Phantom Tokyo

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Xmas '01 on
Jan '02
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So now I have to try and remember what Macdonalds and KFC and Dunkin Donuts and the kissa played from Dec 1 to 25th inclusive so that eating fast food in December became a martyrdom. I don't know all of them, is one reason why it's hard to compile this list, but enough of them date from my youth (*my* youth, dear god) that I can make a preliminary stab:

Winter wonderland- the hands-down winner
Rockin around the Xmas tree- Brenda Lee, always
Santa Claus is coming to town, Motown Christmas version
Ditto, Frosty the Snowman
I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus, by some revolting child
Here comes Santa Claus, here somes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus lane
Whitney Houston, I think- Silent Night- sai-hai-le-hent-ny-hite, ohh ho-ohh-ly ny-hite
White Christmas- if not Bing, then Diana Ross
Have yourself a merry little christmas
That uninspired Beatles Christmas song
Other massacred versions of Silent Night and Oh little town of Bethlehem. Silent Night deserves it; Little Town does not.

But once it was different. Christmas '95, when I had either bronchitis or asthma and coughed so hard that evening after classes that I tore a muscle along my ribs, and for a bit thought maybe I'd cracked the rib as well. That morning I was in the Chat Noir coffeehouse by Heiwadai station and a musical selection was playing, and one of the tunes was unbelievably 'Past three o'clock, and a cold frosty morn, past three o'clock, good morrow masters all.' Never before and never since.

I don't know why they don't play the more traditional carols- We Three Kings, Adeste Fideles, or even Little Drummer Boy. It's as if the Japanese had purposely decided to appropriate the worst parts of western Christmas whole hog and make them their own. Hence it's the ugliest versions of the ugliest non-religious songs that they play. Possibly one should be grateful for this; I don't know.

Lugete o veneres cupidinesque-- my Japanese handtowel has finally ripped in two. I've had it since I was in Japan. I've had it since before I went to Japan. I don't remember when I got it. Maybe I inherited it from my grandmother. I had it in the showers at the Kimi Ryokan, tracking damp footprints down the dark and highly-polished wooden hallways all that steamy summer, and I had it in the shower stall in Tobu Nerima with its suspiciously greasy squishy mat underfoot, and it went with me to the sento round the corner in Yamatachou. And when for poverty I didn't go to the sento, I washed with it in the cold water sink outside my bedroom door, with strong-smelling Cow soap. That's the brand, BTW; has a picture of a black and white cow on the box. The overwhelming scent of Cow soap has mixed inextricably with the claustrophobic experience of rooming with an hysteric from Orange County to give me vague feelings of suffocation and oppression whenever I encounter it again. A feel-bad smell, like the Tiger Balm I used to use on bindertwine headaches and that can now start a headache off just by association.

More happily it washed me in my deep short tub in Heiwadai, being practically the same colour as that, and dried out on the balcony on my round plastic drying frame, while either the bright stars of winter shone overhead or the swift gokiburi of summer gained entrance to the room in the three seconds the screen was open. It went with me to the sento in Toshima-en along with the soap in the plastic bag in my carrier, and came home the same way wrapping the still damp soap so that I had to rinse it of soapmush when I got back. It's been with me the last seven years since I came home, and gone with me the five times I've been back.

When I say handtowel I mean of course those small scratchy nylon things you use for washing, not drying. They dry fast and they exfoliate you beautifully. (It should be noted that Japanese terrycloth towels don't even dry you properly, a fascinating phenomenon. They don't absorb water and they barely manage to wipe it from you. Doubtless a property to keep them from molding, but they mold anyway. A light cotton handtowel is what's needed for drying.)

Not all handtowels are scratchy, of course. I have two others that aren't, but they're not much good for getting grime and sweat off- and for someone who sweats a lot and who lives in grimy cities, something that scrubs is a necessity. This one was pink and for many years had a small hole in the centre that got slowly larger and finally the thing ripped in two. I've bought a new one from the Korean supermarket (how could I have remained blind so long to the virtues of Kotean stores?) in a vivid shade of green. No false good taste here. It scrubs fine but it's not my old friend, the humble unnoticed companion of thousands of baths and showers, that has washed in strange waters and hung out to dry under unfamiliar stars and that now travels the dark road to the land they say no-one returns from. Curses on you, malignant shadow of Time that swallows all things beautiful, for you have taken my Japanese handtowel.

This is the time of year when I'm often- I will not say usually- somewhere else. On this day when I was 25 I was in Pau in the SW of France near the Spanish border, and Franco was going into his coma. When I was 30 I was in Florence looking for a laundromat with Richard. When I was 40 I was in Tokyo making reservations in my faltering Japanese for a trip over the Japan Alps and going out to Kamakura in the disorientingly unwet soft rain. The distance between the woman in Pau and the woman in Florence was of course about twice or three times the distance between that person in Kamakura and one talking to you now, because time works like that after 40. There's still a fair distance between me and her, which is encouraging.

