The Japanese Chronicles by Nicolas Bouvier

Author:Nicolas Bouvier [Nicolas Bouvier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780601656
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2019-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Not many delinquents in Shinjuku. All the same, the police sometimes block a road or a cinema to check identification papers and direct everyone to the station, where they pass several hours smoking and joking with the old crippled Crainquebilles, street peddlers truly vexed that they’ve been caught, who protest by waving their permits: expired, falsified, curled from perspiration. The sun shines golden on the floor of the police station. Sometimes a cop gets up to put the teapot on or they reprimand someone – they love it – but it is not often that they draw up a report. The easygoing mood is a cross between Brueghel and Hokusai.

As everyone knows, police raids draw people together, and in the floating world of Shinjuku, even a foreigner can make friends. It is more delicate in Araki-cho. Not that they would be xenophobic there, but they attribute a number of exotic habits to a foreigner, incongruous appetites and whims, sources of problems and puzzles. Several months passed while they observe me without lowering their guard. Relations here are rarely born of individual whim; they are almost always the result of sponsorship, of adoption, of group consensus in one form or another. I had learned what I could of spoken Japanese; as for the written, the newspapers employ no more than two thousand ideograms that make up a kind of demotic requiring many years of study. I had started by memorising the proverbs. All the Japanese proverbs about unhappiness, disappointment, or bad luck are powerful expressions. ‘A bee sting on a face in tears’ works better than our ‘Misfortunes never come singly’. As for all the rest, they are as sententious, flat, and stale as our proverbs; but they have the advantage of being known and used by the Japanese masses for at least three generations. A proverb does not necessarily have to signify anything, its function is to reassure: at least you know where you’re headed! In any case, they work wonders. Each time I use them judiciously, I am greeted by the same incredulous stupor that always greets the foreigner with the slightest amount of tact, knowledge, or timing: O-djosu neee! (Isn’t he talented!). This exact phrase can also signify: ‘Work hard, you still need a lot’. But it is not in this sense that it was used here, they were not at all malicious – only wary, and not very disposed to entering into a relationship without having already figured out a way to get out.

Another way to their hearts is to be very attentive to your body. My landlords sleep on mattresses, four in one bedroom, with their feet literally on the neck of their neighbour. In the house next door it is the same. But this promiscuity has no odour, because in Japan cleanliness doesn’t cost anything: one can bleach and starch a shirt for the price of a beautiful apple and spend two evenings at the sento (public baths) for the price of a cup of coffee.

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