Louis and His Porn Compassion

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Everyone Wants to Be Friends With Takashi

Escape from Tokyo: Series One



1. drip

 Under no circumstances should a can of milk coffee be called Boss Silky Drip.  Then again, I still remember the cans of Wild Drip.  Antibiotic resistant, presumably.  And let us not forget Double Shot 69.

 Japanese can coffees are like the boyfriends of your unlucky friend: despite the names and the packaging, they are all the same, and not much good can be said of any of them.  They are what you resort to out of dire necessity, or, more likely,  thoughtless habit.

 There was once one with cinnamon that was really quite tasty, but, like most of everything I ever managed to enjoy in Tokyo, it has since been discontinued.

 Akagi Shrine, Tsukiji Market, Kabuki-za, Mister Donut Senzoku, Sesame Chicken Chips, Alcoholic Ginger Ale: I mourn your passing.




2. we’re all in this together

 For the record, I would like to make clear that only in Tokyo do I lock myself in public toilets to drink liquor.  This is something special.  In other countries I think, “Oh, perhaps a beer with dinner would be nice.”  Only in Tokyo do I find myself desperate to take the edge off before the next time I get crammed onto the train.  Of course I don’t need to lock myself in.  It’s legal to drink anywhere.  But sometimes I need, you understand, just a little time-out.

 And evidently I am not the only person who feels this way because, look, here are two tall cans of Asahi, a Kirin, and a glass sake jar, lined up neatly beside the garbage bin.




3. spell

 The following is a spell which will render you twenty seven percent more sexually attractive than you are now.  For some of us, that’ll be a really big deal.  For others, not so much.  Still, you have to work with whatever it is you’ve got.




4. married life

 Identify and circle the errors in the following conversation.

 He was making individual pizzas.  He had lit too many candles.  We were both sitting down.

 I said, “Oh, I think the pizzas are burning!”

 He said, “I don’t smell anything.”

 “But I do!” I said.

 “But I doooooo,” he mimicked me.

 “I can’t pretend that nothing is burning just because you don’t smell it!!!”




5. Tokyo monsters

 If you do not know Japan, you might imagine that foreigners stay here for the money.  But the time for easy money passed decades ago.  You might imagine that foreign men stay here for sex, for a vastly more beautiful girlfriend, or younger boyfriend, than they’d qualify for anywhere else.  There’s truth in that surely, but it’s still only part of the story.

 So why do foreigners stay here, year after year, turning into ever-stranger hothouse shapes, into Tokyo monsters?

 Simple.  Foreigners stay in Japan because they get away with things here that they absolutely would not get away with anywhere else.


Excuse me.  I ought to say, “we”.




6. back straight, people

 As any Zen master can tell you, what swirls through your head during these proceedings is not so important, but the correct posture is vital.

 As if suspended from the top of one’s head by a string.  A very ordinary bit of greenish twine, that’s what I’m seeing.  But if you’d rather have a streak of red ribbon, please, go right ahead.




7. I’m only going to say this once 

 Takashi here has the penis I’d like to present every time some moron makes a snide remark about the magnitude of Japanese tackle.  Almost every gay bar I visit in Europe or the States, soon as I say I live in Japan, I hear the same crap.  Pisses me off.  But if Takashi were with me, I wouldn’t have to be angry.

 “Yeah?  Is that what you think?  Show the man, Takashi.  See that?  You feel dumb now, don’t you?  Feel kinda undersized yerself.  Inadequate.  Shortchanged.  You’d like to be friends with Takashi now, wouldn’t you.  Everyone wants to be friends with Takashi.  But you can’t be friends with Takashi if you say stupid racist shit, can you?  OK, Takashi’s going to put his heritage back down alongside his leg now.  No, you do not get to feel how heavy it is.  Not with that kind of attitude.  I think you’d better say you’re sorry now.  How about you start by buying Takashi a beer?”




8. writing in the gap

 Like all writers of ambition, I aim at posterity.  At generations to come.  At eternity.  Which in this case is, what, maybe fifteen years?  Forever gets shorter all the time, though it’s ugly to complain, since forever lasted only seven years, on average, back when the Sioux were signing treaties.

 The survivors will not be much interested in stories.  Not long ones, any way.  They will learn, at last, to make do with much less.  They’ll be interested in -- what?  Desalination, maybe.  Decontamination.  Edible Plants.

 I hope you will excuse me if I sometimes seem uncertain.  I am filling in the gap between literature and emergency manuals.




