Hrm. Half hour to kill before lunch.

Here is something else from my first time in Japan. It’s basically a longish journal entry.

Land of Excitement
Blinding sunlight slices down, knocking my eyes together like brittle resin clackers. It seeps into the cracks in the shale of my brain, where petroleum used to be. A little runnel of sweat runds down my spine. A brief fever thought flashes over my consciousness, an image of my sanity shattering in a yellow flash of this same light, and of waking up in a cool blue sanitorium on an isolated alpine lake. But this appealing thought fades and I am back in the hyper-real world.

Mad dogs and Englishmen. Extras on the set of “The Burmese Harp”, the remake of a popular Japanese war movie. This morning the make-up ladies spent an hour smearing brown suntan make-up on everyone, and now we are all British soldiers.

One of the director’s assistants comes over to where my group is loitering. She is a young Japanese woman with a Hawaiian lilt to her English.

“Okay, guys, for the next scene, you line up over by the blue box over there, by the hut.” She explains the next scene as she leads us over. “The Japanese soldiers are inside, singing. The British soldiers are gonna attack, but then they hear the singing. It’s an English folk song or something. So you start singing too, and then they surrender, and you take them prisoner.”

Confused looks are exchanged among the British troops.

“You want us to sing, am I royt?” someone asks.

“Do ve get paid extra for a speakink role?” asks a nearby British infantryman.

The woman motions to a man in a baseball cap. “This is Mr. Morimoto, the stunt director. He’s gonna teach you the song.” At the words stunt director, someone in the group fails to restrain a short cackle. An Australian next to me shakes his head, a bemused grin on his mug. I chuckle.

The extras are lined up – American, English, Australian, Israeli, French, German, Belgian, Pakistani and Indian, the latter two nationalities outfitted with turbans and bushy black beards as well. The stunt director climbs up onto the light blue box and spends three hours in the sun trying to teach the lyrics to an old folk song to this variegated group. A tape is played on a boom box.

“This is Home Sweet Home,” he says.

No response from the extras.

“It is very famous song. You all must know it, right? How many know it?” No hands are raised, and Mr. Morimoto gives us all the look that Sisyphus must have given the boulder rolling back down the hill. He looks as though he would rather be teaching a bear to ride a bicycle.

“Nobody?” he says. “I play it for you once more.” Lyric sheets are handed out. “Try to sing along.”

“Vat dis?” A British soldier squints at the paper thrust into his hand.

“Tip,” says another.

“Vat?”

“Tip, tip! For de cassette tip!” (Cut.)

Suolnokkinnen plnktonen maede maekle maedenekklinnen. A man in black, contemplating the fate of the American economy and the position of the United States as quasi empire: the Rome of this age, it will become the Italy of the next, no offense. In his black Levis and Reebocks, he is underdressed for the black, imitation-metamorphic-stone ambience of the cafe he is visiting, and he sits there, inhaling the steam of his cappucino and coming to terms with being a housewife, the worst role imaginable in the second half of the twentieth century.

Burning the candle at both ends: today’s man wants to have it all. Career, household, family. Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. News flash: living in Japan can lead to personality changes. Then where’s that leave the Japanese? In the metamorphic eon. Shoganai. If it’s too hot in the kitchen, go back to Menlo Park, Mr. Edison.

The man lingers in the cafe, located in a corner of the women’s designerwear floor of Tokyo’s poshest depaato, the Seibu Yurakucho of the golden robot clock. This is all so gemütlich, in an urban way, and nicer than the housework waiting with barbed fangs. Suolnokkinnen plnktonen maede maekle maedenekklinnen. It’s Scandinavian Week at the Seibu and they have reindeer crafts on display (“nothing is wasted”) and signs with Finnish phrases on them. The phrase above is not Finnish, but it looks arguably like it.

He worries about his wife, who has a real job and is getting too stressed for her own good. Maede maekle maedenekklinnen. the impressions just whiz by you here, he thinks, just simply whiz, fast and continuously. Your C.B. is receiving more than one channel simultaneously, good buddy, and that is expensive. In human terms, as they say. You don’t live forever doing that, althugh some seem to manage to cram a near infinity into a lifetime. But that ages you.

