Part V, or, I Am the Literary Angel of Death

Before I continue relating my adventures over here, I feel compelled to tell you all of my inextricable involvement in literary deaths. Last summer, in the US and in Oxford, I bought a bucketload of English-language books to tide me over during what I (it turns out correctly) anticipated might be many empty hours in Japan. One of those books was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, aggressively advertised to me by two generations of American visiting students. Then on September 12 of that very same summer, Wallace de-mapped himself (as he would no doubt have put it).

Well I of course thought nothing of it and continued to live life much as I had before. But four days ago the New York Times front page greeted me with the news that John Updike had died of lung cancer. This would not have caused any particular emotion for me, had I not also bought a copy of Updike's seminal Rabbit, Run last summer. The message, finally, was clear: the authors whose books I had bought last summer (those who were still alive, anyway) were dropping like flies. My buying spree was slowing turning into a protracted killing spree. If Cormac McCarthy (aged 75), Don DeLillo (72), Thomas Pynchon (71), Salman Rushdie (61) or Michael Chabon (45) are reading this now, I can only urge them to finalize their wills, because they won't be able to stave off the inevitable.

On that note let's look at what I did with myself when I wasn't toiling away at the elementary school. Despite my new implacable working hours (8 to 4:30, and sometimes later because on Wednesdays there is a general meeting of all the teachers which I must attend despite the fact that it is entirely in Japanese and—from what I can tell—no use whatsoever; I will have more complaints about Japanese work and management styles), it goes without saying that my little escapades with Veep and Canett continued. Two days after my introduction at the elementary school (October 30th), I was summoned to the junior high school to make another completely pointless speech at the students' morning assembly there. They sang the school song with noticeably less gusto than the elementary school kids.

After that I was shown around the school, and then we all went back to the vice-principal's headquarters to chillax with some piping hot green tea, "all" being Veep and Canett and assorted people from the junior high and high school. One of these, whom we shall call Stanley, was an English teacher at the high school and had I think the best English I've encountered among employees of the King Bear empire. He also wore a tie covered in the names of various books of the Bible, which would have tended to indicate that he was one of Japan's one or two million Christians, although in this country it could just as well have been worn purely for the roman characters on it.

Over tea I'm pretty sure we were treated to a rendition of Canett's Trip to America, a sort of chanson de geste whose performance admits no variation and which is always greeted with great joy and anticipation by all people present. It begins with Canett telling us that he was about thirty when he first went to the United States, on a Fulbright Scholarship—"very difficult" to get, Canett is proud to remind us. In those days, it took fourteen days to get from Yokohama to San Francisco, by boat! He studied biochemistry at the University of Oregon—despite his mastery of the English language, which he teaches, he is in fact trained as a biochemist. Oh, Oregon! (And here occasionally I find myself obliged to admit that I have never been to Oregon.) But during his stay in America, Canett was fortunate enough to visit no fewer than eighteen states! Yes, the US is a very large country. Japan, of course, is much smaller, but it has much beautiful natural scenery. Japan—and this is inevitably the punchline, the climax of the story—has four seasons. There is a certain group of Japanese people who are unable to realize that, far from being an exclusively Japanese phenomenon, four seasons are noticeable throughout much of the globe's temperate latitudes. I would love to have gotten to see young, fresh-faced, Fulbright-Scholar Canett, just off the steamer, running around 1950s Eugene, OR, earnestly explaining to everyone that Japan has four seasons (!!!!!!!!).

Anyway, that was followed by the usual protracted devious plotting by Veep and Canett in Japanese, and finally I was returned to the elementary school.

That weekend I had a nice little stroll through the "skyscraper district" of Shinjuku, one of the few guidebook-approved areas of Tokyo I hadn't already visited on my previous visit. It's not a particularly exciting part of Tokyo, with its wide, almost empty avenues, but there are a few buildings there where you can get a good view of the city for absolutely free. One of these is the terrifying Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which my guidebook describes as "a computer-chip version of the great cathedrals of Europe." You may judge for yourself:


This is also the area of Tokyo where the Park Hyatt Hotel, made famous by the movie Lost in Translation, is located. I had a walk down there but it didn't look familiar to me at all. This may have been because the hotel itself only occupies the top floors of the skyscraper in which it's located, and I didn't have the courage to take the elevator up. (The hotel bar where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson bond beautifully really exists and has fantastic views and is open to the public, but I am still waiting for someone willing to fork over tons of money for one drink to come with me, although maybe one day I'll go by myself and hope someone as ruvry as Scarlett Johansson is striken by my drunken deadpan charm.) On the ground floor, though, there was an electric Yamaha piano being grandly showcased, but no-one was paying any attention to it. Seeing this poor little piano playing sadly to itself was heart-rending, especially since it was playing some hilariously crappy power ballad that unfortunately I can't remember now. By the time I got my camera out, the piano had already started on the outro. Here is my completely uninteresting video of this piano:

Actually my computer won't upload my Sad Piano video, which is probably for the better, and which means that you won't be getting any videos until I can figure out how to do this. Do any of you technologically savvy people know a program that allows me to convert videos into different formats?

