During the 5 hour stopover in Seoul they put me on a bus for a tour of the city. We were taken to a restaurant were they served us the Korean classics, that is, of course, mainly kim-chee, a spicy cabbage dish, and I realised immediately why the Japanese call the Koreans "ninniku-jin" (garlic people). I happened to be the only westerner in a group of Japanese. And I kept thinking; was it only last week, was it only last night, this morning even ? All these scenes like frozen carvings or luminous netsuke holograms in my memory, my mind, are they not possessions as well ? And do they impoverish me or enrich me, I'm afraid I don't know. Another lot of images to go by, to deduct from, to maybe shape future conduct and behaviour, feelings and decisions. New people, dear ones, but only there for a couple of weeks or even days and then probably never to be seen again, never to be talked to or touched. A buddhist I once talked to in Northern Thailand counseled me to stop traveling, to stop accumulating more experiences and sensations, to turn inward and digest and wipe out all these accretions and thus gain deliverance. Well I wonder because somehow I have this hunch that one has just as hard a time when one is digesting one or in any case few experiences or going on and on and tackling the whole gamut of them. After all, any emotion at all deeply felt is bound to touch on all compass-points of the "soul", a word I use for lack of an apter one. So whether you try to fathom one of them or all of them, you're always up against the same mystery, bound to be overwhelmed by the very same awe. So carry on.
So at that point he asked her if she would like to hear a song. She said yes please and settled back in her chair, her knees drawn up to her chin en her arms around them. He took the guitar that unfortunately lacked the first string and that hadn't been played for a very long, long time. He could sense this, and of course the thick layer of dust on its big body and neck told its own story of neglect. He strongly felt instruments shouldn't be left unplayed like that, uncared for in some closet. Still he played her one of his simple songs with intricate lyrics and at the end said, it's called Nothing World and you could say it's a buddhist song in a way. He felt slightly nervous and self-conscious. This usually happened when he played for someone. The evening was cold and he shivered while lighting a cigarette.
They had sat in silence for close on five minutes when he asked "Can you hear the sizzling night ?" After some more silence she said "Yes, I guess that's what it does."
So they sat by the wood-and-paper sliding-doors and listened. He was not nervous now and his cigarette had long been extinguished. Now you may think their minds were racing but, really, they thought of nothing in particular. For all kinds of interlocking reasons this was a very happy night for them. It was another case of just carrying on and the odds were in their favour .
Hours before they had met for the first time in a Kyoto jazz club were they were thrown together in a group of people and got to talking. At a very early point in their half-shouted conversation she said "If we have breakfast together ..." and then her voice trailed off in the noisy surroundings. That, and her remarkable attractiveness, quite made him sit up and as the evening and the drinking went on the story emerged. It turned out she had been studying kimono-making for nearly two years here and she had done it the hard way, that is under a Japanese sensei who really believed in old-style discipline which means that for instance the first months you do nothing but sweep the courtyard and carry out the garbage so to speak. This is a test of your determination as a real master doesn't want to waste his time with hobbyists or amateurs. All instruction was of course in Japanese so there was more study but she progressed and was kept on her toes with more and more intricate techniques and for the last months she had been working round the clock on a book about Japanese textile design. So there really was no time for any kind of social life and she had even lost touch with the extensive expat community in Kyoto. So that evening when she decided on going out she had looked in the mirror and said, this is 16 months I've swotted and sweated and for all that time I haven't touched a man; this is about to change tonight. So that evening she sized up the field and finally ran into someone just over on a holiday and about to leave in a week, i.e. no way this little fling was going to complicate her life as an affair with someone living local would have done. And he turned out to be the lucky one although of course it was complicated. A woman who's been alone that long and who has to drink a lot to get her courage up is quite something to bed. There's great theatricals and a lot of shoulds and shouldn'ts but as shown before it turned out well for both parties concerned. Just the drunken ride home on her bike with me wearing a borrowed helmet and being taunted by the bozozuki (motorcycle hooligans Japanese style) was a comic strip adventure in itself. Oh Carolina !
