VIII.
I meet Hisako when I was twenty-two and we end up going out six years in total, roughly two each in Yokohama, her original place; Kitakata in the north of Japan, and then Ginza, where we ended up, reaching such a culmination of position and environment as has been commented, but the road there is the story worth recounting; the twists and turns are what in the end constitute the journey itself. There is first the first year: and corrosion of time has already set in, I want to write about midnight kisses on an east side promenade, but who to care, who to recount as if past history when all other things have swept them away, leaving everything else discarded sweeps of memory? It is in our third year together I propose to Hisako that we go up north and what is motivating this is a sort of stupidity, a naïve, immature, childish view of the world that entails such ideas as “moral redemption” and “reform.” Unsophisticated, naïve, I impose a Christian Western value system; I decide that we are to go north to escape the city and set in motion an interregnum of a year, a pointless exercise in time.
"Look why don't we go north, escape this city, start something up there."
Hisako knits her brows, looks cross and thinks it's a stupid idea, but things are listless, things are restless, and this idea is a fixation of mind; under such singularity of purpose, driftlessness cannot resist. I am driven by a sense of proportion and childhood values; a somehow clear distinction between right and wrong.
-There is nothing up there. Why do you think I left?
“I don't know. It's just that we have to try something new; something about the way things are is wrong.”
I had first come to Japan the year after my freshman year of college. I checked my email one day in Los Angeles Central Library while backpacking in America's West and found a last-minute offer from Northwest Airlines, three hundred dollars and change to Japan for a week.. When I touched down, Kansai Airport, I made my directly to Kyoto, where I booked the cheapest place in my backpacker's guidebook and by now it was nightfall, the red lanterns on Kawabata-dori were out, a light mist was falling. It was perfect that the evening's blush hid the modern buildings, such that it possible for a moment to believe that one had somehow been transported into the 16th century and come across a mysterious, magical city as a first discoverer. Kyoto, even by daylight, was a rare, sunlit place. Certainly, there were cars in a hurried horn-bleeting traffic-jam that day or the trains did glide into and trundle off from stations just like they did in the West; what was different was the odd perfection of the place, the hush and still of the people, the precise feeling of everyone holding their breath for something miraculous about to happen the very next moment. The Tokyo hotel movie captures it. You are jet-lagged, stunned, culture-shocked, horrified, mocked, and reverently worshipped all at once.
For the next three years of college, I worked at my part-time job and saved up every penny for summer and winter holidays with one single purpose: to spend every spare penny, every spare week to fly to Japan, sometimes for $250 or $400, relying on frequent flyer miles, crazy airfares that appeared for a day or less, travel right after a notorious plane crash, etc. Compared to the utter banality and utter predictability of blonde social Pennsylvania, where so much money earned you such a carefully calculated amount of pleasure or positional improvement, Japan was the answer to everything. Its silence; its restraint; its somehow slightly offset vibe: every moment felt like the verge of something incredible; every nook and cranny offered some rare possibility and exotic foreignness impossible to find in conventional life. One crazy mid-winter expedition took me all the way to Wakkanai, where snow fell continuously and the white breath from my exhalations could not obscure the perfect snow-buried northernity of a seaside port-town village. I rode out as far as Kanazawa, where a few hours overlap in schedule permitted not enough time to actually see the place before the rapid train went back to Tokyo, a third best garden. I backpacked out to Beppu and Nara and Morioka and Sapporo, and everywhere quaint little village people or sophisticated city dwellers treated me with kindness or disdain, but it was all the same thing, everyone was small and well put-together, the trains ran on time, the hostel beds were cheap, and turning a corner, you could come across two girls who giggled before clasping each others' hands and running away together looking back at you, everything 4/5th scale; everything seeming to be made just for you, polished, perfected, new.
