Phantom Tokyo

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Xmas '01 on
Jan '02

Mimi talks about how westerners, and North Americans particularly, don't understand the concept of things being available only at certain times of the year, and how things are actually better that way. I see this with my usual split vision. Yes, it's nice to have tomatoes all year round. Yes, it's nice to have the coming of August marked by the appearance of beefsteak tomatoes in the groceries. It makes August special. It's a signpost, like the cicadas starting to sing, so much higher and fainter here than in Japan. Like the Fall Preview, the sudden coolness for three or four days that happens sometime in the first two weeks of August. Like the hayfever season, even, back when I had hayfever and not something that now hits in July (there and here both. The only month worse than July There was November, when something deadly fells all the susceptible, and I never did learn what it was.)

Would I have beefsteak tomatoes all year round if I could? Well... yes. Marking a seasonal change is an aesthetic satisfaction. Eating beefsteak tomatoes is a visceral satisfaction, and, well, to paraphrase Brecht, Grub first, then aesthetics. But of course, what you'd get instead is just a facsimile of the real beefsteak tomato of summer, like the pale hard winter tomatoes from California that might as well be made of plastic for all the taste and satisfaction they give you. Might as well be properly aesthetic than eat those. (Though OTOH a winter with nothing but northern root vegetables and no fruit at all is a dreary prospect. There are times one is grateful for California and Florida.)

So tomato sandwiches are a seasonal thing. Greek salad is seasonal. Corn, if I ate it, is seasonal. The Japanese are more resigned than we to having their food as seasonal as their flowers. Strawberries in season. For two weeks in-- May, is it, over there?- the world is full of strawberry shortcake and strawberry tarts and strawberry everything. Then strawberries go back to being a luxury item in the department stores. The other seasonal foods are things I never really ate. Summer eel, tried once, found revoltingly fatty. Saba ditto, a mackerel that produces such oily smoke when grilled (and the Japanese always grill it) that it should set off all the firealarms in the house except the Japanese seem, amazingly, not to have fire alarms. December dried kaki, as disappointing as persimmons are in any other form. Winter oden, boiled pulpy everything and *especially* purple octopus tentacles draped over the edge of the stainless steel pans in the convenis. New Years's omochi which removes fillings. February rice gruel with little gingko nuts, unless I'm imagining those, warming but bland. Bland, Japanese food, by and large. Rice that tastes like wallpaper paste. Green tea that puts your teeth on edge. Not a country for the gourmet or the gourmand, and so I suppose one that can afford to be seasonal in its foods because there food is indeed aesthetic, not visceral.

And the moment caught in time in the story is also a night in January, two years later, and me out on my bicycle into the uncharted lands of fields and nameless roads past Kanpachi doori. Past Kanpachi it felt as if you could keep on going west till you hit the mountains that you sometimes saw on very clear days. Actually if you were where I was, going on got you only to Itabashi-ku, but Saitama wasn't that far away. It looked countryish to me, all those fields flat under the open sky with the moon and the clouds crossing it, and off to the west the line of darkness that meant trees and azalea bushes surrounding the houses. Like Hiroshige's Foxfires on Musashi Plain, the last in his 100 Views of Edo. I have a copy of that print, with the borders missing which probably reduces its value to nil, but otherwise I could never have afforded it. It's a second or third printing. In all the catalogue and artbook reproductions you see, back of the foxes the plain goes on into black darkness and looks uninhabited. But in mine the background is printed in deep blue, and you can see the line of little houses where the people are sleeping while the foxes come together to celebrate new year's. It felt like that, and the houses when I got to them shuttered up behind their high cinderblock walls and asleep, with the big moon in the huge sky over the fields. (The clouds in the black sky were a surprising pure white with sharp scalloped edges, but when they moved across the moon they glowed a soft bleached yellow like his pale hair under the street lamps.)

That was one of three place-specific stories I wrote, all around the same time, as I was readying myself to leave Japan. Adam began on a January Wednesday by the Sumida in Tsukishima, walking up and down the embankment and putting the story together in my head, not thinking much of it. Came home and told myself don't be silly, write it down, see what it looks like on paper. And did. Apples begun a little earlier, in Komagome. Next to the station there was a plaza, is all I can call it- open, paved in stone, entrance on the street that sloped down parallel to the tracks; with a fountain on the Yamanote track side, and benches where the furoujin would sit and anyone else who wanted to. Its length backed up against Hongo-doori and faced away from it, a few feet below its level, so you could ignore the traffic and look instead at the trees and the little shops against the opposite side of the square, a druggists and a dry-goods and a pet store too I believe. They redid it all later and not nearly as nicely.

