The Rose Tango by Mieko Kanai / Fiction / Untitled Books

We wore oversized, loud aloha shirts over bodies that hadn’t seen the inside of a bathtub for a month, and our hair gleamed with pomade, which we firmly believed would drive the girls wild.

Photograph: © Robert Lebeck from Tokyo / Moscow / Leopoldville published by Steidl

The Rose Tango by Mieko Kanai

At my age, it only makes sense that I would think about the things that have influenced my unremarkable life. I have never formed the habit of thinking things through, so I have no idea of how to explain myself, what words to use. The year after the war ended, my grandfather, brandishing his old-fashioned political theories, declared that we were entering an "age of diplomacy," and made my younger brother and me take lessons in Chinese. It might have been good if I had really applied myself to studying languages when I was young. But since our world was completely buried in concrete material things--in fact it was the lack of any sense of fulfilment that impelled me to daydreams--there was no need to express anything in words.

How well, and in what succinct language, we would have been able to express everything that happened and even all we thought, when we were children! When night came, we would pretend to go off to our Chinese lesson, but would instead take the violin our late father had left us to an empty lot and practice there. We never even discussed the need to keep this activity secret. I don't know whether we had loved our dead father or not, but we had an unconditional attachment to the sweetly sentimental, high and clear cry of this violin, which we had heard long before. My brother and I hardly ever spoke, and this poverty of language, like all such conditions of poverty of language, signified innocence as against the ideas of punishment or unhappiness, or indeed any and all ideas. Our concerns were focused solely on concrete things; to be concerned with anything that did not have a concrete shape would be like having our souls stolen by the Devil and as sure a proof that old age was quietly creeping up on us as the appearance of wrinkles or gray hairs. We believed in the concrete sound of the violin. My brother didn't care to play it himself, so I was the one to play, and I did get better at it, thanks to my nightly practice. Then we went out into the night streets, pretending to be war-orphaned brothers, and made money playing the violin for drunken customers in bars. The drunks found us amusing and gave us drinks and tried to get us to smoke, and my brother and I accepted it all with a very serious air. I got very drunk and became unable to play the violin, but our business only lasted that one night, anyway. Some gangsters whose territory it was got hold of us, dumped water on our heads, took the violin, and chased us away. Our grandfather got the violin back for us later, but we got ten times the punishment from him that we had from the gangsters. Even so, we were still living in a world of contentment. In a world of contentment, like maggots or pieces of fruit.

My earliest memories are of Peking, where my father was the violinist in a group called Domingo Rodriguez and his Tango Orchestra, which played in dance halls and places like that. We were renting part of a quiet Chinese-style house in the depths of a narrow hutong alley to the west of the Dong'an Market. The old corridors--with their stone floors and their scorpions--that faced the central courtyard and the courtyard itself were my playground. There were large jujube and peach trees in the courtyard, and in front of our rooms was a pink rose bush that Father had had sent for my mother from Shanghai by a German musician. That may have been our family's happiest time. Young as I was, I could not grasp what relations were like between my parents, but it may well have been that the assertions both made about the many sacrifices they'd endured in order to marry had brought unhappiness to the relationship. When he was not playing popular songs with wild melodies or tangos in some dance hall, my father was always drunk. It got so he stopped bringing home the money he'd earned, and Mother fell ill from worry. To get Father's salary directly from Domingo Rodriguez (a Russian Jew born in Qingdao, who was the band master and piano player), I would take my little brother by the hand and walk through the cold night streets of Wangfujing until we arrived at the hall in Dongtan where Father worked. "Domingo Rodriguez" was of course a stage name; he claimed to be Argentine, but in fact he had no clear idea of where Argentina even was. Rodriguez would hand over the money to us and say, with sleepy, half-closed eyes, "You poor, poor little kids. It can't be a happy life, what with Mickey's artistic temperament and his bitterness . . ." Perhaps he thought that Father went from having a brilliant future as a musician to playing in a two-bit tango orchestra overseas, all as a result of having married my mother. When he learned that we'd collected his salary from Rodriguez, Father would always slug me. But we had to go on living, even if it meant a beating. In December of 1945, the year we lost the war, my father fell down in the street, dead drunk as usual, and froze to death. I was ten.

