I have accepted this assignment from a travel magazine reluctantly-I even turned it down once. I was worried about reliving some old trauma. Worried about, not to put too fine a point on it, losing my shit and bursting into tears on some foreign street corner, thousands of miles away from my home. I was also illogically convinced that returning to the scene of the crime would somehow prompt my lymph nodes to bloom forth into malignancy once more.
Finally facing down that demon, I have decided to hope instead that this trip will prove exculpatory, putting to rest once and for all that sense of unrequited love between Tokyo and myself. I am also hoping this visit, coinciding with the newly tanking Japanese economy, will mean that I will finally be able, indeed am enjoined, to savor the city in a way unavailable to me at the green and miserable age of twenty-two.
I have been inundated with gloomy anecdotal evidence of Japan's depression: tales of the legions of risutora (derived from the term restructured, the Japanese equivalent of our own oblique and sinister neologism "downsizing"), those individuals who, unable to tell their wives of their disemployment, daily put on their suits and leave their homes, only to spend the eight hours sitting in the parks or riding the subways. All of this has made my head swim with visions of a holiday spent like a pasha among scores of have-nots. Lots of opportunities for lubricants.
My abominable, grandiose fantasies are not remotely augured by my flight. Those of us in economy are so vastly outnumbered by first- and business-class travelers, they've curtained off the entire unused rear third of the plane. At least I have three seats to myself, all the better to watch a roistering comedy about a Tokugawa-period angling enthusiast, Samurai Fishing Nut. The hours pass like days.
Nor are Japan's economic woes outwardly visible as I walk out onto the Ginza of a Saturday evening in spring. Tokyo remains the city lover's paradise. The Ginza is still a vertiginous canyon of stores, blazing with neon in Angkor Wat profusion: Blade Runner directed by Dr. Seuss. The surreal quality is enhanced by having been awake for thirty hours, dropping my bags at my hotel, and taking a stroll in the purple twilight. On the front of the Warner Brothers store, a dubbed Tweety outsmarts Sylvester, only to be replaced moments later by quickly alternating images of Jennifer Aniston and the cast of ER. On another jumbotron down the block, a Godzilla-size Kim Basinger rubs some miracle emollient into her gargantuan pores. (The economy still seems strong enough to cough up sufficient mammon to pay American stars, too pure to do commercials domestically, to hawk wares in Japan. In the past it has been Woody Allen, Sylvester Stallone, and Kathleen Battle. On this trip, in addition to Ms. Basinger, I see ads with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kevin Costner.) The stores are full, the streets throng with young people. Even in the window of the Matsuya department store, the Issey Miyake Pleats Please sweaters, suspended on invisible wires, bounce up and down in accordioned, carefree bliss-so happy to be sportswear.
My feet, through some unconscious memory, lead me to the fondly remembered Ginza Lion Beer Hall. It's just as I recall, a lovely Teutonic vaulted interior in honey-colored glazed ceramic tile. It's like the clattery cafeteria at Valhalla. Over the bar is an Arcadian mosaic of Rhine maidens at harvest: toga-like garments, sheaves of grain, blond hair. The clientele is a mix of generations, from the very young to the youngish. I nurse my beer as I scan the crowd with rapidly dwindling comprehension, now thoroughly in the fugue state of jet lag. Is it really possible that they all have cell phones? (Yes, as it turns out.) The overriding sense of Tokyo-and I don't think an inaccurate one-is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future.
Not that I would know anything about the future. I seem to have a negative aptitude for prediction. My first job in Tokyo in 1986 was one I held very briefly-twelve hours-with an advertising firm that was starting up a "computer network" where English-speaking expats could "log on" and "talk" to one another or get useful information from a "newsletter." This was all explained to me by Jeff, the only other Westerner in the company, a Montana native. Jeff sat me down and, with Pentecostal fervor, tried vainly to explain the mechanics of computers, drawing incomprehensible diagrams on a legal pad. I could not feign interest; indeed, I could barely stay conscious. I knew at that moment that this job would not work out. Talk to one another on the computer? I thought. What a bunch of losers. In my diary from that time, I find the entry where I talk about this "network": Who needs something like this? Strictly for those comic book enthusiast weirdos who actually take the advice of those little boxes that read "for more on the Green Goblin, check out Spidey #137-Ed."
Trying to make conversation, I pointed out how strange it was that on some level the newsletter didn't really exist.
"What do you mean?" Jeff snorted defensively.
The term virtual had not yet been coined then, at least not for the general population. This was the only remotely intelligent thing I said that day.
I was to spend my time looking at back issues of the publication, to get a feel for its readership. I was seated at a long table of computers beside three other Japanese men. Using my very first mouse, I moved it to the edge of its pad. The cursor shifted about three inches to the right across the screen and no farther. Rising from my chair, I continued to move the mouse down the table. On the screen, the cursor crawled another three inches to the right. Now at the elbow of the man beside me, I wordlessly showed him my screen, my stalled cursor, and pointed beyond his shoulder farther down the table, indicating my manifest destiny ever rightward.
Gently he picked up my mouse and showed me how to move it along and pick it up incrementally. "You must uplift the mouse," he said. Uplift the Mouse! This mouse, I decided, would never master it. It was time to free myself from the shackles of the job before things got ugly. I quit the next morning.
Walking out of that office, as buoyant as someone who's had his Titanic reservations canceled, I said to myself, Sayonara, suckers. Good luck with your network. Weeks later I was relieved to be making a barely living wage in book publishing.
Getting it slightly but disastrously wrong was my specialty that year. At the only wealthy expatriate party to which I was invited, I stood talking to a small circle of investment banker types, when the subject of the Mormon missionaries came up. One used to see them all over Tokyo, traveling around in pairs on bicycles, with their initially-handsome-and-then-not-really-on-closer-inspection blond faces, short-sleeved polyester white dress shirts, and dairy-fed fat asses.
"It seems unfair," said a young woman with Credit Lyonnais. "Everything is so crowded in Tokyo, and they have no private space at all. I heard they even make them room together." We were in an apartment in the Akasaka district that was huge even by New York standards.
