When a bullet train hits its terminal velocity, it moves so quickly that the view from the window dissolves into patches of vertigo. The pacing of its superhuman straining inserts a wedge between the blurred landscape outside and the buoyant stillness inside the carriage; once a bullet train hits its stride, it is better to abandon the view through the glass and settle into your seat, into your book or thoughts – or your bento boxed meal. It is only when the train is in approach or when the train is pulling away that the view outside will settle, palm in palm, with the movement of the train; only then will you suddenly again feel that a journey is being undertaken.
Several days after my arrival in Japan, I ride the bullet train westwards from Tokyo to Osaka. The last few days have passed with the fleet rapidity lent by pleasure, for there is always an undisclosed pleasure in returning to Japan, one that, however much anticipated, still lends small, regular shocks of surprise; that is to be found in the details of sundry sun-drenched events: a sip of sweet Royal Milk Tea, can plundered from a nearby vending machine; the slow swing open of an automated taxi door; the affectionate abbreviation of my Japanese middle name, Megumi becoming Megu-chan, Megu-kun, these substitute namings rushing towards me in the showering of a warm and impetuous colloquy, as though the syllables had for a moment been held still in the mouth, before being suddenly released. But, for all these incidental pleasures, I am nonetheless anxious to arrive at my parents’ home, which is simply another way of saying that I am anxious to see my father.
The seeing is important, irreplaceable, for the evidence of my eyes will confirm the truth of his recovery – recovery at times seeming like a promise too easily broken, a cover designed to disguise the hard straining of two opposing vectors, the bettering of recovery being set against, and also a part of, an opposing pull, in an opposing direction. And so once the bullet train pulls away from the station, the figure of my cousin – waving blithely before turning to trip away down the platform – receding with accelerating rapidity, I am happy, if not to be leaving Tokyo, then to be heading towards Osaka.
The two cities, placed at the centre of two Japans, Western and Eastern, might be said to represent opposing tendencies. As I make this journey I am abruptly reminded that my mother comes from the East, my father from the West, and that, even when they are meeting in the middle, there is still a multitude of small differences between them. And if, as the train pulls out of Tokyo Station, I am in a sense leaving the birthplace of my mother, then – the vertical assemblage of buildings and lights flying into the distance and the train heading towards the more solid sprawl of Osaka – I am also in a sense returning to a place long familiar to my father.
There can be something of the dream to Tokyo, but Osaka has a ready-hewn roughness that is equally compelling. Much of the country’s commerce and industry is housed in Osaka, which plays metaphorical host to the still powerful ambition surging out of Japan (and surely it is significant that this bullet train, so much a symbol of Japanese technological achievement, so much a vehicle destined for the future, is presently moving away from Tokyo, and towards Osaka). The city is touched with the residue of a greater ambition that, not too long ago, coupled with the famed Japanese work ethic to engender the buoyant economy of the Eighties. And I realize, sitting aboard this bullet train bound for Osaka, that I have never been entirely able to divorce the weight of that work ethic from the cancer that overcame my father, so that they are all bound up together: the hurtling forward of the train, the characters spelled out upon its destination placard, the reasons for my being here, on this particular train, at this particular time.
I carry in my wallet a photograph of my dad and two of his best friends, placed there during what were for me the more worrying days of his recurring illness (those days when I was in London and he was somewhere in Japan, lying in an anonymous and unseen hospital bed; days when I was unable to concentrate and instead spent long hours ploughing through books without reading anything at all). In the photo he sits with his friends at a restaurant dinner table. They are smiling for the camera, just three middle-aged men enjoying a meal. They gaze into the lens with the mitigated naturalness of artificially posed photographs – a little code of artifice so instantly recognized and read that it has acquired its own special aura of naturalness, and it is easy to imagine life’s continuum beyond the edges of the image.
The picture is framed and composed with the careful precision of the amateur: the figures centred with the mechanical caution of the viewfinder, the image wrought in the impersonal sharpness of autofocus. The real personality of the picture, the intrepidity of the eager amateur, only declares itself in the evidence of technical imperfections that threaten to mar the image. The flash has broken out overstrong, so that the details of their features bleed into celestial flatness while everything else in the image is plunged into indeterminate darkness. Off to one side, the waitress is faintly discernible as a sliver of white sleeve, blurred with motion.
My dad is sitting in the middle, looking much the California academic despite the ten years that have passed since his return to Japan. He always looks still in photographs, which can give him an air of shy, benevolent certainty. While those around him radiate fidgety impatience, brittleness or breathless exuberance (a whole series of infinitesimal movements, instantly seized by the lens and converted into so many pixels, embedded into so many millimetres of negative), he always remains motionless, radiating the unwearied patience of his smile. In pictures he has the smile of a child, though that smile is rarely his in real life.
Mr T sits to one side, leaning forward towards the camera. His posture makes him look a size larger than my dad, hulking to one side protectively, but in reality they are the same size and height. Mr T has acquired a trim, sturdy figure from long weekend hikes. He and his wife regularly hike to distant temples and shrines in the Kansai region of Japan, through woods and over mountains, mutually indifferent to rain and sunshine. His hair is still black and thick enough, but not so thick as to render careful brushing and arrangement entirely redundant. He has a friendly face, and he tucks in the corners of his mouth as he gazes into the camera.
Mr T is your typical bureaucrat. He lives in a nice house in a prestigious neighbourhood of Kyoto. His wife is youthful and beautiful and in many other ways perfect; his daughter is pretty and graceful and attends one of the elite women’s colleges in Kyoto; his son is surprisingly tall and in his first year at an esteemed university; they own two expensive and fluffy thoroughbred cats that pretty much have the run of the house. Every day he commutes over an hour and a half to Osaka, where he works for the city government. He is one of the hundreds of conservatively clad businessmen that can be seen on any given day, riding the train in the early hours of the morning and returning late in the evening. He has worked as a civil servant the whole of his professional life, and will continue to work for another seven or eight years before settling into a comfortable retirement, serviced by an excellent pension. By then, what little remains outstanding on his mortgage will be paid off, his children will be settled, and he and his family will be able to spend leisurely weekends at their second home in the mountains. His hobbies, which he pursues with keen passion, include photography and hiking.
In the picture Mr T is staring intently at the camera, which is some feet away, perched on a tripod and working on a timer. The camera is his, which maybe explains some of the anxiety in his eyes. They have been sitting, posed and waiting, for what seems an inordinately long time. He worries that the timer has grown temperamental; perhaps the battery has run out of juice; perhaps he forgot to press the start button, that has happened before. His smile is a little pinched because of those multiple anxieties, the corners tucked in deeper than usual, and behind his glasses, his eyes are round with doubtful anticipation. To his relief, the camera finally gives a slow whirr followed by a bright flash and a delightfully audible click. For a moment all three of them – Mr T, my dad, and Mr S – remain frozen in place, mutely staring at the little black contraption on its spindly legs.
‘Just one more!’ Mr T says, and he stands up and hurries over to the tripod. Mr S rolls his eyes with a sarcastic grimace, reaching for a glass; my dad takes off his glasses to rub away the after-effect of the flash. The waitress comes to the table with a tray bearing coffees and plated desserts. Mr T bends close to the camera, glasses resting on his forehead and eyes squinting at the viewfinder. ‘Could we get another bottle of wine?’ Mr S says under his breath to the waitress. He looks at the dessert plate set before him. ‘Hey! What is this again?’
My dad stirs his camomile tea. He fishes out the teabag with two fingers and a spoon. Blinking, he sips sedately.
‘Excuse me,’ Mr T says as he squeezes past the waitress and hurries back to his place. ‘OK, here we go,’ he says to himself, and gazes towards the camera with the same anxious expression as before. My dad reiterates his still, secret smile; Mr S gulps down the last dregs of wine in his glass, craning his neck to see where the waitress has gone. He puffs at his cigarette, then pulls it away in time to grin for the camera as the bulb flashes.
Mr S lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from Mr T. In the photograph, he sits with his head drawn up, as with a sudden gesture, and smiles with toothy unevenness. There is the trace of a rambunctious leer in his smile, and it is easy to glimpse his younger self peeping through. He smokes and drinks and indulges in rich foods without compunction. In the happy inebriation of his more expansive moments, he insists that he’ll be the first to teeter off towards death, but in reality he typifies the meaning of the phrase ‘rude health’.
Mr S is an eccentric, particularly in the context of Japanese society. He is what might, at one time, have been called a bon vivant. He throngs his life with pleasures – with the slow-moving leisure of idleness, the aesthetic pleasures of excellent clothes, the sensual delights of good food and drink. The fundamental pursuit of his life is no more or less complicated than the chasing of whim. He stalks the course of his whim with the obsession of the connoisseur, hounding it through the leaps and starts of a garrulous spontaneity, travelling from slum to teahouse with equal ease.
‘He only does what he wants,’ my dad once explained. ‘That is the thing about S.’ He paused, then continued in a voice that was half wondering. ‘If you stop to think about it,’ he said, ‘it’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?’ Mr S always means what he says and always means what he does – that’s why, I think, my dad calls him ‘amazing’. It has always been a revelation to my father that some part of him is both puzzled and moved by what can only be termed a kind of old-fashioned concern with morals.
I look up through the window. Outside, as the train shoots through the outskirts of Tokyo, the build-up of glass and steel dissolves into erratic low rises and listless suburban sprawl. Moving through this thinning landscape, the scenery outside slows and then momentarily falls into the eye’s grasp. And though it is only that the rate of movement has grown harder to measure, the landscape outside having so quickly lost its density, it seems almost as though the train has stayed its acceleration, simply that it might accommodate the framing of the view outside.
