Sons of Loki

And it’s all coming together, just a little bit more. I’ve been here two months today. Can you imagine it? And we all have something to show for it; Ella’s off giving speeches to Imperial princesses, Dan’s hanging out with Japanese actors, and – well hey, let’s just say it’s been an interesting weekend.

Today I did some weight training with Rob at ICU, which was draining work, but we rewarded ourselves with a trip to Book Off (owners of the amusingly-named Hard Off chain of second-hand stores). I bought Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask in the original Japanese, which I will probably struggle with for a few days before giving up on and parking on my shelf to look good for the rest of the year. Then I got lost took a scenic route home, along the Nogawa river, marvelling at the birds and trees and how pleasant it all was, despite the chilly weather. I cut through Tama Cemetery (which I always feel a little guilty about) and saw a colony of cats staring suspiciously at me, and then later after a stupidly tight and low turn on wet tarmac I fell off my bike, grazing my knee and turning it a lovely shade of purple. Hurt like hell for a while, so I sat and rested it before moving on.

On Saturday my dear friend James came up from Kobe with our friend Eri, and I gave them a haphazard tour of Tokyo. Well, Shinjuku. Well, a bit of it. Returned to the New York Bar (“I’m practically a regular,” I said wittily, with the kind of wit I am valued for at the New York Bar, where all the staff probably know my name, maybe) for another £11 martini, then a meal at a Chinese restaurant (where the food is nothing like good, authentic, British Chinese food).

The day after I’d signed up for this 300 yen sightseeing do, run by the International Office. It was rather enlightening. We saw the Diet, the seat of the Japanese government, and the House of Representatives.


Then a westward jaunt to the Edo Tokyo Museum. Not the best museum I’ve seen lately (that’d have to be the National Museum of Korea) but a nice place to while away a Sunday afternoon. A lot of meticulously-crafted little models, which were gorgeous.

Stages in woodblock printing.

Wartime sketches of the USS Saratoga and Yorktown.

There was quite an interesting point in the exhibition where you passed out of the war-era Tokyo, with the bombs dropping all around and fires raging and desperation looming only to find yourself in the post-war section, surrounded by modern automobiles and inane 50s TV commercials. I like to think that this somehow reflects the shock to the national psyche after Japan’s defeat, or it might just be poor planning on the part of the museum.

After that, we went to a nearby chankonabe restaurant which serves the shabu-shabu so beloved of sumo wrestlers. “I can tell why they’re so fat,” I wittily quipped quippily, confronted by mounds of fish and veg and meat.

And did I mention, I finished Nanowrimo? Yes, behold the snazzy winner’s web badge to the right there (unless you’ve got this on a RSS feed, you clever person). It seemed an impossible task thirty days ago, but whether by accident or design I did about 2400 words this morning after class, leaving just another 100 in the afternoon (50,000th word was “to”) and then a few hundred just for good measure.

I eagerly await instruction on what to do next from the Nanowrimo team.

So somehow we went to this birthday party at this club called Lebaron de Paris thanks to a case of fraudulent posturing mistaken identity and it was quite a bizarre deal. This was genuinely the sort of thing guys like us don’t get invited to; it was full of hipsters and DJs and gaijin male models and art directors and I-shit-you-not supermodels and skateboarding hipster supermodel DJs, and everybody knew everybody and kissed on cheeks and drank Dom Perignon from flutes, and everybody was so incredibly fashionable that to my naive eyes it looked like they were just wearing anything at all, from spandex tights and heels on one guy to bizarre sparkly goggles on another.
Anyway, it was the birthday of four of these rare, transcendent beings. It was a pretty good night in all, despite the ridiculous drink prices (just had my free gin rickey and dodged the bar staff for the rest of the night). I actually didn’t really talk to many people. Part of my brain’s going “But these are the kind of multi-talented globe-trotting mixed-media photographer-dj-writer-musician-artist-hipsters you admire! You want to be these people someday!” and the other part’s going “yeah, but what would we talk about?” and the first part’s all “well fine, be that way.”

