she was just going to the Rave
and we
being old men
were leaving
but when my friend
remarked to the minx
that she was an angel
she stopped, faced us
and flipped a hidden switch
which caused her wings
to light up in a dozen multi-colored diodes.
Next year we'll go late
and stay later
in order to experience
the spectacle
of youth,
the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Happy Birthday
I woke up
in pieces
21,900 days
alive
60 winters
60 summers
What fresh hell is this?
Should have been dead
5 or 6 times
that I know about,
or damaged
at the least.
Yet now I'm strongest
at the broken places
at the top of my game.
Is this heaven?
The women loved.
It's to those gentle ones
that my memory runs.
Or more likely somewhere
in-between
a purgatory
wrapped in a
Roman Carnival
with Barkers
on the Midway.
Born August 12, 1948, Nick Masesso Jr. grew up in the 1950's of suburban Chicago . In the late 1960's he co-founded a commune. He traveled throughout North America in the 1970's and made treks to South America, Southern and South Central Africa; His book: "Walking the Midway in Purgatory, a Journal" is available on-line and through bookstores in the USA and Europe, and through Amazon where he maintains his author blog.
Bruce New
Bruce New was born in 1970. He currently resides in the wilds of Kentucky, on a mountain top, right next to the sun, where he creates his work high on butterfly wine. www.brucenew.com
The Night The Stars Fell From The Sky
My Home in the Belly of a Dream
Robin Hiding the Sun in the Stars
The Night Keeps a Thousand Secrets from the Day
Ash Hibbert
The Forty Seventh Ronin
Awake.
The sounds of barking dogs and starting cars drift through a balcony door unclosed through the night.
He pulls on yesterday's shorts.
Seven a.m. and the room is already hot. On the balcony he hears something rumble distantly overhead -- a jet engine or thunder?
He grabs the camera from the desk and throws its strap over his shoulder.
Roppongi: Caucasian capital of Tokyo; day twenty-eight.
~
Outside, along balconies, futon mattresses held in place by giant pegs are beaten violently by armed house wives. Florian dodges descending dust blooms that taunt his allergies.
A young woman drags signage before a hair-dressing salon.
Ahead of its teenage owner, a pig, larger than any local dog, vacuums the pavement with its flat, pink snout.
A convoy of Swedes pedals from the local supermarket with the silhouettes of groceries pressed against the plastic bags hanging from their handles, bells ringing.
A son, held upright on his bike with the help of giant training wheels, banks hard, driving his father into the curb-side shrubbery.
Pigeons ascend between buildings. The sun's burning reflection hangs in the gigantic mirror of a tower's face.
Opposite, a boulevard flanked with street lanterns sparkles with the morning's reflected light.
He is in exile -- an ambassador, an artistic attache -- beyond geography. Here to write the story of his life. But a protagonist needs direction and character development and objectives. And a hero -- a hero needs something to die for; and yes, maybe he can live his life out of spite against others and the society he finds himself in every morning -- maybe even against himself; but what allies can he hope for in such a battle?
And how can he hope to be anything but a tourist? Will he be 'in' Japan when he is no longer scrambling between points on his map? Or is being a non-tourist about not visiting new places? -- Replacing breadth for depth, quantity for quality.
~
In the capital of the Shinto-Buddhist state, beneath the cold splendour of dome-topped architecture, Florian steps into the solitude of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral.
The Australian atheist scans -- illiterate and unfaithful -- paintings surrounded by Hebrew and Russian. Here he has found amnesty, united with the church by their shared conspicuousness. Thin yellow candles dance in a glass cabinet, flames reflected in a liquid wax that turns the air into oil. At the entrance, he begins to talk softly with two elderly guides in their own tongue but quickly remembers a drawback of using his fledging Japanese -- if he says a little he's presumed to be an expert; as their voices accelerate and his responses slow, a short and narrow woman -- a visitor who had earlier contributed a candle to the cabinet -- steps up beside him. Her black-red hair is pulled to one side in a single pigtail and she has the face of a twenty-year-old.
Florian guesses her to be about forty.