Slowly now, the train passes a cluster of farm fields, patches of neatly bordered green tended by solitary farmhouses. They are spread out as a constellation, connected to each other by thin streams of road, and at their centre squats a large brown building. Though it doesn’t stand very tall, it seems to loom over the surrounding landscape. Erected across its front are the neon katakana characters reading PA-CHI-N-KO, and the sight of those letters immediately recollects Mr S – a leisure gambler and a casual frequenter of Pachinko parlours – so that the landscape outside seems to fold and fall back into the recently recollected photograph, tucked back inside my wallet. Instinctively, I move a hand to touch my bag, and then, reassured, return to the slow view from the window.
The Pachinko parlour is still in the midst of its slackened approach. And the longer I look, the more convincingly does the building, with the insistent legibility of its flashing letters, appear like a squared pyramid, a Mecca of calculated risk. There are no other public buildings visible – no supermarket, no drug store, not even a bar or restaurant – and I notice that all the narrowed roads of that cluster (it is not even a village, it is nothing more than a handful of cultivated fields and houses resting alongside the train tracks) lead directly to the parlour. Here all roads point not to Rome, but to Pachinko. A moment later, acceleration resumes, and the whole picture, the fragile constellation, falls apart, sliding past the frame of the window.
Pachinko is a game of joyless excess. It is the kind of game that, once begun, one is likely to get stuck on. It is too easy to while away an unknown count of hours inside these parlours, whose fluorescent-lit interiors betray no evidence of the quickly passing day outside. It is too easy to get caught up in the bland hopefulness of the game, that the big jackpot is always about to descend, the lucky break just around the corner. Pachinko is underwritten by the logic of excess, and there is a definite, deliberate ethos of multiplication at work here – in the shower of little silver balls constantly flying across the monitor, in the incessant stream of bells and whistles ringing out, in the hysteria of sound and movement and psychology, impossible to track or trace.
Pachinko is like a hybrid of pinball and slot machines. A spurt of silver balls shoots out from one side of the machine. The player directs the balls towards a kind of jackpot hole, which subsequently sets off a slot machine mechanism. Should the icons arrange themselves properly, a shoal of little silver balls comes bursting out from the bottom of the machine. In the smaller parlours the traditional icons of assorted fruits spin round joylessly; in the newer parlours everything from rounds of sushi (cartoonishly unappetizing pieces of ika, maguro, unagi, kappa, spinning round on plates) to sea creatures (squid, dolphins, turtles, even mermaids, swimming through watery landscapes) declares the nature of your fortune.
Built into the logic of the game is the pretence of a nominal skill requirement, which lures customers into believing that they can become ‘better’ at playing. But mostly it is a matter of logging time and waiting for the head of luck to strike. Customers perch before the machines for hours, in a state of near paralysis. Here there is none of the enthusiasm, the excitement, that you can sometimes feel in a casino in Las Vegas, or Reno, or Atlantic City – the excited tourists spinning their way through twenty dollars counted out in nickels, the grannies descended on Sin City for a highschool gambling reunion, the Florida condominium-inhabiting couples caught up in the wistful melancholy of a golden anniversary trip – all of which is due to the fact that playing a bit of Pachinko is as common and unremarkable as shopping for groceries, or paying a gas bill. There are very few Pachinko enthusiasts, but there is instead a whole population that plays Pachinko with the casual regularity of the addicted.
Certainly there is something very particular in the way Pachinko hones the player’s desire, and whets the gambler’s risk. Traditionally the winnings of Pachinko are paid out by a points system; points (awarded according to the number of little silver balls accumulated) are redeemed against everything from Christian Dior handbags, Marlboro cigarettes, bottles of whisky and bottles of soy sauce to toilet paper, children’s toys, candy bars and instant microwave meals. These diverse goods are ubiquitous within the parlours, on counters and in Perspex cabinets, so that the object of your desire is always present just before your eyes. Couture handbags and lipsticks dangle in the air, suspended by fishing wire above economy-sized bottles of washing liquid. The juxtaposition is a strange one, not least because of the way it declares the wayward subjectivity of our desire, its flights of fancy and its final prosaic grounds. However much the average Pachinko player may long for the Dior handbag or the Dunhill wallet, she knows that ultimately she must plunk down her silver balls in exchange for an extralarge package of crackers, a bottle of frying oil, a three-roll pack of paper towels and a five-box pack of Kleenex. The effect is part gambling hall, part low-end department store, part discount supermarket. And it is the constant disappointment of our desire, the hand-bags and the jewellery that are relinquished in favour of a bale of nappies, that lends the place its final tawdriness.
I have – perhaps because there is nonetheless something beguiling in the childish logic of Pachinko barter, something that recollects carnival fairgrounds replete with candy-striped booths, points earned and stuffed animals, boxes of cigarettes and sweets, hardly won – been obsessed with Pachinko parlours since my childhood. I remember the Japan of childhood visits and summertime stays according to the secret inclinations of that obsession. Whenever I heard the magic word ‘Pachinko’, my ears would fumble to convert fugitive snatches of Japanese conversation into a more legible English, that I might better retain the imprint of whatever piece of information, whatever tiny detail, had therein been yielded. Walking down the streets of Tokyo or Osaka, I would slow my pace, dawdling a little that I might peer into the parlours. And though the windows were mostly obscured by those opaque manga-decorated façades so common to Pachinko parlours, with nothing beyond a few pale whiffs of smoke and the deadening beat of music betraying any hint of what took place inside, I remained transfixed before them.
But of all these juvenile longings tangled up in Japan, the most distinct, the most poignant and resonant, involved that obscure object of desire, the little silvered Pachinko ball. During one of these exercises in dawdling and in what was one of childhood’s more blissful moments, I found one of those silver balls on the pavement outside a Pachinko parlour. It was resting in the centre of the pavement, as though it had been dropped unknowingly by an exiting customer, or somehow leapt and rolled its way from one of the machines, down the aisle and out the door. Before my mom could object, I bent down and, pretending to tie my shoelace, slipped the ball into the palm of my hand. I hung onto it for weeks, carrying it in my pocket like a little talisman, my fingers feeling out the smoothness of its surface, the jagged seam that ran round its circumference. Sometimes, in secret, I would bring it out of my pocket and sniff at the bitter pong of its metal.
I continued lingering before Pachinko parlours, hoping against hope to spot the gleam of another wayward silver ball and all the while entertaining fantasies of hoarding enough stray silver balls that I might, eventually and over my young lifetime, trade them in for a plastic tea set, or a teddy bear. (When, several years later and on the cusp of my American adolescence, I came across the silver ball among a drawer of old things, I threw it away. It seemed, in the newly donned perspective of my teenage years, a silly enough thing to keep, and I tossed it into the bin with a resounding ping. The moment I threw it away, of course, I regretted it. But it was too late. I heard a distant voice call out, ‘Take out the trash, will you? The garbage man will be here any minute.’ My teenage brother slouched in and, without a word, slung the binbag over his shoulder and trudged out to deposit it in the bins outside. From inside the house I heard the muffled roar of the rubbish lorry. The door slammed, and my little silver ball was gone for ever.)
Then, many years later when I returned to visit Japan as an adult, Mr S asked if I’d like to go to play some Pachinko. The dust flew off, the fantasy roused itself back to creaking life and I leapt at the unexpected chance of resurrecting an old childhood dream. It is that unanticipated restoration that I remember now, as I relinquish the view outside the train and settle into the state of drowsy wakefulness that to me seems so often to sprawl out from train journeys and partial remembrances, so that there is now a kind of double return, the return of that past adventure, as well as the attendant childhood longing it carries, still lingering close.
He had suggested it lightly, carelessly, over a cup of tea, on one of those regular occasions when my parents and I had travelled to Kyoto for the day (my father there for work purposes, my mother and I for an itinerary of shopping and time-killing leisure no less onerous).
‘Oh no,’ my mom had said, shaking her head decisively. ‘You’ll hate it. Terrible places – cigarette smoke and loud music.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I remember saying.
‘No, believe me. You won’t like it at all. Besides,’ she continued, head shaking again, ‘the people who play Pachinko really aren’t that nice.’
‘Meaning people like me?’ Mr S asked drily.
My mom looked at him, and smiled despite herself. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘The idle and the unemployed. Do you really want to go spend the afternoon in a room with cigarette smoke and loud music and a bunch of people like Mr S?’
‘I’m just curious.’
‘At least it’ll be something different,’ Mr S said. ‘Just look at it as a cultural excursion and be prepared for the smoke and the noise.’
‘Is that your idea of culture?’ my mom asked. ‘She’s going to think that Japan is all Pachinko parlours and karaoke bars if she spends much more time with you.’
‘No.’ He shook his head.
‘No what?’ My mom looked at him.
‘No karaoke.’
His voice was casually disdainful. My mom paused, then shook her head bemusedly, sighing. ‘You had better get going.’ She stood up and began gathering her things together. ‘Call me when you finish up.’
As we drove along the Kamogawa, the river running through the centre of Kyoto, Mr S tried to explain the basics of the game to me.
‘It’s pretty simple. The only thing you have to worry about is the dial. It controls the balls as they come out – the further you turn it, the further they shoot out. You want them to come out towards the centre, so that they have a better chance of falling into the slot.’
‘OK. Is that it?’
‘That’s all you need to worry about.’
‘That it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘What’s the very best thing you can get?’
Mr S tapped his fingers on the wheel. ‘Well – there’s this thing they call the Three Golden Crabs.’ He paused. His voice grew slowly enthusiastic. ‘It’s like a Pachinko myth. An immediate payout of ten carts. A deluge of balls. All you have to do is hold the dial and wait for the balls to collect. Put cynically, it’s the hook – the one that lures them in, and keeps them coming back for more.’ He stopped, then looked at me. ‘But all you should worry about is getting the balls into the slot. OK?’
‘Yeah.’ I paused. ‘It sounds kind of confusing.’
‘Well, there’s a lot of stuff going on, but it’s pretty simple once you get started.’
‘What happens if I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of it?’
‘You can’t.’
‘What do you mean I can’t?’
‘You can’t. Once you start playing, you have to continue. That’s the point.’
‘What kind of point is that?’
