the poor animal

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A Tokyo Love Story

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo, 2013)

As you can imagine, it’s a terrifically delicate business. A challenge. To spend an entire evening at the neighbors’, across the table from the luminous red-headed wife, her blouse low-cut, her voice like drinking bourbon, her smile dazzling, a smile in which an invitation may or may not be concealed, her businessman husband at her side, overworked but affable, with the easy confidence of the incorrigibly successful, and their radiant girl-child, as bright and warm-hearted a child as ever lived. It’s a tremendous challenge, as I’m sure you can imagine, to sit there all night, apparently enthralled by their antics and exploits, their charm and cuisine, with my composure impeccable, my demeanor irreproachable, when in fact I don’t give a damn about any of them. Not a whit. I care only for their pet rabbit. The rabbit wears his resplendent brown fur in the style commonly referred to as “fluffy”. His name is Bunny. Bunny is five years old. Imagine having one’s own rabbit! He is the most adorable and beguiling creature I have ever in my life beheld. Could other rabbits possibly be like him? Bunny is the only rabbit I have ever been with. I mean that platonically, you understand. But other rabbits must not be so magnificent. Not like my Bunny. Because otherwise the news would be full of rabbits and people would stay home with their rabbit instead of spending their entire lives going here and there on the trains, staring all the time into their phones. Tokyo with a rabbit. Well, it just changes everything, doesn’t it? Here in Tokyo we have no animals. That’s not true. We have crows and cockroaches and dogs who wear shoes. A bunny rabbit in Tokyo is something downright revolutionary. No doubt this will knock the bottom out of the market for pet beetles. All night I remain at the neighbors’ table. My voice subdued, my expression rapt, my eyes where they ought to be: on the crudites, on the girl-child’s origami, on tops of the wife’s freckled breasts, composed even as my chest feels fit to burst and my heart is forever and always with Bunny, who is allowed to roam freely through the downstairs in the evening. Bunny prefers shadowed corners. It’s one of the things we share in common, Bunny and I. But now and then Bunny comes around to survey the perimeter, to visit the humans and make a show of his boundless tolerance to adult and child alike. I endeavor to keep my breath slow and calm. I speak as long as I am able to speak. When I can no longer speak I do my best to amiably nod. I remain at all times a gentleman. It’s not my fault. Bunny toys with me. Nothing about life in Tokyo ever prepared me for a rabbit. Now and then Bunny will even run figure-eights around my stocking feet. I myself am faultlessly discreet. But not Bunny. Bunny is shameless.

Account Information

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo, 2013)
Here in Tokyo, My husband and I went to the bank to sort a few things out. The bank teller explained that I had been out of the country so long that my account had fallen asleep. Unfortunately, there was no way to wake it up. It was entirely impossible because a) I’d lost my card (just a few years back) and b) I’d lost my bankbook (forever ago, before I ever understood what bank books are for and why they are so important to Japanese people) and c) I had no valid work visa. There was money in the account. Not a lot of money. A lot of money for me. “There is no way to do anything?” I asked the bank teller. Meanwhile, my husband was already getting mad. “So now we just lose everything?” “It is difficult”, said the bank teller. He asked us to return to the seating area and he would see what he could do. Twenty minutes later he called us back to the counter, presented me with my new bankbook (Winnie the Pooh!), told me I’d get my card in the mail, and in the meantime, would I like some cash? “Special case”, he said. The degree to which Tokyo is rule-bound can hardly be over-stated. At the same time, things like this do happen far more often than is generally admitted. After all, there are so very many rules. If you’re going to break one of them, you might as well break them all. Addendum: My husband reads over my shoulder and is flabbergasted. He insists that I have missed the entire point, omitted the primary point of interest, skipped the heart, soul, and flesh of the matter. Please excuse me. I will try again. The bank teller was absurdly impossibly gorgeous. Not handsome, not striking, I am talking about breathtakingly global celebrity gorgeous.*  While we waited, we watched advertisements for the bank’s services on the video in the waiting area. Not one of the famous people shown was anywhere near as good-looking as our actual bank teller. Fortunately we had been required to fill out the forms in advance. Otherwise we would not have been able to remember why we were visiting the bank.
Imagine an angelic yet masculine clean-cut boy-band star who has unfathomably decided to devote himself to courteous banking. You must know this moment: when you think, oh so obviously photo-shopped and then realize oh no, wait, this is actual life. He could have sent us away with nothing. We would not have made a fuss. We would have come back cheerfully, every three days, for the remainder of our lives, to see if he’d changed his mind. He also spoke excellent English. Almost perfect. Of course my husband spotted an error. “We do not say the account is sleeping”, my husband said. “We say it is dormant.” My husband went on to explain that he just happened to be a tutor, teaching English privately, professionally, casually, for a very reasonable rate, at his home, and here was his business card, which he presented at once with smile and a flourish. That dog.