A year later in September I was firmly and at that time happily ensconced in Tokyo, just back from a week at home to get visas and staying in Lisa's room at the gaijin house in Tobu-Nerima while she went back to Australia for a month. That was the dream part of my stay- not as in ideal, though that was about as good as it got, but as in faraway and a little strange when remembered now. If I don't look too hard I can still see the place- a modern Japanese house starting to crumble a bit, its rooms all occupied by one gaijin apiece. They were six mat, but I remember them as enormous. Against one wall was a counter and a hotplate and a sink that gave cold water only, because you have to buy your own water heaters in Japan and pay to have them hooked to some gas supply. Memory says there were frosted glass windows behind the counter, and I'm sure there were, but I remember the window being in the left hand wall behind the futon. I came back from TO and lay wrapped up in quilts watching the fall jidai-geki specials on my tiny hand-held TV while the soft September rain fell endlessly outside. In the right hand wall was a closet, the ceiling of which had holes that let rain in, and the door that looked down the hallway. The room smelled of the sickly-sweet incense Lisa used always, and if I could smell that again I'd be able to see the whole place clearly, with its worn-out tatami and grimy walls and the usual tattiness Japanese houses have after only a few years in Japan's all-devouring humidity; but unplaceably welcoming nonetheless.

In the entranceway by the door was a pay shower stall. Don't ask me how; there just was. It was mildewy of course, but gave you lots of hot water under strong pressure for your hundred yen. The toilets, women's and men's, were along the hallway. There was no light in the women's ever and the base of the toilet got broken in an earthquake so the thing rocked precariously when you sat on it. Since I never saw it I can't swear to this but I think it was a Japanese toilet with a plastic seat placed above the pan, such as is used to adapt Japanese toilets for gaijin or, more likely, older people with bad knees.

The house itself was on a hill so the air and the light seemed cleaner, always. You could walk the steep path close by that took you to the main road and the sento and the conveni where I bought my food so often; or you could take the long way round, along the edge of the hill, that passed the sento with the laundromat and the sake store and various other things, then across the tracks at a fumikiri that was always closing, even though Tobu trains run every eight or nine minutes, and along a street of restaurants to the station.

What made it homey was the presence of friends. Bill from TO lived in the room under the stairs and we went to Noh plays together on the weekend. When Lisa came back I moved into the room next to hers, whose owner had also decided to go back home for a month. Lisa and I used to go to the sento together or to dinner at various local spots where she was a regular. There was one rather bizarre Italian place that had cases of-- antique western odds and ends, I think. The food was nothing special but the ambience was friendly. That term at school we had the nicest bunch of people in our class that I ever encountered in Japan, or anywhere, in one place at the same time. All this meant that for two months of my stay in Japan the country seemed like a rational place with rational people in it, an impression that was not to be repeated any time in the remaining four and a half years I stayed there.

Before 2001, September 11 was one of my minor fandom anniversaries. It was on a Saturday ten years ago, vaguely sunny and nondescript, and my stomach hurt and I was supposed to go up and meet Jean- whom I'd only met properly some two weeks before: a chance encounter as she was going into the subway we were coming out of in '89 doesn't count- at her place up in Itabashi-ku. I stopped by the bookstore on the way to the station. The bookstore was a little hole in the wall place that didn't last much past '94, but I can't remember when it vanished and the snazzy green and gold bookstore was built right next to the station. I think the place ultimately turned into a dry cleaners, but now when I try and envisage the series of buildings on the way to the station they melt and shift about, as do the nameless roads themselves. The Coop store wants to locate itself where the izakaya is, and so on. But on Sept 11 I found that both Animage and Animedia came out and both had Papuwa covers, and Gangan came out a day early with its latest episode, and suddenly my stomach didn't hurt at all and I was able to bicycle up to Jean's, the first of many many times, quite happily.

September 15 is Respect the Aged Day, and that year I rode into central Tokyo by way of Mejiro-doori, I think, and then switched to Waseda-doori at Takadanobaba. I used to bicycle to Taka all the time, but I'm damned if I can remember how I did the stretch between Ikebukuro and Mejiro. Getting in to Ikebuk is simple enough, but the street that gets you around the station is hidden somewhere to the south and I can't find it on the map. Memory says I only used it coming back up the Yamanote tracks anyway, and that I was always surprised when the twisty little detour actually led me to Ikebuk. Whereas to go in I may just have gone south to Nerima and picked up Mejiro-doori there, or followed Kannana further south to the Shin-ome kaidou, both of which join and drop you just north of Mejiro.

Whatever, in the empty city I made my way over to the Daimaru by Tokyo Station and discovered one of the oddities of Tokyo- inside the Yamanote isn't that big at all. It looks enormous on a map, and if you go by the schematic subway maps it seems to be twenty miles across. But in fact it was a quick whizz through Shinjuku-ku and Chiyoda-ku south of the palace to Tokyo eki. Shinjuku is a new ward, Chiyoda burned in the raids, and somehow the streets there make more sense. Bunkyou-ku is the place where I always got lost, though I thought that burned too, in the earthquake if not the raids. There's something unchancy about Bunkyou-ku anyway, with its quintessential Tokyo street pattern that follows the landscape (and there's a lot of landscape in Bunkyou-ku) and its own sweet whims. But it's more than that. It feels claustrophobic to me in much the way London does- too much past bottled up and not able to escape. The northern bits aren't so bad- Honkomagome, Sendagi- but as you move south it gets worse, and next to the Kanda River and over by Toudai I get short of breath.