From the almost molten sea off that little traveled branch line from Akita to Kanazawa, the close-knit valleys of north Japan, Tazawako, Towadako, unbelievable vistas of Nagano prefecture, the downtown life of Ueno, Harajuku on Sundays the only possible place for the peculiarity of a particular gap in time, to Nikko, Karuizawa, Takamatsu, and Osaka/Kyoto metropolitan complex, I knew this country as I knew the back of my hand. Hidden mountainside temples gave way to vistas across incredibly wide valleys; the sun declining on an afternoon's rice paddies was completely sunk by the time the cities stirred to life, a plateau on which children stretched before long-distance runs, playgrounds, tea plantations, forested hills. With this sort of background, I romanticize Kitakata as the perfect antidote to the dishonesties of the city. It is here we will build anew.
Winter's first snowflakes are falling when we pack up a white kei car in a parking lot of gravel near Ueno, brown-cartons of so many useless possessions, a completely filled vehicle, snowflakes so abnormally large. In that moment before our big move, there is the expectation heavy and hanging in the air of a great responsibility and a time of trial ahead. In the passenger seat, Hisako sits, eighteen, checking her lipstick with her careless black hair tossed idly back behind her ear. I get into the car; I start it. Hours of a national route 1 snow-bound and countryside exerting itself finally gives way by evening to a dusty valleytown forgotten by time. It doesn't take long to find the apartment arranged weeks before by telephone; the first impression is of disappointment, a slapboard shack of four stories, on the second of which we have one railroad flat.
That night, I take a walk around the neighborhood to get my bearings. In this dark, dark utterly silent night there is just wasteland. Even blasted earth would in some ways been more desirable, if only for the interruption of pitch darkness. The skies had cleared by the time we reached the place and gotten the key from the superannuated landlord, revealing a night sky that was somehow completely inky blank. Kitakata: a first impression, inky nothingness.
In the first night's darkness, electricity not even hooked up yet, we snuggle up together under a wool blanket and the world seems entirely still. Here is a gravel parking lot to match the one in the city we have left; here is a town set in a valley that the traditional character of the people had left untouched by the national railroad, leaving things unchanged since that dusty day in the 15th century when the town had been founded. The next town over got the railroad; it developed into a fair-sized city. Kitakata remained terraced farming plantations and small. It was one valley, the opening end of which had a rusting metal broadcast tower, pod-shaped and oddly oblong as a sole concession to modernity. Our apartment is located about a third of the way deep into the valley, right at the meridians of power-lines and mountainside stream, a deep and tremulous location. That earth throbs that very night, the deep and buried shock too deep to send dishes crashing to the floor; we awake and stir, ascertain no imminent peril, and then sleep again, without dream.
I have some dazed and semi-psychedelic vision of wise and beatific farm-people smiling at passerbys from the fields as they go about their daily lives; the reality instead is of a town high in elevation and sufficiently north that winter is six months of the year. The snow falls; the snow falls; the snow falls some more, and winter has begun. The weeks pass with a sudden adjustment of time. From Tokyo's frenetic pace we are suddenly faced with long hours of solitude.
“Eto, I think the colored ponds here are most famous part. Springs of water that ran through rock and are blue or red or green.”
“We should go.”
“And we should decorate this room with more color. No window, no light. Maybe we need buy lamp.”
“Let's do that. We'll use our next paycheck for a refrigerator; the one after that for all the decoration we can get.”
Silence hits like a bombshell, a sudden aching realization that life in the city is a perpetual stimulation; once you leave, there is only oneself to deal with. The small railroad flat slowly takes on the shape of home, becoming decorated in small and larger ways. I take a tiny moment of pleasure in the way Hisako puts her furoshiki washcloth, blue, folded on the rack; even in this defective specimen of the race, a certain control and form, a way of doing things.
“So you guys are moving here, you want to live in Kitakata?”
Eri Hasegawa, our one friend.
“Yeah, we think we’ve had enough of Tokyo for a while. Want to try to build a life, just get back to the countryside.”
