M Train

  I hoped to set aside my impatient woes, be of service, and possibly add a few images to adorn my Polaroid rosary. I was glad to be going somewhere else. All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms. I overturned a card from my tarot deck, and then another, as casually as turning over a leaf. Find the truth of your situation. Set out boldly. I covered all three envelopes with leftover Christmas stamps and slipped them in the letterbox on the way to the deli. Then I bought a box of spaghetti, green onions, garlic, and a tin of anchovies, and made myself a meal.

  —

  Café ’Ino looked empty. There were tiny ice formations dripping along the edge of the orange awning. I sat at my table, had my brown toast with olive oil, and opened Camus’s The First Man. I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

  Perhaps in the case of The First Man I was transported more by language than by plot, beguiled by the hand of Camus. But either way, I couldn’t recall a single thing. I was determined to remain present as I read, but was obliged to reread the second sentence of the first paragraph, a spiraling length of words journeying east on the tail of sinewy clouds. I became drowsy—a hypnotic drowsiness that even a cup of steaming black coffee could not compete with. I sat up, shifted to my pending travels, and made a list of things to pack for Tokyo. Jason, the manager of ’Ino, came over to say hello.

  —Are you leaving again? he asked.

  —Yes, how did you know?

  —You’re making lists, he laughed.

  It was the same list I always make; yet I was still compelled to write it. Bee socks, underwear, hoodie, six Electric Lady Studio tee shirts, camera, dungarees, my Ethiopian cross, and balm for joint pain. My great quandary was what coat to wear and which books to bring.

  That night I had a dream about Detective Holder. We were making our way through a mass grave of engines mattresses stripped laptops—another kind of crime scene. He climbed to the top of an appliance hill, scrutinizing the surrounding area. He had his rabbit twitch going and seemed even more restless than within the confines of The Killing. We climbed over the debris surrounding an abandoned airplane hangar that faced a canal where I had a small tugboat. It was about fourteen feet long, made of wood and hammered aluminum. We sat on some packing crates and watched rusting barges moving slowly in the distance. In my dream I knew it was a dream. The colors of the day were like a painting by Turner—rust, golden air, several shades of red. I could almost make out Holder’s thoughts. We sat there in silence and after a time he got up.

  —I have to go, he said.

  I nodded. The canal seemed to widen as the barges drew closer.

  —Strange proportions, he muttered.

  —This is where I live, I said aloud.

  I could hear Holder on his cell and his voice growing fainter.

  —Tying up some loose ends, he was saying.

  —

  For the next few days I searched again for my black coat. A futile effort, though I did find a large canvas bag in the basement filled with old laundry from Michigan—some of Fred’s flannel shirts, slightly musty. I took them upstairs and washed them in the sink. As I rinsed them out I found myself thinking of Katharine Hepburn. She had captivated me as Jo March in George Cukor’s film adaptation of Little Women. Years later when working as a clerk at Scribner’s Bookstore I gathered books for her. She sat at the reading table examining each volume carefully. She wore the late Spencer Tracy’s leather cap, held in place by a green silk headscarf. I stood back and watched as she turned the pages, pondering aloud whether Spence would have liked it. I was a young girl then, not wholly comprehending her ways. I hung Fred’s shirts to dry. In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.

  I had yet to settle on the books I would take. I went back into the basement and located a box of books labeled J—1983, my year of Japanese literature. I took them out one by one. Some were heavily notated; others contained lists of tasks on small slips of graph paper—household needs, packing lists for fishing trips, and a voided check with Fred’s signature. I traced my son’s scribbles on the endpapers of a library copy of Yoshitsune, and reread the first pages of Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun, whose fragile cover was adorned with Transformer stickers.

  I finally chose a few books by Dazai and Akutagawa. Both had inspired me to write and would serve as meaningful companionship for a fourteen-hour flight. But as it turned out I barely read on the plane. Instead, I watched the movie Master and Commander. Captain Jack Aubrey reminded me so much of Fred that I watched it twice. Midflight I began to weep. Just come back, I was thinking. You’ve been gone long enough. Just come back. I will stop traveling; I will wash your clothes. Mercifully, I fell asleep, and when I awoke snow was falling over Tokyo.

  —

  ENTERING THE MODERNIST LOBBY of the Hotel Okura, I had the sensation that my movements were somehow being monitored and that the viewers were hysterical with laughter. I decided to play along and reinforce their amusement by channeling my inner Mr. Magoo, prolonging registration, then shuffling beneath the string of high hexagonal lanterns straight toward the elevator. I went immediately to the Grand Comfort Floor. My room was unromantic but warmly efficient with the special addition of extra oxygen pumped into it. There was a stack of menus on the desk but all were in Japanese. I decided to explore the hotel and its array of restaurants, but I was unable to locate coffee, which was troubling. My body had no sense of time. I didn’t know if it was day or night. Words to the song “Love Potion No. 9” looped as I staggered from floor to floor. I finally ate in a Chinese place that had booths. I had dumplings served in a bamboo box and a pot of jasmine tea. When I returned to my room I hardly had the energy to turn down my blanket. I looked at the small stack of books on the bed table. I reached out for No Longer Human. I vaguely remember sliding my fingers down its spine.