‘Listen, Miss America, that’s how it works, OK? Just go before you play. You’ll be fine.’
We pulled up to a large building on the river’s edge, just adjacent to Kyoto’s famed Gion district, that dreamscape place of geishas and teahouses, of narrow paths and hidden entrances. Mr S parked the car on a patch of asphalt turf. I got out and stared up at the building. The whole front was covered with a hysterically colourful façade. A multitude of manga characters paraded over its plywood surface, an assorted jumble of dewy eyes and milky thighs, hysterical smiles and pearly white teeth, hastily sketched washboard stomachs, thick manes of purple hair, bikini babes and terminator guys, guns and space ships and heaving bosoms. Astride this senseless scene, neon characters spelling PA-CHI-N-KO blinked and purred. It wasn’t immediately obvious what palm trees and space robots had to do with the game of Pachinko, and if there was anything pornographic in the pictured scenarios, then it seemed to me that it wasn’t so much in the literality of breasts and long thighs and bullybag pouches, but in the sheer illegibility of the juxtaposition, sea crabs dancing alongside spacemen and mermaids and hot air balloons.
We entered through a more sedate back entrance. The walkway leading up to the entrance was cluttered with a dense tangle of bicycles and motorbikes. A man of indeterminate age, face leathery and creased from the sun, stared at us with gaping eyes, hands in pockets. He seemed at a loose end. A plump woman with a no-nonsense air about her adjusted her opaque sun visor as she prepared to straddle her bicycle. Overhead, an arched covering of red tarpaulin cast a strange glow of light on the faces of the customers leaving and arriving; below our feet, a faded red carpet made a half-hearted attempt to lend some élan to the proceedings. I looked back at the man with the leathery face; he was standing as before, hands jiggling in pockets and weight shifting from leg to leg uneasily.
We passed a small booth to the left of the entrance. A young couple smiled excitedly as they left the booth, counting over a thick handful of bills. Behind them, a middle-aged matron in a beige trouser suit sedately handed the booth operator a small ticket. She stared straight ahead as she waited to collect her money. There was a brisk air of professional implacability to her expressionless face. She took her money and swiftly placed the envelope inside her handbag before snapping it shut and walking away.
‘That’s where they collect their earnings.’
‘But I thought you got prizes – stuffed animals and handbags and things like that.’
‘They have them too. But they also give out cash equivalents – it’s more useful that way.’
‘When did they start doing that?’
‘Oh, it’s been that way for ages. It’s better business, you see. When they started giving out cash winnings, a whole new market for Pachinko sprang up. Students, young couples, housewives. There’s a whole population of people who pay their bills with their Pachinko winnings.’
‘Isn’t that bad?’
‘Well, it depends on how you look at it. It’s great for the Pachinko parlours. It’s great for people who need a bit of extra cash now and then. But I suppose it’s a bit depressing when you think about the people who are playing because they need money to pay their electricity bill.’
‘Why don’t they get jobs?’
Mr S laughed. ‘There’s something called a recession happening in this country. You know – this little thing that screws up the economy and makes everyone poor? It’s been going on for – oh, I don’t know, ten years now. Do you Americans not know about things like this?’
‘Of course we know about things like—’
‘Well then, you must have heard about the unemployment rates in Japan. Who on earth is going to hire a middle-aged housewife who’s never worked a day in her life? Who’s going to hire an elderly businessman whose last company went bankrupt? Even the students, who are young and educated – there’s a hundred people applying for a single job. No – the people you’ll see here are people who need other ways of making ends meet. That’s just how it is.’ He gave a vigorous nod of the head, as though to close the conversation, and then strode ahead.
We passed through the sliding doors into the parlour, and immediately we were confronted by a raucous din, the sound of pop music and loudspeaker announcements. I had the sensation of pushing through a wall of sound, and my movements suddenly felt thick and swollen. Mr S leaned over and said something to me, but I couldn’t make out his words. I waved a hand in front of my ear and shook my head. He nodded and gestured for me to follow him.
The narrow aisles were thronged with machines. The customers sat before these machines on low, backless vinyl stools. It was a strangely unmoving tableau, set against the hectic noise of the room. Eyes glazed over and glued to the screens, the players sat with their legs crossed, cigarette in one hand and dial in the other, immobile amidst that tremendous washing of music and noise.
We were indeed surrounded by the idle and the unemployed. Nobody else could be whiling away the afternoon hours of a weekday in a Pachinko parlour. There were a few people in their twenties of middling affluence, students presumably, but for the most part the place was filled with middle-aged men and women, housewives and unemployed men on welfare, all of whom carried with them traces of depression and poor health.
They comprised the underbelly of Japanese society – the underclass that was rarely, if ever, discussed. This was the population for whom the bursting of the Bubble merely meant that things went from bad to worse; for whom the Japanese dream of hard work and reward was simply irreconcilable with their present existence. And while so much concern had been granted the middle-class families whose sudden wealth had disappeared with the equally sudden bursting of the Bubble, little notice had been given to this quiet underclass, whose prospects passed from a countable few to none at all.
Looking at them now, it seemed as though their faces had long ago hardened into expressions of grizzled discontent. In contrast to the youths, they were dressed in clothes whose shabbiness was apparent at first glance, discount-rack polyester shirts or trousers of faded cotton, thick-soled white sneakers. None of the brand names so prevalent elsewhere in Japanese society were visible here, and instead they were clothed in an anonymous vacancy.
We passed a woman in her late forties, dyed hair pulled into a frizzy ponytail set high on her head. She wore calf-length pink leggings, white socks and black sling-back high heels. The fluorescent light bathed her in an excruciatingly honest brightness; her eyes were hooded and weary, and her hairline crumbled into a messy bank of dried and flaking skin. She chain-smoked as she played, one elbow propped on her thigh and a nearby ashtray harbouring a growing collection of lipstick-stained cigarette ends. As we passed, she moved her hand to tap her ash into a plastic cup. Her eyes remained fixed on the machine as she returned the cigarette to her mouth. A vague motion of inhalation struggled across her chest. From between her lips, a wisp of smoke escaped and drifted across the machine’s screen.
The man sitting beside her was surrounded by crates of silver balls. He was playing with a dogged persistence, clinging hard to the thread of his fading luck. A drooping moustache of mixed black and grey flopped over his lip. Dressed in purple jogging bottoms and a white T-shirt, he wore a plastic watch loosely strapped around his left wrist. In the reflective surface of his eyes you could almost see his good luck dwindling away, and as I watched he looked up and caught my eye. Embarrassed, I looked away.
Pantomiming energetically, Mr S pointed in the direction of the toilets. I nodded. As I walked over I noticed a few people seated on the benches outside. They looked exhausted, and I wondered what they could be waiting for, and why they didn’t leave. An elderly man with finely pocked skin emerged from the men’s room. His complexion was ashen, but he walked briskly enough towards the concession stand and ordered a coffee. He tipped the plastic cup towards his mouth, hand trembling. As the coffee went down, his body seemed to brighten visibly from its tonic, and he even smiled. I pushed open the swinging door leading to the toilets.
It was quieter in here, the noise outside muffled and insulated by wrappings of material, pipe and tile. I locked myself into one of the cubicles, hiked my skirt up and plonked down on the toilet seat. It was pleasantly pre-heated, and ranged along one side were the various buttons – sprays, temperature control, sound modulation – typical of a Japanese toilet. I sat for a few moments, lulled by the warmth of the seat and the relative quiet inside the cubicle. I swung my legs, hummed a tune, examined the tips of my hair for split ends.
The cubicle next to me whooshed enthusiastically, followed by the sound of a stall door opening and a firm clicking of heels. Suddenly self-conscious, I flushed and, pulling my underwear up and pressing my skirt down, followed suit.
A woman stood by the sinks. From the back and in the dim lighting of the place, she was only muted outline and shadow. She was wearing an inky blue suit, seamed stockings and black high heels. Her head, with its heavy arrangement of hair, drooped astride a long, pale neck. I could faintly make out the straightened seam of her stockings, the outline of her suit, nipped in at the waist and flaring subtly at the hips. Her pitch-black hair was piled carefully on her head in the traditional Japanese arrangement, a rigid display of fanlike waves and knots. A discreet lacquer clip was pressed in at the bottom. Her pale face, shadowy in the mirror’s reflection, was unexpectedly exquisite, otherworldly in the blurred fullness of the chin and cheeks, the deftly elongated eyes. Her eyebrows were thickly drawn in and the pout of her lips was carefully rouged; that makeup, densely powdered and inked, added to the spectral effect of her image in the glass. Heavily serene, she was like an apparition moving in the disjunction between the severity of her clothes and the ritual mass of her hair and face.
She was leaning forward towards the mirror and touching carefully at her hair with one hand. Leaning back again, she rinsed her hands with water. Moving with small, neatly controlled gestures, she opened her bag and drew out a delicate handkerchief. Drying her hands in a patting and dabbing motion, she looked into the mirror again before snapping her bag shut. Then, with a click of heels and a swing of doors, she was gone.
I waited a moment before approaching the sinks and washing my own hands. I rinsed them hurriedly, avoiding the mirror, and then ducked out into the lobby.
Mr S was waiting. ‘What took you so long?’
‘Sorry.’
He shrugged and motioned for me to follow. I trailed after him as we weaved through the aisles in search of free machines.
‘Hey,’ I said, after a moment.
‘What?’ he shouted.
‘Hey.’
‘Yeah, hey, what?’
‘I think I saw a geisha in the bathroom.’
‘What?’
‘I think I saw a geisha in the bathroom!’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Isn’t that weird?’
‘Not really. The Gion district is around the corner. I see them here a lot. I guess they’re just taking a break before the evening shift.’
‘Oh. Well, I thought it was kind of cool.’
‘What?’
‘I thought it was cool.’
‘Cool? Why?’
‘Well, you know, I’ve never seen one up close.’
‘Christ – such a tourist.’
‘Well, it is cool, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘I said, it is cool, isn’t it?’
