Tokio Whip (5 page)

–
Right, and all those bars where the salary-guys pay ¥10,000 for a bottle of beer.

–
Really?

–
Yeah, of course.

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Right, and that's a cheap one.

–
Cheaper blow-job.

–
I heard of two guys once who had three bottles of beer – normal bottles, you know – and they had to pay ¥50,000.

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No way!

–
It's true.

–
Yeah, but then it must've been a yakuza-run place.

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Well, I don't know about that, all I know is that I heard it.

–
So, you just trust everything you hear?

–
Well, I trust my friends.

–
Anyway, ya' know, Lang's always bragging about how short the walk is, he says he often strolls from Nihonbashi to Yurakucho, but that sounds crazy to me – it's like four or five stations!

–
No, this place just isn't your type, Hiroko, my pal.

–
The girls are too nice for me –

–
And the guys are nice, too, but ... well, it's just like at work.

–
?

–
Smile and keep your makeup on close.

–
And then it all ends at Shimbashi, lickety split, it's like another world once you go under the bridge. Ginza so p. e. and then things get funky again

–
But the same more suits.

–
Hey, who's this Prometheus guy?

–
Who?

–
Really, what a weird statue.

–
Isn't he in the
Heike Monogatari
?

–
Noli Me Tangere
?

***

Rich and strange, Arlene thinks, that the changes I need to effect are coming to me naturally, here. And when they come into clearer focus, it will be time to leave. Roberta and Lang are right, I shall be more free in Europe, more the self they see me as than I yet see. But I will nestle this city inside me. Wherever I shall be.

***

Before you leave, don't forget to pass on the cartoon: cock at desk, “up betimes and crowed.”

I was a child then, naked. Came to Tokio. It clothed me, made a woman out of me.

***

R'n'L!!

Dig this: on my little, 12-minute walk home from the station, there are four dry cleaners, five convenience stores, and three hair-dressers.

So whadda'ya' think – did Priscilla do it with the Colonel?

The day a star was named after me.

Ya' know, I've always wanted to finish a smoke by just throwing it on the floor, just like in the movies. But one thing I don't get is how whenever someone hangs up on another, the hung-up-on one starts clicking that phone thing, like being hung up on is temporary.

Cleaning house, I came across this in an old notebook: “Finish Whip fast; spend next five years writing only two short stories, and studying ancient Greek.” Small ambitions, eh?

“Wish I'd Said That/Quote of the Week” Dept. “It was such a beautiful day that I decided to stay in bed.” Courtesy W. S. Maugham.

And then I loved LC's description of her work: “A transitory witness to the changing conditions of light.”

The other day someone asked me if I'd been raised in an apartment. What a great compliment!

Did I ever tell you that the climax of
North by Northwest
, ie, the Mt. Rushmore sequence, occurs on my very own birthday?! No kidding; there's a shot in the movie of a newspaper – you know, “Diplomat Slain at U. N.” – and you can read the date and then figure out the rest. (But did you know the dates are all wrong in
Walk, Don't Run
?)

Looks like I have to reread Nerval. His name's popped up in three conversations in the past two weeks.

Just saw
Angel
for the first time. Lubitsch, Dietrich. So this guy goes nuts over Marlene, woos her, takes her to dinner. End of meal, she says, “You must be quite a success with women.” He asks why, and she answers, “Any man who can order a meal like that must be.” Ah, a line worthy of Wilde!

God, this new camera, what am I gonna do with it? Got one idea: two “portraits” of you guys; but not yer faces necessarily, more your “worlds.” You know, those fave things around you, souvenirs picked up in yer travels, the pictures on your walls, a favorite pen or coffee cup, that sort of thing. All together it would end up giving the viewer an idea, uhn, I mean picture, of youze. And in between the two people portraits there'd be a third “project” as my artist friends would call it. I'd take photos of all my fave and the most interesting places in Kichijoji, including the bad ones, like those patches of lawn and concrete they dare to call “parks” here; the village idiot; the mother who's always walking with her two daughters (I think I saw the husband once); the fat lady at the dry cleaners, etc. Write some captions on the margins of the photos. In the end it should be a portrait of Kichijoji and indirectly of me. Whadda'ya' think?

***

–
I can't quit 'ya, Roberta, but I gotta go.

–
Lang, you can be such a fool.

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Should I repeat myself?

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You will, Lang, regardless of what I say.

–
Why these Americanisms?

–
Why all this violence?

–
I love you, Roberta.

–
As I said, to repeat myself.

–
The violence?

–
The love, Lang.

***

City of my sins.

– Spanish phrase

***

Other friends could tell other stories.

– LZ

Whose are these young, these innocent faces? And why do I mistrust them?

***

ABC

–
It was a shell, a spiral, an unfolding screen, Cafferty was explaining to Roberta and Arlene – a two-dimensional plan/accident perhaps that divided into the low and the high cities, but more the shell-spiral, a labyrinth that let the traveler out in Ome, Tama, across the Edo River, on some happy tropical islands. This “empty center” business has gotten much too out of hand; I prefer to see other pictures.

–
Bric-a-brac, Arlene responded; a crossword puzzle on top of a pointillist painting on top of a digital photograph.

