Keiko

You would know by her languid airs that she had all the time and money in the world, well. Not so much of either, anymore.

Grown up in Tokyo, daughter to a wealthy merchant father and an heiress mother, Keiko had never know hunger, nor desire, nor anything that moved her to want. Living a perfect sheltered existence through childhood, attending an exclusive playschool at the age of six and graduating from a ladies’ university at nineteen, the world awaited her with cradling arms. Beckoning her so close to their hearts to become human.

Her looks couldn't be bought, only cultivated like a true pearl, through the harsh revolving grit and grind of a careful, possessive shell.

In her formative years she felt no stress, hands flocked around her to take care of that. Keiko knew how to dress with understated glamour, not an eyelash out of place, lips the shade of roses that flowered and whithered with each season.

Men would tap her on the shoulder as she swanked down Ginza Bouleavrd, as she kept friends in lockets who’d grab any hot-blooded male’s attention: Miss Arashi being one, a JAL air stewardess being another. The 1960’s. Her hair, her make-up, her wider than usual almond eyes that sloped off in to a distinguished smile.

‘Are you free to have tea with me?’

‘May I take you for a dance?’

‘Would you and your friend escort us to a private member’s club?’

She never had to cook a meal for herself, never. Always a new man vying for her attentions. Youth, money, beauty, song, gourmet, dance, evokes the memories of an old lady.

Seventy-six is old by any standard, and yet, as if it were yesterday the melody of the American band and the sequined nightgown of the maitre’d float by, leading you coaxingly, deferentially away to a table.

Handsome face, aquiline bridge, light green eyes, a pilot from Egypt with the manners of a prince. ‘I thought, I would never be so happy again.’

Married at twenty-one to a man, a nuclear scientist of all things, who had won her heart with sweet devil talk. Her simple softness seduced by his slick tongue, it was all a complicated dance and she felt lied to. He died at forty-six leaving her a home that only accrued escalating taxes with age.

But by the sea, everything so green and turquoise blue, it never got cold so the fruit always grew so plump. The spiders were hideous and hairy beasts, butterflies with wingspans she’d never believe. Fruit flies the size of horse flies.

The very tanned surfers, with sculpted bodies would ride the waves each morning, forgetting the storms and Keiko liked to imagine mustering that kind of resolve one day. To approach relentless crashing with forethought and courage, mixed with a thrill of the fun.

Those two years of freedom, working as an elevator girl at the Department Store had finished her. She had been too attractive to not be taken off the shelf, wrapped in one of those sharp-cornered bags strangled in frilly ribbon.

She had never bought a cigarette in her life, yet had always been offered foreign silk cuts out of silk pockets, handkerchief, necktie, studs.

Wondering whether the fish danced with the surge of the wave or got swallowed whole in to a vortex –

Keiko alone liked to watch the setting sun, rise, then set again.

It was called the Land of the Rising Sun, perhaps this was the reason why, purely for her to amount to being at this windowsill.

That was her routine, never lonely looking out to shore.

She would never be sure of herself again in her life.

Yayoi and Georgiana

Took myself on an art day today. Woke myself up early for a Saturday, the earliest in a long while. Made myself a milky instant coffee with a sturdy helping of sugar and then out the door in to a murky grey morn, it’s supposed to be summer.

I woke up fully on the train. Saturday morning carriage still surprisingly filled with hipsters holding caffeinated drinks in flimsy white cups.

The queue when I get there is massive, it’s about an hour and half wait until the front and it’s only just gone 10:00. What a sensationalist exhibition, or populist because it’s free but I don't mind because I have been wanting to see this. Yayoi Kusama that Japanese New Yorker internationally famous pointillist feminist artist, the one I saw one of the best retrospectives of at the Tate a few year’s back is back in London, with some of her walk-in pieces. I had never been to the Victoria Miro gallery and I had wanted to ever since I lived on the boat. What’s an hour and a half on a Saturday morning when there’s nothing else to do but wait? 