The next weekend, my iPhoto tells me I went to Omotesando, the avenue often called Tokyo's Champs Élysées—mostly because it is lined with high-end brand boutiques, and not because it runs from a victory arch to an ancient Egyptian obelisk, though. There, I had Japanese desserty-type things that looked like this:


They're actually much better than they look.

Then my friends and I walked to the end of the avenue, which leads to Yoyogi Park. There we saw youngish Japanese men in leather jackets and greased-back hair and Japanese women in floral skirts dancing to rockabilly music. I have a video of this too, but in its current absence here is a picture:


I am clearly a terrible photographer. Anyway, I have no idea why these people were doing this, but they are a fairly regular sight on weekends there. To indulge in an absolute cliché, Japan is a land of contrasts: on the one hand, their favorite proverb is "the nail that sticks out will be hammered down", and on the other they do things like this in public, apparently fairly indifferent to attracting an audience or not.

Later that evening I was invited to dinner by the family of one of my RA-ee friends, at a great seafood restaurant where I was able to eat freshly chopped-up octopus—so freshly chopped, in fact, that the tentacles were still writhing when I picked them up with my chopsticks. This is the sort of thing that makes traveling worthwhile, although I am still waiting to find a place where I can do this. My friend's father is also fairly typical of Japanese salarymen in that he likes to pound the drinks when he's off work (this is transparently indicative of existential despair), so I am treated to a couple of beers, then some sake, then another type of sake, then a couple of types of shochu, which is Japan's distilled alcohol (usually about 25% alcohol). That night he then took us to a wine bar and we proceeded to put away a couple of bottles of wine on top of that.

This brings us to the following Wednesday, November 12th (you can do your own calculations if you don't believe me), the day of the elementary school concert, an all-day cutefest that us teachers were asked to attend. Each class performed a song in Japanese followed by a song in English, and I have on my computer a video of class 1-3 doing Old MacDonald, complete with animal gestures, but due to technical difficulties blah blah blah. In lieu, here is a picture of one class regaling the audience with a recorder instrumental interlude:


Awwwwwww!

The concert, by the way, started with a standing rendition of the school song by all people present, and then spectacularly closed with a collective interpretation of a song written, in English, by Veep herself, entitled "See You Tomorrow". Since this song is beyond parody, I shall simply copy the words for you here:

Thank you Friends
Thank you for your Lovely Smiles
Thank you Teachers
Thank you for your help
Thank you for our school.

Thank you my Family
Thank you for your Loving eyes
Thank you for
the blessing of this world
Thank you for everything

Thanks every one
Thanks for being with me
See you Tomorrow (bis)
Thanks for Everything in this world

In case you were wondering, the melody sounds like the bored improvisation, the musical doodle of a five-year-old with like two months' worth of piano lessons.

Apparently this was not the first time Veep composed for a school event: apparently last year she wrote a "lunch song" which made quite an impression on my English-speaking colleagues.

After the concert was over, Veep (who of course attended; I don't know what she does all day besides hang around her father's various campuses and attend events) asked me whether I could come to such-and-such station that very evening. I said okay, but I was planning to meet someone at 9 that evening (this was true), so I would have to be back before then, and what exactly was I going to be doing at this station? Now Veep clearly understood my question, but panic started to gleam in her amphibious eyes, and after about a minute of verbal flailing she told me I didn't have to come to the station after all.　おかしい (okashii, weird), as the Japanese might say. But in any case, this demonstrated that it would be possible for me to get out of Veep activities if they were suggested to me without much notice.

Before returning to the school after the end of the concert (this was a Wednesday, after all, so there would be a Japanese-language meeting), King Bear, who was there at least for the end of the concert, grabbed hold of several of us native English teachers, as well as of the Cat, and dragged us to the coffee shop of the place where the concert had been held, and all but forced us to get some tea and cake to eat (he paid for it all). Then, he subjected us all to a free-flowing meditation on various subjects, including education, hospitality, and religion, all translated for us by the Cat, who also added a sarcastic running commentary (with remarks like "This makes no sense, but I think what he's trying to say is…"). Right under poor King Bear's non-Anglophone nose! Talk about a dysfunctional professional relationship. This lasted about an hour.

