Fraud (20 page)

“Do you speak Japanese? Because we don’t speak English,” I am greeted at the sushi bar I enter at seven
A
.
M
. The only Westerner in the tiny place, I sit between a young couple on my right, blissed out in morning afterglow, and to my left a scarily bright-eyed foursome of Prada-wearing businesspeople, two men, two women. I am given the choice of a $
30
or a $
23
breakfast set. Deciding upon the latter (even as I write this I am still stewed in regret over my foolishly saved ¥
800
), I begin with a miso soup flavored with thumbnail-size clams. The sushi—extraordinarily fresh, some pieces still eerily warm with recent life, others bracingly freezing—is placed directly on the counter in front of me.

Perhaps it’s the early morning protein jolt of all that fish, the sheer Carl Sandburg big shoulders quality to the whole Tsukiji enterprise, or the proximity to all that top o’ the food chain death and mayhem, but I leave exultant, walking out into the rain with a high heart like Gene Kelly.

My exuberance isn’t entirely food related. I have been so relieved to find that the city in and of itself is not enough to unlock the sadness or fear of my younger self. To the contrary, I have been unable to wipe the smile from my face since I arrived, giddy with a sense of survival. It’s not even clear to me that that old misery is still even housed in my body anymore. I had been avoiding a monster behind a door for thirteen years, only to find that it had melted away long ago, nothing more than a spun-sugar bogeyman. It’s definitely not the first time in my adulthood that I have realized this, but it never fails to cheer me to have it proven yet again that almost any age is better than twenty-two.

An enormous blue balloon of
Dobbu-kun
(“Mr. DOB”) artist Takashi Murakami’s mouse-eared, agate-eyed Everycreature adorns the entrance to the Shinjuku branch of the Parco department store. Department stores are far more microcosmic than their American counterparts, with bookstores, food halls to rival Harrod’s, and art galleries of important stature. Murakami is at the forefront of the Japanese vanguard that owes much to
anime
cartoons,
manga
(comics), and archetypal Japanese cuteness. Limited to neither the strawberry-scented eraser world of
Hello, Kitty
nor the ubiquitous youth-lobotomizing cult of Pika-chu and his Pokémon pals, the archetypal aesthetic of
kawai
(“cute,” most often said in reference to a pencil case and drawn out in a nasal whine, almost pained at the intolerable levels of said object’s adorability) now spans both the globe and generations, from schoolchildren to club kids to the worlds of typography and design. Mr. DOB’s candy-colored world of smiling daisies and psychedelic toadstools is very
kawai
indeed, albeit with a vaguely sinister undertone of throbbing sexuality and atomic age anxiety. It has brought out the full range of Tokyo trendocrats: art students, critical theory heads, collectors. An American dealer in a blue blazer and Hermès tie walks from painting to painting, talking in Japanese into his cell phone. His pressed jeans are rolled up at the cuff, revealing the red thread at the selvage, the telltale proof that these are the limited-edition Levi’s manufactured exclusively for the denim-mad Japanese market.

In terms of sheer label-crazed consumerism, the Japanese have always been able to teach Americans a thing or two. I walk through Takeshita-dori, a rabbit warren of streets and alleyways geared to the city’s younger adolescents: teens in their autonomy training wheels phase. It is a crush of juvenile bodies, many in school uniforms—the girls wearing their trademark
ruusu soksu
(literally “loose socks”), white socks that grip the leg just below the knee and then cascade in folds of ribbed cotton, pooling over and around their shoes. The river of youth flows in and out of stores selling notebooks, lighters, stickers, pens, and clothing that will come apart after one washing—all the merchandise is eye-catching and fairly shitty, the entire scene scored with incredibly loud bubblegum music.