But ten years ago was a sunny happy day and I remember it with fondness. The oddity is that I remember so much of that first fannish month as being on a high, and I was. I was also- this I know even if I can't quite remember it- down in the rockbottom depths a lot of the time, holding on with my fingertips until Bev got back from vacation and thinking I wasn't going to make it. The extreme nature of Tokyo, or maybe all foreign countries, where you live without a net and everything is so much better or hurts so much worse than at home. Here on this cloudy and vaguely typhoon-like day in Toronto September I look back at the sun and blue skies of that day in Tokyo, and safe dull Toronto me remembers the emotional knife-edge I lived on there. Wouldn't want it back, but it was interesting to have known.

Summer is humid in Tokyo. Like pain, it's a sensation I can't remember properly in the different sort of humidity we have here. I *know*, as a fact, that walking the two flights down to street level made me wet from the skin through to my shirt. I know I changed my clothes three times a day there, and hung the sodden ones up to dry on my room's few projections (the edge of the open closet door) before putting them in my laundry bag, lest they mildew. I know that tshirts were too thick for the heat, even white cotton ones. I know that because there was one store, in Nakano's Sun Mall, that sold tshirts thin enough to wear in summer and big enough to fit my gaijin frame. They only had them occasionally and I bought them when I found them. A mauve one and a pea-green one came home with me seven years ago. Here I can wear ordinary tshirts in summer, so I used my Sun Mall ones for sleeping in on hot nights. I don't know what happened to the mauve one. I think it disintegrated first, because I liked it best. The green one has bleach stains on it now and a few small holes and will not last many more washings; and when it goes I lose the summers from 93 to 95, a part of which I have lost already.

When I came back for Christmas in... 93, I think it was, my best friend from high school gave me an impromptu present- the extra large Body Shoppe tshirt she wore all through her one and only pregnancy five years earlier. It was perhaps the nicest present anyone has given me ever. That was what I slept in in Japan. It gave out just before I left: worn through, it developed a long rip in the front. I have it still, carefully folded away in a cedar drawer, just to keep the memory of those nights, and the memory of the cold star-spangled January evening when she drove me home from her place and gave me a kiss in parting, the only one in our thirty or more years of friendship.

The wallet I used in Japan is gone; I can't even remember what keyring I had then; one pair of Berkenstocks lasted until last year, the ones I avoided wearing because they were suede and hard to slip on and off. In later life they became stiff enough to give me no trouble, but after two resolings the uppers wore through beyond mending. I have a couple of dresses, bought at the mall in Asagaya near Mary's office, that I never cared for much and so never wore out; a top of thin cotton, from '92, that never looked as good as I thought it would, and which now has torn at the shoulder like Cohen's famous blue raincoat; a long scarf bought in Shibuya with Nadine, the Mitsubishi trainee from the New York office, who also left a huge grey canvas bag with the company logo on it in her room when she went back after six months. That I appropriated and used at doujinshi sales until it wore out; the scarf was too heavy to wear in Tokyo's humidity and until this year I used it as a curtain on the back door. I wish I had the bag still, because that's the object that holds all the memories.

The train journey in Sen to Chihiro isn't any journey I ever made myself, but I've made that journey, long and endless through summer afternoons with a blue sky to the horizon, past uncounted stations with indecipherable names. My anonymous and indistinct travelling companions got up one by one, pulled their luggage from the overhead rack, got off at deserted platforms where vaguely seen family waited for them, and went down the stairs and off to their unimaginable lives elsewhere. The sun set. The clouds greyed as I went farther into the unknown country that isn't Tokyo, a place where people are different from what I knew in the dear damned distracting metropolis, my home. I don't know when this journey happened. The summer trips I made were on relatively full trains, and I stood all the way to Kamakura or Fujisawa, and I always came home again that evening. But what you see in StC is the reality that lies under the reality of all the trains in Japan, and I think Miyazawa is brilliant to have captured its Platonic essence so exactly.

(And may her journey bring her to a house where all's accustomed, ceremonious. A place where those who are maddened by the crowds and the need and the greed and the million inchoate unsatisfied desires can breathe in peace amid the country emptiness, drinking their tea and learning the satisfaction of making, not getting.)

And of course I knew Goodnight, Moon for years before I came to Tokyo. I loved Little Rabbit's room, since we're speaking of accustomed and ceremonious. Everything there where it should be, everything anyone could want. I used to see it as the Bedford of my childhood, some winter night with the cold dark outside and the bright cozy lights in, when (of this I was quite sure) my parents had gone out for the evening to some firm function, my mother in a long dress and bright red lipstick, smelling of the perfume she only wore on good occasions. For me Little Rabbit's room has always had the lingering scent of Chanel no.5 faintly in its air.

