Raw Silk (9781480463318) (31 page)

In Kyoto I registered at the Palace Side Hotel, which was Western in every respect except that a
kimono
had been laid out on the bed. I dined in the nearest restaurant, the Akuho, which served only Chinese food and looked rather like a gilded Ramada Inn, and went to bed early in the narrow room.

A
FTER THAT THINGS WENT
downhill in avalanche. The first few days were laid on for me with tours of the Osaka operation, office buildings in the steamy suburbs and warehouses in blasted fields lined with shacks and hungry goats. A cocktail party was arranged in my honor at which a dozen East Anglian émigrés, none of whom I had known at home by name, enveloped me in a hysterical familiarity that I could understand but could not respond to. Tyler Peer, his moustache more walrus-like than ever by contrast with the clean-shaven Orientals, met me every morning for quick coffee and a few witty observations on the face-saving customs or bathroom habits of the Japanese. Then he passed me on to someone whose English was deemed sufficient—usually this meant a lot of gestures and flipping of phrasebook pages—who took me to see looms I’d already seen in operation in Migglesly, or to explain the automated silk-screening machines we were about to get. The mill sections were scattered all over the Osaka outskirts at the ends of subway lines and bus runs, but they had a common architectural theme of overgrown Quonset hut with stucco vestibule. With the sun beating down on the corrugated roofs and the steamrollers running inside by the acre, the temperature averaged a hundred and ten; they said it was worse in September.

Industry’s not meant to be beautiful, and I could stand the heat. What I really found hard to get used to was the stuff coming off the presses. In the Tokyo museums and the
obi
shops of the Ginza I had felt my way into what I thought was Japanese design. I’d studied and absorbed and sketched branches in serene arabesque on hand-printed
kimonos,
washed-out shades of interlocking woven diamonds, translucent swirls of petal, surf-shaped borders. What they were printing at Utagawa, mainly on cotton and mainly for Canada, looked like the stuff they make aprons out of for small-town Woolworths in the Midwest. A bunch of grapes and two turnips on a ground of celery salt. Cubist study of ice cubes. Daffodil
in extremis,
with rainbow. The gentlemen were inclined to offer me dress lengths and brag. “Most Western, very Western.”

“The stuff is hideous,” I stormed in a whisper to Tyler one morning. “What are they doing it for?”

Tyler made a path through his moustache to admit his pipe and patted my arm, amused.

“Money, dear. They do it for money.”

“Well then, what am I doing here? We’ve already got their machines. I’m hardly going to learn anything about design.”

“Not about design, about design organization. Just hang around the Center for a few weeks; you’re bound to pick up a lot.”

“All right,” I said, dubious and depressed, and went to take up my listening post in the Center in Kyoto.

The Utagawa Design Center is a single ice blue room the size of a football field. It contains a hundred and fifty steel desks, fluorescent strip-lighted from above and roughly sectioned into groups of ten by waist-high filing cabinets. Inexplicably, there is a bust of
Venus
on one file. Every desk has a typewriter and a telephone; every telephone has a muted ring like a doorbell chime and every chime rings on an average of once in ten minutes. Each corner of the room has a megaphone-shaped loudspeaker, and these speak in unison on an average of once in ten minutes. They say
bong,
or
bingle,
then announce the time and the tea-break shift. This much about the organization of the Design staff I learned in the first hour.

I was met by a bespectacled young man with flawless English, rather plump for a Japanese, who introduced himself as Mr. Lawrence “Larry” Tsuruoka. He’d been born in San Francisco, he explained, and added by way of credential that his parents had spent the war in an internment camp in the dry bed of the Salt River. I did not know the appropriate response to this. Mr. Tsuruoka said that I was to do anything I liked. Mr. Tsuruoka was entirely at my disposal, and any member of the staff would be happy to answer my questions.

“You will find us very Westernized,” he added brightly, and led me to a desk that had been assigned for my convenience between the fifth filing cabinet from the south wall and the second water cooler from the window.

“I am entirely at your disposal,” he said again, and disappeared.