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* Please contact me privately for branch information.

A Forest Ten Feet Wide

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo 2013)

“Don’t laugh at Tokyo,” my husband says.  But I wasn’t laughing.  That sound I made just now was the involuntary squeak that accompanies the truth when it abruptly comes into view.  When it passes through me suddenly, like a chill.

We are walking through the forest from Ookayama to Jiyugaoka.  This is Tokyo.  The forest is ten feet wide.  Let’s be specific.  The concrete path is four feet wide.  Then there three feet on either side for trees.  Some of the trees are hundreds of years old.  The path is interrupted, every fifteen feet or so, by curved aluminum barriers, so that bicyclists must dismount.  It’s a highly managed forest, you might say.  It is the forest of Tokyo.

Look at these trees.  Some of them are really tremendously old.  What was this place before?  It is impossible to imagine now, but I remember hearing Donald Richie insist that this was once one of the most beautiful places in the world.      

The Party of the Visible World

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo 2013)

As my husband and I walked together, in Tokyo, through a forest ten feet wide, we passed Midorigaoka station.  A young man with a prominent mole on his chin was giving  a speech on the dangers of nuclear power.  Not one of the commuters hurrying in and out of the station even glanced at him.  Two fellow organizers struggled to hand out leaflets.  I took one.  I read: The Communist Party of Japan. 

I admit that I had no idea it still existed.  I asked my husband, “In this day and age, how does a young person end up running for office in the Communist Party?”

My husband explained, “His grandfather was very important in the party.  His father was important, too.  Now it is his turn.”

If the world we live in was decided by a vote, like a presidential candidate or celebrity contestant, the ordinary visible world would not even be one of the main contenders.  The ordinary visible world would be, at best, a dark horse candidate.  Only a few radicals would be in favor of it.  They would all be looked down upon and called reactionaries. 

The main candidates might be perhaps the phone world and the shopping world, with strong showings by meat world, sex world and pharma-world. 

But of course the worlds would not actually be called that – it would all be brand names and genius marketing.  Voters would check the box beside Monsanto Pleasure Pavilion and iPhone Paradise Access.  Further down the ballot would be the Good Times with Coors party and the XTube Triple-X Personal Freedom party.  Just imagine the delights and the gadgets, the distractions and gimmicks.  You need not imagine very hard.  How easily you might forget that there was any world but theirs. . .

Meanwhile the party of the ordinary visible world would just stand around pointing at things.  No PowerPoint, no laser pointers, just pointing with their actual fingers.  And pointing at what?  Not much that’s appealing.  It’s not like we live in a garden, here in Tokyo.  Asphalt and electric wires, convenience stores, pachinko – and you’re likely to get your toes run over if you stand around staring too long.  The ordinary visible world does not need to be lovely in Tokyo.  I mean, seriously -- who looks at it?

Who are those unpleasant and awkward people, the members of the party of the ordinary visible world?  Musty old hippies by the look of them, old apple pickers who can’t even get up their ladders anymore, unseemly outdated liberal academics who joined after the Actual Book party’s unseemly collapse.  The party of the visible world, or “reality fundamentalists”, as they would swiftly be dubbed, extremists in favor of experiencing the world without multiple apps, magic glasses and pharmaceutical enhancements.

