Harajuku Sunday (30 page)

-Ha!

"Well, actually, I think we're beginning to realize that we're city people.
 
This whole thing about living in the country, it's kind of a joke, right?"

"No, I'm not so sure.
 
I rather thought you were beginning to enjoy it."

I breathe out heavily.
 
And here self identity itself seems to dissolve, it becomes impossible to conceive of anything within the framework of I or you or them, we are all pressed together in psychological unity, a deliberate elicitation of the mob instinct, enraptured in what is only a religious bliss.
 
It would be a terrible act for anyone to slow down now, now there's really a mob, now there's really a mob, the mob is moving forward, the shrines are being pumped up and down, and loud ecstatic flute music and drum beating drives everyone forward, forward towards the hilltop temples where the portable shrines will be encased again.

-Ha!

[Hisako hated her father!
 
He was an all right man for most of his life, but when he got old, he kept criticizing and criticizing her; there was never any room to be your own person in that household.
 
Weakness, genetic or family upbringing, sliding down the family line.]

"This life-- you know, raves in one's young twenties, north of
England
or small town
America
.
 
English teaching, eight hundred yen an hour, it's just... all this.
 
All this."

-Ha!

[Sakura 2nd was a terrible, terrible middle school.
 
Once all the teachers surrounded her because she kept on misbehaving.
 
It had a reputation for all the dyed-haired rejects even for those thirteen year olds.]

"Well, sometimes I feel that way. I'm not totally sure whether grad school is going to really change anything in my life, though."

"I'm sure it will be fine."

[He never really loved her.
 
It was just a rebound thing.
 
But it went on and on and on...]

-Ha!

Something definitely does unhinge now, the crescendo itself begins to crescendo, and all the sixty thousand inhabitants of Kitakata must be on the street tonight.
 
Forget town-consolidation; forget the labor troubles at the factory.
 
One hundred twenty thousand eyes are on the shrine bearers, one of whom slips, eliciting sixty thousand gasps, but who then recovers, and the shrine is pushed up another ten meters.

"So what did you learn from all this?
 
Was it worth it?"

"Yeah of course. I mean, take even the hill. They say the temples are hundreds of years old; giant stone monoliths that have survived so many changes of government; so many revolutions and martyrs.
 
Blood from one last band of samurai who resisted the introduction of guns is said to still stain the central shrine."

Now the load-bearers are mounting the steps; with a feeling only describable as agony, we watch in unity with the moment as the shrine trembles, as it trembles.

"So I guess we feel a sense of something bigger than ourselves.
 
That maybe these traditions and old customs are really something worth preserving."

"Yes, maybe.
 
What kind of grad school was it?"

"Oh peace studies.
 
Like training for the U.N. maybe."

I find myself privately wondering; I hear most positions go to Third Worlders these days.

"You will both go right away?"

"No, Chika's parents are sick.
 
She has to minister to them.
 
But she'll come over a year later it looks like."

"That sounds nice."

Everything has reached its final, ultimate point.
 
The steps are mounted, blood is flowing from the shoulders of more than one shrine-bearer, but with the collective attention of an entire farming valley's inhabitants urging on the load-carriers, there can be no possibility of retreat now.
 
Streams of sweat, streams of blood are pouring down the flesh of the muscled men, and every muscle is tense, every last ounce of strength is being channeled.
 
And it almost does seem to be on the verge

of collapse.
 
They really do seem like they will all collapse.
 
But there is no return now.
 
There is no retreat possible now.
 
Everything that has been written is about the airless hopelessness of town life.
 
Everything that has been written is about the airless hopelessness of foreigners in
Japan
and
Asia-at-large
.
 
All their dreams were pointless in the end, for Julian never went anywhere with his film, and Melanie just got older to disappear into Taos, a respected figure to a new generation of dreamers who would be doomed to sell-out or achieve only minor success, pointless love affairs giving away to passionless sex, it didn't matter five lovers or five hundred, everyone just got old, nobody married anymore, and entire districts were depopulated.
 
Finally they mount.
 
Finally they mount.
 
The shrine bearers have ascended the peak, it is over, it is over.

-Ha!

Catharsis, as complete as tears running down one's cheeks; as complete as the feeling of removing a plug of sebum from a clogged up pore; heavy and fulfilled; all banalities have fallen away. One is nothing, a silly American amidst people who are thousands of years old in culture.

If it took hours; if the town had anticipated the festival over the course of days, it now begins to unwind in a matter of an hour or two. From the absolute tension and collective dissolution of will, everyone now forms and dissolves off into pairs or small groups, to find a convenient patch of riverbank in which to finish off snacks and beer, or to make their way to the train or bus stations or car parking lots.
 
They say next valley over it's all about fireworks.
 
The main branch of the river goes through that one, and everyone collects on the riverbank to watch this one family that does only this, for a six hour show that gets televised on NHK.
 
But here it's just daisy-cutters or sparklers, whirla-gigs and handheld fizzlers.
 