The grey clouds had broken apart and turned into moving wisps. Seagulls dipped round and round about a tall skyscraper. 

A well-to-do family joined the queue behind me, they were fine apart from the son who must be at whatever parents call ‘a difficult age’ because he couldn't see the point of waiting for something (anything I assume) nor did he like art. As the line progressed I saw taxi cabs pull up and drop well-coiffed males with expensive sunglasses who looked perplexed at the idea of waiting. And aghast tanned belles who strutted up and down the queue surveying it whilst on FaceTime whilst taking a selfie. 

Once inside it was over in a flash. Upstairs there’s a walk-in box room with mirrored surfaces that contain some of the light-up pumpkin installations. They are not beautiful but striking and have that hallucinogenic appearance about them especially when seen close-up from inside a dark reflective box, but as I say, it was over in a flash - 20 seconds to be exact - because of crowd management. Apparently someone had fallen backward and smashed one of the pumpkins during a busy time (insert joke about the band here) whilst taking a selfie, amazing, so the staff had to limit numbers and duration inside the walk-in box. 

But there was more. The all-mirrored and slightly larger walk-in box downstairs which held a revolving flashing chandelier was more alluring. The infinite depth of reflections, you know that trick of facing a mirror to a mirror and getting an optical illusion happened, so the artwork called Chandelier of Grief sort of felt like that. Eternally spinning and superficial aka. ennui. 

In the outdoor garden a pond displayed an older installation by Yayoi, hundreds of silver orbs floating on the surface of the water called Narcissus Garden. It was all very her and I admired the space. Victoria Miro blows Damien Hirst’s new gallery out the water for sure. It’s the elegant use of light and form, concrete doesn’t have to always look like slabs. There’s this long narrow staircase wide enough for two slender maidens to ascend up like waifs, to hit a window pane. Even mortal me can walk up the stairs as through a tunnel to a bright surface. Then sky.

I headed on the 243 towards central London, the red buses completely inadequate for the heat. Sure you can open a window here and there but the seat covers are made of what looks like industrial velvet and you feel suffocated just looking at them. 

Dogs die in hot cars, is a thought. 

Ding Ding! off the bus at Somerset House which holds the Courtauld Gallery. Another space I’d never been to for no good reason at all. I’d been hankering to see the artworks of this Victorian spirit medium called Georgiana Houghton, because frankly they looked weird as hell. 

Ironically she drew most of her paintings about God: the father, son and the holy spirit mainly. White feathery veils were the spirit and the tiny dots something else holy, I remember reading, on the back of one her horrifically detailed paintings. These looked like the product of someone who was not only mad but concentrating really hard on being mad - but she wasn’t remember - because she was a Victorian who conversed with ghosts.

Spindly incessant lines evolving in to swirls

that erupt in to bloom.

Brash irrational colours 

all sensing impending doom.

No salvation

The artist said her hands were controlled by dead spirits like that of Titian’s or St. Luke the Apostle’s, it wasn’t her painting but these dead people and God using her body as a vessel. And you know what, the exactitude of her fine lines and fastidiousness of her scribbles do look like they were made in a trance state. Sure, these even reminded me of heinously close-up variations of Aboriginal DreamTime paintings which were often produced in ritual trance sessions. Yet Georgiana’s paintings were gory and fragile. Precious and atrocious. A bit sick to be honest.

But if you see one of her drawings you’ll think it’s a lot more modern than it is, even the curator when he got shown one of Georgiana’s paintings at first thought it was from the psychedelic period in art i.e. the 60’s. The cool thing is spirit medium or not, this Victorian woman artist managed to preempt the Abstract movement in art by about 40 years, Georgiana’s stuff in the Victorian time looked a bit like a completely-bat-shit Miro before Surrealism had even been invented. So how does that happen? 

That’s what I was interested by, anyway. This glitch in time in something so boringly linear as art history.