In the departure lounge trying to buy some cigarettes I got it straight from Korean television. I couldn't understand a bloody word of course but one thing stood out like the sorest thumb you could ever come across: it was HIM allright. They were showing stills of an aunt-faced B-movie actor at various stages of his very moving and truly inspiring career. Right, it is fucking Reagan after all. My features must have conveyed such unadulterated disgust that several Japanese and Koreans standing close by were visibly taken aback. I turned away abruptly and made my sad way to the upstairs bar in order to get pissed. On the American channel of Korean TV they had some kind of beauty pageant; the Miss Universe swimsuit competition. All the meat was called up piecemeal to say a few words to the American M.C. who deftly managed to treat them each to some bafflingly stupid macho put-down at the end of their little exchange. The panel of judges was presented to the enthusiastic audience. A number of slick fat men done up in expensive suits and dirt-cheap smiles, with the token woman thrown in for good measure. So here goes folks. Here's miss Iceland, she's 19 years old, she has brown hair and green eyes, she weighs 118 pounds and she's 5 feet 9 inches tall. There's a human being for you. So feast your eyes and the old dormitory rule that bids you keep your hands above the bedcovers is waived. So the long night wears on. The election and the swimsuit competition for heaven's sake, what's the difference anyway. Both of them seem to be won by being as bland as you can possibly get away with and sucking up to the right people in the right places. If only it didn't burn out your brain you could just carry on. But this is Korea right ? The guy from Korean Airlines who drove me to the Hyatt Regency once after I've wheedled a free night out of them on a different journey, told me his was a good country, it's a democracy, just like America, he said. Well, no going that one better, right ? And if you ask them about this whole place out there on the streets they're bound to wax lyrical or at least quite positive about the whole set-up here. But talk to them in private if it can be done. I'm sure they're fed up with it all but it's hard to go and open your mouth when you're shaking in your boots. Ask Kim Dae Jung. At this very moment the bastards are frantically busy trying to figure out just how bad it's gonna look if they off him. They're dying to know just how much flak they're gonna catch if they go and bump him off. Right, but now here's miss Sweden, swinging a mean tit for all you innocents out there, so get with it, drool. And you can bet your sweet ass they're quite prepared to take a LOT of flak to get Kim Dae Jung out of their hair, an awful lot. Just imagine, here's this guy who actually dared to talk back, even tho' in muted tones, who actually had the bloody cheek to try and put the whole militaristic rigmarole into some kind of perspective. Like that's just about unnatural, right, against the heaven-ordained order of things, order, there's the rub, right ? Someone who couldn't agree 300 % (and that's the least these bloodsucking bastards will accept) so he's better off dead and all the little children can rest easy, they won't be strangled in their teeny weeny cots by that lunatic Kim Dae Jung. Oops, did I just miss out on miss America's gorgeous ass disappearing offstage, god how these petty political musings distract you from what really matters. But not again, better get set for miss Thailands 's pearly belly button. Let's get down to serious businesss, pass the kleenex folks and kindly look the other way. How's that for carrying on ?
These beauty pageants, these Playboy magazines, Penthouse, the tits and ass that sell cars and cigarettes and chewing-gum, the lot, don't they present you with a riddle ? They did me I tell you, I used to endlessly ruminate on the question where they got these unreal women from, these girls that try to turn your bowels to water and succeed as often as not. But don't look too closely because when you do you'll find they're all the same and no matter how much their sex-appeal is played up they seem so cold and from one mould and I know just why that is. If you can take it I will tell you tho' I don't know if it's going to help you any as I don't even know if it did me. But then of course let nothing bar the pursuit of pure knowledge just for knowledge's sake. It's Howard Hughes all over again. We, civilisation in general that is, haven't finished with this aviator yet, not by a long shot. You know there's a legendary plane nearly eternally airborne. There's an awful lot more to it than just that silly escapade, there has to be. It's simple, you can't just endlessly fly around and drink, be merry, sleep and count clouds, play scrabble or read comics, you want to work for your keep and even if fortune has put itself out for you in ways that make labour superfluous you still want to feel useful or keep the bucks rolling in just for the hell of it. So old Howard and his cronies in the think-tank came up with the perfect scheme and science pitched in for all it was worth (and we all know what old Howard was worth, right) As you know it is all men up in that plane, and boys being boys and dirty minds being joys forever, the guys in control decided to to take it from there. Here's how it works, I won't bother you with the technical side of it all, being of a rather simple turn of mind myself in that respect. They came up with the masturbatron, a steel and glass contraption where all the male fantasies of all continents and ages are stored and by processes I can't fathom they're turned into semi-sentient holograms that eventually roll onto a pink silk assembly line where the ultimate fantasy spectrum is generated to later on be set down at conveniently isolated airports from which these new creatures, hot and raring to go, are let loose on an unsuspecting but quite expectant planet. Hence these pageants and scintilating magazines.