But now when I read it to the babies it's not Bedford but Heiwadai I see. Tokyo winter nights are like the night seen out the great windows of Little Rabbit's bedroom, dark and star-spangled, but in Nakano the clustering houses blocked most of the sky and the streetlights drowned the stars. Out in Nerima-ku when I bicycled home the stucco buildings were cozy on one side, a fence of domesticity against the dark, but in the other direction were only cabbage fields and the great sweep of the sky, more sky than I ever see in Toronto even. Dark night and moon and stars and the friendly cold of Tokyo winter nights, and the human world very small and low beneath that placid expanse, leading its ordinary and accustomed Japanese life of rice cookers and tsukemono and kids doing their homework at the kotatsu with the TV tuned to some game show. So yeah, while Little Rabbit reads like an English book to me (that nursery fire is what does it) his room feels like Tokyo.

Seven years ago, actually, I came home to a city doing something like what today was doing, except then it was snow- cold, sleety, sullen snow- and today it's closer to freezing rain.

Seven years ago today I woke to blue-skied April, not as warm as it had been three days earlier at the last comic sale, but not the grey dank it had been for the previous two days' room cleaning either. I put my blanket and pillow and sheets into a box and bicycled it in the basket precariously to the little post office on Kanpachi and sent it home to Canada. I biked over to the little park in the back streets on the other side of Kanpachi for a last look at the sakura. I went by the vegetable stand on the way to the station to give my good-bye cakes to Ojisan there and said I'm leaving today, taihen o-sewa ni narimashita, and he said good-bye and come visit.

I came back to the dorm and gave the bicycle key to the person who'd bought the bike. (I had two bikes, and two people bought them, and I can't remember if it was the guy or the girl who bought the unsatisfactory wani that replaced the never-returned red bicycle.) Mizuno-san came and looked at my room and gave me back my deposit less some ridiculously small sum for the lower drawer front of the desk that came off at one point- wood glue drying out presumably. "Is that OK?" she asked worriedly, and I assured her it was fine. Most apartments don't give you your deposit back period.

Jean came by and I got my carry-on stuff together and I said good-bye to my home of three years and change, walked down the green concrete steps and the terracotta-coloured tiles for the last time, gave the key to Mizuno-san in her office and said good-bye to her. We walked to the station, and I said good-bye to Heiwadai on the way- good-bye cabbage fields, good-bye toy store where I bought playdoh for my kids, good-bye 7-11 where I xeroxed my stories at 4 am, good-bye little kissa cum real estate agent... Down the steps to the subway, into Ikebuk; JR to Asagaya for lunch with Mary, waiting outside the office because Saitani her crazy boss was in one of his snits. Good-bye Mary, and then to Ueno with Jean, to look at the sakura a last time there, and get the Skyliner with her out to Narita, hanging about in the lounge in the unravelling last minute way one does before any plane trip. And good-bye Jean, and boarded, and the plane at last took off. She waited in the airport to see it go, she said. I sat through the flight home, numb with misery, barely noticing the unpleasantness of the chronic turbulance on that route. Came into cold and small-souled Toronto, with its cold and small-souled bureaucrats. Had had the sense to ask my brother to come meet me, to pad the dark night of the soul a little, and he drove me back to our place through the snow-crawling traffic. My house was my house, cold and empty and evil-smelling as ever when I first come back to it, but the refrigerator was unexpectedly full of cold cuts and salad and mayonnaise and a bottle of organic wine, the kind that doesn't give me headaches, provided by my sister and my soon to be sister-in-law respectively. I'd asked only for Pepsi to combat the inevitable headache. So I felt consoled.

Since then, of course, 'tis centuries but each seems shorter than the day I stopped living in the prolonged and mild hallucination that was my Japan and began again, and painfully, living in the not entirely satisfactory reality of my native land.

How I started teaching. I went to meet Lisa my roommate one evening at her school. She was going back to Australia for a month and I believe I'd agreed to cover her classes for that period, and was off to meet the boss. I can't think why else I'd have gone there. I'd been in Komagome my first trip in Tokyo, looking for the famous garden there, and taken the wrong set of stairs to the wrong exit and found myself in a warren of little stores and streets and pachinko parlours, a landscape I didn't yet know to be 'terribly Tokyo.' I never could find those same places a second time when I went back when I lived there. Memory probably presented me with a scene that didn't exist. Komagome seen from the other exit- the one for the school and the garden- looks totally different. 'Long view to the white clouds edge' up Hongo-doori or north and south along the railway cutting of the Yamanote line.

So I went, and met her boss Minami-san, who'd once worked for a big trading company that stationed him in Egypt for about eight years, where he learned not only English but a healthy command of Egyptian. He quit the company- 'It would have killed me eventually, working for it.' 'Even in Egypt?' 'Even in Egypt.'- came back and opened a language school. His peculiarity was that he wouldn't advertise for teachers. 'You never know who you'll get.' He preferred recommendations from the people he already had working for him who were usually about to take back off home. Or, as had happened just now, had already taken back off home on five days' notice. I once pointed out that with the shifting gaijin population of Tokyo, 'someone I know is looking for work' is just as haphazard a connection as an ad in the Tokyo Times. He saw it, but didn't see it, if you understand.

