The Speed Of Dreams

I work about ten hours a day and I commute nearly two hours and I socialize sometimes until last train and sometimes past last train and I go to the gym and I am sometimes away from home for twelve or fourteen hours and sometimes away from home for twenty or more hours at a stretch. That is a long time to be away from home with little respite in a city that moves at the pace that this city moves. It was difficult at first to get used to this and when I first got here, on my days off I could only take Tokyo is bites that were four or five hours big and then I would have to come home and sleep and sleep. But now I am used to being overwhelmed, used to the pace, used, too, to the exhaustion and to little respite. Still, I am sometimes so exhausted that Tokyo moves past me like a dream, only some of it marking my psyche. These days a lot of it moves by so quickly that I don’t even have time to turn my head and note it. But here are some things I have noted:

In Ben’s Aussie bar in Shinjuku last night, I was talking with one of the students about the films of David Lynch. The Japanese pronunciation of “Mulholland Drive,” runs something like “Moo-how-ran-do Du-drai-bu,” and so at first I don’t understand. Finally I do. The conversation progresses and he asks why I came to Japan. The students have begun to ask questions (precipitated by Ben’s leaving) about how I feel about Japan, about living here. I turn the question around if I know they have lived abroad. “How did you enjoy living abroad?” I ask. They enjoyed it to a one, but they also admit that they felt lonely, isolated, sometimes frustrated by the experience. So.

David comes with his bags full of omiyage from home. He has packed new clothes for me in the next larger size. I can still fit into the smaller size, but that is a rapidly changing fact as I am growing fat in the land of fish and rice because I drink to socialize as the Japanese are wont to do and I get home too late and too tired to cook so most nights I eat meals I buy in convenience stores. (The students are shocked by this and tell me how unhealthy it is.) David has also packed a number of things that he’s collected for my altar. He has brought gifts from the animals that I know and love: A feather from George the peacock’s tail and half of Alberdine’s extracted teeth, a lock of Cooper’s hair in a barrette and a bit of Lewie’s frisbee. He has brought reminders of my life as an artist: A small clay figure from Jaime and a magnet from Stuart and one of my pieces with Matthew’s face and a bowl of his own. He has brought a microscope lens from Kelly, a reminder that the unexamined life is not worth living. And he has brought something else: I unwrap a bit of paper and there are three pieces from my grandmother’s jewelry box. One is a stylized crucifix on a metal chain. Two other pieces are tiny locks, locked, and their keys. I use the keys to open the locks and as I do, I feel my heart snap very quietly into pieces and the pieces fall onto the floor and I pick them up hold them all in my hands and I cry.

We are in Kamakura, David and I, in the Hase Shrine. Part of the shrine is a cave with figures lining the walls. The first part of the cave is such that one can stand upright. The cave is lit by a few dim electrical lights and many, many flickering candles. The room is close and ends in a passage through which one must crouch to enter. Even the tiny Japanese women coming through have to bend at the waist to get through what I assume is only a passage. In fact, the passage leads to another room in which the ceiling is only a few inches taller. I crouch in the tiny circular room, fascinated by the walls. They are rough and damp and crumble away easily as I brush them with my fingers. I run my hands along the wall where I think countless others have done the same. David is standing near the single dim electrical light in the room and he points out a grainy green section of the wall that he says is oxidized copper. The rest of the room is lit only by flickering candlelight and I think about the walls colored softly green in the darkness. I think the room must taste like old pennies, and to test this hypothesis, I put my face close to the part of the cave that curves over my head and I put my tongue against the wall. It tastes like wet stucco a bit and, yes, a bit like old pennies.

One of the Japanese teachers takes a liking to David and offers to accompany him to Hachioji to see Ben’s band play. They meet in the afternoon and Dave meets the teacher’s girlfriend (whom I have, in six months of working with him, never met) and then the teacher takes Dave to play pachinko. Later, the teacher arranges a dinner for Dave in an Okinawan restaurant in Ginza.

The handsome businessman sits next to me, his knee pressed against mine under the table. He talks about his wife and children, about the shock of finding out four years ago that his wife was pregnant. They were both into their forties and their other children in their teens when they had their latest baby. “I was surprised,” he says. At the end of the night, he finds a way to pet me: He is explaining about aircraft wings and how the wing covering is sometimes, in the English language manuals that he has to be familiar with, called “skin.” He says, “I understand ‘skin,’” and reaches out and runs his fingertips over the bare skin of my arm. He says, “But they mean something else.”

