Wrong About Japan (2 page)

“It’s so
American
,” said Jack. “I didn’t come all this way for
this.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“I want to see the Real Japan.”

I knew what he meant, of course—temples, tea ceremony Kabuki—but I teased him for it and was doubtless a very irritating companion for the next two weeks.

“No Real Japan,” said Charley. “You’ve got to promise. No temples. No museums.”

“What would we do?”

“We could buy cool manga.”

“There’ll be no English translations.”

“I don’t care. I’d eat raw fish.”

“What else?”

“And slimy things. I’d eat everything.”

“What if we interviewed some anime directors?”
I asked, trying to figure out how to pay the airfares.

“Could we talk to Tomino?”

“Who’s he?”

“Only the director of
Mobile Suit Gundam.”

“We could talk to people about what all the weird stuff really means.”

“Could we meet the guy who did
Godzilla.”

“Maybe, I don’t know.”

As the weeks passed, the fantasy hardened into a plan and Charley spent a lot of time eating raw fish and revising the lists of anime directors and manga artists he required me to interview.

“Maybe,” I suggested, “you can ask them questions, too.”

“Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “Can I have an ice cream?”

I was not without contacts in Japan. I wrote first to Paul Hulbert, who was then working for my Tokyo agents. Given their distinguished list of literary authors, I expected he would have little knowledge of cartoons and comic books, so I told him what
Mobile Suit Gundam
was and why I was interested in such a lowly subject.

“Perhaps,” he replied, “I should explain a little about myself.” Yes, he was a literary agent, of course, but he had previously worked at Kodansha, a large
Japanese publishing house that produced many best-selling manga, including most of the Mobile Suit Gundam series. “During my time there, I worked with manga and anime creators, and in my final year was involved in the production of an eight-hundred-twenty-five-page authorized encyclopedia of the Gundam saga called
Gundam Officials.”

So I began to understand that the fringe cult in New York City was a huge business in Japan, where 1.9 billion manga were sold in 1995—a staggering forty percent of all magazine sales. Everybody in Japan read manga, except those just born or about to die.

Paul said he would certainly arrange an interview with Mr. Tomino, the originator of the Gundam series.

“Could I have my photograph taken with him?” Charley asked.

Sure.

He bought a map of Tokyo and marked “weird” things with purple stars and “cool” things with silver circles.

His teachers were impressed, and hoped he might give a talk on his return. However, while this new obsession seemed to have briefly transformed him into someone almost garrulous, he had not really changed his character, so when we finally took
off from JFK on the first day of his summer vacation, there were important words he had not yet spoken. Only as we landed in Narita did he confess that he’d made a Japanese friend on the Internet and this friend would soon come to visit us at the hotel.

“How can he find our hotel?”

“Dad! It’s only on the itinerary. I attached it as a Windows document.”

Getting more information was like drawing teeth. The friend’s name was Takashi. He apparently had no other name. He wanted to practise his English. Yes, he was interested in anime, was that all right?

“How old is Takashi?”

“Obviously, he’s a kid.”

“Is he a teenager?”

“A kid. That’s all I know.”

I would watch this damn Takashi like a hawk. If he showed the slightest hint of creepiness, he was gone.

Arriving by train in Tokyo, I lost the Japanese-language map specifically drawn to get us from the station to our hotel.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

Later Charley said, “You didn’t think it would be fine at all. You did that thing with your hand like when you’re really stressed out.”

“What thing?”

“That
thing. You know.”

Naturally the taxi driver had no English, and yet when he saw our crumpled English map, he didn’t sneer like a Manhattan cabbie; he
studied
it, once at the start of the journey and then three more times en route. We were on our way to a
ryokan
, a traditional inn with tatami floors, beds that were rolled away each morning, and a little
tokonoma
, the alcove in which the artful Japanese will display a single precious object. One might assume Tokyo was full of these hotels, but this one, which was also moderately priced, had been very hard to track down, and now seemed impossible to find. The best our driver could do was deposit us at the wrong end of a one-way lane and point with his Mickey Mouse white gloves.

Looking down the lane, I could see mostly parked bicycles and garbage cans, a foreign country where I could not read or speak the simplest phrase. Understanding my hesitation, the driver personally escorted us, running ahead and waving for us to follow, the idling engine of his unlocked cab inviting auto theft.

Touched by his kindness and his poor-man’s shoes, I shook his gloved hand.

He, in turn, shook hands with Charley.

“Good-bye,” he said. He bowed, then jogged back to his taxi.

The inn is located in the Asakusa district, which
was bombed to dust in World War II. In the nineteenth century when Tokyo was named Edo, Asakusa was a stop on the route from the city to Yoshiwara, the so-called pleasure quarters celebrated in Kabuki and wood-block prints. Soon Asakusa became a pleasure quarter of its own, offering prostitution, Kabuki, and such peculiarly risqué entertainments as female sword fighting. In the streets of Asakusa we recognised the big temple bell from
Kikujiro
, and saw our first transvestite, questionable geisha, pachinko parlour, strip joint, our first drunks sleeping in cardboard boxes. Inside the ryokan was another world entirely—old Japan, kimonos, fish and rice for breakfast.

“Ask if there’s a message,” Charley said.

“From who?”

“Takashi.”

But we were already being escorted to a phone box which turned out to be an elevator, and while we ascended mechanically, the kimonoed maid tore up the stairs, spiralling around us so she might meet us when the lift doors opened on the floor above.

