Back home, in the Shinjuku death maze

Back home, in the Shinjuku death maze
by David Benjamin

CHIGASAKI, Japan — On the streets of Tokyo, population 20 million, facing waves of 80-year-old kamikaze bicyclists wearing surgical masks and wielding umbrellas like bayonets, watching with wonder as an office lady in a pencil skirt sprints through traffic on three-inch heels with a stack of fourteen bento boxes and a half-gallon bottle of oolong tea — without breaking a sweat or showing a glimmer of facial expression — I’m strangely at home. And I think of my stepsister Vicki, who gets nervous as soon as she’s even a few miles outside of her lifelong hometown, Tomah, Wisconsin, population 9,000. I know how she feels.

It’s all a matter of turf.

Tomah was my first turf. I knew it better than Vicki by my tenth birthday, when I got my first bike and started using it to stretch the town, beyond the lake, halfway to Tunnel City, and out past the VA Hospital along the Lemonweir.

When Mom moved us to Madison, population, 125,000, I was suddenly 100 miles out of town, as twitchy as Vicki in Vladivostok. This was all somebody else’s territory and I didn’t even know who.

But I had my bike.

A few weeks later, I’d found a new kemo sabe named Greg who had the charming habit of buying Coca-Cola by the quart, like a wino stocking up on Thunderbird. Pretty soon, I was sponging off the rich folks who lived on Lake Monona, and I’d stretched my territory as far as Olbrich Park to the east and Langdon Street downtown, where I zipped along fraternity row figuring out the Greek alphabet. I didn’t claim all of Mad City (the West side was a mystery) but I knew a few of its best secrets — the fishing spot behind the Fauerbach Brewery, the ice-cream parlor at Bancroft’s Dairy, the little beach on Waunona Way where Donna Wind went sun-bathing now and then in her itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini. I had new turf, bigger than Tomah.

I had undergone a sort of Darwinian miracle, like a fish crawling onto the sidewalk, sucking in a lungful of slightly polluted city oxygen, feeling a little tipsy and deciding, suddenly, to never go back into the swamp.

Since Madison, I’ve evolved similarly in a half-dozen polyglot cities on three continents, plus three hamlets and a peninsula. I’ve gotten to know the best spots to eat, drink, hike, browse, take pictures and stand on the corner watchin’ all the natives go by. I know (mas o menos) how to get there, what to order, how to ask and where the toilets are. I know the best views, where to buy the news, who’s on the make and who’s on the level. All this local savvy applies to Paris, Brooklyn, Boston, Beloit, Manhattan, Tokyo and even a few pieces of Barcelona.

It’s also good to know what you don’t know.

Like Tuesday in Tokyo. I decided on an excursion to Shitamachi, the “Low City” of the Edo period and the only part of town not reduced to ash by General LeMay’s B-29s. Trouble is, there are corners of Shitamachi I hadn’t seen in years. I needed to hit a a bookstore and buy a map.

Tokyo bookstores are surely my turf. I used to browse Jimbocho, a warren of alleys where every other storefront is crammed with books. Most are in Japanese, but you need to go inside, because suddenly against the back wall, yellow-edged and stacked precariously, a trove of 25-cent pulps from my dad’s generation — Zane Gray and James M. Cain, Hammett and Chandler, Spillane, Benchley, Heinlein, Wyndham, Wodehouse, Erskine Caldwell and Grace Metalious, Hesse, Broch, Mann, Camus, Gide and Bonjour Tristesse. In Jimbocho, Charlie Tuttle used to run a store (maybe he still does?) that contained the whole staggering backlist of Japanese lit translated into English, from Genji to Dasai and Oe, to The Joy of Sumo (by me).

But Jimbocho isn’t where you hunt for a map. Nor is Takadanobaba, one of my old literary haunts, if only because I loved to announce, “I’m going to Takadanobaba.” (Go ahead, try it. Three times fast: Takadanobaba-takadanobaba-takadanobaba). So anyway, Tuesday, from Chigasaki-by-the-Sea — where we stay nowadays — I aimed for Tokyo Station and its nearby megastore for books, Maruzen. I changed my plan, however, at Chigasaki Station, because the next available train was to Shinjuku, which has two bookstores, both called Kinokuniya — one tall and shiny, one old, grubby and packed into a building with an arcade full of fish-fragrant nomiya and beery akajochin.

