Authors: S. Michael Choi
From the scuba fins representing a few desultory attempts at that hobby, to the life jacket that was actually used for a few Tokyo Bay excursions, to paintings and tapestries and expensive Oriental rugs and rice mats assembled in the motley yet consistent fashion ensuing from random acquisition but ready willingness to discard, syncretism of East and West, the DVD collection, the plants that were watered exclusively by the girl, history, family lineage, and social and economic connections to the city at large were present, and as a culmination of so many desires, some jumble is inevitable.
Histories radiate from so many objects, yet defy quick capture of things.
On substructures new structures are built; on those structures, yet new superstructures arise.
So it is here, where a crystal Swarovski dish is once used as a puppy's drinking water dish.
Discarded golfclubs suggest a half-pursued hobby.
The clash of cultures and histories is integral; without some reference to a fold-away futon, a couch covered in sheets inherited from childhood, these again are pointless to the main line sequence.
In all the manifest unfairness of the world, hundreds of millions lived without even a ghost of a chance of ever living here.
If we are defined by our domiciles, if we say we come from a place and of a place, that apartment defined a section of life, a half-flicker of a flame that blew out faster than can be said and would in other hands be the foundation for an entire understanding of man.
So much useless money was spent; human potential was not developed, and a ready supply of cash and the little medallions and tokens of frivolous purchases are like useless trinkets, tokens of a social structure seemingly impossible to penetrate for reasons of provenance.
Outside the door the assassins crouch.
In a split second, the assault, swift, complete, devastating, indefensible will begin. Sixteen million dollar apartments.
Either by itself is unremarkable.
VIII.
The 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.”
"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.
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.”
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 pile 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.
In 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: against the reality instead 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 begins.
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.
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:
Japan
countryside’s new generation 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.
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 perogatives 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 one 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 pines.
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.