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Namegawa Island is a big failed bird theme park, one that up until fairly recently held its own against the twin Disneys standing astride the Chiba peninsula, past which any bird-aficionados would have to run the gauntlet to reach it. It sits perched on a precarious jag of forested coastline, completely blockaded from the mainland by a wide swath of mountains stretching from edge to edge, accessible only through tunnels that are now thoroughly gated and barbed.
“She’s a big girl,” said his father, but Tarragon didn’t understand. He saw his father’s face leaning over him, smiling, and he smiled back. “They say, when she dances, the earth quakes for miles around.” Tarragon made googling noises. Then he saw Alegria. He saw her hand, batting and patting at the whuffs of cloud in the sky. He thought it was his father’s hand, but when he reached out to touch it, he couldn’t. So he watched it. He watched it balling up clouds, shaping them into elephants, stringing them across the sky. As they drew closer he watched the hand stretch up into an arm, then into a shoulder, then into a neck, and then he saw the hair. He clapped his hands in his blankets. He wrinkled his toes like monkey feet with happiness. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. It was like the sun, a brilliant spray of golden shine effervescing around a giant weathered face. He saw the great chain of stolen wagons and rooftops across her naked chest, braided together in bent metal and warped oak, a giant necklace barely covering her vast pendulous breasts. He watched as she moved, shingles and chocks of wood falling free, rattling down her great earthen belly, wide as the Helakios amphitheatre and tanned as brown as the dirt, to rest in the folds of her thick sailcloth skirt. He saw her vast haunches, the cliff-top buckled beneath her feet, the behemoth staff be her side. Most of all though, he saw her hair. He watched it for as long as he could. When they passed out of sight, he cried quietly into his blanket, and didn’t know why. Image from here.
Lost Japan was first published in 1993 in Japanese, a collection of biographical shorts concerning the author’s life in Japan. It won the prestigious Shincho Gakugei literature award in 1994, the first time for a foreigner. In 1996 it came out in English from lonely planet, and was met with positive criticism, with numerous reviewers falling over themselves to espouse Kerr’s view of Japan as ‘unique’ and ‘brilliantly informed’. Kerr first came to Japan in 1964 as the son of a US Navy family, and has been back and forth numerous times, living here for extended periods, buying a house in a remote valley, getting involved in cultural teachings, kabuki, calligraphy, and art collecting. The book is a series of vignettes about all these various aspects of Kerr’s life, with lavish detail poured upon the art of kabuki, interesting facts shared about the thatching of traditional Japanese houses, and an insider’s guide to the world of Asian art dealers. Throughout are the seeds of what will become the latter book ‘Dogs and Demons’, as he first considers the meaning of Japan’s concreted hillsides, the slow asphyxiation of kabuki under the weight of its own pomp and circumstance, and the ugly unorganized power line-striped morass of big cities like Tokyo. These are the things destroying the Japan that he loves.
And now, in the past several months, samsdot have plucked up two of my stories, both of which got published elsewhere in the 12+ months since submission, and published them in their print zines despite withdrawal emails I sent to them. One was Caterpillar Man in their April 2009 edition of ‘Shelter of Daylight’, and the other now. I’m not complaining though. Now I have three print credits, wazaaaa! If you’d like to buy a copy of Aoiffe’s Kiss, do it right here. I don’t get any cashola from it though, I was paid with a contributor’s copy. Unfortunately I didn’t make the front page There’s been a lot of haikyoing action happening round the Kanto plain recently, with some new faces (to me) and new info on old locations- here’s the round-up: Tokyo Times- Lee’s been busy since I last updated here, going to the Underground Vault I found at Yamanakako lake and solving its mystery with the revelation that it was a Sanyo Securities hide-away. He managed to identify one of the vault symbols in the banner of a Sanyo magazine left lying around- keen eyes! Though I think he told me it wasn’t actually him that spotted it. Very honest! After that, he went to a recently abandoned Love Hotel- still hoping to hear the location of it from him Swifty- A chap called Edmund Yeo headed with some of his friends out to see the Hotel Royale and Sun Hills Car Park (these links to my posts). They reported, as others have recently, that the Hotel Royale is impossible to get access to. Sun Hills was fine though. He added some details on about Sun Hills, which either he Googled (more skilled than me) or read about it in a haikyo book I don’t have: “[Sun Hills is] a ‘cursed’ hotel that was recently demolished. Its tale was a sad and tragic one. A hotel guest set the place on fire to kill himself and took down parts of the hotel. The owners, debt-ridden, and desperate by the damage caused, hung themselves in the hotel as well.” Dark. I hadn’t known that when we were there. Edmund is also a short film director with some success- kudos. Cousin Macho- Tom sent me the email that let me know about Swifty above, and also his own exploration of the Toyo Bowl in Kanagawa recently. He’s got his photos on Flickr. Misuterareta- This was the first haikyo trip I went on with someone I didn’t really know. Paul and I hooked up over the net, and he suggested a shared haikyo. It was great cos he brought a location to the table I knew nothing of, and likewise did I. We had a good time chatting about the hobby on the long drive into Chiba- but you can read all about that on my post. Together we hit up the Namegawa Island Theme Park, I can’t even remember who tipped me off to it, and to the Yui Grand Love Hotel that Paul’s family tipped him off to. The Yui Grand Love Hotel is an abandonment with a more sordid past than usual, if urban legend is to be believed. According to the story, a gang of bosozoku riders (noisy yakuza-ish motorcyclists) kidnapped a schoolgirl into one of its rooms, where they abused and killed her. I’ve no idea if that is true, but stories of her haunting of the place are apparently so rife that people actually queue up outside at night to go into the room where she died, to hear her ghostly wails. All in very poor taste, and again I’ve no idea if there’s any truth to it, it sounds like the kind of thing another haikyo writer might invent to jazz up an otherwise fairly normal location.