Anyway, Donna or whoever it was had disappeared last week and he needed someone who could teach kids, and no-one who comes to Tokyo wants to teach kids. They want company workers who've been stationed abroad and can already speak English. 'Do you know anyone who can teach children?' he asked me hopefully, and I said, 'Well, I worked in a daycare for ten years' and that was it. Next day we went to Tsukishima, the island in the Sumida, together. Grey and rainy; could have been any month but in fact it was October. The geography of the place confused me though in fact it's quite simple, there at the northern end of the island. There are two main streets making a capital T, with small old houses and buildings along the vertical street and the ones running off it, and great new highrises clinging to the crossbar of the t. And past the t, there's the Sumida itself.

But what I recall of that first visit were the amazingly tall buildings of Riverpoint Towers where I was going to teach and the lushness of the gardens surrounding them. 18, 20 storeys, in a city of universal lowrise two floors, with careful landscaping at their base- thick grass, thick azalea bushes, small trees even- all seen in the greyness of approaching dusk on a drizzly day. Autumn, but with the misty greenish burgeoning feel of spring, because Tokyo seasons run into each other in a way that confuses an Easterner from here. When I say it could have been any season, I mean it. Even July, if it's still rainy season, does that grey and 60sF/ 17C thing. Even winter has blooming flowers.

Long long ago, some autumn of my childhood, there were several rainy days. They may even have been several rainy days in a row. I remember them almost clearly, a rarity, and I remember there was something important about them, but the important thing may only be that I remembered them. I also half-remember that at some point around that time I got my memory back- back from what, I'm not sure; that sometime in the fall when I was eight I was suddenly stunned and overwhelmed at the fact that I could remember events that had happened before, like last week. My memory is full of holes- I'm the only person who doesn't remember a thing of grade one- and I'm pretty sure the cause was psychic, not psychological or even physical. If people think too loudly- and my mother was a very loud thinker- I turn myself off. But the world I saw standing out in the street in front of our house on that very rainy evening approaching dusk (and no, I don't know why I was standing out in the street in the rain and certainly not why mother let me do it) was something very much like what I saw that first time in Tsukushima. The rain wasn't as heavy, is all.

As with Komagome, it never looked that way to me again. I found in a week where everything was, and the short cuts-- the side route that took you from the Sports Centre by the subway entrance past the canal and under the expressway to the backwater area of Riverpoint. This was all actually near the Tsukuda jinja in the historical ie not *recently* land-filled section of the island. (Can't remember if any part of these islands is natural. Tsukuda, the original island, may be, though its name suggests otherwise. But go south from Tsukishima down to Ome, where the comic sales happened, and you're in manmade territory.)

I always liked it in Tsukishima. It felt more open than Tokyo, even the farmland area where I lived. The river's doing, of course- that view out over the water either to Koutou-ku on the eastern side or towards the upper reaches of the Sumida, because here you're at the tip of the island. Over on the western side of the tip there was a park for the Riverpoint residents built below the old lighthouse, with a pond that had irises in it in the spring. One of my last memories of Japan was an early evening there, the last Friday class, standing on the path going up to the lighthouse watching the light fade and the globe lamps come on in the park and a gaggle of middle school girls in uniform playing Daruma-san ga koronda. There was another walkway between the lighthouse and the river, thick with azalea bushes and benches and bushes and lights at night. I set a large part of one story there, calling it a Belgian river and canal but knowing it was really the Sumida.

And inside the apartments- that was where I got to see what very few gaijin do. Inside a Japanese home, into a Japanese family. Four little girls in party dresses greeted me. Their mothers were all friends, living in that building or the annex beside it. They walked in and out of each other's places with the insouciance of relatives and called each other by their last names plus 'mama'- 'Ebitani-mama, is next week's class at your place?' The girls called the other mothers aunt. When you have no family in Tokyo, you make a family.

There was Ayana, tall and gangly and loud and bossy, the leader. Her mother had recently survived a tough pregnancy with twins, and a harrowing birth that had caused nerve damage to one of the boys. A nice woman who always looked tired, not surprisingly. Ayana was the one who answered my English question, 'Have you any brothers or sisters?' with, 'I have two brothers- (emphatically) nihiki!." Tomomi, short and forthright with a hoarse little voice, and her equally commonsense efficient mother. Ton-chan as they called her was the only one who wasn't an oldest child, but she acted more older sister than the other two. Maki was the best looking- beautiful by western standards at least, and quiet and studious. She had a little sister at one point, a round roly-poly laugher I'm certain was called Maya, but her mother, also beautiful and quiet and tout à fait comme il faut I can't remember at all. Haruna, very tall, the youngest of them but with a fashionable mother who saw that Haruna's hair was curled and sometimes coloured. A bit much for a five year old, I always thought, but no mind. And I always wondered why they had a Hanukkah candleabra at their house, but never asked. Occurs to me now that it was probably a souvenir, but there are indeed Japanese Jews, or rather Jewish Japanese.

But in the 21st century February has been Tokyo because that's when I've gone. 2001, 2002, accompanying Sue.

