In transit: notes from a daybook - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 3: Webs of Power
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
HIROSHIMA: A typhoon is out in the Pacific, several hundred kilometres south of here. Ponderous, gunmetal grey clouds have piled against the steep mountains inland and the air is so dank it is hard to breathe. Cargo ships are sheltering in the lee of steep islands that litter the inland channels of the Seto Inland Sea, and oystermen are securing the timber rafts on which they farm before boarding their boats and navigating the maze of narrow passages back to the relative safety of small mainland harbours. There are still cranes pecking in the shallows of the muddy delta that intersects the city.
It's so dark that it's hard to imagine it is just after sunrise. We're sitting by a window on the sixth floor of an automotive manufacturer's headquarters, staring out across the rusted rooftops of the engine plant towards a dense cluster of suburban housing clinging to the side of a nearby hillside like a fetid blight. Below me, an empty parking lot, slick black and partly flooded, will begin filling with company cars during the next hour and then the whole building will stutter into a droning half-life of pointless busyness. We're waiting for a herd of senior managers to turn up for a teleconference with their opposite numbers in the company's United States subsidiary: a large monitor displays a fuzzy, out-of-focus image of the clock on the wall above our heads.
The earth tremor hits before they arrive. It is no more than 3.0 on the Richter scale, the television news reports later. Weak but prolonged, it begins as a low, resonating rumble and, within seconds, there is a curious, rubbery flexibility to the walls and floor. Then the furniture becomes animated. I wait for it to intensify but it gradually subsides and solidity is regained. I am a little disappointed that it wasn't stronger.
TOKYO: The thing that surprises me most about Tokyo is the water. It's everywhere. You come upon it in unexpected places: on freeways, where the high supporting pylons are driven into black canals that flow between the shadows of high office towers, or at the edges of new suburbs of glass and steel that float like refugees on low, flat rafts of reclaimed land. There are inexplicable, bracken inlets and backwaters enclosed by concrete dykes. And then, in the distance, there is the occasional glint of sunlight that, beneath the umber smog, reveals the infinite horizon of the sea.
The wet season has begun early, although it feels colder and less humid than a year ago. From my hotel window, the city is a ghostly silhouette beneath a pall of monsoonal rain, the grey clouds so low, they're like shabby awnings strung between the rooftops of the nearby high-rise apartments. Everything is monochromatic, flat, except for the bobbing flow of umbrellas along the sidewalk. The city's incessant throb is muted.When I arrived last night, the upper floors of most of the buildings were just an eerie glow within ragged scarves of low grey cloud. The city felt like a futuristic battlefield imagined by sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison and rendered by an otaku game engineer. The 23-year-old and I checked into a suite at The Westin in Ebisu, a longed-for-relief from the shoebox dimensions of Hiroshima's "business hotels" and closet-sized bathrooms cobbled together with plastic laminate and injection mouldings.
THIS CITY IS TOO CONDUCIVE to the manic mis-wiring of my psyche. It's too easy to be swept up in its unrelenting momentum, the raw energy of 30 million intense, tightly wrapped souls teeming through its arteries, the hyper-electric jolt of its too bright neon and plasma, office lights always burning, the visceral rumble of its streets – deeper, louder even than New York – and the heightened sensitivity to data swarming like tsetse flies in the ether around you, stirred up by millions of tiny CDMA phones. But there are times when I'm oppressed by the stifled emotions, the compressed sense of space and the contrary social protocols that combine to amplify the ever-present neurotic jitter that infects every minute of life here.
I will never really understand the Japanese, not even with the 23-year-old's help. They are not unlike the English in some ways: both are confined to small islands and share an insular disregard for the rest of the world that is usually interpreted as xenophobia. They cling to worn-out traditions and protocols and avoid exhibitionism, while at the same time, they forebear eccentricity. They are both suppressed, uptight peoples, undemonstrative, even cold, but with a capacity for sympathy and unselfish kindness. They both have bad teeth.
LOS ANGELES LAX: The sub-dermal irritation I get from Americans these days flares like an allergy every time I'm in close proximity to large numbers of them: the obese mid-Western women with their bad perms and too colourful clothes, the cookie-cutter Gen-Yers with their skater T-shirts and baggy cargo pants and their dumb faux-ebonic chatter, the too tightly wrapped mid-level business executives and sales reps in Brooks Brothers knock-offs and badly fitting shirts. Between them flow the self-righteous, insular, God-fearing, thoughtless, uninformed, media-referenced monologues that pass for conversation these days: no-one listening to the other, everyone expressing themselves (because they've been taught that they should, no matter how dull-witted or ill-informed they might be).
WEST HOLLYWOOD: I'm like a spinning top at that moment before it loses speed and balance and topples on its side. Dizziness has overwhelmed rationality. I am on the net, teleconferencing over Yahoo! Messenger with my psychiatrist, 2500 kilometres away in Tulsa, Oklahoma. When I was in Tokyo, she wrote an email that instructed me to "focus on the things you can enjoy and try to capture a sense of wonderment about this strange land where you don't always understand the spoken word but you certainly can understand things of beauty". Now she is telling me to increase my dosages and seek help as soon as possible in Los Angeles.
I am holed up in The Standard Hotel with the 23-year-old who, like an unruly kid, has strewn her clothes among half-spilled files, notebooks, electronic organiser, mobile-phone charger, a tangled nest of computer cables and a laptop tipped on the floor. Her underwear is drying on hangers above the terrace door. Nearly all Japanese girls suspect laundry staff of a fetishistic interest in their bras and knickers, perhaps with reason, and they insist on washing their own.
The nights are long when you don't sleep. I have lost interest in the 23-year-old's pseudo-innocence and elastic skin. I channel-surf the TV, clicking the remote several hundred times before my attention is arrested. I develop fleeting fascinations for golf, get-rich-quick real estate schemes, Baptist sermons, rap music (especially if the video features big-assed mocha-skinned women in bikinis) and kitchen gadgets. I immerse myself in re-runs of '60s and '70s comedy episodes I know so well I can recite the dialogue. I watch the scrolling headlines on CNN at the top of every hour. Finally, it's dawn and I'm released from the obligation to rest.
I wonder how long the 23-year-old will be around. Few people – and even fewer memories of them – "stick" in my life. As soon as my relationship with someone or something is over, I erase it from my mind, a kind of emotional "reset". I've erased so much from my mind that I'm confounded by how often and unexpectedly I come across blank spots, like the black, felt-tipped strokes of the censor on classified documents.
I read somewhere that the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once argued that if two people dream the same dream, it isn't a dream anymore – it signifies the existence of an alternative reality ... The insane always occupy multiple realities: their internal narratives are always different to their actual or external experiences. For me, that can be complicated by the fact that, when I was unmedicated, which was for most of my 49 years, the character I adopted for one experience was very different to another that I adopted for a different experience somewhere else. The process was so compulsive that I would, for extended periods, devise a complex network of different characters and different lives in different parts of the world, with different relationships, then live intermittently in and between them, while blending them all into a fluid mutability that had the parallel narratives and multi-tiered options of a computer game. And the game engine was an invisible "real" me, solitary, sentient and more than a little crazy.
These days, medication gives me the possibility of sustained reason, of a reliable perception of the present. But the same cannot be said of what I remember, so I am disenfranchised from my past, condemned to roam in search of a future. ♦