He tells the guides of his visit to nearby Confucian Shrine Yushima Seido. His translator recounts in a soft tone, and the guides quickly respond. He stifles a laugh at the younger woman's difficulty in converting the guides' recommendation but he already understands: the Kanda Myojin Shinto shrine -- a temple half a k' north. He thanks them, bows, and turns. They call out and wave him and the translator back.
They are to go to the Kanda Myojin together.
He looks to the matchmakers -- and then to her, eyebrows raised. She smiles and nods.
They exit the cathedral and cross the road
Her name is Hiroko.
"You live in Tokyo?" he asks.
"Hiroshima. You know -- first atomic bomb?"
"Good night life?" She laughs and nods. A block later, they are walking through a children's playground, the temple roof appearing above a canopy of trees.
A band of cheeping school children marches past; one says 'hello' and Florian replies in kind. With hands covering mouths the party bursts into laughter, and quickly scampers.
"Why are you in Japan?" Hiroko asks.
"My boss thought my last article reflected a desire for a change in scenery."
The stairs to the temple ground undulate; he slows for Hiroko.
In the temple grounds Hiroko stops to translate a plaque and helps him slowly piece the Japanese glyphs together. In a flower bed opposite a shrine, a large and collarless orange cat single-mindedly shadows a bird pecking the dirt.
Shrines remind him of Jewish tabernacles, albeit larger than their kosher counterparts: astral-houses -- metaphysical or archetypal equivalents of their domestic counterparts. They are homes of heaven. And here, even astral houses have their own doghouse -- down the side and in the rear of the main shrine is the Kitsune Shrine, with its supernatural foxes, bowls of water, drink cans, and decorations before them.
The space made for shrines is a quiet one. It is an alcove of darkness within an often terrifying light, like the dualism of nature and the city -- but it is not a fair parallel to make to a shrine. For a shrine can sit on the roof of a building, it can display bare concrete-tiled courtyards for dozens of meters either way, contain foxes made of stone and skeletal cherry blossom branches.
And yet it is a different place.
They put their bags down and walk to the entrance of the main hall.
Hiroko asks if he can pray.
He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a golden five-hundred yen coin. It is all he has, but it is a cheap price to pay. They throw together, their coins clinking against the wooden bars of the collection box before landing on a bed of similar metal; clap hands twice sharply, then bow. Further down, a mother stands behind her young son, leaning him forward
and bringing his hands together slowly. Hiroko, following Florian's line of sight, smiles sheepishly.
The two of them walk towards the main gate and the torii beyond.
A group of French junior-high students crosses their path, one stopping in Florian's way. Florian says 'excuse me' in Japanese but the young legionnaire budges only when a friend tugs him out of the way.
"There is a fireworks festival in Yoyogi Park this evening," Hiroko tells him. "Do you enjoy?" He nods quickly. "My children -- they watch from our balcony. And my husband -- he does not care for them."
"You prefer seeing them up close?" Florian asks, and Hiroko nods.
"So do I." He studies her carefully. Japanese is best spoken when it isn't. "What time should we meet at Yoyogi Park?" he asks with care.
"You are here on holiday, Florian," she replies. "Today I will be your guide."
~
An Akiharabra-ambiance of gadgets; giant neon signs wage war against their senses.
In darkness between stations, Florian seizes sight of Hiroko watching his reflection in the train window. Her blank face suggests a respite from expression.
Looking around the carriage, he makes eye contact with an American. In the early days he scoured local expatriate magazines and newspapers, hunting for envoys that had trekked the paths he wished to pursue; those who had done much of the ground work that would take him years to catch up on. He clumsily penned half-serious notices for the Japan Times personals -- 'White Australian male, mid 30s, looking.' He never specified who or what he was looking for. That is his brief, after all -- to look, to listen. For others, though, it is to speculate; swarms of travel writers seem to have made an industry of it. And so he chooses to avoid the well-trodden path. He has tried siding with them. Younger siblings, mums and dads of colleagues from back home, in need of a guide for the metropolis. It is hard to resist, the idea of mixing with new arrivals, showing, even with the measly experience he has of it -- and narrow sighted, at that -- the city to strangers with the same confidence and self-assuredness of one who has lived here all their life. But his few encounters with other Westerners dismayed him -- was he, fresh off the plane, similarly loud and detestable? So instead, he simply lingers in Tokyo's hotspots. He keeps his interaction with other foreigners limited: no longer seeks them out, refusing to acknowledge them on the street -- and they, for the most part, are thankful for it. They are in a fantasy land populated by cartoons, where the encounter with another participant is to break the illusion, to be reminded of what they are and always will be here: alien.