So I finally get on the plane, pissed out of my brain and considerately pissed off. Now these people on an interncontinental flight do really stay with it. The tele's on and it's Reagan all the way of course. The corpse is smiling and they've hit on a way to make him gesture quasi lively. Perhaps they let him have a closer look at the masturbatron. Here's to the decrepit and the maimed, the knackered in body, the shattered of brain; their man is in now for the harvest. Have a missile man, knock yourself out on an ICBM wet dream. You just can't help but feel that they're gonna come awfully cheap. And here's this bunch of people quietly sorting out their seating arrangements. I bend over some young kid, slightly freaky-looking "You American man ? ", "I am Danish", very polite. "Fucking Reagan took it man" Very cultured smile, apologetic, like, don't blame him, right ? I mean, who gives a shit these days ? So I stumble on, gotta find my seat, right ? I know I got one in the bowels of this flying rabbit-hutch. Black guy's occupying my window-seat. OK, none of that discrimination shit, so I tell him he's in my seat and he moves "Fucking Reagan, man", "Yeah, how the hell can they do it ? Sorry 'bout taking your seat, man". So there's the victorious mummified factotum of middle-class futility gone berserk saluting the masses, bloody muppet gone clean out of control. Sleets of shit coming down a mile a minute and don't it frighten these people ? Well no, we're on the Paris flight and it's mainly French tourists who'd only get upset if the wine was slightly off. What's it to them ? They've got the Eiffel-tower, the Tour de France and De Gaulle's legacy of baguette greatness so they're happy as pigs in shit. Oh, and you want me to carry on. Good. I will. But can I please smash something, just some haphazard harmless little bit of careless violence maybe. Dance to the tune of the times, so to speak. Wakarimashita ! I ...will...carry on, but if ever there was a case of well-meaning people, harmless little fuck-ups, being left in the lurch, holding the baby, well this is the primordial case of it not just being twins or triplets, no, this is beyond quadruplets, it's goddamn quintuplets we've got stuck with this time. But carry on, right ? Carry on. If I must.
I had ended up in Zacbaran that night, a jazz-joint in the northern part of town on Marutamachi. It was the first time I went there on my own and of course I managed to get lost after getting out at Kumano-jinja, the nearest crossroads. Well I got there anyway, none the worse for wear and ready for some action, like it's saturday night, right ? Sat down at a table near the piano and I'd hardly been there a couple of minutes when Barry and Billy stumble in. Beer everybody and how is everybody ? At this point, in walks this French pick-up artist with three girls in tow, really scored big tonight. Another case of biting off more than you can chew, but wait, let's just see if there might not be something for little old us there. Barry, pretty drunk by now - have we seen this before somehow ? - stumbles over to the little group by the counter who are obviously at a loss about where to sit as the place is quite packed as per usual. So they come and sit with us. I know none of the girls but I don't want the French guy to sit down next to me so I manoeuver in such a way that the most attractive woman sits by me. So now I'm on my own and hanging in there for all I'm worth. Still, I got spared most of the normal effort because as it happens it was she doing the hunting and I just fit the description. So we got to talking, the usual give and take, the customary banter but with just the right measure of wit thrown in. The right measure being all you can come up with, all you can bloody well get away with, but going on past experience not counting on anything, not placing any bets, for once just going with the flow, not caring, just enjoying the moment, her good looks and feeling happy about the fine conversation and the kind of underlying understanding that we both want the same thing. So we're just five minutes into our ritual dance, into our personal currency exchange and she's been telling me about her being a textile designer and studying the whole kimono designing process with a sensei and how she worked for a whole year in a textile factory for paltry wages just to get the hang of what the whole thing was about. So I tell her I don't know anything about this and that the technical terms she's using are way above my head when she tells me that maybe if we have breakfast together she can show me some samples so I'd understand more about it. But this is after midnight so there's an awful lot more here than meets the eye and I can hardly believe what's happening to me and Barry, who's been hanging in there on the fringe of our discussion, suddenly seems to realise this is going to be MY night, not his, so he gets ready to split being more than normally drunk by now.
Carolina asks me if I've got a motorcycle, and if not, can I borrow a helmet to come with her on hers. So I tell Barry to put his spare helmet in the basket of the little blue Honda 75 parked left of the entrance. He promises he will but insists on me paying his bill in exchange, there just ain't no free lunch in this world is there ?