I sat at the desk and looked around me, trying to establish some contact with the others in my ten-desk encampment. Apart from a few nods, which I returned in kind, I failed. Nearly everyone looked young, though as I’ve said I find it difficult to tell with the Japanese, and there were about three men to every woman. They were all in uniform, the women in dark dresses and the men in dark suits and ties. They were all passionately busy, hunched forward over graph paper, typewriters or telephones. I inspected my desk, which was well stocked with graph paper and carbon pencils, got myself a cup of water from the cooler and sat down again. I commanded a vast outlook of bent heads.

It seemed clear that I was intended to bend my own, so I took out a pad of the paper and centered the words
UTAGAWA DESIGN CENTER, KYOTO: ORGANIZATION
across the top. This took five minutes. Then I retraced the letters, calligraphizing their shape; that took another ten. Then I designed an Oriental version of the arabic numeral 1 and reflected that Simon Cunliffe was a prick: I
told
him I was no good at organization.

“1. Proportion of designers to secretarial staff:”

I’d got this far among the tinkling phones and the singsong of conversation when a louder chime, something like the first two notes of a cathedral bell, sounded from the megaphone, and all at once everybody stood and snapped to attention. A short speech ensued in enthusiastic monotone from the loudspeaker, punctuated at several points by a universal response of “So!” I stood myself, to be less conspicuous, though I understand that it is not possible to be conspicuous where nobody is paying any attention to you. As I got to my feet the room went into motion. The dark clothes bent and snapped while the megaphones chanted. There were barbell bendings of the arms and backbends and toe-touchings and a finale of running in place. The chime bonged again. They stopped. They sat.

“Oh, that,” said Mr. Tsuruoka when I found him. “That was the declaration of loyalty to the company and morning calisthenics. Very good for the circulation. Please feel free to ask any questions you wish.”

I went back to my desk and for the next five days what I did was, approximately, to sit there. From time to time when restlessness impelled me I wandered among the desks and tried to strike up conversations, but there were several impediments to this, of which the major one was that I found no one outside of Mr. Tsuruoka with more English vocabulary than “Yes” and “Good-day.” Even these comments were offered furtively, with however extravagant a showing of teeth, and it was clear that even if the staff might have been happy to answer my questions they did not feel free to do so. Not if it involved unbending from the nape. I evinced no curiosity and could discover none in myself: what the designers bent over were the scurvy designs I had seen in Osaka, and what the secretaries bent over was secretarial stuff. The graph paper was for plotting Jacquard cards, as at home. I knew what everybody was doing there but myself.

I am no good at doing nothing (Calvin was a sick man but no fool) and this routine began to bleed my spirit. Why I continued to go there I don’t know; I was expected to. Because I was expected to I wore my one dark dress and became passably good at calisthenics. I thought I should be writing a report on the organization of the Utagawa Design Staff, but after the word “military” I did not have much to add. When the pretense of research brought me to acute exhaustion I decided that I must save myself by the one thing I knew how to do, and I began to draw. For the first time I found myself an object of some curiosity, not that this was expressed overtly but in detours round my desk on the way to the tea corner. I began making patterns after the
kimonos
and
obis
I had sketched in Tokyo, but almost immediately I began to hear titters behind me, between the glug-gluggings of the water cooler. No doubt my version of the Sumi style was as crude as the Osaka Woolworth’s. So I began tracing on the graph paper old designs, the best of those I had submitted over the past five years to East Anglian. There can’t be a much more pointless exercise; I was showing off for the benefit of people with whom I had no contact.

The Design Center hours were long and I attended all of them; I was expected to. So that by the time I was released into the steaming streets the museums and parks were closed. I walked the main thoroughfares among boutiques with names like Man-Dom and Love-Tan-Tan, or strolled in the dusty Kyoto Gosho Palace Park, or sat in my colorless cubicle in the Palace Side, reading Mishima. (“That is what makes travel so utterly fruitless.”) I had been told that Kyoto was a more beautiful city than Tokyo, the city of the arts, so it disappointed me. It seemed sprawling, centerless. When the weekend finally came I went from museum to museum, avid to catch as many as possible during their open hours, to find again some sense of a tourist’s urgency. I began to make mistakes, irritating little evidences of impotence, like mispronouncing one vowel in a street name so that the taxi driver delivered me to the wrong end of town. I went to Gion Corner for the variety show, but had misread the performance times, and a lone ticket seller advised me to come back the next day. I bought a bag of what I thought were sweets, like those Jill had offered the seed-sifter in Tokyo, and when I popped a whole one in my mouth as I walked along the street, it turned out to be an unbaked roll. The flour dust had an alkaline taste and the dough was slimy on the roof of my mouth. I looked round for a litter bin but encountered only curious faces. Unable to spit out the pasty lump in that crowd, I chewed and swallowed it.