‘You know, it’s a bit difficult to hold a conversation in all this racket.’
‘Never mind.’
We continued moving along the aisles.
Mr S motioned me to sit down at a machine. ‘This is a good one,’ he shouted.
‘How do you know?’
‘What?’
‘How do you know?’ I shouted.
He shook his head. ‘I’ll explain later.’ I sat down, and he inserted a five thousand yen bill into the machine. The machine sprang to life; on the computer inlaid across the centre of the machine, an anime character, blonde and buxom in bikini and flippers, swam across the screen.
‘Turn the dial,’ Mr S shouted.
I turned the dial. Immediately, a torrent of silver balls bounced out from one side of the machine, ricocheting senselessly before dropping to the bottom of the machine. I turned to look at Mr S.
‘No, no! They’re going all over the place! You’re turning the dial too far!’
I loosened my grip on the dial. With a gurgle, the spurt of balls disappeared.
He shook his head. ‘Somewhere in the middle – try somewhere in the middle.’
I turned the dial midway, and in an even shower, the silver balls began to fall in what was evidently the right direction. Mr S nodded.
‘Now what?’ I shouted.
‘Nothing. You just sit there and wait.’
‘For what?’
‘Just wait.’ Mr S sat down at the machine next to me, and began to play. I stared at the screen. Nothing was happening. Bored, I tried twisting the dial full throttle. Immediately, the balls flew in a burst across the machine, before sinking impotent to the bottom.
‘Don’t do that!’ shouted Mr S. ‘You’ll waste the balls.’
‘This is boring!’ I shouted back. He rolled his eyes at me exasperatedly. Resignedly, I directed the balls back towards the centre. Hand on dial, I twisted my neck to look around. The aisle was still with silent, crouching figures. A young man wearing yellow-tinted sunglasses entered the aisle, looking for a seat. He stared at me for a moment, puzzled. Then, gesturing to an assistant for a cup of coffee, he sat down and began playing. Overhead, music videos flashed across a television screen.
I turned my attention back to the machine. The screen had suddenly come to life. The buxom girl waved excitedly before swimming off, and was replaced by a slot machine mechanism. The icons – various sea creatures – spun round merrily, and as they met an approximate match – two crabs and one shark, three octopuses, two squid and one dolphin – a slow trickle of silver balls fell out of the machine.
‘That’s good!’ Mr S shouted. I nodded.
A pile of balls accumulated reluctantly at the bottom of the machine. The icons continued spinning into minor matches and mismatches, according to which an unspecified tally of balls was yielded. The slot machine spun with awesome energy, pausing breathlessly over two-dolphin-one-goldfish, three-red-squid, two-crabs-one-swordfish, three-sharks, two-starfish-one-turtle, one-dolphin-one-whale-one-turtle, rattling out the tongue-twisting combinations with nary a gasp of uncertainty. Down below, the machine hiccupped and burped out silver balls with perfunctory regularity. And then, quite unexpectedly, the machine slowed to a delicious stop over a matched line of three gold crabs.
I looked up at Mr S. For a long moment the gold crabs sat there, one atop the other, winking and blinking knowingly at me. I stared back at them, open mouthed with surprise. Then, the crabs flew away and the buxom girl appeared, jumping up and down elatedly, breasts trembling and arms waving in the air. A row of lights burst into colour and ran frantically along the edge of the monitor. The machine, overcome with excitement, began rocking back and forth, howling out impatiently before coming to a restless halt. The buxom girl continued jumping about on the screen, eyes glistening sentimentally.
Mr S, and several other people, turned to look. His eyes widened; then, nodding enthusiastically, he slapped my back in congratulations.
‘What just happened? What do I do now?’ I shouted. Mr S only nodded his head again and gave me a thumbs-up sign. From out of nowhere, a uniformed assistant appeared. He carried an exuberant sign, emblazoned with three golden crabs and an array of glitter-encrusted kanji characters I couldn’t identify. He affixed the sign to my machine before peering at the screen and smiling friendly at me. I smiled back nervously, spine crouched and holding the dial with one hand (‘all you have to do is hold the dial and wait for the balls to collect’) in what I hoped appeared a practised stance.
As if coaxed into the madness of an extreme good humour, the machine was now loudly singing a tuneless ditty to itself. The buxom girl waved a final, ecstatic goodbye, and was replaced by the slot machine, on which the old icons of the sea were spinning round in a hysterical blur. Then, icons still spinning and without obvious reason or explanation, an inundation of silver balls erupted from the bottom of the machine. The clatter, as the balls fell into the cart, was deafening. It was as if the machine was racked by fits of acute indigestion and spewing out the sum total of its insides.
Within moments, the cart catching the balls was full. A different assistant appeared and exchanged the full cart for an empty one. He too smiled his congratulations. A third assistant set down a cup of coffee by the side of my machine, and offered me a hot towel. As the violent emissions continued to flush out from the bowels of the machine, I suddenly found myself the centre of immediate attention, congratulation and goodwill.
The full cart was parked behind my stool. A minute later, the new cart grew full, was duly exchanged for an empty one, and so on until there were eight full carts and counting, piled up around me like buccaneer’s bounty. People were staring; a man seated several places down growled discontentedly before standing up and departing. I chortled gloatingly.
Next to me, Mr S was having less luck. Irritated, he lit a cigarette and recrossed his legs. The avalanche of silver balls continued without pause. He got up and shouted, ‘Something to drink?’ before disappearing. I continued to sit before the machine. Every few minutes, an assistant appeared to exchange the carts and generally exude helpfulness and congratulations. The complimentary coffee sat untouched, cooling.
As I continued to sit there, stomach aching with a dizzy sense of gratification, I realized how much this game exaggerated the sensation of a big win. Each basket was worth only five thousand yen, a little under fifty dollars; the point about the massive pile of silver balls behind me was not the several hundred dollars they represented, but the feel of winning they imparted. And for a country caught in the grip of an extended depression, a country with high rates of unemployment and under-employment, that feeling of winning was addictive. It gave a sense of artificial exuberance and good luck, a promise that the universe was after all not without its points of benevolence – and it was in search of that feeling, as much as any pecuniary compensation, that the unemployed and the elderly, the housewives trapped in their homes, came to these Pachinko parlours.
Mr S returned with two plastic cups filled with a brown liquid. He set one down next to me. A quickly dissolving island of brown powder floated on top of a murky liquid.
‘Chocolate drink,’ he said. I nodded and stirred the liquid with a finger. It was impeccably room temperature.
‘Hot chocolate or chocolate milk?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Chocolate drink,’ he repeated.
I drank it down. It was thick and cloyingly sweet, and I coughed as it went down. The woman next to me had four empty coffee cups strewn messily around her machine. ‘People sit here for hours,’ Mr S shouted. ‘They need the caffeine to stay up, I guess.’ On the screen overhead, a young man in a white suit and panama hat was dancing energetically. ‘It gets kind of boring.’
An hour later we stood in a daze outside the parlour. The relative silence of the street rang loudly in our ears after the incessant noise inside. I was exhausted.
‘Eighty thousand yen!’ Mr S said. ‘That’s not bad at all!’
I nodded. I could see why people were addicted to Pachinko; with eighty thousand yen, a single person or a clever housewife would be able to manage the household expenses for a month.
‘You OK?’ Mr S asked.
‘Yeah, I think so. Why?’
‘You look kind of grey.’
‘I feel a bit sick.’
‘All that smoke, maybe.’
‘I think it was the chocolate drink.’
‘Or the chocolate drink. Let’s get some real food in you.’
As we started to walk towards the car, I turned back my head for one last look. They were sitting there still, haunting the place with the dull resignation of ghosts in limbo. Set amidst that ocean of noise, they moved with elongated gestures, silent and wraithlike. And as we left the place, I suddenly realized that the real nature of my good luck was indistinguishable from the ease of my departure, and the unlikelihood of my return.
The train now slows to a stop at Nagoya, and suited businessmen quickly fill the few vacant seats in the carriage. One such man claims the seat directly in front of me; flipping his briefcase up onto the rack above his head, he sits down with a hollow thud. From behind, I catch a brief glimpse of his face in profile, eyes shadowed and mouth drawn in a half-frown of fatigue. His suit, though, is immaculately pressed. Abruptly, he reclines his seat to its maximum, crosses his legs and settles into a practised sleep, the top of his hair visible to my eye. With the train thus full, and the seatback suddenly so close, the leisurely tempo of the journey fades, and I feel unreasonably compressed.
That visit to the Pachinko parlour was several years ago. On my most recent visit to Japan – that endlessly hot, summertime visit earlier this year and now through recollection increasingly so close as to seem almost continuous with my present stay – I came upon the same ghosts, displaced and in a different setting, but unmistakable nonetheless. I had accompanied my mother to the Daiwa Securities Bank, a bank dedicated to helping shareholders manage their accounts and portfolios. The Japanese stock market was then improving; it was, in fact, at that moment the highest performing market in the world. But that, as my mom drily observed, was only because the stock prices had fallen so low there was nowhere to fall but up.
We had timed our morning errands in order to arrive at the bank in the late-morning lull, but when we arrived there was still a short queue of people waiting to be served. We were instructed by the white-gloved attendant to take a ticket and wait until our number was called. Ticket in hand – no. 987 – we edged our way across the lobby and found a couple of spaces along the banquette seats in the waiting area. My mom picked up a fashion magazine from a rack near by, several months out of date.
We sat down. My mom opened the magazine with a vigorous snapping of the wrist and began perusing its contents – tips on how to achieve high-fashion looks on low-fashion budgets, the best buys in cosmetics and skin care. I looked around me. A thin, dusty light veiled the lobby, streaming in through clouded side windows. Passing through that watery sun, the figures in the lobby appeared ghostly and unreal. They were leaning against the public computer consoles, peering at the screens and scribbling notes in pencil; they were sitting slumped across the banquette seats, staring up at monitors delivering realtime share prices. A few of them simply stood in the middle of the floor, hands dropped at their sides and mouths propped open in paralysis.
