There used to be a vacant lot at the end of an alleyway leading to a large river that flows into Tokyo Bay. Rumours of a different martial arts match-up between sumo and wrestling on the damp weedy field caused a frenzy in the town, but disappeared like a puddle evaporating on a sunny day. There was a cinema in a cul-de-sac further downstream of the culvert. It was a small shed and for some reason the stage in front of the screen was very large. Occasional secret stripteases were organised. At the ticket booth, a terribly thin woman in a purple wig wearing a translucent yellow vinyl coat over her sleeveless chambray cotton dress showed only her pink enameled fingertips through the reception window. She put the ticket stubs and coins, the sweet treats that she always kept ready in her tiny beaded crochet purse into his hands and asked him.

“But really, Monsieur, what would one be if one was not alive?”

For him as a child, she looked like an old woman.

“Dead, Madame.”

As he replied mischievously, like Poirot in an Agatha Christie TV series, she opened her eyes wide under her curly wig.

“Hic!”

A hiccup burst from her closed vocal cords.

One Christmas, the film The Dancing Girl of Izu, based on the novel by Yasunari Kawabata, was screened starring then a very popular singing actress, but the hut was destroyed by fire early in the New Year. This was because it was located on a narrow street where even fire engines could not enter. The burnt down theatre was abandoned for 14 years until the landowner changed the registration, despite rising land prices in the 1980s.

To start with, striptease is a sport: there is a Striptease Club, which organizes healthy contests whose winners come out crowned and rewarded with edifying prizes (a subscription to physical training lessons), a novel (which can only be Robbe-Grillet’s Voyeur), or useful prizes (a pair of nylons, five thousand francs). *

On a rainy Sunday, he buys four ham and cheese galettes plus a fried haddock fillet sandwich and cranberry crumbles from a crêpe van that has a stall in front of his apartment. A young downcast saleswoman repeats his order, but only a thin, sobbing breath could be heard through the gap of her teeth getting braces, hidden under a medical mask.

“Stop picking on my new girl!”

A man who calls himself Cricket as an owner of the crêperie threatens him over the counter. Cricket drops kneaded buckwheat flour onto the burning griddle, grumbling at the unexpectedly large number of orders. Raindrops falling on the hot iron rise in a smoke.

The end of the striptease is then no longer to drag into the light a hidden depth, but to signify, through the shedding of an incongruous and artificial clothing, nakedness as a natural vesture of woman, which amounts in the end to regaining a perfectly chaste state of the flesh. *

They happened to pass by. Women who might not have been them. Both sighs of despair and gasps of ecstatic joy. Just as a clothed corpse at a murder scene will soon get naked in front of the coroner.

“It was fate – NOT a coincidence.”

The alibi crumbled.

Prehistoric birds, even if they could not fly, would not have been lost in a forest with nowhere to go and no return. They would have been able to smell the budding young leaves and sense the changing seasons.

“To the Métro Line 2.”

Although the hands of the modern clock have been broken, as he superimposes the map of his memory on the river flow, a dragon boat at the helm takes to the open sea. Masquerade dancers fanned with angel feathers reveal him their intimacy.

“We all have illusions.”

The Can-cans chanting in chorus,
Changing in purified water.

…

hiromi suzuki is a poet, fiction writer, artist living in Tokyo. Her writing has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, RIC journal, Berfrois, Minor Literature[s] and various literary journals on-line.

Quotation:
*Striptease (Roland Barthes Mythologies, 1957 / Translation by Annette Lavers)