiny place, I sit between a young couple on my right, blissed out in morning afterglow, and to my left a scarily bright-eyed foursome of Prada-wearing businesspeople, two men, two women. I am given the choice of a $30 or a $23 breakfast set. Deciding upon the latter (even as I write this I am still stewed in regret over my foolishly saved ¥800), I begin with a miso soup flavored with thumbnail-size clams. The sushi—extraordinarily fresh, some pieces still eerily warm with recent life, others bracingly freezing—is placed directly on the counter in front of me.
Perhaps it’s the early morning protein jolt of all that fish, the sheer Carl Sandburg big shoulders quality to the whole Tsukiji enterprise, or the proximity to all that top o’ the food chain death and mayhem, but I leave exultant, walking out into the rain with a high heart like Gene Kelly.
My exuberance isn’t entirely food related. I have been so relieved to find that the city in and of itself is not enough to unlock the sadness or fear of my younger self. To the contrary, I have been unable to wipe the smile from my face since I arrived, giddy with a sense of survival. It’s not even clear to me that that old misery is still even housed in my body anymore. I had been avoiding a monster behind a door for thirteen years, only to find that it had melted away long ago, nothing more than a spun-sugar bogeyman. It’s definitely not the first time in my adulthood that I have realized this, but it never fails to cheer me to have it proven yet again that almost any age is better than twenty-two.
An enormous blue balloon of Dobbu-kun (“Mr. DOB”) artist Takashi Murakami’s mouse-eared, agate-eyed Everycreature adorns the entrance to the Shinjuku branch of the Parco department store. Department stores are far more microcosmic than their American counterparts, with bookstores, food halls to rival Harrod’s, and art galleries of important stature. Murakami is at the forefront of the Japanese vanguard that owes much to anime cartoons, manga (comics), and archetypal Japanese cuteness. Limited to neither the strawberry-scented eraser world of Hello, Kitty nor the ubiquitous youth-lobotomizing cult of Pika-chu and his Pokémon pals, the archetypal aesthetic of kawai (“cute,” most often said in reference to a pencil case and drawn out in a nasal whine, almost pained at the intolerable levels of said object’s adorability) now spans both the globe and generations, from schoolchildren to club kids to the worlds of typography and design. Mr. DOB’s candy-colored world of smiling daisies and psychedelic toadstools is very kawai indeed, albeit with a vaguely sinister undertone of throbbing sexuality and atomic age anxiety. It has brought out the full range of Tokyo trendocrats: art students, critical theory heads, collectors. An American dealer in a blue blazer and Hermès tie walks from painting to painting, talking in Japanese into his cell phone. His pressed jeans are rolled up at the cuff, revealing the red thread at the selvage, the telltale proof that these are the limited-edition Levi’s manufactured exclusively for the denim-mad Japanese market.
In terms of sheer label-crazed consumerism, the Japanese have always been able to teach Americans a thing or two. I walk through Takeshita-dori, a rabbit warren of streets and alleyways geared to the city’s younger adolescents: teens in their autonomy training wheels phase. It is a crush of juvenile bodies, many in school uniforms�
�the girls wearing their trademark ruusu soksu (literally “loose socks”), white socks that grip the leg just below the knee and then cascade in folds of ribbed cotton, pooling over and around their shoes. The river of youth flows in and out of stores selling notebooks, lighters, stickers, pens, and clothing that will come apart after one washing—all the merchandise is eye-catching and fairly shitty, the entire scene scored with incredibly loud bubblegum music.
All of this buzz, both aural and visual, is vibrant but leaves me feeling clobbered. Seeking out an antidote to all the stimulus, I board the subway. I can only sympathize with the man in suit and tie (perhaps one of those fabled risutora? I shall never know) dozing with his sleeping four-year-old daughter. Tied around the father’s wrist is a plastic bag in which a goldfish—not asleep—swims casually back and forth. I am bound for my favorite part of Tokyo, Yanaka and Nippori, two adjacent neighborhoods that are part of Tokyo’s old Shitamachi (downtown). The myth that Tokyo’s history has been effaced by earthquake and war is, thankfully, only partially true. Yanaka is marked by its authentic working-class flavor, old houses, profusion of lovely temples, and magnificent cemetery. The main shopping strip is a narrow pedestrian mall of food stores and utilitarian shops, grandly named, in a touching bit of puffery, the Yanaka Ginza. I buy a small bag of fish balls from a vendor and walk along snacking in one of the few areas of Tokyo where public eating is not a faux pas. A politician running in the current municipal elections stands beside his idling station wagon, addressing a small group of shoppers and merchants. He finishes to a smattering of applause and gets back in his car. All around town I see entire walls plastered with posters for dozens of candidates. Later on in the day the rain graduates to full-on torrential as the same candidate, getting soaked, promises all manner of things that I cannot understand to me and two 7-year-old schoolchildren on their way home. I stand listening, too embarrassed to move.
