In 1979, when David “of the wandering Schlange” (German for snake) would periodically ooze off to find, as he called it, “futon-filler”, it behooved his invited guest to politely dismiss his odd figure of speech and praise his hospitality, if not his delicacy. Life in Kyoto was lonely at times for the single philosopher, however charming his roommate. “Don’t wait up for me, Watson,” he would say over his shoulder as he chose one from his wall of hats, “I might come back late.”

This caused me some concern because while we both slept on futons on the tatami straw mat floor, I was near the door and he was near the far wall. “Don’t step on my nose, then, Holmes,” I would reply, “and see that she don’t either.” But one Friday afternoon in October, we paused at this unlikely point for a serious discussion. What, what in heaven’s name were we going to do with four visitors in our room of 4 x 2.7 meters (about 9’ x 13’), where would they sleep? For the morning post, which arrived daily at one or two in the afternoon, had brought us the various news items that Terry, Elaine, and Carol, our collegiate and studious friends, were to arrive the following Monday, with Paul, an engineer pal of mine, to come that Wednesday. “Uh, David? What about our relations with the neighbors? Aren’t they going to be gossiping their fart-sniffing heads off about the immoral and communistic foreigners?”

“They’ll love it, if I know our landlady Mrs. Hashimoto, they’ll love it. And we do have plenty more futons in the closet, fleas included.”

“But are you sure it’s OK with you, David? The room is small, we might have to go out in the hall to change our minds, with all their stuff and Paul’s toys…”

“Toys?”

“You just wait, Davey boy, you just wait.”

“I’m waiting. Uh, don’t wait up for me, Watson, right?”

“No problem, buddy.”

 

Sure enough, the following Monday morning brought three babes in the woods with their matched luggage, straight from a pompous East Coast U.S. university environment, and a dormitory-style reunion in our crowded little room. We had removed the curtain partition and generally cleared the space save for the central table around which we sat on low square pillows drinking sake from such tiny cups as we could find in David’s flea market pile. The tape deck and speakers treated our astonished neighbors to the divine sounds of Lightnin’ Hopkins as a background for our foreign-tongue conversational chatter. My main interest was in why Terry hadn’t written us earlier.

“But Michael, I wrote that note two weeks ago.”

“Fucking anti-Semites, it came last Friday.”

“Now, now, I may be Irish but I’m not anti-…”

“Not you, Terry, the mailman,” I explained. “We have it on good authority that they’re Jew-haters. Instead of delivering our mail, they spend their days in neo-Nazi meetings and putting up posters for anti-Semitic conferences. After all, The New York Review of Books that we get by subscription is so heavy.”

“Outrageous,” Terry agreed, playing along.

“We have a plan, actually, to embarrass them publicly,” David continued. “They seem to save their sexual activities for rainy days because God knows they don’t get around on the route, and if we’d but await them at the post office door and trail them to their den, we could notify the police or the newspapers to raid their brothel. No doubt the Undoh people, the peace movement, would be interested.” The latter were the remains of the anti-war movement who, when the Vietnam War ended in 1975, didn’t disband so much as enter the lunatic fringe.

 

David wasn’t the sole Westerner living in Kyoto to work up travel money. In those days, in one year of teaching in Kyoto, an English speaker could save enough to live for five years in India, and many an ashram-sitter chose this course. Linda Pernise was such an arbitrageur. Born in Brooklyn, she had lived and worked in a health food and psychic studies commune, made her way to South India, and thence to Japan with high hopes of returning to her studies in meditation after a year of diligent work. To make the year easier and more interesting, she studied pottery at a Japanese studio, flower arranging at a traditional school, and had found a Japanese boyfriend who played flute very sweetly. Her life was generally calm until she met David.

Their affair was short-lived but pleasant, leaving her refreshed and him a trifle guilty—not about her boyfriend in the slightest—but his Kafkaesque mind would not permit him to feel anything so mild and trivial as “pleasant”. He needed to inflict something on himself so that there would be a wound to examine and heal. She reproved him continually for his egocentric and Western point of view. He told me about a crisis that happened over his use of the Yiddish word dafke. As they were going out for a bicycle ride one day, the threatening clouds made good their gloomy warning and it began to rain gently, a humid still drizzle. “Dafke now it has to rain!” exclaimed the boychik.