Her British Lazard Freres boyfriend explained, "Well, they do that so they can watch each other in case one of them is tempted to have a wank."
"Well," say I, drunk, twenty-two, smart-ass, "it's always better with someone watching."
This was my first and final encounter with Tokyo affluence.
Until now. The Seiyo is the first of three hotels that I will stay in over the next ten days. I decided that it would be a really good idea for the story (italics and really stupid idea my own) to mirror the Bubble and its aftermath by staying in progressively cheaper hotels. Come see the Human Economic Synecdoche! Thrill to the sight of his declining fortunes!
The Seiyo's quiet elegance, its second-floor lobby, subdued golden beige palate, is anodyne after the thrum outside. The intelligent, friendly, and bilingual staff keep their voices low, at the dulcet register of the museum gift shop. Even by Japanese standards they are solicitous. I ask one of the concierges a question in Japanese. He begins to answer me in English, then stops, apologizes, and switches to his native tongue.
My room is a riot of color: taupe, buff, sandstone, wheat, parchment, and cream. On the small side table sits a black lacquer tray with a small mountain of perfect strawberries, kiwi, thin-skinned oranges, and cherry-size plums, along with a personalized note of welcome. The toiletries in the bathroom are just the lubricants I was hoping for: the kinds of ridiculously silken unguents I would never buy for myself, including a cunning can of shaving cream the size of a piece of chalk. To merely say or even think the word towel at the Seiyo is to find one of the numerous huge bath sheets replaced. None of this should be a surprise, given the nightly expense of my room, which hovers somewhere around the monthly cost of my apartment. Although gratuities are not part of Japanese culture, I wonder briefly if the world of luxury at this level is beyond nationality, if the Seiyo, more than being in Tokyo, is some international principality, a consular outpost of the mythic land Affluencia, where tycoons and movie stars still "duke the help," to paraphrase Mr. Sinatra.
Half a block away from the hotel one morning a doorman, out of breath, taps me on the shoulder and hands me a beige (of course) pearwood-handled umbrella. I have risen, falsely refreshed, at four A.M., the international dateline playing havoc with my circadian rhythms. At that hour in Tokyo there's only one place to go: Tsukiji, the fish market where over 5 percent of the world's seafood is sold daily. Immediately outside the market stands a three-story mountain of white Styrofoam boxes. If I squint through the rainy mist, this snowy mound is as close to a convincing view of Fuji as I come over the next ten days.
And how astonishing is Tsukiji itself! It is so vast, of such volume, the brawn and biology of it so daunting, that it's like getting to see where they make air. Aisle after aisle of sea creatures: eels, octopi (in both charcoal and vivid carmine), cockles, clams, fish of all varieties, crimson roe, the tiniest fish I have ever seen-bright white, smaller than bobby pins with minuscule poppyseed black eyes-crabs, sea urchins, sardines, squid, which all give way to the open area known as tekka jigoku, Tuna Hell, where the prized fish are auctioned off. If unfathomable profusion be hell, then this Madison Square Gardensize, wet, sodium-lit garage, shrouded in the mist wicking off the frozen tuna, is it. Small circles of men gather every few yards, crowding around the auctioneers who stand atop one of the iced, rock-hard beasts. Nothing prepares you for how big a tuna is. Easily the size of an English teacher, each one is labeled with red paint directly onto its silver skin, indicating where in the world's oceans it was caught. Near the tail, a small flap has been cut, to give prospective buyers a look at the flesh.
If you don't work there, Tsukiji is an exercise in being in the way. The aisles are almost impossibly narrow, and men barrel through on little motorized trucks with oil-drum-like steering mechanisms, making no concession to space or speed. Those on foot carry long fish gaffs, big meat hooks on wooden handles. It's amazing that the place isn't littered with the walking wounded, the gored, the run down, or run through by one of the long two-person saws used to cut up the frozen tuna.
"Do you speak Japanese? Because we don't speak English," I am greeted at the sushi bar I enter at seven A.M. The only Westerner in the tiny place, I sit between a young couple on my right, blissed out in morning afterglow, and to my left a scarily bright-eyed foursome of Prada-wearing businesspeople, two men, two women. I am given the choice of a $30 or a $23 breakfast set. Deciding upon the latter (even as I write this I am still stewed in regret over my foolishly saved 800), I begin with a miso soup flavored with thumbnail-size clams. The sushi-extraordinarily fresh, some pieces still eerily warm with recent life, others bracingly freezing-is placed directly on the counter in front of me.
Perhaps it's the early morning protein jolt of all that fish, the sheer Carl Sandburg big shoulders quality to the whole Tsukiji enterprise, or the proximity to all that top o' the food chain death and mayhem, but I leave exultant, walking out into the rain with a high heart like Gene Kelly.
My exuberance isn't entirely food related. I have been so relieved to find that the city in and of itself is not enough to unlock the sadness or fear of my younger self. To the contrary, I have been unable to wipe the smile from my face since I arrived, giddy with a sense of survival. It's not even clear to me that that old misery is still even housed in my body anymore. I had been avoiding a monster behind a door for thirteen years, only to find that it had melted away long ago, nothing more than a spun-sugar bogeyman. It's definitely not the first time in my adulthood that I have realized this, but it never fails to cheer me to have it proven yet again that almost any age is better than twenty-two.
An enormous blue balloon of Dobbu-kun ("Mr. DOB") artist Takashi Murakami's mouse-eared, agate-eyed Everycreature adorns the entrance to the Shinjuku branch of the Parco department store. Department stores are far more microcosmic than their American counterparts, with bookstores, food halls to rival Harrod's, and art galleries of important stature. Murakami is at the forefront of the Japanese vanguard that owes much to anime cartoons, manga (comics), and archetypal Japanese cuteness. Limited to neither the strawberry-scented eraser world of Hello, Kitty nor the ubiquitous youth-lobotomizing cult of Pika-chu and his Pokemon pals, the archetypal aesthetic of kawai ("cute," most often said in reference to a pencil case and drawn out in a nasal whine, almost pained at the intolerable levels of said object's adorability) now spans both the globe and generations, from schoolchildren to club kids to the worlds of typography and design. Mr. DOB's candy-colored world of smiling daisies and psychedelic toadstools is very kawai indeed, albeit with a vaguely sinister undertone of throbbing sexuality and atomic age anxiety. It has brought out the full range of Tokyo trendocrats: art students, critical theory heads, collectors. An American dealer in a blue blazer and Hermes tie walks from painting to painting, talking in Japanese into his cell phone. His pressed jeans are rolled up at the cuff, revealing the red thread at the selvage, the telltale proof that these are the limited-edition Levi's manufactured exclusively for the denim-mad Japanese market.
