The Book Of Ian Watson, page 2
‘How did you get here so quick with that tree on your head? Maybe you changed yourself into a crow and flew here with it in your beak?’
The witch spat at the catechist’s feet and he hopped back quickly to avoid her spittle.
In her own mind maybe she did something, thought the policeman, but only in her own mind.
Chad?
VERTICALS: BLUE, YELLOW, & RED.
Gambia?
HORIZONTALS: RED,
BLUE,
& GREEN
but the part of the BLUE HORIZONTAL was crossed by WHITE VERTICALS.
The farmer stepped back from his hoeing, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and saw stars as he poked the sweat from his eyes with his knuckles. Soon the field would be ready, the little rains would fall, seedlings would sprout in their beds, tall green tobacco would wave.
A huge white bird swooped down among the boulders.
Then he noticed the man racing crazily down the slope, and the bird turned into a white-frocked woman pulling herself laboriously upright with both hands, her face a small red blob of effort in the distance.
She fell billowing among the rocks, a white flag of surrender.
‘Don’t let her die all alone I beg you! If she dies all alone I’ll hold you responsible, I’ll always remember.’
But how much do you remember? Can you describe this nation’s flag from memory?
On the way up, she stopped to get her breath back beside an ants’ nest. It would be the most horrid death to be eaten alive by ants. Yet it was a punishment in Africa. The prisoner was covered with honey and staked out upon an antheap.
Her hands and ankles were bound tightly to the four stakes, her spine was arched above the heap like a bow, her belly to the sun. The blood ran to her head, the sun blinded her. She shut her eyes, but how long dare she keep them shut? The temptation to see the ants moving on to her body—as if seeing was controlling or anticipating—was so strong. But when the ants moved across her face her eyes would blink shut again instinctively. How long would her eyelids protect her eyes? How long would her eyelids continue to exist? She expelled the air from her lungs fiercely, snorting it out of her nostrils as if she’d just surfaced after swimming underwater for a long stretch—blowing like a sealion. But the ants boiled over her from the depths of their heap, their deep secret chambers and galleries where slaves toiled and herds of aphids dumbly grazed waiting for milking time, and where the pulsing heaps of eggs were packed. They boiled out, nipping the honey. She could bear this nipping fire on her body, but not her face. No not the face. The eyes. She thrashed her head from side to side in an effort to crush the ants, clenched her mouth tight to protect the tongue she will scream with later. She blinked her eyelids desperately and rolled her eyes. She opened her lips and sucked in ants to crush them. But how could she drink the boiling sea? The ants were no longer individuals that could be caught and crushed between her teeth or blown off her chin on to her chest, they were a surging black sea, a spreading fire, a roasting alive. They clothed her nudity in an acid suit. Her legs were spread wide apart by the stakes to let them feed on her sex. Fiercely she contracted her child-bearing muscles. Her whole body a flux of raw muscle. Surely she would die of exhaustion. She could hold her breath for two minutes while she swam underwater. Could she hold her breath while the ants ate her? When you are mad do you still feel the pain? Pain has to be faced. It’s a condition of being in this century. Everyone has to face the likelihood that one day she will be strapped on a table and a man in a rubber apron will come to her with instruments for twisting and screwing and burning, that one day she will bear a baby with her legs strapped together. One day it will happen, your life ends in a chaos of pain and mutilation and madness. And what happens to your psyche then, if the patterns of the mind are pain and terror at the end?
The pebble she had dropped on the mouth of their nest was already moving, lifting, tilting.
He was gazing out across the bush when she reached the summit. A fresh breeze brushed the top of the hill.
Before them the wild bush stretched out indefinitely studded with termite mounds, grey swollen baobabs and tall wooden cacti with dull green branches. Other hills like the one they stood on looked like the cores of tiny old volcanoes on a flat lunar surface where the gravity was not too strong. The sinking swollen sun silhouetted a few tiny wide-branched trees on distant ridges. Parts of the bush, where the lines of fire had passed, were charred ghostlands with clumps of black straw floating on a dust ocean.