9. welcome to japan (please follow the rules)

 Italian looked reasonable, from the outside.  In Japan it is always done perfectly right.  But inside the server explains to us that only one person may order the dinner special.  Others must order from the regular menu.

 Dwight asks, “So, can we both have the dinner special if we sit at separate tables and pretend we don’t know each other?”

 The chef boss just stands there, looking terribly embarrassed in his chef hat, because that’s just not a question a Japanese would ever ask.




10. let’s pull a hawthorne

 How about I make like Nathaniel Hawthorne?  Isn’t it time to pull a Hawthorne now?

 How long did he stay home, in seclusion, teaching himself to think -- about twelve years, wasn’t it?  Of course he had help.  He had support, though I’m certain they often got tired of him.  By most reports he was kind of a twit.  Seriously, would it be so bad if made like Hawthorne?  If I sank out of sight?  I am cheaper than most people’s dogs.  If not quite so well-behaved.

 Then again, Hawthorne obviously had the knack some people have, for convincing people they matter.  Whereas I have always been a peripheral person, somewhere between invisible and suspicious.  I was the youngest son of the Pumpkin King.  Then, because it was abruptly possible, I had to go and get married.  And I married The Nicest Guy in the World.




11. high technology

 In this city, which is rumored to be the most technologically advanced in the world, rooms are heated by means of enormous hair dryers, which are hung way up on the walls.  Up there it is warm, surely.  What a pity we all sleep on the floor.

 On the plus side, the room is so dry that, if you wait five minutes to eat the second half of your cheese sandwich, you will find the bread is more or less toasted.




12. directions 

 You might as well do what is right.  If only because what you want is so fucking unreliable.




13. adjustments

 When the space beneath the sink is full I pull out all the milk cartons, cut them uniformly and bundle them, just as all Japanese housewives know to do.  A few I forgot to rinse and so they are moldy.  Those I scrub clean.  Don’t say I haven’t adjusted to living here.  I even wash the trash.

 In other ways I was well-suited to Tokyo even before I arrived.  Ever since I was child I have not stopped apologizing.  I cannot apologize enough.  It may be that if you say I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry enough times you end up in Tokyo, the same way that old women who pray a million rosaries are at once teleported to Lourdes.




14. a few horrors we’re allowed to skip

 Now and then history spares us something.  Seems to me it doesn’t happen nearly enough, but of course there’s no real way of knowing.

 There are days when I can almost cry when I remember that, despite everything, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas did not die in a concentration camp.




15. only

 Life is worthless.  As is well known.  But it is only worthless overall.  The details are lovely.  The details are worthwhile.

 For example, this woman here at the cafe, who thanks me as I leave and smiles while drying a tray.  That’s worth showing up for.  This old tree, too, here bedside the subway entrance, was clearly intending to die, but then Spring came along and it just couldn’t help itself, it burst out green.  The details in this world are really first-rate.  What a shame that I so seldom notice them.  I am too busy thinking of life overall, and of how it is going for me.




16. to the gods,

 Please enter into this, the thin soup of my enduring failure.  Much too much salt.  In this soup in which it is too late.

 Dear gods.  Now that it is too late, arrive.

 In time, if not in time.




 17. karaoke in the afternoon

 Kiyoko explains that karaoke boxes have multiple functions.  They’re not just for drunk kids on weekends, or lovers, or even for singers.  On weekday afternoons middle-aged ladies use them to scream.  You couldn’t possibly scream at home.  Nothing is insulated.  The neighbors are too near.  The police arrive in minutes.  But you can lock yourself into a karaoke box and scream all you want.

 But isn’t karaoke expensive? I ask.  I imagine Japanese housewives mindfully budgeting ‘screaming money’.

 Not weekday afternoons, Kiyoko explains.  Weekdays you can get an hour for maybe 500 yen.  Afternoons no one is there.  No one except middle-aged Japanese ladies, screaming at the top of their lungs.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Takahashi Mutsuo

Takahashi Mutsuo,
Twelve Views from the Distance 
translated by Jeffrey Angles
University of Minnesota Press, 2012 






One of Japan’s most prominent poets, Mutsuo Takahashi knows how to make beauty from suffering. What skill could be more urgently necessary now? How lucky that this book, originally published in 1970, has at last been translated by Jeffrey Angles in language that is as accurate as it is gorgeous. 

Raised in poverty by day laborers, Takahashi appears to be one of those rare persons able to use every misery as fuel for insight. The twelve chapters of this book are indeed “twelve views”, or angles, and the perspective gained thus of violence, sexuality and rural Japan is complex and unflinching.