Nothing like it had been seen in the sitting rooms of Victorian houses or imaginations before. Yes, even at a time when seances, ouija boards, magicians like Houdini, and Arthur Conan Doyle type stories were prevalent. Even at a time when machines seemed to be superseding the human race à la Industrial Revolution with steam power and the light bulb. Even when Charles Dickens’ most popular Christmas tale conflated Pagan spirits with Yuletide morals in a Christmas Carol, did the people of Victorian England have the capacity yet to cope with the avant garde. It was way too early, far too avant.

Her downfall?

She puts on an exhibition of all her best work at a prestigious and probably pretentious art gallery in Bond Street in the 1870’s and it was a successful spectacle but ruined her financially. After that she didn’t get another chance and was forgotten about until now when post-modern art critics are looking at Victorian Georgiana’s spiritualist pieces with newfound admiration.

Old Days

The last few Sundays have been grey and monotone. Feeling under the weather or staying under the covers there had been no need for me to get up and face the music, however, on Sundays I usually call my Obaachan in Japan. This time two years ago  (three if you’re counting the Japanese way) my Ogiichan died. He was my grandfather and Obaachan doted on him even though she mildly complained and sometimes jibed at his inadequacies, I remember she used to often follow it up with ‘I am grateful for how hard your Ogiichan worked in his day’. They were an old couple like any other, they annoyed each other and couldn’t imagine life without one another. Then he passed away. One cold February morning, there was still snow piled up on the roadside; you could see your breath inside the house. The cold wooden corridors left condensation marks after your feet. I always forget about February and how harsh it can be and so darn draining, even here in England, and especially here in London. It is a time when sane creatures hibernate.

‘Moshi moshi?’ Comes from my speaker - it’s Obaachan’s inquisitive kind voice.

‘Moshi moshi.’ That’s me - saying that it’s me to her.

‘Today I went to a laughter-show at the local centre. Held for children, parents and old people of Hamakawado. The man had grown up here, a Hamakawado resident, and the woman had been at school here until Year 6. They were very funny and made me laugh a lot. Afterwards, we played wa’nagé.’

Old age and community are done differently in Japan. I think being old means you are just another category of human being who is treated in a certain way like children, and you have a definite position to fill in the community who see it as common sense for old people to be included. They aren’t old and separate. They are old and present. I like it. I ask is a laughter-show some sort of comedy/entertainment/stand-up/pantomime and she replies yes, and I wonder some more about the different sorts of people who were there today but first -

‘What is wa’nagé?’

‘You have ten long sticks in the ground and you try and get the wa’nagé in between them.’ It must be like cricket and wickets I think.

‘So wa’nagé are balls?’

‘No circles.’

‘Circles that are balls?’

‘No they are more like circles.’

I then remember that the Japanese for hay is possibly ‘wa' so I ask: ‘Are the balls made of hay?’

‘The wa’nagé have to go over the sticks.’ She sounds miffed that she can’t communicate to her granddaughter a very simple game she had played today, ‘the more sticks that you get the wa’nagé caught on the higher your score.’

‘The wa’nagé go over and around the sticks?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like doughnuts?’

‘Like doughnuts.’

‘What do you win?’ There was a pause. Perhaps she was coming to terms with the comparison between wa’nagé and doughnuts or it was the sense of relief she felt after I had finally understood the basic mechanics of the game.

‘You win… the game.’ She said frankly.

’No prizes then.’ I say more to convince myself that this was in fact fine.

‘You win the game. The person who scores the highest wins.’

And I realise that my whole concept of having fun in a community was sort of like a fairground where you win soft toys and tack that you don’t need and I felt a bit tacky myself for having asked.

‘During the show they give beer to the parents, sweets to the children and then there’s tea for the old people.’ Obaachan held back one of her laughs, ‘I took home quite a lot of rice crackers. It was fun.’