The wild northern Masai with long knotted hair, bouncing earbangles, loping gait, and yellow calabashes full of blood and milk, were racing silently through the bush, their thoughts on death and cattle. It was the only high point of defence. They surged up the hill, leaping from boulder to boulder with great agility, ululating like a wind and casting long shiny spears that sparkled against the stones. …
Ghost spears and ghost raiders riding through the air, riding the breeze from the north across the burnt bush, where in the heat of the day they had taken the form of whirling dust devils. …
‘What a wonderful setting for the murder!’ she exclaimed. ‘But I wish there weren’t so many ants.’
A little way from the flat ochre stone her head rested on, lay a dark maroon handkerchief bunched into the shape of a fist.
Like a crumpled flag, the policeman thought.
He settled down to read the exercise books by the light of the hurricane lamp, chose one from the Indian Printers.
Opening it, he saw the title!
The Fall of Woman, or The Great African Murder Story.
JAPANESE
Although Africa made me aware of the Third World, and of politics, it was Japan which dosed me with future shock and made me become a science fiction writer. Thirteen years after leaving Japan, the French magazine Actuel asked me and other writers to answer the following two questions. Which place has been magical in your life? And which was the worst rathole you visited? Here is my answer to the first question …
Shrines and Ratholes (part 1)
Just outside Kyoto is a remarkable and magical shrine: the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine, set upon Mount Inari in Fushimi Ward.
Well now, many Japanese shrines are remarkable places (not least the Shrine of Gratitude for Penis, at Tagata near Nagoya—which is full of enormous polished wooden phalluses!). And in a sense all Shinto shrines are magical. For in Japan two entirely different religions coexist (just as so much else which is apparently contradictory coexists there merrily). One is Shinto, an earth-religion, with its shrines. The other is Buddhism, a religion of the psyche, with its temples. The first is bodily, superstitious, mythic, ‘primitive’. The second is abstract, transcendental; and people switch from one to the other, as need be. It’s rather as though Europeans were Christians on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, and paid offerings to the Devil, of the old religion, on the other days.
This Inari shrine at Fushimi is dedicated to the gods of human prosperity; so at the Industrial Festival held there every April the Hall of Worship is full of offerings of industrial products: TV sets, video games, whatever … But the really mind-blowing thing isn’t the shrine buildings, nice as they are. Nor the sideshows and stalls selling barbecued sparrows, china foxes, masks with phallic noses and TV monster masks. It’s the 10,000 torii gateways, painted bright vermilion, packed shoulder to shoulder in a stone corridor that leads up the mountain and then around the top in a 4-kilometre-long circuit—through trees with a host of white paper bows tied to them for good fortune, like flocks of butterflies.
Climbing this mountain up the red stone corridor, with the sun shafting through, was a totally numinous experience for me. It was like being a corpuscle flowing through my own bloodstream externalised: a sensory event of far more impact than the calm elegance and aesthetic trance of the Buddhist Golden Pavilion in Kyoto itself; and during the 3 days of the New Year prosperity festival nearly two million people visit Fushimi, and this red corridor is dense with human corpuscles.
But I don’t like large crowds. But I don’t much care for earth-religions, which remind me of national soil and Nazism. But I have never actually set any story in Fushimi … So why is this place so numinous, and luminous, for me?
It’s because, while living in Japan, I found myself as a writer; and for me the shrine at Fushimi is a quintessence of Japan.
Japan switched me on to writing science fiction, the métier in which I found myself. I began writing SF as a psychological survival mechanism, for there in Japan (at the end of the Sixties) were all the seductions and all the terrors of the 21st century; Tokyo where I lived was the science fiction city.
But more importantly, in a deeper sense—I see now—Japan has a genius for making contradictions coexist (as Shinto and Buddhism coexist)—not least the contradiction between traditional past and futuristic present, between the calligrapher and the cyberneticist. Such places as the Inari shrine forced me to perceive analogies, to yoke together contradictions in a paradoxical knot—while at the same time deranging my senses through sheer visual impact.