“I have been loved by many different spirits,” Takahashi writes. This book preserves an understanding of “places outside the world we cannot see with eyes alone” that seems to have been eradicated in modern Japan as surely as the rivers have been lined with cement. “Spirituality” is what it usually gets called but it is a spirituality devoid of wishfulness and precise as cartography. The only other book I’ve found that conveys this level of (how to say it?) rural Japanese spiritual acumen is Michiko Ishimure’s Lake of Heaven.

 Of the twelve views, the view of sexuality is certain to grab one’s attention. After all, Mutsuo Takahashi was Yukio Mishima’s lover and confidante. (You are also unlikely to find another truly compelling literary depiction of sex with chickens.)

 Besides the understanding of “communities outside the world”, what I find most stunning about the book is its profound understanding of violence. After describing a beating at the hands of his mother, Takahashi writes, “It sounds strange to say this, but when adults behave violently toward children, they always seem much sadder than the children they mistreat. Children do not fail to notice that, even as they tremble in fear.” 

Justly lauded for his translations of Tada Chimako and other Japanese poets, Jeffrey Angles is able to render Mutsuo Takahashi’s swirling, image-saturated poetic prose is English that is both clear and full of emotion. Indispensable for anyone interested in Japanese literature, rural Japan, or the lives of gay men, this book deserves to be widely read for its profound understanding of the unseen world, the nature of violence, and the transformation of suffering.      

Fernando Pessoa A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems Edited and translated by Richard Zenith Penguin, 2006 If I had to name my favorite ten writers, Fernando Pessoa would be at least four of them. Not satisfied by making poetry, he made poets as well, each with his own history and style. This book is thus one of the world’s great anthologies, like the Bible, a chorus in different voices and it deserves to be read in that way. Here is Alberto Caeiro, the sage, who sees in things only the things themselves and announces, “All it takes to be complete is to exist.” And here is the sad and wise Ricardo Reis who counsels us to “Let’s love with greater calm / Our uncertain life”. These are Fernando Pessoa’s “heteronyms”, but here also is Fernando Pessoa himself, no slouch as a poet. My wife, whose name is Solitude, Keeps me from being glum. Ah, what good it does my heart To have this non-existent home! If you are shopping for a volume of Fernando Pessoa in English, it is useful to know that this book (published by Penguin in 2006) and Fernando Pessoa & Co (published by Grove in 1999), are both translated by Richard Zenith, but contain almost totally different poems. If you love Pessoa, you’ll want them both but, if you can only buy one at a time, this volume seems to me the most essential. Frankly, how people manage to live their lives without these poems is a mystery to me. How did I get by before I read Pessoa? I can’t remember. For Pessoa’s prose -- most of all for selections from the diary of the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares -- read Zenith’s Selected Prose. Also, if you are a fan of Pessoa, it is thrilling to read Jose Saramago’s novel A Year in the Life of Ricardo Reis but, be warned, Saramago’s time-traveling stunt will change the way you read the poems forever.  

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Madame Blavatsky's Baboon

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon
A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America

by Peter Washington 
Schocken Books, 1995

At the moment, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon is out of print -- which seems unfathomable, since this tremendously entertaining book is also one of very few resources if you wish to puzzle out the cast of characters that launched the “New Age” in America.  If you despair of ever untangling the Rosicrucians from the Vedantists, Gurdjieff from Ouspensky, or St Germain from the Secret Masters, here is your book.

As a prospective reader, the most important thing to know about this book is that it is NOT primarily about Madame Blavatsky.  She is dead on page 100.  The primary pleasure and benefit of this book is Peter Washington’s ability to sketch out compelling life sketches of the main characters who brought spiritualism to America.  These include: Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Charles Leadbeater, Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, J.G. Bennett, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Idries Shah.

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon is packed with rollicking jaw-dropping good stories and tremendously fun to read.  At the same time, it also presents a painfully bare view of human nature.  As you may have already discovered, our capacity for self-delusion turns out to be entirely perfectly limitless.  There is nothing so ludicrous, so obviously wrong, or so thoroughly debunked that we cannot believe it and go on believing it as long as we live.  If a belief makes us feel special or part of a group, we will sign on to absolutely utterly anything.  This book proves that on nearly every page.

For example, how amazing it is to learn how much of Helena Blavatsky’s worldview and philosophy is based, not on the teachings of disembodied Tibetan masters, but on the novels of Edward Bulwer Lytton.  In other words, a good part of what you’ll find in your local New Age bookstore originates from the man who wrote “It was a dark and stormy night.”