With the David Lynch student, I also talk about his visit to Pearl Harbor, about Hiroshima. He doesn’t have the English to say what he wants to say about the subject, and I don’t have the Japanese. I know that he is more uncomfortable by the subject than I am.

Two and a half years ago the Ex-student and his classmates sailed the Nippon-maru around Japan, learning the ports as they went. Docked, the ship is a museum, and we have paid to board it. The ex-student makes me laugh by picking up things that are on exhibit and showing me how they work. The other museum-goers don’t quite know what to make of his picking up the displayed coconut-husk brushes and showing me how he had to scrub the deck. In another part of the ship, he uncoils a rope and then shows me how to coil it back up. We move on and he unhooks a harness and straps himself into it. One of the passersby goggles, perhaps wondering if he should say something. The Ex-Student pays no attention. Instead, he points up at the ship’s mast and the ropes that run to and from it’s apex. You can’t use the harness until you reach there, he says, pointing at a place that seems dizzyingly far above our heads. I ask him about the scariest thing he experienced on the ship. He tells me that ships normally avoid rain at sea if they can because the wind is unpredictable in a rainstorm and the ship can’t easily be navigated in such wind. Once, he says, they couldn’t avoid a storm and in the midst of it, he had to climb the mast to let down the sails. We wore raincoats that caught the wind, he says. We were barefoot and the ropes were slippery in the rain. He points up at the uppermost sails. I had to climb to there, he says. He will spend the next ten years at sea, learning the ins and outs of the ships that are the lifeblood of his family’s business. I ask him later if he likes boats. No, he says. I don’t.

The students are fascinated by the fact that David and I were once married and that we remain friends despite being divorced. One student says, “It’s because you have pure hearts.” I laugh at that though I probably shouldn’t. Pure hearts are still taken seriously in this country, where the word “naive” describes a desirable state. I teach a class in requesting information and one part of the textbook explains about asking and answering personal questions. I suggest that we make a list of things that are too personal to ask about. I make a column for Japan and for the US: Asking about salary and other money matters can be too personal. Age can be too personal in both. Sex is too personal in both. Marriage is too personal to ask about in Japan. I pause. Then I write “OK” in the US column. “It is okay to ask about marriage in the US,” I tell the students. They are surprised. “It’s okay to ask if someone is married?” one of them asks. I say yes. They don’t believe me. Here, I’ve embarrassed students by asking this question. The men looked trapped when they tell me something and I ask, “What does your wife think of that?” Later, as we are drinking up at Kachi-kachi, they verify the fact that it’s okay to ask if someone is married with David. He explains that, yes, it is okay to ask someone in the US if they are married. He goes on to explain that most people who are married wear wedding rings to show that they are married. Wedding rings are rare in Japan.

Someone in my apartment building has tossed out a full set of encyclopedias and other books. I dig through the pile and choose a couple of volumes for collage material. I find another small hardback book that sort of looks like a kanji dictionary but isn’t quite. I carry the books upstairs and look through the smaller book. It takes me a long while to examine it and figure out that it is a kind of dictionary for the stylized kanji used in calligraphy. I set it on my kotats’ (my heated table). Weeks later, Dave picks it up, leafs through it for less than a minute and says, “Oh, a calligraphy dictionary.”

“Lead me to the station,” I say to David on his second day here. It is easy for him to rely on me in this neighborhood, Higashi-Mukojima, but tomorrow he will be on his own. If he wants to find his way back, he’ll have to do it on his own. He walks past the big red lantern where he’s supposed to turn and I wait half a block before I ask him where he’s going. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. I say, “C’mon, April figured this out on the first try!” He laughs and says that she must have a better sense of direction than him. I too have a very poor sense of direction and so I have tried to begin to learn Tokyo by heart.