Wherever they were, whoever they were, they had the air of having settled in. Some of them carried newspapers, but they remained unopened. Others carried briefcases or file folders, but they too remained closed.
My mom looked up from the magazine she was reading. ‘They spend the morning here.’
‘Who?’
‘Them.’ She nodded towards the watching figures with her head. ‘Them.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘Watching share prices. I don’t know.’
‘Why can’t they do it at home?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are they retired?’
‘I don’t know.’ She paused. ‘I think so. I think…’ She hesitated, and then spoke reluctantly. ‘I think they like coming here. They must like coming here. I mean, they spend hours at a time here, watching and watching. It’s like they’re obsessed.’
‘Obsessed with what?’
‘With the stock market. Your great-auntie was like that. Always checking on her portfolio. We used to joke about it, until we found out she had made a fortune playing the market. You never would have guessed it, to look at her. She looked just like a little old lady, maybe a little bit senile. You know – wearing old clothes and not really looking after herself. Nobody would have guessed from looking at her that she was actually…’ She hesitated.
‘Loaded?’
‘Well, that too, but more that she was looking out for herself, and doing a good job of it. People didn’t take her seriously. She was old. A retired housewife. Retired people don’t count for much, in any society.’
That explained their look of quiet outrage. These were men and women well past the age of retirement, in their sixties and seventies perhaps; it was retirement’s rude displacement that gave them that air of wandering homelessness. When I looked closer, I thought I could see traces of old cunning in their eyes as they tracked the sprees and falls of the market. I leaned towards my mom.
‘Maybe they’re waiting to be served. Like us.’
My mom shook her head. ‘No. They’re just hanging around. I’ve seen them here before. They never seem to leave.’
‘Even if they are retired, how can they just stick around all day? Don’t they get bored?’
‘You don’t get bored when you’re addicted.’
‘It’s not really like an addiction.’
‘Maybe. But in any case, they do seem to spend a lot of time here, don’t they?’
‘Why are they so worried about money?’
She laughed. ‘Who isn’t, nowadays? Everybody in Japan is worried about money. It’s just a state of being. You get used to it.’
‘But isn’t the whole point of retirement that you can finally relax and stop worrying about money?’
‘It’s meant to be, yes.’ She looked around. ‘I mean, look at these people. How old do you think they are? Late sixties, say seventy? They were probably the ones who were on top during the Bubble. They had a few years to get used to having a whole lot of money, and then, just as they went into retirement, they saw it all go crashing down. Maybe they were lucky and hoarded all their money in a savings account somewhere, but more likely they invested in the stock market. So, offhand, I’d say they’ve had about well over a decade to get used to worrying about money.’
Maybe all ghosts were worried ones. It was true that the anxiety in their faces had settled into their skin alongside the creases of age. They had money-worry wrinkles around their eyes, fiscal furrows across their foreheads. It was that nervousness and unease, more than any measurable pallor of skin or light, that made them seem so unsubstantial as they stood in the carpeted lobby, that converted them from flesh-and-bone human beings into spectral presences.
If they were indeed in their sixties and seventies, then they would have been the chief architects of the Bubble, the ones directing that wave of economic madness, and riding high on the crest of its momentum. And, they would have been on the brink of retirement when the Bubble burst in 1990. They would have spent the last few years of their career watching everything they had built come tumbling down with a crash, and they would have been ushered into retirement in the arms of uncertainty. If they had a habit of watching obsessively, then it was maybe not so surprising, because for a few brief years in the early Nineties, the stock markets, with their erratic fluctuations and their stunningly poor performances, seemed to hold the key not only to the security of their future, but to the enduring meaning of their past.
It was in the Eighties that the Japanese economy first surged to life as the most daunting of the Asian Tigers, and during those years it seemed, as levels of productivity and rates of efficiency climbed ever higher, genuinely unstoppable. Everybody was rich. Everybody had money. I remember it as a child, watching from America. My cousins, aunts and uncles, the whole of my Japanese family, were suddenly flush with money. Their homes were bulging with material things – with the latest Nintendo game consoles that would not be available in America for another six months, with electronic remote-control cars, with plush leather sofas and endless racks of costly clothes, with Mercedes Benz station wagons and BMW convertibles. They ate out almost every night, and when they ordered delivery, it was not pizza, or Chinese food, but platters of the finest sushi and sashimi.
Simultaneously, my parents watched as the Japanese economy came bounding into the columns of American newspapers and magazines, business reports and television news stories. A dense accumulation of sensations – wonder and astonishment, fear and anxiety, greed and hope – gathered around the idea of the Japanese economy. Around the enchanting idea of its unfailing success – but also around the human character of that success. Because the real source of the tremendous noise around the Bubble, the human-interest angle to the fiscal story, was in the indomitable, selfless work ethic of the Japanese. In the way the economy seemed to climb, expanding to such vertiginous heights, on the labours of a nation that believed in hard work and sacrifice, and did not hesitate to direct the hoist and pull of their personal ambition into those channels sanctioned by society.
Technically speaking, the Bubble was nothing more than endless rows of numbers and figures, cold unfeeling units of data, but it was all somehow linked back to the idea of a nation, of a national character. What most fascinated and bewildered the Western world was the notion that the Japanese worker, the typical salaryman with his homemaker wife and two children, was working endlessly at the office in the name of a cause above and beyond personal advancement; that he lost count of overtime hours because he believed in the idea of building a nation. It was at about this time that the word salaryman became as common to the world as kamikaze had been in another time.
This was a notion of economic strength that was deeply invested in the idea of national power – and, however intuitively, America seemed to understand both the threat and the allure of that nationalism. If there was a certain hysteria to the boycott of Japanese companies in the Eighties, to the sweeping imperative ‘Buy American!’, then that was because America understood that the surge in the Japanese economy related to an idea of power that was subconsciously linked to the path of a long recovery. A recovery from war scars and war shames, easily invoked in the sounding of single words, simple syllables: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa.
‘I think it was about then,’ I remember my mom saying, ‘that we finally got over the idea that white people were better than us. Up until then, for as long as I can remember, we thought that white people were better than us. It now seems crazy, unthinkable. But that is what occupation – not just military occupation, but cultural occupation, ideological and psychological occupation – does to a country. That is what total defeat does. We were so stupid. We believed it, for so long. But that’s ended now.’ The long process of recovery finally seemed complete when, during the Eighties, Japan emerged as a plausible world power, in the face of which America itself was daunted. And perhaps for a brief moment, in the midst of boycotting Toyota, America dimly imagined that this surge in the Japanese economy was merely the second act to a more violent struggle enacted some fifty years earlier.
Our number was called, the digits 9–8–7 flashing in red across the little digital display. A mechanical female voice addressed us from the PA system.
‘Customer 9–8–7. Thank you for waiting. Please go to desk four.’
With a sigh my mom replaced the magazine. Gathering our things, we walked up to the desk. A little teller with a coiffed bob, neatly middle-aged, blinked at us from behind the desk.
‘May I see your ticket, please?’
Patiently, my mom slid the scrap of paper across to the teller. Using both hands, she picked it up, examined it closely, and then slid it to one side of the desk.
‘May I apologize for the wait. How can I help you today?’
The teller was rosy cheeked, and she had the plumpness of a good piece of poultry. She held her eyes wide open and moved her head with quick, alert gestures, nodding and pursing her mouth as my mom spoke. While the teller was busy punching at her keyboard, my mom abruptly asked, ‘How is Hankyu doing by the way?’
The little teller inclined her head. Her fingers slowed, then came to a halt. She wheeled round in her chair to face my mother. She took in a breath, then exhaled. ‘It’s gone up a bit.’ She paused and tilted her head. ‘Let me just get the figures for you.’ She wheeled back to face her computer, fingers darting at the keyboard.
‘Let’s see. At the moment it’s 405, it started the day at 395. It’s been fluctuating around there, but going up steadily!’ She spoke enthusiastically.
‘That’s good,’ my mom said thoughtfully.
‘Yes, very good. It’s very good indeed – it’s doing well!’ the little teller said, ruffled feathers showing in her voice.
‘Has it gone up a lot?’ I asked my mom, as the little teller watched us.
‘Well, yes. It was around 300 not long ago.’ She raised her voice and, casting a sidelong glance at the teller, said, ‘It really has gone up a lot!’ Then she lowered her voice and spoke to me more confidentially. ‘I think your grandmother bought the stock at around 1200. It’s inherited stock, you see. She bought them right at the height of the Bubble. But for us – 400 is good. We’ll take 400.’ She shrugged.
The little teller looked at my mom and cleared her throat. ‘Anything else?’ She held her fingers poised over the keyboard expectantly.
My mom paused. ‘Haltech?’
‘Ah.’ The little teller shook her head sadly. Her voice seemed to falter and then slow into reluctance. ‘Not so good I’m afraid.’
‘Yes,’ my mom said. ‘It seems to be in a steady decline.’
‘Just a moment. The figures are coming up. Ah!’ she cried in dismay. ‘Not so good, not so good at all!’
‘What is it?’
‘180. Down twenty yen from 200.’
‘Right. I suppose really we should just dump them and invest elsewhere,’ she mused. ‘They don’t show any likelihood of picking up. I think things might be over for Haltech.’
The little teller looked both ways before leaning forward over the desk. ‘They say that steel prices should go up,’ she whispered confidentially.
‘What’s that?’ my mom asked, absently.
The little teller shut her jaw with a firm click and leaned back from the desk. My mom looked up and stared at her. The little teller stared back.
‘She said –’ I began. The little teller’s eyes darted to my face.
‘At least I think she said –’ I paused. The little teller’s mouth grew more pinched. She stared at me, eyes bulging with meaning. I cleared my throat.
‘I think she might have said, maybe, though I’m not sure, that there is a chance, possibly, that steel companies…’ I trailed off. The little teller nodded her plump chin imperceptibly. ‘…are a good thing to have around?’