But that day I was sitting there before classes in strong winter sun under a blue sky and remembering days like this long long ago in high school- back when I played basketball, which takes me to grade 10 or so- and remembering the last day of term in December that year with Johnson, bitterly cold day, wandering through the labyrinth of Rosedale to find Jodie's house to give her her Xmas cards. (Joanne Feheley, and why was she in our class, because I thought she was Camilla's friend a year ahead of us?) And remembering meeting Johnson that same term and thinking I could map Jan and Servis onto that real-life experience, and did.

I think I thought I was wrapping up my own Toronto past and putting it into these stories- capture the experience of meeting Johnson at the start of grade 10 or being with Marguerite the first term of university and have it put into words for good- but in fact it was my Tokyo present I was summarizing and trying to preserve in written form, against the time I wouldn't have it any more. And Nandemo was the one that did it best.

(I think he was happy that night. His head was thrown back, and he looked at the racing clouds and the little winking stars and the old man's walking stick tree branches. His face was calm, and the corners of his mouth turned up a little, the way they did when nothing was bothering him. He could never suffer fools gladly, and there were enough of them back home in the army. But the army and his brothers and the daily frets were all far away that night, in whatever city it was. He stopped and let me catch up with him and put his arm through mine, and we walked on again, not talking, but side by side together, until we got back to our nondescript little room in our nondescript little hotel.)

The second longest however is the one I used to do myself periodically. At Nagatachou, to get from the Yurakuchou line to the Marunouchi line (which is actually in Asakamitsuke station), you have to cross a hallway, go down a steep flight of stairs/ escalators, walk the length of the Hanzoumon platform, go up the escalators, turn around a couple of times and then find the platform where, oddly, the Ginza and Marunouchi lines pass each other on either side. That, of course, is the shortest norikae in Tokyo.

But all this seemed infinitely long ago and far away as I stood in the yard rocking the babies. I couldn't even rremember which line it was I was coming from to get to the Marunouchi.

But in fact the Nagatachou trek is the only way to get from the Yurakuchou line to the Marunouchi if you want to go to Shinjuku and *don't* want to go all the way back to pick it up in Ikebuk. (Funny line, the Marunouchi. Yes, it's inside the circle and yes it does describe a circle, but with the Ikebuk-Shinjuku section of the radius missing. So instead of going east-west like all other lines, it kind of feels like travelling on the snake that eats its tail.)

And it's the only way to get from the Yurakuchou line to the Ginza. The Ginza always felt very exclusive and wakarinikui. You can't norikae onto it from any line I regularly took (never had any use for the Chiyoda, and the Marunouchi is always too crowded); the only line it really 'speaks' to in south-east Tokyo is the Hanzoumon; and it terminates above ground on the 2nd or third floor of a department store in Shibuya. Getting down to ground level was always a nightmare. Whereas the Hanzoumon is a nice rational line that ends properly underground with exits that take you out into Hachiko square, and its colour motif is purple, and it's always emptier than the other subway lines in Tokyo. And in the east it takes you to Ningyouchou and the Tokyo Airport Terminal, is that what it's called? with its own government office where you could get re-entry permits in half the time it took at Ootemachi. Couldn't renew visas there, though. That was the mandatory half-day minimum in Government Central, including break for lunch.

My lines were the Yurakuchou and the Touzai. The first got me to classes in Tsukishima and home from Ikebuk, and out to the mountains if I wanted to go the other way. The Touzai I picked up at Takadanobaba from the JR, on my teiki, or at Iidabashi from the Yurakuchou though that's a bit of a pain because IIRC they're at opposite ends of the station. It went to Waseda and Kagurazaka when I was exploring that part of town; or Nihonbashi when I was going to art galleries; or out to Monzen-nakachou for the Edo jidai museum that used to have dance recitals. The flat-lands, the poor lands, across the river, always the scene of disasters in Edo times and still undistinguished and poor-cousinly. West Tokyo is where I lived. West Tokyo is newer. Across the Sumida is from an older time, and it feels it.

