9:20 a.m. - 2022-05-22
Sumo
My first trip to Japan coincided w/one of Sumo's bi-monthly tournaments. NHK broadcasts these live and so, after mornings spent ogling Kyoto's endless array of shrine and temple architecture-porn, I'd return to my hotel room and inevitably switch Sumo on in the background. But I had a whirlwind itinerary of dinners and cocktails w/my soon-to-be cousins to attend, and a short speech I'd yet to write that, as the Shinto equivalent of a “best man”, I was slated to deliver at a formal-beyond-the-occidental-pale reception. So that weighed on my mind and, while intrigued and confused by these heavyset stoics on the TV and their elaborate pre-bout rituals, I paid less attention then than I would come to do later.
That lens came into focus one afternoon after my return to Tokyo, post-wedding. I'd discovered a punk venue a few blocks from the hotel the night before and pulled a late one. Half a foot taller and two decades older than anyone else in that raucous basement club, I was also the only gaijin in attendance. But by the end of the night the youth had taken me in. Maybe because I felt compelled to mount the stage and compliment every band after their set, trading broken Japanese w/broken English and punctuating everything with high-fives? Maybe because I'd befriended the bartender…in any case, someone in a plaid skirt and Docs and all the safety-pins everywhere and the aggressive eyeliner pulled me (literally) over to dance with her and her friends and so I did until we shut the joint down and I stumbled home ebullient and sweaty; high on the scope of the “scene”, its perseverance and, to some extent, my own. But yeah I felt every bit “two decades older” the next morning. So after a Japanese breakfast (this is an actual amazing thing, not just a band name) I walked down to Inokashira Park and just chilled on a bench. Watching the swan boats w/their tittering passengers bump into each other and a street musician earnestly swapping Rs for Ls in Bob Dylan covers and patting Shiba pups on leashes and just soaking up the loose vibe these Saturdays afford a culture even more workweek-rigid than my own.
At some point the humidity hit critical mass and the first fat raindrops of the afternoon peppered the lake so I headed back to the hotel. Summertime showers are common in Japan - but this was a serious tropical storm moving in. A storm that would set the mis en scene for a wild day and night to follow but...this story isn't about that. It's about padding down a silent, carpeted, air-conditioned hall to the vending machine to buy a Sapporo, cracking it back in my tiny room and switching on the live Sumo broadcast. It's about realizing that the same vending machine also dispensed something called “chubai”, a sparkling high-alcohol grapefruit-flavored malt liquor. It's about how, when the rain began to pour, then sheet, then sluice, the pigeon nested w/her egg on the tiny concrete ledge outside my window stayed high and dry...both of us taking in the press of umbrellas below and the elevated trains snaking through the wild tangle of signage surrounding Kichijoji Station and the cloudy summits of the buildings fading into the storm above us. And it's about watching hours of sumo, baffled and fascinated. For a combat sport, the matches exude a certain calm....as much an affirmation of social contract as an homage to feudal violence, the expressionless mien of the wrestlers adding to the sense of critical distance.
I saw “Lost In Translation” when it came out and left the cinema nonplussed. It struck me as too precious, too privileged, and I felt like the whole “point” of the film could have been better served as the aesthetic underpinning of like, I dunno...a plot an' shit. But I get it. While immersion in the unfamiliar sparks a childlike part of our mind oft-dulled by the routine and can leave us “giddy”, the feeling of isolation in a foreign crowd is its own complex high. And the scale of my little room amidst the seeming chaos of Tokyo, the indecipherable spectacle on the television (and a few cans of chubai I'm sure) brought on a weird euphoria. Something best described by a contradiction – it felt like an intimate out-of-body experience.
So back in the dry rural drudgery of Texas, during the 2 weeks of Basho every other month, I'm up at 4 AM, watching and remembering.