In May of the next year my mother and brother and I were evacuated to Sasebo on a US Army LST tank-landing ship, and went to live at the home of my grandfather, who had taken refuge in T. City during the air raids. Grandfather was a judo expert, proud of the fact that he was a descendant of the Aizu samurai, who had remained loyal to the shogunate to the last. He had opposed our parents' marriage from the start, and Mother had had to elope to join Father. But it was a time when even our strong-willed mother could no longer insist upon her pride and on her right to have eloped to be with the man she loved. There was no one she could turn to but Grandfather. But that same year Mother passed away all too quickly, from a bad bout of flu, and Grandmother died soon afterward as well. Our family was poor, and since I didn't much like studying anyway, it was decided that I would go to work at a nearby men's clothing store as soon as I graduated from the middle school in our provincial city. At night, I practiced the violin by myself. It wasn't that I wanted to graduate from a music school, like Father, and become a professional violinist. It was just that the violin filled my heart with daydreams. Grandfather didn't approve of what I was doing, but the loss of first his daughter and then his wife had aged and weakened him, and he didn't express his opposition directly. At the men's store and on the streets I got to know some teenage hoods, or chimpira, as they were called, and became a member of their group. Most were kids like me: simple, "wild" guys from poor families, and without exception much less fortunate than other boys of the same age group. But when it came to their own fortune, good or ill, they were as unaware as a bunch of pearly maggots. We all had a deep-seated admiration for "manliness," but we'd never thought about what it really was. We used the word "manly" for everything beautiful whose surface had a kind of rough radiance. We were bewitched by rough, violent flesh giving off the scent of death, the flesh as life attired in the garment of "America," gleaming brightly like a movie on a screen. If I were to give an example of the "manliness" that we regarded as typical, it would have to be a young guy named N. He appeared like a whirlwind in the entertainment district that we hung around in, got into a fight at the Rhumba Tamba dance hall with the yakuza gangsters who controlled the district, and had no problem dealing with several of them all by himself. I still remember the Rhumba Tamba and the fight I saw there, my first ever. Tropical-style neon that bathed in a scarlet light the couples dancing among the yellow and green palm trees flashed at the entrance to the hall, and from the windows, with their gaudy rose-colored curtains of artificial silk, a constant stream of dance music flowed into the street. The red and green colors of the neon sign shed a soft light on the street, and we penniless chimpira hung out in front of the hall, showing off steps and wiggling our hips in time to the music. With vulgar words and gestures, we made fun of the couples who entered the dance hall, and puffed at our fags in proper delinquent style. We wore oversized, loud aloha shirts over bodies that hadn't seen the inside of a bathtub for a month, and our hair gleamed with pomade, which we firmly believed would drive the girls wild. Sometimes we were chased off by the dance-hall bouncers, but since we were happy and eager to run errands for the more influential gangsters of the district, once in a while one of those gangsters would take us to the dance hall and buy us a beer. One thing led to another and I found myself playing the violin with a small band that played exclusively for the Rhumba Tamba--maybe due to the feeling for music I'd inherited from my father. "Played exclusively for" may sound pretty impressive, but it was in fact a strange group of musicians gotten together in a hurry: two old guys--an accordion-player and a guitarist-- who used to wander around the streets of the district playing for tips; a clarinet player whose day job was with a chindonya minstrel band that played at store openings and the like; and me on the violin. Our band name was the Rhumba Tamba All Stars. I felt I was now a real adult, and played that violin for all I was worth. I was called "Mickey," copying the name Father had used in Rodriguez's band. Since I had already lost my job at the men's clothing store (I wasn't even able to carry on a normal conversation with the customers), I was grateful for my new job. Besides, I really loved playing the violin--and not only the violin: I was drawn to all musical instruments. The members of the Rhumba Tamba All Stars taught me how to play each of their instruments; but it was guitar that I liked best, and I was really happy when I was finally able to get a used guitar at the neighborhood pawnshop.

Our band performed at the dance hall twice a night, from seven to eight and then from nine to ten, but I stayed on after we were done, listening to the music as it boomed out of the speakers at high volume. I never felt better than when I was listening to the music, shaking my body slightly to the rhythm. The melody and rhythm seemed to be pleasurably rubbing themselves against my skin all over, as if they were tangible things. They caressed me as though they were bodies in love with me. There weren't many dandyish customers who made a point of dancing the tango in prewar style; but once in a while the dance hall would play old prewar tango records by artists like Von Geczy, Leo Reisman, and the Orquesta Canaro, and then I would play my violin along with the recordings. The various melodies that I remembered from the performances of the Domingo Rodriguez Band would caress my body as if entreating me with their almost obscenely sweet and sentimental sounds. Then one night among those many nights, N. Appeared and started to dance to Leo Reisman's "Rose Tango." There was an attractive if slightly overage dancer named Akemi who had drifted down from Tokyo. She was by far the best dancer among the girls at Rhumba Tamba, so when the young customer said he wanted someone to dance the tango with, she came right over and, with a supremely self-confident smile, took from his hand the set of pink tickets and put it deep inside the plunging neckline of her red "silk" dress. Awed by the aura of energy the two of them possessed, the other couples who had been dancing in the hall withdrew to the sidelines and watched them as they began to dance. The young man had the slim build of a pointer; his hair shone with pomade, and he was sharply dressed, all in black. He was the kind of man in whom dangerous cunning, coarseness, and a kind of intelligence, easily bred in poverty and ill luck, coexisted in the form of a fierce physical beauty. Not that I felt that at the time. I just sensed that the young man was the embodiment not of American jazz, but of the tango. There are all sorts of guys: jazz types, chanson types, pop song types, Hawaiian types. They all have an inborn affinity with one kind of music or another.