“But you are not farmer. You have nothing to keep you here.”
“That’s kinda the point.”
Hasegawa, twenty-two, is only here because she will inherit her family’s place, a silk-dyeing concern that has been in the family for six generations. Located on the outskirts of the city, the small wooden-building houses a factory of sorts that uses modern technology to replicate old techniques. But the professional aspect of the family makes Hasegawa concerned about trade realities.
“You can teach English.”
“Ugh.”
“Maybe dispatch position. You stay in headquarters, send the teachers to their jobs, use walkie-talkie to make sure everyone is going to the right place.”
“Okay, I will look into it.”
She changes the topic.
"Look here, 7-11 gives you two points for every meal you buy, and you paste them here to get 80 points, but in a month's time, there's really only enough to get almost enough for the free dish set."
"So what?"
"But that's exactly it. If we can bring together every single person in the town to pool their points rather try to hit the target independently than we can collect enough points to get a free dish set and not have everyone waste their 60 points."
7-11 is just the start--there are hundreds of companies handing out meaningless point schemes, but she seems to understand the weakness of each.
"Okay, so let's all help out. And we'll post things on websites to assemble the points."
Weeks later, her apartment is full of the October dish set.
"But now what?"
"Now we sell..."
So here we turn our energies to researching and participating in as many consumer-affinity programs as possible and a half-baked hobby turns into a preoccupation--though only to the degree that it entertains.
"But we still have... oh, seven hundred sixty eight dish sets."
"The electronic goods one is actually the best. If we can just hit the next target...they're giving out trips to Thailand."
Six months working in a restaurant for the old man, technically 800 yen an hour but in reality much less; six months spending that carefully hoarded money on Thai islands: this is the reality of the part-timer driven new economy. So we have Eri and Hisako, smiling girls in bikinis on a crystal-blue Thai beach, means to at least learn of the existence of other foreigners; characters in what drama that does exist.
Here is space to speak of the monumentality of days. Tokyo’s hectic pace recedes, recedes, recedes, and all there is left is the sound of wind whistling through mountain cedar and the snow that drifts down by September and then remains on the ground in some form or another until March. December’s utterly frigid grip on the valley leaves drifts of ten or fifteen feet, and people can only be seen as bulk asexual shapes in the white, struggling to make progress on ice and frost-rimmed roads. I take the dispatch job. Due to lack of any previous experience or certification and because Kitakata is such a rustic place to live, I do end up teaching in the end, almost half the days at least, sent to thirty different primary and middle-schools in the area, some as small as one classroom on a rotating basis and devoid of any normal teacher prerogatives or position. In a small rustic kerosene-smelling office, I grab black radios with mittened thumbs and try to coordinate the movement of two-score contractors across five or six mountains valleys, radio reception utterly non-existent. The one consolation is that because some of the assigned workplaces are so distant, travel takes me across the most obscure winding country roads up to distant nooks and crannies of the mountain range and seeing the countryside as few get to see it; the tiniest of small-holdings struggling to exist in the rockiest of hidden valleys. It is low prestige, everyone living in Kitakata is low status, but drearily of the life, the place, the perspective, one loses the sense of perspective. Hisako busied herself with home decoration and then her restaurant job. Once I see a Brazilian girl, light skinned, at the train station, in school uniform, but I never see her again and coffee and motor oil and smoke. In the evening I return to our apartment, and it is still kerosene and rock and the low light of a single bulb amidst the wind-howling valley pass.
