Travel Diary
A friend of mine has a recurring dream. She's living her usual Ohio life- friends, job, house, all that- and she realizes, with an immense sense of shock, that she's forgotten that she has a whole separate Tokyo existence happening at the same time, with an apartment and a cat and a job and English classes that she teaches, and that in fact she's supposed to be somewhere teaching a class in an hour's time. She wakes in panic to find that it's true. Tokyo is the reality. Ohio was just a dream.
That's sort of what it's like for me.
I always forget what Tokyo's like when I'm at home. And I always forget that I forget, so I think the vague impressions of it that remain with me in Toronto are real. Which is why, when Sue proposed I come with her on her February shopping trip, I was unenthused. She might as well have suggested a week's jaunt to New Delhi or Shanghai. My mind said foreign crowded uncomfortable difficult full of strangers and I don't speak the language. But I went.
I opted to go through San Francisco instead of Chicago, on account of San Francisco is rarely closed down by the kind of blizzards we'd been having last winter. Rational, but a bad move. It adds five hours to what's already a twelve hour flight and requires getting up at 4:30- or rather, getting ready to go at 4:30 because who's going to sleep with that kind of wake-up time? So I arrived in Tokyo on no sleep for two nights running, stuttered through Customs and Immigration's basic Japanese inquiries, stumbled downstairs to the Skyliner counter and attempted to tell the nice lady there that I didn't want to go all the way to Ueno, I wanted to change to JR at whatever station it is uhh Nishi-Nippori? 'Ahh,' she smiled, 'Nippori no norikae desu ne?' Oh. Yeah. Nippori no norikae it is. I knew I didn't speak this language.
The Skyliner was empty, as ever, and over-heated, as ever, and I desperately fought the gentle rocking motion that kept making my sleep-starved body fall into blank moments of nightmare not-there-ness. I couldn't think why I'd agreed to do this. The only bait was that I'd be getting this month's manga episode of Saiyuuki a week or so earlier than I might have, and as I once again clawed my way out of sleep, that didn't seem reward enough to balance the present misery. It was only slightly better when I got into the cold winter air at Nippori. The guard at the automatic ticket gate said something incomprehensible to me about using the big one, and it didn't help that he'd had to say the same thing to the elderly Japanese man in front of me. I was alone in this strange foreign city where I didn't speak the language, and I didn't like it at all.
It was as I was going down the stairs to the Yamanote platform that the first twinges began. The people around me-- who were all these people around me, so neat and compact and one-pattern? There was none of the rainbow variation of Torontonians, and none of their size either. No blond hair, no brown skin, no bright red down-filled ski jackets taking up the whole of a seat meant for two. Black coats, navy blue coats, beige coats, all wrapped around people who were-- small. I kept looking at them under the weird fluorescent lights of the train. Not like the Koreans in my neighbourhood- not at all like the Chinese downtown- familiar somehow but--- The stations passed, half-familiar names I'd known in another life- Nishi Nippori, Tabata, Komagome, Sugamo. The grey concrete platforms under the perpetual fluorescent lights tugged at the back of my mind like a face you know you know but can't give a context to.
So into Ohtsuka, and through the back streets by instinct to the cheap business hotel I always stay at, and up to my little womb-like room, just big enough to hold a bed and a suitcase. And all I wanted was one of those deep Japanese baths, hot hot water up to my neck, and ten hours sleep. But I'd come for this month's ep of Saiyuuki and I was determined to get it before Hourindo bookstore closed in Ikebukuro. So out I went again, and put the familiar 100 yen coins into the ticket machine, and put my ticket into the gate and grabbed it as it popped out at the other end, an action that comes back like a reflex. And went up the concrete stairs to the platform to hear the voice every Tokyoite hears unthinkingly at least twice a day if not oftener- 'Mamonaku densha ga mairimasu. Kiken desu kara, kiiroi sen no uchigawa ni o-sagari kudasai'- the recorded male voice that announces the arrival of the train and politely asks you to stay back of the yellow line. One stop to Ikebukuro, all cream tiles and cream-coloured flooring and the perpetual fluorescent lights and the perpetual evening crowds even on a Sunday, pushing out of Tobu department store's basement exit and into the entrance to the Tobu Tojou line next to it. The same, absolutely the same. Ikebukuro never changes. Up the only escalator at the west exit, and out onto the sidewalk in front of the station. Lines of green taxis on the street in front of me. Macdonald's on the corner across from me. Marui up the street, its red O|O| glowing seven storeys up. Over to my left the neon sign of Flamingo coffee house, Furamingo, that I always want to read Flaming-O, on the fifth floor of the building even though Flamingo is in the sub-sub basement.
And that was when it happened, the moment that always happens when I go back to Tokyo and that I always forget afterwards. The moment when I wake up and remember where I am. I know this place. Of course I know this place. I live here.
The Japanese language over here is a poor sorry thing, a dried-up fish out of water. I only get it in one cramped place, between the covers of manga tankoubons, and only in one form, written up and down and right to left in the standard manga typeface. It's pathetic, being so out of context and far from home. But over there it runs free, like a dog off the leash, or maybe a pack of dogs. It's all over the place and it goes in all directions at once. Not just right to left and up and down but also horizontally left to right like a western text, and occasionally, in old building signs, horizontally right to left, just to keep you on your toes. 'Ya zaki matsu' you read, and realize it has to go the other way around. It's on billboards seen from the train and pixel screens watched while waiting for friends in Shibuya and on the covers of the magazines in the platform kiosks and in headlines read over strangers' shoulders. Most especially it's on the advertising plastered all over the insides of trains, especially the ones for magazines. It comes in a zillion typefaces, fat and black and bold or calligraphy wavy or pastel delicate or faux-computer blocky. It's an ill-assorted mish-mash of four different writing systems, kanji and hiragana and katakana and romaji, that often all show up together in the same advertisement, elbowing each other for your attention. The written language you see all around you in Tokyo is like the city you see all around you in Tokyo, a chaotic jumble that gives the feeling of boundless energy. (In fact the city lack-of-planning and the advertising may be the only energetic things in Tokyo, a city that eats energy just by existing.)
The train posters tell you that, depressingly, the Japanese are just as concerned as westerners are with balancing their stock portfolios with the proper bond issues, and that yappari/ indeed it's the right handbag that makes the woman, and that there's yet another volume of Onihira Hankachou out, though you'd thought the author had died ten years ago. So you turn to the ads for the scandal rags, which take you back to a more familiar world, the one you see in the manga. 'Bijin haiyuu K-san no BEDDO de otto no M-san ni dakareta!!!' screams one headline-- Beautiful actress K's husband M screwed me in her own BED!! which I automatically took to be M having a gay affair. Until I realized that if it had been the headline would have screamed that too.