  Credit 12.2

  Ghost robe

  I followed the motion of my pen, dipping into an inkwell and scratching across the surface of the paper before me. In my dream I was focused and prolific, filling page after page in a room that was not my room in a small rented house in a whole other district. There was an engraved plaque by a sliding panel that opened onto a large closet with a rolled mat for sleeping. Though it was written in Japanese characters I was able to decipher most of it: Please be silent for these are the preserved rooms of the esteemed writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. I knelt down and examined the mat, careful not to draw attention to myself. The screens were open and I could hear the rain. When I rose I felt quite tall, as everything was set low to the ground. There was a shimmering wisp of a robe lying across a rattan chair. As I drew close I could see it was weaving itself. Silkworms were repairing small tears and elongating the wide sleeves. The sight of the spinning worms made me nauseous and, steadying myself, I accidently crushed two or three of them. I watched them struggling half alive in my hand as tiny strands of liquefied silk spread across my palm.

  I awoke groping for the water tumbler, spilling its contents. I suppose I wanted to wash off the unfortunate wriggling half-worms. My fingers found my notebook and I sat up abruptly and searched for what I had written, but it seemed I had added nothing, not a single word. I got up and took a bottle of mineral water from the minibar and opened the drapes. Night snow. The sight of it provoked a deep sense of estrange
ment. Though from what was hard to tell. There was a kettle in my room, so I prepared tea and ate some biscuits I had pocketed in the airport lounge. Soon the sun would rise.

  I sat at the portable metal desk before my open notebook, straining to get something down. On the whole I thought more than I wrote, wishing I could just transmit straightaway to the page. When I was young I had the notion to think and write simultaneously, but I could never keep up with myself. I gave up the pursuit and I wrote in my head as I sat with my dog by a secret stream incandescent with rainbows, a mix of sun and petrol, skimming the water like weightless Merbabies with iridescent wings.

  The morning was still overcast but the snowfall had lightened. I wondered if extra oxygen was really being pumped into the air and whether it escaped whenever I opened the door. Down below crossing the parking lot was a procession of girls in elaborate kimonos with long swinging sleeves. It was Coming of Age Day, a scene of flurrying innocence. Poor little feet! I shivered as they trod through the snow in their zori sandals, yet their body language suggested squeals of laughter. Half-formed prayers like streamers found their mark and trailed the hems of their colorful kimonos. I watched until they disappeared around a bend into the arms of an enveloping mist.

  I returned to my station and gazed at my notebook. I was determined to produce something despite an inescapable lassitude, no doubt due to the deeper effect of travel. I could not resist closing my eyes for just a moment and was instantaneously greeted with an expanding lattice that shook soundly, blanketing the edge of an impeccable maze with a torrent of petals. Horizontal clouds formed above a distant mountain: the floating lips of Lee Miller. Not now, I said half aloud, for I was not about to get lost in some surreal labyrinth. I was not thinking about mazes and muses. I was thinking about writers.

  —

  After our son was born Fred and I stayed close to home. We often went to the library, checked out stacks of books and read through the night. Fred was fixated on every aspect of aviation and I was immersed in Japanese literature. Rapt in the atmosphere of certain writers I converted the small storage room, adjacent to our bedroom, into my own. I bought yards of black felt and covered the floor and baseboards. I had an iron teapot and a hot plate and four orange crates for my books, that Fred painted black. I sat cross-legged on the black-felt-covered floor before a long, low table. On winter mornings the view outside the window seemed drained of color with slim trees bending in the white wind. I wrote in that room until our son came of age and then it became his room. After that I wrote in the kitchen.

  Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Osamu Dazai wrote the books that drove me to such wondrous distraction, the same books that are now on the bed table. I was thinking of them. They came to me in Michigan and I have brought them back to Japan. Both writers took their own lives. Akutagawa, fearing he had inherited his mother’s madness, ingested a fatal dose of Veronal and then curled up in his mat next to his wife and son as they slept. The younger Dazai, a devoted acolyte, seemed to take on the hair shirt of the master, failing at multiple suicide attempts before drowning himself, along with a companion, in the muddied, rain-swollen Tamagawa Canal.

  Akutagawa intrinsically damned and Dazai damning himself. At first I had it in mind to write something of them both. In my dream I had sat at the writing table of Akutagawa, but I hesitated to disturb his peace. Dazai was another story. His spirit seemed to be everywhere, like a haunted jumping bean. Unhappy man, I thought, and then chose him as my subject.

  Deeply concentrating, I attempted to channel the writer. But I could not keep up with my thoughts, as they were swifter than my pencil and wrote nothing. Relax, I told myself, you have chosen your subject or your subject has chosen you, he will come. The atmosphere surrounding me was both animated and contained. I felt a growing impatience coupled with an underlying anxiety that I attributed to a lack of coffee. I looked over my shoulder as if expecting a visitor.

  —What is nothing? I impetuously asked.

  —It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.