The two of them danced wonderfully together; but the man was rough, and by the time it was over, Akemi was breathing hard. The back and midriff of her red dress were wet with perspiration and appeared blackish, like clotted blood. This was not the night when the youth fought with the gangsters: it was a few days later, when he and Akemi were again dancing at Rhumba Tamba. The cause was jealousy on the part of the gangster who was Akemi's lover. Akemi had fallen head over heels for the handsome young tango dancer who had appeared so suddenly a few days before. Her lover was a gangster with considerable influence in the district, and he had brought three or four underlings with him. The world we are describing is extremely poor in language, and as a result abounds in the rich abstractness of violence and the flesh. Everything proceeded as in a pantomime or silent movie. As the gangster approached N. and Akemi, who were dancing across the floor, the last strains of the Rose Tango we were playing had just ended. One could hear the slight hum of conversation that always follows a number, the sound of the sky-colored fan revolving on the ceiling, and the heavy footsteps of the customers and the girls, who always walked in a weary-looking way when not actually dancing. When the big man in a white suit and loud aloha shirt approached the couple, he first grabbed Akemi's arm and pushed her against the wall, and then with narrowed eyes looked N. Over from head to toe. Finally he fixed his eyes on N.'s with a sly upward glance and said, as if savoring the sound of each syllable, "So you're the one?" I could still feel the quiver of the violin strings on my fingers, and that feeling spread to my whole body, making me numb. The words "So you're the one?" meant both "You're Akemi's other guy, right?" and also "I'm Akemi's man. You mess with her and I find out about it, you won't be feeling so big. I'll have to teach you a lesson. Understand, buddy?" All of that was implied. At the words "So you're the one?" the underlings got ready for action, and the gangster's heavy fist hit hard against the solar plexus of the young man dressed in black. It was an everyday sight in this part of town: hoodlums in attack mode, giving loud, meaningless shouts and kicking away at a lone victim lying doubled up on the ground before them. But this time it was different. N. (though at this point I didn't yet know the young man's name) dodged the blow to his solar plexus with the speed and agility of an animal, and then gave a good strong counter-punch of his own. Shouts went up from the dance hall, and the accordion player growled in excitement, "He's like a bloody panther!" With the violin and bow gripped in my hands, I gazed--infatuated, unable to make a sound--at the body of the young man in motion. After N. had knocked five of his opponents to the floor, Akemi ran to him and clung proudly to his neck, but he freed himself from her hands and left the dance hall on his own. The manager of the hall, who had been cowering in a corner, rushed to put on a record, and the lively sounds of New Orleans jazz echoed though the hall. "Hurry up and dance!" he shouted to the dancers.

We young hoodlums didn't have enough money to buy alcoholic drinks, so we usually hung out in coffeehouses. Guys who didn't have enough money even for the coffeehouses would stand or crouch in front, waiting patiently for a friend to come by who might have enough money to treat them to a coffee (not that there was much chance of that). They chewed loudly on remnants of pieces of gum so old they had lost all flavor, and, like the men in cowboy movies, energetically spat the saliva that had collected in their mouths onto the pavement. The dry, dusty gray pavement was pockmarked with numerous blackish spots as a result. N. Was the new hero of our juvenile group. Everyone was eager to be noticed by him; and when he walked by, we staged fights so as to attract his attention. Among all those young hoodlums, I was the only one who had actually witnessed his famous fight, so naturally the others demanded that I tell them all about what happened that night. They wanted a detailed, realistic account of it all, and they asked me for it repeatedly. And among the realistic descriptive details, lies began to creep in--the more realistic I tried to make my description, the more numerous the lies became. I told them about the pale, frightened faces of the onlookers, about N.'s eyes, tight with tension and cruel and bright as a jaguar's, and about his swift movements. I learned the rise and fall of my listener's reactions, and I learned that it was more effective to keep them in suspense when I told the most exciting parts. I racked my brains to make my description of N. leaving the dance hall as impressive as possible. At the moment that my violin was playing the last sharp, trembling notes of the Rose Tango, lengthening them out and then letting them die sorrowfully away, the door of the Rhumba Tamba opened, and the men came in. As the one piece of music ended, another began in low tones, as if in premonition of its first me lodic line. In the midst of the dance hall's hum, there emerged the quiet, uncanny rhythm of the timpani: That was the effect I was aiming at in my narration. The seven-colored reflections from the mirror-ball, the brief exchange of words (just like in the movies), the large jackknife that Akemi's boyfriend took from his jacket pocket, and the way it was reflected in the mirror-ball (he hadn't in fact used a knife . . .), the way he held the knife, as only someone who had actually killed a person would know how to from personal experience, etcetera, etcetera--I described these things like one possessed. My psychology may have been similar to that of the chimpira who physically injure someone for the first time, or steal something--do something a little scary, in other words, and then, while still afraid of what they've done, advertise it in an exaggerated way. In short, my psychology may have been similar to what is called fiction. It's the weak person who turns talkative. Only, what I talked about was not myself, or the crimes I had committed-- within the peculiar impulse that made me talk, there was something akin to a crime, something that could be termed misfortune. The act of talking, the loquacity itself, was the evidence of my misfortune.

