The Great Railway Bazaar - Theroux Paul (книги онлайн бесплатно без регистрации полностью TXT) 📗

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 connected to barely visible switches marked bright and dusky, the tables and waiters and spigots that materialize from the wall, the machines in the subway that sell you a ticket and then punch it, the disappearing chairs, and the silent trains you board with the help of the disembodied arm of a man who is hired to push people aboard. At seven o'clock in the evening when the stores close, two girls in uniform appear at the door; they bow, say 'Thank you' and 'Come again' to each customer, and they are back in the morning. At the enormous Isetan Department Store in Shinjuku, the groups of employees standing by display counters say, 'Good morning' to the first customers, making them feel like stock-holders. Everything works: the place spins with polite invention.

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 anniversary of the birth of the Japanese playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Even the sadists in Japan, I was to discover, have a sense of history. There were only two or three gaijins in the audience. A cultural evening elsewhere would have been a tourist affair: I had a feeling this large local turnout would afford some insights into the Japanese use of leisure.

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 running into a room where, on the floor, oil lay in a wide pool. This film might have been shown at one of those university film societies that have an annual screening of L'avventura, Pather Panchali, and tedious East European cartoons: it had a pretentious chase, odd camera angles, and the kind of formal hysteria I had always associated with film-society offerings. Then one woman slipped in the oil and the other pounced on her and they began fighting. They screamed, tore at each other's hair, and gnashed their teeth, and each time the victim tried to escape she slipped in the oil and was pinned down by her pursuer. There were shots of dripping fingernails, oily hair, bums, breasts, and knees as well as outrageous cinematic effects, like that of a mouth about to engorge the screen.

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 innocently enough with a film of a man fondling a woman. I asked my grinning neighbour what the title meant. He said it was simply the name of an island in the Sea of Japan where this quick feel was taking place, and I hoped, as it unfolded, that it was not on my itinerary. The man was behind the woman now and it took very little imagination to conclude that he was resolutely sodomizing her as he worked at her breasts like a man squeezing lemons – lemons rather than grapefruits. Two girls came onstage as before and demonstrated in a way that might properly be called symbolic what the man and woman were doing in the film, and a full ten minutes of lubricious sex play passed before the final scene. This was an embrace, and as the girls onstage made the beast with two backs, the man in the film hopped into the missionary position and at the moment of orgasm – a wince its only warning -drew a glittering sword from beneath the mat and cut his lover's throat. There was a close shot of the fatal laceration, of blood running between the dead woman's breasts (this seemed a popular climax), and I moved to the lobby for a breath of fresh air.

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 'Onna Harakiri', which is fairly explicit once you know that Onna is the name of the girl stripping off her kimono and unsheathing a sword and holding it to her stomach. A man offstage recited what sounded to be a mocking Japanese poem with the rhythm and metre of 'The Raven'. The tormented Onna, stark naked, pushed the blade in and pulled it sideways. Blood spurted from her belly, spraying the stage, and she tumbled over. But she was still alive. She knelt again and, as the poem proceeded, stabbed herself in the left thigh, the right thigh, and under each arm, releasing gouts of blood. So clever are the Japanese that it was not until her sixth attempt that I saw she was puncturing a small cellophane envelope of blood each time. Now she was covered in gore, her tatami mat was sticky with it, and the people in the front row wiped it from their faces with hankies. Finally, she succeeded: she exhibited her blood-stained body to the reverential audience and then pushed the dripping blade into her throat, impaling her head like a lollipop on a stick. Blood shot to her jaws, and, much perforated, she swooned and fell flat. The floor revolved, giving everyone a view of the carnage before the platform descended into the stage well, pausing briefly for Onna to raise a bloody floodlit hand: it was this hand the audience cheered as the lights went out.