I ask Carolina if she wants more hot sake but she refuses as she's not used to drink. "I'm drinking now, but that's because I felt I was cracking up. I've been here for nearly two years but I never go out. I didn't even know this place existed. I avoid foreigners you know, the only contact I've got here is with Japanese, and well, I've come to wonder whether that's contact at all, the way we understand it." "They're hard to get close to in a personal way, I know." "You tell me... but I love Japan, I'm passionately in love with this place. It's great, but the fact that I'm cracking up now, isn't that crazy ?" "Well, love-hate relationships with Japan are not as uncommon as all that." "I know, I know, it's all so intricate but I don't know how much longer I can take it, I might be here for another two years, and after all I've got this book to write, but then I might be off next month, I just don't know any more." "Why didn't you go out and mix with foreigners to ease the pressure somewhat ?" "I don't know, well I do know, who wants to go out and be talked into bed by the first drooling gai-jin who happens along, but in a way that's why I came out tonight. I just felt I couldn't take another saturday night at home, working, working, burning out my brains or what's left of them, over my book.
Suddenly, the table halfway topples because Barry's popped up again, the awful genie strikes again, he's tried to lean on our table confidentially and there go half of the glasses and bottles. He's off in a flash and we are left to take stock of the damage. Now everyone's heading for an all-night disco and to my chagrin Carolina decides we have to go along as she hasn't been out for ages so she feels she really has to make a night of it. So it's paytime, stumbling outside time, loiter in the street time, motorcycle talk time. Everybody's got a bike and all the guys usually carry spare helmets in case they get lucky. Why no cars, you'll ask. When you buy a car here you've got to prove you've got somewhere to park it and there's little or no space for that except when you live out in the country, but that's impractical for most foreigners. The streets in old Kyoto are so narrow they're nearly all one way so no parking there. You might secure a place in some neighbourhood parking lot but that costs an arm and a leg and there's rarely any places free anyway. So a lot of the talk revolves around bike makes, flash helmets, leather gear, mileage to the gallon and gas ripped off by local teenage gangs. All this does not interest me at all so I'm just patiently standing around smiling ingratiatingly and praying to be off.
Luckily Carolina's bike is small and not very fast because I'm usually afraid on the back of the bigger machines of my friends who of course know this and like nothing better than swerving in and out of the busy downtown traffic and making U-turns like there's no tomorrow with me praying to make it home alive. So we're heading back south with Billy in the lead on his powerful Kawasaki playfully speeding ahead in order to wait for us at the next junction, he does this repeatedly until his bike breaks down on Sanjo so we walk from there with Carolina pushing her little bike along. We're crossing the bridge in the direction of Maruyama Park when who come roaring up but the bozozuki (Japanese motorcycle hoodlums), firing their engines like crazy and generally creating a terrible racket. They really get me on edge and I keep muttering, Stupid cunts, ah ya cunts, fuck off, fuck off, when Carolina turns on me and really gives me a piece of her mind "Why do you say that, why should you use that word in such a derogatory sense, it's a vital part of my anatomy which we're about to enjoy and you use it as a goddamn curse, you've got no right on earth to do that, it's so goddamn sexist !" And of course she's right, so many things that just roll off our tongues so easily have that sexist slant, you're not even conscious of it but it's there as a symbol of totally biased thinking and then someone steps in and rubs your nose in it. And I look at Carolina's face and it's like caleidoscopic, like it's countless faces and this is not the drink talking but infatuation. When you first fall for someone they have so many faces, later when you're used to them they have their one face that's convenient to you. Familiarity seems to rule out the multitude of faces and maybe true love is the acceptance and continued openness to someone else's multitude of faces.
