Omodeto, Kenni-san!!

Inner Vision

“Sumo! Sumo!” I say excitedly. Everyone looks at me, the way they do when I break out in, to them, inexplicable exclamations.

What?

“Sumo!”

I point across the street, to the door of the Ginza Bellevue Hotel where a restrained commotion is heralding the arrival of a sumo wrestler.

A current passes through the bar and everyone turns to look. We are less than twenty feet away, sitting in the door of the bar, and we are pointing and saying loudly, “Sumo! Oh! Sumo! Sumo!” We stare unabashedly at the sumo wrestler.

He takes not the slightest notice of us.

The people in his group are in very formal clothes, tuxedos and long dresses. He is also in a tuxedo. His companions are very formal in their treatment of him and bow very deeply to him. I think as I watch that it is like seeing a grizzly bear moving through the Ginza. He moves with a stateliness that belies some inner vision, a vision that I respect despite my own incomprehension of its terms and implications.

What I mean is: The way he moves feels right. It is the way one should move if one has this particular position in the universe, this particular relationship to time and space. He moves so as to avoid waking himself and others from the dream that is this waking life. It is nearly perfect.

He is unhurried, absolutely unconcerned with the excitement that surrounds him. I wonder if he and his companions are celebrating the retirement ceremonies that closed the sumo aibasho today. That must be it. He disappears into the hotel and we turn back to our drinks and talk about how sumo smell wonderful. (“Smells good desho?” Ben says to Aki, who nods in gleeful agreement.) When she speaks of him, Chie uses the terms “sumo-san” and “o-sumo-san,” both honorifics. Her respect is obvious and unconscious.

Seitetsu is Japanese--Well, Actually, Most Of Us Are

Seitetsu is strange and wonderful. He always wears a driving cap and he speaks English very poorly and he always looks like he’s either drunk or hungover because he’s always either drunk or hungover. He runs a bar in Ginza and I don’t know if it’s his bar or a family bar, but the bar is very small and its black interior is very dark and there are strange things hung on the walls, like a painting of a woman’s backside done partly in 3D.

Seitetsu has baked a cake for Ken’s birthday, a banana cake. With our drinks he brings us snacks, pappadum and vegetables and shrimp and chocolates and corn nuts and the extra bananas from the cake. When me miss the last train, he invites us to stay in his bar until first train. He gives us each a free drink after we have paid very, very little for the drinks we have had. He won’t accept my offer to buy him breakfast in the morning. Instead, he slips out and buys himself onigiri and vegetables from the 24-hour convenience store I have just returned from.

We choose to sit in the front door of the bar and two men come in, then two more men. (One of the students has said of a restaurant, “If Japanese see Americans eating or drinking there, they will come.”) One of the pairs of men eyes us--us being our little bilingual group--interestedly. They don’t say anything to us, but later, I hear them speaking English to one another. To my American sensibilities, there is no reason for them to be speaking English, but they do.

We drink. And drink. And drink. The cake arrives and we sing happy birthday and Ken blows out the candles and we toast and eat the cake and everyone exclaims it to be “umai!” and “oishi!” and Seth leaves because he has a big date the next day. We stay and we miss our last train so we drink. And drink. And drink.

Ken is twenty-six and he wants everyone together in a big group. Ken is twenty-six and he talks about his girlfriend who is twenty-nine, about how big her breasts are. Ken is twenty-six and he tells us about the English lessons he got at the Kaisha in Ikebukuro, repeating one of the questions they taught him (“How many carpets did you lick?”). Ken dances around the bar and drums on Akiko and Yuko and he sings and acts like the hyped on sugar twenty-six-year-old twelve-year-old that he is.

Yuko is stupid about drinking and throws up everything. After she throws up, she dances around the bar and I don’t want to think disgustedly of her being sixteen in her head, so instead I think sympathetically of her being sixteen in her head. Later, as we are standing on the balcony of the Kaisha building watching the sunrise over the Ginza, she says to me of another teacher, “I want him to notice me and I keep doing things to get him to notice me but he doesn’t notice me and I don’t know what to do.” It’s high school all over again and she is ten years out of high school and I don’t know what to tell her. Instead, I try to see her life and her dilemmas with sympathy and to love her for who and what she is.

Chie is sad and glad because she will soon be transferred to a Kaisha in Ikebukuro and she does and doesn’t want to go. Chie wants to find out what her future holds and she is unafraid and moves through the necessary sadness that marks letting go of the past and embracing the future. She does this with a beautiful grace and humor that I admire.

At some point, the night crosses over from fun to endurance and another Yuko and I go to Lawsons for something to eat. Then Yuko (the first) decides she wants to go, so I go with her. We return to the bar and Ken, who has been chatting with Chie and Akiko, decides he wants to go do karaoke. We agree and wait for Akiko, who has gone to Lawson’s for a toothbrush, to return.

Bidding Seitetsu goodnight and thanking him profusely, we head over the karaoke chain near The Kaisha.

Because I am the first to turn the corner onto Sotobori Dori (the street in Ginza that The Kaisha is on), and because I am the most sober, I am the first to notice the Mercedes sitting on the sidewalk. They don’t park on the sidewalk here. And if they did, you can be sure they wouldn’t park at that angle and the car’s front end certainly wouldn’t be smashed to hell.

Just to shorthand the car accident, it’s like this: The Japanese are very concerned with everyday safety and consequently accidents are rare, but when they happen there is a kind of sense of...having to pretend as though they hadn’t happened. As far as the car accident goes the driver and others had already been ferreted off and the traffic at the intersection was already being directed by about seven traffic cops. The smashed up car however, was itself fair game. We wandered right up to it and I took several pictures. There was no one to warn us to stay away, not one officer hindered our inspection of the car no matter how close we got. After we had satisfied our curiosity, we crossed the street, nodded to the officers who were standing in the doorway of the koban, and we made our way to the karaoke chain that sits next door to The Kaisha.

At the karaoke place, we were politely informed that they were closing in twenty minutes and we would, to their great regret, not be doing any karaoke tonight. Ken was disappointed, but then he remembered that he and Jun have their guitars stored at The Kaisha next door, so we all trooped back up to the school. Ben and Ken pulled out the guitars (an acoustic and an electric bass with an amp) and they sang for a while. I wandered around and used my toothbruth and drank some coffee and ate some cake, now stale, that Masashi brought as omiyage from Hokkaido maybe...Yuko pulled out some work and I decided then that it was time to go home.

Leaving The Kaisha, I wandered through a strangely deserted Ginza station. I slid through the ticket gate and lingered, stamping my train diary with the train station stamp that sits on a small table near the steps that lead down to the subway platform. As I examined the imprint, I heard the train coming and, not wanting to wait the three minutes for the next train, I ran down the stairs and lept onto the train just as the conductor blew his whistle. The doors closed behind me and it wasn’t until then that I saw that I was facing a car full of tourists, big white folks, taking each others pictures on the subway. If I hadn’t been so tired, so obviously tired from an all-nighter with cocktails, I would have laughed. It was the other side of the looking glass that, these bright, shiny, happy big white folks and me. I once looked that way I think. But this morning, I was wiped out, my hair held back by a pen I found on the desk in The Kaisha, my makeup absolutely gone, dressed in jeans and boots and a shirt that looked like, well, like I spent the night in it.

Deciding to spare the other passengers the added annoyance of yet another foreigner, I made my way to the next car, which was filled with a mixture of businessmen on their way to work from home and businessmen on their way home from drinking and businessmen on their way to work from drinking. Oh, a few club kids were riding the rails that day, too. And me,
wiped out.

I slept on the train home.