  I was suddenly hungry but had no desire to leave my room. Nonetheless I went back down to the Chinese restaurant and pointed to a picture of what I wanted on the menu. I had shrimp balls and steamed cabbage dumplings wrapped in leaves in a bamboo basket. I drew a likeness of Dazai on the napkin, exaggerating his unruly hair atop a face at once handsome and comic. It occurred to me that both writers shared this charming characteristic, hair that stood on end. I paid my check and got back into the elevator. My sector of the hotel seemed inexplicably empty.

  Sundown, dawn, full night, my body had no sense of time and I decided to accept it and proceed Fred’s way. Following no hands. Within a week I would be in the time zone of Ace and Dice, but these days were entirely my own with no design other than the hope of filling a few pages with something of worth. I crawled under the covers to read but passed out in the middle of Hell Screen and missed the balance of the afternoon and sunset transitioning into evening. When I awoke it was too late to dine, so I grabbed some snacks from the minibar—a bag of fish-shaped crackers dusted with wasabi powder, an oversized Snickers bar, and a jar of blanched almonds. Dinner downed with ginger ale. I laid out some clothes and showered, then decided to go out, if only to walk around the parking lot. Covering my damp hair with a watch cap, I went out and followed the path the young girls had taken. There were steps carved into a small hill that seemed to lead nowhere.

  Unconsciously I had already developed some semblance of routine. I read, sat before the metal desk, ate Chinese food, and retraced my own footsteps in the night snow. I attempted to quell any recurring agitation with a repetitive exercise: writing the name Osamu Dazai over and over, nearly a hundred times. Unfortunately, the page spelling out the name of the writer amounted to nothing. My regimen slipped into a pointless web of haphazard calligraphy.

  Yet somehow I was drawing closer to my subject—Dazai the dazed one, a stumblebum, an aristocratic tramp. I could see the spikes of his unruly hair and feel the energy of his accursed remorse. I got up, boiled a pot of water, drank some powdered tea, and stepped into a cloud of well-being. Closing my journal I placed several sheets of hotel stationery before me. Taking long, slow breaths I emptied myself and began again.

  —

  The young leaves did not fall from the trees but clung desperately throughout winter. Even as the wind whistled, to the astonishment of everyone they had the audacity to remain green. The writer was unmoved. The elders regarded him with disgust, to them he is a wobbling poet on the brink. In turn he regarded them with contempt, imagining himself an elegant surfer riding the crest, never crashing.

  The ruling class, he shouts, the ruling class.

  He wakes in pools of sweat, his shirt stiff with salt. The tuberculosis he has carried since youth has calcified as tiny seeds—minute black sesame liberally seasoning his lung. A bout of drink sets him off: strange women, strange beds, a horrid cough spraying kaleidoscopic stains across foreign sheets.

  I could not help it, he cries. The well begs for the lips of the drunkard. Drink me drink me, it calls. Insistent bells are tolling. A litany of He.

  His sinewy arms tremble beneath billowing sleeves. He bends over his low table composing small suicide notes that somehow become something else entirely. Slowing his blood, the beating of his heart, with the forbearance of a fasting scribe he writes what has to be written, conscious of the movement of his wrist as words spread across the surface of the paper like an ancient magic spell. He savors his one joy, a cold pint of miruku that moves through his system like a transfusion of milky corpuscles.

  The sudden brightness of dawn startles him. He staggers into the garden; bright blooms stick out their fiery tongues, sinister oleanders of the red queen. When did the flowers become so sinister? He tries to remember when it all went wrong. How the threads of his life unraveled like winding linen from the unbound feet of a fallen consort.

  He is overcome with the disease of love, the drunkenness
of generations past. When are we ourselves, he wonders, trudging through the snow-covered banks, his coat illuminated by moonlight. Long pelts, lined heavy silk the color of aged parchment, with the words Eat or Die written in his own distinct hand on the sleeves, vertically on the back and beneath the collar running down his left side over his heart. Eat or Die. Eat or Die. Eat or Die.

  —

  I paused, wishing I could hold such a coat in my hands, and realized the hotel phone was ringing. It was Dice calling on behalf of Ace.

  —The phone rang many times. Have we disturbed you?

  —No, no, I am happy to hear from you. I’ve been writing something for Osamu Dazai, I said.

  —Then you will be happy with our itinerary.

  —I am ready. What first?

  —Ace has booked dinner at Mifune, then we can plan for tomorrow.

  —I will meet you in the lobby in one hour.

  I was delighted by the choice of Mifune, a sentimental favorite, themed on the life of the great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. Most likely, much sake would be consumed and perhaps a special soba dish prepared for me. My solitude could not have been severed in a more fortuitous way. I quickly straightened my things, slipped an aspirin into my pocket, and reunited with Ace and Dice. Just as I supposed, the sake flowed. Drenched in the atmosphere of a Kurosawa film, we immediately picked up the thread of a year ago—graves, temples, and forests in the snow.

  —

  The next morning, they picked me up in Ace’s two-tone Fiat resembling a red-and-white saddle shoe. We drove around looking for coffee. I was so happy to finally have some that Ace had them fill a small thermos for later.

  —Didn’t you know, asked Dice, that in the renovated annex of the Okura they serve a full American breakfast?