In terms of sheer label-crazed consumerism, the Japanese have always been able to teach Americans a thing or two. I walk through Takeshita-dori, a rabbit warren of streets and alleyways geared to the city's younger adolescents: teens in their autonomy training wheels phase. It is a crush of juvenile bodies, many in school uniforms-the girls wearing their trademark ruusu soksu (literally "loose socks"), white socks that grip the leg just below the knee and then cascade in folds of ribbed cotton, pooling over and around their shoes. The river of youth flows in and out of stores selling notebooks, lighters, stickers, pens, and clothing that will come apart after one washing-all the merchandise is eye-catching and fairly shitty, the entire scene scored with incredibly loud bubblegum music.
All of this buzz, both aural and visual, is vibrant but leaves me feeling clobbered. Seeking out an antidote to all the stimulus, I board the subway. I can only sympathize with the man in suit and tie (perhaps one of those fabled risutora? I shall never know) dozing with his sleeping four-year-old daughter. Tied around the father's wrist is a plastic bag in which a goldfish-not asleep-swims casually back and forth. I am bound for my favorite part of Tokyo, Yanaka and Nippori, two adjacent neighborhoods that are part of Tokyo's old Shitamachi (downtown). The myth that Tokyo's history has been effaced by earthquake and war is, thankfully, only partially true. Yanaka is marked by its authentic working-class flavor, old houses, profusion of lovely temples, and magnificent cemetery. The main shopping strip is a narrow pedestrian mall of food stores and utilitarian shops, grandly named, in a touching bit of puffery, the Yanaka Ginza. I buy a small bag of fish balls from a vendor and walk along snacking in one of the few areas of Tokyo where public eating is not a faux pas. A politician running in the current municipal elections stands beside his idling station wagon, addressing a small group of shoppers and merchants. He finishes to a smattering of applause and gets back in his car. All around town I see entire walls plastered with posters for dozens of candidates. Later on in the day the rain graduates to full-on torrential as the same candidate, getting soaked, promises all manner of things that I cannot understand to me and two 7-year-old schoolchildren on their way home. I stand listening, too embarrassed to move.
Yanaka cemetery is as crowded with headstones as Pere Lachaise, only the markers, rather than being adorned with crosses, are festooned with sotoba, wooden pickets painted with the decedent's Buddhist name in kanji. The lanes are sodden with rain, the paths muddy. Huge ravens, oily black, sit soaked and spindle feathered in the bare trees. It is blessedly still, inordinately peaceful, and contemplative. I am alone here, even though I am in central Tokyo, a stone's throw from the railroad tracks of the train station, a short ride from my hotel. A good thing, too. In ten days I never manage to sleep more than four hours at a time, so I return to the hotel each afternoon for a very necessary rest and some even more necessary TV watching.
Television is good practice for my remaining Japanese, a mere fingernail paring of comprehension and conversational ability. TV is also my only indication that Tokyo is no longer Fat City. I see a number of new shows concerned with "bargains." The camera careering through a grocery store as the hostess holds up packages of sea urchin for only 350! She is amazed! A restaurant in Nagoya serves curry rice (a Japanese staple: a brown, curry-scented gravy of dubious provenance served over rice) for only 1! The patrons shoveling the mess into their mouths are most definitely getting what they pay for. On another program, a housewife economizes by making everything by hand: the family tofu, the potato chips. She has ledger books and calculators. I watch her attend a pot luck, having managed to keep the cost of her ample contribution down to 30. At the end of the taped sequence, in the studio audience with her husband and two children, she is presented with a certificate of accomplishment. Her nerves worn filament thin from her labor, she bursts into tears.
There is also the equal and opposite reaction to all this frugality. High Life programs with host after host going to hot springs hotels. After being shown in the bath discreetly naked, they lounge in cotton yukata robes by a hibachi. A large clam is placed directly over the flame and pops open, the rilled edges of the creature furling in succulent demise-a time-lapse flower in reverse. I see this image at least three times.
The only person with whom I have maintained barely sporadic contact in the decade-plus since I lived in Japan is Kyoko Makino, with whom I worked at the art publisher. When I go to pick her up for dinner, I feel none of the anticipated trepidation as I walk into the office. I know almost nobody still working at the publishing house, and I, in turn, am barely remembered. The new publisher is the son of the man I worked for. When he was nineteen to my twenty-two, I tutored him in English. Even though it is quite clear that I am there to see Makino-san and not him, he sends her off to get me some coffee that I do not want. After ushering me into the conference room, he shows me the company's newest project, a magazine devoted to oenophilia in Japan. (This will prompt me later over dinner to teach Makino-san the term wine bore.) We have come to a restaurant in an old house at the end of a long, shaded walkway, lit with glowing braziers. We sit on tatami, an ember-filled grill in the center of our table. A seemingly endless variety of beautiful dishes emerges from the kitchen, starting with three small rectangles of tofu on bamboo skewers, each block enameled with a puree of a different color-green pea, orange squash, and a vermilion sweet miso-and ending some two hours later with a chilled slice of Japanese melon, dark jade and nearly translucent. The meal is extraordinary, and we spend a great amount of time talking about how good everything is. "Isn't this sort of the same thing as a 'wine bore'?" Kyoko asks. "Are we being a 'food bore'?" Scandalized by such a ridiculous suggestion, I assure her we are no such thing.