Foreigners come and go. Job opportunities are quite weak and the ambitions of most seem so limited; to save up money, to buy an English franchise of one’s own; to go home and try to find a “real job.” But reality is Saturday night poker games, dinner parties obsessed over and planned out to minute detail; long hikes through the surrounding countryside. It is worth it because of Hisako. Hisako and just Hisako. Five three, black haired, a slightly awkward chin. I put my lips on her shoulder and she shivers. She is deliberately wearing a white sailor's blouse with blue neckerchief collar: a garment that still fits her eighteen-year old frame. A certain assumed pose that was the only reasonable response to things. Society that grows more and more obsessed with ever younger girls. To the onlooker, a friendly greeting, an untrue assessment, a pat on the back, a disciplinary session-circle match, Hisako lying back on a table, Hisako fetishized and dolled-up. She is a cranky in disposition, she has some tendency towards mood swings, and she is a natural submissive in a society that takes this quality to its utmost degree in its women, but whether all of this adds up to anything disproving the preeminent role of chance in life, I don't know. Her quality is of lacking quality, a mediocre fate dissolving into a less than mediocre outcome, the desire for something unique precisely motivating the decline itself.
"I was an only child..."
Speak ecstatic shiverence upon that yielding body, though our circumstances are straitened, and we live in a barely habitable LDK. In one dusty corner, I find photographs of prewar military exercises, schoolboys training in the snow. In another, wood carving marks date to the eighteenth century: it is 1941 now or 1921. Upon this blasted geography I superimpose my own history; Hisako in pretended indifference works away on a sketch, I creep upon her onto her.
“We can go to Fuji-rock next year. Or Aomori.”
Hasegawa’s giddy enthusiasm drops down a notch after she gets to know us better. We have plans; we have dreams and ambitions.
“Cosmo-K will sell DVD 500 yen only. 500 yen stores have everything you need.”
Chinese-made goods streaming into the countryside, sold for 500 or even 100 yen; prices slowly climbing down, unemployment not a concern.
“Take a picture of me; check out the store, the magazine, the ‘gravure’ shot.”
Exactly the thing about her is that she has little personality to begin with: one imposes something on her. Your dream, your fantasy, your half-remembered memory. I grab the camera; I shoot. Photographer is linked to subject of the photo; the relationship is a social relationship itself. There is something frail about her; in our first years she is often sick, but still of course there is some kind of vitality here, we can't just talk about trees and highways and decaying cities and wrap it up all like this; modernity. Click: girl amidst dead trees. Hisako is a girl who could have been pretty ordinary; she could have been wistful Mrs. Watanabe in a concrete grey apartment complex, she could have been Shibuya AX dancing away in Ebisu. But then, maybe this isn't even true, the birth rate goes down and down. In some sort of half-way snuggling down bedding meeting of young lovers whispers, one's younger sister is getting married, but although Toru is only a high school graduate, he has a lifetime employment job, he can provide for the family. Click: girl in pink dress. Confessions are a meeting of mind; the bright winter sun is a foil to conversation I cannot understand nor even try to understand, the confidences of a sisterhood closed to men.
There is a certain memory of Hisako that occurred when she was in sixth grade, about to be pulled into the ‘yanqui’ (delinquent girl) life and all the teachers surrounded her in a group discipline session that was her last chance to be straight and narrow. At the risk of collapsing into some sort of perverted Shinjuku-studio imagery, the idea of many men surrounding one thirteen year old girl being what it is, this memory holds so firmly because it was Hisako’s true last chance to stick it out to the normal and bourgeois, for the factory-job lifestyle that entailed, the apartment that I eventually forced her back to (ironic), but of course under her name, her impetus, and the drear that was her destiny regardless.