2001 was some kind of highpoint. I remember it as the one time when I had enough during a Tokyo visit. (Enough is a commodity in rather short supply over there.) We stayed at the New Sanoh, the hotel the military use. If I stay at hotels in Tokyo they're tiny business hotels with the usual Japanese hotel inconveniences of smokers and curtains not meant to block the light and heating available but not automatic. (Except the Prince hotels, where the heating is always on high and the windows don't open.)

The New Sanoh doesn't do that. It's subsidized by the US government and they do their servicemen proud. So I had a big warm-enough room all to myself (and regularly asked the front desk to turn the heat off when I came back) and for the only time I've been back in Tokyo since '96 I *didn't* come down with bronchitis or asthma after a week. Not staying with people who have cats helps, getting enough sleep helps, not fretting about the Japanese exam helps immensely. We ate in the hotel restaurant morning and evening, and even if I missed my usual Tokyo eating haunts a bit, like the kaitenzushi place in Sugamo and the Indian restaurant in Shinjuku, it was nice to have all that food available, and cheap. We went shopping every day for djs, which scratched the urge to shop without me having to spend huge amounts of money. It was early days for Saiyuki djs, so though I bought whatever the stores had, pretty much, it was never more than five or six at a time. Meanwhile Sue unpacked her millions of djs every night and put them in boxes and mailed them from the army PO in the morning, and something about the lavishness of it all- /fifteen bags/ of djs and the hotel room awash in them- was immensely exhilarating.

Riko brought me a tape of Saiyuuki episodes, maybe ten in all, and Sue a YnM tape. The hotel of course had TV sets that you didn't have to put 100 yen coins into, and VCRs to go with them. Sue always had hers playing while packing, so I got the YnM weirdnesses as background, but I watched mine episode by episode, gloatingly because I had so many to see. All second season after the first three episodes, and minus a couple of forgettable ones, to just after the flashbacks. The old Puff, bought my first night there, had a Minekura focus; the new one that came out had the manga rankings with Saiyuki sweeping the polls. I bought the artbooks. I bought keychans and shitajiki and notebooks and fan paper and CDs at Animate. I had enough, finally.

Odd, that the sun of this extremely cold winter looks so much like the sun of the mild Tokyo version. K talks about how one opens the windows at this time of year and yes I remember that the sun that was so warm even when the sky was a frozen pale blue. Or a pale blue that would be frozen if it was a Canadian sky, but there it was simply the sky of early spring. Think too that the ancients had it right there- here we are in their first month, and on New Year's you gather new herbs because of course there are new herbs to be gathered at this time down in the Kantou, just as there are daffodils and crocuses coming up in Seattle.

February was nothing much when I was in Japan- a holiday here, a Comic City at the end of the month, the plum blossoms if you could find them. Remember them, my first winter, at the Yushima jinja I think it is (try to find the Chuuou line on a ward map of Tokyo, just try)-- the one up from Ochanomizu dedicated to Sugiwara no Michizane, the patron of learning. Exiled from the Heian court, died, and wrought such damage with his postmortem urami that a number of shrines had to be built to calm his spirit. *My* kind of patron of learning. A year later on a sultry day in Umegaoka amongst families, and on a bright cold one down the Sumida at the Hamarikyuu Teien that's a bitch to get to by foot (traffic bridges if you come from nearby Hamamatuschou; I used to go to Tsukiji and walk, which at least kept me on the right side of the street) but fun if you take the boat cruise from common vulgar Asakusa to this place where Shogun Yoshimune used to go hawking. There's still a bird sanctuary there, behind high wicker walls, but you can peek in the little windows and see a strange world, a forest all white with guano kind of the opposite of a mescaline one. And come by chance in Shinjuku Gyouen, my park of preference along with Rikugien. Shinjuku Gyouen is big and has a variety of stuff- Japanese gardens with bridges and western vast vistas of lawn (yellow-brown straw at this time of year) and shady pathways where one wants them and a decent restaurant. Cold in February, of course, and not really conducive to sitting out, but a nice stroll. In later years the plums were always come-by-chance because I was done with exploring Tokyo then and doing other things. But they were nice when I found them, usually at the season when the conveni were stocking their Valentine's Day chocolates- giri choko, the chocolate you have to give your boss and the guys at work. So my memory of plum blossoms also overlaps the deep reds of the convenis' chocolate laden shelves.

I have two Japanese cups. One is green, the colour of a jade plant, and the other is robin's egg blue. I got them in a- what? Second hand store? Antique store? Junk store? on a back road in Kamakura on this day, which is a Japanese holiday, in 1994. Jean's friend Phil was in Tokyo and she set up a trip to Kamakura for him and asked me along. We met in Shinjuku station, and if I think for a minute I'll remember exactly which doujunshi I was reading by the south exit as I waited for them. (Shousetsu, not manga. One of the early Luzar ones.) I can't think why we left from Shinjuku, because the JR Kamakura train goes from Shinagawa. But Jean, the great Tokyo traveller, takes the cheaper Odakyuu instead of JR whenever she can, so I suppose we took Odakyuu to somewhere and then transferred.

