Jubilee Hitchhiker (147 page)

Employment possibilities were even more limited for those without degrees. Sony required only that the applicants submit essays describing why they wanted to work in the new corporation. Figuring millions of people read the national newspaper and Sony would be deluged with applications, Aki sent in a radically brief essay simply stating her qualifications and declaring, “Why don't you ask me to meet with you?” Sony liked this approach and invited Akiko for an interview with their top executives. They wanted to test her English language skills because the job involved working closely with their American joint venture companies.

“But my English was so bad because I hate it,” Aki later confessed.

Akiko got the job in spite of her obvious shortcomings as a linguist. She became part of the company's international division, later known as CBS/Sony, working in what the industry called A&R (artistry and recording). Aki married an advertising man named Yoshimura. Female employment was uncommon at the time, and it was even more rare for a married woman to work outside the home. Aki's English had improved, and one of her responsibilities involved showing visiting American artists, such as Pierre Boulez, Leonard Bernstein, and Isaac Stern, around Tokyo.

Akiko worked mostly with foreign talent, but she sometimes produced the work of contemporary Japanese artists. This included public relations, and she had many contacts in the publishing industry. Promoting a record she was about to release, Aki met with an editor who frequently exchanged inside dope on what was new, hot, and hip with her. Aki saw a copy of a Richard Brautigan book in the man's office. She had read Japanese translations of Brautigan's work in university, first
In Watermelon Sugar
, later
Trout Fishing
and
The Abortion
. Akiko was excited. “Oh, did you read that?” she asked.

“Yes. Very unique book,” the editor replied.

Several months later, early in 1977, the editor came to see Aki. He spoke to her about Brautigan. “Do you know that author is in Japan right now,” he said “and is staying in Keio Plaza Hotel.”

“Shall we call him?” she asked.

The editor gave her the number. Akiko phoned the Keio Plaza only to be told that Richard had checked out. When the desk clerk heard the disappointment in her voice, he said, “No, no, he is supposed to be back again.” A week later, Aki called the hotel a second time. Again, she was told Richard had left. “Mr. Brautigan is in the Gifu area to watch the
ukai
[cormorant fishing]. He's supposed to come back by now.”

Soon after, Aki tried the number again. This time he was there. The front desk connected her with Richard Brautigan's room on the thirty-fifth floor. “And my heart started beating like some small girl talking with some superstar or something.” Brautigan spoke rapidly, excitedly, as if he'd tuned in to her own exhilaration. “I just talked with the telephone operator in Montana,” he said, “and asked what the weather looked like.” Akiko didn't quite know what to make of it all. She felt perplexed. “That kind of conversation,” she remembered. “And blah, blah, blah . . .”

Ice broken, Richard asked the stranger on the other end of the line three quick questions. First: “How did you get this phone number?”

“Oh, by a certain way,” Aki answered coyly.

Brautigan sounded pleased with her reply. “Are you a journalist?” was his second question.

“No.”

“Who are you then?”

“I am working in the music industry,” Akiko said.

“Oh, that's okay.” The melodic voice was not a threat to his privacy. Richard immediately asked Aki for her phone number. And she gave it to him.

Small talk can be difficult with someone you've never met. Brautigan launched back into his rapid-fire free association, talking about the Japanese television program he was watching, a detective cartoon.

Akiko forgot about their odd conversation. She thought, “The famous author is never going to call me.” He did call and asked her out for dinner. “My god!” she remembered with a certain wonder. Although still married, Aki accepted Richard's invitation.

On the appointed evening, Akiko drove to the Keio Plaza Hotel. She brought a stack of Brautigan's books in Japanese translation with her, hoping he might sign them, but took only
Trout Fishing
when she rode the elevator to the thirty-fifth floor, leaving the others in the car. When Richard opened the door to his suite, the famous author greeted her wearing the summer kimono called a
yukata
. “Kind of bizarre,” Aki remembered. “Unusual. So, I thought, hmm, strange.” In spite of his unorthodox dress, Brautigan was gracious and polite. He immediately offered Akiko a drink and some appetizers. She recalled smoked salmon on plates decorated with a trout pattern.

