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I hadn't seen the barrel until she used it: Tokyo's order is apparent only up close – from a distance it is a jumble, but the jumble must be studied for the plan to emerge. Then you see the sliding doors, the neatly hidden lights in the wall and under the table co
On a department-store wall there are forty-eight colour televisions, an impressive display of electronics, and, though even forty-eight images of a little Japanese politician giving a speech in living colour do not make him Winston Churchill, the array reveals the Japanese taste for gadgetry. There must be something in the Japanese character that saves them from the despair Americans feel in similar throes of consuming. The American, gorging himself on merchandise, develops a sense of guilty self-consciousness; if the Japanese have these doubts they do not show them. Perhaps hesitation is not part of the national character, or perhaps the ones who hesitate are trampled by the crowds of shoppers -that natural selection that capitalist society practises against the reflective. The strong impression I had was of a people who acted together because of a preconceived plan: a people programmed. You see them queuing automatically in the subway, naturally forming lines at ticket counters and machines, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the people all have printed circuits. But my assessment changed with time and I began to see people struggling against order in these subway lines: as soon as the train drew in and the doors flashed open, many people who had waited silently for a long time in an orderly line broke ranks and began shoving and flailing their parcels and throwing themselves at the door.
So far on this trip (it is another bonus of the sleeping car) I had managed to avoid those so-called cultural evenings during which one was held captive in a hot room to applaud the degenerate spectacle of dancers and singers in feathers and beads performing numbers whose badness asked to be excused on the grounds it was traditional. But the night before I caught the Hatsukari to Aomori I had some time to spare and, for no particular reason that I can remember, decided to go to the Nichigeki Music Hall to see a two-hour show called Red Flowers Fall on Fair Skin. This was pedantically advertised as commemorating the two hundred and fiftieth a
Just as the lights went down, two middle-aged women darted down the aisle and took their seats in the first row, giggling. The opening number was a kick line, ten Japanese girls in gold Thai-style headdresses and little else, apart from tiny gold lame bikini bottoms. The lead dancer ascended through the floor on a revolving pedestal and flourished gold snakes in front of the nimbly kicking troupe. I groaned. The music blared. After having searched the papers and rejected the noh and kabuki offerings I had come up with a tit-show. I wanted to leave, and I nearly did after the next number, a Japanese song, sung by a powdered androgynous wraith, which left me feeling as if I had just been subjected to the complete unstringing of a piano. I hung on, faintly attracted by the nakedness and finding a queer enjoyment in the dance routines, 'Cheerio! Charleston!' and 'Black Cry-Out' (a spirited episode, relating the death of Billie Holiday, with the Japanese in black-face – more a minstrel show than a comment on the race question). Up to that point most of the numbers mimicked Radio City Music Hall, but what followed owed absolutely nothing to the West.
'Aburagoroshi', which my Japanese neighbour gladly translated as 'oil-kill', began with a film of two women ru
While this film – growing progressively sadistic -flickered at the back of the stage, two naked Japanese girls appeared from the well at the centre of the stage and performed a live stylized version of what was taking place on the screen – that is, aping the sadism, pretending to tear at each other. The women on the screen were now gleaming with oil, and you could see it was going to end badly when one sank her teeth into the other's bum, causing the victim to thrash. The biter straddled her. The simultaneous presentation continued, two writhing nudes on the stage, two thrashing nudes on the screen. The camera shifted to show wounds, blood mixed with oil, and blood and oil coursing down the breasts of a woman on all fours. This entertainment ended showing two murderesses triumphant over the prostrate bodies of their victims, and there was much applause.
The next item, 'Ten No Amishima', began i
I was not quite provoked to return for 'The Blood-Stained White Body', but I saw 'Japan Sinking'. This was a hilarious portrayal, by ten nude girls and ten epicene male dancers, of how Japan will finally go under. The last number was a solo entitled 'O