Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan Page 4

  What did Shizuko see when she looked at you? A slight woman, narrow of mouth and shoulder. Your hair was cut short, like a foreign man’s, and the scissors and the humidity had unlocked your hair’s tendency to curl, so your head looked like a briar patch despite the pomade. It wasn’t unheard of for women in Yokohama to dress like men, but even a writer could afford better tailoring.

  Shizuko tilted her head to one side, considering.

  “Thanks. That’s perfect. Hold it right there. Don’t move.”

  Ghosts flickered across the screen, destroying all your similes.

  It went on, one of those friendships that seems almost real until the first time you kiss, drunk, in a noodle shop in Chinatown after your second viewing of The Resurrected Corpse, and think, What am I getting myself into? Nothing wrong with lying to a girl, but it’s better to avoid kissing the kind of girl who only likes you because you’re a liar, else you end up growing nails for a week just to scratch her properly, which is messy and not your idea of a good time. “I like my sex a little less kabuki,” you tell her, and she avoids you for a month.

  She lives in a small house with her father, the kuroko, and many dead people she is unaware of—children, mostly. “I think they died of cholera,” you told her. “I’ve seen those sunken eyes before.” Shizuko smirked and slowly unraveled the long black curtain of her hair. “No,” you said. “I mean it, there’s like six dead babies in this room. Could we please go somewhere else?”

  You’ve only seen her father once, in the morning, coming home as you left. Two moments after meeting him, you forgot what he looked like. A man like that can get away with anything.

  “Where are you actually from?” Shizuko asks. You say, “The land of the dead. Isn’t it obvious?”

  When you close your eyes, Namiko, you pretend you are home. The smells of a coastal city are not so different from the smells of a coastal village; there are just more of them. The noise reminds you where you are, but you can filter that out. Movies have no noise; they are chiaroscuro, motion, silhouette. You think that a movie is the pure essence of story, stripped of meaningless detail. You think an important story is something that could happen anywhere.

  Here’s a story: You were in love for a very long time with a woman who loved you back. A little while after she died, you started seeing ghosts. But you’ve never seen her ghost, so you wander through your days half alive and half dead, searching through a world of shadows, and you are always sleepwalking.

  See? We’ve all been there.

  III. The Hypnotist

  —wears black and has four distinct chins, each with its own personality.

  “More coffee,” he tells Namiko, and there is something in his voice that makes her long to rest her head on that ample bosom and tell him all her secrets.

  “Do you see that man over there?” Shizuko whispers to the Russian.

  He nods; he is a Russian of few words.

  “That man used to be a rakugoka.”

  What, says the Russian, like a storyteller?

  Shizuko smirks. She’s wearing purple lip color today, making her look even sillier than usual: “Exactly.”

  Shizuko hoists herself onto the counter next to the tray of pain raisin and swings her legs. She knows that the Russian hates her visits, also that he won’t throw her out so long as Namiko wants her there. She pops a strawberry-flavored macaron into her mouth—provisions! “You’d have heard of him”—swallowing the macaron in one gulp, poking at the Russian with her elbow—“if your Japanese was better.”

  The Russian shrugs. “What happened to him?” Famous stage performers don’t eat coffee for their midday meal, even when they are so badly in need of reducing as the Hypnotist, whose magnetism attracts new flab as it does people, as if the very adipose adores him.

  “He died,” says Shizuko, pondering her next macaron: Hazelnut? Lemon-perfumed? Green tea? She thinks for a moment of the Hypnotist curled on the floor of their old house vomiting, her father crouched over him, preternaturally still. “He almost died. I guess he’s back now.”

  Namiko runs back to the counter so quickly that she almost drops her tray of empty plates; she catches Shizuko with her free arm and pulls her into a kiss. The Hypnotist has left her a tip.

  “I learned to read English from the Hypnotist.” This is the story Shizuko wants to tell about herself. In fact, even her spoken English is not very good; she means, He used to tell me stories.