“Dafke?” asked Linda.

“ ‘Dafke’ is a Jewish word indicating some malevolent perfection of timing on God’s part in arranging our lives to meet the maximum interference in any situation,” he explained. “You know how it would be used—you move out of your house and you notice they’re opening a great little coffee shop across the street. The bank forecloses and then your uncle dies. You light a cigarette and then the bus comes.”

“You really think the world is arranged for your particular pleasure, don’t you? God, you’re so egocentric!”

“Not just me, my dear friend.” A slight smile played on his features. “For example, a radical Jewish feminist newsletter is called Dafke. Why there are whole multitudes of people who think they’re the center of the universe. The funny thing is that only some of us are right.”

After gathering her strength, Linda plunged into the gap. “You’re so incredibly self-centered, from the Eastern point of view. And that’s why you fit badly into your environment—you don’t see the pattern and so you can’t fit.” She regarded him critically. “No wonder you complain about being neurotic.”

But another challenge to Linda’s analytic capabilities arrived in the person of Paul Romney. Depending on whom you asked, Paul was either a raving maniac or a far-out guy but in either case, he was fond of toys. When I returned from teaching that Wednesday night, he was ensconced on a pillow with a suitcase open before him out of which he was taking knickknacks like a kindergartner at show-and-tell: Havana cigars, a bottle of Drambuie, Chinese medicines, fans, little boxes, camera attachments, oriental yo-yos, small ivory carvings, his English Jew’s harps (which he never traveled without), very fine paper cut-outs of butterflies and dragons, lacquer chopsticks, dictionaries, mechanical gizmos, and much more. The crowd around him was awe-struck and a little gone from the Drambuie, and I breathed a sigh of relief as I had worried how the mild-mannered student types would take to Paul’s circus. My face lit up in a delighted grin and we hugged and cavorted a bit. He had brought me several presents, among which was a small battery-powered alarm clock of the latest fashion. It was like David’s and Elaine’s, both of which sat next to each other on a shelf.

“You have no idea how inferior it makes me feel,” David commented, “that for the last few days or so, my clock has been consistently five minutes behind hers!” I showed Paul my new Japanese shirt-coat and explained to him that dressing Japanese might make me less of a freak attraction for the natives. Of course, my Jew-fro ensured the freak reaction but never mind.

Paul was a freak show of the first order. Blonde hair to the middle of his back, a handlebar moustache, a gray pin-striped three-piece suit, big black boots, and a cane because he had hurt himself sky-diving in Taiwan.

“What were you doing in Taiwan?” I asked him.

“The factory I worked in went out of business and sold the machines to a Taiwanese company. Naturally, I removed several of the key parts before the stuff shipped out so when they set them up in Taiwan, machinee no workee. They paid to fly me there and I thoughtfully brought the parts in my suitcase and installed them at night after hours.”

David nodded admiringly, “Great scam.”

“Uh huh. Unfortunately, I sprained my leg sky-diving and that’s why I’m using this weird cane I bought in the Snake Market there.” He brandished an ornately carved bit of chinoiserie as a case in point.

After the ensuing brawl paled at 2:30 or 3 a.m., we all laid down on the side-by-side futons and murmured until we slept. At 8, my eyes opened as usual and remembering our plight, I arose on a triangular elbow to survey the wreckage. David’s eyes opened presently and his head turned on the pillow toward the room. Across the tangle our eyes met and we smiled and waggled our eyebrows. Silently I rose and took the coffee beans and the noisy grinder into the bath cubicle to operate in tactful seclusion. A short time later the aroma of fresh brew wound from the coffee machine to sleeping noses and they duly twitched and tilted.

