Read Online Tokio Whip by Arturo Silva - Free Book Online Page A

hair, and growing stupider with each day. The woman who had broken up and then slept it off now comes over to Kazuo. She takes his arm and leads him away, saying, “I could see you weren’t comfortable. Let’s go over here and talk.” They walk off into the small garden of a danchi where a barbecue is taking place. They are in Funado, Itabashi Ward. Kazuo is drinking champagne, enjoying talking with the woman. He compliments her on her Japanese, but then learns that she is in fact half-Japanese. She tells him that she knows Kazuko, and knows what she is doing right now.
    In Hiromi’s dream she opens the door of a large auditorium, where she sees people milling about, drinking, small-talking. A band is on stage playing Country music (Dwight, Roseanne ...). Later in the evening there is to be an awards ceremony. Hiromi has no idea why she is here. She walks around and around the auditorium. Sometimes she takes an exit, but that too just leads around and around, from one snack bar to another. There are conventioneers sporting happy-face name-tags; sports fans with megaphones and pennants; kids dressed for a Rock concert, like in the magazine cover-story on London she once read. All she can do is continue looking for an exit. Finally one appears; she takes it. Funado, Itabashi Ward, another area of Tokio that the economic miracle passed by. If Nakano is the 50s, Funado is the 60s. Makeshift houses all falling apart now; factories with tall chimney stacks; rag-and-bone men. The nation’s Self-Defense Forces has a large dormitory here; so too are there numerous schools for the mentally and physically handicapped. And danchi after danchi : those long, multi-building apartment blocks; 2 or 3LDKs, with whole families in them, everything falling apart, and no funds to fix any of it. Hiromi is aghast; Funado is not the Roppongi and Shibuya she hangs out in. When did she ever visit here? What’s it doing in her dreams? Why can’t she wake and get out of here? And besides, she doesn’t even like Country music!
    ***
    Everything changes. What’s the rest of the line?
    The escalator of the Edo-Tokyo Museum is out of order. She climbs the hundreds of steps, and wonders, “What did people do before escalators? Maybe the world really was flat.”
    ***
    I’d found a new way around the moat one early winter evening and decided to try it – there was so much I needed to mull over – to walk it over to Hibiya where Arlene was working late. (I used to love coming into San Francisco across the Bay Bridge. The slope, the ascent, the towering pillars and then the cityscape and skyline the ocean beyond and above and between and below it all the setting sun. But it was all anticipation and no fulfillment. It made no sense as to what a city might be; I knew the people too well.) Tonight, however, circling the moat counter-clockwise (without a sunset, happening in some other city perhaps) and thinking about all the changes that were to come in all of our relationships – the storm ready to burst, the chill to follow – I was suddenly lifted and briefly felt blissfully light, empty even: it did not matter what became of us here – what was this sudden glimpse of the city? – a corner turned a shot of light and we all forgotten against that silver wall – it wasn’t the sun and it wasn’t the moon, merely an effect of light, Tokyo light – that others too may discover going round the moat.
    Or exiting a station, kissing goodnight, asking the operator for a phone number, a stranger for a light.
    ***
    I have seen the traces of the city, Lang drunkenly boasts to himself, have traced the outlines of its stories and legends and multiple names. I have followed the rivers, eaten and slept in the black, long, low houses of the powerless, and bathed and made love in the mansions of the powerful; have seen Utamaro with hands bound, and seen him watch the naked pearl divers; have