ASAKUSA

Our apartment is just across the river, but despite our having a map its location eludes the taxi driver, who turns his meter off and drives around asking directions. Two phone calls to Liina don’t seem to bring us any closer to the elusive apartment, until she rings us and says she’s just across the road - and so she is, six feet tall if she’s an inch, and gorgeous. Trying to banish the tidal wave of inferior feeling that crashes over me is useless; I surrender, letting myself get good and soaked. We press some extra yen on the white-haired driver, who is reluctant to take it but eventually accepts with a bow; then Stu, Liina and I walk the short distance to the apartment, which is on the fourth floor of a small building and every bit as tiny as its advertisement promised. But it does have two rooms, and it’s much cheaper than a hotel. Liina, or Galadriel as I am starting to think of her, tells us that the bedding will be brought around in an hour and the washing machine, microwave and TV will arrive on Monday, then departs in a shower of twinkling stars, leaving us mortals to decipher the Japanese aircon remotes and hot water controls.

We wait for the bedding to come, then sleep, then go and buy groceries. Having rested and fed, we check out what’s on in Asakusa. The Asakusa Samba Carnival is on, it turns out; but in the afternoon, and it’s already 6pm, so we think we’ve probably missed it, and we have. But never mind; we do see a couple of eye-popping sequinned costumes swishing by in the crowd near Sensoji, the famous temple west of the river, where the carnival was held (because Buddhist temples and samba go together like…um, Buddhist temples and Samba?). And of course we saw the temple itself, and the Nakamise shopping arcade (specialities were rice crackers and souvenirs) leading up to it from the Kaminarimon (Thunder Gate). I have a thing for paper lanterns, so the giant one hanging over the gate appealed to me very much:

The next gate:

The temple - there’s supposed to be a statue of Kannon (Kuan Yin) in here, but you can’t go inside, so no one knows if it’s there, making it a sort of Schrodinger’s goddess:

A restaurant sign in a street near the temple:

Closing time - decorated doors in the Nakamise arcade:

Walking back across the bridge we heard music on the other side and wondered if we hadn’t missed the carnival after all. The music was coming from the direction of this building, whose decoration might or might not actually be a giant golden sperm (Jizzilla!) - Stu took these pictures catching the effects of car lights on the bridge:

The music turned out to be coming from an open air stage which was occupied not by samba dancers but by middle-aged women in kimono leading a crowd of ordinary people, of all ages, in both traditional and modern dress (we saw quite a few young women, not geisha, out and about in kimono, and a handful of men in old-style clothing) in a circular dance, accompanied by musicians in skimpy white costumes, with kids taking turns to beat the drum.

(As I write this, the peace of this quiet neighbourhood is being disturbed by wankers in a black van broadcasting ultra right-wing propaganda out of a loudspeaker. They drive around here every day. Why they do it here, where there’s no one about, I have no idea. Maybe they’ve been lost in Asakusa for years and just keep driving in circles, dutifully making noise, too embarrassed to ask for directions. In any case, I hope the Chinese find them, kill them and eat them.)

Anyway, back to the other night… pictures of the dancing and some more pretty lanterns that were strung along the river and the plaza where the stage was set up:

24-o8-2007

Off to Japan! My still rudimentary Thai is now good enough to tell the friendly security guard outside our building where we’re going, when, and for how long. It’s only six hours from Bangkok. The plane (Singapore Airlines) leaves at 11 pm, so of course they keep us up till 1 am to feed us. As usual SA is good. The food is fine, the cutlery is all metal, and if I want to stay up all night playing games on the seat-back screen I can, but once the dishes are cleared away and the cabin lights are turned off Stu and I make as comfy a nest as we can in our window seats and catch some sleep.

When we arrive at Narita we rent mobile phones. Stu handles this. The people at the rental counters speak excellent English (it’s probably a prerequisite for the job). This won’t last as we get into the city, I know. Although English is compulsory in Japanese high schools, until recently only the written language was taught, with the result that a Japanese person who reads English fairly well may be unable to speak it.

We catch the train to Ueno station, a ride which reminds me that Tokyo is not a beautiful city. Earthquakes, the regular fires that used to burn through the city in the days when it was made of wood, and fire bombing in World War Two all have played a part in ensuring an almost zero survival of old Edo. What stands in its place is an immense amount of what Anthony Powell would have called “experiments in architectural insignificance”: cinderblock apartment buildings and no-frills houses painted off-white, mushroom and grey. It’s all less offensive, however, if perhaps less interesting, than the suburban drive from Melbourne’s airport through the crowded paddocks of mansions, Mc and otherwise, in mock-Tudor, mock-Federation, mock-Palladian, mock-Acropolis, mock-Rocky Horror and so on. But I don’t have the almost supernatural sense that I had on my first disembarkation in Bangkok of being welcome here. There are no dogs roaming about, and certainly no elephants; no wats glittering like funhouses, no kooky postmodern skyscrapers with little pavilions and domes on top that look like they came out of Christmas crackers, no places where the plant kingdom appears to be tearing down fragile concrete before your eyes, no trees with cummerbunds of coloured scarves. The buildings look clean, the streets look quiet; there’s a sense of shut doors, and anything but a sense that you, a foreigner, will be just one oddity among many. In fact, the lack of any obvious sort of oddity makes me feel a little tense.