It was a bright spring morning when Mandragora came upon the sweet little cottage with the two dead bodies hanging from its eaves. “What’s all this then?” he asked his skulls, rattling out behind him on their 100 leather tethers. “Looks like a violation,” they called, bobbing and jostling to see. “A clear violation. Bodies from the eaves, what else could that be?” Mandragora walked over and studied the bodies. One was a man and he had his skin intact, though one of his legs was gone, and the other was a woman but it wasn’t easy to tell because all her skin had been removed. Mandragora poked the man’s blotchy pink flesh. “Was I not clear last time? I posted the laws all over.” “Yes yes,” nodded the skulls, “you were very clear. No cannibals and no human-skinning.”
Image from here.
The book begins with Booth headed for Tsugaru, a little town at the ‘North Pole’ of Honshu in Aomori prefecture, tramping in the footsteps of a 1944 journey made by the poet Osamu Dazai, for whom it was a return to the land of his childhood. As ever, Booth is beset by rain and heavy winds as he ploughs up narrow valleys towards the Tsugaru Straits. He admires little Buddhist statues, faces worn away by long years of protecting the roadside, at the same time as he dispassionately recounts the details of huge newly constructed bridges, roads, and the exorbitant undersea tunnel project to connect Honshu to Hokkaido beneath the Tsugaru Straits. The legend-tripping concept allows for a deeper and fuller understanding of the place than otherwise possible. We see the land through not only Booth’s eyes, but also through those of his predecessor. For Dazai, his travels in Tsugaru and the resultant book formed the apex of a career and life filled with drunken histrionics, imprisonment, and bed-ridden sickness, in search of a nursemaid he felt he was in love with.
The Raw Shark Texts is an experimental idea of a story in book form. The raw ingredients encompass just about every sizzling modern experiment of a story that preceded it: a pinch of Fight Club, two sprigs of the Matrix finely chopped, three cupfuls of House of Leaves, a smattering of Cryptonomicon, a generous dose (at least 6oz) of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind infused with essence of Memento, all whirl-chopped in a blender, salted with textual decoration, baked in a easter-egg kiln and served up à la mode. What am I talking about? Well, I’m talking about a book that wants to be more than it is is, or more than you think it is, an ambitious Rorschach Test of a book that wants to discern something about its reader even as its reader discerns the truth (?) about it. We begin in media res. Our hero Eric Sanderson spends a few pages waking up; flutter-rolling, bang-rattling, and coughing coughing coughing. When he’s awake, he realizes he doesn’t know who he is. A cryptic note from ‘the First Eric Sanderson’ sets him off on a rollicking quest to find out his own identity, leading him deeper into the world of slipstream metaphor, where conceptual fish live in the tidal wash of informational flow, nibbling away at words, ideas, and in particular those old style letter-S’s that were written like this: ∫. The BE labs haikyo in Shizuoka is mis-representing itself somewhat by posing as a lab; at best it was a spa-resort for people who worked at a lab, somewhere far off and long ago. It sits in the crook of some distinctly un-Japanese rolling hills, looking rather like a bunker with its zig-zag concrete front-eave and fence-wires on the flat-slab roof.
(Advisory- this is a graphic story, X-rated really.) Mad Noah can’t give me what I want. No. Mad Noah comes to me at night and between his whisperings of a world gone mad he slips his fingers between my thighs, and while he tells the story of the one eyed fox that learnt to fly above the second flood, he strokes me, and I do what? This proud woman, tall, strong, I do what to this little man above me? I do nothing to stop him at all. Image from here. The Kabuki-za is a fancy-pants theater in Ginza for the screening of Kabuki- a highly stylized and traditional (read ‘boring to most people’) form of storied stage performance. The Kabuki-za is famous as the principal theater for this kind of show in Tokyo- with a long and varied history dating all the way back to 1924.
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The first time Tarragon Ray saw the giant Alegria, he was a baby. He was lying in his father’s arms, staring goggle-eyed up at the clouds and the big blue sky. He could hear the comforting crack of his father’s whip, and the low braying of their humpback pony as it strained against its hauliers. He could feel the joggle of their Sheckler’s wagon over the ramshackle red dust road, and the gentle motion of his father around him.
Lost Japan is an ode to an idealized, forgotten, and headily cultural past, written by an inveterate literati to whom pure artistic beauty is one of the loftiest goals imaginable. In this book we see the gentle beginnings of bugbears for the author that in time would evolve into the strident arguments of his masterwork- ‘Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan’. But where that book is fiercely angry and relevant, this one is reverent, gushing, and more than a little soft around the edges.
. I’m not a big enough name I suppose.
(Lee….?)
Looking for the Lost is one man’s swansong for the ancient vestiges of rural Japan, a multi-threaded tramp through history and culture in search of something perhaps impossible to find. Our narrator Alan Booth rambles on foot through some of the remotest hills and valleys in the country, legend-tripping the paths taken by various historical figures. He is invariably exhausted, blistered, and sodden with rain, mocked by school-children and construction workers, set upon by alternatingly fierce and friendly mama-sans, in whose company he is witty, gently drunk, erudite, and hailed as a bit of a celebrity in the karaoke booth.