 

That day, Paul, Carol and I took the bus to Kiyomizu Temple, a beautiful sight, although its trails are steep and difficult for a gimp. Afterwards, we walked to a teahouse nearby, a lovely spot with a tiny wooden bridge over a stream jammed with carp. A platform verandah projected into the middle of the garden, a prize-winning miniature with juniper and cherry, and we sat at a low table there. Presently six Japanese high-school girls entered and demonstrated that they were from a rural area by covering their mouths and giggling while pointing at us, evidently the first white people they’d experienced up close. I was instantly furious. “Itsu ki-agatta ka, o-nobori-san?” I asked them. “I asked them when they arrived in town,” I replied in answer to Carol’s question.

“They didn’t answer,” Paul pointed out.

“Nan da,” I insisted, “Nihongo hanasanai ka?” This they disbelieved altogether and their giggles redoubled.

“What was that, Simón?” Paul used his nickname for me.

“I asked if they didn’t speak Japanese, Pablo. It seems that they don’t.”

Later in David’s room, we decided that giggles were one aspect of Japanese life at the time that we’d have to learn to live with. David, as usual, had an illustrative parable. “I was riding the bus one day and a Japanese fellow, about 45 or so, struck up a conversation with me. After getting some compliments on my nihongo, he asked me if there was any aspect of life in Japan that particularly irritated me. I answered, Yes, when little girls cover their mouths and giggle at me for being foreign. He raised his eyebrows and said,
“Yes, they giggle at me too, because I am old; it is annoying. But we are ridiculous, aren’t we!”

That night, Paul and I decided to go out and get drunk. We hobbled down to the river, him leaning on me, and found a dive in a sort of tent there. The word “sake” had the desired effect and we returned to David’s with me leaning on him.

After numerous coffees, the discussion at breakfast centered on how Paul and I could sight-see Kyoto, given his game leg and cane act. Buses were slow, taxis expensive, and walking quite impractical. David’s eyes brightened as he suggested the following plan in his usual rounded periods. “There’s a bicycle that you fellows can commandeer, you know, if you look up an old acquaintance, who borrowed it from me after a romantic spell together. Her name’s Linda or Rinda-san, if you prefer, and she is sure to claim squatter’s rights if I don’t act soon. If you two could spare me the embarrassment of giving her notice, I would be quite content.”

“How did you get two bicycles?” Elaine wanted to know.

“One belonged to a truer flame, who left Japan last year.”

“Really!” Paul exclaimed, clearly happy to get off his leg. “Where is she? What do we say? Will you call her?”

“She has no phone but she should be at her pottery studio this afternoon after 1. Just tell her I said Paul could use the thing for a week and that she can have it again after that. Oh, and be firm, she’s quite a schnorrer.”

“Schnorrer?” from Paul.

“In Yiddish, a true schnorrer,” I explained, “is one who makes you feel glad you can lend five dollars to a nice person like them.”

“…And lingering guilt that you only lent them five dollars,” David put in.

 

That afternoon at 3, we set off on my bicycle to the pottery studio on Omiya-dori. The way was fraught with danger as I hadn’t yet got used to driving on the left. Moreover, being a New Yorker by birth, red lights did not really mean “stop” until several seconds after they changed. The momentum of the bicycle quickly became more than its pitiful brakes or my will to obey traffic laws could manage. Coming up on Gojo-dori or Fifth Avenue, the light turned yellow as we roared into the first lane of the very wide boulevard at full speed, and red as we entered the first lane of the other side of the center island. I cranked as hard as I could and we oozed out of the intersection as the first cars zoomed past where we had just been. Exhausted, I coasted around a municipal bus when I twigged that his signal was blinking and he was pulling out towards us. “Honk your horn, man!” I gasped.

“AAAHHOOOOHHGAAAAHHH!” Paul complied at the top of his lungs, attracting the attention of every Japanese for three blocks, fortunately including the driver of the bus, who stopped abruptly.

After puzzling out the signs in Japanese in the elevator, we chose the 6^th floor and did indeed discover Rinda-san elbow-deep in clay. Since I had heard about and experienced somewhat her tendency to spiritualize, I expected little fuss over the bicycle, or if anything, a short but pithy remark about selflessness, oracles, and the half versus the full lotus. As a matter of fact, we touched off quite an explosion of invective. “You’d take my only transportation away from me, how’m I gonna get around? It’s going to take me another half-hour to get to the pottery studio, and another half-hour back. I just can’t give it to you!”

