AFTER HE HAD RETIRED AND SETTLED BACK IN TOKYO, Mr. Watanabe realized that the culture shock of returning to his country was greater than that of leaving. He found that he didn’t understand some of the expressions used by his youngest compatriots. And that to them, he sounded hopelessly old-fashioned.
Once, in response to a question about a downtown address, a young man, wearing his cap backward and mistaking him for someone who wasn’t fluent in the language, replied to him in English.
Nice cap, Watanabe had growled back in Japanese, exaggerating his Tokyo accent as he walked away.
For the first few months, he noticed that in certain situations, he was prone to act like a Latino. Spanish speakers had frequently remarked upon his reserve, but now in the eyes of his own countrymen and women, he appeared to suffer from an incurable garrulousness. If he missed his stop on a bus or train, he would jump up and rush toward the doors, while the other passengers looked at him as if he were a madman. He would shout on his cell phone, much to the annoyance of his quiet neighbors.
As other languages had entered his life, Watanabe became aware of the extent to which his mother tongue limited the possibility of improvisation, of meandering through a sentence in search of its point. The flexibility of Spanish, in particular the long-windedness of its Argentinian variant, was a structural impossibility in Japanese. Once he’d vanquished his doubts and insecurities, he’d learned over the years to enjoy that slipperiness. Which, he is sure, even altered the way he walked. He suspects now that his gait gives him away as much as his intonation.
The first thing he did after setting up his desk was place the mouse on the left side of the keyboard.
In spite of the cost and the advice of his friends, he decided to move to the hectic neighborhood of Shinjuku. Among other reasons, because of its convenient proximity to public transportation. The only thing he feels increasingly miserly about is time. In Watanabe’s opinion, wasting time requires more effort than making the most of it: the supply is infinite.
Contrary to the numerous objections he has heard, he continues to believe that living in the center of a city, aside from being extremely practical, is the best way to live nowhere. Its equidistance turns it into a multiple frontier. The center seems to him less a fixed point than a revolving axis, where currents converge for an instant, only to scatter in all directions. During his wanderings, Watanabe has come to understand that the Western image of the urban nucleus differs from his own. Instead of something full, to him it represents a dynamic void.
Not far from where he lives, the train station unfurls with hundreds of departures that lead to as many other worlds. Mr. Watanabe remembers it being rebuilt when he was a child. He’s aware that virtually none of the passengers who use it today have seen the station in that former state. When he compares those ruins with its present vitality, it seems to him he can see his entire country: it has been raised at the expense of forgetting its foundations, like a skyscraper floating in air. Shinjuku Station is inhabited by nojuku, mendigos, or beggars, depending on the language of the person averting their gaze.
Although Watanabe seldom writes letters, he finds the proximity of the post office reassuring. Watanabe feels that every individual is a potential castaway. The greater the access to help, the happier isolation can be. The only things that bother him are the adjacent districts of Chiyoda and Minato, where several rival companies still have their headquarters. He occasionally walks past them, pausing to observe the comings and goings of employees, suppliers, executives, public officials. Not knowing who they are makes him feel a mixture of relief and bitterness. In his mind, the senior employees always look older than him.
But above all else, he has chosen this neighborhood because of the number of foreigners. Here, the movements of every possible race and nationality overlap, like a whirlpool drawn by hand. At this stage of his own disorientation, Watanabe would be incapable of living in a zone that is too homogenous. His previous cities have accustomed him to melting pots. They make him feel he is in several places at once. It could be said that nothing in Japan is less Japanese than Tokyo. Perhaps this is a sublime form of being a capital city.
His friends claim the area has been invaded: hotels and tourists are popping up all over the place. This invasion doesn’t upset Watanabe. Were it not for the nervous astonishment of the new visitors, he would scarcely notice his surroundings.
The neighborhood also offers a variety of nighttime entertainment, some of it respectable. Its lights and sounds are as tireless as its consumers. Filled with video games and slot machines, the area itself seems to him like a video game, one that accepts all kinds of currency. During the day executives work here, produce, act like responsible citizens. And at night they spend recklessly, invest in vice, sponsor exploitation.