At Ueno I call our Estonian estate agent, Liina, who suggests we get a taxi rather than wrangle with our cases on the subway. The taxi driver is a lovely elderly man (as the first face of Japan we meet outside the airport, no one could have been more assuring that behind the conformity and closed-facedness of a superficial impression of Japan are people as nice as you’ll meet anywhere) who will have difficulty find the apartment, a not uncommon problem in Japan, which has a peculiar way of numbering streets (oddity number one!) - but before we get lost we drive over the Sumida river, which is laced up with numerous bridges. The river itself is steel grey, medium-sized, sea-smelling (I will discover later) and a relief from all the surrounding dull buildings. An old-looking boat at a pier below the bridge catches my eye and I try to impose an eighteenth-century image over the geography but I can’t make it stick. It seems the ghosts of Edo really have headed west*; I’m going to have to deal with modern Tokyo. Stu and I have been here before, but only for three days, during which we packed in a fair amount of sightseeing. On this trip I’m planning to check out the bits in between the bits in the guidebooks, and some of the surrounding countryside and the attractions there.

*The Buddhist paradise was in the west, as referred to in the third senryu here.

Coming up: Asakusa; Kaminarimon; Harajuku and Yoyogi; Dinner with Kelly Link, Gavin Grant and Yoshio Kobayashi; manga shopping in Ikebukuro

I’m tidying up part of the unicorn story where he remembers he and his mother coming to the castle in a wagon drawn by a horse called Bess (who is a sort of wise aunt to him). Some time after writing this part I heard about the folk singer Vashti Bunyan, who travelled for a time in a horse-drawn wagon, and thought that his mother might be something like her.

This morning I Googled for horses called Bess, since I didn’t want to use the name if it was inadvertently going to be a reference to a well-known horse in, I don’t know, Tolstoy or something. What I found was that Bunyan’s wagon horse was called Bess.

I will write a little more, then I think I will wander in a daze for a bit.

I like the pictures. I really like the words (click ‘artist statement’):
http://www.jacanagallery.com/artists/feuz/feuz_home.htm

Larval transfer theory

The possibility of artificial life (for when we kill off all the natural life)

Hmm. I got a scanner and a cheap-end Wacom halfway through doing this. I have a lot of learning to do.

Still, there is violence and loss of clothing, as requested.

I’m going to Japan for a month this Friday, so there’ll be a hiatus while I’m there.

This morning the non-real word “octotrope” came to my mind. I suppose an octotrope would be something that turns towards eight, whatever that might mean. As a surrealist game, I decided to brainstorm eight meanings for what “octotrope” might be or might lead to. I got these:

1) A crystal ball wrapped in a dirty white sheet.

2) The smell of lemon trees in spring.

3) The aviator’s aquatic wound (he will die of another).

4) A stag with an unborn child in a glowing caul balanced between his antlers.

5) A vicious battle between candelabras and daggers.

6) A well with a large silver fish living at the bottom: he’s a subtle and challenging teacher.

7) A row of medals, each fancier than the last.

8 ) A hawk with clipped wings. She has learned to sing, but would rather fly.

Second 8, because I couldn’t stop:

1) Under the table, a glass chamberpot waiting to be discovered!

2) In total, seven pink ribbons and one lavender (because there was no more pink) tied on the horns of the sacrificial bull.

3) Owls at night, flying backward to the North Pole.

4) The Fibonacci spiral of an unfurling leaf, explained to a child.

5) The boring existence of two crossed hairs.

6) Nails that one must hammer into a piece of wood: the xylophone music of this.

7) A seaside boarding house for retired medusae.

8 ) Their ritual of exchanging poems rolled up in china cups.

I had fun with this and thought that if anyone else has definitions of or responses to “octotrope” it might be cool to make a table of them, and maybe we could publish it somewhere (and here if all else fails). Be as free and zany or deep or pretty or ugly and concrete or abstract as you like. Languages other than English are welcome.

Please send any contributions by email to octotrope@kjbishop.net

Edit - please send all further contributions by email, since if we’re going for publication it’s best not to have too much online.

I type this with the stink of burnt hair filling the apartment. The light in the bathroom blew and we couldn’t get the cover off, so Stu put a couple of candles in there (there’s no window). The maids, Wass and Wan, were in here cleaning. Stu was in the bathroom asking them if they knew how to uncover the light. He turned around suddenly and the very dry ends of his yard-long ponytail (that hair which has been the envy and plaything of women from Cairo to Soi Cowboy) brushed the flame. Next thing I see from my desk is a conflagration and Wass very quickly and quite heroically batting it out. Stu thought it was okay and didn’t need trimming, but frankly the ends had needed trimming for a long time and getting set on fire had not improved their appearance. I cut about five inches off. It wasn’t that much hair that got burnt, really; what is amazing is how much it smells.