Didn’t the New Year festival, with a ‘toothpaste tube’ of people squeezing up Mount Inari through the bloodstream corridor, resemble rush-hour on the Tokyo underground? Didn’t people accept the crush of life in megalopolis because the pursuit of economic growth had a quasi-religious flavour? Didn’t the Japanese accept the transformation of their land from a place of calm, beauty and nature, into a materialistic science fiction fantasy, precisely because there were deep traditional spiritual forces at work in this? Wasn’t the psychedelic art of the advertisers not simply a borrowing from the West, but a reincarnation of the garish fairground colours of Shinto?
In the first three books which I then set out to write, there were two features in common, as regards structure and flavour. Each book contained three very diverse, but intersecting plot-lines. And each book (or at least two of them—Japan itself features in the other one) juxtaposed the ancient or traditional (Amazonian Indians, the Incas) with something hypermodern (alien visitors, a trip to Mars).
The fusion of contradictions! And the reincarnation of ancient traditions in a futuristic setting!
I’d say that Japan rewired my brain to think this way—and rewired my emotions too, since to comprehend a place like the Inari Shrine cannot simply be a cerebral experience but must also be a sensuous and bodily one: a realization that this corridor of red gates is indeed a living bloodstream, belonging to an alien culture, true, but also at the same time for a while it was my own.
So perhaps I can say that Japan helped me to become an alien, by giving me a blood transfusion.
Let’s try my hand at a sort of haiku:
A Fushimi
Le sang montant
Vers les étoiles.
My first book was published in Japan, in a series of simple English readers aimed at high school and university students. We had flown our large, eccentric tabby cat out to Tokyo; and a Japanese modern classic is Natsume Soseki’s I am a Cat, in which a feline resident of the same ward of Tokyo as ours—Bunkyo Ward—observes the impact of modernisation upon Meiji Era Japan. My own Japan: A Cat’s Eye View relates a British cat’s insights into Japanese society in the late 1960s—and the little book has steadily sold thousands of copies ever since. Hence the fact that I had a publisher in the early, gestatory days described below …
Imaginary Cricket
We play imaginary cricket along the platform of the bullet-train station at Odawara, huge, empty and high. She bowls an imaginary ball, I hit with an imaginary bat. It’s been a puzzling day and we want to puzzle somebody. The station is a high steel and glass causeway through the town and the red neon symbol of Marubutsu Department Store reflects in the glass, seems to brand the hill behind with a mystic emblem. One of the superexpresses appears far away at the end of the track, sending its sound waves ahead of it, zing-zing, zing-zing, rhythmic, climaxing in a booming whistle. The train speeds through the central tracks at a hundred miles an hour, lightning flickering from its overhead contacts, sucking our minds towards it. A high speed train empties itself visually of people. There’s only the train-skeleton, no human beings in it.
Can anyone see us from the train? Or is the platform a smooth white unit, stripped of even us? It’s been a puzzling day and we want to puzzle somebody. We arrived at the station on a bus whose conductress sang out all the way, at every stop and start and turn, ‘Awry … awry ….’ It’s the English phrase ‘all right’ turned into Japanese, seems intended as a tranquillizer; but it reminds us that far from being all right, something is awry in our sense of the word, something is all wrong … but we’re not sure what, can’t pin it down. We’ve seen a tattered international village, a reconstructed castle, a lioness with a tumour, views of Fuji. We’ve been round the ‘Golden Course’—a sequence of boiling sulphur springs, valleys, a lake. We’ve travelled by mountain-railway, cable-car, boat and bus. And we can’t say why on earth anyone should want to go round the Golden Course, yet we can’t say either what is wrong with the whole scene. Suspicions of something vastly wrong, a confidence trick (which reminds me of a science fiction story where the first spacemen discover that the moon is a huge facade with no far side—only scaffolding)—but you could note a million details and miss the synthesis; the day remains a great enigma.