But the funny thing is, I had a chat with this famous actor and didn’t even know who he was. This art director introduced Dan and I to his old friend, this actor guy, the “Japanese Orlando Bloom”, and we chatted for a bit about nothing in particular. And you could tell he was a somebody by the way people kept stopping by to pay their respects, and the way he could wave a glass in the air and get it refilled instantly, and the way he was wearing a red tracksuit in the middle of a club and no one minded.

So we talk about the usual topics – where we’re from, have you been to the UK, where’s the cool clubs in Tokyo at, that sort of stuff. We head back at 5am, sleep like the dead through the train home, and I catch a few hours kip before having to prepare for a presentation on Friday. And then I find this guy on Wikipedia, the actor guy, and he’s genuinely big! (He was even in this drama series I downloaded (never watched, though)) He has legions of female fans across the world fawning over him on the j-drama sites.

And I sat next to him in a club and he asked me if I liked Japanese food. Bizarre.

So there’s this gay fascist dead writer I love who died today, 39 years ago.

36 years later Owen Pallett would write “I’m Afraid Of Japan” about this Yukio Mishima, I’d hear it, read After the Banquet, about the love affair between a middle-aged proprietress and a failed politician, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, about the monk who decided to burn down the Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto, and The Sound of Waves, about a young fisherman’s first love. Then I read the biography by Mishima’s translator John Nathan, and thought: now here’s a writer.

All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.

Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka in 1925. He wanted to be a writer. His father didn’t approve of his faggy literature hobby, so he wrote in secret and shared it with his mother. For most of his childhood, he lived with his domineering grandmother Natsu. He was too scrawny to be drafted in WW2. He wrote dozens of novels and plays and essays, and even more meaningless pulp fiction for the mainstream market, written for profit in as little as a week in hotel rooms. He became a superstar in Japan and abroad.

He visited gay bars. He was a nationalist, even a fascist. The liberals hated him. The nationalists hated him. He was obsessed with the beauty of death all his life. He was married with two children. He was a earnest bodybuilder with weedy legs who loved to be photographed topless. He was the lover of a drag queen.

When he was done writing his final tetralogy of books, he summoned the private army of revolutionaries he had been training and launched a coup to take over Japan on November 25, 1970. They took over an army base. He tried to incite the soldiers to join him in his coup, but they couldn’t hear him properly; they jeered him. So he went back inside the commander’s office with his closest associates and committed seppuku by thrusting a knife into his stomach. He wanted to write something poetic with his blood, like the hero in his short story “Patriotism” from four years earlier, but Mishima had fucked up, and was in too much pain. He had delegated his friend Masakatsu Morita to perform the coup de grace and behead him with a sword, but Morita fucked up too, and couldn’t cut through the neck. Finally, Hiroyasu Koga had to step in to do the task. And so, Yukio Mishima died.

Man, what a crazy week!

Actually, nothing has really happened. I ran out of food and money. I felt guilty for not attending the school festival. I met Rob in Shinjuku and he bought some speakers and I shopped around for a PS2 and a copy of Beatmania but decided spending overdraft on games consoles would be something I would regret when I wanted to buy food to eat. And I returned to Nikko, probably two years to the day if I could be bothered to look up dates.

Fran and I traversed Tokyo to reach Asakusa to catch the 0900 train to Nikko. Obviously we got there on time to discover that we couldn’t get the Spacia limited express with our ticket and had to get the regular Rapid, which meant we got there an hour after we were supposed to meet Katy and Rob. Luckily for us, they were late too. Anyway, Nikko hadn’t changed a bit. It persisted in being very cold, with a kind of ski town feel according to Fran. I found myself with fond memories of the train station where I once sat reading Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy. (I cannot think of a way to word that sentence that does not make me sound like a pretentious arse.)

We caught a crowded bus up to the shrines, where we joined the crowds of tourists to walk around and go “ooh” at things.