  Nothing more boring than the professional storyteller who’s never off the clock. She tuned out his lectures about the lost ways of the past, the erosion of the culture, but she listened when he explained Oliver Twist—foreign squalor, so exotic—and got as far into Moby Dick as the storyteller’s lament that he shall never finish anything, at which point Shizuko thought, If he’s not going to, I don’t see why I should. She remembers the city with the whalebone gates surrounding each house, where women in whalebone corsets marry with a whale as their dowry; she likes the idea of the whale-dowry, that somewhere in that ocean there’s a monster with one’s name on it, a monster for each of us.

  “Shizuko,” her father asks, “when will you let me marry you off?”

  “Buy me a whalebone corset,” says Shizuko, “and a dress the color of stars.”

  Perhaps there are plenty of kaiju in the sea after all; night after night, the Hypnotist, who was not a Hypnotist in those days, went onstage to narrate his own adaptations of The Woman in White, of Lady Audley’s Secret, fixing the audience with his ocean-blue eyes and explaining just what the Paris Morgue was; but day after day he lounged at Shizuko’s home with her father, making omelets and annoying everyone with his stories.

  “What part of England are you from, anyway?” Shizuko asked.

  “Adelaide,” said the Hypnotist through a mouthful of egg.

  When the Hypnotist moved out and Shizuko’s father’s eyes drifted to the half-empty jar of rat poison—he was leaner; he’d get the dosage right—Shizuko said, “Cheer up! We’ll go to Adelaide and find you a new foreigner with blue eyes and a big white hairy belly.”

  Her father’s smirk was a thin line, almost invisible. “What,” he said, “run to sea?”

  “That’s why I hate the theater,” Shizuko tells Namiko. “It makes people selfish. Everything is so archaic—and so isolated—and so all-consuming—” She’s gesturing wildly, and it only makes Namiko more still. “You can’t give yourself to a dead thing and have enough left to be a real person. The dead eat souls.”

  “Not all of them,” says Namiko. She’s grown more friendly with the cholera victims in Shizuko’s bedroom. They teach her interesting facts about the 1830s, and all they ask in return is to kiss her hands and neck with their frigid lips, or else suckle at her breast. She has a hard time understanding why she humors them whenever she’s off the premises, but in the moment it doesn’t seem much to ask.

  Shizuko ignores her; already she is back at her bookshelves. “You should read this,” she says, grabbing the Hypnotist’s translation of The Law and the Lady; “You should read this and this and this.”

  Namiko is a reader, but only in Japanese, and only books Shizuko finds boring: long literary things about women’s colleges with lots of hand-wringing about feminism and modernization and how we shouldn’t emulate Western countries because Western women don’t have the vote. Shizuko likes English novels where people take arsenic and commit bigamy. She says, “You are such a savage, Namiko.” She says, “The English are centuries ahead of us, culturally speaking. I am going to educate you.”

  There are too many books in her house, books upon books, stacked vertically on the single row of shelves and spilling off in heaps and drifts in the corners; they are readers, Shizuko and the kuroko (and the cholera babies too, though mostly they prefer to use the books as blocks for building castles and fortresses and barricades to trip Namiko in the night), but some of the books
are in languages they don’t read, and at least one bears a stamp marking it as the property of a library in Glasgow.

  Sometimes Namiko looks at the books and thinks, If this place caught fire, we’d all be dead.

  “Smoke with me,” she says, and Shizuko sits with her in the corner, her back against a stack of old issues of Japan Punch, and accepts a cigarette with exaggerated ladylike gestures. Shizuko smokes with the mannerisms of a female impersonator. When her father comes home, the smoke will make his eyes water.

  Namiko watches the smoke plumes writhe along the ceiling, forming themselves into weird specters, half lives. “I can’t make any promises.”

