THE TOKYO DEATH ORGASM

by
William Pittam

I

Lucian stood half naked in his studio apartment, looking at himself in the mirror. The sun crept in at every angle, intensifying his features. His skin was yellow like smoker’s fingers; blemished, withered, and dashed with wrinkles. Below a fine layer of wiry chest hair, his ribs protruded hard as machinery, framing a stomach that hung over his belt. His bedroom – large, open, with wood flooring, Japanese prints and great white studio lamps, resembled a clothes shop changing room. Lucian felt an uncomfortable reserve as he looked at himself, like one who tries on an expensive shirt over a bulging physique, knowing the limits of their beauty.

Lucian’s apartment was between the central western town of Oulu and Northern Inan, Lapland. There were no signs of life, except for the occasional grey flash of the Saami – indigenous villagers who every once in a while travel south to trade with the larger towns.

Lucian leaned out of his bedroom window, blowing cigarette smoke out into the cold. Northern Finland embodied an eerie infinity in spring. The endless snowfields shone brilliantly in the sun and resonated with a relentless, deadly cold. The days, it was said, had gotten warmer; the nights however, never crept above minus forty.

Slumping down on his black leather armchair, Lucian spoke into the machine,

‘Heating, rise – three degrees.’

The house responded with a gentle hum.

Despite his three-piece furniture, Lucian’s lounge never looked crowded. The heated floors were a pale white, framing a circular Jacuzzi, and the north-facing wall was made from synthetic glass.

With his head back in the armchair and his eyes half closed, Lucian imagined himself meandering through the universe as an infinite white spirit, gliding over the snowfields, close enough to skim them with his fingertips.

He opened his eyes as a troupe of grey figures moved slowly across the landscape. They were three persons strong, four, no – five. Lucian sat up and watched them. They looked like a family, with the larger figures pulling a loaded sled, while the smaller figures danced around them like sprites. They had perhaps four hours to reach the southern town before the night set in. Lucian felt like a space commander at base, watching his band of astronauts trek steadily across a moon-field.

‘Water temperature, rise – three degrees.’

Lucian stretched his tired limbs in the oval bath that sat in the centre of the lounge. He smiled at the figures that crossed the fields as the warm bubbles glided over his body. The sun disappeared.

These days, the weather turned quickly in Finland, and as the snow began to fall, Lucian wondered about the state of the planet. The Earth had become like a friend lost to madness, one at the limits of old age, finally at a peak, the blizzards and hailstorms were like the violent tossing and turning on the deathbed; feverish and frantic.

But the end of the world weather, as the media had started calling it, aroused in Lucian a strange wander-lust. He had experienced it in his youth. It was the electricity of the storm, the kinetic energy that tore away the skin of lethargy and relit the world with cinematic vigour.

The snowflakes reminded Lucian of his time in Tokyo some fifty years ago, of him and Keiko running through Ueno Park, catching cherry blossom petals. He had felt something that day; an indefinable ecstasy that he could compare only to sex. But it was different to that. It was inverted, infinite and silent.

II

Lucian stood with Keiko at a sushi stand as the sounds of the Gion festival burned all around them. Great veils of red and white tore past his peripheral – flags and banners, elaborate katakana scrolls with knife swipe calligraphy and huge boards with hiragana text proudly framing 2015. He was in Japan, in his thirties, feeling unstoppable. A hot gale burned through the traditional wooden streets of Gion; rich volcanic air that rumbled down from the mountains. Lucian smiled and the Gion dancers laughed and cheered as if the gods had spoken to them.

As he watched the silk-clad yama-boko floats drift by, he could see in the participants an air of power and control. The Gion Matsuri had traditionally been held to drive away the epidemics of plague and as the floats and dancers marched by, there appeared in them a sense of battle. As he chewed a final chunk of sushi, Lucian’s gaze met that of a dancer. Her kimono burned a deep orange from the glow of the street lamps; her face was tanned from daylong performances in the sun. Lucian swallowed his sushi.

The dancer moved with a kind of violence, leaping feverishly as if something threatened to combust her from the procession and into nothingness like a finite wisp of fire.

Lucian turned to a stranger next to him and smiled; and to Keiko, who didn’t look back, only sucked hard on her cigarette, moving her shoulders subtly to the crawling rhythm of the passing taiko drummers.

Retaining his gaze on the flowing procession, Lucian snuck up behind Keiko; sliding his hands around her waist. She kept on looking at the parade, but moved her head back against him.

Lucian gently pressed his chin against her and pinched the cigarette from her mouth and took a drag. The rush of nicotine slowed the scene down for a moment, when all the sparks in the air seemed to float, and every limb in the procession flowed like melting wax.

‘Hiiiiiyooooooo.’

The music of the parade intensified sending an excited shriek through the crowd of bystanders. Lucian could feel the ecstasy kicking in. He’d laughed at the suggestion of doing a pill for the Gion festival; it was a kitsch idea; childish, but aligned his mind perfectly as the shrieks of the yama-boko dancers grew into animalistic howls. Lucian shut his eyes. He took in the intense smells of oil-fire torches, hot noodles, mountain moisture, and Keiko’s hair; it was sickly sweet like inhaling treacle. The drums beat louder and faster; fire breathers, leaping mock-samurai swinging wooden swords, huge two-man puppets with great devil smiles, a hundred Geisha; pale and giggling, uniformed dancers in bright blue, green, red and white, all tore past in a flurry.