Anyway, he still has plenty of hair. Wass’s hand is okay. And sometimes the gods poke us into action, even in such small matters as trimming dry split ends.

*Before reading - what started off as a minor whinge turned into a rant about strange thoughts of mine. There’s potentially offensive material below. Normally after writing something like this I would delete it, but I feel I actually should post this for some reason, not sure why. Not so much the urge to confess, I think, as that of being a public witness to a human feeling that I have access to and the documentation of which might be of use to someone somewhere.

I have mid-cycle pain today. Meh. I don’t get it every month. I think it’s when the ovary on the left happens to be the one to fire off an egg that I get the twinges of ouch and the weird feeling of something going on in the dark in there without my permission. In the mid-months when I get pain I also seem to retain fluid and get kind of panicky and depressed - and not just because I suddenly feel like I’m getting fat.

I start thinking about how much I hate having a female body. I was always a tomboy, never wanted to be a girl, and certainly didn’t want to be a woman. Which is odd because I am, as Stu says only half-jokingly, effeminate. If I were a man I’d not only be very short, but very camp. I mean, I’d be Queen Victoria. No, I don’t want to be a man. But I don’t really want to be a woman, either. I guess I’d like to be some kind of adolescent androgyne. That seems the least uncomfortable option out of a range of iffy choices.

I have thoughts that my superego tells me are not really ok, not healthy. There are parts of my body that I love. Namely, the bony parts. I like my Skeletor hands and my pointy elbows, my collarbones and the ribs on my chest; I love the thin days when my hipbones show. I don’t mind some of my muscles, either, especially the flat, intricate ones on my back that show when the light’s from above. But wherever there’s more than a thin layer of flesh, or the flesh is soft, I don’t like it. It frightens me. This has nothing to do with wanting to be attractive to men, or women, or anybody. I think it has to do with wanting to be unattractive, in some way. I want the desiring gaze to knock itself out against a wall of bone, injure itself on fingernail points. I don’t want to look anything like a nest for your sons. I don’t want you to want to take me home and keep me. I want to be a sea urchin or an arthropod. I want an exoskeleton.

I consider myself a feminist, so I feel guilty for having these thoughts. Many of my girlfriends have had children, so I feel like a traitor for disliking my own hypothetically childbearing body. I try to understand these thought processes - or rather non-thought processes, because thinking has nothing to do with it. It’s all visceral and emotional. But I haven’t unravelled all the contradictions yet. I like men, and I like to flirt. But my flirting is always only about minds. I like to meet in the mental plane because this physical thing seems both vulnerable and shameful. Shameful because of the imprint on it not of sexuality but of reproduction, the possibility of milk, the sense that I am not in control of every cell but must be vigilant and ever watchful in case something grows inside me, which is what this blind flesh in the darkness of the pelvic orbit wants. You’ll become like your old great aunts, it seems to say. Magnificent, perhaps, but thickened and floral.

I won’t, of course. But the fact of the potential is unsettling. I don’t know what I am. Female but not a woman? An ageing teenager? A child afraid of women? Darth Mavis is no doubt a demon of my subconscious. The other night I dreamed about axolotls (Mexican walking fish), which live in a larval stage all their life. Maybe that’s what I am. A friend of mine who recently had a baby said that she felt the process transformed her and completed her. Whereas I would like to be transformed into something metallic. A cyborg? A Cylon in nylons? Something without ovaries, in any case. Something armed, and safe. A ghost in a machine that’s really a machine, perhaps.

Some semi-sentient life form evolved from dick cheese has sent so much spam from my address that not only is my mailbox overflowing with automatic “not here”, undeliverable” and “fuck off” replies to all the spam, but my real mail can’t get through.

I will get you in the next life, you anal polyp.

This fulmination doesn’t help in any practical way, of course. But it is much faster than meditating and frankly more effective at restoring equilibrium.

Personally, I always thought I looked like Carrie Fisher. I tried this with another photo and got a completely different lot of celebs, most of whom were male.

Nota bene that I do not look like Nicole Kidman. Not even a little bit, in the dark, standing on a box with the light behind me.

P.S. The hand’s getting better. I bought a mouse, and a pig made of glow in the dark jelly which is actually a wrist rest, and a wonderful thing. I also got a low-end wacom tablet for photoshop work.

I went looking for an ergonomic chair and found one that was good for me, but the saleswoman wouldn’t let me have it, on account of how it perfectly matched the desk it was with in the showroom. She said I could have the same model in a different colour. Being a paranoid goldilocks I tried it out, and it wasn’t as comfortable. I couldn’t figure out why. In the end I asked her to get a tape measure. Sure enough, the (welded, non-adjustable) arms on the second chair were 5cm further apart than those on the first. Which made a difference. I’m going back, on Stu’s clever advice, to ask her if she could order one in the same colour for the showroom and let me have the one I tried.