Herself (18 page)

Severity is with me again—unsympathetic as I think I basically am toward the craze for things Japanese which is rampant at home—I am already looking at this big, blond jovial gent, that young lady secretary, through almond-eyes. Miss D. chaperones me—two labels will suffice to identify me—I am “an American writer who is going to lecture at the universities,” and I have just got off the plane, isn’t it wonderful of me to come?

Well, it is rather, I think as I bow, mutter, enunciate clearly, bend double to this fragile male Watsunabe, that trio of gentlemen from the Tokyo press. I, who have never felt faint in my life, feel as if I were going to—and know I am not. Two Japanese I remember particularly—they are standing together; in different ways they have the imprimatur of aristocracy; my libertarian-trained blood no longer disapproves but is grateful—it means manners; it means that they will make the effort to seem as if we are “talking” together; we will each act as if we are at ease even if we are not. They are Professor Kotani, emeritus from Tokyo U., in Amer. History, and Mr. Koizume, former Pres. of Keio, tutor to the Crown Prince, so introduced. I like Kotani particularly—he has a delicate and beautiful face, a faraway voice that speaks a somewhat ghostly, precise English, which I bend to hear more of, not because of his height but because of the cocktail hum. We talk a little of what I have been reading—the books Donald recommended—Tanizaki’s
Some Prefer Nettles,
Kawabata’s
Snow Country.
He is no more interested in them than an American professor of Japanese history wd be—why should he?—but he nods and (I was going to say that his face lit up)—it did not, but there was a kind of postural wince of pleasure—at the mention of Keene, whom he knows. I should like to know more of the professor, but doubtless shan’t.

The tutor is a big man, tall as I almost, heavy. His face is a mass of scars from burns, the runny type of scar with probable plastic surgery. He is more the pompous aristocrat, or perhaps he merely wants me to
know
he is one; with empressement he repeats his identity, his tutorship, wants me to know that he has been several times in America. Asks me if I know Mrs. Vining’s book, (Tutor to the Crown Prince, it was, or some such; I saw an installment or so in the LHJ). I meet a prof. from Keio U. (best private U.) where I am to talk next week. I tell him that I do not lecture, only seminar informal discussion (I know that this will be difficult with J. students particularly, since tradition, respect, inhibits them, probably more than other foreign students, many of whom still do it with difficulty). He looks dubious—the seminar, I remember, is a distinctly American habit. I am dubious too, but am determined not to lecture. Determination easy, since I have nothing cooked up.

I meet several Japanese embassy wives, all of whom speak English, a particularly august one, wife of a “big” there, in kimono, has daughter at Wellesley. Miss D. had promised to take me home, but she cannot leave until the personages do—I must go, or drop. I borrow another 200 yen and cab to the Imperial, unfortunately the driver leaves me at the entrance to the Old. By bridge, underpass, corridor, stairs, I reach the New, half in one of those unending subway-train dreams I used to have as a child, wrong stations melting into others equally wrong. I take the wrong elevator, but at last I make it. I am to call Miss D. next day.

Arise on Sat. at what I fondly take to be 5, have my kippers and a huge breakfast when rm service opens at what I think is 7, write in the journal, and at last call Miss D. at what I think is 9. It is 12, noon—my watch, still going, which I set by hers last evening, I know—has had its atoms scattered too. We are to meet for lunch right now, and a Mrs. Betty Larsen, a wd-be writer, works for a paper too, will be with us. I am too tired to evade the beginnings of the embassy-wives deal. We go to lunch to a pleasant restaurant with magnificent gardens which I merely regard and thank for their cool—named
Chinzan So
, Emperor visited in former days, says the little pamphlet, “unfortunately, however, on May 26, 1945, all the buildings were reduced to ashes and the whole garden devastated by fire.” There is no need to say by whom, why. But, resumes the pamphlet “restored thru the great efforts of Mr. Eiichi Ogawa, Pres. of the Fujita Kogyo, that extended over 6 yrs after wars end.”

The girls gossip intramurally after Mrs. L. interviews me “—ooh weren’t you excited when you were first in
The New Yorker
”—and we make some conversation about me—I hate to be a duty to them, know I am, and resent them a little because I am stiff with them and conscious of possessing charms that wd not charm them, that Mrs. L. particularly wd not have the wit to draw from me. Miss D. is brighter, or perhaps only more experienced—she is Embassy, Mrs. L. merely the wife of Amer. Express man here. Both of them wear splendid double ropes of cultured pearls—I resolve to buy, and immediately not to—I know how that will end. They discuss a dress, “Stateside” purchased by Mrs. L. which she will sell to Miss D. (since Mrs. L’s husband doesn’t like) for $59.95, and the mink jacket which Miss D’s sister in Chi., who has a “mink-entree” as Mrs. L. puts it, will buy and send here. “Oooh, Nancy,” says Mrs. L., “the man who marries you will get you with everything, mink, pearls.”