As a lifelong student of alternative spiritual traditions, I know that scandals are part of the territory.  Still, it is sobering to learn that the tradition of “renouncing the teacher but keeping the teaching” goes right back to the beginning.  In fact, it is very nearly universally practiced.  Almost every one of the teachers profiled here knew that their own teacher was painfully duplicitous, if not downright fraudulent.  The most charming teachers wore their own fraudulence lightly.  As Peter Washington writes, “Much of HPB’s life is a glorious comedy, as the tone of her letters often tacitly recognizes, but it could have tragic consequences for those who trusted her”. (86)  This turns out to be even more true of Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti than of Madame Blavatsky.

The life sketches Peter Washington paints are generally but not always well-rounded.  It is jarring to move from his scathing depiction of Charles Leadbeater to his almost reverential portrait of Rudolf Steiner.  (Peter Washington is not entirely to be blamed for this: Leadbeater the proselytizing pedophile is a remarkably despicable character.)  Washington is at his best when he tells the story of Krishnamurti, who comes across as a gifted spiritual teacher, a pathetic prisoner, and an aristocratic spoiled brat.  I simultaneously wished to bow to him, to embrace him, and to slap him across the face.

I hope very much that this book will one day be re-issued in a revised expanded version.  It often seems to me that the names of Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and Krishnamurti are revered by people who often don’t know the first thing about who they actually were.  Or even wish to know.  What passes for respect is often just laziness and the desire to have an empty slate for our own projections.

For example, it’s much easier to revere Ouspensky and Gurdjieff if you can forget that they loathed each other.  Both claimed the other was a fraud.  (Ouspensky even came out at the end of his life and proclaimed himself to be a fraud, which his students piously ignored.)  

Ask your local mystic, intoning about the enneagram, who Gurdjieff actually was, and you’ll likely be offered a soy chai latte and told to listen to your own inner wisdom.  Don’t be bought off.  The truth is complicated, and not infrequently pathetic, but also fascinating.  It is necessary, too, to be reminded of the high cost of delusion.  Everyone who professes to be “a deeply spiritual person” should swap their rose-tinted lenses for reading glasses and sit down with this book.

Hazelnut

When I was a child I believed that the hazelnut tree growing on the side of the dirt road just past the cemetery was actually a mystic portal, a secret door to other worlds. When I was eighteen I knocked three times on the side of the tree and walked, through the trunk, into Bombay. It was still called Bombay then. I was immediately cheated by taxi men and put on a one-way non a/c bus to Hyderabad. Some people will know exactly which tree I am talking about. Two-thirds of the way down the dirt road, with the farmhouse behind you and orchards on both sides, there is a solitary hazelnut tree that juts out from the right side of the road, that stands there like a sentinel. The wide smooth space on the side of the trunk of the tree is actually a secret door, though there is no telling when it will open, or for whom, or where it will lead. The smooth space extends between hip and eye level. When the secret door opens it is just big enough to squeeze through. It is possible the hazelnut tree was struck by lightning many years ago. A not unreasonable possibility, considering the tree’s height and position. More likely it is only a space from which a wide branch fell long ago. It took the bus sixteen hours to get to Hyderabad. I sat in the very back of the bus, in the middle, and was thrown into the air with each bump. I knew that I had made the very biggest mistake of my life and now would most probably die. I got off the bus only once, at a roadside dhaba where men sipped tea out of clay pots, then crushed them beneath their sandals. I looked around. The only thing that was familiar was the Moon. Even compared to most eighteen year old boys, I was quite exceptionally helpless. Nothing prepared me: I had only walked through the trunk of the hazelnut tree. I was not in any way brave, strong or resourceful. A lot of what gets called accomplishment is just accidentally not dying. A circumstance for which I cannot take credit. Many years later, not yet old but with white in my beard, I returned to the farm, to the dirt road, to the hazelnut tree. At least it appeared to be the same tree, on the same road, on the same farm, but it could not have been because I had passed through the door in the tree to the other world, when the other world was still called Bombay, and it occurred to me that in all the years following I had never passed again through the door. I had never returned. I considered it. But what could be done with me now in the world I had left long ago? I would only be in the way, like an oddly shaped tool with no obvious use. (What is it actually? I think it’s a pineapple knife.) Nothing that came out of my mouth would ever make any sense. Just the same I rested my cheek on the smooth place on the trunk and listened to the hazelnut tree, breathing heavily as it dreamt.

the poor animal

it

is

hard-

ly

to

be

blamed

if

it

goes

a

lit-

tle

mad

Forthcoming: Zymbol

My story "Pa, Randy and the Sugarhouse Fire" is forthcoming in Zymbol, a print magazine out of Boston focusing on the tradition of surrealism and symbolism.
Thank you to everyone who encourages me.  (Despite their better judgment.) 