The human cyborg android is designed to experience one million things in thirty-five years, say, no faster. If you do it by the time you are twenty-five, it ages you prematurely to thirty-five anyway, and the profit in time is lost. This is an auxilliary to the Scarcity Laws of nature. “The Law of Preservation of Scarcity.”

“Tokyo is an assault on the human system,” he writes home, “hitting you from multiple directions. Bubba the Pachinko God, the linebacker of culture shock and sensory overload, you sidestep him nimbly at the outset but he turns on a dime and comes back to blindside you three weeks later, even though you were always:

1. careful to rinse off all soap before getting into the ofuro, and

2. careful not to walk on tatami mats in your shoes.

There is no referee there to blow his silver whistle – tweet! – and penalize him, a colored flag arcing through the crips, blue autumn sky. “Ten yards!” That doesn’t happen, mom and dad.”

And the creeping, slinking psychological hyena of race, “man, there are so many Japanese here! And I’m so tall and handsome and in all the ads.” English spoken everywhere, “Bogey Puff, momma calls me her little gastronome, my very favorite thing is pumpkin juice,” and the trickey Japanese versions of every society’s prejudices and double standards. You’re sidelined, aching on the green grass of the gridiron, counting your limbs, seeing stars, checking your joints after being slammed from behind by culture shock, and the hyena sneaks up and nips you in the soft meat. Social shock.

“Cuty Crosby, the cat with black hair,” legend on a Felix the Cat knockoff sweatshirt. Die Grenzen der Sprache werden hier gesprengt, because I say so. My very favorite thing is pumpkin juice. “Puny Horror,” on a shopping bag, with a cute mummy baby and a Frankenstein monster, the latter in tux and top hat. (Cut.)

As I walk up the old stone stairway to a temple, a cherry petal lands on my eyelash. I pass a man with a clubfoot, eating a club sandwich. He has a face like Lon Chaney, Jr., and smells like sweet moss. A man running stairs passes us both, like a Vitalis breeze. (Cut.)

We had that conversation about suicide last night in bed, you and I. You condemned it as the worst possible response since hope springs eternal. I condemned it as well, but could understand the frame of mine, because I am often in that frame. That last part remained unsaid but still somehow expressed. “Cruel theater,” we agreed. Join the circus if you want that kind of attention. Tantrums of a detestable adult. “Typical Viennese,” you said, another attempt by Bruno’s girlfriend having been the starting point of the conversation.

What was it that Mr. G. said? Smart went what?

Do you ever feel like a xenolith, a spike of metamorphic rock in a plateau of clay?

People like the Limbo Queen appear to cheat the Law of Preservation of Scarcity, but this is only because they are blessed with healthy, elastic skin which keeps up the illusion. Possibly they really do cheat it, more probably they just wring more nectar out of the same amount of experience. They intensify. (Slow zoom.)

There is a universe where the Limbo Queen is the Iguana Queen. (See map.) Königin der Leguane. She sits on a red velvet, gold and gold brocade beauty parlor throne. Bejeweled. Reptiles are sacrificed to her in elaborate rituals which will make the career of the first anthropologist to describe them and get away with hisher life.

The Iguana Queen. Flickering, sputtering greasy candles. Tallowlit ceremonies in a hidden room in the rear of the lounge, over the water. Waves lapping the briny, barnacled pilings of the pier sunk deep in the cold mud of the bay.

Nick Bonebrake’s greatest case. Uncover the Iguana Queen. Somewhere, a grimy neon Vacancy sign flickers out. (Cut.)

Go dog, go. This is Real Life: police discover the charred body of a man, and four people are arrested and charged with murder. The alleged motive: the victim was extorting money from one of the perps, a company employee, or kaisha-in as they say here in Japan, with whom he had been in prison. He had threatened to reveal the man’s past to others.

Murder in a group, bad idea. Too hard to keep a secret, if you’re dealing with normal people with connections to society. The secret festers, bloats, rises to the light. Especially given the average Japanese criminal’s propensity to confess all upon arrest.

Body parts turning up in Tokyo subway lockers over a period of many weeks. Now, there’s the crime of an individual who’s been keeping his mouth shut.

Cherry petal on my eyelash. Two faces of Japan.

O, the puny horror.