Hot weather for two days has started the cherry blossoms popping in Toronto, three weeks after they usually bloom in Tokyo; and accompanied by the leaves as well, which Tokyo sakura doesn't do unless the weather is odd or the sakura is very late.

I was remembering a day in some forgotten year, bicycling up from Nerima probably and meeting the canal that took me most of the way home. Cloudy day, pale greyish skies, and I had the sudden illusion that the sakura along the canal bank looked like snow. Palest pale-pink snow lying heavy on the tree branches, without the coldness or the biting dank that accompanies snowfalls there and here as well. Aesthetic snow.

But then because tonight is heavy and moist and time-out-of-time, I remembered the canal as I usually saw it, at night, bicycling down to the upscale sento at Toshimaen. Dark nights usually as dank as this, and if not that, then dank because I was bicycling beside the canal and listening to the ripple of its black water far below. Tried to recall, with difficulty and a little disbelief, the route that I used to take from the dorm to the canal once or twice a week at least- '/up/ to the end of the street? Really?'- and verified it on the map.

Yes indeed. If you went up to the end of the street and round a corner which I can't recall, you found yourself going down a long curving hill that dropped you at Hikawadai station and the canal together. It makes sense on the map, but no sense in my mind, and never did. Because if you went *down* the street a long ways, and turned off to the left, you also found yourself at the canal. Of course the canal angles downwards as it goes, and of course none of the streets in this area are due north-south or even straight, so my notions of direction were skewed from the start. But it always felt as if space was warped in this part of Nerima-ku, and that roads going in opposite directions would all land you more or less in the same place. You could go the pleasant round way to Hikawadai, past the Hikawa jinja and an old tiled rice store that looked to date from Edo; or you could go the direct, crowded and dangerous route along the street that passed Heiwadai station and that took you straight over to Hikawadai. The former I'm sure was an old highway- witness the jinja and the rice store and the general easy follow-the-landscape sense of the thing. The latter must have been a bright idea of the city planners.

Complicating memory is the fact that when I got to the canal I could go either right to the sento or left to my students' place in Kotake-Mukaihara. Landmarks along the way have gotten blurred in my mind. But now I have it straight that the brick-tiled walkway going past the two-storey factory that always had this sharp acridish smell to it behind its walls, and which always felt terribly douanier Rousseau, and the cozy little houses after it with the ivy on their walls that always felt so terribly French, were on the way back from the Kuribayashis. And the brick-tiled walkway on the other side of the canal with the streetlights planted among the bushes, a walk closer to the canal and narrower but feeling this time rather Dutch, was on the sento ride. Nonetheless, it's the latter that I had Dorian and Takamatsu walk along together in Percy, which actually happens in Belgium.

Sun. Sun. A bare blue sky extending to forever. Branches of yellow-brown trees moving a little in the wind. Here and there both, sometimes it does this. Plum blossom season, there- the vague sweet smell from the black and spiky trees. Cold weather viewing, not for the empty-headed. Old people muffled in kimono and jackets, sipping rice gruel as they sit on the benches in the kindly sun, avoiding the blocks of shade with their blue-black chill. (The blocks of shade come from the surrounding office buildings which, somehow, are always there wherever you go, unless you go to Umegaoka or Shinjuku Gyouen. The time I went to Umegaoka it was warm enough to thunder- April suddenly transported into February.)

Still the sharp-edged season of winter, when everything looks more beautiful to a Canadian eye than any other time. And amidst this peaceful and civilized flower-viewing, backed by the murmur of conversation and nothing else (no karaoke, no office parties), the lovely pinky-white blossoms like a small miracle, beauty and sweetness blooming from the twisted and cold.

In my grimy language school, the second one, in grimy bustling Shin-Okubo, above the canyon of the cheap tiled apartments and office buildings with pachinko parlours and the convenis at ground level, the blue sky and February sun lighting the happy souls on the 6th and 7th floors. Out the classroom window a blue sky like this, and sun on the gravel of the roof, so that me and the Minnesotans had to open the sliding glass and smell the earliest-spring smell of cold sun on concrete after the snow goes, while the Chinese from everywhere complained bitterly. 'What are you doing? It's freezing!' our sensei protested, and we said 'But Sensei, at home we call this kind of day spring.' 'Well, here we call it winter,' she said practically. 'Close the window.'

