Tokio Whip Read online

  Accordingly, Rutland rents half of his apartment to Davis, unbeknownst to Miss Easton (who, incidentally, had an inclination to end sentences with prepositions, for example: “you don’t have half to sublet a half of”). She is also a bit nervous over sharing her rooms with two men, who soon discover that she is engaged to no one less than the proper Julius D. Haversack – the smug, officious and obnoxious Second Secretary who’d earlier offended Rutland.

  Rutland obviously sees Miss Easton as being rather repressed (that tight schedule) – and that she will only become moreso if she goes ahead with her plans for marriage to Mr. Haversack. He also sees what she cannot: her own real, and physical, attraction to Davis. (At their first breakfast together, Davis stares intently at her. Taken aback and uncomfortable, she asks, “What are you gawking at?” His answer is simple, American: “You. You look nice.” Flustered, she can only respond with a weak, “Oh.”) And so he decides to play matchmaker.

  However, things go wrong when the two men return home drunk one evening and, like two nasty schoolboys, they spot Miss Easton’s diary and Rutland begins to read it, while also speculating on her sexual experience. She overhears them; hurt and offended, she asks them to leave the next morning. The next afternoon, Miss Easton returns home to find Rutland already gone and Davis packing. He hands her a present from Rutland – a prototype of a new moving-image viewing device. It is accompanied by a note from Rutland, explaining that the fault is entirely his, and that Steve had nothing to do with the nastiness. “How do I know he wrote it?” “You don’t,” Steve answers. “Well, if he wrote it, how do I know it’s the truth?” Davis’s elegant answer: “You don’t – only it’s the truth.” She is genuinely touched, and knowing that without a room – the Olympic Village hasn’t opened yet – Davis might very well be sleeping in Shinjuku Gyoen – she offers him his old room for the night.

  He gladly accepts, and goes so far as to ask her out that evening. “But what about Mr. Haversack?,” she faithfully wonders. On their way home, he makes affectionate overtures, a caress here, a stolen kiss there. She wonders about the women in his life: “Who was next?” “Jane Alice Peters.” “What was wrong with her?” Nothing, except ...” “Except what?” “She wanted to get married.” “Well, what happened?” “She got married.” Meanwhile, unbeknownst to either of them, Rutland has reintroduced himself to Haversack, and is pretending great interest in his Japan memoirs. Haversack takes the bait. Meanwhile how- and moreover, the ever-vigilant KGB have seen Yuri and Steve with their small tape recorder and cameras; the agent Dimitri takes Yuri, and informs the Japanese police, and suddenly Steve and Miss Easton – as his landlady – are up before a judge. Some phonecalls are made, and Rutland, accompanied by Haversack (rambling on – “I would think it devastatingly paradoxical if I opened chapter five with my arrival in Japan!”) – who discovers that his fiancée has a handsome roommate – testifies to everyone’s good character. However, Haversack also smells scandal, and – after more complications – it turns out that the only way out is for Steve to sign a waiver, and to marry Miss Easton. Steve meanwhile has disappeared in preparation for his Olympic event the next morning: the fifty-kilometer walk.

  And walk he does. But how to avoid the ensuing scandal? Steve must sign the papers. But he’ll be walking for hours! Rutland is inspired. He gets into a cab, locates Davis on his long route, undresses, and joins him in the race – in his white boxer shorts! (Steve comes in tenth place.)

  Exhausted, Steve and Chris marry. Haversack thanks him, and shares a glass of champagne with Rutland, who leads him away to hear more of his memoirs, and then just leaves him – and Steve and Chris – and his life in the movies.

  Oh, why continue this charade? No doubt, the reader who has not fallen asleep or turned to the next section long ago guessed that no Sir William Rutland ever existed, no such memoirs were ever written, and certainly no such silly story ever transpired. What I have done, however – and here I offer no apology – is given a précis of a mediocre film called Walk, Don’t Run, a film which is set during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (though it was not released until 1966), and whose only real distinction lies in its being the seventy-second and final film of Cary Grant.