OK. Take-off time. You've been there: twinkling glowworms fading in the oriental twilight. Allright, so you're up in the air. Grab a magazine - what have they got ? Time and Newsweek of course. The game is rigged. Just open one of them rags and the shit, the fathomless river of fragrant faeces hits you like a ton of bricks and I tell you, it doesn't even take reading between the lines. It takes no genius, no special perspicacity to see what's going on here. As long as you have not yet turned into a complete machine, into a godforsaken, blindly comsummating robot, some semi-stillborn brainwashed idiot you can see it spelled out plainly here. It's not even a case of some obscure writing on the wall that takes a religious bent in the reader's mind for it to properly come across, no it's fucking plastered across the bleeding sky, it's written all over the moon, the sea , the trees, all over defaced mother nature's countenance; the game is rigged from start to finish, it's a set-up, it's a stake-out and the control, the manipulation, the rape of language, the semantic assault, the disfigurement of feeling and what little wholesomeness is left isn't slackened for a goddamn split second and you can't even cry anymore, you can't even cry ... but, hang on, back to the oracle of western independent thought ... it seems that in East-Germany (another police-state that, but are there any others ?) they are putting up a statue for Frederick the Great. But it fits, it fits, 'cause call it capitalism, call it communism, call it christianity or esoteric buddhism, call it tourism for all I care, who is it calls the shots love ? The shots that so cruelly get in amongst you and leave you helpless at the psychiatrist's door, on the goddamn priest's threshold, the bloody welfare center's upholstered chair, deathrow's wooden bench, who set up the unholy hierarchy that puts certain people and institutions in a position to call the shots and trample all over the rest in a trance of religious observance, political subservience ? A manipulated press, a system of law that perpetuates the square root of status quo, all that endless parade of dog eat dog where individual responsibilities go down the drain ? It's THEM. Them of course, OK but as I'm too drunk now to be coherent and pinpoint the heart of the matter where we all are kept in a daze of cheap but heartfelt beliefs, opinions and the lot so that it is fairly impossible to focus your rage and therefore it's off to another football game for us, another miss Swimsuit competition to jack off to, another presidential election, another shot of heroin, another senseless murder. And your personal integrity and decision-making process is all out of kilter. Well you've been there and back and you've despaired and you were damn right to do so, how the hell can you carry on ?
Well I will, as I must, but on whose terms ? Mine ? I'll have to spell them out in my own sweet time and confused and disorientated as I am I don't know if I'm frightened of death or not. Are you ? I had to ask myself the question as suddenly we hit an area of extreme turbulence and I could see that even the stewardesses looked frightened and totally upset as I kept ordering more booze and knocking it back with obvious pleasure. As we kept dropping into one air-pocket after another and luggage and stuff was flying around I realized I couldn't give a monkey's toss if we made it or not, and believe me, there's freedom for you.
Carolina and me met up in the center of town and had a drink together. She wanted to take me to Heian Jingu, a big Shinto shrine that was built as late as 1895. As we walked through the truly impressive red entrance gate (torii) she told me it was one of the biggest in the whole of Japan and I didn't find it hard to believe her, as it was really huge. The grounds are extensive and the immense front courtyard is covered in some kind of white sand. We strolled through the gardens and then she showed me a building were there were all kinds of alcoves with live-size dolls of court ladies of old. They were covered in layer upon layer of colourful kimono and Carolina explained that the number of kimono and the quality of the material used determined these women's status. She gave me a lot of technical details that I did of course forget nearly instantly but the pleasure of her company largely compensated for my unfamiliarity with her profession. We were in that befuddled state were you tell each other all kinds of things from your past, sometimes in hope of finding a certain common ground. In the course of all this I found myself recalling and telling her a story that I had rarely shared with anyone else and hadn't thought about in years and years. Sometime in 1967 I had written a totally off-the-wall surrealistic piece of free association prose full of weird images of which I now recall only the picture of our Belgian king peddling oranges from a barrow in a busy marketplace. I had taken the piece with me to a beat and hippy hangout in order to review it I guess and what with one thing and another I forgot the folder with my piece in the pub when I left for home. There it was found by Jos De Hert brother of now famous Belgian film-maker Robbe De Hert. Robbe was not as well-known then as he is today, no it was Jos who stood out as that year he had won first prize at the then renowned Film Festival of Oberhausen in Germany. So Jos was considered one of the great white hopes of Belgian moviemaking and after reading my piece he decided he wanted to get to know me in order to turn it into a movie, or at least that was what he told the barman who kept the piece until I came asking for it the next day. He gave me a card with Jos' address and told me to contact him forthwith. I felt very flattered and proud and then never did anything about it. I never even mentioned it to Jos when we crossed each other in the street and as he didn't know me personally he never identified me as the author of the piece. Now, why did I do that, or rather not do that ? My mother once told me she thought I had a combination of a superiority and inferiority complex and said that was at the root of a lot of my problems and I guess she was right to some extent. Anyway, these were heady days of drugs and music and I believe that Jos took one acid trip too many, joined the children of god and later slipped into a relative obscurity. Carolina refrained from comment and just hugged me and we made our way over lovely Kyoto's beautiful little side-streets. The whole city is laid out as a rectangular grit of streets with grand avenues in geometrical patterns crisscrossing so it's not easy to get lost there as you can always refer to these big crossings that are all over the place from north to south and east to west. At that time there was a rumour that even David Bowie had a house in Kyoto and that he sometimes was seen in rock joints etcetera. We all thought it plausible, as who would not want to live in sweet Kyoto, which was long called Heian Kyo by the way.