Her mother, naturally, doted on her, but as she grew up I guess it was impossible to control that wild child, a single mother with few economic possibilities of her own. What occurred was that lack of sibling drama she could never really understand others. The world was something that happened to her; she selected from her options. Second, her father, before he died, was Soka Gakkai; he brought the whole family into the group. It's a new modern religion that isn't quite cult and isn't quite mainstream. Society was sufficiently well attuned that it wasn't made a huge deal of, but the disconnect with mainstream values was the beginnings of estrangement from the cultural norm. Among all the characteristics that flowed through a youthful personality, there is distinctly a streak of narcissism. But even this was within bounds; there is no pathology, there is no simplistic answer that left you doomed. Patty Hearst pointed guns at police officers and lived to tell the tale; Leila Khalid was the sole survivor of an El-Al hijacking. Our Western female antiheroes are people of action. But in the minefields, the poor and dispossessed marched towards paradise; canapes and champagne are consumed at the Paris Air Show; the divide between the Third and the First Worlds is uncrossable. I walk about the city and fail to attain enlightenment or even some Tom Cruise-version of the Japanese countryside as refuge and retreat. The grandmothers of Kitakata are so old, their skin almost seems to exude dust. Big piled up stacks of daikon lay at the shop, searching for a hopeful buyer, blue plastic tarps and bamboo-frame construction, the thin, almost imperceptible fabric covered what attempts there were to put up new buildings, and at the town edge, the land slopes down to a river that is already too polluted to swim in, and the effluence of sixty thousand souls makes it genuinely reek. Yet the road behind the main strip: here parking spaces can be found; the shocked faces of townspeople hide behind metalled doors, and geography has once again triumphed; fate interceded only insofar as the absence of happening could itself be defined as a happening.
Hisako tells me early on that she had a "bad personality," and I come to understand this, I come to see what she is talking about, all though that is a simplification as well. It was just somewhere early enough the idea of Japan as exoticism had been implanted, and everything else was cheap and humdrum by comparison. Greek culture is culturally related to Japanese, and there is something possible here connecting the strands of mother-love, Oedipal complexes and primordial father conflicts, primitive mythology imposing itself on our decision-making, but that, after all, is so-much philosophical claptrap: we are here. None of this works without understanding her. There is no more family here for her. My half-assed personality can't cope with all this cheapness, we furnish the apartment in plastics and hundred yen store manufactured goods; the old culture is lost, therefore; the old ways are swept aside by the new. American, crass, suburban, I resented what came out of my own culture: I am just the only one willing to admit it. The old hags at the cosmo mart or iida k do not even acknowledge her presence. Tokyo's hectic ceaseless beat gives away to utterly silent winter nights and the cold crisp mountain air. The thought will come, this was, after all, proper and normal. It is the normal way of living. It is the city that was abnormal and psychosis inducing. So proper here to leave space for the cry of the baked yam seller wending his way through summer nights, the wordless camaraderie of people hiking together on cold February weekends, and the change of the seasons to even springtime's raw molting awakening of the earth, moist, birthing, insolent as life. In rude health the power of the mountain itself could be heard, and no symbolist or analyst can decipher it.
“Maybe we should take a boat out on the lake.”
Here in snow-bound Kitakata valley I eke out a one-and-a-half thousand a month existence on dispatch work proud of a paycheck I earn myself, proud of a sort of parody of middle-class existence, not unaware of the parodic prospects of this characterization (here, now); now unaware of the thin underlying tendencies here recorded; an abomination in my own mind. Weekends with Eri; mountain-climbing trips; walks through ancient forests; vistas from incredibly high. Stimulation is so intense in these modern times that we have to resort to superlative; it seems truly apocalyptic these mountain ranges stretching away as far as the eye could see; it seems the end of the world.
“See we rent the boat here; we can take it out as far as that island, or maybe just a bit further.”
Something is degenerating the whole time as the months pass, I collect my pay in my bank account every month, slowly start accumulating cheap plastic goods in that prefab apartment. It is not the glad cries of children I do not know nor the mind-stultifying tasks of resentful countryside Japanese managers. Aleks is off to Alaska; Tomas opens up a café. Little by little the domicile becomes home.
“Let's boat out to the island; to the far shore; the water is sweet.”