It’s difficult to correlate your impressions in Japan. The whole tendency of Japanese culture is against correlation—and foreigners find it easy to lose themselves in details: ikebana, Zen, sumie, haiku. …
Is Japan complex, or simple? It’s in our nature to try to fit the jigsaw puzzle together; and this is impossible in Japan. Each experience insists on being separate. How to connect them? The Japanese don’t see it this way. We believe that what the world needs is generalists. We try to explain our sense of wrongness about this day on the Golden Course by reference to ecology, the life of the commuter, Shintoism. It’s our way of seeing. But we can’t buy a length of bamboo by indicating a bamboo brush and saying we only want the handle, not the head. A brush is a brush. Each item is a separate discrete unit. So the crowd-surge of a Shinto festival has got nothing to do with the subway-surge at rush-hour or with the activities of the Japan Travel Bureau, we’re told. Functions are separate; there’s no synthesis. And Japan is always a mirror-image of yourself. It’s your own politeness, your own aggression, your own sense of beauty, or of ugliness, that are projected back at you. Japan remains ambiguous. So we play imaginary cricket. What is the sound of one hand clapping? An imaginary cricket ball striking an imaginary cricket bat.
This year X Department Store sent its employees for their summer treat to the top of Mt Fuji. The employees brought back a couple of thousand cans of fresh air from the summit, which the store handed out to the public as an advertising gimmick. ‘Today’s oxygen is sponsored by X Department Store.’ Because if somebody doesn’t sponsor it, there won’t be any? Air is no longer an aspect of Nature (what is Nature? I’ve forgotten), it’s an economic casualty.
We live in a small house on a hillside looking towards central Tokyo. We can see Tokyo Tower, a few feet higher than the Eiffel Tower, and the Kasumigaseki Building—Japan’s first skyscraper, and hero of a recent movie, since the building of such a skyscraper in this earthquake zone is either an act of heroism or of economic hubris—and in either event has the makings of tragedy. Already the Kasumigaseki Building has been followed by a taller World Trade Centre, and an even taller hotel is on the drawing boards. Economic pressures have revised the building codes to transform Tokyo into a skyscraper city, and Breughel’s Tower of Babel is rising in grey concrete on all sides. I watched a TV programme about what will happen after the next great Kanto Earthquake. A blown-up map of part of Tokyo with magnetized toy cars on the streets. One man pushed the toy cars into tailbacks and pile-ups blocking all the roads; but while he was addressing the camera a second man methodically unblocked all the roads and parked the cars in neat lines. Noticing this, the first man wrecked the cars again. But the other man’s hands were already wandering across the board nervously restoring order.
People say what a quiet area this is, where we live, and it is quiet compared with most of Tokyo; but certain noises are pandemic—sirens, loudspeakers, helicopters, piledrivers, traffic. Quiet no longer exists in any absolute sense, only degrees of noise.
But we’re lucky to have a separate house to live in and empty air to look through, though it frequently smells of gas or glue, occasionally of lead or diarrhoea—for housing pressures are so bad that estate agents are combing the city for funerals and temples are selling their graveyards for high-rise apartment blocks.
The cheapest-looking cafe may have an electrically-operated door, colour TV, taped music, intercom to the kitchen—for this is a consumer culture. But the matter of food supplies for these narrow crowded islands is fraught with comedy … and tragedy. The latest Russo-Japanese crab conference was comic enough in its way. The Russians maintained that the succulent King Crab crawls upon the Soviet continental shelf, a sedentary denizen of it. The Japanese insisted that the King Crab leaps long distances using the technique of an Olympic pole vaulter and that when it finally sinks back to the continental shelf, it does so ever so slowly, reluctantly, flapping to and fro like a Japanese paper fan (and therefore, Japanese fishermen, come and get me!). On the tragedy side, over a hundred citizens of the town of Minamata, who ate shellfish that had ingested organic mercury waste, died in agony, and hundreds more went insane, over a period of several years, before anyone could trace the source of the ‘Minamata Disease’—or before anyone chose to trace it … since industry and the economy are more consequential than nature or life, and it’s more important there should be a surplus of consumer goods in the shops than for these consumer goods to be safe or desirable. We had chicken for lunch today, with a 10 per cent likelihood that the chicken had been suffering from leukemia, and while nobody knows (or chooses to know) whether eating leukemia chicken is harmful to humans or not, it isn’t a nice thought while you’re feeding, is it? (Between the Manufacturer and the Consumer Falls the Shadow.)