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.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Flann O'Brien

The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien

Edited by Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper

Translations from the Irish by Jack Fennell

Dalkey Archive, 2013

Often a collection of short fiction is the place to start if you wish you wish to begin to discover a writer unfamiliar to you.  For example, you could begin to explore Joyce with Dubliners, or Beckett with the Complete Short Prose.  Not so in this case.  This book is for fans and scholars.  If you are not yet a fan, you will be shortly, but please: start with At Swim, Two Birds.

That said, Dalkey Archive has done great service by rescuing these stories.  Several of them are so vivid and appealing that I expect that they will now be anthologized for as long as the human race hangs on.  I am thinking of “John Duffy’s Brother” and especially “Scenes in a Novel”, which experiments with the device of characters in rebellion against their novel, prefiguring At Swim, Two Birds.

The story that impressed me most was “Drink and Time in Dublin” -- a relentless and unsparing account of going on a bender.  My god, but the man tells a lot of the truth.  (When I visited the Writer’s Museum in Dublin, I went up to the attendant and said very earnestly that I wished to visit all the places in Dublin associated with the life of Flann O’Brien.  The gentleman shook his head at me and said, “You couldn’t possibly, you’d die a’ alcohol poisoning.”)

“Slattery’s Sago Saga”, the forty-one page manuscript of O’Brien’s last unfinished novel -- about a plan to remove all the potatoes from Ireland and replace them with sago -- is a joy and a frolic.  If there turns out to be an afterlife, you will find me in the pub of that establishment, begging Flann O’Brien to tell me the rest of the story.

Résumé

I have almost no skills whatsoever. It happens that I can write a little. Not nearly as well as an educated person could write a century ago, but since nowadays many people can hardly write at all, it is useful and (very rarely) even a slightly big deal that I can write a little. Also I am able to read. Nothing special about that either. Except that nowadays almost no one reads, particularly not in the traditional fashion, considered now to be archaic: in a straight back chair, in a silent room, for three hours, with a blank page to copy out admirable sentences. People are too connected now. People are too important. There are so many exciting things on which to click. It is possible that I have somehow become stranded in the 19th century. Telephones I find spooky and unnerving, like a person who never leaves home without a Ouija board. Driving an automobile, no matter how cautiously, seems to me a rash and reckless act. I say that I am able to write and I am able to read. However, it often happens that I am unable to write or read. I am not a reliable person. I admit it. I could never get a job as an automated teller machine or a commuter train. When I cannot write and I cannot read, I try to pay attention. Of course this is exactly nothing. Paying attention cannot be said to be a talent, not even in the slight way that writing or reading might be said to be. Just the same, there are fewer and fewer people paying attention. So few that the ability itself appears endangered. So many things clamor for our attention now. So many noisy, bright, and unpleasant things. No small number are downright terrifying. I am not in any way a special or talented person. I am only taking advantage of the general decline.

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.

_______________

* 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.

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Marie Redonnet

Marie Redonnet, Hôtel Splendid
University of Nevada Press, 1994
European Women Writers Series
Translated from the French by Jordan Stump

Life is always evolving, society is forever progressing and we are all getting better and better in every way -- claim certain religious types and all advertising men. But, as you may have noticed, it sure as hell doesn't feel that way and that is where Marie Redonnet steps in, as Beckett did, to give us a taste of what life actually feels like: a hotel on the edge of swamp with one sister who is perpetually ill and another who dreams uselessly of being an actress. Life keeps looping around and the toilets never remain unblocked for long. We firmly intend to give up and somehow we don't get around to it.

In Hôtel Splendid, things getting slightly better is always a set-up for things getting significantly worse. Redonnet's staccato sentences, usually 5 to 10 words long, pile up like problems or bills to be paid and patter like rain on the roof. It is very likely that this elegant French novella contains more blocked lavatories than any in the history of literature.

This book is nothing but problems one after another and I can honestly say that I enjoyed it more than anything else I've read all year. It is absolutely transfixing. I laughed out loud so many times and I cannot provide a single example because you have to read it and fall into its strange rhythm and world until reading the words "The head foreman was bitten right in the calf by a rat" provokes you to laughter in spite of yourself.