Night falls. I look out through the shoji into the central courtyard. There are two smaller teahouses, used as private dining rooms, the stone steps up to each of them ensnared in wisteria roots. It is a perfect evening. For many reasons, actually. Japanese is the unbicycle of languages: you never remember, and I had been fearing that my speech, unpracticed for over a decade, coupled with stereotypical Japanese reserve would confine Makino-san and myself to such conversational gambits as "Oh, look, beer!" and "Yes!" But I have remembered a great deal more than I thought. We talk about former co-workers, marriage and singlehood, aging parents, all of the things I might talk about with friends in New York.
This greater openness of feeling is true of almost all my encounters. The Bubble, with its influx of foreign business, has achieved what over a century's passage-since Japan first opened up to the West at the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868-and even a postwar occupation could not accomplish: Tokyoites seem almost completely inured to Westerners, thanks in part to the scores of foreigners I see speaking perfect, unhalting Japanese. By the same token, the use of egregiously bad English is also far less in evidence, although happily has not entirely died out, as evidenced by the T-shirt on sale in the Melrose Boutique for Men that reads, simply: "Blow jobs $10." At around 118 yen to the dollar, this would be one of the city's real bargains. Actually the city's real bargain is the once legendarily expensive Tokyo coffee. I keep reminding myself that it is we who have caught up with Japan, now that "Double Skinny Macchiato" has become global Esperanto for "Here's my savings, where's my breakfast?"
Here is the object lesson of room 201 of the Tokyo Station Hotel, my second place of lodging: the time that it takes to utter, in camp appreciation, "This room is like a set from a snuff film. It's faaabulous!" also turns out to be the maximum amount of time one really wants to stay in same. It is another matter entirely to have to sleep there for two nights. It is very high ceilinged and enormous, but room 201 is the kind of sad interior where gamblers down on their luck live out their last days, only to end up drunkenly falling against the sharp corner of the coffee table, scattering their pills across the nylon carpet, and slowly bleeding to death. Not a happy place. Although clean, the place is grimy with disrepair and shabbiness: overhead fluorescent lighting, chipped wood veneer, and antimacassars on the armchairs, worn shiny with use and old pomade. And what can one say about a room where everything is so meticulously and ostentatiously wrapped for "your sanitary protection"? That old witticism of the schoolyard "Whoever smelt it, dealt it" springs to mind.
My previous hotel certainly didn't feel the need to protest this much. Whereas at the Seiyo, in the dresser drawer, along with the stationery and room service menus, there was also, beautifully printed on vellum, a suggested jogging route around the Imperial Palace gardens, at the Tokyo Station Hotel I am provided with a long list of "Rules on Accommodation Utilization." I am told "not to give annoyance to others by making great noise or disgusting behaviors." I am forbidden from bringing onto the premises "things with loathsome smell" and, inexplicably, "materials in great quantity." But for the omission of "Don't Shoot the Piano Player," it is a code of conduct straight out of Dawson City. I am also proscribed from "hanging up such items at the windows which will spoil the outside view of this hotel." While it is true that the Tokyo Station Hotel from the front is a lovely red-brick-and-limestone building like the great railway hotels of old, should I choose to open the pebbled-glass windows of 201, which faces the back, I would be greeted with a view of the permanent dusk from the elevated track above, the hum of industrial air ducts below, and at eye level, not twenty feet away, a commuter platform, complete with salary man looking straight back at me. I have often wondered, when riding into cities late at night on the train, Who are the sad people behind those darkened windows that directly abut the tracks? Now, in some small measure, I know.
I couldn't feel sorrier for myself. Don't they know I'm fragile? After a scant four days of the betoweled lushness of the Seiyo, I have turned into the high-maintenance jerk of my own worst nightmares. Fleeing my room, I seek out the city's nocturnal diversions.
I eat supper at an outdoor yakitori restaurant, a stall with chairs and two tiny tables, underneath the highway overpass near Yuraku-cho station. The sidewalk and traffic are barely masked by the noren, the abbreviated curtains that hang down a foot or so. In the rain, right up against the traffic, both foot and vehicular, drinking my beer while I wait for my food, I am overcome with the urban romance of it all. How, I wonder, is it all that different from my high-ceilinged hotel room, disinfected for my comfort and protection, that sits right up against the railroad tracks, waiting for me?
Not ready to go back there just yet, I hop the train to Ebisu, Tokyo's youth Mecca ascendant. The holdup at the door to Milk, one of the city's most popular clubs, is not so management can verify ID, frisk for weapons, or confiscate drugs. It is due to the many umbrellas being checked by the young, young crowd. Sporting my natural hair color and not wearing white-framed Lina Wertmuller sunglasses makes me stand out almost as much as my being one of the only Westerners on line, not to mention being a good ten years older than everyone else. Upon entering, a nineteen-year-old girl in baby barrettes, a T-shirt worn over a sweater, and orange canvas clam diggers presses something small and round into our palms. Ah, I think, holding the disk-shaped freebie, good old condoms. I look down and see that we have been handed not rubbers, but rather six plastic bookmarks printed with the prim slogan "Yes, I do, but not with you."
Milk doesn't seem all that much different from most clubs I've been to. It is loud, dark, crowded, underserviced by toilets. A Japanese thrash band plays, the lead singer adorably shirtless and screaming. Young men boil around like piranhas in the mosh pit. I am no more inclined to join them now than I was a decade ago, but I can always use a good bookmark.
Returning late to room 201, I muster sufficient Japanese to say to the night clerk at the hotel, "My room is making me very sad. I would like to kill myself. May I have a different one tomorrow, facing the front, perhaps?" And so off to bed, feeling spoiled and venal. The room is quiet and dark, at least, the platform outside my window silent and closed for the night. I bless the fact that the city's mass transit stops just after twelve, with the exception of one night a year, December 31, when they run all night.
On New Year's Eve the already mythically crowded Tokyo subways are exponentially more so. During normal rush hour the tsukebe, Tokyo's storied subway frotteurs, can at least find enough space to get their grubby hands on the nether parts of some poor unsuspecting girl; on New Year's Eve you literally cannot move. You just hope you've gotten on the same car as enough people going to the same stop as you; otherwise you will have to wait until the river of humanity decides to disembark.