‘What are you talking about?’ my mom asked. She turned to look at me. She turned to look at the little teller. We both stared back at her. She sighed. ‘Anyway, I don’t suppose it matters all that much. Everything seems to be going down. I mean, granted they go up for a little bit,’ she said with a wave of her hand and a concessionary nod towards the teller. ‘But the general long-term forecast is always facing downwards.’ The little teller blinked her eyes sympathetically. My mom stood up. She snapped her handbag shut and gathered her papers.
‘Well, thank you very much for your help.’
‘Thank you for coming in,’ the little teller said formally. She was standing, and bowed from behind the desk. ‘Please have a pleasant day.’
As we walked out, my mom said in a low voice, ‘What were you babbling about back there, about steel companies being a good thing to have around?’
‘I was paraphrasing. The teller said something about steel companies being expected to go up, and then she went all funny and quiet.’
‘Haltech is a steel company.’
‘Maybe she was trying to say that you should hang on to it, then.’
‘There’s no way that was what she was trying to say. The stock goes down a bit more every day. The company doesn’t diversify, it can’t adjust. It’s a lost cause.’
‘Well, maybe she was saying you should invest in other steel companies.’
‘How on earth would she know, anyway?’ my mom asked, exasperated. ‘Why is she the stock market guru all of a sudden?’
‘She does watch the market all day. I mean, it’s kind of her job. She must know at least as much as all those retired people hanging out in the lobby.’
‘That’s what you’d think. But the truth is, when things are going down, they just keep going down and no amount of knowing or watching the market is going to help. You can move your shares around as much as you like, but in the end it’s pretty much all the same.’
‘The same being what?’
‘Being – well, bad to worse, bad to worse. The prognosis has been the same for the past fourteen years, and it’s not going to change any time soon. The sad thing is that your grandmother paid a fortune for these shares – all of them. They’re only worth a quarter of what she paid, maybe less. It’s so sad, because she thought she was leaving behind a nice nest egg for her children, but things changed.’
Things changed. Because, of course, the Bubble burst.
Did it in fact happen, as it seemed, overnight? One of the last nights that crowded in before the start of a new year, 1990, a new year and a new decade – was it possible that panic could be so efficient? That a national economy could so quickly flounder and then flop face down, beyond help or hope in an irreversible rigor mortis? Inflation, overvaluation, speculation, yes – but who would have guessed that the insubstantial world of numbers could wield such devastatingly real effect on the day-to-day life of a country?
In Tokyo, Osaka, all across Japan, an ominous stillness settled in. People were filled with dread, because they knew that something very bad had happened, a catastrophe beyond their control, like a meteor flinging its way through the night. They were afraid. Afraid to spend money, afraid to be out shopping, eating in restaurants, driving their cars. Fearful for their jobs and fretting over their futures, they were too scared to move, and were trapped in the irrationality of a paralysis that had leapt its way into their lives over-night. They combed the newspapers, the financial reports. They reviewed their portfolios, the records of performance, trying to find the origins of a cataclysm they suddenly knew had been a long time coming.
And then, step by step, their fears ceased to be paranoid nightmares, and became instead the slow trickling delineation of their new reality. One by one, the feudally loyal salarymen were fired. They took to passing the day in coffee shops and in parks, newly idle after a lifetime of daunting activity. Sitting on public benches with empty briefcases resting on their knees, they became the emblem of a stagnant economy. The smaller companies, formerly run by intrepid entrepreneurs, shut down. The suicide rates went up. Abandoned building sites began to appear, projects hastily ditched as funding failed to come through. Those building sites of wasted steel and half-erected frames were only the more literal signs of an abandonment that was taking place on a larger scale all across the country, as share prices fell, businesses folded, and unemployment rates inched further up.
All this seemed to happen overnight. And within a year, maybe two years, people began to wonder whether the economy would ever pick up. A recession will never last longer than eighteen months, the sages and oracles said, bobbing their heads wisely. Give it eighteen months, max. Eighteen months passed. The sages and oracles adjusted their spectacles, cleared their throats. It was not so much a recession, they said, but a depression. Not to worry. Things would eventually look up. People looked at them despairingly. Blinking, the sages and oracles backpedalled. It might be a slow recovery – we never said recovery would be immediate – but recovery would come. It was only a matter of time. They flipped through their books, looking for new prophecies; they made things up. An economy with such a solid infrastructure, so outstanding a work force, was bound to come back up on top. Give it a few years, they said. And then they slammed their books shut and closed up shop.
Almost fifteen years later, the repercussions of the bursting of the Bubble – the audible pop heard all around the world – were still being played out. The worst had not come at once, crowded into those early years that ushered in the Nineties. No, the worst had spread itself thickly across the years leading up to the millennial celebrations around the world, the count-down in Times Square, the conspiracy theories regarding computer settings and the doubting hope of chaos, all the way up to the eve of that hectic carousel and then past it, trickling over indefinitely into the future. It continued for so long precisely because the Japanese infrastructure appeared so solid, and the work force so wonderfully motivated; because they clung tooth and nail to what they had, and disenchantment took a very long time to settle in.
Nothing, not even calamity, can move so quickly. But it was the bitterness of disproportion that made things seem so instantaneous, for if the aftermath of the Bubble unfurled for too many years, then the economy decimated by the Bubble was the product of too many decades. It was a slow build placed upon the foundation razed and then assembled again by the preceding generation – the generation that had lived before and through and then after the war. It was the case everywhere, on larger and smaller stages, in the national economy, in local family businesses. And it was for this reason that the devastated Bubble economy bore such a memorable, personal face of woe.
Such was, inevitably, the case with my mother’s own family. The family business, which rode so high on the Bubble, was built out of post-war rubble by her father. My grandfather was the patriarchal legend in the family, the one nobody could live up to. His life story was one I had heard so many times that it was lodged somewhere between truth and myth, and ratified mostly by belief. (I never knew him, and have no memories of him; he died while I was too young to remember, a case of failed synchronicity, a source of regret.) Abandoned by his parents and raised by grandparents, my grandfather left school when he was thirteen to work at menial jobs. He continued in this way until the tumult of the Second World War swept into his life and millions of others’ lives, engendering a ruthless social levelling. He survived, and then bounded out into the freshly razed world of nation rebuilding. In an astonishingly slim handful of years, he established a business of such notable success that it seemed to have moved past such ideas as expansion and security and well into the home straight of permanence. And it was fed on such certainty that my mom, her brother and her sister, were born into the world. They adored and were in awe of their father, and the only time he ever let them down was in dying.
He died when he was sixty, just a few years before the Bubble. And my uncle – my feckless, carefree uncle, who had grown up with racing cars and fast living and whom nobody could imagine as the head of the family – inherited the company. Once the funeral services had concluded and my grandfather been buried, the whole family gathered round my uncle and in a unanimous chorus told him what a wonderful opportunity he was being given. The chance to make a name for himself, handed to him on the proverbial silver platter. Nobody pointed out that he could never really make a name for himself, only build upon or undo the family one. And so at a premature age he was forced to crawl up onto the throne of the family and the business, and instructed to muddle through as best he could.
And he did. He managed everything – the company, the family assets, the family name itself – with surprising proficiency for well over a decade. My grandmother helped him, but everybody had to admit that they were surprised by his success, and that perhaps they had been wrong in their judgement of him. The company grew, and then grew, and then grew again, puffed up to astonishing heights. In those years – the years before we knew that this unnatural growth was the growth of a Bubble economy, and believed it was simply the signs of hard work and a growing market – we observed the material evidence of his success. An enormous house in the centre of Tokyo, the fast cars of his childhood resurrected and returned, widescreen televisions in every room of the house. He put on weight, his smile grew loose and generous, and at about the same time, his manner became more imperious, perhaps because he spent the day ordering people about.
But then the Bubble burst. The economy crashed, and then it grew worse, showing no signs of improvement. Everybody held their breath, waited for the phone call. But calamity worked at its leisure. It hid its face, bided its time. The company seemed to be doing OK. They didn’t want to fire anybody – they didn’t believe in it. They would get through this together, no problem. A couple of years passed, then five. It seemed as though they had cleared the woods, made it through the roughest patch. Some minor signs of economic resuscitation emerged, and, unanimously, everybody felt they had the right to exhale. They had made it.
But even as the economy began to show slow signs of recovery, things in the company were failing to improve. The figures should have been picking up, should have been righting themselves, but they weren’t. My uncle puzzled over them every evening in private misery, half-disbelieving, even as the figures assured him that the apparent victory of their survival had faltered and given way to a mire of debts and creditors. Anxiety began to reproduce itself in a diseased pattern that, over time, overcame my uncle. Perhaps it was his fault – perhaps he had made strategic mistakes, perhaps he had grown lazy and complacent, or perhaps it was just that the company had been running on the steam of his father’s success all those years. He didn’t know. In truth, it was only the Bubble that had kept things afloat for so long, and his was just one of the thousands of companies in Japan whose dreams shattered and then fell to dust.
Just after the new millennium was rung in triumphantly and Japan entered its second decade of a seemingly permanent recession, the company went bankrupt. Calamity arrived at long last with its army of rented furies, and began tearing everything to pieces. They went through the accounts, itemized the contents of the house, measured out liquidation with terrifying efficiency. After so long a deferral, it seemed hard to believe. But there were certain unshakeable truths that were beyond the shallow hopes of denial. The company was past salvaging or recovery, and as the news spread, the family name was gutted and left hollow, meaningless as an obsolete sign bent in two and resting on a scrap heap.
The family shook itself and declared its solidarity. The children said they would find work; the sisters said they would offer what money they could. Help was proffered from unexpected corners, and for a single, trembling moment it looked as though strength of family would overcome that of misfortune. But as the material facts of adversity declared themselves in more and more ways – in the foreclosure on the house that stood as proud testimony to the success of the family business, in the failure of the children to find employment, in the fatigue that showed itself, deeper and deeper, in my uncle’s face, who finally took work as a delivery man, because it was something, and who was forced to swallow a feeling that was different from shame, that was not shame or humiliation but something else altogether – the family started to fall apart.