Riding out the Chuo-sen in the late afternoon to Asagaya and Kichijouji, among the uniformed schoolgirls gong home, it did this- blue sky forever above the low buildings that stretched to the horizon like the ruins of Charn. Following the Shakuji river- really a canal- on my bicycle and trying to avoid Johoku Park (where I always had to get off at some point and walk through the mud) it did this- a hill of bare brown trees backing up some small come-by-chance temple. Somewhere in Shinjuku-ku, maybe following Okubo-doori one Saturday afternoon, unless as it might have been it was Mejiro-doori, it did this, bright wind loudly rattling the sotoba in a cemetery on a hill, and a small Canadian totem pole that I never did find out what it was doing there. It did this, the bright Tokyo February sun on all the large and empty places I've forgotten in five Tokyo Februaries.

Always it seemed, and still seems, that this season should lead to something amazing, something wonderful. This is the right backdrop for miracles- this sun, this sky, should see you coming home to a letter from a lost love or a solicitor wishing to convey information that may be to your advantage. To win lotteries or get contracts. Or even to pick a Tokitoh up from a back alley, and how right Minekura was about the season for that, even if (she says smugly) Jan 22 1996 was actually cloudy and warm. But of course it doesn't happen like that, and can't, and didn't. The miracles I had in Tokyo happened in August, one of the last months I'd have expected it. Forget plum blossoms. It's cicadas that do it.

During the warm snap a few weeks back I almost got what it was about the Tokyo cold and why it's different from Canadian. Tokyo cold is of course cold, because it isn't warm. It falls in that half of the spectrum that's blue rather than red, registers under whatever arbitrary mark it is- 60F? 50?- that's the end of warm/ temperate and is the beginning of cool/cold. But it lacks the basic characteristic of Canadian cold, its intrusiveness. Even near the freezing point it doesn't hurt you. Doesn't numb the fingers or start the dull black ache in the bones. It gives energy and purpose. It's enlivening. It makes all things seem possible and the world look like a very good place to be in.

On 'cold' Tuesday nights in winter I finished my kids' classes in Riverpoint Towers and walked through the narrow streets of Tsukishima to the station, past the kura where the matsuri wagons were kept and past the dark two storey bulk of wooden houses with grey tiled roofs. A white moon was in the darkening post-sunset sky over the Sumida, and the water in the little canal glittered black under the streetlights. I'd slip into the even narrower corridor-street in Tsukuda where the jinja was. Not a building, but a room. A little three-sided room with a great tree growing in it, with a round hole in the ceiling for the tree to go through. The bright electric lights on the smooth blond wooden panelling were like the lights in the dining room at Bedford, the big house I grew up in. The dining room jinja I thought of it, and it had the same settled and sheltered air to it, speaking of middle-class comfort and modest prosperity. The corridor itself was paved in grey stone, and across the way- the way being maybe four feet wide at most- was the little house where the jinja's priest lived, looking also very clean and bright and respectably comfortable.

The tree and the little spirit house behind it shared space with a Buddhist shrine, a stone stele to some bodhisattva or monk. I never did figure out which. You could wash the stone and burn incense, and people did, so the place smelled always of incense and wet stone. Or you could put a coin in the offering box and talk to the Shinto kami. I did the latter, generally preferring trees to stones and Shinto to Buddhism. Naturally I felt hideously uncomfortable doing it all- washing hands, dropping coin, clapping, bending head and praying- because I was brought up in a much more discreet religion that carries its rituals out in much darker venues. I always hoped it would get easier, but it didn't. I couldn't forget I was a large-sized foreigner in this small setting, doing what the Japanese would find very curious in a foreigner. But it was just an incidental discomfort in something that was basically a relief, like the pain of working a muscle knot out of your shoulder. (For that I used the poles by the doors on the train, which were just the right circumference to get into the shoulder blade and flatten one's knots against.) I needed that momentary hopeful glimpse of a larger, different order of reality than my narrow human-enclosed one. At home I had the babies to provider difference- people whose brains don't work together yet and who are rather odd in consequence. In Japan I had the kami, who if all the stories have any truth to them, are rather odd as well, and in much the same way.