Tokyo Sketches: Short Stories

Buy from Amazon.com

From Kodansha Internatinal 1992

Although Pete Hamill and New York City have been a steady item for years, it shouldn't come as a surprise that he has turned his attention halfway around the world to another metropolis with a different kind of attitude. He hasn't really deserted Broadway and environs for the Ginza; rather he has found in the teeming Japanese capital some of the same passion, the same kinds of chance encounters, dream seekers, challengers, and champions that he has documented so memorably in books like Dirty Laundry and The Invisible City.

At a time when Americans and Japanese seem to be engaged in an ongoing series of mutual culture shocks, these Tokyo Sketches document the fundamental truth that despite differences of language and expectation, hearts that share the same feelings can make themselves known. Stories like "A Blues For Yukiko, in which Big Boy Carter, a blind musician visiting Tokyo, haa trouble getting through to his young female interpreter, and "Samurai", about an American youth whose whole sense of Japan is influenced by his obsession with classic Kurosawa films, dramatize a felt need to understand, to experience directly each other's culture through a personal relationship that both Americans and Japanese are increasingly familiar with.

Some of the stories are about international love affairs, like the one between a Japanese combat photographer and an American TV anchorwoman in "After the war"; others deal with unexpected relationships that transcend the boundariee of age, experience, and culture: the Japanese industrialist in love with a sophisticated interpreter in "The Price of Everything" or me two boxers in "The Opponent," which provides a satisfying new twist to a familiar confrontation. Throughout is a sense of the author’s own enthusiasm for his fundamental theme, that ultimately the world holds no strangers, just peoplewho haven’t yet met.

The thirteen stories in Tokyo Sketches were written after Pete Hamill’s earlier stories of New York in The Invisible City gained success in Japan. So this first American publication of Tokyo Sketches is itself a kind of cross-cultural hybrid, celebrating the shock of recognition that can move readers in different languages who share the same need to touch each other’s souls.

Notes on Tokyo Sketches

THESE stories are fragments retrieved from a number of visits I made to Tokyo over the past decade. When I first saw that amazing city, I was overwhelmed by an odd tangle of emotions. Tokyo was at once the most completely foreign town I'd ever seen (though I was the foreigneir, and a place that was eerily familiar. Walking alone at night on that first trip, I couldn't read the forest of neon calligraphy. I couldn't read the morning newspapers either, or the nuances of gesture, tone, clothing, attitude—that tight mesh of signs that contain a people. So much of life in Japan is encoded that a stranger could spend a lifetime trying to crack the codes and still fail, because so many codes are continually altered or discarded. In New York, where I was born, I knew most of the codes; and though I couldn't penetrate them in any way, I could identify the codes of Europe. In Tokyo, in those first days, Iwas looking wilhout seeing.

At the same time, I felt oddly at home. For a New Yorker, Tokyo has the familiar dense vastness of a great city. The basic structures and components are there: rivers, bridges, skyscrapers, traffic, markets, movie houses, parks and subways and bookstores. The streets are as thick with people as the avenues of Manhattan. You hear rap music and rock 'n' roll imd the plangent chords of the blues; you see huge crowds filing into baseball stadiums; you see T-shirts from American universities and scarlet caps from the Chicago Bulls. The surface geography of that Tokyo is knowable. I could sudy maps and guidebooks and explore that physical ciiy on foot or by subway. All cities have similar templates. They can be touched, seen, heard, described. Tokyo was no different. Or so I thought.

But as I spent more time in Tokyo—going back with my wife, who was born there, or visiting with newspaper friends—I began hearing stories that convinced me I would always be a stranger in its streets. Our histories are too different, as I understood after listening to many ordinary people who remembered the horrors of World War II and the humiliations of the Occupation. I'm from a city that has never been bombed, a nation that has never been occupied and can't ever fully understand the feelings that accompany such memories. The rubble of the South Bronx might superficially resemble Tokyo in 1945, but self-inflicted wounds aren't the same as wounds inflicted by strangers. To be sure, the Japanese almost never mention the war to visiting Americans. But its immense, almost mythic presence can be felt in those silences.

I also met many Americans who first entered Tokyo because of the war, the Occupation, or the later struggles in Korea and Vietnam. They were also silent about the things that happened here when they were young, until you found the moment, usually late at night, to ask the questions that released the tale. All seemed permanently shaped by the past, by unforgiven errors and stupidities and casual brutalities; some were drawn back to Tokyo by the need for redemption or to ease some obscure guilt; others clearly wanted to experience again some ancient careless adventure. Usually, nothing helped, not even whiskey.

Most of these stories originated in some form during those brief encounters late at night. Sometimes the tellers of the tales were Japanese. Sometimes the stories were told about other people. But they often shared some common trait: a broken communication, a misunderstood word, a clash of myths, the enormous, unforgiving power of the past, I thank all those who gave them to me.

Pete Hamll 1992