Phantom Tokyo

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12-25-01 to 1-04-02

Snow falls here, backed by the whole of the Canadian landmass. I think of it falling all the length of that immense expanse, flat and almost featureless, that stretches between Toronto and the North Pole. For all I know it's sunny at the pole today, but that's not the point. It's that this land goes on forever, and its weather always feels a little untamed in consequence.

Snow in Tokyo however is cozy. It makes you think of furosato type things- great old farmhouses with sloping thatched roofs, outdoor onsen with a bunch of buddies, up to your necks in hot water while drinking sake as the thick snow falls all about you. When I lived in the Tohoku where there was much more snow than farther south, I was enchanted by the TV ads for onsen resorts. They always started with views of heavy snow falling on the thickly wooded perpendicular sides of mountains, and something vaguely folk air in a minor key playing in the background. Fir woods, falling snow, rural Japan. Straw boots, why not? It may be that part of the Japanese consciousness keeps a mental picture of the Yukiguni, the snow country on the China side of the island where snow falls high as a house, even if they come from the more temperate regions. Just as here in warm Toronto I remember the scrubby pine forests and flat tundra of a northern Canada I've never seen.

It snowed maybe three times all the time I was in Tokyo. Snowed to remember, that is; enough snow to withstand the next day's sun and above freezing temperatures. First was when I was living in the Japanese-style house in Nakano, with its little back garden viewable from the usual sliding doors in the living room. Very satisfyingly Japan, it felt. Snow on the firs and the little bushes. Snow filling the small space between tiled houses. Inside in the kotatsu watching the snow fall outside. It happens sometimes that Japan actually looks like what you think Japan should look like, and that was one of the times.

The second was more active, and far more Tokyo. A Saturday, and myself all ready to go teach in Komagome, when my boss called to say don't come. "The mothers won't let their children out today." For an inch or two of snow? I shrugged superior Canadian shoulders, as I did at remarks about 'beautiful fall colours' (Japanese fall colours look like an old Polaroid that's lost its colour adjustment, greens bleeding into yellow and an unnatural rusty red.) Time to go over to Ueno or somewhere, then. But the Ueno-bound trains weren't running. Snow. And come to that, the drivers along the way to the station had been skidding with quite heart-stopping frequency. Some even had chains on their tires. Not a snowy city, Tokyo. Maybe the mothers were right after all.

I went the other way to Takadanobaba and the Horindo bookstore there. (Parenthetically, I never did figure out which direction on the Yamanote is mawari and which sotomawari. Logic suggests that from where I was, Ueno-yuki being clockwise is mawari, and Shinjuku-yuki is soto-mawari, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the opposite. The Japanese walk on the left side of the sidewalk, after all.) Had the good croque-monsieur in the coffee house a floor down from Horindo that I always had. Was driven out by the cigarette smoke as I always was. And then, because there was as ever no place warm and smoke free to sit and read in in Tokyo, and because the Ueno-yuki trains (always less crowded than the ones going in the opposite direction) were running again, I got on a Yamanote train and did the circle, reading my book in the crowded warmth until it was time to meet my friends in Takadanobaba.

And when I came home, as ever, all around my house the local kids had built yukidaruma and even the occasional snow house. Snow houses are standard in the yukiguni- big enough to accommodate a couple of friends, and you take your shoes off at the door. We build snow forts and have snowball fights. They build snow houses and invite people in for tea. Cultural differences are no more indicative of anything than they have to be, but a snow house is a nice thing to see when walking home from the station.

It started almost the minute I was back in Canada. When I thought of a place in Japan, any one of the familiar places I'd spent three or more years in, my mind tried to substitute a place in Toronto instead. Some of these memories were from years and years back, from my childhood. The narrow laneways of Tsukishima, an island in the Sumidagawa whose setting makes it immune to Tokyo disasters like the Kansai earthquake and the fire-bombings and so keeps its Edo street structure, elicited the side of the parochial grade school I briefly and unhappily attended, a narrow corridor between the school and the greystone church it backed up on. Others were things I'd completely forgotten because there was no reason to remember them. The language school I went to in Yotsuya for a year- the mythological Iron Age of my Tokyo stay- turned into one of the utterly nondescript staircases of my early 60's high school. The gaijin house in Tobu Nerima becomes the hallway of a house on Wellesley I lived in for a year in the early 80's. I kept having- I keep having- to bat the intrusive Toronto pictures away in order to see the familiar but now infinitely distanced Japanese original instead.

It's as if my mind will no more keep memories of That Place when I'm here, than it will allow me to have mastery of two languages that are not English. My French was in pretty good condition by the time I first went to Japan, but it all vanished after only three years there. I came back one Christmas and went to the French consulate to see whether I could get EC citizenship by virtue of my French grandparents, confidently thinking I could manage the simple French inquiries. I couldn't. I couldn't even remember the word d'accord. All I could get was Wakarimashita instead. (And no, I didn't get my EC citizenship either. The French turn out to be like the Japanese, in having family registers. And if you live abroad, you have to have your carnet de famille registered with the consulate, and all births *and marriages* duly noted. My mother was Canadian by the time she married, so no-one was registering any such thing with anybody.)