‘All for free?’ I am so pleased with this whole idea of a Sunday fun day with kids and beer and comedy.

‘Of course for free. We pay money in to our communal pockets every month so when they have enough money they hold these shows or similar things. Last time it was a talk about cherry blossom gardening but only for the old people.’

I am going back to Japan relatively soon after I had left it this Christmas. I notice each time the enthusiasm with which Obaachan greets me and takes up the activities such as shopping for groceries or cooking or gardening whilst I am there, but I worry that she will overdo it and make herself ill. One holiday I remember we went with the whole family to a bath-house in the mountains. All the meals were included and laid out beautifully in wooden lacquer boxes and filled to the brim with delicious things. Obaachan with her olden days philosophy, or it could have been her World War mentality (or both) hates the wastage of food so preceded to eat everyone’s leftovers from their boxes after the meal. After that she got ill and caught a fever because her stomach was so tired from having overworked at the bath-house. A hard-worker by nature a hard-worker by nurture, it doesn’t suit her to sit still and be patient, she wants to get up and clean things, cook things, fix things, and so old age I imagine doesn’t suit her at all.

‘I walked all the way to the Post Office the other day. I was pleased with myself when I got there because I had walked a long way and I still felt fine, so, then I walked to the super store. But once I had walked there I had got very tired. Very tired so I sat down on the bench just inside the entrance.’

‘I know the entrance. You should use one of the old walking sticks that Ogiichan left behind.’ Obaachan concurred that she should, only, she didn’t feel she needed them because she doesn’t get tired often enough to require a stick. Stubborn as well old. How refreshing.

‘I sat down taking my time and having a rest. And I noticed that on the other end of my bench was an elegant old woman. Her hair looked very neat. I said to her: ‘Once you reach eighty years old everything you do makes you feel tired’; and she smiled, nodded and replied: ’Yes it is the same for me too. I am glad to hear the same applies for you as well. I get tired so easily now.’ ’

And the pair struck up a conversation inspired by mutual dissent of ageing and Obaachan had found one of her own. She had begun telling me the story with a hint of what was still possible but I didn’t realise that it was the story of how she had made a new friend who was also in her eighties and now lived alone. It strikes a note of pity in me when I think of Obaachan alone. She likes to tell stories and laugh and joke, you can’t very well do that in the evenings by yourself. The old graceful lady had moved to the town recently, precisely because the Post Office and the super store were at a walking distance from each other; she had lived in a city before where everything was further away and not close to her home. Now she lived in a high-rise flat and her daughter would come to visit sometimes and she liked it here. The pair ended the conversation inviting each other to their abodes, in the hope that one day they would meet again. No numbers were exchanged. But no lies were offered up either. It was a pleasant serendipity that passed my Obaachan’s day and the other’s too.

‘By the time I had said good bye -’ Obaachan this time let out a fire cracker laugh, ‘it was already getting dark and I knew if I went home then I would have to turn on the switch on the rice cooker and wait forty minutes for it to finish. So instead I went downstairs to the food court and bought myself two onigiri (rice balls). And when I got home I ate the two for dinner.’

She never liked leaving Ogiichan alone in the house after dark. I remember her rushing the final bits of grocery shopping to get home before five o’clock so she could bring in the washing and turn on the rice cooker incase Ogiichan had forgotten. She would buy her groceries in the day in preparation for the night and the meal she would lay out at home for the pair of them. It gave her a routine and a reason to be home by a certain time, to make her cadential apologies to her gathering of friends at the super store or on the street corner to get home in time to do the cooking. Now she has to be her own stopwatch and when you stop living even just a little bit for that other person, when ostensibly you stop being needed by someone, you slip up - a little bit like - over a frozen crack in the pavement. I was afraid she would lose her footing being departed by her husband like that, like so many old women of Japan where longevity is unnaturally great, but I worry just like her, a lot.

