Jubilee Hitchhiker (161 page)

During their meal, Brautigan remarked to Conner, “Whenever I think my mind's going, I'm going to get rid of myself. I could blow my brains out.” Richard made a gesture with his forefinger, miming a pistol barrel inserted into his mouth. “He also said he'd never told anybody that before,” Conner recalled.

“Why would you want to do it that way?” Bruce asked. “Can you imagine what a terrible mess this is for somebody to clean up? How disgusting it's going to be?”

“Well, I won't be there to do anything about it,” Brautigan replied. “Why should I care?”

“Hey, man,” Conner said, “your mind is going already. What's the big event?”

After their planned film collaboration crashed and burned, Richard and Bruce continued to lunch together nearly every day. “He would talk about how he couldn't find a sock in the morning,” Conner recollected. “How he looked all over the place for it. He talked about his tax problems or any number of mundane and stupid things.” These trivial subjects were the basis for much of Brautigan's short fiction and had a creative importance for him that was lost on his listeners.

Bruce Conner had long been interested in the country music from the thirties, forties, and fifties that he'd listened to as a kid in Kansas. He liked all the old-time stuff, hillbilly music, Western swing, rockabilly, and had collected “dozens of records.” He made tapes of some of these and brought the cassettes along with him to Japan and played them for Brautigan, a big fan of Dolly Parton's more commercial country music. Richard didn't care for Conner's tapes. “He said that it
reminded him of when he was a boy,” Bruce reflected, remembering their conversation. “He didn't want to hear those songs because he was living with his mother and there would be these men that would just sort of come in and carry her away. He'd be abandoned.”

What “impressed [Brautigan] was the interviews, the publicity, the publication,” Conner observed. Richard enjoyed being perceived as “an important artist” in Japan “because an artist who is recognized is respected much more in their gestures than many other people. The social relationship is quite different.” One night at The Cradle, Brautigan used his cachet to benefit his friend. Richard and Bruce were drinking and schmoozing with several corporate executives from NHK-TV and Brautigan was “badgering them into giving Bruce Conner an exclusive tour of their most recent Samurai production.”

Early in October, Bruce went to dinner with Richard and Akiko's sister. Richard told Bruce about visiting his wife's family “a few times” and that “things were a little bit awkward.” Even so, he felt “everything was going along fine.” This evening proved otherwise. Bruce remembered “the sister was as combative and irritating and insulting as you could be.” She spoke English well, making it impossible to miss the point. Conner felt familiar with the refinements of Japanese etiquette and understood “that she was obviously not being very nice.” A few nights later, she had an opportunity to up the ante.

On the night of October 10, Richard Brautigan was scheduled to give a reading at Jean Jean, a performance space housed in the Yamate Church in Shibuya-ku. Bruce Conner took the subway with Richard from their hotel. When they emerged from the station, passing the bronze statue of Hachikō, it started to rain, a gentle autumn sprinkle. Brautigan told Conner, “I'm gonna go across the street and pick up something at the drugstore.”

“Take my umbrella,” Bruce said. He had one of those compact folding spring-loaded bumbershoots. “Here. I'll open it for you.” Conner pushed the button, and his umbrella expanded with a
snap
, splattering water all over Brautigan.

Delighted, Richard exclaimed, “This is marvelous! I like the rain.”

Bruce loved his friend's reaction, “like he had received a wonderful gift. It was a jewel-like event.”

Takako Shiina and a large contingent of the Nishizawa family were also in the Jean Jean audience with Bruce Conner that night. Richard shared the stage with his friend, Japanese poet Shuntarō Tanikawa, a collaboration set in motion during Akiko's visit to Tokyo the previous May. Tanikawa went on first. During a ten-minute break between readings, Aki's sister inconspicuously slipped out of the theater.

When the audience returned to their seats, Bruce Conner observed an empty chair standing alone, a deserted island in a sea of spectators. A dozen minutes or so into Brautigan's presentation, after he read a new poem titled “The Link,” a member of Jean Jean's staff came onto the stage, interrupting the proceedings with an important message. Word had just arrived of a medical emergency. Akiko's sister had collapsed in a nearby department store.