Early on January 1, 1987, my evening's celebration concluded, the dawn of a new year breaking, I stood on just such a train. It was a function of how blitzed I was from the night's revels, traveling from shrine to temple to club, drinking all the while, that I didn't experience a complete agoraphobic attack. As we approached my stop, I looked over to my right. There, not eight feet away, was a young woman, jammed up facing a man about a head taller than she. He began that unmistakable wet-mouthed, lip-smacking, compulsive swallowing that indicates the impending need to vomit. His upper lip shone with perspiration, and his eyes were closed. The woman had nowhere to go-indeed, there was nothing she would be able to do until the train reached the station, and that might not be in sufficient time. If the first thing you do on the first day augurs the spirit and tone of your new year, this woman was in for a very bad 1987. She began to cry.
In one of those vodka-pure moments of proof that laughter is often nothing more than anxious release-I, on the other hand, began to giggle uncontrollably. The joke was on me, of course, because I ended up having the shitty year.
The Hotel Alcyone, next stop on my ever-downward spiral, is scrupulously clean. Even the carpets in the elevator are changed daily, because like the panties from Bloomingdale's 1970s Forty Carrots heyday, they are printed with "Sunday, Monday," and so on. My room is undeniably monastic, however. Small and Spartan, and again, while clean, it seems academic if one can't actually distinguish between something that is dirty and something that merely looks dirty. But at under $100 a night near the Ginza, it is an affordable, well-located bargain, if not a tad gloomy. Sitting on my bed before I go out for my last evening in Tokyo, I experience the first earth tremor of the trip. As much a feeling as a noise, a deep, all-encompassing, almost electric rumbling. It lasts only a very few seconds, but I think, How perfect to buy the farm here at the Hotel Alcyone, flattened and crushed, this sprung mattress with its Hollofil polyester bedspread my funeral bier.
Later that evening I eat roasted eel in the top-floor restaurant of a department store in Shinjuku. The restaurant is famous for its eel. The traditional accompaniment to unagi is green sansho (mountain pepper) powder. I have been warned that taking too much will make my "tongue go to sleep." I take too much. It tastes of concentrated citrus peel with an intermittently forceful salty note and something green underneath, like hyssop. Sure enough, my lips start to buzz, my tongue and throat feel as if they are lined with Velcro. The sensory strangeness is amplified terrifyingly by the evening's second earth tremor, stronger than the first and eight seconds long. Try it right now: sit for eight seconds and imagine the very ground shifting, unstable, threatening immediate and lethal liquefaction. But the eel is really delicious.
Close to midnight I find myself in a near empty plaza underneath an enormous outdoor television screen. I stand, rapt, among five or six homeless men and a small crowd of young people, their telephones quiet for the moment, as we watch an extended Nescafe commercial: a thrilling montage of people of various ages, races, and genders falling in love in fields, farmhouses, cafes, churches. "Open up!" sings the song, urging us to embrace the world in all its romantic, universal, caffeinated glory.
Perhaps "Open up" really means the ground will continue its tremors, forming fissures that widen and swallow whole this extraordinary, illusory city. God knows I once felt the specter of obliteration here before, a destruction from which I thought I'd never recover, and the ground hadn't had to move an inch. For now, though, the only thing shaking is my two hundred-gram box of chocolate-covered almonds. I am becalmed by the sound that I have quite a few left.
I USED TO BANK HERE, BUT.
THAT WAS LONG, LONG AGO.
Hodgkin's disease, the illness that sent me packing from Tokyo at the age of twenty-two, is a form of lymphatic cancer, common among young men in their twenties. Hodgkin's is also highly curable. So highly curable, in fact, that I like to refer to it as the dilettante cancer.
An old Canadian joke bears telling here: A boss says to an underling, "I'm off to Sault Sainte Marie for the weekend."
"Sault Sainte Marie?" asks the employee, incredulous. "But, boss, there are only whores and hockey players in Sault Sainte Marie."
"My wife is from Sault Sainte Marie."
"Oh. (beat) What position does she play?"
When I joke about Hodgkin's being the cancer for boys who do things in half measures, it is invariably to someone whose husband or brother or son has just died from Hodgkin's. I don't mean to denigrate other survivors or less fortunate nonsurvivors. My inappropriate wisecrack only serves to prove a point about myself. On some level, despite the fact that I received both radiation and chemotherapy, I cannot escape the feeling that I was, at best, a cancer tourist, that my survival means I dabbled. Kinda been there, sorta done that. It has only recently occurred to me that perhaps I might stop glibly insisting that the cancer wasn't real and the doctors popped me into an Easy-Bake Oven, where a forty-watt light bulb halted the metastasis in its tracks.
What remains, almost fourteen years after the fact? Four small tattoos, subcutaneous black dots, like compass points on my torso; near total numbness in the very tips of my fingers, as well as a palm-size area on my right inner thigh also without feeling; some dry mouth; and, most lastingly, three straws of my prechemotherapized sperm, in cold storage, somewhere in Toronto. Like millions of tiny Walt Disneys, they wait, frozen, until the day I will return and have them conjoined with some willing ovum and thereby fulfill their zygotic destiny, growing into children who will eventually go on to break my heart and not talk to me.
I'm not entirely sure I even want children of my own, although I'd like to keep my options open. Being of a certain class and living in Manhattan, I have been led to believe that my life is nothing but an embarrassment of options. Parenthood frequently comes late around these parts. Go to any playground on the Upper West Side, and you will find that most of the grown-ups are fortyish, and among the children there is an overrepresentation of fertility treatment enhanced sets of twins and adopted Chinese girls. Once, I watched as a twenty-eight-year-old mother arrived at the jungle gym with her toddler. Twenty-eight might even be considered late for a new mother elsewhere in these United States, but there she looked like some Appalachian child bride, ridiculously young for the burden of parenthood. Everybody was casting concerned glances her way, as if to ask, "Who is the brute who did this to you?"