On the day of my grandmother’s rosary, I go to Odaiba and then out drinking with the Ex-Student and we miss the last train from Ginza. You can just stay in Shimbash’ at my place, he says. I will make you dinner. I agree. No one knows that my grandmother has died and I want company. His apartment is in a swank part of Tokyo and its about five times the size of mine though he shares it with his brother who is a college student but who doesn’t come home most nights. We drink and make nabe and we talk about his experience as a sailor and about my experience as a teacher and we eat dinner and then I decide to get really drunk and I do. Completely smashed, I ask if I can step out on the balcony. He says it’s strange. I ask why and he says, “You’ll see.” I step out on the balcony and I look over the railing and see that the apartment overlooks the back of a temple, the balcony hangs over a graveyard. I so drunk that I laugh. I tell the Ex-student that I am going to spit on those graves and I start to lean over the railing. This is not funny to him and he pulls me inside. I break down and cry and he tilts his head in wonder and that makes me laugh and though he is confused, he takes it as I might take it. He tries to learn from it, I mean. Later, he tells me that when he met me, even though I was smiling, he could tell that I was not happy. You were just smiling, he says. This was weeks before my grandmother died, so it wasn’t that pinprick of sadness that he was picking up on. I say, “How is it you can see my heart?” I mean that it’s hidden, hidden so that even the Japanese--who are aware of such things to a discomfiting degree--that I come into contact with are confused by my lack of affect. He replies, “It’s not hard to miss.”

Dave and I are drinking in a Spanish bar in Ginza with two students. The table places another order: Saori has a lemon sour and Ai an oolong cha. Dave orders a yuzu sour and I have a gin-tonic. The students with whom we are drinking are both studying architecture and as they talk with Dave, I look past them at the big screen TV near the door. Such is the nature of Tokyo to seem to have such a random mix of culture that I don’t even find it unusual that Tom & Jerry are chasing each other around cartoon corners and smashing each other with cast iron skillets. We drink mixed drinks made of Chinese liquor and watch American cartoons in a Spanish bar with Japanese students. We talk about Frank Lloyd Wright. When we leave the bar, I ask one of the students how she’ll get home. She says she has to take a JR train from Yurakucho station. I say jokingly, “Do you know where the station is?” She answers seriously, “No.” Her school friend is surprised. “I’ll show you,” I offer. “No, no,” her school friend says and insists on showing her.

David and I are on our way to Narita Airport’s Terminal One on the Keisei Skyliner. I watch out the window of the train as the multidimensional concrete plains of Tokyo dissolves. The tall apartment buildings give way to smaller apartment buildings and then the smaller buildings mix with small houses that sit close together and then the houses get bigger and further apart and their tiled roofs become hidden among trees whose red and gold leaves are beginning to fall. Here and there among the houses are temples and the temples grow larger and as do the gardens and graveyards that surround them. The houses and temples give way to fields where things are growing or being harvested in rows and then the living things grow wild. The trees are dense and the water finds its own way, unrestrained by man. I tell David that over eighty percent of Japan is still forest, and it is a wonderful figure even though it means that one-hundred and twenty four million people live in a handful of places and this translates into trains that run at 400 percent capacity during rush hour in Tokyo. The train that we are on is not full however. I think about the fact that I will make the return trip from Narita alone and when I think this, I remember the sometimes intense loneliness that I feel here and then I reach for David’s hand. I can’t think too much about why we are on the train because then I begin to think about David leaving and then about the Ex-Student leaving and about Seth leaving and about Ben leaving and about my grandmother leaving. I know that I have prayed to the universe to break me and the universe has done its best to oblige. I am tough though and so the lesson repeats and repeats and the intensity varies and despite this, I endure. It only slowly occurs to me that maybe the lesson is really about not being attached to such a selfish prayer.

I board the Skyliner after dark and the windows of the train have turned to mirrors. Near the airport and Narita city there are three stops complete with announcements. I look out the window at the areas near the stations and think about why we light what we light at night. An intense light keeps watch over cars in a parking lot. Every balcony on an apartment building is lit, even though the apartments are mostly dark. Isn’t light a talisman against the darkness? And if so, why do we light these uninhabited spaces? Why not leave them dark? I wonder at what darkness is a talisman against. There is a long stretch of travel where the train picks up speed and we do not stop and there are no announcements and without thinking, I am asleep, waking when the announcements begin again, just before we reach Nippori. After Nippori is Ueno, where I must change to get the train back to Asakusa then to Higashi-Mukojima. I have plans for a quick dinner and then I have to head out to Shinjuku San-chome, where Ben is having a birthday party in the Aussie bar.