The witch spat at the catechist’s feet and he hopped back quickly to avoid her spittle.
In her own mind maybe she did something, thought the policeman, but only in her own mind.
Chad?
VERTICALS: BLUE, YELLOW, & RED.
Gambia?
HORIZONTALS: RED,
BLUE,
& GREEN
but the part of the BLUE HORIZONTAL was crossed by WHITE VERTICALS.
The farmer stepped back from his hoeing, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and saw stars as he poked the sweat from his eyes with his knuckles. Soon the field would be ready, the little rains would fall, seedlings would sprout in their beds, tall green tobacco would wave.
A huge white bird swooped down among the boulders.
Then he noticed the man racing crazily down the slope, and the bird turned into a white-frocked woman pulling herself laboriously upright with both hands, her face a small red blob of effort in the distance.
She fell billowing among the rocks, a white flag of surrender.
‘Don’t let her die all alone I beg you! If she dies all alone I’ll hold you responsible, I’ll always remember.’
But how much do you remember? Can you describe this nation’s flag from memory?
On the way up, she stopped to get her breath back beside an ants’ nest. It would be the most horrid death to be eaten alive by ants. Yet it was a punishment in Africa. The prisoner was covered with honey and staked out upon an antheap.
Her hands and ankles were bound tightly to the four stakes, her spine was arched above the heap like a bow, her belly to the sun. The blood ran to her head, the sun blinded her. She shut her eyes, but how long dare she keep them shut? The temptation to see the ants moving on to her body—as if seeing was controlling or anticipating—was so strong. But when the ants moved across her face her eyes would blink shut again instinctively. How long would her eyelids protect her eyes? How long would her eyelids continue to exist? She expelled the air from her lungs fiercely, snorting it out of her nostrils as if she’d just surfaced after swimming underwater for a long stretch—blowing like a sealion. But the ants boiled over her from the depths of their heap, their deep secret chambers and galleries where slaves toiled and herds of aphids dumbly grazed waiting for milking time, and where the pulsing heaps of eggs were packed. They boiled out, nipping the honey. She could bear this nipping fire on her body, but not her face. No not the face. The eyes. She thrashed her head from side to side in an effort to crush the ants, clenched her mouth tight to protect the tongue she will scream with later. She blinked her eyelids desperately and rolled her eyes. She opened her lips and sucked in ants to crush them. But how could she drink the boiling sea? The ants were no longer individuals that could be caught and crushed between her teeth or blown off her chin on to her chest, they were a surging black sea, a spreading fire, a roasting alive. They clothed her nudity in an acid suit. Her legs were spread wide apart by the stakes to let them feed on her sex. Fiercely she contracted her child-bearing muscles. Her whole body a flux of raw muscle. Surely she would die of exhaustion. She could hold her breath for two minutes while she swam underwater. Could she hold her breath while the ants ate her? When you are mad do you still feel the pain? Pain has to be faced. It’s a condition of being in this century. Everyone has to face the likelihood that one day she will be strapped on a table and a man in a rubber apron will come to her with instruments for twisting and screwing and burning, that one day she will bear a baby with her legs strapped together. One day it will happen, your life ends in a chaos of pain and mutilation and madness. And what happens to your psyche then, if the patterns of the mind are pain and terror at the end?
The pebble she had dropped on the mouth of their nest was already moving, lifting, tilting.
He was gazing out across the bush when she reached the summit. A fresh breeze brushed the top of the hill.
Before them the wild bush stretched out indefinitely studded with termite mounds, grey swollen baobabs and tall wooden cacti with dull green branches. Other hills like the one they stood on looked like the cores of tiny old volcanoes on a flat lunar surface where the gravity was not too strong. The sinking swollen sun silhouetted a few tiny wide-branched trees on distant ridges. Parts of the bush, where the lines of fire had passed, were charred ghostlands with clumps of black straw floating on a dust ocean.
