Читать книгу Seeking the Cave - James P. Lenfestey - Страница 15
ОглавлениеSeptember 19, 2006, 5,953 miles from home
Flight 19 landed at Tokyo’s Narita Airport at 4:30 p.m. local time. The afternoon temperature of eighty-one degrees and the soaking humidity surprised two Minnesota men. Mike and I immediately lost each other at the massive airport, realizing, on our chance reunion, that with no cell phones or backup plan for finding each other, we’d better stick together.
On the bus to our downtown hotel, we struck up an English conversation with a seatmate, affable Mr. Goto, a forty-year-old businessman wearing a conservative dark suit under long hair and funky rectangular glasses. He told us that he lived in Santiago, Chile, where he exported tankers full of wine to Japan.
I laughed at the intoxicating image of a tanker full of wine. Goto laughed too, and cheerfully volunteered to be our tour guide in Tokyo. After Mike and I checked into our hotel, Goto walked us to the famous Ginza, like Times Square on neon amphetamines, the flashing heart of Japan’s global electronics empire. Although it represented everything I’d hoped to leave behind, Mike and I gaped slack-jawed like every other tourist. We continued on to traditional Yakitori Street, located beside the Yūrakuchō train station, where we grabbed a barrel-top table at one of the minuscule sidewalk cafés. We devoured a brace of delicious yakitori, invented here—skewers of chicken grilled with different spices—plus a plate of pickled onions and mugs of cold draft Sapporo. Then we drifted back to our hotel.
I awoke at 5:00 a.m. to an unfamiliar sound from the bathroom, Mike’s electric razor. By six we were wandering the narrow corridors of the massive Tokyo fish market, which a friend insisted should be our first stop. We watched auctioneers chant over torpedo-sized frozen tuna covered in a skin of frost. Large plastic vats squirmed with eels and pulsed with sea urchins, their spines removed and pulsing in separate vats. Dockworkers in orange jumpsuits forklifted squeaky Styrofoam boxes of sea life onto motorized carts that rattled toward a cordon of idling delivery trucks. The scene throbbed with life, but I felt a rush of despair for the silent sea nearby.
AT THE TOKYO FISH MARKET, 6:00 A.M.
Someone invented language for this—
to dedicate the prows of sleek steel trawlers,
to name these frozen bodies tuna, not torpedoes,
to name their tongues tongues, still black and hungry,
samurai nature unable to resist the proffered hook.
Every word living in the sea is sold here.
In the quiet bay beneath the bridge, a lone cormorant dives free.
Still, I cannot help but feel the voice of the sea is lost.
A cab scooted us to Takashimaya Department Store before nine, as a friend had advised us we must not miss the store’s opening spectacle—white-gloved salesgirls singing the corporate song. The store opened at ten, so we waited on the busy street outside like scruffy American mannequins as workers rushed by to their offices.
IN FRONT OF TAKASHIMAYA DEPARTMENT STORE BEFORE IT OPENS
Listen to the shoe soles, like herds of gazelles!
Tap slap, tap slap of backless heels,
woodblock prints of sandal flats,
leather swish of knee-high boots,
oxford scrape of company men.
All march to the tune of shiny dark towers.
Across the street, the tallest crane in Japan
pivots against the sky, and flies higher.
Catching a badly needed espresso at Tully’s Coffee across the street, we managed to miss the opening ceremony. Still, when we entered the store, lovely blue-suited women bowed to us. “Ohayou gozaimasu.” Everywhere, more bows. We slipped down to the celebrated basement food court and feasted on free samples: pear sauce on bread, steamed moon cakes filled with sweet miso or red bean paste, a delicious sweet and vinegar cabbage, a taste of earthy Argentinean Malbec, perhaps from Goto’s tanker. A white-gloved elevator attendant whisked us to the rooftop garden, where a small boy and his mother delighted at a butterfly basking in raindrops from the spray of the elderly gardener’s hose. What a delicious way to alight in a new country, I thought.
A BUTTERFLY VISITS THE ROOF GARDEN AT TAKASHIMAYA
The gardener sprays roof grass with rainbows,
hose arcing back and forth across his bent frame.
A butterfly trembles beneath silver drops,
wings inset with turquoise glistening in sunlit prayer.
Like the cicadas who called all night in this ancient city
paved over rubble of the last Great War, surprises emerge.
How did he get here? the delighted child wants to know.
The butterfly? The gardener? Me?
The boy’s bored mother introduced herself to Mike and me in excellent English. Daughter of a diplomat, she was raised around the world, married now to a Japanese businessman. She badly missed the freedom and individuality she found overseas. “In Japan, you feel . . . I don’t know. I like to be different. I am different, but here it is very hard. Everyone wears the same black—I want to wear bright colors. You going to Kabuki? I drive you to Kabuki. I have German car. I like to drive fast. My husband is okay, he travels a lot. That’s okay too. This is my only child in sixteen years. I like being a mother. I have so much sympathy for the princess. She is trapped. Nothing she can do.”
At the famous Kabuki Theater, Mike and I bought two bento boxes for carry-in lunch and tickets for the cheap fourth-floor balcony. The actors’ painted faces and stylized drama fascinated us for an hour or so until we fell asleep from jet lag fatigue.
Back at the hotel I called Burton Watson at the phone number he’d sent me, and we arranged our interview for mid-morning the next day. He did not want to meet at his apartment—“Too small, too far away,” he said—so he would meet us in the hotel lobby. Mike and I spent the rest of the day madly scouting nearby parks, cemeteries, museums, and temples for an elegant interview location. In the end, we settled on Mike’s least favorite option, our hotel room, the only suitably quiet place we could find in this noisy, crowded city.
At 5:20 a.m. the phone rang. It was Goto, his body restless with the same jet lag as ours, offering to take us to see the fish market. I told him we’d done that already, so he offered to take us to breakfast. I thanked him for his generous hospitality, and the enduring image of a cargo ship filled with wine, but today we must begin our trek on the path to Cold Mountain. As we signed off, not to see each other again, I mentioned my surprise at the intense humidity in Tokyo. “This is the best weather of the autumn season,” Goto answered. “Before you arrive, a hurricane. After you go, a hurricane. You have landed between two hurricanes. The gods are on your side.”