The party of the ordinary visible world would be held in complete disdain.  The other parties would be united against it.  Almost everyone would agree: those people are nothing but partisans of an unimproved world, Luddite extremists in favor of a world we’ve left far behind, despite the fact we happen to go on standing in it, in our ishoes.

The party of the ordinary visible world would be as unpopular as anything else that makes people uncomfortable.  Indeed, that is the essential promise of all the other parties: we will make you comfortable.  And what kind of masochistic freak doesn’t want to be comfortable?  The Communist Party would be popular, in comparison to the party of the ordinary visible world.  Hell, climate change would be popular in comparison. . .

“It’s just another kind of prejudice,” people will say.  Racism, sexism, realism.  Eventually it will be a highly offensive term.  “How dare you accuse me of being a realist!”

This run-down scuffed and sullied world.  Concrete, wires, and smog.  The lines are long.  The weather is inconvenient.  No birds but crows.  Who wants this world? 

Excuse me.  I am only playing make-believe.  None of this is the case.  The world is not decided by a vote.  Not by my vote and not by yours.  Not even by a trillion votes of inattention, of turning away. 

Even without care, the ordinary world languishes but does not disappear.  Even as it goes on losing, the ordinary visible world cannot lose.  It is the only contender. 

No matter how long you stare into your phone, you remain standing here, in the ordinary visible world, as a storm nears, as the first drops land on the back of your bent neck, and still you do not look up.

My Career

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo 2013)

At last I have settled on a career.  People who know me are sure to be relieved.  Everyone must find a path through the world.  As for me, I am going to be a Japanese society lady.  Naturally it’s not the career path I intended.  Not originally.  It’s not what I went to school for.  At least it’s not what I thought I was in school for, back when I was in school.  Just the same, I’m qualified. 

I have proven that I can spend time in cafes every day.  I have demonstrated this time and again.  Can I obsessively scrutinize my appearance?  Yes, I can.  My nature is already very highly reserved.  I am innately discreet.  While I do not attend movies, I do like to read.  Heavy reading, though by no means required, is at least permitted, the titles discretely shielded by white linen book covers.

I will be my husband’s ornament, his jewel.  I will be beautiful or invisible, as the situation requires.  When my husband comes home exhausted, late at night, I will present his slippers, stir his miso, grace his table.  I will be the fluorescent light of his life.  All he need ever give me in return is a tremendous amount of money.

I warn my husband that my career will be intensely demanding.  Although there are aspects which may appear pleasant – the Dior uniforms, the chitchat, the brunches – there are other aspects which are highly exacting: to eat continually and never gain an ounce, to persist in permanent youth.  Not for nothing do society ladies almost inevitably require heavy-duty psychotropic medications and extensive plastic surgery.  Counseling certainly.  Exotic vacations unquestionably.

I will be a Japanese society lady seven days a week, eighteen hours a day.  Even in my sleep I must aim to dream of Audrey Hepburn, her hands folded in her lap, her expression pleasant, sitting on a white sofa on a white carpet in a room with white walls.

It’s a JOB, I tell my husband.  I can’t just choose the parts I like.  It’s true that I have options.  I have exactly two options.  A set is one option.  The other option is B set.

A set: I will need a dog, a teeny-tiny dog, an adorable itsy-bitsy dog, vicious and prone to ailments.  I will buy my little dog suits and boots and raincoats.  I will treasure my dog above all, I will kiss him, clutch him to my chest, and cry when he sneezes.  Oh my little itsy-bitsy precious puppy dog, my baby, fragile as a blown-out egg and fierce as an  attorney.

My husband says he does not wish to have a dog.  Especially not a little yippy-yappy nasty dog.  In fact, he refuses.  Absolutely not, he says.  And that is OK.  That’s all right.  There is still another option.

B set: I must have long, doomed, drawn-out, hopeless, squalid, sordid affairs.

It’s that or a little dog.