The wild northern Masai with long knotted hair, bouncing earbangles, loping gait, and yellow calabashes full of blood and milk, were racing silently through the bush, their thoughts on death and cattle. It was the only high point of defence. They surged up the hill, leaping from boulder to boulder with great agility, ululating like a wind and casting long shiny spears that sparkled against the stones. …
Ghost spears and ghost raiders riding through the air, riding the breeze from the north across the burnt bush, where in the heat of the day they had taken the form of whirling dust devils. …
‘What a wonderful setting for the murder!’ she exclaimed. ‘But I wish there weren’t so many ants.’
A little way from the flat ochre stone her head rested on, lay a dark maroon handkerchief bunched into the shape of a fist.
Like a crumpled flag, the policeman thought.
He settled down to read the exercise books by the light of the hurricane lamp, chose one from the Indian Printers.
Opening it, he saw the title!
The Fall of Woman, or The Great African Murder Story.
JAPANESE
Although Africa made me aware of the Third World, and of politics, it was Japan which dosed me with future shock and made me become a science fiction writer. Thirteen years after leaving Japan, the French magazine Actuel asked me and other writers to answer the following two questions. Which place has been magical in your life? And which was the worst rathole you visited? Here is my answer to the first question …
Shrines and Ratholes (part 1)
Just outside Kyoto is a remarkable and magical shrine: the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine, set upon Mount Inari in Fushimi Ward.
Well now, many Japanese shrines are remarkable places (not least the Shrine of Gratitude for Penis, at Tagata near Nagoya—which is full of enormous polished wooden phalluses!). And in a sense all Shinto shrines are magical. For in Japan two entirely different religions coexist (just as so much else which is apparently contradictory coexists there merrily). One is Shinto, an earth-religion, with its shrines. The other is Buddhism, a religion of the psyche, with its temples. The first is bodily, superstitious, mythic, ‘primitive’. The second is abstract, transcendental; and people switch from one to the other, as need be. It’s rather as though Europeans were Christians on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, and paid offerings to the Devil, of the old religion, on the other days.
This Inari shrine at Fushimi is dedicated to the gods of human prosperity; so at the Industrial Festival held there every April the Hall of Worship is full of offerings of industrial products: TV sets, video games, whatever … But the really mind-blowing thing isn’t the shrine buildings, nice as they are. Nor the sideshows and stalls selling barbecued sparrows, china foxes, masks with phallic noses and TV monster masks. It’s the 10,000 torii gateways, painted bright vermilion, packed shoulder to shoulder in a stone corridor that leads up the mountain and then around the top in a 4-kilometre-long circuit—through trees with a host of white paper bows tied to them for good fortune, like flocks of butterflies.
Climbing this mountain up the red stone corridor, with the sun shafting through, was a totally numinous experience for me. It was like being a corpuscle flowing through my own bloodstream externalised: a sensory event of far more impact than the calm elegance and aesthetic trance of the Buddhist Golden Pavilion in Kyoto itself; and during the 3 days of the New Year prosperity festival nearly two million people visit Fushimi, and this red corridor is dense with human corpuscles.
But I don’t like large crowds. But I don’t much care for earth-religions, which remind me of national soil and Nazism. But I have never actually set any story in Fushimi … So why is this place so numinous, and luminous, for me?
It’s because, while living in Japan, I found myself as a writer; and for me the shrine at Fushimi is a quintessence of Japan.
Japan switched me on to writing science fiction, the métier in which I found myself. I began writing SF as a psychological survival mechanism, for there in Japan (at the end of the Sixties) were all the seductions and all the terrors of the 21st century; Tokyo where I lived was the science fiction city.
But more importantly, in a deeper sense—I see now—Japan has a genius for making contradictions coexist (as Shinto and Buddhism coexist)—not least the contradiction between traditional past and futuristic present, between the calligrapher and the cyberneticist. Such places as the Inari shrine forced me to perceive analogies, to yoke together contradictions in a paradoxical knot—while at the same time deranging my senses through sheer visual impact.