“Watch head,” she said, a little out of breath.

The low-ceilinged corridor presented many reasons to “watch head,” as we turned left, then right, past the communal bath and into our room which, if spacious in comparison with the lift, was
very small indeed. A single bed had been made up on the floor.

“Ah,” said the maid, seeing my unhappy face. “So sorry. We thought one person only.”

I had sent so many faxes asking for a big room that I am almost certain—and of course I may be wrong—that this was as large a room as two people were going to be allowed. Any bigger and they would’ve squeezed in three mattresses. Back in the days of travelling salesmen, this is how hotels accommodated them, and you see the economic sense of it. Now that there are no travelling salesmen the hotel stages cultural performances, traditional songs, little plays, big parties, fifty empty beer bottles after breakfast!

“One more mattress, yes?”

“Yes. Where do we put our suitcases?”

“Ah, so sorry. Japanese room.”

Yes, that’s exactly what the faxes had demanded: a Japanese room, tatami, very minimal. We’d seen it in the movies. Now we resolved to keep it neat, except there was nowhere to hide the luggage, never mind. I never saw a suitcase in the movies.

We had no sooner begun to drink our green tea, sitting cross-legged at a little table that would be pushed to one side at night, than Charley asked me to call Takashi—the first salvo in what would
become a constant battle to have me talk instead of him.

“You call,” I said. “He’s your friend.”

“Dad, I have to go to the toilet.”

As he closed the door behind him, I resolved that I would not give in this time. He would have to talk himself.

“Come!” he called from the bathroom. “Come now. Quick!”

Whatever he had seen in the bathroom, I knew immediately, was very strange. He’d already seen weird Japanese stuff on the way here—the white-gloved taxi driver, the extraordinary neon-lit shop of pink and orange and blue flowers, a newsstand filled with countless manga with spines two inches thick— but the strangeness he was now negotiating was of a different magnitude.

“Everybody with a taste for traditional architecture,” Junichiro Tanizaki wrote in 1933, “must agree that the Japanese toilet is perfection.” He then lamented the cost of traditional construction and described his own compromise between cost and custom. “I at least avoided tiles, and had the floor done in camphour wood. To that extent I tried to create a Japanese atmosphere, but was frustrated, finally, by the toilet fixtures themselves. As everyone knows, toilet fixtures are made of pure white porcelain and have handles of sparkling metal. Were I
able to have things my own way I would much prefer fixtures—both men’s and women’s—made of wood. Wood finished in glistening black lacquer is the very best; but even unfinished wood, as it darkens and the grain grows more subtle with the years, acquires an inexplicable power to calm and soothe. The ultimate, of course, is a wooden ‘morning glory’ urinal filled with boughs of cedar; this is a delight to look at and makes not the slightest sound.”

“Dad, come
now
! Look!”

God knows what Tanizaki would have thought, but I was certainly as startled as my son, for the toilet in our traditional hotel looked like a contraption designed for a science-fiction comedy. Its arrays of yellow, red, and blue buttons beside the seat might, as one could guess, lower or raise the device, convert the toilet to a bidet or—surely this must have been my misunderstanding—a shower. However, it was not immediately clear how one would flush it. Finally I pushed the blue button and the toilet indeed flushed, but then water started gushing from a faucet into a triangular basin in a corner of the room.

We burst out laughing.

It was at just this moment, before we had time to discover that the seat was electrically heated, that the telephone rang.

“Please come,” a woman said.

“Who is this?”

“Front desk. You come now, please.”

“That will be Takashi,” said my son, slipping into his shoes in the vestibule.

“Is there a problem?” I asked the woman on the phone.

“Yes. Please come now.”

Charley was convinced it was Takashi, though I was equally certain there was a problem with my MasterCard. We bickered amiably while proceeding down the narrow stairs. In the tiled reception, the two young women who’d welcomed us so warmly were still smiling, though differently now, with a sort of grimace of embarrassment. Credit card, I thought, credit card for sure!

The elder, she was no more than thirty, did not speak. Instead she made a gesture that foreigners are taught is more polite than pointing: not one finger, but all five digits together like a slap. Looking in the direction this indicated, I saw, by the wide doorway to the lane, in front of the antique calligraphic banner and beside the picturesque sake barrels, the most singular boy. It was not just his hair, or his eyes, or his clothes that distinguished him. There was a certain quality of
light
he seemed to have brought in with him, one quite distinct from the deep shadows and glowing gold tones of the ryokan, something more like that clean white, almost hallucinogenic illumination in a Tokyo department store. He literally
shone
.

I looked at Charley. How happy he seemed.

This must be Takashi, I did not doubt it.

In Tokyo’s Harajuku district one can see those perfect Japanese Michael Jacksons, no hair out of place, and punk rockers whose punkness is detailed so fastidiously that they achieve a polished hyper-reality Takashi had something of this quality He had black hair that stood up not so much in spikes but in dramatic triangular sections. His eyes were large and round, glistening with an emotion that, while seemingly transparent, was totally alien to me. He wore a high-necked Cambridge blue jacket with what might have once been called a Mao collar, and which glistened with gold buttons. His trousers were jet black, his boots knee high. No one could doubt his pride, or his sense of dignity.

“Charley-san?” he asked, and bowed.

My son also bowed.

The women in kimonos looked straight ahead as if none of this was happening.