  “You won’t be able to stop reading. Not once Miserrimus Dexter shows up; he is mesmeric. When you suffer a loss, your other faculties become sharper to compensate. Dexter has no legs, so he’s a genius.” This is how Shizuko’s mind works. Why does she lift her chin like that as she exhales, why must she always strike attitudes? “Kairakutei explains them for you, so it’s not confusing. You know: What’s a Scottish Verdict. What’s a Barrister. Why are English men so secretive about their concubines, and where are the pockets in men’s pants.”

  Namiko pulls her pockets inside out.

  “Well, but this was ten years ago; people didn’t wear those then.”

  Namiko starts to say that she doesn’t understand why a man who hates his homeland so much would spend his life explaining it to foreigners, then stops; of course she knows why. It’s money that gets the Hypnotist up on the stage, wearing his whiteness like an inverted yellowface; money that makes him flood the market with “cultural translations” of British potboilers even as he bemoans the loss of, what did he call it? “The last beautiful place.”

  In England, everything is ugly, there is coal smoke, the women act like men and the men can’t fuck each other unless they want to go to jail—except no one really goes to jail—except sometimes they do. Namiko asked him to explain this, one day at the café, but all he said was that it was complicated, and ordered sake. The Hypnotist has a Japanese wife whom he had to marry to get citizenship, but no one has seen her in years. Perhaps Kairakutei’s wife, like the kuroko, is invisible. Perhaps the Hypnotist has that effect on people.

  Shizuko tells her father she is afraid to marry. This is late one night when they are both drunk. He is working on a play in which his main task is to raise the waves to drown the heroine. The heroine, a man who has worked with him before, is an epic slut of legendary stupidity who once mocked Shizuko’s father for his country accent. The kuroko hasn’t enjoyed his work so much in years.

  “Where’s Namiko?” asks the kuroko.

  Two days ago, Namiko bragged about all the money she is saving from her wages at the café. She keeps track of her savings in a little green book, and she showed the book to Shizuko, who said, “It is just as dull as all the other books you like.”

  “But no,” Namiko explained. “Those are books that tell the past, and this book tells my future.” Namiko has lived in this ghost town long enough.

  “Tokyo?” says Shizuko. “We’re going to Tokyo?”

  “I am going to Tokyo.” Namiko tousled Shizuko’s hair, loose around her shoulders. There was a red scratch on Shizuko’s neck. “I’m not like you, little mermaid. I couldn’t be happy staying in one place my entire life.”

  “Where’s Namiko?” the kuroko asks, not without irony. He knows how to suggest evisceration through tone of voice alone. He gets the Scotch from its hiding place at the back of the bookshelf, behind a copy of Trilby the Hypnotist bought before his departure and never finished. He never finished the Scotch either, but they are going to do so tonight, Shizuko and the kuroko, as she turns and turns in the silver kimono he bought her, silk the color of stars.

  Somewhere, a hundred girls just like Shizuko labored to tend the worms and spin the thread and weave the cloth the kuroko has paid to have sewn into her wedding dress. They say that being a factory girl is not unlike being a human silkworm. The accident of birth, Shizuko supposes, grateful that she has made the wise choice to be born motherless rather than fatherless, and wondering why it is so much more often the other way around. She feels sorry for the silkworm-girls, of course, but she isn’t really interested in their story. Look how the kimono shimmers!

  The silver of stars: it reflects the lamplight like a liquid mirror. No electricity in this house, oh no; the flame casts flickering shadows on the heaps of books and magazines, and the Scotch lights a fire in Shizuko’s belly, and the kimono is alight with borrowed passion, and it is just like old times.

  “I’ve never felt so beautiful,” says Shizuko. She sweeps her arms up; she sweeps her arms down. She tries to walk in the stiffly embroidered fabric. “I can’t move much.”

  “And you wanted a corset,” says the kuroko.

  Shizuko examines her sleeves, her hem. She reflects.

  But what if I am empty, only shimmer and stage gestures? Shizuko asks later, when they are further into the Scotch. She means she is afraid of disappearing.