Here's one taste. (Redonnet works in blocks of text approximately three to six pages long without paragraph breaks.) From page 17: "The swamp deserves more attention. It is a real nature preserve. There is always more of it to explore. Ada seems to be convalescing. The empty hotel is good for her. Even though she has always hated the swamp, she asked me to take her there for a walk. I was sure the swamp would do her good. That is the first time Ada has asked to go out. But she was disappointed by her walk. She couldn't bear the odor of the swamp. She thought it was always the same, no matter which way you turned. She couldn't stop shivering, in spite of the blanket she was wrapped in. When we got back, she went right to bed. She had a high fever. I had to give her a hot-water bottle. It did not warm her at all. She says her limbs are like lead. She blames the swamp for her relapse. She will never go back there again. The walk was not a success."

I discovered this book by reading Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2013, which contained some lively stories and some pretentious ones but nothing that compared to the story "Madame Zabee's Guesthouse" by Marie Redonnet. Searching online, I found three short novels (Hôtel Splendid is the first) translated almost twenty years ago and another translated ten years later. (There is also a collection of short stories, now so rare a copy of it will cost you five hundred dollars!) Reading Hotel Splendid made me hope that new work will soon be available, including a collection of short fictions. Redonnet's work is weirdly irresistible, like an unsettling dream you can't stop dreaming.

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.

Just Interesting

Tokyo, 2013

It sounds odd to call Taro my student, since he was eighty-seven when he died and  already over eighty when he started coming to my English class.  He was old enough to have been a soldier in World War Two – a very young, near-sighted, and perhaps slightly eccentric one. 

I can report that although Taro’s English was slow and halting, he didn’t make many mistakes and he could say what he wanted to say.  He did not, however, participate in discussions.  While the other students related their ailments, holidays and grandchildren, Taro sat still as a statue, without seeming to move even his eyes, so becalmed you could be excused for thinking that he’d maybe gone a little soft in the head.

Each week, when the discussion had slowed down a little, or when I saw that class would soon be over, I’d turn to Taro and ask, “So, Taro, any news?”

If it sounds like I wasn’t a very good English teacher, that’s the truth.  I was lazy.  I was too tired and too busy, like the rest of the population of Tokyo.  On the plus side, I was not very important.  A focused and energetic English lesson -- would only have gotten in the way.  I was just an excuse.  I was just an excuse and I knew it.  The English language was just an excuse.

There we were, in Tokyo.  Tokyo is the number one loneliest city in the world.  I’ll arm-wrestle anyone who says otherwise.  But these old people weren’t lonely.  They were having a good time and, if their grown grandchildren sometimes laughed because grandma was taking English lessons, and maybe had been taking English lessons since almost the Occupation, even though her English never improved much and she continued to say I go to shopping despite being corrected three times every Wednesday, still, I’m telling you, these old people were very clever, they knew a thing or two about living.

Just because some people remain immune to wisdom all their lives does not mean that wisdom can be ruled out.  Some people do become wise in their old age and some of those people, it turns out, go to English class, even when they are eighty-five years old.

Whenever I called on Taro his magnified eyes would blink behind the heavy lenses of his  glasses and he’d rub his lips together to moisten them.  Then he would open his spiral notebook and cough to clear his throat.  Using his notes to assist him – there were always a few words he’d needed to look up – he would tell the class a story.

In my life so far, Taro is my favorite storyteller.  If I tell you one of his stories, you will be disappointed and you will think that I am not a good writer.  That is the truth, but I know, too, that I am not very important and that counts as a skill nowadays.

For example, the story of when Taro went to Paris with his wife.  They went to celebrate their 50^th wedding anniversary.  I’m not sure, it may even have been their 60^th.

“Wonderful, Taro!  How romantic!  What did you and your wife do in Paris?”

Taro explained that it was raining in Paris and they did not feel very energetic.  The chambermaid was a single mother raising two children on her own.  She taught Taro and his wife to count to ten in French.

“That’s great, Taro!  And what did you do in Paris!”

At that point Taro nodded to the other students.  They all smiled broadly to each other.  I think it actually pleased them that their American teacher understood nothing whatsoever about life. 

It was a long time before I understood that. . . nothing special needed to happen.  Taro and his wife went to Paris to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary.  It was raining and they didn’t feel well.  They stayed in the hotel and the friendly chambermaid taught them to count to ten in French.  That was it.  And that was enough.