The voice of reason whispered in my ear and I repeated its fateful words. “Well, as far as we understand, it’s David’s bicycle, and if he said we could have it, if only for a while, I guess we should get it. But if you do have any arguments or pleas, why don’t you talk to David? He’ll be home today after 4, just pop by and present your case. But in the meanwhile, give us the machine, please.”

Although she gave us the machine, I was left with the suspicion that I had let David in for heavy weather. After we tootled around town for a bit in happy motions of chains and pedals, Pablo and I retired to the palais for backgammon, with the peaceful clacking of Terry, Elaine and Carol’s Scrabble tiles in the background. Japanese beer is such a pleasure. He was winning as usual when Deadly Rinda herself walked in.

Eventually someone dropped a pin and the silence lifted. “Uh, David’s not here but he should be back soon,” I said helpfully, “Come in, come in. Want a beer?”

“No thanks.”

“Come on, Simón, your roll.” Paul began to manifest his own peculiar talent, generally very irritating, for talking over any emotional noise, by involving Rinda-san in learning the rules of the gammon. He was explaining a “prime” when David’s head appeared in the doorway.

Several icy words exchanged without anything being settled, David and I offered to cook dinner for everybody after we returned from the bath house. On this last point there was general agreement so we took our shampoo and left.

In every grade-B Japanese detective movie there is a scene in the sento or bath, where the detective and his sidekick, muscularly immersed in the steaming, figure out the plot and decide on a plan of action. Dolly in on David and me showering on little stools sitting naked before mirrors, shaving, soaping, scrubbing, and finally settling down to business in the 106-degree soak.

“The plot is fairly thick here, Watson.”

“What causes worry, David?”

“I’m not worried, man, I’m embarrassed and I just don’t see what I’m going to do—possession is 9/10 of the law and she doesn’t want to give up.” He sighed. “I abhor scenes.”

“Looks like David of the wandering Schlange got himself in fairly deep this time.”

An enormous body, tattooed around the left armpit, appeared on the horizon, then sank slowly into the vapors, shaking our smaller crafts. “Chikishoh, atsui na!”

The water calmed and suddenly I had an idea. “Don’t worry, David,” I reassured him. “Schlange got you into this, it might get you out. I bet you 30 to 10 on 80 yen that Paul and Rinda-san sleep together tonight.”

“Do you really think so?” eyes brightening. “What do they have in common?”

“We share a certain class and erudition, which they fill in with astrology and meditation. Also, Paul slept to half-naked women without a murmur last night. And how else will Rinda-san get her bicycle away from him? In fact, now that I consider it, I’ll give you 70/10.”

“Hmm, no takers. But it’s not so much class as intellectual taste.”

At any rate, I would’ve won. When we returned to the manse, Paul and Rinda were eagerly playing the gammon, not by statistics or odds, but by controlling the dice kinesthetically! “Come on, six and two, six and two,” Paul chanted and rolled.

“Two and four, whew,” Rinda sighed, rolling the cubes in her hand.

“Hey, use the cup, you’re too good with bare hands.”

“All right, all right,” Rinda-san grumbled, placing the cubes into the dice cup and shaking click-clack. “Five and one or four and two.” Clack. Four and two.

“Wow, cup and all.”

David and I scratched our heads, waved to the Scrabble game, and moved toward the stove. “Man,” David was heard to exclaim, “darn white folks shore havin’ big pahty tonight.” He put some Snooks Eaglin on the box.

After dinner, Rinda left on her bicycle and Paul followed on mine. The five scholars relaxed, drinking more sake and smoking Havanas. Everyone admired my new shirt-coat item and I related how the lady at the bath had said, “Ee no kita-haru,” or “Nice thing you’re wearing.” Terry pointed out that it was a woman’s garment because of the way it tied. David said he didn’t care, he was going to buy one anyway. Terry and I both objected that he couldn’t wear it in public but David, as usual, was ready with a rejoinder. “After all we’ve been through, buddy boy, I’m not going to let a little shirt bother me!”