I ask where to buy pearls, and intimate that what the gals at home are wearing is broadtail. They ignore me—what shd a “professor,” which they think, me, know of this, and I am wearing a blouse and skirt. And no pearls. Momentarily I regret the jewelry left in the safe-deposit, like a good girl, at home. Especially when Mrs. L. adds “Now, all you need is diamonds.” I’m a bad girl, and know it. But what do embassy people get paid here, any way?

Miss D. shows us a ring, worn for the first time. Given her by a Jap. friend, male. She had refused of course but he had replied “from my chi-chi” (the intimate word a J. uses for father, although a stranger may not do this) and had run off “before she cd do anything about it.” We giggle,
en femme-ille
, and admire the lovely mauve lustre of its two pearls. “But I can’t get over the lustre,” says Miss D. over and over. I call her Nancy, asking permission, God help me.

We go then to Mitzukoshi, dept. store, ostensibly to show me the exhibit of Brides’ Kimonos—Oct. is the season, but Mrs. L. manages to hunt for a bathrack, buy a lampshade, and Miss D. prices transistor radios and binoculars. We drive back. Tokyo center is rather dullish at first, as I had expected. I do not know whether I will have the incentive to tour here. My instinct, in art objects, etc., has always been to prefer the Chinese—although, as I well know, the modern Jap. ceramics, pottery—we saw some Hamada which was very good—are beautiful, they are so in somewhat the same way as the Swedish—and we at home have already seen as much of them. Woodblocks, yes I suppose if I were smart I should pick up some—I do not particularly wish to. Miss D. is having a kimono and obi designed by a mod. J. artist. Etc. Etc. I don’t know. Already, in the States, I have been somewhat sickened by the ease at which the conquering have invited the conquered to conquer them. But will explore this anon.

Purchased an apple, some J. biscuits, and a lime, in M.’s grocery dept., came home, fell in bed and slept without supper until ten, ordered tea and pastry (a pale green—which was even less sympathetic than a fish, complete with lizardlike head and white eye, that was on the hors d’oeuvres at lunch, soused in cream.) Ate my apple and wrote all this. It is nearly 3
A.M.,
I am time-boggled. Tomorrow is empty Sunday—had tried to get Mishima on phone, but he apparently, like the hard-working writer he is, has none. Will write him. And so to bed, feeling that time, which I have so beat about in my book, has at last beat me.

It is already nearly three of the following morning. Sunday began by being one of those vacant Sundays which bring the prospect of terror to those, like me, who connect melancholy with such days even from childhood—listless afternoons even then, worse in adolescence, and in my case worst in those early years of my maturity when I seemed to be accomplishing nothing. As it turned out, it became one of those reverie-days that I may remember better, later on, than others stuffed with activity.

Found that Mishima had a number after all and had the temerity to phone his home at 9:30, probably very rude, but I leave Jap. Tues. and his present is on my mind. Was of course told that he was “sleeping”—“until three.” He called me then—I am to phone him tonight at a restaurant where there is some sort of party, 6 to 9—the Hyo-Tei. Although he speaks excellent English, it was somewhat difficult to understand over the phone, and cd not be sure that he was not inviting me—but I thought not, so said I wd call him there and perhaps see him after dinner. Asked about Kawabata (am reading his
Snow Country
). I know he lives in Kamakura. M. said he was “suffering from stomach trouble,” and had gone away to “avoid” either it—or perhaps callers like me. I am of course too new here to know when I am being too pressing, or when an excuse is real. I told M. I was a writer, at which he seemed relieved. Think it will clear up when we meet—they must often be plagued with visiting Americans—publishers, editors, or worse.