Or the time Taro found a dead cat on his roof.  A cat corpse saturated in cooking oil.  Taro’s wife thought she smelled something, Taro got on his ladder and, sure enough, there was a large dead oil-soaked cat on the roof.  There were a lot of restaurants around where he lived.  They poured used cooking oil into a barrel, but they didn’t always put a lid over it.  The cat must have been lured by the smell and fallen in, then been overwhelmed when it tried to clean itself.

“Oh, Taro!  I am so sorry!  That’s terrible!  That’s disgusting!” 

For that matter, what the hell was an eighty-five year old man doing on a ladder?

Again, Taro looked to his classmates.  Again, the knowing smiles and nods.  Like I said, I think they really appreciated the fact that I could be relied upon to be dumb and insensitive.

The point was not that the cat was disgusting – it was all just interesting.  Whether it was a dead cat on the roof or learning to count to ten in French, here was reality, and Taro attended to it.

Nothing bad ever happened to Taro.  I was his teacher for years and I can attest to the fact.  Nothing good happened either.  Everything was just interesting.  Whatever it was, he took care of it, and wrote an account in his notebook, always with a few new words which he forgot almost as soon as he looked up from the page.

What a very interesting world it was.  For example, it was interesting that he was constantly being arrested by the police.  As a young man he’d never been arrested, not even once.  Now he got arrested all the time. 

This was because of his bicycle.  He liked his bicycle very much, although it was just the ordinary heavy kind of bicycle which Japanese use to get back and forth from the grocery store.  He had built it himself, from the parts of many different discarded bicycles, and it was several different colors.

In Tokyo, when something breaks, you get a new one.  Even if just one small part is broken, you get a new one.  It is not usual to fix something, much less to make something from what others have discarded.

The police took one look at Taro’s multi-colored bicycle and assumed that he had stolen it, part by part.  They put him in the squad car, drove him to the station, and accused him of being a bicycle thief.  It took him a long time to convince him that he was just someone who liked to fix things.

This happened multiple times.  It happened so often that the police chief, the moment he saw Taro, would rush over and start apologizing.  The chief would apologize profusely, then lay into the patrol cop for having nothing better to do than accuse an octogenarian of stealing a bicycle.

The truth was, Taro didn’t mind.  He didn’t mind being arrested any more than he minded finding a dead cat on the roof or traveling to Paris.  He was not at all displeased.  He was not neutral either and certainly he was not unfeeling.

Taro lived to be 87.  He was an art teacher and a painter.  His canvases were abstract and enormous and people who saw them invariably said that they seemed like the work of a much younger man.

Taro was the best storyteller I have ever known.  His life was ordinary and also uncommonly rich.  He was the kind of person who finds everything interesting.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Giedra Radvilavičiūtė

Giedra Radvilavičiūtė, 
Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again

Translated from the Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas

Lithuanian Literature Series
Dalkey Archive Press, 2013





Giedra Radvilavičiūtė isn’t well-known in English and that’s a shame because this is a marvelous book and I can imagine many people loving it, if only they could discover it.  These are stories in the form of essays, or fictional essays – it doesn’t matter what you call them, you’ll catch the drift at once, I promise.  (The people who used to be obsessed with classifying genre appear to have finally exhausted themselves, thank God.)

These stories have the suppleness of stream of consciousness – and a sense of precision suitable for a legal secretary.  What sort of reader will be fond of this book?  Off the top of my head: fans of W.G. Sebald or Julio Cortazar or Lydia Davis.  Actually, I predict that there are fans of Lydia Davis who will like Radvilavičiūtė even better.  She has what I think of as “the Jane Bowles gift” – there’s no guessing what sentence will come next.  These essays are a cure for literary claustrophobia.

Although the longer essays are impressive, I confess that I was especially fond of the shorter ones, which are still plenty complex.  For example “Awakenings”, which begins with the narrator chatting with her dead mother, whom she discovers standing beside her bed.  When she says she wants to talk, her mother says,

“Well, be quick about it.  Just until I’ve finished my cigarette.”

She tells her mother, “This past fall I went to Kaunas.  Your granddaughter, looking out the window of the bus, saw a cow and asked, Does that cow belong to anyone, or is it Nobody’s?  I said, Cows always belong to someone, only people can be Nobody’s.  Mom. . . Now, when I wake up in a pool of sweat, most often at daybreak, I start to feel quite clearly that I myself belong to Nobody.  My eyes are Nobody’s.  My arms are Nobody’s.  My legs, skin, nails, lungs, breath, and hair – Nobody’s.  It makes me feel terrible.”