All of this buzz, both aural and visual, is vibrant but leaves me feeling clobbered. Seeking out an antidote to all the stimulus, I board the subway. I can only sympathize with the man in suit and tie (perhaps one of those fabled
risutora?
I shall never know) dozing with his sleeping four-year-old daughter. Tied around the father’s wrist is a plastic bag in which a goldfish—not asleep—swims casually back and forth. I am bound for my favorite part of Tokyo, Yanaka and Nippori, two adjacent neighborhoods that are part of Tokyo’s old Shitamachi (downtown). The myth that Tokyo’s history has been effaced by earthquake and war is, thankfully, only partially true. Yanaka is marked by its authentic working-class flavor, old houses, profusion of lovely temples, and magnificent cemetery. The main shopping strip is a narrow pedestrian mall of food stores and utilitarian shops, grandly named, in a touching bit of puffery, the Yanaka Ginza. I buy a small bag of fish balls from a vendor and walk along snacking in one of the few areas of Tokyo where public eating is not a faux pas. A politician running in the current municipal elections stands beside his idling station wagon, addressing a small group of shoppers and merchants. He finishes to a smattering of applause and gets back in his car. All around town I see entire walls plastered with posters for dozens of candidates. Later on in the day the rain graduates to full-on torrential as the same candidate, getting soaked, promises all manner of things that I cannot understand to me and two
7
-year-old schoolchildren on their way home. I stand listening, too embarrassed to move.

Yanaka cemetery is as crowded with headstones as Père Lachaise, only the markers, rather than being adorned with crosses, are festooned with
sotoba,
wooden pickets painted with the decedent’s Buddhist name in kanji. The lanes are sodden with rain, the paths muddy. Huge ravens, oily black, sit soaked and spindle feathered in the bare trees. It is blessedly still, inordinately peaceful, and contemplative. I am alone here, even though I am in central Tokyo, a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks of the train station, a short ride from my hotel. A good thing, too. In ten days I never manage to sleep more than four hours at a time, so I return to the hotel each afternoon for a very necessary rest and some even more necessary TV watching.

Television is good practice for my remaining Japanese, a mere fingernail paring of comprehension and conversational ability. TV is also my only indication that Tokyo is no longer Fat City. I see a number of new shows concerned with “bargains.” The camera careering through a grocery store as the hostess holds up packages of sea urchin for only ¥
350
! She is amazed! A restaurant in Nagoya serves curry rice (a Japanese staple: a brown, curry-scented gravy of dubious provenance served over rice) for only ¥
1
! The patrons shoveling the mess into their mouths are most definitely getting what they pay for. On another program, a housewife economizes by making
everything
by hand: the family tofu, the potato chips. She has ledger books and calculators. I watch her attend a pot luck, having managed to keep the cost of her ample contribution down to ¥
30
. At the end of the taped sequence, in the studio audience with her husband and two children, she is presented with a certificate of accomplishment. Her nerves worn filament thin from her labor, she bursts into tears.

There is also the equal and opposite reaction to all this frugality. High Life programs with host after host going to hot springs hotels. After being shown in the bath discreetly naked, they lounge in cotton
yukata
robes by a hibachi. A large clam is placed directly over the flame and pops open, the rilled edges of the creature furling in succulent demise—a time-lapse flower in reverse. I see this image at least three times.

The only person with whom I have maintained barely sporadic contact in the decade-plus since I lived in Japan is Kyoko Makino, with whom I worked at the art publisher. When I go to pick her up for dinner, I feel none of the anticipated trepidation as I walk into the office. I know almost nobody still working at the publishing house, and I, in turn, am barely remembered. The new publisher is the son of the man I worked for. When he was nineteen to my twenty-two, I tutored him in English. Even though it is quite clear that I am there to see Makino-
san
and not him, he sends her off to get me some coffee that I do not want. After ushering me into the conference room, he shows me the company’s newest project, a magazine devoted to oenophilia in Japan. (This will prompt me later over dinner to teach Makino-
san
the term
wine bore.
)

We have come to a restaurant in an old house at the end of a long, shaded walkway, lit with glowing braziers. We sit on tatami, an ember-filled grill in the center of our table. A seemingly endless variety of beautiful dishes emerges from the kitchen, starting with three small rectangles of tofu on bamboo skewers, each block enameled with a puree of a different color—green pea, orange squash, and a vermilion sweet miso—and ending some two hours later with a chilled slice of Japanese melon, dark jade and nearly translucent. The meal is extraordinary, and we spend a great amount of time talking about how good everything is. “Isn’t this sort of the same thing as a ‘wine bore’?” Kyoko asks. “Are we being a ‘food bore’?” Scandalized by such a ridiculous suggestion, I assure her we are no such thing.