That weekend, I went to Akihabara, the area of Tokyo famous for its electronics stores, and also for being the favorite district of Tokyo's manga-obsessed nerds who walk around dressed as their favorite cartoon character. This was a bit of a disappointment, though, because I didn't get to see any of these costumed weirdos. Maybe I came at the wrong time, I don't know. What I did see were another instutition to cater to these colorful eccentrics: maid cafés. Maid cafés are just like regular cafés, except more expensive and staffed by young women all dressed in French maid outfits. The idea is that the poor, lovelorn nerd can come to these cafés and talk to real-life females, dressed as maids for added… servility? While I was in Akihabara, many maids handed out fliers extolling the virtues of their maid café (one of the most striking things about walking around a Japanese city is that people are constantly trying to shove fliers into your hands, screaming at the top of their voices), and I fully intend to visit one as soon as someone sympathetically-minded comes to visit me. I am told there are also butler cafés in Tokyo—the equivalent for women, so I assume these are not the dignified, gray-haired butlers of European lore. Also, the Japanese word for butler (執事, shitsuji) sounds a lot like the word for sheep (羊, hitsuji), which I think is pretty funny.

Also in Akihabara, I spotted a couple of examples of Franponais, which is Engrish but where French is the language that is being mangled beyond recognition. Those that find Engrish a little bit too mainstream—passé, if you will—will find Franponais fresh and full of life. This is because it is not as widespread as Engrish, and because the Japanese speak French even less well than they speak English and so make almost no effort to get the language right. Here are a couple of examples:


I think this PIA place is just a video game arcade, so I have no idea why they decided to jazz themselves up with a little bit of Franponais, which is usually reserved for perceived high-class stuff, like cakes. For instance, I also saw someone carrying a bag with the following slogan: "Nous offrons avec corps et âme, un cadeau de satisfaction." I don't remember where the bag was coming from, but I think that's just beautiful.

That Saturday I also attended yet another school festival, although this time briefly, just for lunch (which, surprisingly enough, consisted of fried noodles and takoyaki, little fried doughballs with a little octopus inside them—they're pretty good!). Veep was there, as were Canett and Stanley, who was once again wearing his hello-I-am-a-Christian tie. Veep, I should have mentioned, not only invariably wears a Winnie-the-Pooh pendant around her neck (quite often paired with a smaller, silver bear pendant), but also frequently has one or two full-sized teddy bears pinned to her lapels. It looks just as ridiculous as you might imagine. I'm surprised she doesn't keel over forwards with all of that bear weight attached to her.

The purpose of my attending the festival was so I could be photographed, of course, but also so Veep could tell me (through the translation offices of Stanley) that that very Monday (November 17th), after school, I would have to take the train into Tokyo with Stanley and attend a special high-class event organized by King Bear, where various professors of the school were going to be honored. That's as much information as I was able to gather at the time. The description of this event gets a separate post because I wrote it for therapeutic reasons as soon as I got back home after it.

Still that weekend—which was clearly my busiest weekend ever—I went to a rickety little old amusement park right near Senso-ji, Tokyo's biggest Buddhist temple and a big tourist attraction here. This was fun and distinctly brought to mind the St Giles Fair, for all you Oxonians out there. There were some good rides, including one where you are suddenly dropped from a great height, which I must have ridden about five times (since the weather was pretty bad, the place was not very crowded). Here are a couple of pictures, varying in quality, taken from rides, obviously:


Isn't that nice? There was also a ride called Bikkuri House (which means "Surprise House"—there's also a chain of restaurants here called Bikkuri Donkey), the principle of which was that you sat down on a bench and then the walls, floor and ceiling of the "house" started to turn, so that you had the impression that it was actually you being turned upside down. For some reason this ride made me horribly nauseated, even though it was clearly the kiddie ride of the amusement park. On the plus side, I was briefly able to convince a little Japanese boy who was riding with us that I was in fact a Japanese person—basically by saying "I am a Japanese person" to him. The gullibility of youth!

The following weekend I went to the Edo-Tokyo museum with one of my friends who's a bit of a history fanatic. There was a very nice exhibition of Japanese woodblocks, including some by Hokusai, and also the permanent exhibition which is devoted to the history of the city of Tokyo. Here I am lording it over the riffraff in my rickshaw, eyes aglow with the fires of Hell, apparently:


And I think I'll stop there for now. Next time, the month of December.