An hour later, rising from beneath the station, I looked around, spotted the Takashimaya department store on my left and said, “Ah, my turf,” and headed for Kinokuniya (tall and shiny).

But gone. Gone? Yes, supplanted by some sort of fashion outlet called Nitoya. Cities change, without warning, no apologies. Adapt or die! I was going to have to either find the old, grubby Kinokuniya in the maze of streets around Shinjuku (which is only barely my turf — I’m cozier in Ebisu, Shibuya, Nakameguro), or ride across town to Maruzen. Meanwhile, there was Tokyu Hands, Japan’s quintessential do-it-yourself, all-purpose dry goods store. I headed to the top. The Japanese have always loved paper, so they have office supplies, pens, ink, inkpads, brushes, rice paper, parchment, calendars, notebooks, files, folders, stickers, staplers, staples, clips, doo-hickeys, gimcracks, thingummies and stuff you can’t figure out what they do, in richer variety than anywhere else on earth. I indulged myself, spent five grand (yen) on clerical toys and headed back out into the warm warren of Shinjuku in search of either lunch or Kinokuniya.

By and by, I managed both. But afterward, there I stood, on that sidewalk, staring into the teeth of the perpetual stampede. The sidewalk of Kabuki-cho was typically sticky. The neon was dulled by daylight. The barkers were perched on stools eating cold fish. The jostling pedestrians regarded me as invisible ’til contact and a doormat thereafter. The sun was out after a wet week. I was hot and sweaty, my dogs barkin’, at home, in Tokyo. My turf. And tired of it.

I called it a day. Shitamachi (Yanaka Ginza! Ame-Yoko! Shinobazu Pond! Say ’em fast, three times) could wait. I slunk into an underground realm of Shinjuku called — for no knowable reason — Subnade. I should’ve stayed aboveground, where the megalith of Shinjuku Station serves to orient (even if you’re on the wrong goddamned side of it — which you always are). Underground, though, the tiled tunnels of Shinjuku are seemingly endless and eternally incomprehensible. Directional signs, Japanese or English, are a mean trick. At any given junction, they’ll point three different arrows at the same train line, Keio East, Keio West, Keio All Around the Town. The only destination you’re sure to reach is Isetan. But Isetan won’t take you anywhere. It’s not a train. It’s a department store.

As a Tokyo veteran, I should lament my confusion beneath Shinjuku, but this is my turf, too. I’ve always gotten lost down here. Everyone does. Shinjuku Station devours the unwary. I’ve always believed in the Black Hole of Shinjuku Eki, a sub-basement that houses forever the hopelessly lost — from Chicago, Shanghai, Dusseldorf, Johannesburg, Tohoku. Unable to ever find the way out, they sleep on cots, eat porridge and hardtack provided by mute Zen monks, braid lanyards, smoke Golden Bats, and read old copies of Collier’s and Popular Mechanics, living out a pale, troglodyte subsistence like the wretched relicts of an atomic war.

Yesterday, wearily, after my usual half-dozen U-turns, just before resigning my future to the Black Hole, I spotted a subtle left turn beneath the strange device, “Excelsior!” (immortalized by Longfellow), followed a hunch and found the Tokaido Line (immortalized by Hiroshige). From there, elbowed by salarymen and squeezed ‘twixt schoolgirls disguised as sailors, I bade the silver streak to carry me off, safe at last from the jealous claws of the ten-headed bitch goddess Shinjuku.

We flew through Ebisu, my old neighborhood. Through Oosaki, where you can find the best tonkatsu in Tokyo (or get lost looking). Through Yokohama, where Kimie and Kennedy live and where the baseball Whales, in a spasm of incorrect political correctness, changed their name to the BayStars.

What the hell is a BayStar?