Aquaria, Love Costumes

In 24 hours in Tokyo I have fallen in love with the seafood, especially the seafood that is still alive. I walk past it--a small sample of it--passing the restaurants that line the main street between my hotel and the nearest subway station. Restaurants keep it--them--in narrow aquaria that face the street; through the frizzy plume from the bubbler you can also watch the chefs in profile, chopping things on counters, with bowls of long pale vegetables to one side of the knife.

In the morning there are fewer--this morning only a few pale squid, several crabs that had divided themselves into two piles, one in either corner of the tank, and some bulbous-jawed, stupid-looking fish backing up anxiously and flicking a white membrane like a bubble up and down just inside the o of their lips, rapidly, like blowing a bubble of gum inside their mouths and sucking it back.

But tonight there are several other kinds of fish in the same tank: motionless stern-looking fish that have protruding, gorilla-like brows; zebra-striped fish whose blurred patterning suggests panic, especially around the eyes, which the stripes make look puckered and askew; and sharper, lither irridescent fish with translucent pointy fins as delicate as dragonfly wings and a motion-sensing stripe along their sides. There is a spider-legged crab, red legs like shiny satin and back a bulb of brown-red silk, glowing defensively from one corner, all elbow-angles, and there is a large snail just under the level of the water, bright apricot foot kissed obscenely to the glass. Best of all is the octupus, coiled glowering and kept to itself inside an orange mesh bag, all arms crossed like the thick line used to tie up ships but hoary with white fringe and white protruding dots just larger that those that come from a hole-punch; occasionally all of these flinch together, in an octopus sneeze or shrug.

And it is strange, having exchanged San Francisco for Tokyo, to be in a place that is so safe. Without fear, life feels like a theme park. The landscape--cityscape--is candycolored and frictionless, and there seems to be a national schoolgirl fetish. On comic-book covers this is the girl with ponytail, glasses, and butterfly-collared shirt unbuttoned to reveal breasts so enormous they would be worse for her back than the enormous backback parents are warned against letting their children carry, and on the subway, and on the street, it is women in tiny shorts and navy-blue or black thigh-high stockings and heels--on an overcast day, in wind and drizzle, me in my practical raincoat, still chilly, asking, how do they do it--yes, I am jealous. I want ivory fishnets with a tiny weave, shirred black leggings with hanging diagonal slashes reminiscent of the Jellicle cats, and a white trenchcoat excessively, delicately darted at the waist. I want to be a creature whose pattern is always changing, who is as bound by necesity as a sugarpuff, the Prospero of my own surface.

Only once, briefly, did I really start to panic. That was when I was trying to cross through Shinjuku Station, from the west side to the east. I would guess a direction, walk through the tides of people (reminding myself to keep to the left--the side from which it would be more convenient to draw my sword and defend myself against a knight riding up from the opposite direction, I also reminded myself--if I were right-handed) until I found an "i" infomation map, and look for the "You Are Here". Every time, I found that I was still well inside Shinjuku Station.

In the Shinjuku train station, a sign for the company Ranking Ranqueen:

For real media producing sympathy of newage.
For a selling channel between goods having the support of a number of people and newly born goods.
For a factory of information. For new module of business.
The password is "Whats up! Whats NEW!"

Ah, newly born goods. Ah, octopus. How good of you to visit us.

But I am beginning to think that power is the no-face, the navy blue suit. In the flow of pedestrian traffic I began to think, perhaps our bodies are for the city's purposes immaterial, in their gangly-star form; really we are part of a liquid, being sucked along. It seems a kind of conservatism that the women are so elaborated into showy idiosyncrasies and the men, once they stop being students, become the same suit multiplied into the millions.

It's not true, though, about the body being immaterial. In Shibuya, on top of a low hill, is the highest concentration on the world (says my guidebook) of "love hotels". $30-$50 for "rest", $70-$90 for "stay". If Matisse ripped a lot off of Japanese woodblock prints, the love hotels have returned the favor--very badly--though the majority of the rooms, displayed in photographs in the lobbies like Chinese food is in photographs in the menu, are more photographic--they have tropical fish or city skylines painted across the walls; one has what I think is a race car. There are also posters advertising Love Costume: Sell or Rental [!]. These picture grids of women in different uniforms of the service industry, smiling under the caption, "May I take your order?" Some of the women are just in a bra and panties--there is even one in military camoflage-pattern holding a plastic machine gun.

And there are shops. I went into one and wrote down the names of the products.

High Quality Two-Layer Hole
Super Real Anal Inner
Super Real Hall
Virgin Road
Salvation Style [?]
17
and my favorite, Femipet Crashhandle

These also remind me of undersea creatures, but dissected. Or, more exactly, they remind me of some kind of science exhibit on large pink worms, with oversized plastic models of the specimins. I am a little too squeamish to learn much about my own anatomy from them; they remind me of the diagram in my seventh grade "health" class book, a cross-section of a man's reproductive organs in profile. I remember memorizing it diligently, and diligently thinking to myself, ok, I guess when I find this sexy, I will be ready to have sex. I wasn't even bewildered by the fact that it wasn't remotely interesting to me; I think at that age I regarded everything that had to do with interacting with other humans as a kind of treadmill that one had no choice but to slog along, avoiding being looked at and saying as little as possible. I am still exhibiting this posture as I leave the sex shop, in fact, but it is crossed by the desire (supressed, by rolling my eyes upward and pursing my lips in an expression I hope is vaguely bemused and superior) to hoot as I escape.

Finally--speaking of the weirdness of representations--there is the Street of Food Displays. This is where restaurants go to buy the plastic models of their lunch and dinner specials. There are fish with flaky concave baked skins curving from the plates; their is a forkful of spaghetti held in mid-air, mid-twirl, above the bowl by an invisible hand; there is a glass of beer being poured foaming onto a mound of rounded ice cubes. Some stores cater to the tourists by selling sushi keychains, and some put up small indignant notices about how this is a serious art, tourists keep your grubby hands off.

But these shops gradually thin and are interspersed with actual restaurants. I have been staring hard at each storefront, looking to see if there's anything particularly gross that I could get for certain members of my family for a Christmas present. And even though I am hungry by the time I decide there is nothing I want to buy, I cannot turn off the part of my mind that is evaluating each restaurant's display aesthetically. It is like the way you can trick your senses by crossing your fingers and rolling one marble around with them, and definitively feeling two marbles: except, in this case, it is the dislocation of finding one kind of wanting, one appetite, displaced by another. It is a little like the estrangement of self-conciousness, of viewing yourself from the outside--to paraphrase John Berger, of watching yourself being looked at.