It may be that I was in love, an unnatural love, with the young man called N., it occurred to me afterwards. When a taciturn person is suddenly transformed into a talkative one, there would seem to be some unnatural, irrational passion or unfortunate feeling being reflected.

Some time later, I got to talk with N. directly, but he'd learned of all my talk and said, "I never thought you were such a little blabbermouth," so naturally my sense of misfortune grew all the stronger. N., for his part, was an extremely quiet guy, and you couldn't begin to imagine what he was thinking. Akemi once told me, "He's a poet," as if she were imparting some secret, but that sounded as crazy to me as if she had said, "He's a woman." The last night I saw him in town he was terribly drunk. It was summer, but I was coming down with a cold, and, having finished my sets at Rhumba Tamba by ten, I was taking a shortcut through the mazelike alleys of the district in order to get home as soon as possible. N. Called out to me and asked me to play him a vulgar tango, the sort with an obvious sentimental and voluptuous appeal. That was a good description of the "cosmopolitan" tangos that Domingo Rodriguez had played in Peking. I recalled as if in a bad dream the way my father's desperately roughened fingers performed these painfully suggestive laments.

"I can't play one!" I answered in a rude, ill-tempered way, my heart full of painful emotion. I had until that moment never thought of my father's music in that way. "Yeah, I guess it's too much to ask of a kid," N. said casually. Then, hard to believe though it may seem, he started talking about the poem he was thinking of writing.

"The ocean--a melting pot!" he cried out repeatedly. I thought that was the title of the poem, but he said it was "Universe and Time," a poem that consisted of the single line "The ocean--a melting pot!"

He had cut away all the unnecessary, flabby words, the murky lard that thickly hid the essence of the poem. He had polished his work until all that was left was this one line. This one line, however, merged the whole universe and all of human existence, like an ocean, mixing them together chaotically at the fierce temperature of a melting pot. This single line itself, in fact, could not escape the defect common to all poetry--synonymous reiteration. That is, the ocean is indeed a melting pot, and this is the ultimate synonymous reiteration, said N. And his whole life would probably be devoted to writing a commentary, an immense commentary whose volume would be as great as the ocean, concerning this one-line poem of his. His life would probably end before he would be able to complete the work; but that didn't really matter because he had already, from the first, written the essence, the very pith and marrow of the thing. He intended to read every word that had been written about the sea, from children's stories to the most advanced scientific research. He would read everything, even worthless scraps of paper on which the word "the sea" was written in any language on earth, from Malagasy to ancient Phoenician. In this way, that single line would come to contain the whole globe. All words, all expressions would meld into one within the melting pot.

My longings for the hero N. were totally changed from that night on. N. had become no more than a troublesome, mad blabbermouth, who spouted meaningless nonsense. I promptly forgot about him, and never talked about his violent quarrel of that night, no matter who asked me to. And N. himself vanished from the district as suddenly as he had made his appearance. Now I ask myself, what was N. to me? I hardly ever talk about myself or my family or my music. When I think about those things, I'm like someone who dreams but is not aware that he's dreaming: I'm not aware that I'm thinking. I have no need to speak, or for words to speak with. Yet with regard to N.--though I can't explain why--words and speech seem important. Nonetheless, in the end, all of these things will disappear into memory, and be turned into that strange silence that lies between memory and oblivion--the sounding silence of the sea of dreams--and go down to destruction together with my flesh.

Wednesday, 7 October, 2009

In Short stories

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Untitled Books

Issue 24 / August - September 2010

We wore oversized, loud aloha shirts over bodies that hadn’t seen the inside of a bathtub for a month, and our hair gleamed with pomade, which we firmly believed would drive the girls wild.