DON’T LOOK BACK
Blue tobacco smoke floats dreamily up the stairs around me and out into the street like money from a wallet. Ears ringing from the blasting music I start to exit the dark basement bar. The staff of Parker House Roll are finally urging their rollicking patrons out the door.
I hear Max call out to me, “Hey O! Don’t look back!” but from where?
Bumping drunkenly against the walls and each other, Haru, Jodi and E-chan are noisily lurching out from the bowels of the bar, Jodi’s lilting laughter pinging off the slick green-tiled walls of the stairwell. Their Japanese banter is a language labyrinth to me. I juggle the words and phrases, some I grasp the meaning of some I hear but don’t understand but others I can’t decipher either way. I try to recall the proverb Haru had taught me earlier. How did it go? ‘koh-ya’ or ‘koh-no’? Ahh that’s right, ‘kou-in!’ ‘Kou-in, ya no gotoshi’ ‘Light and shadow, are as an arrow’. I try to commit it to memory once again, along with the dozens of others I treasure but don’t fully comprehend. But can I be sure it’s secure in the muddied vault of my recall?
Outside, at the top of the stairwell, O-stuki-san, the moon, is a cold eye above a slumbering city. Weak morning light is filtering across the eastern hills of Higashiyama and, as it has done each day for a thousand years, gently painting the ash-grey rooftops of the Old Capital a golden hue.
Our long night had begun, as they always did, on the entertainment strip, Kiyamachi-dori. Me and Max in the bar Very Good (Shock Absorber), draining cold pints of Guinness and Yebisu and sucking stinging smoke through Seven Stars Mild and American Spirits. Pedaling our bikes from drinking bar to drinking bar to izakaya food bar. In 844 Store and A-bar scoffing vegan yaki-soba, hiyayakko and the inevitable edamame. And all the while I’m playfully peppered with my friend’s machine-gun mind games, word wizardry and twisted stories, the essence of conversations with Max. I try to match his weaving, sidestepping banter but I’m always one weave adrift.
Time with my Ontarian friend is variously a lesson, a conversion, a dalliance in delightful diatribe, a zig-zag through Catholic mysticism, the precepts of the Bushido, a lament for the soul of Joe Strummer, a gilded, guided pathway through a matrix of ascetics, aesthetics and athletics, an inspired ride in the city through which we weave, a salutation to a temple or shrine by which we pass, a tip-of-the-hat to an historical marker at which we turn, a nursery rhyme, a ko-an, a song beneath a rising moon or a tanka as we pedal through the gentle Kyoto rain.
We’d come earlier to this particular basement ‘live house’ to see a friend play guitar for Asakawa Maki, a blues singer who’d been famous in the 70s. The heady performance complete, my mind still reels from her haunting “Nemuru-no ga Kowai’ (Sleep is Fearful). Halfway up the stairway I turn to see if Max is following - he was right behind me a second ago. I know this as he’d just called out to me - but where is he now?
A breath of cool morning air reaches down and touches my face. I look up and out through the open portal at the emerging day. The sun is yet to brush the steel and glass façade of the office building across the street.
“O!” he calls again.
OK, so he is in the stairwell, but where? I glance around. Not ahead of me, not behind, and these stairs are concrete, with no access to a space beneath. I’m suddenly alerted by the others’, “Ahhh, sugoi! Owen! Mi-te! Ue!” (Oh! Wow! Owen, look up!). Spurred by their cries of disbelief and appeals, I do.
Spider-like, hands and feet braced against the tiles, Max has shimmied up the stairwell walls and is now suspended a good two metres above us. Like a bug he scoots over our heads and drops lightly onto the top landing. Framed in the open doorway he calls again, “Come on O, I’ll race ya!”, before darting out of view and along the street towards his bike.
When I get to the top of the stairs he’s already riding off, singing at the top of his voice, ‘London call-ing to the underworld, Come out of the cupboard, You boys and girls…!’ and pedaling like a lyrical lunatic.
Yeah, it’s been a long night, but somehow, with an intuition born of repetition, I feel that it is not over just yet. No, naturally the night will not be complete until, at the street-stall Nagahama Ramen back on Kiyamachi, we’ve slurped the last our noodles and, raising our bowls, drained the final grainy dregs of our soup.
But wait, just down the street, in our mate Hako-chan’s bar, ING, the Yebisu will still be flowing…
+ + + + +
© Owen Smith
In Lockdown, July/August 2021