Read Online Tokio Whip by Arturo Silva - Free Book Online

winding sheet.
    ***
    â€“ On occasion Hiroko simply likes to wander. She closes her eyes, lets her finger fall on the map, takes a train to the closest station, and from there hops on a bus. The custom comes from her childhood, when her grandparents were still alive; they’d take little Hiroko-chan on tour busses outside of Tokyo every few months. These days, she doesn’t really like to go into the country, so she maintains the tradition by exploring areas of Tokyo unknown to her, and most likely areas never known by her beloved grandparents either. Today her finger fell on Yoga Station (Shin-Tamagawa Line), and that’s where she got on a bus, having declined the Hanzomon Line, and so having willingly screwed up by taking a couple or triple of busses from Shibuya (the Toei 6), she first found herself in Shimouma, went back to Shinjuku and got on the 91. It all seemed so fresh and clean (and expensive, she was sure). She traveled farther afield. Baji Park to see the horses; an old man taking photographs from behind people. So many apartment buildings (on the bus trip back she looked up and saw the old man now shooting from his balcony). Back at the station she had some spareribs at Kenny Roger’s restaurant. Good, but a bit messy.
    â€“ Is that so?
    â€“ Yeah. Ya’ know her grandfather designed T-shirts. Taisho period. People were very fussy then.
    ***
    Lang keeps telling me, “you must read Bernhard, Kazuko,” and I keep telling him to read Schnitzler. But he does seem pretty well-adjusted – to Tokyo, I mean. Oh, I’d love to be back in Vienna. When was it, three years ago? The Graben, the Belvedere, the Esperanto Museum. You go round and round, just like the Ring, the “girdle.” Walking, looking, shopping, stopping at a café; then you do it again; and then once more. The coffee might be a glass of wine, but the cycle remains true. What is it? “Situation desperate, but not serious.” We Tokyoites could learn a lot from the Viennese. That’s the city we should have a sister relationship with. But no, maybe we’re more alike than not, with our sentiments and silliness, our baby-talk and finger-food. Spoiled brats. The old and the new worlds meet and go crash, boom! Will I ever get out of here and back home? Will I ever see Vienna again? Maybe Lang is right, and I do find something of myself in the two cities. Shadows I’d never suspected before.
    Oh, be careful, Kazuko.
    And Joan Fontaine was oh so pretty!
    ***
    Kazuo is in the San Francisco apartment of a friend. Or, rather, he is in a dream-combination of familiar apartments, rooms that he or friends have inhabited, both in San Francisco and even a few rooms from back in Japan, rooms he’s seen in films perhaps, and that have obviously made a deep impression. Three women are cooking in the kitchen; in one corner a man and a woman are breaking up, laughing hysterically one moment, silent or sobbing the next. Kazuo takes the stairs that lead from the kitchen down through a bedroom, where the woman who was just breaking up is now sleeping peacefully. He descends finally into a large living room dominated by a grand piano in one corner and a bar in another; a party is going on. Country music is playing in the background: Roseanne, Iris, Dwight, Lucinda. There are no arguments here as to what constitutes this music. (Do people tap their feet in dreams?) He is not dressed for the occasion, and his embarrassment shows immediately. He tries to move to a corner where he will not be noticed, but an American (whom he does not know) comes up to him and begins asking Kazuo about “the market.” Kazuo detests this type of person: smug, successful, superior – superficial. Always speaking in initials (“Read DR in the JT today?”), or reciting statistics (“53 out of 89, I tell you, no less than 53 out of 89!”). But he can laugh to himself because the Yuppie is rapidly losing his