Didn’t the New Year festival, with a ‘toothpaste tube’ of people squeezing up Mount Inari through the bloodstream corridor, resemble rush-hour on the Tokyo underground? Didn’t people accept the crush of life in megalopolis because the pursuit of economic growth had a quasi-religious flavour? Didn’t the Japanese accept the transformation of their land from a place of calm, beauty and nature, into a materialistic science fiction fantasy, precisely because there were deep traditional spiritual forces at work in this? Wasn’t the psychedelic art of the advertisers not simply a borrowing from the West, but a reincarnation of the garish fairground colours of Shinto?
In the first three books which I then set out to write, there were two features in common, as regards structure and flavour. Each book contained three very diverse, but intersecting plot-lines. And each book (or at least two of them—Japan itself features in the other one) juxtaposed the ancient or traditional (Amazonian Indians, the Incas) with something hypermodern (alien visitors, a trip to Mars).
The fusion of contradictions! And the reincarnation of ancient traditions in a futuristic setting!
I’d say that Japan rewired my brain to think this way—and rewired my emotions too, since to comprehend a place like the Inari Shrine cannot simply be a cerebral experience but must also be a sensuous and bodily one: a realization that this corridor of red gates is indeed a living bloodstream, belonging to an alien culture, true, but also at the same time for a while it was my own.
So perhaps I can say that Japan helped me to become an alien, by giving me a blood transfusion.
Let’s try my hand at a sort of haiku:
A Fushimi
Le sang montant
Vers les étoiles.
My first book was published in Japan, in a series of simple English readers aimed at high school and university students. We had flown our large, eccentric tabby cat out to Tokyo; and a Japanese modern classic is Natsume Soseki’s I am a Cat, in which a feline resident of the same ward of Tokyo as ours—Bunkyo Ward—observes the impact of modernisation upon Meiji Era Japan. My own Japan: A Cat’s Eye View relates a British cat’s insights into Japanese society in the late 1960s—and the little book has steadily sold thousands of copies ever since. Hence the fact that I had a publisher in the early, gestatory days described below …
Imaginary Cricket
We play imaginary cricket along the platform of the bullet-train station at Odawara, huge, empty and high. She bowls an imaginary ball, I hit with an imaginary bat. It’s been a puzzling day and we want to puzzle somebody. The station is a high steel and glass causeway through the town and the red neon symbol of Marubutsu Department Store reflects in the glass, seems to brand the hill behind with a mystic emblem. One of the superexpresses appears far away at the end of the track, sending its sound waves ahead of it, zing-zing, zing-zing, rhythmic, climaxing in a booming whistle. The train speeds through the central tracks at a hundred miles an hour, lightning flickering from its overhead contacts, sucking our minds towards it. A high speed train empties itself visually of people. There’s only the train-skeleton, no human beings in it.
Can anyone see us from the train? Or is the platform a smooth white unit, stripped of even us? It’s been a puzzling day and we want to puzzle somebody. We arrived at the station on a bus whose conductress sang out all the way, at every stop and start and turn, ‘Awry … awry ….’ It’s the English phrase ‘all right’ turned into Japanese, seems intended as a tranquillizer; but it reminds us that far from being all right, something is awry in our sense of the word, something is all wrong … but we’re not sure what, can’t pin it down. We’ve seen a tattered international village, a reconstructed castle, a lioness with a tumour, views of Fuji. We’ve been round the ‘Golden Course’—a sequence of boiling sulphur springs, valleys, a lake. We’ve travelled by mountain-railway, cable-car, boat and bus. And we can’t say why on earth anyone should want to go round the Golden Course, yet we can’t say either what is wrong with the whole scene. Suspicions of something vastly wrong, a confidence trick (which reminds me of a science fiction story where the first spacemen discover that the moon is a huge facade with no far side—only scaffolding)—but you could note a million details and miss the synthesis; the day remains a great enigma.