Night falls. I look out through the shoji into the central courtyard. There are two smaller teahouses, used as private dining rooms, the stone steps up to each of them ensnared in wisteria roots. It is a perfect evening. For many reasons, actually. Japanese is the unbicycle of languages: you
never
remember, and I had been fearing that my speech, unpracticed for over a decade, coupled with stereotypical Japanese reserve would confine Makino-
san
and myself to such conversational gambits as “Oh, look, beer!” and “Yes!” But I have remembered a great deal more than I thought. We talk about former co-workers, marriage and singlehood, aging parents, all of the things I might talk about with friends in New York.

This greater openness of feeling is true of almost all my encounters. The Bubble, with its influx of foreign business, has achieved what over a century’s passage—since Japan first opened up to the West at the beginning of the Meiji period in
1868
—and even a postwar occupation could not accomplish: Tokyoites seem almost completely inured to Westerners, thanks in part to the scores of foreigners I see speaking perfect, unhalting Japanese. By the same token, the use of egregiously bad English is also far less in evidence, although happily has not entirely died out, as evidenced by the T-shirt on sale in the Melrose Boutique for Men that reads, simply: “Blow jobs $
10
.” At around
118
yen to the dollar, this would be one of the city’s real bargains. Actually the city’s real bargain is the once legendarily expensive Tokyo coffee. I keep reminding myself that it is we who have caught up with Japan, now that “Double Skinny Macchiato” has become global Esperanto for “Here’s my savings, where’s my breakfast?”

Here is the object lesson of room
201
of the Tokyo Station Hotel, my second place of lodging: the time that it takes to utter, in camp appreciation, “This room is like a set from a snuff film. It’s faaabulous!” also turns out to be the maximum amount of time one really wants to stay in same. It is another matter entirely to have to sleep there for two nights. It is very high ceilinged and enormous, but room
201
is the kind of sad interior where gamblers down on their luck live out their last days, only to end up drunkenly falling against the sharp corner of the coffee table, scattering their pills across the nylon carpet, and slowly bleeding to death. Not a happy place. Although clean, the place is grimy with disrepair and shabbiness: overhead fluorescent lighting, chipped wood veneer, and antimacassars on the armchairs, worn shiny with use and old pomade. And what can one say about a room where everything is so meticulously and ostentatiously wrapped for “your sanitary protection”? That old witticism of the schoolyard “Whoever smelt it, dealt it” springs to mind.

My previous hotel certainly didn’t feel the need to protest this much. Whereas at the Seiyo, in the dresser drawer, along with the stationery and room service menus, there was also, beautifully printed on vellum, a suggested jogging route around the Imperial Palace gardens, at the Tokyo Station Hotel I am provided with a long list of “Rules on Accommodation Utilization.” I am told “not to give annoyance to others by making great noise or disgusting behaviors.” I am forbidden from bringing onto the premises “things with loathsome smell” and, inexplicably, “materials in great quantity.” But for the omission of “Don’t Shoot the Piano Player,” it is a code of conduct straight out of Dawson City. I am also proscribed from “hanging up such items at the windows which will spoil the outside view of this hotel.” While it is true that the Tokyo Station Hotel from the front is a lovely red-brick-and-limestone building like the great railway hotels of old, should I choose to open the pebbled-glass windows of
201
, which faces the back, I would be greeted with a view of the permanent dusk from the elevated track above, the hum of industrial air ducts below, and at eye level, not twenty feet away, a commuter platform, complete with salary man looking straight back at me. I have often wondered, when riding into cities late at night on the train, Who are the sad people behind those darkened windows that directly abut the tracks? Now, in some small measure, I know.

I couldn’t feel sorrier for myself. Don’t they know I’m fragile? After a scant four days of the betoweled lushness of the Seiyo, I have turned into the high-maintenance jerk of my own worst nightmares. Fleeing my room, I seek out the city’s nocturnal diversions.

I eat supper at an outdoor yakitori restaurant, a stall with chairs and two tiny tables, underneath the highway overpass near Yuraku-cho station. The sidewalk and traffic are barely masked by the
noren,
the abbreviated curtains that hang down a foot or so. In the rain, right up against the traffic, both foot and vehicular, drinking my beer while I wait for my food, I am overcome with the urban romance of it all. How, I wonder, is it all that different from my high-ceilinged hotel room, disinfected for my comfort and protection, that sits right up against the railroad tracks, waiting for me?