There were endless rows over the telephone, until it stopped ringing altogether, and silence spread in its place. Old jealousies were suddenly reasserted; old snubs and old wrongs were dredged up from the past and brooded over again. And those stories, flown out from Pandora’s box, those aged arguments and tired animosities, once released, continued to swirl in the air, between the family, in the very rooms of the foreclosed house. Then, shortly thereafter and proving that misfortune cannot help but arrive in threes, my father was diagnosed with cancer and my grandmother with Alzheimer’s, and then we could no longer worry about the company, or the foreclosed house, and the scrabbling of our minds went towards other causes for reparation.
In the end only such vapours remained, of all the bricks and mortar, steel and concrete, of all that currency and exchange, of the man-hours, the calculations, the boardroom meetings and the midnight telephone calls. Such was the legacy of those years, this long process of watching things slip away. Affluence, certainty and confidence, even health itself, all was carried away on the motion of a national crisis that was no different from an economic, and then a moral, illness. It was not how things were meant to be. It became, though, the way things turned out.
The furred smell of food filters through the air vents of the train, and then hunger comes upon me. A lazy hunger, bored and ever open to the suggestion of food advertisements spilling from the slow-turning pages of a magazine, the sight of a young woman, seated across the aisle and unwrapping a chicken cutlet sandwich. I watch her hungrily – the dainty movement of her fingers, the intimate rustling of cellophane pulling loose, the breaded edge of the cutlet, pressed between two thick slices of bread – then swallow and look away.
When, shortly before the end of the journey – the cutlet sandwich long eaten and the woman having stood up to dispose of the grease-stained wrapping – the food trolley comes round, manoeuvred down the aisle by a uniformed girl, pastel-coloured cap set on head and skirt pleated to the knees, I purchase a bento box, a can of hot green tea, and a box of chocolate-covered almonds. And as I eat, slowly, deliberately, the bento box balanced on my lap and the can, still warm, resting along the window’s ledge, the familiarity of the food recollects the meals of my childhood in America. Those meals began in a time when my parents, more newly immigrated, clung steadfast to the food of their mother country, and extended through to the time when, the urging of American life and cooking having overcome us all, the influence of Japan was reduced to a simple side dish – a cucumber and seaweed salad dressed in vinegar, a plate of Japanese pickles – and then disappeared altogether.
And if returning to Japan can at times be so pleasurable, then that is because the food itself exists within a whirling mix of Western and Eastern influences, holding up at one end the purity of the traditional Japanese meal, and at the other a kind of lusty, degraded mix of flavours. And so, looking down at the meal that rests on my knees, moving my chopsticks from the fried chicken to the rice and pickles, methodically demolishing a soft-whipped mound of potato salad before setting down my chopsticks to shell the salted soy beans, I recollect those times in my childhood – the processes of recollection grown so inverted that, to recall my childhood in America, I am obliged to travel to present-day Japan – when the influences of Japan and America were equal, and there was no indication that that easy balance would ever grow loose and be forgotten, only to be tardily recollected so many years later.
But it is in a little temporal peculiarity, in a puzzling act of contortionism, that this meal, even as it flickers back into the past, also remains firmly entrenched in the telling of the present. And if as I eat, one part of me is shuttled back into the past, then I am simultaneously touched by matters closer at hand, reminded of the way that in our family, eating has of late grown altered again, and hunger become a new thing. Since my dad’s operations (they cut out half his stomach, dismantled and removed his oesophagus, wrenched a portion of his colon upwards into their hollowed-out places, and then they closed him back up), we have watched as he has been forced to learn a new rhythm of ingestion, one that is parsimonious and slow. And we are always aware that he has not succeeded in teaching his hunger those same rules of moderation, so that his appetite is forever leaping out ahead of his newly stunted capacity to eat, discontented.
There are two kinds of empathy. One is a kind of mental acrobatics, in which the empathizer flies flipping and flopping and landing into the psychological state of the empathized. The other is less cunning, less deliberate, and occupies the body, so that the state of the empathized seeps stealthily into the body of the empathizer, catching him unawares. It is maybe out of the latter peculiar empathy that both my mom and I found ourselves feeding according to that same limping rhythm, whether in England or Japan: eating slowly, never eating enough, always hungry, but unable to eat faster, satiety achieving the quality of myth. And though there is the peculiar richness of associated memory in the eating of this meal, there is at the same time – in the slowness of my eating, in the absence of the compulsion that accompanies any true appetite – a reminder of the altered state of the present. There is a reminder of the reasons for my present journey, and the disjunction between times past and present is only thrown into sharper relief by the warmer comforts of nostalgic recognition.
A fellow bullet train whooshes past, bearing eastwards, the slogan Ambitious Japan! emblazoned across its shell. As its windows move by, with equal speed and in the opposite direction, the moment of its rollicking beside us as transient as the compounded speed of two trains moving on two separate courses, our own train is mirrored back upon us, the slogan Ambitious Japan!, with all its declaration of fading hopefulness, reading backwards and in ghostly characters. Once the train has passed I see, flying by in a jolt so fleeting it might have been imagined, a signpost for Kyushu. The sign is written both in English and Japanese, but it is the kanji characters spelling out ‘Kyushu’ that I read first. And though this seems impossible, the intricacies of kanji being long unknown to me, I am nonetheless left with a distinct feeling of prior acquaintance, turning round these particular characters, in this particular sequence.
Moments later I see another sign for Kyushu, characters whipping by with the same strange rapidity, and I realize the reason for its lucid familiarity is simple enough, explaining itself through the recollection of a near forgotten visit to Kyushu several years past. Embedded in that visit are pieces of the dislocation evoked by my meal, and then by the childhood it recalled, all of this linked together in the most tenuous, most fragile, of ways. And the thought occurs that it is just the spillage of associated memory that has coated everything round me with this feeling of possible recognition, drawing the flourish of association where none previously existed…
Though it was summertime, the day then, as now, was overcast. And the place was a strange one – a patch of land near Omura Bay, latticed with artificial canals, dotted with stunted windmills, covered in fields of vivid tulips, indifferent to season and perpetually fresh. People paced along empty streets paved with bricks imported from the Netherlands and built according to the precise science of Dutch engineering. They passed a fake version of Gouda Town Hall, they paused before an exact replica of the Domtoren. Ducks formed geometric Vs in the still water of the canal. Somewhere, a switch was thrown, and the windmills began to spin merrily, although the grey sky was still, and there was no wind.
This place was Huis ten Bosch, a theme park conceived during the Bubble years, and opened just after the fatal crash. The premise of the theme park – a painstaking recreation of a seventeenth-century Dutch town, a children’s park devoted to Dutch architecture – was so ludicrous it could only have made the precarious leap from personal delusion to fully fledged and funded project during the mania of the Bubble years. As it was, the park’s founder and visionary, one Yoshikuni Kamichika, had little difficulty in raising the required investment. Gripped in the green-lit delusion of creating ‘a seaborn kingdom’, he set to work building the park, pouring approximately 2.5 billion dollars into its miniature canals, extravagant replica buildings, manicured gardens and artificial windmills. Construction began in 1988, at the height of the Bubble. Two years later and halfway through the park’s construction, the Bubble burst.
The park finally opened in 1992 and, from the start, was destined for failure. People were not travelling. People were not spending money. People were certainly not travelling hundreds of miles to a secluded bit of Kyushu to pay 4,800 yen to visit a hashed replica of an imaginary Dutch town. The inaugural year passed, and then the year after, and then the next. Those years that piled up one against the other were spent haemorrhaging money until the park had been bled dry and reduced to a pale version of its imagined self. The park’s four hotels were perennially vacant. The boats on the canal ran sporadically, if at all, and the park began to gather the spectral dustiness of abandonment.
We visited the park during its tenth anniversary year. When we arrived, on that cloudy summer day, the park was deserted. There was no queue at the ticket booths, and when we paid and passed through the park’s gates, we found ourselves standing in a plaza, neatly tended and empty apart from a lonely balloon man, standing in the crossroads holding up his colourful wares despairingly.
‘Wow.’ My dad whistled under his breath. ‘Do you think there’s anyone else in the park?’
‘I don’t like that balloon man,’ my mom said nervously. ‘I don’t like the look of him.’
‘He’s selling balloons for God’s sake. It’s fine.’
‘Then why are you whispering?’
‘I’m not whispering.’
‘You are.’
‘Come on, you two,’ I interrupted. ‘Let’s not just stand here.’ I cleared my throat and opened up the park map that had been given me with my ticket. ‘Look, we can ride the Canal Cruiser. It leaves from the dock over there.’
Avoiding the balloon man, we hurried over to the dock. My dad walked several paces ahead of us in a brave display of enthusiasm, and reached the dock first. He came to a stop in front of a sign and paused to read it.
‘No good,’ he called.
‘Why?’
He shrugged. ‘It only runs between two and four in the afternoon.’ He craned his neck to look down at the map in my hands. ‘Where’s your mother?’
She was standing in front of a row of shops, edged along one side of the plaza. ‘What time is it?’ she called out.
‘Eleven thirty.’
She peered in the windows. ‘They should be open,’ she said wonderingly. ‘Look, it says ten to four, daily.’ She rapped on a windowpane experimentally. The glass shivered, and then was still.
‘Well.’ My dad stood, hands on his hips. ‘Well. Why don’t we get something to eat? What kind of restaurants do they have here?’
‘Dutch restaurants, I guess.’ I shrugged and looked down at the map. ‘De Rode Leeuw features an appetizing array of traditional Dutch cuisine,’ I read aloud. I paused. ‘Or there’s a Heineken brewery on the canal somewhere.’
‘Surely it’s a bit early?’ my mom murmured.
‘Or some rides, then,’ my dad pursued.