  Walk, Don’t Run was directed by Charles Walters (?), and costars Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton, two small blips on the 1960’s screen. Besides being Grant’s last film, Walk, Don’t Run is also a remake of the far superior The More the Merrier, directed by George Stevens in 1943, and starring Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea (no blips they!), and with Charles Coburn in the Cary Grant role, and who won that year’s Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Walk, Don’t Run tries to be funny – it is mildly amusing – while it also takes the best bits from the original (that lovely seduction scene, Jean Arthur all nervous and innocently sexy, for example) but never surpasses them. (The movie’s trailer even boasts of “The Land of the Rising Fun”! There are a few good things in the film: it’s nice to see the actual locations, while the set – at 2-35 Osaka Road!? – tries hard to be real; good fun is made with the presence of two children as Rutland’s shadows; Rutland takes a deep breath and coughs from the pollution.)

  It does, however, try to make something of its being Grant’s sayonara song. There are allusions to his earlier films: for example, twice he whistles the popular theme from Charade; in another scene he sings of a “love affair,” and even mention marriage “in name only” (regrettably, the only film he made with Carole Lombard). In yet another, Hutton comes across as trying to imitate James Stewart (with whom Grant was paired of course in The Philadelphia Story): “Hey now, wait just a minute you” – complete with typical Stewart gesture. More important is the end, Cary’s departure. He says goodbye to Steve and Haversack; he gives Christine a glass of champagne and kisses her hand. He leaves the apartment. He glances down the stairwell – and all we see is his shadow. That would have been a perfect and poignant moment to end the film. Instead, Walters distastefully plows on and has Rutland get into his car – where his driver offers him a sayonara present: a statue of the god of fertility.

  ***

  –Hiromi says the Pam-Pam girls used to give the GIs blow-jobs for a quarter here.

  –What? Where, here – outside? Under the tracks?

  –Here? These tracks?

  –VZ calls it “yakitori-dori,” good food, cheap.

  –That’s a dumb joke, a foreigner’s joke.

  –It’s funny how you get all these run-down joints and those old geezers hauling those wooden crates collecting paper like they were attached to their backs, and just next to it all, these big, expensive department stores and restaurants –

  –Right, and all those bars where the salary-guys pay ¥10,000 for a bottle of beer.

  –Really?

  –Yeah, of course.

  –Right, and that’s a cheap one.

  –Cheaper blow-job.

  –I heard of two guys once who had three bottles of beer – normal bottles, you know – and they had to pay ¥50,000.

  –No way!

  –It’s true.

  –Yeah, but then it must’ve been a yakuza-run place.

  –Well, I don’t know about that, all I know is that I heard it.

  –So, you just trust everything you hear?

  –Well, I trust my friends.

  –Anyway, ya’ know, Lang’s always bragging about how short the walk is, he says he often strolls from Nihonbashi to Yurakucho, but that sounds crazy to me – it’s like four or five stations!

  –No, this place just isn’t your type, Hiroko, my pal.

  –The girls are too nice for me –

  –And the guys are nice, too, but ... well, it’s just like at work.

  –?

  –Smile and keep your makeup on close.

  –And then it all ends at Shimbashi, lickety split, it’s like another world once you go under the bridge. Ginza so p. e. and then things get funky again

  –But the same more suits.

  –Hey, who’s
this Prometheus guy?

  –Who?

  –Really, what a weird statue.

  –Isn’t he in the Heike Monogatari?

  –Noli Me Tangere?

  ***

  Rich and strange, Arlene thinks, that the changes I need to effect are coming to me naturally, here. And when they come into clearer focus, it will be time to leave. Roberta and Lang are right, I shall be more free in Europe, more the self they see me as than I yet see. But I will nestle this city inside me. Wherever I shall be.

  ***

  Before you leave, don’t forget to pass on the cartoon: cock at desk, “up betimes and crowed.”