Aki noticed something else. In one corner of the room, Richard had assembled a makeshift altar to himself, arranging several of the Japanese translations of his books into a personal display. “Like a little shrine to worship his own book,” Akiko thought.

Later, Brautigan removed the
yukata
. Clad in his typical blue jeans, he took Akiko out to dinner at Szechwan, the Roppongi District Chinese restaurant Kazuko Fujimoto brought him to the previous year. Afterward, he brought her to The Cradle and introduced her to Takako Shiina. By this time, Richard was very drunk, having alternated between whiskey and sake all evening long. Aki had never known an alcoholic. “That's the tragedy, I think,” she said in retrospect.

They quickly became lovers. Richard's courtship ritual had long included preparing an intimate spaghetti dinner complete with his famous sauce. He soon stirred up something al dente for Aki. Tracking down Italian ingredients was no problem in cosmopolitan Tokyo. The logistics of finding a place to prepare the feast presented a far greater obstacle. A two-burner hot plate in his suite at the Keio Plaza was out of the question. Asking Kazuko or Takako to use either of their apartments eliminated any possibility of romance. Brautigan played his ace in the hole and called Len Grzanka, a bachelor who lived alone.

Grzanka agreed to let Brautigan use his suburban apartment for the planned pasta tryst. Richard wanted privacy, so Len generously vacated for the night. When Grzanka returned the next morning, “the place was a disaster.” Not only did he find the unmade bed a tangled testimonial to a night of passion, but Len also observed that Richard “didn't wash a single plate. He burned sauce in a bunch of pots. There was sauce all over the place.”

Around this time, Delacorte sent the uncorrected galley proofs for
Dreaming of Babylon
to Tokyo. Brautigan went to work on them with his usual obsessive concern for detail. Daytime hangovers and night owl habits dictated an eccentric schedule. Richard's most productive time came in those predawn hours after he returned to his hotel suite from The Cradle. As always, he depended on his friends to supply advice on the fine points of grammar and vocabulary. Len Grzanka's position as an English professor elevated him to the top of Brautigan's local list of potential advisers.
“He had a habit of calling me up at about 2:00 or 3:00 am to look up words in the dictionary for him,” Grzanka said. “He'd keep me up for hours.”

This didn't sit well with Len, who had to rise at six and take a long train commute to get to work at Tsuda College by eight. He repeatedly explained his situation to Brautigan, pleading with him to call during the day. It didn't seem to make any difference, and the late night phone calls continued. “Richard basically had no consideration for anyone else,” Grzanka observed.

As Richard's relationship with Akiko intensified, he became increasingly emotionally dependent on her. “We thought we could stimulate artistic creativity together,” Aki recalled. While she regarded herself as basically a positive and optimistic person, she recognized Brautigan's inherent negativity. “Every minute he always had some kind of negative energy kept within him,” she said. Because she was interested in his mind and loved his work, she wanted to give him all she had, both mentally and from her heart. “I was small, but I was open,” Akiko observed. “And he was touched by my openness and my small things.”

One night, Richard cried bitter tears. “I never thought I was loveable,” he told her. “I was abandoned by my mother. I was abandoned by my first wife. And so, I thought I [would never be] loved by any women anymore.” Aki realized “he had some big complex about women.” She knew Brautigan believed she was the one who could give him everything. For a time, she believed it, too. In spite of her imagined role as a liberated woman, Akiko understood how much she relied upon her husband. “So, I was not independent at all,” she said. “I was dependent.” In Richard, Aki saw a way out of her predicament. Richard represented freedom from all the traditional restrictions of Japanese culture, from being the daughter in the box. She didn't understand how completely he wanted to possess her.

Even as their affair grew in intensity, Richard and Akiko spent more time apart than together. She still had her day job and a husband at home. He retained a loner's instinct for solitary nocturnal wandering. These aimless evenings often ended at The Cradle. One night at the bar, Brautigan encountered Ryu Murakami, who had just finished his second manuscript (
War Begins Beyond the Sea
) and was in “a dreamy mood,” almost as if intoxicated. Meeting Brautigan, Murakami told him, “I've just done my writing that'll be published soon as my second novel.”