Department stores open at 10. They roll up the iron shutters that have covered the doors and you see the lights on and everything ready inside. People are always waiting on the sidewalk outside because the opening is an event- a minor event, but an event. A door opens and a small group of young ladies in the department store's uniform come out and stand in a line, smiling. They all have hats and gloves and are wearing red lipstick, because that's manners in Japan. One nice young lady steps forward and thanks you in respect Japanese for coming to the store. She bows. All the other ladies bow. They turn and go back into the store. You are free to do the same.

But I forget what happens next, when you go into a newly opened store. I think it's all business as usual- the clerks are there waiting behind their counters, you are in the aisles looking. Maybe they say Irasshaimase to you, the first customer of the day. I really don't remember any more.

But going to a store-opening in Seoul- that I do remember. I thought the place would have been already open for an hour, but this store at least started late by the standards I was used to. I arrived as the doors were opening and the greeters leaving the scene. I walked into the store with the first morning crowd to the strains of 'Pomp and circumstance', last heard at my high school graduation. Every single clerk in the store was standing at their counter, bowing. And holding it as we walked past. I have never felt such a prat in my life.

The best January was 1994. New into fandom, newer into djs, newest of all into writing stories- a bare five weeks. I'd had a month at home over Christmas and spent it writing steadily, the Papuwa characters clear in my head and coming out clearly onto the paper, reminding me every day of the amazing thing that had happened to me in Tokyo. I wrote at 6 am, jetlagged into early waking, as the black eastern sky at last turned green and then pale blue and then resolved into the solid silhouettes of trees and houses against a glorious gold sky. I wrote in dim restaurants and I wrote in the sunny coffee house at upscale Hazelton Lanes where I'd gone to bank. In a kind of numb terror, I started my first serious smut on a snowy day while my new gas furnace burnt off its newness making the air reek strangely, and continued it days later in unholy triumph riding out to Oakville for dinner with my irreproachably domestic younger brother and his family.

I saw all my TO friends again- Rita, Leana, Stephen, Aara, Jane- all of them so pleased to see me. I found that my sister and I could finally talk to each other, now that we had an interest in common. I read her APAs, great thick stacks of them, and felt like I was delving into prehistory even if it was only the fannish events of seven years earlier. The anime world, the anime names, the sense of a tradition and a community. Backgrounded by the Papuwa over-world, where I spent half my waking thinking time, Toronto looked better than it had ever done before. But Tokyo was where I wanted to be. Tokyo was where the wonder was. I had friends at last, someone I could talk to easily after two years not knowing anyone who was on the same wavelength as myself. Friends who bought me djs at winter comike- 'We were thinking of you.' A place to go to after work when work ended early, and watch TV and tapes and just yak with someone.

And then there was the first January sale, Sunday 30, the second comic sale of my life since the first one in November had changed my life for good. A cold Sunday morning under a cloudless blue sky in east Shinjuku, meeting Mary and taking the special Ome bus to Harumi. Inside the huge dimness of Higashi-kan, the tables piled high with books about My Guys. All the circles by the wall- Swastika, Ponpalas, BeataBeatrix, Sannasubi, Ein. Swastika had a shinkan, 0214. I read it that night in the laundromat past Kanpachi, puzzling my way through the kanji to see what Servis was doing in *this* ep. Getting screwed up against a wall by his betrayed nephew was what he was doing. 'I'll forgive you if you let me do it to you here- now--' I'd gone to heaven. People didn't do this in any other place I'd ever been in, real or imagined, and I realized how much I'd so much wanted them to, for all of my life. I'd had glimpses of it, brief sideways and never enough, here and there at home, but I'd never found a whole world where this kind of eroticism was the current coin.

So that winter was all about having a dj or two in my bag to read on the subway to classes or to see Beverley in Shibuya on Monday mornings or to see Jean at night after work, on Wednesdays when work ended early. The Tokyo cold, the winter nightfall so early, the lights, the stone of the subway stairs, the recorded voices announcing the arrival of my train- the world outside. And in my bag and in my head, the bright sun and the blue sky of the island, the ambiguous smile on Servis' face, the bright unsettling charisma of his brother the Commander, all making another world instinct with sexuality and possibilities undreamed of. Not to be experienced again, at least not here, and not even to be remembered too clearly any more at a distance of eight years- that other way of being. Only to know that it happened once, in that place over there, and was wonderful when it happened.