It’s difficult to correlate your impressions in Japan. The whole tendency of Japanese culture is against correlation—and foreigners find it easy to lose themselves in details: ikebana, Zen, sumie, haiku. …
Is Japan complex, or simple? It’s in our nature to try to fit the jigsaw puzzle together; and this is impossible in Japan. Each experience insists on being separate. How to connect them? The Japanese don’t see it this way. We believe that what the world needs is generalists. We try to explain our sense of wrongness about this day on the Golden Course by reference to ecology, the life of the commuter, Shintoism. It’s our way of seeing. But we can’t buy a length of bamboo by indicating a bamboo brush and saying we only want the handle, not the head. A brush is a brush. Each item is a separate discrete unit. So the crowd-surge of a Shinto festival has got nothing to do with the subway-surge at rush-hour or with the activities of the Japan Travel Bureau, we’re told. Functions are separate; there’s no synthesis. And Japan is always a mirror-image of yourself. It’s your own politeness, your own aggression, your own sense of beauty, or of ugliness, that are projected back at you. Japan remains ambiguous. So we play imaginary cricket. What is the sound of one hand clapping? An imaginary cricket ball striking an imaginary cricket bat.
This year X Department Store sent its employees for their summer treat to the top of Mt Fuji. The employees brought back a couple of thousand cans of fresh air from the summit, which the store handed out to the public as an advertising gimmick. ‘Today’s oxygen is sponsored by X Department Store.’ Because if somebody doesn’t sponsor it, there won’t be any? Air is no longer an aspect of Nature (what is Nature? I’ve forgotten), it’s an economic casualty.
We live in a small house on a hillside looking towards central Tokyo. We can see Tokyo Tower, a few feet higher than the Eiffel Tower, and the Kasumigaseki Building—Japan’s first skyscraper, and hero of a recent movie, since the building of such a skyscraper in this earthquake zone is either an act of heroism or of economic hubris—and in either event has the makings of tragedy. Already the Kasumigaseki Building has been followed by a taller World Trade Centre, and an even taller hotel is on the drawing boards. Economic pressures have revised the building codes to transform Tokyo into a skyscraper city, and Breughel’s Tower of Babel is rising in grey concrete on all sides. I watched a TV programme about what will happen after the next great Kanto Earthquake. A blown-up map of part of Tokyo with magnetized toy cars on the streets. One man pushed the toy cars into tailbacks and pile-ups blocking all the roads; but while he was addressing the camera a second man methodically unblocked all the roads and parked the cars in neat lines. Noticing this, the first man wrecked the cars again. But the other man’s hands were already wandering across the board nervously restoring order.
People say what a quiet area this is, where we live, and it is quiet compared with most of Tokyo; but certain noises are pandemic—sirens, loudspeakers, helicopters, piledrivers, traffic. Quiet no longer exists in any absolute sense, only degrees of noise.
But we’re lucky to have a separate house to live in and empty air to look through, though it frequently smells of gas or glue, occasionally of lead or diarrhoea—for housing pressures are so bad that estate agents are combing the city for funerals and temples are selling their graveyards for high-rise apartment blocks.
The cheapest-looking cafe may have an electrically-operated door, colour TV, taped music, intercom to the kitchen—for this is a consumer culture. But the matter of food supplies for these narrow crowded islands is fraught with comedy … and tragedy. The latest Russo-Japanese crab conference was comic enough in its way. The Russians maintained that the succulent King Crab crawls upon the Soviet continental shelf, a sedentary denizen of it. The Japanese insisted that the King Crab leaps long distances using the technique of an Olympic pole vaulter and that when it finally sinks back to the continental shelf, it does so ever so slowly, reluctantly, flapping to and fro like a Japanese paper fan (and therefore, Japanese fishermen, come and get me!). On the tragedy side, over a hundred citizens of the town of Minamata, who ate shellfish that had ingested organic mercury waste, died in agony, and hundreds more went insane, over a period of several years, before anyone could trace the source of the ‘Minamata Disease’—or before anyone chose to trace it … since industry and the economy are more consequential than nature or life, and it’s more important there should be a surplus of consumer goods in the shops than for these consumer goods to be safe or desirable. We had chicken for lunch today, with a 10 per cent likelihood that the chicken had been suffering from leukemia, and while nobody knows (or chooses to know) whether eating leukemia chicken is harmful to humans or not, it isn’t a nice thought while you’re feeding, is it? (Between the Manufacturer and the Consumer Falls the Shadow.)