I always take JR and always get off at Kita Kamakura, which is more picturesque than downtown Kamakura, fond as I am of downtown Kamakura. But having no sense of direction I have to stick to the main roads in that town, and so I always end up seeing the same temples. (Having no head for heights, I have to stay out of the hills as well, because they can get precipitous in no time. People with acrophobia have a hard time in Japan. If it's not mountains it's traffic bridges.) Jean has a brilliant sense of direction and so always cuts across country to see what can be seen.

That sunny afternoon she took us by one of the back trails to see this temple and that, and as a bonus we found our little antique store. Then we made our way back to the downtown and tried to decide on a place to eat- she won't eat Indian, I won't eat Japanese Chinese, she didn't want sushi, I didn't want ramen. Phil, an agreeable person, was agreeable to anything. I think we ended by having the usual undistinguished Japanese food- omuraisu or something like that for me, the indigestion-producing Japanese curry for them. It was while we were eating that she started telling us about Dick Francis, which was why I started reading him.

So I got two things that day. My cups- the blue one of which has a chip in it now, so I don't use it but keep it very carefully so it won't break; and Dick Francis. I used to use the cups for mixing psyllium in, which is a sticky nasty substance that adheres tenaciously to things, and I can remember them sitting in the sink in back of my bed for days with dried brown gunk in them that I was trying to soak off. I borrowed Jean's copies of Dick Francis, and periodically when I'm rereading them now, I'll remember that I first read this one in the sunny green park in Tsukishima one spring or that one in the hot crowded train going out to feed Mary's cats in the unspeakable July days of '94.

But now through friendly seas they softly run,
Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green
and I use the green cup for my occasional sake, and have bought my own copies of Francis that sit in the side bedroom bookshelf, and our first encounter was very long ago and far away and something that seems to have happened to someone else.

It's true, yes, elder worship turns to kink, and that's why god made doujinshika. But that all happens in the jungle of the id, and the jungle rarely encroaches on the farmlands of the everyday world. To an outsider in Japan, the nii-san thing is a sunny benign yang phenomenon from some eternal ideal childhood, like all the family you have who aren't your family. The nii-sans at the conveni who heat up your omuraisu, the ojisans who run the bento stalls and the oden carts, the nee-sans in the coffee shops who take your order- people who would be strangers here, and treat each other as strangers here, have this film of family relationship there that cheers the exiled heart immensely when the exiled heart is feeling more than usually large and foreign and outside-person. It works with the professional niceness and courtesy to make a comforting illusion of belonging. The nii-sans are just hotter than the others because they're cuter and can slide into dj thoughts more easily. (Though those ojisans...) If I read hentai I'd probably have nee-san thoughts in the same way, but I don't read hentai, for very many reasons.

The sadness of Tokyo is that you the gaijin can't go around calling these people o-nii-san or o-nee-san, and certainly not obasan. Older women stand on their dignity with gaijin and put them ruthlessly in their place as needed, where other people make allowances or simply don't care. And the assumption of happy family all round you is changing too. In my day even mothers were beginning to object to having strangers call them o-kaa-san, and that was ten years ago. I suppose they're all oku-sama now. Tokyo consists of *real* strangers having to live with each other somehow, and it makes for distance. (So do aspirations to middle-class respectability, I think. The family terms are for shitamachi commoners and the mizushoubai water trade and (huff) *we* live in Setagaya-ku and *my* husband is a shain.)

Out in the country I think I could probably do it, or have done it, because out in the country you speak the Japanese the Japanese there speak and take on the automatic assumptions of that language. It's news to them that there's another kind of Japanese anyone *could* speak. And since all mothers are naturally o-kaa-san, and all young women automatically o-nee-sans, gaijin use those terms too, or risk sounding ridiculously formal.

So I went and wrote me some Dragon King smut, and no, no-one gets to see it, for more reasons than I can count. Imprimis it's the dreaded Original Character Syndrome. Sure the names are traditional, and the colours and uhh 'areas of influence' too, I suppose, but the seikaku-character of them is all my own work. Now it is a truth that ought to be universally acknowledged, that the world divides essentially into born doujinshika and born mangaka. Good djka like Toshimi Arina are inspired by the anime characters and do their best work with them. When they go pro, their charas are watercolour and uninteresting- really only pale reflections of the anime characters that spoke to them originally as an artist. Good mangaka like Minami Megumu may have started as djka, but they only got their wings when doing their own stories. Their series-based stuff is unsatisfying. It confines them too much, and it shows. Their anime derived charas keep wanting to be someone else- a Minami Megumu character, mostly.

The cobbler to his last- I am by nature a djka. I do best with other people's characters and very badly with my own. People like me need the rigor of someone else's concepts because we lack the distance (and quite often the imagination) necessary to create interesting OCs on our own. They're always parts of our personality, or even more embarrassingly, parts of our psyche: Mary Sues in everything but sex. And it shows too. A good editor can take care of the syndrome, supposing the thing ever sees a good editor, but this kind of work usually doesn't make it out of the slush pile. And rather more to the point, we don't want the syndrome taken care of. These characters resonate for us precisely because they're us.