So after seeing Rob and Katy for all of an hour, they had to rush off for a free buffet thingy, while Fran and I walked back to Nikko (we were going to take the bus, but the driver apparently forgot to open the doors to let us on and drove off, so we walked, but it was pleasant anyway). The plan was to meet Katy and Rob at Edomura Wonderland, a theme park (with ninjas! the promotional pamphlet was eager to explain) but we’d missed the last bus there, or the last train, or there wasn’t a bus, delete as appropriate depending on which official you spoke to. So we had some ramen, and it was extremely pleasant to slurp noodles in a warm restaurant while gazing out at the cold beauty of Nikko outside the window.




On the way back we got the wrong train, of course, and spent twenty minutes shuttling back and forth on the subway before we could even think about beginning the hour-long journey home, but c’est la Tokio.

My novel has a title. It is called “The Remnants”, which sounds like some early-90s California art-punk-rock band (I think I’m confusing The Replacements and The Rembrandts). And, thanks to judicious use of WriteOrDie, I’m continuing on like the damn Duracell bunny to 33,827 words, just an hour or two away from passing last year’s 35,608. I was very pleased when I managed to Title Drop the title a few days after picking it:

Humanity finally had harmony, but at what price? In a sense, the Hostiles had already won, for they – the remnants of humanity – were living in a world that very closely matched the Hostiles’ ideal of a well-regulated, orderly, soulless society.

That passage sounded so good when I was writing it. In the light of reflection, less so. But this is Nanowrimo, and I will soldier on.

TV continues to fascinate me. I watch the late-night anime. Back when I was really into anime – it must have been 2000-2002, bookended by Tenchi Muyo! appearing on Cartoon Network in September 2000 and Saiko Exciting! coming to a premature end in 2002 – the sum total of anime available was dubbed, edited, and at least four or five years old (Tenchi Muyo was eight years old in Japan when it debuted in the UK!).
Now, of course, you can download fansubbed versions of the hottest new anime in about ten seconds off the net, but there’s still a spark of excitement in being able to watch brand new episodes of some anime debuting on Japanese TV, even if most of it’s crap and I don’t understand any of it. (An episode of Miracle Train has just concluded on TV Tokyo, which is about anthropomorphic personifications of Tokyo subway stations, or something.)

It’s getting better, sort of. After about a month too long and a few chats with teachers I have got the hang of the Japanese lessons, to an extent, just in time for our week-long break (school festival, which if it means no lessons is something I’m all for). And I’ve settled in, sort of. I still make the same kind of stupid mistakes I did at the beginning (I accidentally bought a second duvet cover instead of a bedsheet the other day, so I just hacked (literally) the duvet cover into a bedsheet and it’s worked so far) but they no longer bother me.

I love TV. Yesterday I watched a Korean language-learning programme on NHK Educational, and it’s in Japanese of course, and it’s a strange experience to learn a language in a language you do not yet know entirely. But it makes perfect sense in a strange way, seeing as Korean is far more like Japanese than English.

NHK is the equivalent to the BBC, and NHK Educational is what BBC Two started off as – the more highbrow intellectual counterpart to the entertainment-based NHK General. It’s touching (and telling) that even at prime-time, when BBC 2 is showing How Clean is Your MP? and Mastermindchef Extreme, NHK Educational is teaching people how to make a quilt and while ITV is sticking Simon Cowell’s fat mug on screen to gurn at hapless children, NHK is showing the sign-language news on at 8:45pm.

Yeah. So yesterday I decided to get out, fix up something highbrow like.

Had a wander around Shinjuku for lunch (been here six weeks and I still don’t think I will ever get tired of that place) and got the train to Rikugien, a lovely little garden tucked away by Komagome station on the north side. Birds tweeted. Couples walked around in kimonos. Salarymen entertained their compensated dates. It warmed the cockles of my cold, cold heart, to see the pretty trees and the swimming turtles. The light was doing lovely things.