Criminals by Robert Anthony Siegel

Author:Robert Anthony Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

UNRELIABLE TOUR GUIDE

AS A STUDENT IN Tokyo in the 1980s I would often go to the local Shinto shrine just to listen to the quiet. The shrine was small and undistinguished, a gap between concrete commercial buildings reached by an alleyway lined with red torii, or ritual gates. Off to one side was a structure no bigger than a phone booth, all steeply pitched roof and closed doors, bound by a heavy length of sacred rope: the place where the spirit, the kami, lived.

I believed I could feel the presence of the kami in the narrow alley and weird little space between buildings, and in the sudden inexplicable quiet amid the noise of the city. It was the same sense of mystery I felt everywhere in Japan, just a little clearer, a little easier to locate. And so it was while standing there, at the shrine, that I decided I was going to write a novel as soon as I got back to America, because novels are shrines too, sacred spaces where you can feel the presence of things too deep to name.

Back in New York City a year later, I bought a typewriter and got ready to write that novel. The problem was that I also needed a job. At the age of twenty-three, my work experience was limited to teaching English conversation to a group of Buddhist priests in the Shitamachi, an older area of Tokyo. They had quickly introduced me to an Edo-period drinking game called Tosenkyo, in which players try to knock down a little target by sailing an outspread fan across the room, much as if it were a paper airplane.

So when I sat down to consider my marketable skills, I identified just three: I was good at trading raunchy jokes with drunken clergy; I knew how to make an open fan swoop and glide across a room; and I could speak Japanese.

And then one day I was walking downtown, avoiding the novel I didn’t know how to start, when I saw a tight formation of camera-toting Japanese in front of the World Trade Center, led by a woman carrying a little red flag. I watched them climb single file into a gigantic bus and lumber off.

Tour guide. I could be a tour guide.

What could be easier than walking around with a little flag, showing people the sights? It would require no commitment, no thought, and would leave my mind free for the novel that was even then, I believed, forming in my unconscious.

I called up one of the bigger companies and got an interview for the very next day. The man who would become my boss interviewed me standing up in a hallway, too busy to sit down. He was cadaverously thin, with big dark circles around his eyes—haunted-looking, as if the thought of losing a busload of tourists in the Bronx, clicking away at their cameras, made it impossible to sleep at night.

“Tell me,” he asked in Japanese, “what do you think makes a successful tour guide?”

I hadn’t given it a thought.

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