So I wake up as we're closing in on Anchorage and my sweet yesterday is lightyears away and I am nearly seized by sheer panic. I keep seeing images of myself acting and talking as if through an endless tunnel and it makes me feel infinitesimally small and the universe's message, its all-pervading motto, its slogan of ultimate futility is like a slap in the face once more. Like waking up of a morning and being crushed by the bleak weight of another uphill day of nothingness. Like lying in the dark beside your lover and still feeling miles away as if you were dangling, trussed up over a black abyss of space and time in an heartbreaking loneliness that I can't come near to describe, as if you were teetering on the ultimate edge of yourself over a cosmic void of dead silence. From high up in the aisles, the cheapest seat in a collosal stadium you get to peer down on a worn-out stage to watch your own performance as protagonist in the god and man game, the good and evil imbroglio, the whole neurotic gig all over again. Do you think you'd like to boo or applaud at that very moment when you can no longer carry on, when all notions of internal volition and external coercion merge and you cannot possibly go on ? Maybe you can spare a last thought then for the futility of human suffering and the statuesque grandeur of single humans displaying the ultimate courage of their flying in the teeth of it all for fleeting love and enduring compassion, their little nests in the eye of the storm, their heartrending small kindnesses and affection that assume monumentality in the face of the goddamn ages of whoredom and general sell-out, the cheapskating that is rife and which is hailed as progress and growth. Honour their endeavours then and file offstage with whatever dignity life hast left you.
And dazed and bewildered I stumbled out of the plane into the Anchorage transit zone with its huge stuffed polar bear in its glass cage and I gave the Hitler salute to the customs officers muttering Hail Reagan and frankly speaking I'm glad they realised I was halfway crazed with drink and travel fatigue, so they took pity and didn't arrest me for contempt or something. Then some whispy creature comes and sits down next to me while slurping cup noodles and desperately trying to talk to me in a language I cannot possibly place, all I can see is its urge to communicate and at the same time the complete impossibility of any meaningful exchange. Intercontinental travel and its strange treats and mysteries.
After our visit to the Heian Shrine, we made our way to another part of town in order to visit Nijo-jo (castle), former residence of the Shogun, or military leaders of Japan for 300 years. Hand in hand we ambled around the gardens and for the umpteenth time I reflected upon the earthiness of so much of Japanese architecture, although, as you'll see later, Nijo-jo is perhaps not the best example of what I'm getting at. Time and again in Japan I was struck, and sometimes awestruck, by the compact aesthetic of the combination of gardens and buildings, the wooden walkways and elegant bridges outside shrines, temples and houses overlooking tempting ponds and artfully composed rock formations that in all their artificiality still seemed to breathe the utter simplicity of nature's own fashionings. This artificiality can really go extremely far in Japan. One autumn I spied upon a team of gardeners in their white tabi (a kind of sock with splayed toes, that can be worn outside) sweeping up the fallen leaves from beneath a deciduous tree and then putting them back in a more artful pattern, which, according to them, was more pleasing to the eye and an improvement on nature's clumsy ways. I mean, you really gotta hand it to them.
Countless times I sat in small nooks and crannies around shrines and gardens and got lost completely in the refined harmonious simplicity and beauty arrived at with such a degree of contrivance and feeling. You can also see this in the narrow Kyoto streets where lots of people have front gardens no bigger than 1 or 2 square yards where, with some moss, a bamboo stalk or two and a few rocks, they manage perfectly to capture a sort of essence of the Japanese aesthetic and its incredible impact. They often made me stop and think, very impressive indeed.