–
Too easy, Roberta pointed out. I think of it as a Mika Yoshizawa drawing: a circle bisected on the right by another circle bisected by yet another: the city, the Yamanote, the Palace. Like some giant Mickey Mouse eye.

–
And what of the river, Roberta?, Cafferty asked.

–
Arteries, of course!

–
And have you thought of this: abstract the circle of the Yamanote, square it and then bisect it horizontally by the Chuo: the sun; bisected again by the Sobu: the eye. That is a pretty standard picture. What we have now as a result of all that 80s overbuilding – overbiting? – is the Bay bisected by the Rainbow Bridge: in other words, the city, the sun-eye not only doubled, but enlarged.

–
Land and water!

–
Yes, Arlene, and more, it's tripled: the Bay has become the repository of the low city's riverine past, while the life of the low city has moved west; it's climbed over the Yamanote, completely passed it by – which in its snobbery didn't even notice – and made its new home West, say from Ogikubo on. You see this historically too, how so many institutions have been displaced or removed to the safer, newer west.

–
Ogikubo?

–
Okagami.

–
What?

–
The Great Mirror, Roberta explained. The city doubles and even triples itself, and we only read ourselves into it. I see a Yoshizawa drawing ...

–
And Lang sees the face of James Joyce.

–
How's that?, asks Cafferty.

–
That odd shape of the Yamanote being Joyce's scrawny head; the Chuo and Palace being the eyepatch; and that area near Hatchobori where so many train lines meet make a huge ear. Joyce resting his head listening to the language of the river ...

–
Ingenious …

–
Or silly.

–
Yes, so many pictures. Look at the actual thing, with all the mountains and rivers ....

–
A corn cob ...

–
Wasabi
...

–
A grotesque, an old man's penis in some
ukiyo-e
...

–
In the mouth of the Bay.

–
Thank you, Roberta.

***

Well, while they're all arguing back and forth with him about Tokyo, I'm out there enjoying myself in it. What would they have to say to that? I mean, it is just a city. Sure it's big and the capitol and all, but hey, you have the same work and play in Nagoya or Osaka. Same difference. What's the big deal? Ok, maybe a few differences in food or clothes, but anyone would expect that. Girls still come with two legs all over Japan, so who's complaining? – So remarks that minor annoyance Hiro, from whom we do not expect much in the way of thought.

***

They got married, placed their faith between his legs.

The ashtray slides its way across the tabletop, and having slid ...

The new kid in town asks around: “So, what gives with this burg?”

***

Hiroko and company got off their bus a stop or two too early. As they – and so many before them – passed the Fuji Latex building, they all immediately wondered.

–
Does that look like what I think it looks like?

–
I think it does.

–
Is it supposed to?

–
I'm not so sure. Maybe it's supposed to be something else.

–
Well, it is that.

–
?

–
Something else!

–
What the hell building is it, anyway?

–
Let's see.

[They step back to read the name and logo.]

[Followed by universal laughter.]

–
No wonder it looks like a condom!

–
Uh-oh.

–
What?

–
Are you wondering what I'm wondering?

–
I'm not wondering anything.

–
Me neither, I'm just still amazed that we got this giant condom in the middle of the city.

–
Not only that, the Palace is just over there, too.

–
Oh m'god, you're right.

–
Do you think they ever drive past it?

–
Do you think anyone ever says anything when they do?

–
No way.

–
Oh, so, what were you wondering?

–
Do you think there's a corresponding building somewhere else, you know, a building that looks like a –

–
Ha! I hope so!

–
Yeah, get this country a sex life!

Then suddenly they were almost trampled over by a crowd of high-school girls who'd just been released from school. Stopped to stare at the joggers circling the moat, runningly asphyxiating themselves.

–
So, whadda'ya' wonder the Crown Prince is having for lunch?

–
I really wouldn't care to know – I'm sure I couldn't stomach it myself.

–
Hey, anyone know what's in the Science Museum?

–
Does Japan have any science?

–
Sure, you know, all that bullshit about our enzymes.

–
And our brains programmed for kanji.

–
And our weird architecture!

–
Hey, but remember Hiraga Gennai?

–
Oh right, we had to read about him.

–
Yeah, cool dude – in a way, I guess.

–
What's that way?

–
Yasukuni-dori.

–
Look, you can look up and down – the other side of the river.

–
Those
torii
are massive!

–
They better be, you know who's there, don't you?

–
Oh, right, the war dead!

–
VZ told me once that there's some sort of fascist architecture around here.

–
Do you really think Roberta's place is just straight ahead?

***

Tough, tender Tokyo, we do understand each other, don't we?, Marianne queries.

***

–
Thanks, let me get the next one.

–
Ok.

–
It's delicious. How did you know this place?

–
Well, actually, Kazuko introduced me to it some years ago, before she went to the United States. And while I was gone, I continued to come here. They soon got to know me. I keep a bottle here, bring friends. It's one of my regular places now. But it's funny, I've never come back here with her.

–
Why not?

–
Oh, I don't know. Maybe because it reminded me of an “earlier Kazuko”; I suppose it had something to do with that split in time. When she returned, her style had changed. She stopped wearing the Tokyo style of clothes – you know, all that black that made Tokyo look like a city in permanent mourning.

–
Kazuko used to dress like that – like me?