Oh my God. You have to go to the Antique and Junk bar. Four little tables, with expensive antiques -- including a German typewriter! -- and handmade pottery littering all available space. Roar and scream with the owner and the manager while lover and Australian friend play guitar and howl. Order a Jack Daniels, pay five dollars, and be presented with a cocktail glass filled to the brim, straight, on ice. Pose for pictures with the Japanese ladies at the next table. They think you are French. Have the potter call you beautiful and present you with a postcard featuring his work. He wears a green turtleneck, green jacket, and green pants, and is a dead ringer for Allen Ginsberg. Tell him this and he removes his hat to shake his hair about and roar. Before you go, drink beer in the park, then stumble through the lanes as the Ausie screams, "Look, it's Jackie Chan!" at every man you pass, to their chagrin ...
The weather cools, and the indigo children rejoice by wearing a long-sleeved jacket and ceasing to worry about underarm sweat stains. It rains a lot: they have a yellow umbrella.
The brevity of their observation is a mystery. Normally they hack this stuff to pieces, consider every angle. Perhaps they are becoming a haiku.
---
Amid strain of Suntory whiskey blues herself ragged and excited: change of weather of clothing of ego, the crumple of autumn and olive shirts and flourescent yellow bags of trash under the green netting by 8 am. A precious and expensive copy of Newsweek read and re-read on trains and at kitchen tables and on dampened patios -- it says we aren't to fear China. Pages stained with rain, cigarette ash, ring of gin: but it's only been two days ... Perhaps will trade, will barter, for the new Vanity Fair, or if someone has an Utne Reader... Wired has been consumed, in a blurry eight-hour spree: read every single word, even the ones that didn't interest her, dealing as they do with electricity-powered cars or the technological needlework behind the fight scenes in Jet Li movies. The words have ceased even to be understood as literary building blocks, have transformed instead into rare and important shards of gemstone, their value considered in terms of their capacity to engage left-brain intellect, and potential for re-sell, or recycle: consider the crazy of Sunday-night void, digesting an article on rice fermentation for the third time.
--
By the way, I achieved the impossible just two hours ago: purchased 9 international stamps at the post office possessing only the Japanese words for "stamp" and "do you have it"! Still and all, it took 10 minutes.
Just walked for half an hour along a lush riverbank to get to a skeevy internet cafe. The riverbank seemed African somehow, as if Dian Fossey were lurking beyond the foliage, chain-smoking and eyeing my bright orange dress with suspicion. I met a black dog, and actually got to pet it because I have finally learned how to say, "Is it okay?" Truly, the past month and a half has been hell in the petting-strange-dogs department, as, language-less, I watch them walk past and can say nothing. Ha, until now! Watch out!
There is a Japanese course starting up in October that I keep meaning to register for. Will have to do that soon. First of all I was sick of communicating only in sign language; now I'm sick of saying I'm sick of communicating only in sign language and need to register for that class; time to do it.
Stopped by an authentic Irish pub for a pint with a couple of kids from work -- on the turntable? Metric. Brilliant!
Another co-worker: "Okay, tell me. WHO are the indigo children?"
More beach, more work, more writing. No homesickness yet, not really, though I miss Sunday morning brunches hungover as fuck at Floyd's. Yesterday I finally found multi-grain bread, and bought two loaves -- my impulse is to hoard.
Have caught myself using big, abstract, stupid words again. Erring. The old pressure is back -- with creative satisfaction always comes stress, uncertainty: sabatoge. Only a change in position will help.
Meditating on the beach in Enoshima: so sincere, so serious. Or trying to meditate. Blocked by daydream, by memory of Boxcar Children, of Railway Children. When will literature leave me alone?
Please, don't leave me alone.
I have run out of books. Finished, Paul Auster and William Carlos Williams and Jack Kerouac and JD Salinger and Margaret Atwood and Henry Miller (aborted) and V for Vendetta. What will I do?
The V so vaginal, and references to Eves, Adams, a rebirth -- the new V of course is female. What means this? Its very shape the emptiness between a woman's legs, filled up with rhetoric and political superiority. What means this? What means the widow-whore at the end, the male protege? Help; call the Cartographer. Usher him through the cellar door. (I'm always so convinced the Cartographer is a man, but who? Is it Dad? Or Clint? Or Matt? Or Ben? Perhaps it's been Woody Allen all along ...) (or Margaret Atwood in dignified drag)
I want to buy presents for everyone at this cool shop I found but the post would, alas, be too expensive. Marijuana leaf toilet paper for Colin!