Children run to and fro.
 
The crowds re now going the opposite direction, still avoiding running children, onlookers who give a curious stare, girls in their kimono comparing each other's choices.
 
The night is filled with the sounds of cars starting, motorcyclists revving their engines, the traffic lights buzzing as they do only here.

Gustav, the newbie to the film-programme, eventually ended up becoming Aoyama's shooting star.
 
A not-too-tall but muscled Swede, he was perpetually cheerful and carried a megaphone as he went on to be a well-respected filmmaker.
 
His little three-minutes samurai flicks achieved 100,000 views on YouTube.
 
Gangs of people went off or on to make a good living or be good at boating or to be mildly respectable in their own ways.
 
Adventures were had in parked cars or in moving ones, police fled after film-makers got high and had their scenes.
 
But everyone got their driver's licenses in the end.
 
And here, this one thing, this limited and boundaried love affair, it came to an end here, I suppose, but something else endured and everyone would go to where they were going anyway.

The countryside is slower.
 
The salary measured out in differences of two point five or three thousand even would make little difference in final outcomes; the quiet girl ends up accumulating a small fortune; the one trying to go to advanced international studies comes back in the end and hides out of unnecessary shame.

POST SCRIPT

Why call me at 4am, ringing the phones in turn, until I grunted, and stumbled out of bed to pick up a buzzing phone.
 
Afterwards I couldn't fall back asleep and lay there with eyes pointed at the ceiling I couldn't see, working on the next draft, until sleep finally did come again, to wake up to a Japan of 6:30am, a February, a stillness.
 
In the pre-dawn twilight what I remembered was my arm sweeping open the window curtain in the Shibuya hotel, the sudden motion catching the eye of a girl in a building across: the strung telephone wires, and how the architecture of that particular building, nested gray ferro-concrete boxes looking modern and shabby at once, framed both the window and her for that instant.
 
Tokyo
.
 
And do you remember the first day in
Frankfurt
?
 
When we walked into the hotel room on a high floor, the television was going, making me think we had been given a room that had already been assigned.
 
But afterwards what I felt was the cold sterility of the place: the blueness of the light which made things seem clearer and harder and people more vague.
 
Light flashing across wire-framed glasses, trains with plastics in primary colors, the smells of unfamiliar cleaning products, and brightly-lit shelves of explicit foreign language magazines.
 
The streets and public trams had been clean and orderly.
 
I walked forward heedless and put our luggage on the bed.

This feeling, this dissolution of progressing thought, this fugue, this drowsiness, this letting-go: it exists only in motion and change; it is a truth found only in transit.
 
Some quoted philosopher undoubtedly said that we invent ourselves as travelers.
 
But to go back further into memory, it is possible that childhood itself or even the heavy red lidlessness of prenatal existence where we sway to the rhythm of our mother's stride and know of nothing else is just this also.
 
The elderly and the young, we can see, rock back and forth.
 
Long car trips on highways thus simulate this blue timelessness, until, finally, our destination, the city, rises up out of the haze.
 
And in that impossibility, that airlessness is the only place we can find ourselves, the only now and I.

Years have passed since those days; by my side now sleeps Ace, who I have dragged out to the north country, but who still doesn't get it; who still doesn't see the way the light glitters on the sea the train from
Akita
to
Kanazawa
.
 
In pre-dawn early morning, she is cocooned in the rolled-out bedding we sleep in on tatami floors, her small blonde Englishness a foil to the banality of so much time.
 
I feel the wind gust in through cracks in the ancient dark wood timbers, I hear the sea roar in ceaselessly.

Who knows what it means?
 
From childless loins, I achieve no immortality.
 
Where is it going?
 
I have no answer; have found no further point or agenda.
 
They find her mannerisms charming; everyone says she's an ideal wife.
 
Years have brought back stories: Melanie a forgotten artist disappearing into
Taos
.
 
Julian, the one hit wonder.
 
Concept act falling into the scrolls of history.

And yet......and yet it still feels all strangely otherworldly; a life not quite of this time.
 
Tucker was not the subversive we thought him to be, and Gerry has done well in later years.
 
Did Shan the Waseda scholarship boy die?
 
He may have simply disappeared.
 
Gustav still makes films, though the pranksters are a bit more aggressive now, hard-edged and political. Takashi still working and hanging out exclusively with foreigners; Herrera abandoning art to get into sailing.

Redd is a nobody at a nobody job.
 
Liam went back and forth; I think still in
Japan
.
 
LeFauve pere a minor political figure.
 
Shibuya, you know, was okay; he was okay.
 
No one, I know, will recall that place down the T-intersection from Roppongi; all the old places are gone.
 
We had gone to
Sapporo
, actually; its snowbound majesties resound.
 
And driving through a half-forgotten Japanese town, I had known the cross-over of centuries; I had known these deserted streets, these covered arcades that seemed anything but the decade we lived in behind a black-tinted motorcycle mask, years before the flood.