One cannot 'escape' human society, one cannot 'drop out' of life and run away from the flow of time. There is the main sequence of events and then ancillary ones, foundering listless directionless one is easy prey for any adventurer or casual wanderer. But this is just possessive metaphor again, falsehoods, dream sequences and representations of representations. If none of it mattered, then what of high speed car races through dark Japanese nights, near shattering accidents, screaming shouting cutlery and cookingware thrown against the wall.
[Say if you really loved her, you would have married her; one can't possess a person, this is what we all learn our teenage years mostly, and what happened in the end...]
“It is beautiful, the line of the cloud above the circular lake.”
Or...'of course if you leave Tokyo, you lose your way, you no longer have definition in your life.'
It is I who encouraged the cranky and antisocial Hisako to go out and reengage with her hometown, welcoming Eri, the young twenty-something Japanese of that small town into our lives and broader social circles to come. Hisako says she sleeps with Tak's friend Jun just out of a sense of sympathy, and this is something about historical tradition as well.
But she does, or she doesn’t; it doesn’t matter anyway; Kitakata, the white snow-capped mountains so distant and now never to be reached, my life as metaphor, the town of utter natural perfection.
The white birch forests, the cedar, the pine; the view of those mountains is like a dagger to the heart, and we grow deeper for interaction with disappearing nature. Hisako, so fragile, so pointless, when returned to her natural environment, somehow begins to conform more deeply with the values of the traditional town. In time I begin to find her indistinguishable from the classical ideal; her clothing, her gait, her personal style become rustified, and she is beautiful amidst all that natural splendor.
At the end of the valley where it spreads out to the flatlands below the main road of the city meets the national highway and the bullet train line. Here as if in monument to the construction, there is an old rusting TV tower, a 1960s creation that looked futuristic and modern at the time of construction but now is charmingly quaint. Instead of being bold, minimal and evanescent, the techniques and construction style are so over-designed that the shape is that of a nub or squat peak rather than the ephemeral spire the designer it hoped it to be—or that modern methods now produce. With metal that has been zinced and is thus stolid rather than radiant; dull rather than gleaming, the nub sits there, squat, uncommenting, easily forgotten. I am writing not out of nostalgia for some 70s school architecture, the Japanese high school we all went to. Rather it is a question of geomancy and alchemy, forgotten sciences of a more superstitious time. I circle the nub, I expend my energies in circumambulation. I walk over and over to the nub and think about it.
This is the only possible vista into a place that defies easy characterization. I put aside part of my paycheck; I accumulate things. There is some kind of charm in this innocence, this boyish way of believing that a pile of sand on top of another will eventually result in a fully habitable castle. But if Kitakata deserves something, it is this: this life is not unlivable. Hisako is wrong about this. It is totally possible to make the sunlit afternoon of a summer Sunday become the totality of a way of life. It is not that I am trying to live in some sixteenth century version of existence. It is that this country life has its own consolations. The sweet water of the caldera lake, Tazawako, is ever so much sweet to the spirit than all the neon dayglo of Shibuya or Ebisu. Those rainbow-colored kids know nothing of differentiations between rouge and ochre or even bark. And even afterwards, even after things are impossible, I am still intent on living here.
“So you want to live here for the rest of your life.”
“…”
“Eight hundred yen an hour, thirty thousand saved by the end of the month if we cut out all unnecessary expenses.”
Her mouth moves; she is animated, flushed.
“This dusty town; this minimal life.”
From the far shore, we can see Towada-ko, the perfect circular caldera lake, an extinct volcano filled up with rain.
This is it. This is the full summation of two years spent in the far north, a futile escape from a city that was going to dominate every other moment, every other waking thought of an entire twenties of one life. If I have to spell out narrative, Eri eventually married her boyfriend, the American who wished to become Japanese. Tak and Shino are still together, older, about to inherit the izakaya. I think the boys on the basketball team are still friends, and the city itself has shrunken slightly in population, a candidate to be merged with neighboring towns. The most striking detail is maybe 100 yen DVDs at the 100 yen store; you accumulate a collection, you sink into suburban ennui.