  I was a child then, naked. Came to Tokio. It clothed me, made a woman out of me.

  ***

  R’n’L!!

  Dig this: on my little, 12-minute walk home from the station, there are four dry cleaners, five convenience stores, and three hair-dressers.

  So whadda’ya’ think – did Priscilla do it with the Colonel?

  The day a star was named after me.

  Ya’ know, I’ve always wanted to finish a smoke by just throwing it on the floor, just like in the movies. But one thing I don’t get is how whenever someone hangs up on another, the hung-up-on one starts clicking that phone thing, like being hung up on is temporary.

  Cleaning house, I came across this in an old notebook: “Finish Whip fast; spend next five years writing only two short stories, and studying ancient Greek.” Small ambitions, eh?

  “Wish I’d Said That/Quote of the Week” Dept. “It was such a beautiful day that I decided to stay in bed.” Courtesy W. S. Maugham.

  And then I loved LC’s description of her work: “A transitory witness to the changing conditions of light.”

  The other day someone asked me if I’d been raised in an apartment. What a great compliment!

  Did I ever tell you that the climax of North by Northwest, ie, the Mt. Rushmore sequence, occurs on my very own birthday?! No kidding; there’s a shot in the movie of a newspaper – you know, “Diplomat Slain at U. N.” – and you can read the date and then figure out the rest. (But did you know the dates are all wrong in Walk, Don’t Run?)

  Looks like I have to reread Nerval. His name’s popped up in three conversations in the past two weeks.

  Just saw Angel for the first time. Lubitsch, Dietrich. So this guy goes nuts over Marlene, woos her, takes her to dinner. End of meal, she says, “You must be quite a success with women.” He asks why, and she answers, “Any man who can order a meal like that must be.” Ah, a line worthy of Wilde!

  God, this new camera, what am I gonna do with it? Got one idea: two “portraits” of you guys; but not yer faces necessarily, more your “worlds.” You know, those fave things around you, souvenirs picked up in yer travels, the pictures on your walls, a favorite pen or coffee cup, that sort of thing. All together it would end up giving the viewer an idea, uhn, I mean picture, of youze. And in between the two people portraits there’d be a third “project” as my artist friends would call it. I’d take photos of all my fave and the most interesting places in Kichijoji, including the bad ones, like those patches of lawn and concrete they dare to call “parks” here; the village idiot; the mother who’s always walking with her two daughters (I think I saw the husband once); the fat lady at the dry cleaners, etc. Write some captions on the margins of the photos. In the end it should be a portrait of Kichijoji and indirectly of me. Whadda’ya’ think?

  ***

  –I can’t quit ’ya, Roberta, but I gotta go.

  –Lang, you can be such a fool.

  –Should I repeat myself?

  –You will, Lang, regardless of what I say.

  –Why these Americanisms?

  –Why all this violence?

  –I love you, Roberta.

  –As I said, to repeat myself.

  –The violence?

  –The love, Lang.

  ***

  City of my sins.

  – Spanish phrase

  ***

  Other friends could tell other stories.

  – LZ

  Whose are these young, these innocent faces? And why do I mistrust them?

  ***

  ABC

  –It was a shell, a spiral, an unfolding screen, Cafferty was explaining to Roberta and Arlene – a two-dimensional plan/accident perhaps that divided into the low and the high cities, but more the shell-spiral, a labyrinth that let the traveler out in Ome, Tama, across the Edo River, on some happy tropical islands. This “empty center” business has gotten much too out of hand; I prefer to see other pictures.

  –Bric-a-brac, Arlene responded; a crossword puzzle on top of a pointillist painting on top of a digital photograph.

  –Too easy, Roberta pointed out. I think of it as a Mika Yoshizawa drawing: a circle bisected on the right by another circle bisected by yet another: the city, the Yamanote, the Palace. Like some giant Mickey Mouse eye.

  –And what of the river, Roberta?, Cafferty asked.

  –Arteries, of course!