Mr. Watanabe avoids certain places, for cardiovascular reasons rather than on moral grounds. He dines at a small izakaya, where he orders a plate of sashimi with vegetables and sesame dressing. Or, if he is allowing himself a treat, tempura squid and fried bread. He has lost weight since his return. After decades of gastronomic adjustments, he is glad to be reunited with this landscape of paper lanterns and cloudy fish tanks. He has missed wiping his hands with an oshibori before his first mouthful. We Japanese, Watanabe often says, have always been good at washing our hands.
An increasing number of working women enter, often unaccompanied, and seat themselves near him. He is intrigued to see them so absorbed in their own affairs, confident of their own space, so different from the young women in his day. He exchanges fleeting smiles with them (his somewhat intimidated, theirs a shade granddaughterly), and they begin to chew over their respective lives.
Unless there is a major disruption (of which the earthquake has doubtless been the most grueling), he spends a couple of hours in the Somewhere Jazz Bar, one of a cluster of establishments crowding the Golden Gai district. Almost impossible to find amid the profusion of signs, it is hidden in one of the few alleyways that still remind him of the postwar city he used to walk through, before the roads were widened everywhere.
After dinner, Mr. Watanabe is accustomed to having one or two—let’s say three—drinks at the Somewhere. (If he goes there during the day, he is careful to order tea first: in his opinion, to get drunk before nightfall is the height of bad taste.) Its cramped quarters, with seating for only half a dozen customers, plus the few stoics who stand at the bar, make for a perfect cocktail of intimacy and mistrust. If the venue is full, he waits as long as necessary. He doesn’t want just a bar. He wants his bar.
One of his fellow patrons is Ryu Murakami: the author of novels he would like to read; the director of a laconic sadomasochistic film, in which Watanabe vaguely remembers a series of dildos, anxieties, and mirrors; and the TV host of a program about the economy, which he occasionally watches.
Murakami is from Sasebo, in the prefecture of Nagasaki, less than a hundred kilometers from the town where Watanabe was born. That small town was destroyed during the war and was on the list of targets for the atom bomb. The victorious military forces occupied it, and as far as Watanabe knows, it is still a U.S. base. Both men have briefly exchanged their memories of the Kyūshū region, long before the new bullet trains, and their respective apprenticeships in America. Never in too much depth, of course; neither likes to poke his nose into someone else’s drink.
Murakami has told him that, although he is currently living in Yokohama, he spends several nights a week at a hotel in Tokyo, where he keeps a secret office and writes. Murakami seems like a man striving to prove his uniqueness, as if he were fed up with being mistaken for the other Murakami. More than once, Watanabe has seen him sign a book by his namesake, perhaps to avoid the tedious explanation he has been repeating half his life.
Among the regulars at the Somewhere Jazz Bar is also a young German translator who speaks with a disconcerting accent in remarkably fluent Japanese, and whom Watanabe usually finds taking notes or discussing politics. The translator always turns up in an old-fashioned hat that looks like a costume. A few strands of hair escape from it, which Watanabe—especially after his second drink—is convinced belong to a wig. The young German is the owner of a small black-haired dog with triangular ears, which waits for him obediently by the door.
Barmen who cater to so few customers become not so much passing conversationalists as established confidants: what they serve up is their ear. The barman on the late-afternoon shift at the Somewhere (whom Watanabe has gotten to know better, perhaps because the tempo in the afternoons is slower and more meditative) insists on being called John, despite being born in a small town to the south of Nagoya. Watanabe hasn’t asked his real name, for which John seems grateful.
As he serves a drink, John will spin the glass on the counter. Sometimes he does it with an astral slowness. At other times with Olympian verve, as if his gesture were being awarded an official score. For Mr. Watanabe, it is a ritual warning before starting to drink: anyone entering a bar knows that verticality is an art. If a customer happens to halt the spinning glass, fearing a possible spillage that has never occurred, John takes offense in a silent, irreversible manner.
On his right, when his hands aren’t darting hither and thither as in a game of Ping-Pong, he keeps a board on which he plays himself at shogi. Dividing his attention between serving some customers and chatting with others, John keeps an eye on his most dreaded opponent’s moves. At nightfall, when he finishes his shift, he changes his shirt, leans on the other side of the bar to drink a Scotch, and won’t allow anyone to interrupt him.
At the far end of the Somewhere are a couple of triangular boards. They slide apart and lead to a cellar where merchandise is stored. Every so often, John disappears into that opening. Watanabe imagines a catacomb concealing unmentionable stories. And yet he suspects that were he able to descend and satisfy his curiosity, he’d be seriously disappointed.