On the local between Okachimachi and Ueno his eyes lock with those of a stone Buddha in a track-side temple. A workman trudges up the steep entrance from the street arcade below the temple grounds, a reel of orange tubing over a shoulder, and ascends the causeway on the corner of the main hall.
Adjacent to the temporary scaffolding, a billboard advertises Nikes.
A labourer walks from a street arcade into a temple to carry out maintenance work on a temple roof beside an ad for football shoes. As old as he is, Buddha is still under construction.
~
While zebra crossing from Ueno station to the adjacent park, Florian drifts from Hiroko, and in the solace of the crowd and his own thoughts the tuner-dial turns to static. Then they are together again and the wireless is in frequency; and though the green man continues to beckon them, an unrelenting rumble nears. He turns and grabs sight of Buddha on a motorbike -- man-boobs protruding from his unbuttoned shirt, smoke in mouth -- buzzing closer. Florian leaps forward and clasps Hiroko's arm, jolting her forward. Turning, he catches sight of a Shinto protection charm fluttering against the rider's windshield.
~
They catch the elevator to the National Science Museum's roof and step into an herb garden. On a raised platform beyond the shrubbery a game of 'chasey' is in progress, and softly whirling polymer sunflowers unfurl and contract to the children's movement. Hiroko reels off the names of the plants they pass as they move towards the deck. A young Caucasian approaches, heading for the lift, and Florian looks the other way. In the bleaching haze beyond the roof's edge, high-tension power lines crisscrossing the cityscape: wires on a silicon board; above. A much larger parasol of clouds screens out the blue of the sky.
The world is wrapping itself around him and Hiroko.
A conclave mirror sits upon a podium encircled by girls who hold cell phones and apples within the glass cup. Hiroko and Florian lean forward, watching the pseudo-holograms generated by the reflective surface. Their curiosity abated, the laughing children dash away. Along the railing, an elderly Japanese man dabs his gleaming forehead with a neatly folded handkerchief and watches Florian with curiosity.
"In Japanese," Hiroko explains, "the word jou means compassion." She writes Japanese characters in the space above the bowl, captivated by her own lesson. "The symbols of compassion and wind means ambiance." They place their hands in the bowl. Ghost hands entwine and then separate. "Compassion and accident means love affair."
They sit beneath an unwrapped sunshade, eating raw seafood and watching children run circles. Florian munches on a triangle of rice topped with slivers of salmon that leave his finger tips scaly, while Hiroko nibbles her slices of fish between dunks in pungent pools of soy.
He traces the progression of a sushi dinner not by the vanishing of fish upon pyres of rice but a shrinking cairn of nose-tickling horseradish.
"I see now why it is so popular to eat sushi with beer," observes Florian. "After a meal of raw fish I am already drunk." Hiroko laughs and, grinning slyly, passes a fresh slice of salmon to his mouth between her chopsticks.
~
Ducks trawl the membrane of the pond and Ueno City rises from the water's edge. A grey stone Shinto gateway, shaped like a perch for giant chickens, blends with the flaking ghost-white of a deciduous.
They are gluttons for Tokyo. Florian and Hiroko run a gauntlet of beanpole portals. The string of red portals forms a tunnel ascending from Ueno's large pond to the park's plateau. While marching up the steep stairs they pass a young couple, whose child holds onto a handkerchief and the other end is held by his mother, walking ahead.