Adults' Day. Coming of age day. A national holiday, just what you need after the four-day New Years break. However much the Japanese may get short-changed on their private holidays ('five days, but of course I never take them all') they're well-treated in terms of national ones. Canadians endure a long dispiriting winter, with the two-day Chritsmas break and a day off on New Year's and nothing else from Thanksgiving early in October to Easter somewhere near the end of March. The Japanese by contrast get *two* November holidays, the Emperor's birthday on Dec 23, the New Year's shutdown, Jan 15 and Feb 11, which at the very least is twice what we do. Makes a nice break.

January 15 was also about the time I used to come back from my Christmas vacation. So even if I was in the country for it, it's associated with the odd reverse jetlag of going west. Coming back to Japan always meant an access of extra time. My body would go to sleep at 9 or 10 and wake up a full eight hours later, rested and refreshed; except that going by the clock and not by what my body insisted was true, it was only three hours. And there I was at 1 am, ready for breakfast and to take on the world.

So it was no hardship to find myself at Shinagawa Station at 7 am, back on Jan 15 1993, heading down to Kamakura to spend the day with Joanne's students. Memory is selective. I can't now remember who Joanne's students were- office ladies, yes, but which office ladies? They've become confused in my mind with Lisa's students whom I remember much more clearly because I taught them myself somewhat later. But it's much of a muchness. 'Most people are only going to see the outer 10% of you,' a Chinese friend explained to me, 'so that's all you have to show them.' And when you only see the outer 10%, most people do end up seeming interchangeable.

We went to the proper shrine in Kamakura, amid all the young people in their new-adult finery, wet and miserable in the rain ('Poor things', said the ladies) and then to the seventh floor apartment of one of the women. Reached by climbing an outdoor staircase- no elevators. The Japanese way of spending a day together, especially a dirty unpleasant day like that one, is to sit inside and eat and drink and do it for hours while making lively conversation about nothing much at all. And that's what we did. It's news to the Japanese, and we never told them, that not everyone finds this pastime congenial. The common, and acceptable, notion over here of 'I'd rather be alone' really is foreign to most of them. They'd rather be with someone, no matter who.

Ordinary places, even places you pass half a dozen times a day, sometimes get a moment of time caught on them like a skirt catching on barbed wire, and whenever you pass them again that piece of time is still there, along with what you were thinking and the way the sun was falling and everything else, all intact. At the corner of Markham and Barton, if I'm cycling east on Barton towards Bathurst, is a moment from last spring greyish and a bit humid with Hakkai looking at Gojou under a tree, a passage from the story I was working out at that time. At the corner of Palmerston and Barton, a block to the west if I'm going in that direction, is an April evening in 2000 with tree buds nearly out and the branches all pointillist black against the golden sky, and Sergei and Dorian sitting on a terrace of the restaurant in Foix that overlooked the river. So in Tokyo, along the Kawagoe Kaidou is an unmarked spot (after the Red Lobster but before the 7-11 before Kannana is all I remember) from early January '96, a mild cold winter night lovely and invigorating, dark black sky with fish-shaped cream winter clouds and many stars even here on the highway, and the thought that on nights like this I really want to have someone with me because nights like this were made for two; but equally, that if there was someone with me I wouldn't have the pleasure of bicycling alone and fast along the Kawagoe Kaidou, smelling winter Tokyo and the cold air in my nose, seeing the white fluorescence of the stores and the vending machines lighting up the dark, and feeling all the unspoken possibilities of nights like this-- because I'd be thinking about the person I was with.

The 24 hour convenis have a little secret most people don't know- they close for half an hour at night. One night when I'd been up writing till late, I decided about 3:30 that I wanted a little conveni gratification- Meiji chocolate, it might have been, or an ume-shiso onigiri (rice ball with plum paste and best of all minced shiso leaves.) I biked over to the Lawson's, only to find a sign up saying they were closed and cleaning till 4. The AM/PM was the same. So I had to go over to the 7-11 on Kanpachi.

Tokyo is in one way a good place for insomniacs. There's nothing to *do* after midnight, of course, but English teachers can start work at noon, if not later. My friend Jean teaches 8 am and 6 pm classes, with the middle of the days off; but Jean can fall asleep the minute her head hits the pillow. Most people would find that schedule taxing- most people at her company did- and for me it would be unbearable, period. Even the need to get up for a 10 o'clock class would cause me to go into 'wide awake till 4 am' mode. But usually being wide awake till 4 am wasn't a problem. I'd write my stories and, if I was careful, be able to print them out without waking my neighbors, and then bicycle among the silent fields and the dark two-storey apartment houses to a conveni to make copies. There were no copyshops when I was in Japan. You did it yourself at the conveni, which was why copying a 30 page story was best done at 4 am. And there were always people about, even at that hour. Not many, but there. I don't know why or how. The trains had stopped running four hours earlier, and none of these people looked like the kind who could afford the $100 taxi fares from Ikebukuro or the other fleshpots of the Yamanote. But there they were- women in skirts and heels, guys in suits- besides the more rational taxi and truck driver types and the evident locals, like me. Only I think the locals were getting up early, not going to bed late.