The entire Nishizawa clan, “all of Akiko's family, mother, father, brothers, cousins, got up en masse” and walked out of the hall together without a word. Richard stood on the stage, watching in stunned silence. Bruce Conner felt it was all a stunt, “obviously a bad, naughty trick which [Aki's sister] had planned ahead of time.” In his opinion, there was “nothing wrong with this woman. She hated Richard.”

Afterward, Bruce Conner conversed with Shuntarō Tanikawa about Richard. Conner felt Tanikawa admired and liked Brautigan but was critical of him “in very small ways.” Takako told a story about a time when she and Richard and Shuntarō went out to dinner together and the Japanese poet said, “Richard, your problem is you don't understand women.” Brautigan's response was a nervous, high-pitched laugh, “Hahahahaha!” He dealt with Tanikawa's remark by treating it as a joke.

Takako Shiina took note of the Jean Jean program in her journal. She had no recollection of the Nishizawa family's mass walkout. Shiina recalled Brautigan was “always complaining about Aki and didn't get along with her family.” Bruce Conner later admitted that some of Akiko's relatives “probably didn't know what was going on” when they were informed of the department store emergency. Richard told Bruce that Aki's mother and other family members came to his door at the Keio Plaza about four days afterward “with gifts, apologizing and tearful.”

In mid-October, Aki left San Francisco on a trip to the East Coast with Marcia Clay, who was having an exhibition of her paintings at the Zenith Gallery in Washington, D.C. They stayed at a friend's apartment in a building full of artists next door to the gallery. The trees had just begun turning color. Akiko was charmed by the capital city. “Lots of old buildings are made by brick like in Europe,” she wrote her husband.

In Tokyo, “summer seemed to be going on forever.” In the middle of October, Richard Brautigan sat in a little student café and wrote “Tokyo Stories, Brautigan” on the cover of a pocket-sized notebook. He began jotting down short pieces inside, completing six that first day. He thought they might be an addition to the work he'd already done for
The Tokyo–Montana Express
. The subjects were mostly everyday and commonplace (crickets, leaves, a man measuring the Shinjuku Station platform), just what Bruce Conner complained about as topics of Richard's conversation.

Typhoon Tip, the largest and most severe tropical cyclone on record, half the size of the United States (1,380 miles) in diameter, roared into Tokyo on October 19, 1979. With winds in excess of 80 miles per hour, the storm had diminished from its peak force of 190 miles per hour but still packed considerable punch, killing forty-four people as it careened across Japan. The nineteenth started out warm, clear, and sunny. In the late afternoon, Richard Brautigan went for a walk in the beautiful park surrounding the Meiji Shrine.

Suddenly, the sky darkened and wind whirled into chaos. Rain sheeted down, debris went flying. Hit by the force of the typhoon, Brautigan braced himself between a tree and a park bench, hanging on with all his strength. The storm lasted about twenty-five minutes, passing away to the north around sunset. The air cleared. The evening light shone with an unearthly glow as Richard emerged, soaking wet and smiling, through the Main Torii, Japan's tallest wooden Shinto gate, at the entrance to the shrine.

Anita LoCoco, a young American woman who lived nearby in the Harajuku District, had been on her way to an acupuncture appointment, cutting through the park, when the storm overwhelmed her. Once the typhoon passed, she staggered on her way, a bit traumatized. She recognized Brautigan from his book covers, his face “kind of glowing.” They were both drenched, with the bewildered look of survivors after a catastrophe. LoCoco introduced herself and struck up a conversation.

Brautigan and LoCoco walked around the park together, dripping wet. She told him how she'd grabbed onto a tree when the wind came up and had been lifted parallel to the ground, “like in a
cartoon.” Laughing, feeling “exhilarated” from it all, Richard commented that the typhoon “was like a life/death experience.” Anita told him about coming out of a reading he'd given at Lone Mountain College, eleven years before, tripping on acid and seeing “the crescent moon with Venus in the middle.” Brautigan remained pleasant, though a bit formal, chatting amicably while keeping his distance. After ten minutes or so, they parted company and walked away into separate lives, never to meet again, a chance encounter after a storm.

All along, Richard wrote new short stories in his little notebooks, working at sidewalk cafés and supermarket cafeterias. He finished four the day after the typhoon, another four on October 22, and an additional six the following day, when cold autumn weather finally arrived in Tokyo. Many of these brief tales involved going to soft-core porn movies. By his own admission, Brautigan watched “between eight or nine porno movies every week” while in Japan. “Richard had this absurd obsession with pornography and sex which did not involve very strong interpersonal relationships with women,” Bruce Conner observed.