So it's more than a simple desire for kids-who can be fairly boring, truth be told. I just want to know where the sperm is. Easier said than done, as it turns out, because since that time, I have moved, my parents have moved, the sperm bank has moved, and the cancer hospital has moved. The traces have been thoroughly kicked over, which suits me fine. I'm not by nature terribly sentimental. I'm not a photo taker, I have no scrapbooks, I have attempted to never look back, until now.
Along with my scar, my tattoos, and my numbness, these straws of sperm are the only things I have left from that time in my life, a period of eighteen months that I have generally tried to not think about. At the age of thirty-five I'm starting to feel that it's bad juju to continue to ignore it. So I am off to find the straws, just in time for their microscopic bar mitzvahs.
My decision to write about my quest is as much about providing myself with a welcome screen of white noise as it is about any need for documentation. My clutching a notebook while searching for the perfect one-liner will be a comfortable distraction from what might result in my feeling something, which is never my first choice.
I was treated at PMH: the Princess Margaret Hospital, the main cancer facility in Toronto. If you were a child at any time from the 1930s through the 1950s, living anywhere in the British empire, chances are you were inundated with images of the two young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. Elizabeth would eventually become queen, of course, but Margaret was always considered to be somewhat prettier, and simply by virtue of her thwarted ascendancy to the throne, she was less duty-bound and consequently more fun. Kicky, almost. As she grew up and had her serial doomed romances, Margaret gave the Commonwealth public a taste of the kind of low-rent scandal we could later come to expect from the house of Windsor. It's not as if she was a slattern or an embarrassment. Calling it the Princess Margaret Hospital is not like naming it the Billy Carter. It's more affectionate than that, more glamorous: the Tricia Nixon might be more apt.
The harvesting of sperm before chemotherapy is a fairly standard practice. Chemo makes you sterile. They suggest it to most male patients of a certain age. It is certainly the most important sperm sample I have ever given, but it is not the first. In 1982, as a freshman, I sold it once. Every bulletin board in my dormitory on 114th Street and Amsterdam Avenue had the following flyer: "College Men! Make Money Now!" It was an advertisement for a midtown sperm bank. We would be paid close to fifty dollars to do, under somewhat more controlled circumstances, the very thing that was occupying a great deal of our waking lives anyway. The lab was very interested in our seed: the Sperm of the Ivy League. There's something so obscenely vital, so borderline eugenic, about that image, imbued with a potency and a Riefenstahlian vision of the future. It was a stereotype much greater than the actual sum of its parts, I can assure you, given some of the knock-kneed Hebrews I went to school with, myself included. The lab wanted a fine-boned lacrosse player with a thatch of blond hair and a trust fund. What they got were pigeon-chested wiseacres who hardly belonged in that febrile pantheon of porn archetypes: the Cop Who Might Be Convinced Not to Write a Ticket; the Frustrated Repairman in Need of a Hand; the Pizza Boy Deserving of a Tip Yet Strangely Enough Not Carrying Any Change; and me for that brief afternoon in that small room with an acoustic tile ceiling, under fluorescent lights: the Strapping College Boy in the Examination Room (Hey, Coach, I think I pulled a muscle in my groin).
I remember nothing from that day. I cannot tell you if there were dirty magazines, although I suspect there were. I cannot remember being embarrassed, although I'm sure I was, and I cannot remember what I was paid, although forty dollars cash rings a bell. The conflation of climax and commerce cannot have failed to escape my notice. At age seventeen, it felt like sexual transgression. I suppose it still does, since until this story I have never told anyone about it.
Hanging on the wall on the way to the radiation room in the old hospital was a photograph of Princess Margaret's hand, taken on the occasion of the inauguration of the building. It was actually an X-ray photograph, so Her Highness's jewelry glows white against the bones and the vaporous gray of her invisible flesh. I look at it every time I go for treatment.
The radiation room itself is a lead-lined interior chamber of the hospital. Two red laser beams cross over the exact center of the table where the patients lie. Using the cross of four small black tattoos on my torso, the technicians line me up and ready me for the thousands of rads of radiation.
The machine is bulbous, huge, and a dull hospital green. A death ray straight out of fifties sci fi. I lie down and look up. Above my head, directly at eye level, someone has drawn a hastily rendered happy face in red marker. Underneath that is written the message "Give Us a Smile!" As with Rita Hayworth's picture that graced the side of the atom bomb they dropped on Bikini atoll, there's something so pathetic, so vastly outmatched, about this little happy face; a garnish on annihilation. Still, I never fail to smile. Even when I reach the point in the treatments when most of my hair has fallen out and my throat has been burned to such an extent that I cannot swallow, I smile.
They haven't stopped at the happy face, either. Every time the lead door closes, latching with a booming clank, so too begins the music. The same song every time. The same place in the same song every time: the full horn section buildup to the chorus of the song "You're Just Too Good to Be True." The plutonium drops down into the central cone, a warm wind starts to blow on my chest, indicating that I'm now getting the equivalent of a lifetime's worth of the recommended dose of gamma radiation. And I smile.
It's not all that hard, after all, to locate the missing sperm lab. A few phone calls and I find that it has been moved, lock, stock, and barrel, to another, more centrally located hospital. When I finally call them up directly to see if they still have my straws, they know all too well who I am. Like cops who spend a lifetime chasing a fugitive who, tired of years of running, gives up and turns himself in, the folks at the sperm bank taste the victory of finally nabbing a long-sought quarry; they've been waiting for me. Or, more precisely, for my money. There are apparently years of storage fees outstanding. I owe close to a thousand dollars. My account was years in arrears and referred to collection. What would have happened if I had never checked up on this? Would I one day be walking past some pawnshop in Toronto and there in the window, next to the watches, the saxophone, and the old Canadian Legion of Honor war medallions, see three straws of my semen, thawing out in a dusty shaft of sunlight?