"Gam-bar-e," the Japanese couple sing to their charge -- 'do your best'. The child swings his small legs up and around each step, his squinting eyes above a beaming mouth. Florian stops to roll a cigarette, lights up, and then turns around for the view of the pond below. The couple and their child come around the bend. "Gam-bar-e," they chant. Florian draws deeply, spits a loose strand of tobacco into the path-side foliage, and with a hand against Hiroko's back sets off again. At the beginning of the last leg, Florian drives his butt against the stone path and throws the dead stub into the nearby plants. Hiroko laughs and Florian turns, hearing the young couple before he sees them.
At the top of the stairs the park opens up to them; cold dirt and concrete host bare cherry blossom trees and pedestrians.
"Where to now?" Florian asks carefully.
"Have you heard of Sengaku-ji?" Hiroko asks, to which he shakes his head briefly. "It is a Buddhist temple. It is where the forty-seven drifting samurai are buried. After their revenge for the death and humiliation of their master they -- you know?" She draws a line with her fingertip across her belly.
Grimacing, Florian gestures for her to lead the way.
~
It is half an hour to Tamachi Station. They begin southward on foot along Dai-Ichi-Keihin.
Florian stops to photograph a defunct street-side battery-dispenser. When he looks up, he sees Hiroko turning down an alley, and quickly follows.
Giant ideogram-lined paddle-pop sticks mark tombstones within tightly packed plots separated by narrow stone paths. Beyond the graves are patches of flowers and a lush fernery. Noise from a neighbouring apartment block's construction resounds across the burial ground. A caretaker weeds around stones. Ravens circle in the air and descend into the yard, drawn by offerings to the dead.
A dishevelled pregn
ant cat limps up to the base of a tree where it lies down.
Beside a shrine, water drips from a bamboo flute and the plaques and paddle-pop sticks of a cemetery swing. On the grey dirt of the ground, shadows of skeleton branches dance in the wind. A raven on a tree limb holds a mouse in its claw, and stabs its prey with a beak. Skies darken. The raven cries sincerely. Growing wind blows bad luck away, while death looms around, and above.
~
A few minutes from the cemetery, they come to a stop at Sengaku-ji's entrance.
"'Mountain of many pines'," Hiroko quotes, and Florian follows her eyes to the writing upon the Middle Gate. A bronze dragon curls upon the Main Gate's ceiling. Through the gate, Florian leans over the railing of a short stone bridge, a deep and dry trough beneath.
Visitors eat from lunchboxes, or pace the temple grounds.
The bell hangs silently behind locked gates.
Florian notices the plum trees. Hiroko, watching, leads them closer.
The first is transplanted from the house where one of the masterless samurai -- a sixteen-year-old -- committed suicide after avenging his master. The second is given by the wife of the humiliated Feudal Lord Asano Naganori to the nun who attends the Ronins' graves. When forced to commit suicide, Naganori's blood stained the third.
Nearby is Kubi-Arai Well, where the Ronin washed Kira's head. Once clean, they displayed it to their lord, resting in his own grave.
Passing the plum trees and well, they head to the grave sites along steps beneath a gate from Asano's residence. Past the entrance a small fire burns in a bin, and faggots of green incense-sticks sting Florian's eyes with their sweet odour. Hiroko and Florian climb to the plateau. Workmates read the plaque names above the three-hundred-year-old remains, before kneeling to lay burning sticks before the graves.
Lying here, having died for a cause no one but they believed in, is someone's husband or son.
Though the sky is mostly clear and the incense merely fragrances the air, Florian runs both hands over cheeks and eyelids and down the flanks of his nose. He touches a wooden post behind a row of graves and clasps a stone of the grave that belongs to their leader Oishi; beside him is their master Asano. And there are two honorary members -- Kayano Sampei, who, prohibited by his family to partake in the battle for Kira's head, killed himself; and Terasaka Kichiemon, who took part in the raid of Kira's residence. The leader of the Forty-Seven Ronin -- Oishi -- sends Terasaka to report what they have done. Their judgment is passed and they are ordered to commit suicide by cutting open their own intestines. However, Terasaka is allowed to live.
The Battered Suitcase September 2008 Page 7