We entered the actual castle, which by European standards isn't all that big, considering it used to house the rulers of the land. One of its interesting features is the phenomenon of the "whistling" floors (I would say they squeeked rather than whistled) to prevent prowling assasins bent on taking the shogun's life from getting near him as they would be betrayed by the sounds coming from the floorboards that no amount of artful stalking could suppress. This is the architecture of power and its private fears. Nijo-jo is built on a relatively human scale as most Japanese buildings are, but even so it too tells the story of all power achitecture. With some English friends I once visited Noyons cathedral. That also isn't all that grand or gigantic but in the flat Picardy landscape it conveys its message clearly. I walked around in it and liked it in a way but as in all these buildings I get this melancholy feeling of suppression. It's not as inhuman as the buildings in the Vatican or the Ceaucescu monstrosities but as all spectacle architecture it was put up with the main incentive to tell the world's poor and downtrodden that that is exactly what they are compared to the rulers of the realm: sheer dispensable nothing or canon-fodder when worst comes to worst. It's a paradox that so many of the superior buildings that indeed inspire awe and wonder were built as a grand salute to the gigantic ego of those who commissioned them rather than as a contribution to beauty that they often also are. And the slaves or underpaid workers who built them were also intended to be the admiring and totally submissive public. Of course I am aware of the fact that a lot of the medieval cathedrals like the one in Antwerp for example were also a result of the labours of the local guilds who were proud to be part of the project that established an emerging class of city entrepreneurs, but still it was also a part of the all-embracing religious culture of the time and please don't get me started on organized religion or I might just go totally ballistic.
Carolina referred to the hierarchical structure of the Japanese language where you usually talk either "up" or "down" to people, where there is a form reserved for women only, very humble of course, or hadn't you guessed. There are also at least three different modi for one and the same expression; colloquial, polite and super-polite. Some of this leads to funny breaches of the code, for instance when you want to say me or I you use "watashi", and tough men say "boku", now if you hear a woman use "boku" (and it happens occasionally) you may draw the obvious conclusion. Carolina, who is Australian, claimed that in her country language was more democratic and everyone spoke in the same manner. But when I hear it I always have trouble with the accent and I still prefer the queen's English although that again is an exponent of a rigid hierarchical class structure.
Carolina and I decided to call it a day and made for her house where we promised each other to strictly stick to egalitarian body language.
And I was on that endless plane-ride, two hours to go till Paris, and I was like fluff, I was pollen, I had dissolved. Maybe it was just my being worn-out by the time-zones, the intermittent twilight areas, maybe it was the beer, the whiskey, the red and white wine with the unspeakably shitty food that did me in. But it felt so good and at the same time so terribly bad, and I had the sensation of being eternally sheltered in that cramped economy-class window-seat with the piss churning in my bladder and the ashtray filling up and overflowing. I felt like crying but it was a rather mixed bag of emotions prodding me. Here I am 31 years old, I have by no means seen it all but I sure put in a lot of watching from the sidelines and yes, from the trenches too and of course I spit on the vile triviality of the show, the tragedy, the comedy we are all going through hand in hand and far apart at the same time, separated by these borders, these opinions and convictions that seem so insuperable but what can I say ? This moment I am not just loathing, I am love, all liquid love, I'm not just all hatred of the deprivation, the ruin; I find myself treasuring some fucking rune saying "wholesome" - go grab it boy, take a flying fuck at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - and carry on, ya silly little bugger, carry on and hang in there.
So I made my way to the toilet and as I stood there casually holding my prick with my right hand while steadying myself with my left and squirting away, I was all of a sudden racked with sobs and the tears, but all too few of them, flowed freely. That hardly ever happens to me, I daresay it's a rather rare occurence with most men my age, our upbringing and messed-up outlook on things gainsay us that release, that ephemeral relief. So if somebody could have seen me there, member dangling, back hunched against the sobs and blindly groping for some toilet paper to dry my eyes and face they might have averted their eyes in vicarious shame or rushed to my side to offer comfort, never realizing that I felt wrapped like a baby in my bittersweet mixture of sadness and rapture and was in no need of consolation. I was weeping beauty and sadness, I cried love and dislike, the conglomerates of the soul, the only true signposts of the heart and as the spell subsided and I flushed the toilet - they run that icky blue chemical solution down them - I caught my reflection in the mirror and I saw a piece of tissue had got stuck in the corner of my right eye near the bridge of my nose. I gingerly removed it and looked at my flushed and dishevelled face and for that moment at least, I found peace with myself. After that, back in my seat, I drank more wine and the steward serving me looked at me quizzically noticing my red, wet eyes, then looked away. I toasted his back, but not Reagan's.