Tokyo. The Subway. Marunouchi line: met/a/mor/phose (met-a-mor-fohz) v. (met/a/mor/phosed, met/a/mor/phos/ing) subjected to intense pressure and heat, coal may become diamond. Evening passengers sweating, packed in, in the humid summer swelter, like uncooked bacon strips in a Detroit vise. But you have a seat, on the wander after the Burmese “extra” job. Suntan washed off with cold cream.

The ancient man next to you wants to start a conversation, you can feel his eyes on you.

“I want to speak English where you from?” His English is surprisingly good. Japanesque pronunciation, incompletely punctuated, but very fluent.

You tell him Washington State.

“Ah yes I have been there twice, in 1939 and in 1981. Washington is a noble city. New York, however, is a most dangerous town.”

(In your own words, tell him you have heard the same.)

“I am seventy-three years old. Do you know Tojo? I was an officer in Tojo’s army.” He says everything firmly, in a voice which, although old, is accustomed to having orders obeyed.

“Tojo, yes they executed him. Very bad.” He shakes his head sadly. “Very bad.” Who, or what, is bad remains unclear.

At this point, the old man breaks into unpremeditated song, and the few passengers who hadn’t been staring now begin to, without exception. And you can name that tune in six, no five, notes. He’s singing “Home, Sweet Home,” the song that you didn’t manage to learn in three hours today.

Out of the corner of your eye, you look for the hidden camera.

The old man knows this song by heart, every verse. You decide to spare his life, and take him prisoner instead.

He finishes. “Do you like to sing?” he asks you and launches into a rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home.” He knows all the verses to this one, too.

“I have been married fifty years,” he says, later. “Where are you going to?”

Shinjuku.

“Shinjuku is a dangerous place.” He points openly at an absolutely normal, average-looking young woman pressed in front of the both of you. “Most dangerous place. Many girl there have disease when you kiss them. No good. Japanese and foreign in bed, marriage, no good.”

You have a book with you, by Richard Brautigan, The Tokyo-Montana Express, composed in his typically strange prose. Odd vignettes about Japan and the United States. The old man takes it out of your hands and begins reciting passages in a deliberate manner, slowly, but very clearly. He pauses now and then and looks at you.

“I can read, you see,” he says.

It sounds more than strange to hear the words of loopy, doomed Brautigan issue from the old man’s mouth. He reads a passage about a cake sale benefit at a Montana church, and it is like a new language, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos played backward on a watermelon grand piano, with live rainbow trout for keys.

In Shinjuku, the old man will promise you that if you visit him he will give you sukiyaki. “I don’t like Western food, you see.” He will say he wants to talk to you more. You will shake his hand and do your special fade into the woodwork forever, that you save for lonely old men. (Fade.)

The Iguana Queen eats a bit of the meat from the barbecued iguana tail proffered on an intricately carved golden latter; she observes the ceremonies of worship through quick, black eyes. Her throne is upholstered in rich velvet, overstuffed. Its frame is solid gold, and weighs over a ton.

The velvet is warm and pleasant on her bare skin and the air in the chamber is warm from the reptile fat sputtering in the smokey grills. She resembles a six-foot Josephine Baker, wearing a skirt of dried lizard tails and a necklace of their claws. Further iguanas are slaughtered on an onyx altar with an obsidian blade, their blood drained through a gutter, into a sacrificial vessel, from which it is taken and used to make paintings, which foretell the future.

There are many dancers moving among the shadows, and the long green lizards scurry about. Rhythms of dense sticks of wood struck together, the hyoshigi of the Kabuki, sound mysterious, pealing patterns through the flickering dimness, and a ghostly moaning thrums from an ancient, curved wind instrument. It appears to harness the ambient movements and vibrations in the air of the room.

The Queen raises her hand and the celebrants quieten.

“Bring them to me,” she says. There is a five-foot iguana on her lap and she strokes it along the smooth line of its jaw. Its tongue flicks out once. All eyes regard the far wall, where mirrors slide apart and two bound and struggling figures are borne in, suspended from laundry rods held on the slick, bare shoulders of devotees.

The Queen’s red tongue flicks out and wets her lips, which form a sneer. “Welcome back,” she says. The lizard hisses.

“Welcome to the Land of Excitement.”

Shinjuku. Your stop.