Japanese tv is a weird and astonishing mosaic -- I keep it on in the evenings permanently, volume low as I cook and read and write, hoping the language will sink in through my pores somehow, work its way into the left side of my brain and stay there, escaping only in grammatically correct Japanese phrases as I try to navigate Tokyo. ("Tobacco doko desu ka? Sumimasen, ari masu ka kohi? Sugoi! Arigato gozaimasu.") Of course as I write this I can already see one error ... Today I glanced up from the baffling pages of William Carlos Williams to see Mr. Dress-up sparkling on the tube, cutting and folding construction paper into fabulous shapes with the aid of a puppet-dog, only of course he was Japanese, had the same glasses and everything. Then also the thunderous sumo wrestling, slow-mo instant replay and the well-dressed housewives in the audience, intent; farcical soap operas with runaway brides and kung-fu-expert wall-punching-through-y fathers-in-law; Tommy Lee Jones in an energy drink commercial (Where were you, Bill Murray?); and something that looked like Iron Chef but really, totally, completely, wasn't. All this, literally, as I slog through The Doctor Stories and try to decide if ol' Carlos Williams was a racist or merely a product of his times. And, if the latter, how to explain his preface to the first edition of Allen Ginsberg's Howl? Maybe it's simply a matter of being lost in translation. Sometimes the English-to-English attempts are the most brutal, and misunderstood, of them all.
PS Steph and Caroline: you wouldn't believe the shoes here! Flip flops with spike heels!
These train stations bigger than airports, and infinitely more crowded -- Shinjuku at mid-day, salary men and schoolgirls, punks and prima donnas, mashed into the machinery of transit by white-gloved men with whistles and microphones. In the midst of this me: tits smashed into the sweating cotton back of retired businessman playing Solitaire on his phone; a bare leg, owner unknown, slicked against mine. Our eyes glued to the scrolling neon marquee as it doles out destinations, like small candies: Yoyogi, Harajuku, Shibuya. In reflection of sliding train door window Lover makes faces, tries to see me laugh -- himself taller than most men on the train, by a head; his waves of hair brighter than an electric halo.
This gets me thinking of the Shimokitazawan angels, whom I will observe next Thursday as they deliver fish burgers and make smoothies out of fresh-squeezed lemon and huge chunks of mango. Their playmates will dance through the mazes of street buying green necklaces and purple, beaded handbags -- I`ll bring the indigo children, we will sit on the concrete steps drinking station beers; they love this. The phone girls in short orange skirts shrieking out incomprehensible megaphone deals on the corner: this is another favourite. Can we be the phone girls, they asked me once, as if I would know. Can we wear skirts like that and have that job. I tell them it is a low-paid job, and difficult, which is true: often I have seen these girls after their shifts, spent: voices hoarse as they order iced coffee from the street vendor, screaming as the drinks slide down their bleeding throats. But the indigo children remind me they have often lusted after unsuitable jobs -- when we were 10, they whisper, all we wanted in this whole world was to be a waitress. And I have to respect this memory because it is true: once they really did believe they could balance trays on their lavendar palms, and not drop them.
Went to the beach with Jon the afternoon of my birthday. From the Tokyo notebook:
`A different kind of Pacific Ocean: the water warm, the sand smooth. Surf a kind of tropical froth. A tallie of beer and a tuna sandwich, a Marlboro cigarette. We walk past a reggae party in grass-topped hut, hear the throb of bass and heat and drunk. Later, an icy glass of beer at another hut, legs dangling over the wooden stool, elbows on the bar. Salt in the air.`
Was waylaid at my train station on Monday because a movie was being filmed. I don`t know which one, but I must find it, and then we`ll watch it together, looking for a scene in which a beautifully dressed thug thunders down the pavement beside the tracks, and in the background, a white girl -- incongruously dressed in severe black business attire and Steph`s orange sunglasses -- looks on with her mouth open and is worried about being late for work.
Went bowling with a crew the night of my birthday. A staff member approached me and I panicked, looking for a place to hide my can of beer and lit cigarette, then watched in amazement as he cleared away the empties and replaced the ash tray. This is a wonderful country, this Japan. Matt has tentatively lined up an acoustic show in an antique bar in Mukogaokuen next month; I`m hoping to set up a literary evening there as well ..... Damn this rain! Had wanted to go back to the beach today. This smell always reminds me of camping trips, of dashed Okanagan hopes and wet sleeping bags.