We were walking by the Kamo river near Carolina's house and as the weather was so balmy for the time of the year I said it was a nice and soft day whereupon she hugged me tightly and whispered I used such gentle expressions, as long as I didn't start cursing of course. We made our way to a small local supermarket and many people seemed to know her in that neighbourhood. Now foreigners, or gai-jin, as the Japanese call us, always stand out of course and their every move is usually commented on intensively by the local gossips. Carolina, working in a nearby textile factory and studying with a well-known kimono master and generally keeping a low profile as well as speaking quite reasonable Japanese must have had a good reputation there. But in thrall to our little conflagration of passion she rather threw all customary caution to the wind and after buying some whiskey she wanted to toast me right then and there in public, so I drank with her and from the corner of my eyes I could see people staring and I'm sure this wasn't doing her standing in the community any good. So I gently hustled her out of there and made it to her house as quickly as possible. We ate and drank and talked and I played her some music but somehow during the evening the mood changed and she suddenly insisted I sleep in her workshop rather than let me share her futon for that night and whatever I said that was it. I pleaded she couldn't just switch me on and off like a light but no amount of reasoning helped so I was left to sleep and ruminate all by myself and I mused on the many strange women I had met in Japan. Many girls coming to Japan suffer from exagerated bouts of Japanophilia where they really think this is the perfect place to end all perfect places. I once took an American woman home who claimed there was absolutely no crime in Japan. I was flabbergasted and asked her what about the yakuza, the officially recognized Japanese gangster syndicates who have actual offices in all the big cities and who parade their criminal identity quite openly. To give you an example, I was once driving in a friend's car through the narrow streets of Kyoto's inner city pleasure quarters when we came upon a huge American car blocking the road and being guarded by an ominous looking type. We waited and waited until I asked my friend why he didn't blow his horn or get out to enquire what the matter was but he just said , "Look behind us, and then take another look at the car blocking the road." Behind us was a long row of cars, some of the drivers got out of their cars, moved on up to take stock of the situation, then moved back to their cars and did nothing. I looked at the car in front of us again and suddenly twigged, this was the case of a yakuza-boss hopping into one of his bars or hostess-clubs to deal with something and he certainly wasn't going to be bothered with looking for a parking-space, so his bodyguard stood by the car and waited, as all the rest of us did for nearly twenty minutes, and don't for the life of you think any policeman is going to intervene. I also asked her if she never read the newspapers with their constant reports on scandals, corruption and, indeed, extensive crime but all to no avail: there was no crime in Japan, full stop. This was not the only weird thing about her though, as there were no condoms in the house the only thing she could think of in the way of sex was masturbating me after thorougly greasing my penis with cold nivea cream, god what a mess she made. Anyway I spent a lonely frustrated night in Carolina's workshop. When I made my way back to Barry's flat in a taxi I thought that was the last I'd seen of her and I felt a sharp pang of regret but also reflected one had to count one's blessings as well. I was nearing my departure date and spent my days as the normal accidental tourist during the daytime and drinking with Barry and his cronies at night. On the eve of my leaving I got a phone-call from an at first quite subdued Carolina who asked if I could borrow Barry's spare helmet and meet her in front of Omiya station. When I agreed enthusiastically she buoyed up considerably and said she'd meet me in an hour and would abundantly make up for last time. When we embraced over her motorcycle in the midst of the hustle and bustle in front of Omiya we both felt elated and we sang idiotic songs all during the long slow ride to the north of Kyoto.
Our night was lovely and tender and stormy and mutually satisfactory and in the morning she presented me with a beautiful summer yukata, a short, man's kimono in light cotton with a blue on white classical pattern of fans which I treasure to this day. I took a taxi back to Barry's and had just time enough left to pack my bags and take leave of Barry and his Japanese-Korean wife and then make my way through the nearly deserted back streets of that part of Kyoto in the sweet autumnal sunshine. I passed Shinsen-en with its pond were whole families go and feed breadsticks to the tame carp on public holidays, and finally ended up on Horikawa-dori in front of Nijo Castle where there is an airport busstop. There I was nearly run over by Bruce, also known as the world's tallest infant, on his motorcycle who'd driven down all the way from the country-side village where he lived in order to bid me goodbye and just as I got on the bus he shook my hand and pressed a huge opal into my closing fist. What a guy ! In my mind some lines of a song I was trying to write about Carolina reverberated "When Carolina's on the make, there's such a lot of give and take, when Carolina's on the make. When Carolina's out to score, there's lust and love and so much more, when Carolina's out to score" and on rolled the airport bus that was taking me to Osaka's Itami airport with the song at the back of my head all along the way.
1981-2011
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