‘Are any of the shops open?’ my mom asked.
‘Can we just – focus?’ I said exasperated.
‘Why are you in such a bad mood?’ My mom sniffed and opened her own map.
‘I’m not in a bad mood, I’m just trying to come up with a game plan.’
‘Have you seen anyone else? At all?’ My mom looked at my dad. ‘We can’t possibly be the only people here.’
‘There are people here,’ I said. ‘We’re obviously just in the wrong part of the park. OK. Look. There’s a whole bunch of rides in this area.’ I pointed to a section of the map. ‘We’ll go there.’
‘OK,’ my dad said. ‘You’re in charge.’
We walked along one of the canals. From dykes and windmills to brick and mortar houses, the reproductions were breathtakingly complete. The place, crowded with minute specification, was astonishing in its thoroughness. As we came upon replica after replica of buildings that we had seen countless times in their original incarnation, we could not help but thrill to the sense of a displaced recognition. Gradually, we found ourselves yielding to the hollow enchantment of the place. And in that succumbing we realized that, in a strange way, we had never really seen the original buildings; it was only at the precise moment of seeing them here, transplanted across thousands of miles, diminished in their proportion and their brand spanking newness but unmistakable nonetheless, it was only in that moment’s strange and certain recognition that we saw those landmark constructions for the first time. In the end, you had to come all the way to Japan to find Holland.
‘You know,’ my dad said as we walked along. ‘It’s interesting, this place. I mean, you have to admit, it has its own kind of appeal.’
‘I still haven’t seen a single soul,’ my mom said.
‘Here,’ I said, ‘we’re coming up to the replica of Gouda Town Hall.’
‘There’s a cheese factory inside the town hall.’
‘What?’ I looked at my mom. ‘Why would there be a cheese factory inside a town hall? That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Or a cheese festival or something.’
‘Why?’ I asked, baffled. A slow thought occurred to me. ‘Oh, because it’s Gouda Town Hall?’
My mom shrugged and sniffed again. The replica Gouda hall was adjacent to the replica Domtoren, the park’s main attraction. A thin crowd of people had gathered at the base of the tower.
‘Look. People. Finally.’ I gestured in the direction of the fake Domtoren.
‘Why would the Domtoren be in Gouda?’ my dad asked wonderingly.
‘What are they doing?’ my mom asked.
‘I don’t know. It looks like they’re waiting.’ I looked down at the map. ‘I think you can go up the tower. Let’s go.’
‘I don’t want to wait in line,’ my mom said huffily.
My dad looked at her. ‘We’re in an amusement park. That’s what you do in amusement parks. Stand in line all day.’
‘But why should we stand in line when there are a dozen other attractions that have no wait at all?’ She pointed in the other direction, down the canal. She was right. A few stray visitors were visible, but mostly that area of the park was deserted. It seemed as though the day’s population of park visitors had concentrated themselves around the base of the Domtoren.
‘OK,’ my dad sighed resignedly. ‘What’s over there?’
‘Astro Gebouw. Horizon Adventure. Crystal Dream,’ my mom read from the map.
‘Those sound terrible.’
‘Come on, we have to give something a try. OK,’ my dad said, squinting down at his map. ‘Horizon Adventure. It’s just around the corner.’
‘What is it?’
‘Experience the power and destructive force of a flooding disaster in the Netherlands. Fog, lightning, waves, torrential rains and tornadoes created by the latest in high-tech flood and wave-making equipment combined with 800 tons of water make this an amazing experience.’
‘Sounds pretty good. It says all that on the map?’ I asked. My dad shrugged.
We headed towards Horizon Adventure, housed in a replica of an old Dutch East India Trading Company building. There was no queue, and smiling uniformed staff ushered us into a dimly lit auditorium. We sat down in uncomfortable theatre seats. There was an unconvincing stage-set, designed to look like a period Dutch street corner, and a lagoon of tranquil water that stretched from the stage to the audience.
‘Do you think that’s the 800 tons of water?’ I whispered to my dad. He shrugged. ‘Because it doesn’t look like 800 tons of water. I mean, I don’t know what 800 tons of water would look like, but I don’t think it would look like that – you know, like a small to medium-sized swimming pool.’ He ignored me and peered down at his map, adjusting his glasses.
A few other visitors trickled in. My dad looked at his watch. The theatre doors swung shut, and the lights dimmed. The scant audience stirred itself expectantly. Lights pulled slowly across the stage floor and up onto the scenery, until a faux sunset effect was rendered on the cloth backdrop. A dulcet voice began speaking, disembodied and floating warmly over the audience.
‘What are they saying?’ I whispered.
‘That there are a lot of floods in Holland,’ my dad whispered back.
‘Is that it?’
‘And that the Dutch survived the floods due to their superior engineering.’
‘What? I don’t believe you. You’re making that up.’
He tossed up his hands and shook his head. ‘I’m not making it up.’
‘You don’t create an amusement park ride on the premise of Dutch engineering. Kids don’t care about Dutch engineering.’ On my other side, my mom had drifted off to sleep.
‘Shh. The storm is starting,’ my dad whispered reverentially.
A slow rain fell across the stage and onto the lagoon. ‘That’s not much of a storm,’ I hissed. The rain picked up, and from over the speakers an energetic wind and thunder soundtrack began. The rain continued. A bolt of lightning shot across the stage. The rain continued. Ten minutes later, a pillar on the stage-set street corner fell to the ground with a loud, choreographed snap. The rain continued. I moved uncomfortably in my seat. The rain continued. Another ten minutes later and a current of half-hearted movement started up in the lagoon, much like the motion of a children’s wave pool at a water park. The sprinklers above the stage gratuitously shot towards the audience for a moment, then returned to the stage and its steady downpour. The audience gasped in surprised displeasure.
‘I’m wet, I’m wet,’ my dad called.
‘Do you think that was meant to happen?’ I asked.
‘What’s going on?’ my mom asked, woken from her sleep.
‘Nothing,’ my dad said. ‘I think it’s almost over.’
Even as he spoke, the clouds parted ways and the sprinklers slowed to a trickle, and then a halt. The faux sunset was back, shining on the backdrop. As we filed out, the fallen pillar miraculously returned to its original and upright position. The other visitors looked similarly wet and bemused as they dispersed down various paths.
‘That wasn’t so bad,’ my mom said brightly.
‘You slept through the whole thing,’ my dad said.
‘Well,’ I said resignedly, ‘we may as well try a few others.’
An hour later, we sat depressively in the Heineken beer garden, staring out over the canal. We had watched a fantastically kitsch animation video featuring overweight dancers and projected onto the ‘screen’ of a few vigorous fountains. We had sat in another theatre, this time unconvincingly made up as a Dutch ship, and watched a grainy video on Dutch history playing on a large cinema screen. At various points during the twenty-minute video, the ‘ship’ would let out a terrific groan and move unpersuasively in either direction. Half the attractions we visited bore signs reading ‘Closed for repair’ or ‘Closed for remodelling’ or, most convincingly, just ‘Closed’. A late-afternoon shower settled in, dissuading all but the most determined of visitors to reboard the local train and head back to a saner civilization.
‘I can’t believe anybody invested money in this project in the first place,’ I said as we sat drinking Coca-Cola in the beer garden. ‘A theme park devoted to Dutch architecture could never have sounded like much of an investment opportunity.’
‘Well, back in those days, they were throwing money at just about anything,’ my mom said. ‘There were loads of projects just like this one.’
‘Loads?’ I echoed. ‘Just like this one?’
‘Well, maybe not loads,’ she conceded.
‘I like this place,’ my dad said suddenly. ‘I like that it will never make money, or serve a discernible social purpose – that it’s a billion-dollar pleasure park, completely without function.’ As he stared across the canals, he paused. ‘This park was somebody’s dream, once upon a time. It was just a piece of imagination. And they turned that fantasy into real buildings, roads, real bridges and towers. They named it, they brought people here, they made it their own. And it’s a beautiful place,’ he said. ‘No matter what you say. So much dreaming that went into it.’
Not long after our visit, we heard reports that the park was on the verge of bankruptcy. Its future perennially in question, the park continued its limping, half-hearted existence, bereft of visitors and waiting for the declaration of bankruptcy to descend. But it persisted all the same. And so the place languished there, like Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome emptied of its dreams, the last vestiges of a time when anything was possible, and anything could be built.
The train pulls into Osaka, and with thoughts of that seaside colony’s dubious persistence still in my mind, I am also reminded of the way that, however much health’s certainty slipped into doubt, over the course of these years it also found its way towards recovery again – recovery being nothing like a restoration of the past, but rather the continuation of a present wrought through with alteration, touched by the unsteady rocking of constant and minute adjustment.
Outside the train, there is all around an architecture of persuasive staunchness, the stadiums and factories of Osaka slowly encroaching upon and then supplanting the fairytale landscape of Huis ten Bosch. The super expressways shuttle across a greying skyline, and the buildings are encased in scaffolding and dotted with cranes. In this landscape there is the assurance of continued productivity and the ticking of placid endurance, so that the process of memory becomes as plain as one foot placed before another, step following step all down the course of a vertiginous tightrope. And it occurs to me that the circumstances of the past, in retrospect seeming so secure, in truth was no different from these present conditions – the same tightrope, the same precipice across which it stretches, only then invisible. And if the tightrope, once seen, cannot be unseen again, then that is only the more stringent of memory’s many conditions.
Now, as the train pulls into the station, destination achieved, I lean forward to peer through the window, knowing that I cannot expect to see them for several seconds more, hoping all the same that they will somehow appear early, and then, just as I catch sight of them – my mom looking anxiously at the arrivals board up above, my dad looking hard through the windows of the train, face rounder and with an extra sharpness to his eye, as if he held before him a picture of the world, newly brought into superadded focus – the train slows to an impossible slowness. And as I gaze out from the window they seem to hover just before me, approaching by the tempo of an exacting lento, measured out by an unseen maestro’s baton.