  The kuroko chews it over. You are what you do; no one knows that better than the invisible man. A daughter is not a wife. There are sea creatures who reproduce by fragmentation, reforming themselves into two distinct beings after falling apart; when the kuroko grew Shizuko from his sharp white rib, like a cutting in a jar, he himself faded to a mere shadow. Now she is all show, signifying nothing, and he lives like a phantom.

  “If I run away, my outside will change entirely,” says Shizuko, “and I have no insides. I will go out like a candle.” She waits for her father to respond, but he is silent. It is as if she is talking to herself.

  IV. The Kuroko

  I am lifeless and immortal, like a virus or a Buddhist. I am most at home when I am out of place. A hundred years from now, you will pass me on the street in New York or San Francisco, in Paris or Berlin or Buenos Aires, and I will lift my black veil and you will see my true face, and then you will see Nothing.

  V. The Picture Bride

  For days before her photograph is taken, Shizuko is uncommonly violent. “Hit me in the face,” she tells Namiko. “I won’t mind.”

  Namiko’s own face a livid gray, she half raises her hand before freezing miserably in place like an actress in an old tableau; another creaky English export like the Hypnotist’s new show, or like one of the Spiritualist acts transported direct from Europe, women in black dresses who claimed to speak for the dead. Two years ago, before Namiko ever met Shizuko, she went with the Russian to see a ghost-speaker perform before an audience of three hundred; the Spiritualist levitated a foot off the floor and spoke to the ghosts of a widow’s lost husband and several sets of parents. One infant too. None of them are real, Namiko complained.

  “I’m not a good person,” says Namiko. “I don’t understand why you want me to be worse than I am. Hate me for the awful things I really do, not—” Namiko waves her hands helplessly in the dark. It’s awkward.

  “I know that deep down, you want to hit me. Go ahead.”

  That night, they sleep side-by-side holding each other. You are familiar with this pose from the postcards of Japanese women sleeping together, which may be found, at this time, in most major cities in Europe.

  After Namiko leaves, Shizuko slams her head into the wall over and over, until purple bruises rise up around her right eye. The kuroko will have to labor over her face for hours with a box of stage makeup. Rescheduling a photograph is expensive, and this is her future at stake.

  A century from now, the picture of Shizuko will resurface at a flea market in Alameda, where it will be labeled “Japanese Bride, 1880s,” despite being taken in 1899; Shizuko’s hairstyle is old-fashioned. The woman who buys it—as a joke, because she does not intend to marry and finds the practice ridiculous, ridiculous, she has not even dated anyone since her only boyfriend dumped her two years ago, though they still talk all the time, he is her best f
riend—pins it to the cork board in the entrance to her apartment in Noe Valley, then moves it to her bedroom when she gets tired of visitors asking, “Oh, is that your great-grandmother?”

  In her bedroom, though, the photograph glowers like a malevolent spirit. The mannish bride in the glittering dress looks miserable—that’s what makes the picture so campy, that’s why she bought it in the first place—but more importantly, she looks monstrous. In her overdone clown makeup, she seems ready for the stage, not the matchmaker; the woman feels she has introduced negative energy into her home.

  Her ex-boyfriend comes to her roommate’s birthday party, still single, still twitchy and blond like a golden retriever with a severe panic disorder, and they get drunk on Negronis in a corner of the kitchen while everyone else plays Mafia. “Why is Male Tippi Hedren here?” her roommate hisses on the way to refill his own drink; thirty hits dancers even harder than it hits the rest of us. It’s because they’re so skinny, there’s nothing to cushion the shock.

  “I think your roommate’s mad at me,” her ex says, so they go into her bedroom to stay out of the way. The woman lives at the back of the building, and her hallway is so narrow that she and her ex-boyfriend have to walk single file, his hands on her waist. Then his hands are below her waist.

  “Hey,” her ex-boyfriend says the following morning, “Why do you have a Japanese drag queen hanging over your desk?”

  A few months later, after her roommate gets married, the woman moves to the East Bay so she can get her own place—she’s too old for all this—and throws Shizuko’s 115-year-old bridal portrait in the garbage. It is really not worth taking with her.