The folks at the lab view me with suspicion, but not because I am a Deadbeat Dad. What the folks at the lab are (rightfully) disquieted by is my need to frame my resurfacing as a story. They don't really understand why I want to tell it. They see my return and even the accrual of the debt-something that I have taken full responsibility for-as an indictment of them. "But we sent you bills!" the nursing manager says defensively when I am no more than thirty seconds into introducing myself on the phone. She's absolutely right, and I don't deny it. I vaguely recall receiving a bill in my old apartment and ignoring it. That was at a time in my life when I didn't want to know or remember anything about that year. If anyone's to blame for the trail having gone cold, I am, and I fully stipulate to this charge.
But my mea culpa is not enough to penetrate the chilly officiousness of the lab. They don't seem to want to talk to me. They are not interested in providing me with fodder for what they clearly see as a very fishy expedition. I try to ingratiate myself. In appealing to their sympathetic natures, I am reduced to using icky tricks, preambling each phone call by describing myself as having been "a cancer patient," talking about my need for "closure," and so forth. All of which seems a little melodramatic to me and leaves them almost completely unmoved anyway. Or, if I'm not being treacly, I'm playing the ridiculous schlemiel, stammering and apologizing: Lucy Ricardo losing Little Ricky while out shopping. It all leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I am finally thrust into that long-sought movie scenario "Things were fine in this town before that writer showed up!" and I'm not sure I like it. They smell a rat, and that rat is me. What begin as frosty but cordial relations between the nursing manager and myself devolve steadily. By the time I fly to Toronto, she refuses to speak with me outright. I am Scrooge revisiting Christmas past, walking through a room, trying to right a wrong, and being completely unheard and unable to physically materialize. I will be able to pay the balance of storage fees, but I will not be able to see the facility, tour the vault or wherever it is they keep the straws, or ask her my many medical questions. My audience with the sperm of the Ivy League is denied.
I am now referred to a woman who works in the corporate communications department of the hospital that houses the sperm bank. She is to be my liaison. "Your project sounds really innaresting?" the PR woman tells me. "But I'm sorry we can't help you with it. If I can be of any further assistance, please don't hesitate to call me."
I was once employed in corporate communications. As a framer of official meaning for someone else's mouth, I often used that very phrase in the name of my superiors: "If I can be of any further assistance, please don't hesitate to call me." But I never had the temerity to use it when I hadn't actually been of some assistance to begin with.
I recall the last time I saw these fugitive children of mine. It was in the summer of 1987. By that time my illness was fairly advanced, I was some thirty-five pounds underweight: an old man at the age of twenty-three. Virtually the last thing on my mind was onanism. I had been told if I could get the sample downtown to the lab within forty-five minutes, I could do the "harvest" at home. To this end, the lab technician at the sperm bank had given me some sterile containers. In the abstract, this sounded far more comfortable, producing my sample in the privacy of my childhood bedroom.
But privacy isn't really the name of the game when your mother has to drive you to the hospital. I have never been licensed by a sitting government to drive a car, and I am far too weak to take public transport. By happy coincidence, my mother's office is two blocks away from the hospital. It is a precisely timed operation. After breakfast she says to me euphemistically, "I'm going to start the car. Why don't you go upstairs and get ready?"-emphasis and winking italics my own. If this freaks her out, she doesn't let on. She's a physician herself, so it might just seem par for the course to tell your youngest child to go upstairs and salute the archbishop and then join you in the car.
My deed done, not my finest effort after what has arguably been half a lifetime of practice, I put on my coat and grab the jar. It is made of clear plastic. In college, my friend's parents came to New York for a psychoanalysts' convention. Getting onto a hotel elevator, crowded with their colleagues, my friend turned to his mother and stage-whispered, "Jocasta, I want you." But it is just me and my mother in the car. There are no Freudians to entertain with the discomfort of the Oedipal situation. Even in my weakened state, I'm certainly not going to ride next to my mother with a transparent vial of spooge in my lap. I look around the kitchen for a suitable bag and find the perfect one. It is four by six, of white paper. It has clearly been in the kitchen since I was very young, because when I turn it over I see that it's printed with the image of an orange pumpkin and a black cat and, in dripping, blood-soaked calligraphy, the words Trick or Treat.
I fly up to Toronto on a gray day in January of the new century, visiting, for the first time, the new Princess Margaret facility. It is beautiful, occupying an old art deco insurance building. It is imposing and elegant and graced in the center with a soaring six-story atrium. It is nothing like the old hospital where I was treated. I feel a little jealous as I walk in. There is even a multifaith chapel, which I don't recall from the old place. Outside of it, on a white board, someone on staff has written: "Just a thought:" and then a quote: "Joy is not in things, it is in us." It is attributed to one Robert Wagner, whose dates are 1813 to 1883. Presumably this is a different Robert Wagner from the wattle-concealing, turtleneck-wearing star of The Towering Inferno and Hart to Hart. So different a Robert Wagner, in fact, that when I try to look him up in my Bartlett's Quotations, he is not listed. Who is listed there, with exactly the same dates, however, is Richard Wagner, he of the proto-Nazi operas of heroic ubermenschen. This puts a decidedly different spin on this little homily. And, funnily enough, Bartlett's doesn't list this lovely caveat against materialism among the composer's notable quotes. But it's a lot more suitable for an oncology chapel, after all, than "To be German means to carry on a matter for its own sake," don't you think?
This new place is completely devoid of anything I might recall. Not a single doctor who treated me still works here. All along the front hallway are framed pictures of hospital directors past, my oncologist among them. Like most official portraits in oils, it misses something essential about the person. Now he just looks benignly Olympian and creamy. In the entrance is an official royal portrait of Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret. Taken recently-in 1998, according to the frame-she wears a gown of mushroom-colored satin, adorned with jeweled medals. And of course, being a real princess, she wears a crown. But the truly stunning feature, the one that announces to the world that we should not for an instant confuse her with her dowdy older sister, is Margaret's hair, a startling shade of brown-black. The unrelieved shock of too-youthful darkness over her not unattractive face of a certain age has turned her otherwise friendly smile into a toothy leer, that last tenuous stage of propriety before full-blown laughter at a dirty joke. It makes her look what used to be called "fast." Behold another porn archetype: the Randy Divorcee, lingering at her front door, swirling the ice cubes in her midday highball, saying to the strapping gardener, "You must be tired and sweaty after all that yardwork. C'mon in and cool off in the air-conditioning."