“Hmm,” Richard mused, turning his head away.

“What a fellow!” Ryu thought. “He didn't even congratulate me.” Brautigan struck him as being in a bad temper.

Suddenly, Brautigan turned back to face Murakami. “The important one should be the third,” Richard told him. “You can write your first novel based on your experiences. And the second should be done using the technique and imagination which you've learned from the first novel. The battle for the writer, just to begin after using up his experience and imagination.” Richard's words shook Ryu out of his happy, dreamy state.

Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, an older and more respected Japanese novelist, also became acquainted with Richard Brautigan around this time. Born in 1923, Yoshiyuki was the oldest child of author Eisuki Yoshiyuki, who died in 1940. After dropping out of the University of Tokyo without a degree, Junnosuke began working as a magazine editor but devoted his leisure hours to drinking, gambling, and consorting with prostitutes. His novels included the
City of Primary Colors
(1951),
Sudden Shower
, (1954, winner of the Akutagawa Prize),
Room of a Whore
(1958), and
The Dark
Room
(1969, winner of the Tanizaki Prize). Prostitution and sex provided a constant theme in Yoshiyuki's work.

Akiko recalled that Richard “had a very good relationship” with Junnosuke Yoshiyuki. Richard's interests in soft-core pornography and his great affection for the writing of Junichiro Tanizaki certainly helped form a bond between the two men. According to Aki, they saw each other several times while Brautigan was in Tokyo.

One nameless night, back at the Keio Plaza, inebriated on love and booze, Brautigan placed an early am phone call to Don Carpenter in Hollywood. “Four o'clock in the morning,” Carpenter remembered. “Drunk as a fucking goat.” Richard wanted to tell Don about his newfound love. “I've met the most beautiful woman,” Brautigan stammered. “We're going to get married as soon as she divorces her husband.”

“Oh, god,” thought Don Carpenter, struggling to clear his sleep-clouded brain. For the first and only time, he told his old friend an unpleasant truth he knew Richard did not want to hear. “If she'll leave him,” Don said, “she'll leave you.”

Akiko's husband suggested she marry her lover. When she told Yoshimura about her involvement with Brautigan, he took the news with equanimity. “Well, you better ask him to marry,” Yoshimura remarked to his wife.

“Why?” Akiko was amazed.

“Because marriage is to protect the woman,” he said. “And without having that I won't divorce you.”

Caught up in the stress of the situation, Brautigan suffered a severe attack of herpes. A sexually transmitted disease never enhanced a new love affair. Condoms offered no protection from embarrassment. Desperate, Richard called Helen Brann for help. Brautigan had only recently received an extension permit for an additional sixty-day stay in Japan, and he had no intention of returning to America for treatment. His agent consulted with her own physician, who suggested a doctor in Tokyo. Richard sought an immediate appointment.

Brautigan got a call from Dan Gerber, in Tokyo with his Zen master, Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi, and Bob Watkins, a friend from Montana. They planned on spending a few days in town before heading on for a longer stay in Kyoto. Dan had been studying Buddhism and sitting zazen for about four years, since the depression he felt following the death of his father in 1973. Kobun, Dan's teacher, was born in 1938 and raised in Jokoji, the Soto Zen temple in Kamo, Japan, where his father had been chief priest. He came to America in 1967, invited by Suzuki Roshi to help establish the Tassajara monastery in Carmel Valley.

Kobun read
Trout Fishing in America
not long after its initial publication by the Four Seasons Foundation. Much later, Gerber gave him a copy of Kazuko Fujimoto's translation, and he “was amazed how different it seemed to him in Japanese than it did in English.” Dan remembered his master “sort of laughing” at “what a different book it was in Japanese.”

Brautigan met them for lunch at their hotel. Afterward they walked about the city. Richard told Dan “how fascinated he was by the design of everything in Japan.” Gerber thought this was because Brautigan couldn't read Japanese. “Everything was pure design.” Dan admired Richard's quality, “ideal for any artist,” of being “a stranger in the place that you live. Richard had a wonderful ability to look at things like a child.”