One evening, Brautigan took Conner along with him to the movies. The artist/filmmaker thought in Japan he'd see “worthwhile” work by great Japanese directors (Kurosawa, Inagaki, and Shindo), but “99 percent of the theaters seemed to be these porno movies.” The pornography presented was not the XXX features shown in adult theaters in the States. Certain cultural taboos prevented “kissing on the screen.” All the sex was simulated, “never too closely depicted,” Bruce recalled. Bondage and rape were popular themes in Japanese soft-core porn.

Brautigan told Conner he was studying Japanese porn films because he planned to write a book about them. “Instead of sightseeing or going on the town to traditional sights like temples and parks, museums and nightlife,” Richard scrawled in his notebook, “I watch television and attend porno movies to find my Japan. This is the Japan of fantasy and imagination [. . .] I think that to come to some understanding of a country you must first try to understand its fantasies.” At porn theaters, he observed “the basic dream life of Japanese men at its lowest possible denominator.” Out of his seventy-six stories written in Japan, only ten were directly about pornographic movies. Others involved actors, models, and television commercials, all satellites orbiting his central theme, part of the book he planned in his mind.

Sometime in mid-October, Brautigan met writer/singer/actor Akiyuki Nosaka at The Cradle. A hard-drinking brawler, Nosaka was a rebel hipster masked by dark glasses. He burst onto the scene in the 1960s with a series of poignant stories about adolescent youth adrift in the chaos of war. He was best known for his novels
The Pornographers
(1963) and
Grave of the Fireflies
(1967), a powerful autobiographical story about struggling to survive starvation with his little sister in the ruins of Kobe after the 1945 American firebombing raids. As a
chanteur
, he used the stage name Claude Nosaka. The two literary outsiders formed a drunken bond. Richard had a presentation scheduled in the American Center in Tokyo. Akiyuki was set to give a lecture at the Yonago hospital at the same time. They agreed it would be a fine idea to travel together and share the experience.

The two writers planned a three-day trip. Nosaka suggested to Mr. Isohachi, his friend at the Tokyo American Center, that he and Brautigan make the trip without a translator. Near the end of the month, they set off on the bullet train. Along the way, both got totally drunk. Through his shades, Nosaka observed Brautigan with a hipster's acid dispassionate reserve. He considered him an American Davy Crockett clone, overweight, pale skin splotched by red patches.

Akiyuki had a secret agenda. He planned on writing about the episode and asked Richard numerous questions. Nosaka's published account of his trip with Brautigan appeared as a short I-novel,
Nichibeisakegassen
(Japan–USA Drinking Battle), in December 1979. Japanese I-novels (
shishosetu
) often distort the truth for artistic reasons. In his novel, Nosaka claimed the first Japanese translations of Brautigan's books stated that Richard had been born in Minnesota in 1930, and he assumed they were both the same age.

When the fictional Nosaka inquired about these biographical details, the make-believe Brautigan insisted they were true and said he worked as a journalist in Europe during the Korean War. The fictional Richard told Akiyuko that he'd gone dancing at a fireman's hall in Minnesota to celebrate America's victory after VJ Day. In his book, Nosaka mentioned how this greatly upset him. The real Akiyuko had been a starving orphan in a burnt-out city at the time.

In spite of the fabrications, many of the I-novel's details reverberated with the clarion clarity of truth. Nosaka described his visit with Brautigan to Yonago, where instead of giving a lecture, Akiyuki reverted to his Claude persona and started singing. This soon became a karaoke session. Richard got into the act, belting out “Buttons and Bows” and “Rock Around the Clock.”

Afterward, Brautigan, Nosaka, and a number of doctors and nurses waited for a taxi outside the hospital, on their way to a
ryoutei
(a restaurant serving traditional old-fashioned Japanese food). They were startled by the heavy sound of a falling body hitting the ground. Brautigan walked back along a path through the shrubbery and encountered the corpse of a fifty-year-old cancer patient who had committed suicide by leaping from a fourth-floor window. He returned ashen faced as white-clad hospital personnel hurried to the scene. “Dead,” Brautigan said.