  –And have you thought of this: abstract the circle of the Yamanote, square it and then bisect it horizontally by the Chuo: the sun; bisected again by the Sobu: the eye. That is a pretty standard picture. What we have now as a result of all that 80s overbuilding – overbiting? – is the Bay bisected by the Rainbow Bridge: in other words, the city, the sun-eye not only doubled, but enlarged.

  –Land and water!

  –Yes, Arlene, and more, it’s tripled: the Bay has become the repository of the low city’s riverine past, while the life of the low city has moved west; it’s climbed over the Yamanote, completely passed it by – which in its snobbery didn’t even notice – and made its new home West, say from Ogikubo on. You see this historically too, how so many institutions have been displaced or removed to the safer, newer west.

  –Ogikubo?

  –Okagami.

  –What?

  –The Great Mirror, Roberta explained. The city doubles and even triples itself, and we only read ourselves into it. I see a Yoshizawa drawing ...

  –And Lang sees the face of James Joyce.

  –How’s that?, asks Cafferty.

  –That odd shape of the Yamanote being Joyce’s scrawny head; the Chuo and Palace being the eyepatch; and that area near Hatchobori where so many train lines meet make a huge ear. Joyce resting his head listening to the language of the river ...

  –Ingenious …

  –Or silly.

  –Yes, so many pictures. Look at the actual thing, with all the mountains and rivers ....

  –A corn cob ...

  –Wasabi ...

  –A grotesque, an old man’s penis in some ukiyo-e ...

  –In the mouth of the Bay.

  –Thank you, Roberta.

  ***

  Well, while they’re all arguing back and forth with him about Tokyo, I’m out there enjoying myself in it. What would they have to say to that? I mean, it is just a city. Sure it’s big and the capitol and all, but hey, you have the same work and play in Nagoya or Osaka. Same difference. What’s the big deal? Ok, maybe a few differences in food or clothes, but anyone would expect that. Girls still come with two legs all over Japan, so who’s complaining? – So remarks that minor annoyance Hiro, from whom we do not expect much in the way of thought.

  ***

  They got married, placed their faith between his legs.

  The ashtray slides its way across the tabletop, and having slid ...

  The new kid in town asks around: “So, what gives with this burg?”

  ***

  Hiroko and company got off their bus a stop or two too early. As they – and so many before them – passed the Fuji Latex building, they all immediately wondered.

  –Does that look like what I think it looks like?

  –I think it does.

  –Is it supposed to?

  –I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s supposed to be something else.

  –Well, it is that.

  –?

&n
bsp; –Something else!

  –What the hell building is it, anyway?

  –Let’s see.

  [They step back to read the name and logo.]

  [Followed by universal laughter.]

  –No wonder it looks like a condom!

  –Uh-oh.

  –What?

  –Are you wondering what I’m wondering?

  –I’m not wondering anything.

  –Me neither, I’m just still amazed that we got this giant condom in the middle of the city.

  –Not only that, the Palace is just over there, too.

  –Oh m’god, you’re right.

  –Do you think they ever drive past it?

  –Do you think anyone ever says anything when they do?

  –No way.

  –Oh, so, what were you wondering?

  –Do you think there’s a corresponding building somewhere else, you know, a building that looks like a –

  –Ha! I hope so!

  –Yeah, get this country a sex life!

  Then suddenly they were almost trampled over by a crowd of high-school girls who’d just been released from school. Stopped to stare at the joggers circling the moat, runningly asphyxiating themselves.

  –So, whadda’ya’ wonder the Crown Prince is having for lunch?

  –I really wouldn’t care to know – I’m sure I couldn’t stomach it myself.

  –Hey, anyone know what’s in the Science Museum?

  –Does Japan have any science?

  –Sure, you know, all that bullshit about our enzymes.

  –And our brains programmed for kanji.

  –And our weird architecture!

  –Hey, but remember Hiraga Gennai?

  –Oh right, we had to read about him.

  –Yeah, cool dude – in a way, I guess.