The lobby here is well supplied with our unique brand of “worse,” the gray-haired Amer. matron, usually in twos or, if with a husband, those of the bony, hard-skulled type strong enough not yet to have left these wives widows. Almost universally these ladies have middle-western voices—the voice of the Chicago grackle is heard everywhere outside their land. But I could not quarrel with the lobby, where I sat alternately reading Mishima’s
Nō Plays
and fascinated by the motley—a Japanese family, man in business suit, woman in kimono, younger generation (college) two young men and a girl, very deferential of course to the elders, the girl bowing deeply even in her “sack” dress out of the latest Amer. movie. A group of Jewish businessmen who, from their conversation live in the Orient, yet spoke with a Brooklyn accent as powerful as Steve Greene’s. A worried man, Malay-Eurasian, who waited for a half hour looking desperate; then was met by an Amer. couple. A girl from, I think, Manila, met by two swains similar, flirting all get-out. The hotel itself is staffed with hordes of pretty Japanese girls. How pretty they are, here and on the streets, but even though one of course begins to distinguish physical types, and they do not “all look alike” as in the ancient joke, they do, I think resemble one another, fall into types, even more than other Orientals, such as the Chinese, for instance. I suspect that if the J. are an “imitative” race, then it is even true that their imitation begins here, in the physical. The beautiful J. woman looks like an archetype of such. I might think that this is merely my Western eye, did I not already know that Chinese do not seem so to me.

Later I went out for several walks; dallied with idea of going to the
Kabuki
Theater which is around the corner from the hotel—the Takarazuka, but decided to wait until the embassy interpreter cd go with me, as planned. Another troupe, possibly better, is playing elsewhere. The
Nō Plays
do not run as regularly.

The streets were crowded with a Sunday-morning-on-B’way-crowd, rather like parts of London too, on that day. Japanese schoolgirls seeing the latest foreign movie—in this case a German one—
The Best Day of My Life
. Walked thru the hotel shopping arcade—Uyeda, the pearl dealer, apparently august enough to close on Sundays, but other shops open, all of them with that same worldwide specious air of the souvenir shop. From Atlantic City to Bucks County antique dealer, lacquerware to bad jade Kwan-Yins, the tone is the same.

In Mitsimoto’s one of our ladies was buying pearls, or rather telling the bland dealer the history of what she owned. “No nothing like that,” I heard her say, rejecting a pearl ring—they are usually of fairly unobtrusive design. “I want a pretentious one, a conversation piece!” Bad as she, I wandered outside to one of the open-stall drug stores, and in an access of nostalgia—and providence—bought a pot of Ponds.

Mostly I yearned for C, with whom such a perambulatory day would have so much meaning—some of our happiest times have been when we have been doing nothing but such, idly walking, observing, in Iowa, Chicago, New York, anywhere. That kind of exchange, basic sympathy, has become a need now; as I warned myself early when we first met, I have somewhat lost the power to be romantically alone in a strange place. Reminded myself that it should not be for long—we will be together in a foreign place—and that, after an early breakfast, I was probably in need of food. Lunched in the hotel on smoked salmon, buttered bread, and the coffee that is better here than in almost any hotel in N.Y. and went out again, this time intending to walk past Hibaya Park to the Meiji shrine. But I always forget that maps are upside down or I am—must have walked opposite, ended up at the Nippon theater. It did not matter, walking is the only way to see a foreign city. One sees the people and buildings not at their apex—the monument—but in their off-moments.

Ended up quite happily in the Sukiyabashi shopping arcade—very like ours at home, modern, air-conditioned, shops open-fronted the only difference. Had a coffee-float in a tea-shop. Saw, with mine own eyes, in a Rexall drug store (Jap. Rexall) there, among the piles of Vicks Vaporub (very popular here apparently), Jap. drugs, and their brand of nail polish (Kiss Me)—the square red box of the “Once More” Famous Condom (quote marks not mine), which, in addition, bears a second legend beneath, quotes also not mine—“Where Particular People Congregate.” I guess this made the day, spirits lifted.

Outside, in the un-air-conditioned street, tried to pin down the unique Jap. street-smell. It is not as bad as Henry Adams recorded it—he was here at the height of summer—but it is strange to Western nostrils, used to bad stinks but their own. It is a sweetish sour blend of soy, fish and fry, a vegetable steam not quite decay, not only perfume. It reminds me that I shall get tired of Oriental cuisine; sweet-sour-and-hot gets to be a bore to teeth uncompromisingly taught to chew. The cheap restaurants display simulacrums of their wares in glass cases outside—the way Woolworths sometimes still does at home—here sundae-frappes piled huge with cotton batting, gamboge cutlets, salads with fretted radishes, and a dozen other convincing minces. There is something dreadful about imitations of food, much more so when it is done so well, as it is here, and is an assumed part of life.