As for the fondly remembered X-ray photograph of her hand, it is nowhere to be seen. I ask the volunteer at the desk if they brought it here from the old facility.
"It was on the way to radiation," I say.
"I was also a radiation patient," she replies. "I don't remember it." She is apologetic. I then ask her if she remembers the music during treatment. She doesn't dismiss my recollection, but she's not sure herself, it was so long ago. All memory is porous. Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too. But of these two details-that X-ray photograph, that music-I am sure.
I think.
Since no one official or medical will talk to me at the sperm bank and I don't know anyone anymore at the cancer hospital, I spend the better part of two days hanging around the atrium. No one pays me any mind. When I look up I can see that the railings on the floors above are shielded with Plexiglas about eight feet high, well over the head of any potentially suicidal patient. Not long prior to my trip, I had a drink in a hotel with a huge atrium that goes up at least thirty stories. I asked the waitress if people ever pitched themselves over the sides in what would be a very public and punishing death, landing with a viscous splat at the patent-leather Mary Janed feet of a little girl on her way to her first Broadway show. The waitress seemed so bored, so in hate with her job, that when she answered my question with, "Yeah, thirteen people so far," there was an almost wistful tone in her voice, as though a falling body might just break up the monotony of her day.
Paradoxically, here at the cancer hospital things are decidedly cheerier. I walk back and forth, I listen to an extremely good jazz quartet playing the lunchtime concert. All hospitals are built around waiting. I don't stand out. In my year and a half of treatment at Princess Margaret, eighteen months of waiting, I never once saw anything that could have remotely been described as attitude. Not one patient, patient's guardian, partner, or parent ever got pissy that I could see. And I'll go out on a limb here and say that in the world of cancer it's not inconceivable that someone might have a right to feel like being at least a little pissy.
It might speak to that stereotypical Canadian reserve, but I choose to see it a little more heroically and politically. When medicine is socialized, when you have true universal health care, when everyone's treatment is the same regardless of socioeconomic station, those strong-arming attitudes of entitlement just aren't part of the vocabulary. This atrium, this lovely space in a hospital with a world-class reputation, is actually the equivalent of a state hospital. That American sense that someone somewhere else is getting what you're not, and the attendant demands that go along with that perceived injustice, well, it's just not in the equation here.
I've recently been told there is a chance that so many years after cure, my fertility might have rebounded. I decide to get tested back in New York, if only to stop having to pay the storage fees on my old sample. My friend Scott, who, for other reasons, was getting tested around that time, told me stories about the comfort and sheer titillation of the lab he went to: armchairs, privacy, pornography of every stripe; a masturbatorium, he called it. Maybe it's an insurance thing, because at the Upper East Side lab I go to, I am given a plastic vial, a Zip-loc bag imprinted with the international symbol for biohazard, that vaguely sinister trillium, and pointed to the bathroom. It is directly off the reception area.
Have you ever been a temp, or in your first week in a new job, and right outside your cubicle your new office-mates hold a birthday party for one of their number? Do you remember how alienating and strange and embarrassing and generally impeding of your performance that birthday party was? I am the only patient in the lab that morning and the only man in the place. Through the door I can hear the technicians talking about their weekends, the scratch of the receptionist's ballpoint as she fills out a magazine quiz, the crisp turning of a glossy page. This feels very public. To add to my difficulties, the bathroom is a standard-issue interior with very little to jog the mind. I peek out through the slats of the metal blinds on the window; maybe I can find a construction site or something to focus on. Nothing doing.
In the end, species will out, and I manage. Sheepishly I leave my sample at the front counter and leave. Why must everything be clear plastic?
The average fertile thirty-five-year-old man has many million sperm, a few million of which are motile enough to knock someone up. When I get my results, I find that I have ten. Not ten million: ten. Three are dead in the water, and the other seven are technically motile but given a grade very close to dead. I'm shooting blanks, as they say.
"Hey, at least you're shootin' 'em," says my doctor.
I come up with the idea of naming them. For all the male-of-the-species reproductive good they'll do me, I consider calling them all Janet. Then I settle on Radcliffe, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Vassar.
Among my destinations on my trip up to Toronto is the site of the old hospital. I'm told it's being used now as a homeless shelter. It was in one of Toronto's few rubby-dub neighborhoods. There were a lot of hookers and also a Christian television ministry back when I was a patient.
The area has clearly been cleaned up, because I can't see any hookers or visibly Christian folks, either. And the purported homeless people going into the old Princess Margaret all look like backpacking northern Europeans. Perhaps it's a hostel. I stand in the circular driveway, the place where the smoking patients used to congregate with their IV stands and enjoy their last fuck-it-all-to-hell cigarettes. I think of that song "This Used to Be My Playground."
I'm trying to actually feel something about the whole thing as I stand there, but I'm not really coming up with anything. The building is possibly one of the more important structures in my life. I feel I should well up with some sort of nostalgic yearning, mourning my youth, anything. But it's just not happening, which is very strange. Or not.
Once, on my way home from radiation, a man came running out of the Knights of Columbus chapter near the hospital. Another man came running after him and, like a cartoon panel come to life, the man giving chase actually yelled, "Stop, thief!" I remember thinking to myself, Well, that's very cliche. I was close to the robber. I could have stuck my foot out and tripped him, perhaps. But I didn't. He made it across the street, dodging traffic, and was out of sight in a moment. The man from the Knights of Columbus stood frustrated on the sidewalk as the cars rushed by. He turned and gave me a dirty look for my inaction. I wanted to say something. I wanted to explain how weak and tired and sick I was at that point. But more than that, how I had essentially let go of any sense of agency. I could lie on a table, they could shoot me full of gamma rays, I would eat what was put in front of me, the hair could fall from my head, my throat could be burned. But I was not involved; I was a stranger here. That he could even see me standing there seemed vaguely surprising.