The Tokyo-Montana Express Read Free Page B

way. Still surprised by the cab stopping, it takes me
a minute or so to become totally aware of the contents of the taxi. When I get in
I can see that something is very unusual about the cab, far beyond the obvious personality
touches that driver-owned taxis have.
    Then, as they say, it dawns on me in the
bar-closing traffic of Shibuya where I am actually at. I’m not in a taxicab. I
am in a shrine of carp. The taxi is filled with drawings, photographs and even
paintings of carp. In the backseat there are two gold-framed paintings of carp.
One of them is beside each door.
    Carp are swimming everywhere in the taxi.
    “Carp,” I say in English to the driver,
hoping that means something to him. I don’t know the Japanese word for carp.
    “Hai,” he says in Japanese which means yes.
Then I have a feeling that he knows the word for carp in every language on this
earth, even in Eskimo where there are no carp, only icebergs and such. The man
really likes carp. I take a good look at him.
    He’s a happy and jovial man.
    I remember that carp stands for good luck
in Japanese and I am in a moving shrine of carp, going in and out of the Japanese
love-traffic. It all makes sense. I see young lovers in cabs all around us on
their way to pleasure and passion. We are swimming among them like good luck.

Meat
    A man is staring at meat. He is so
intently staring at meat that his immediate surroundings have become the shadow
of a mirage.
    He is wearing a wedding ring.
    He is perhaps in his early sixties.
    He is well dressed.
    There simply are no clues to why he is
staring at meat. People walk by him on the sidewalk. He does not notice them.
Some people have to step around him.
    The meat is his only attention.
    He’s motionless. His arms are at his side.
There’s no expression on his face.
    He is staring into the open door of a meat
market locker where whole sides of beef are hanging from hooks. They are in a
row like cold red dominoes.
    I walk past him and turn around and look at
him and then want to know why he is standing there and I walk back and try to
see what he is seeing as I walk past him.
    There has to be something else, but I’m
wrong again in this life.
    Nothing but meat.

Umbrellas
    I have never been able to understand
umbrellas because I don’t care if I get wet. Umbrellas have always been a
mystery to me because I can’t understand why they appear just before it starts
to rain. The rest of the time they are vacant from the landscape as if they had
never existed. Maybe the umbrellas live by themselves in little apartments
under Tokyo.
    Do the umbrellas know that it is going to
rain? because I know that people don’t know. The weatherman says that it will
rain tomorrow but it doesn’t and you don’t see a single God-damn umbrella. Then
the weatherman says that it will be a sunshiny day and suddenly there are
umbrellas everywhere you look, and a few moments later, it starts raining like
hell.
    Who are these umbrellas?

A Death in Canada
    There is not much to talk about today
here in Tokyo. I feel very dull like a rusty knife in the kitchen of a weed-dominated
monastery that was abandoned because everybody was too bored to say their
prayers any more, so they went someplace else two hundred years ago and started
different lives that led them all to the grave, anyway, a place where we are
all going.
    A few moments ago somebody died in their
sleep in Canada. It was a very easy death. They just won’t wake up tomorrow
morning. Their death will not affect the results of anything going on in Japan
because nobody will know about it, not a single person out of 114,000,000
people.
    The Canadian corpse will be buried the clay
after tomorrow. By any standard it will be a modest funeral. The minister will
have a hard time keeping his mind on the sermon. He would just about prefer to
be doing anything else than giving this sermon.
    He is almost angry at the corpse lying a
few feet away in a cheap coffin. At one point he feels like