It seemed to lodge in my diaphragm, heavy and unassailable by digestive juices. I went to an exhibition of modern textile sculptures, and was temporarily eased by my own pleasure in them, thick wrapped rope hangings, tapestries textured from fine filament to cable and fur; until standing before the best of all, a great triple cone of multicolored rope that was at once a sculpture and a child’s climbing frame, and which was titled in English
Climbing Up, Slipping, Tumbling, Crawling Under,
I observed my own mind and discovered that I was describing it to Oliver. I had been doing this for some time. I went to a small café for supper, where I ordered pork tempura from a window menu composed of plaster reproductions, but I was unable to eat it until I heard British voices at the next table, and I inveigled myself into their conversation. A civil servant and his wife, on leave from Delhi. They invited me to their table—sweet people, whom I would not have crossed Eastley Village to see. Nevertheless the doughy stuff lifted off my diaphragm, and for two hours we exchanged the excited pleasantries of strangers. I was giddy with relief, and talked too much, too animatedly, of home. Walking back through the palace gardens to the hotel I suffered my particular brand of
esprit d’escalier,
which is to wish I had said nothing. Whereas what I had said had been either a eulogy of British hearthside life or else taken from Tyler Peer’s anecdotal condescension to the Japanese. I sat in the hotel lobby in front of the television set, and for two hours watched the behemoth bodies of Sumo wrestlers who seeped sweat like roasting pork. I went to bed and dreamed of the garden, of its being yet larger and more formal and more arbored with roses than it is, where ladies in Victorian gowns and cartwheel hats were taking tea. I wandered among them in my housecoat, slatternly, claiming to unattending ears that this had once been mine.

I rose tremulous with the unbaked roll clinging to the roof of my stomach. I walked back along the Keihan-Sanjo, involuntarily aware of European faces, never entirely free of the fantasy that I would encounter Jay Mellon in the loafers and pullover of the fifties. I forced myself to take my sketch pad back to the Kokuritsu Hakubutskan to sketch screen fans, altar cloths, fragments of eighth-century
amigoromo.

I came upon a young man of about twenty poring over a case of maps, in Levi’s and T-shirt, with the pink-bronze skin and bleached hair of a Southern Californian. Like me he was sketching in a notebook, and though the maps held no immediate interest for me I hovered there, hoping he would speak. He didn’t; he shifted his canvas shoulder bag and walked on to the scroll room. I followed, caught his eye and smiled, then addressed myself to copying some delicate botanical studies, but was desolate when he went out, and the lump in my stomach lurched with some unspecified hope when I encountered him again at the print stall in the foyer.

“You’re an artist,” I blurted. He gave me a startled, hostile “No” and left the museum in a single shove of the swinging doors. Blushing, humiliated, I wanted to run after him, to shout: I wasn’t trying to pick you up, you Yank runt!

I went back to Gion Corner, a kind of variety show for tourists, of Japanese arts from flower arranging to Bunraku, and when the ticket seller smiled and said, “Ah, so, you find us open this time,” I flushed with gratitude at his recognition. I went to the ladies’ room and sat on the toilet crying through the tea ceremony.

I was at my desk the next morning with the same dull dough at the pit of my stomach, and tracing aimlessly on the graph paper the outlines of Frances’s old Rubigo, when I finally allowed myself to know that the mood would not lift. The megaphone sounded for morning calisthenics and I started mechanically to rise. Then my knees decided not; instead I lowered myself to the bare cork floor and pressed against the dough lump with my forearms. I looked up dully into the face of a gray steel filing cabinet. I saw the cabinet, the floor, myself and Frances. I am not doing anything here, I thought, not because there is nothing to do nor any means to do it, but because there is no point. I am not going back to England.