Oe versus Dog Bamboo
1998; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/25304282
ISSN2327-5804
Autores ResumoCall me Oe. Father of the eponymous Oe Mirror which casts an unreversed image of the viewer on its concave steel surface. One day a hundred Oe Mirrors of all sizes will grace the walls of Oe Hall - my future home and stronghold. Soon I will write my memoirs describing my travels all over Japan and the United States where I was the most persuasive encyclopedia salesman in the Southwest. Along the way I strummed Okinawan folk ballads for the ladies on the riverwalk in San Antonio. I feasted with the dirt-eaters of Mississippi who confided in me their secret, tangiest banks of red clay. Most recently I earned the stars and rights to my best story - an old-fashioned atavistic brawl, my first - a glorious man-to-man fistfight in a posh Tokyo bar. Over a woman. An American. She appreciates neither the story nor the irony of her figuring principally in it. She rather wants to hear about Yuki Kara. Tell me about Yuki, she demands, with a toss of her lush cocoa-brown hair. It would take decades, generations maybe of iodine-rich seaweed and kelp, for yours to get any of the blue-black and coarser weight of hers. (I have no intention of telling her a thing about Yuki Kara. I know she hopes to cajole from me some arcane Oriental womanry to abet her own female experience.) Soon, June. I distract her by paying attention to her cat which has approached. This will not distract her long. I think hard, but my mind is full of Yuki. I see her dark, intelligent eyes. I imagine telling her the details of my fight, truly one of my epic stories. Once I cast always, a disparaging eye on the ranks of meat-eating, pierced-eared, broad-shouldered, low-heeled American women who pass through modern cosmopolitan Tokyo. An opprobrious eye well cast back to be sure. I've often sat listening to American coeds pontificate on the non-potential of us Japanese males. Ick, they say. We smoke, we are unliberated and patronizing. We are Oedipal Peter Pans. We ally with our mothers to terrorize our wives. Our conversations never range beyond business and golf and we don't come home at night. Furthermore, our legs are short. We vomit after a single glass of whiskey. We are coarse and rapid lovers. We never hold open a door for them or give up our seats on the train. Curious then that I'd answer an alien damsel's call to arms. (Credit my allure, thinks June, credit my exotic Western gravity.) Actually I was less pulled than pushed, kicked, propelled from my country's distaff. Credit a native force, Yuki Kara. Allowed hindsight's extra inch of awareness, I'd admit her eternal un-acknowledgment of me as other than ordinary was made unbearable by my being, in fact, somewhat in love with her at the time. I see now how her climactic put-down (Keep your snout out of my work!) of my signature grids and color schemes, sent the injured superego, steeped in unrequited passion, pinwheeling onto the shoals of foreign womanhood. I might add, with the same candor, that dear, cool, beautiful Yuki, was highly probably fairly and understandably jealous of my splendid English conversation abilities. Soon after, I left the company, resolved to become an Evaporated Man as is the custom in Japan when you wish to flee a sorrowful life. I moved, filed an unlisted telephone number and severed many of my business and personal connections. I set up a new life, freelancing at a large architectural firm during the day and drinking alone at night. The hardest part of my evaporation was finding a bar where I could drink in comfort. The credit and camaraderie I had built over the years at my accustomed spots were not things you could transplant easily, like a heart. Sundered from my familiar haunts I felt vulnerable and alone. One night I was down in Ginza, where street after street features building after building, each layered with a dozen or more bars, each its own world with its own clientele. There are Wafuku bars where the hostesses shuffle about in kimonos. …
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