Then again, what I was trying for in this story was an erotic topos on the lines of ohh say The Lustful Turk or The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. Titillating and perverse sexuality happening among those strange and alien and hence sexual beings, Turks or nuns or dragons. Of course it's an old bad habit of any culture to ascribe disgusting practices and rampant sexuality to anyone seen as Other, whether Catholic or Jew or black or even Chinese. (The last one kills me. A feature of Yellow Peril mentality, all those lascivious coolies and depraved mandarins supposed to be drooling over innocent white women. Uhh, yeah. Sure.) I know dragons aren't people, and *I* at least know I'm deliberately playing with the trope, but it doesn't make the exercise any less mittomonai for that.

And umm of course the locus of my exotic sexuality is Confucianism, which is not, you know, something I want anyone Chinese reading, who's seen the system, or what remains of the system, from the inside. I mean, from *my* pov Confucianism is asking for the full Secrets of the Seraglio treatment, but I can't see anyone agreeing with me. (How, you ask? Oh come. The full God the Father treatment, or rather your father, God- though older brothers substitute nicely. Male with absolute power in his family, to be revered and worshipped; infallible no matter how arbitrary or even unjust, and if you disagree with him, then you are by definition a vile wretch; with power of life and death over his sons/ brothers, which dear God the occasional father seems to have exercised. Is this an invitation to masochism or isn't it? I merely ask.)

So you don't get to read it. You get to read the mainstream Gaiden story I'm writing, which is a piece of fanfic, and which compares to the other in interesting ways. Because it too has dragon family politics and dragon family sex in it, which will be all 'alien and strange sexual foreigner' unless I chicken out bigtime. But it also has Tenpou, who automatically puts the thing back into a Japanese frame.

I remember reading once that, though Japan did indeed have the tradition of 'jishin kaminari kaji oyaji' (earthquakes thunder fires and Father, as things to be terrified by) the Japanese family never operated in quite the same way as the Chinese. 'Authority in China was one-way,' the author said. Father-down, no court of appeal. Even if wrong by outside standards he was Father and therefore right. In Japan there was, subtly but present, a sense of mutuality. His authority was based on the respect and love people gave him, your obedience proceeded from affection inspired by what he did for you. The emphasis being on everyone united by ties of feeling, not ties of duty. (Now samurai vis-a-vis their lords, *that's* Chinese.)

Which brings us back to Papuwa, in fact. Look at what's happened to our autocratic paterfamilias and older brother there. Certainly he runs the world and whacks his brothers when they mouth off at him, and they never protest. But his brothers also snark at him, and make fun of his weaknesses, and what does he do? Breaks into tears at their ingratitude. No, of course my Goukou isn't going to break into tears at anything, and neither is he going to whack anyone over the ear 'ole. But my Gaiden dragons are ever so much more bound by mutuality of feeling than my lustful Confucian dragons are.

I have been writing dragons, I had a tooth pulled last week, and the weather since then has been bitterly cold. Those facts are all related. In very cold Januaries the sky is blue and almost cloudless and I remember clearly and precisely what the sky looked like from the plane taking me back, mid-January, to Tokyo, and what the huge Tokyo sky looked like when I got there, and therefore I can see what the sky looks like to a dragon flying in it. The tooth? Pain killers, mostly, that hermetically seal the universe off from the ordinary and the everyday, and the requisite time away from work that certainly doesn't hurt the process. It's been like... time-travel, a little. The world looks as it did in January of '94, a cold hard sunny winter in Tokyo. The world feels like it did then- me in this odd subuniverse in my head, full of people who aren't real of course but whom I *know*, nonetheless and instinctively, and whom I can find things out about if I just think about them a little more. The people in one's head- that was the great revelation of writing, and I'd forgotten how odd and wonderful it felt then because of course one takes it for granted now. Other people. Being another person. Being a different person completely, and finding with no small surprise that yes, you can be someone quite different from yourself and know how he thinks and what it feels like to be in his skin, and it's easy. It wasn't as different as being a dragon has been, this past week, but you know- it definitely wasn't me. (Private army, nope I don't have no private army.) Sun-split clouds, endless skies, a strange but half-familiar society, the company of friends even when alone. Tokyo, January, 1994.

(Later- yes, there are four dragon brothers and yes, there are four Ganma brothers and yes, I seem to have fixated on the oldest as objet d'akogare. What is your point, precisely? ^_^ Oh, that it adds to the nostalgia? Yes, doesn't it.

Neither of these fictional nii-sans is my older brother at all, though that steadying feel he gives the family is. Even if Magic is certifiable, you can rely on him in any pinch but an emotional one. Equally, while Harlem could never be Michael (the idea boggles me), Goujun comes perilously close, which makes writing him odd. I have to fight to unconstipate him. He's a dragon king, not a legal editor. Gouen is a wild card I can do anything I want with, since my bets are he's not Servis though he may be Suze-my-sister. If I want. And Goushou- fast skim suggests Tanaka makes Goushou Narsus, and I do not want my dragons to have anything to do with Arslan. I'd rather make Goushou me than Narsus, because if he's Narsus then Goukou is Darun, and that I simply won't have. How to drain the attraction from a character in one easy step. He'll be Magic Sousui sooner than Darun, be very very sure about that.