The two old friends were sat on the massage chairs on the fifth floor of the super store. If you slot a ten yen piece in to the arm of a chair then the machine turns on and gives you a massage for three minutes. The legs and the back. The local super store is a warm safe hang-out for the old, and my Obaachan and her friends often spend their whole afternoons there buying some little thing and then sitting and chatting. In the winters it is cheaper to sit with friends in the warmth of the super store than to have your electric heater turned on at home alone. And more fun, I suspect.

‘I was talking with Tabata-san on the massage chairs on the fifth floor and we didn’t notice then but I do vaguely remember now a tall woman passed us by. There was nothing familiar about her. She might have given us a nod. I don’t remember.’

‘Do you use the massage chairs often?’ They always looked so clean too, which was more my surprise than their existence.

‘We weren’t getting massages we were just sitting in them because they are comfortable’.

Obaachan wanted to speed on with her story this time her tone said it. I was always impressed by her stories, they never had non-sequiturs like mine or my mother’s, which always go off on tangents. There is something of the trained storyteller about Obaachan which is something I had always been drawn to like a bright light but only recently landed on, it is the reason for my enthrall when she speaks about the past and plays out scenes from her life over and over again with dutiful clarity each time.

‘Tababta-san and I conversed’ about their relatives and possessions they owned but no longer needed or friends who were ill I presume, ‘then the woman came back and handed us some tea. Green tea. She said: ‘Here you are, please have it.’ So the both of us exclaimed: ‘We can’t take this - it’s not our place to take it!’ but she insisted and said: ‘Please have them.’ ’

‘Who was it?’ I wondered. ‘How old did she look?’

‘About Mariko’s age’, who is my aunt and so I suggested she could have been one of Mariko’s school friends who recognised Obaachan and thought to buy the old women some tea.

‘I’ve kept the empty bottle on the table. To not forget it happened. It was an odd thing to happen.’ And so we mulled it over and passed it off as random kindness. I think of her in Japan and make sure to call next week.

 

Seasons

I look down the corridor and it is still. I look out of the window and I see a formation of seven geese soar above the roof. I bought a chilli plant this morning and was given a white porcelain pot to place it in. The stolen clock now contains batteries and tocks above the bookshelf.

*

There is nothing profound in saying this: how times change. Everyone’s said it. And everyone’s felt it I bet. The return of seasons make progress seem familiar but times are never similar. Not that I’ve found anyway. I have always had a penchant for chilli plants and that began two years ago when I lived in an ex-council flat in Bethnal Green, which was a pub crawl away from Columbia Road Flower Market that opens every Sunday. The narrow street would fill to bursting with flowers; stalls and hawkers; coffee enthusiasts and fixed-gear bicyclists; expectant skinny mothers and babies in suede, it was a version of heaven - back then. And I would try and pick up the dregs of flowers that hadn’t been sold at the end of the day, because it was cheaper still and I would always be enticed by the chilli plants. The red and yellow bulbs that shone, and I knew you could eat them and the taste would be sweet or bitter and if you’re lucky, extremely hot.

Friends I cared about but no longer see stayed with me back then. In my rented apartment that I no longer live in nor share with the people I knew (the housemates have all scattered too.) The friends who stayed over had only just finished university with me and so there was real promise of visits and “no plans over the weekend” and such and such. And when I think of the daily trials and tribulations of two years ago it was different – I was drunk more, I couldn’t tell if I enjoyed my job at all, people who meant nothing meant everything, and the Winter seemed long. Maybe Winters always seem long and we forget because Summer stupefies us.

Today on the bus a woman thus spoke to a neighbour:

‘Make the most of the sunshine

You don't know when the breeze is coming

In this town

And the darkness'

In her Caribbean accent she had directed it at a neighbour who wasn't sat beside her. Oh, there was someone there certainly; it wasn’t a call of madness. It was sound advice. Later she fell asleep. I heeded it. I should be enjoying every minute of this.