Her mother responds, “How did your daughter’s semester go?” (40)

Radvilavičiūtė is a master of the aside, the parenthetical.  When the doctor asks, “By the way, how are your relations with men?”, here’s the response:

“’Very good,’ I said, thinking of men generally, as a sort of aggregate. (As half of humanity.  Or like penguins in a snowstorm, huddled in a pile in distant Antarctica.)” (43).

This must have been a difficult book to translate, but it doesn’t read that way – it is engaging, clear and smooth.  Perhaps Novickas took the advice of the narrator in the final essay: “I think you can really only translate good prose smoothly when you’re a bit drunk.  And during a full moon.”

This book needs to be discovered!  Please read it, enjoy it, then spread the word around.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner

Published in Brazil in 1880 as Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas

Translated from the Portuguese by William L. Grossman

Foreword by Susan Sontag

This book is an example of a genre woefully under-utilized: the posthumous memoir.  As Bras Cubas reports, “I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing” (5).  If only this could happen more often.  Just think of all the people who would almost unquestionably be more interesting from the other side of the grave than they are on this side.  Kissinger springs to mind. 

(A little more seriously: can you think of other novels that use this device?  I would love to make a list.  Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, with Penelope in Hades giving her side of the story, is the only one I know, though I’m sure that there are many more.  If you think of one, could you respond in the comments?)

“But in death, what a difference!  what relief!  what freedom!  How glorious to throw away your cloak, to dump your spangles in a ditch, to unfold yourself, to strip off all your paint and ornaments, to confess plainly what you are and what you failed to be!” (57)  This is the energy that inhabits the 160 very short chapters of this book, as Bras Cubas recounts, in extraordinary style, the rather ordinary life of a 19^th century Brazilian aristocrat.

When I first spotted this book, in the library of a monastery, I chose it because it seemed the most worldly book available.  However, it is so relentless in stripping away human vanity, pretension and self-delusion that it nearly qualifies as a spiritual text.

The book had grabbed my attention because I instantly loved its title.  In fact, “Epitaph of a Small Winner” is actually the subtitle of the original novel.  Although I noticed that other people disliked this translation, I found it very readable. 

That said, plenty of people over 35 are going to reject this book as soon as they open it for the simplest reason.  This is obviously a reprint of a printing done in the Fifties – and it appears to have been done on a mimeograph machine from that period.  Letters are fuzzy, blotchy and blurred.  Unworthy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux!   

It seems condescending to applaud a 19^th century book for being “modern”, but, I’m sorry, I can’t avoid it.  This is a post-modern text, written in 1880, which may be a bigger trick than a memoir written from the grave. . .  Fragmentation, a peculiar viewpoint,  commentary on top of commentary – it is all so lively and so much fun.  Fans of Rushdie or Saramago (or even Vonnegut or Murakami) will feel immediately at home.

I loved this book both times I read it and I'm grateful it's in print.  If it was in print we could actually easily read, that’d be even better.

The Function of the Shopping Cart, In This Life and the Next

When I was a child I believed that when I went to sleep a witch arrived to carry me off to the land of dreams.  The means of transportation was a clattering shopping cart, same as at Ferretti’s Grocery.  The witch herself was somewhat craggy.  She was downright geologic.  In profile she looked exactly like a solitary volcano on Mars, as depicted on the poster on my bedroom wall from the Boston Museum of Science.  The witch looked just like that volcano.  Her hat was a Martian cloud.

After death the shopping cart ascended.  The wheels ceased to clatter.  The witch only went part way.  In structure the afterlife resembled two parking garages, one on either side, extending as far as the eye could see.  Worlds were stacked one on top of each other, all the way up and all the way down, innumerable worlds.  Heaven and Hell (there were many of both) were not above and below but right beside each other.  The shopping cart rose in a column of air between them.

Heaven was on the left side.  Hell was to the right.  Or else it was the other way round.  (Was it possible my shopping cart was spinning?)  Here was the crux of the problem: Heaven and Hell kept switching sides.  Countless heavens, countless hells.  You had to choose between them.

This was extremely difficult because Hell mimicked Heaven and did all it could to seem like a really good time.  Hell promised homemade cookies, unlimited pinball and the company of the Strawberry Quik bunny.  Not until too late did you learn that the cookies had pond slugs in them, that you were the ball in the machine, that the evil pink bunny would never ever stop tickling.

Heaven couldn’t help but seem a little dull.  It was the sort of place you loved once you got there, like Aunt Pilar’s house, but without the cactuses.

Which to choose?  Which was the real Heaven?  Which was torture?  I couldn’t decide.  I wished the witch was still with me, perhaps she could advise. 

Meanwhile the shopping cart continued to ascend.