Lucian was fire. His hands burned and his muscles flexed seemingly without limit. His vision was godlike. He gazed around at the screaming, dancing parade. They were all fireflies – a thousand burning molecules; seamless; infinite; unafraid.

Thunder rumbled in the sky above Gion. It spoke to Lucian like the smoky voice of a dying grandmother; coarse and wary from a lifetime of speech, but effortless and omnipresent – immortal words that remain forever in memory.

Without explaining himself, Lucian took Keiko by the hand and led her slowly away from the procession. He took her through the crowds and past the dancers, until the burning reds of the festival disappeared.

‘Tonight is my last night in Tokyo,’ said Lucian excitedly. ‘I want to visit the Ueno shrines one more time.’

‘If we are caught you could be stuck here with me for even longer,’ said Keiko, forcing a serious expression.

‘We won’t be caught.’ Lucian smiled. ‘Tonight; we are unstoppable.’

III

Lucian could hear the armies of Japanese businessmen singing Beatles songs in karaoke bars as they drew past Ueno station. At midnight, much of Ueno Park was closed, and guarded by the night watch men; shadowy figures that moved back and forth along a metre stretch. They rarely met intruders.

Cherry blossoms lined the streets and left a carpet of red, pink and white petals in their path, and as Lucian led Keiko north to the old Tokugawa battle site, the sounds of English words in Japanese accents began to fade.

The ground ascended as they walked, and all the while Lucian gazed about, tasting the electricity in the air. Ueno hill was populated with a host of old temples built to honour the fallen shogun of the Tokugawa conflict over two hundred years ago.

Many of the shrines were broken and blackened by the fires that had raged during the battle. The Tosho-gu shrine of Tokugawa Ieyasu, however, was exactly as it had been hundreds of years ago, mysteriously untouched by the conflict. Lucian wanted to see it one more time, and maybe sneak a look at the walls of gold inside. Ieyasu was an entity so shrouded in myth that he had become an essence in Japan, a transcendental demigod who’d fought ninety battles and displayed the heads of countless defeated samurai across the old capital.

‘Look, we’ve been spotted already,’ said Lucian, smiling and pointing at two golden dragons that guarded the main gate to the Tokugawa shrine gardens.

‘They look so real,’ said Keiko. ‘Tradition says they sneak away at midnight to drink from Shinobazu Pond.’

‘Do you think they’ll rat on us?’

‘No, they are rule breakers, just like us.’

Lucian pulled Keiko up onto the wall before dropping down onto the perfect grass inside, catching Keiko as she followed. A great black cormorant flew out of the darkness as she landed, making Lucian jump.

The gardens that surrounded the shrine were a blackened labyrinth of stone lanterns and hedge art, cut to the shape of watchful demons. Lucian imagined himself in 1868; the build up to the battle; ninja patrolling the gardens, and the rising sea of fire as the emperor’s troops ascended the hill. The main shrine and worship hall was further north in an open courtyard. Lucian felt a power brought on by the danger, the drink and the drugs – a confidence in locating the guards who patrolled the gardens. Taking Keiko’s hand, he started to run through the narrow hedge paths. Faces of demonic stone statues howled at him as he ran, and Lucian’s palm heated against Keiko’s as if they were fusing together.

Lucian stopped running and put his arms around Keiko. The centre of the shrine gardens was mysteriously empty; a great stone platform that spread before the steps of the Tosho-gu shrine. The surrounding trees bowed majestically in the wind, spreading a snowstorm of cherry petals through the air, and somewhere a water clock filled and emptied with a delicate splash-clunk.

Lucian turned to face Keiko, breathing heavily. She was in tears. He held her, and remembered his journey to Japan; feeling nervous as hell as the plane descended for landing, trying to picture the alien world he would walk out into. But the mysticism of Japan had been crystallised for Lucian as he met her at Narita airport; his gaze met hers as his right foot met the Japanese earth for the first time.

Now, as he pulled her around in a silent dance to the music of the waving trees, Lucian felt as though he understood the limits of his youth; of adventures in mythology; of chasing spirits that dance elusively through ancient worlds. He had to fly home tomorrow, and find some permanence.

Lucian woke gently the next morning. He felt Keiko in his arms, and as he opened his eyes; caught sight of Mount Fuji near Narita, and a single white aeroplane, ascending into the clouds, delicate as paper.

IV

‘House expire, code zero, zero, zero, one.’

Lucian terminated the machine – the power seeped from it with a great hum of relief. Crawling painfully from the bath, Lucian stood dripping naked before the north-facing glass wall. He pressed his hand to it and it opened; shimmering away into nothingness as the howling Finnish blizzard rushed over his body.

It numbed his skin in a second, until he could feel nothing and see nothing but possibility and erotic mysticism, like the white blanket of cloud that sat above Narita as he peered out of the window en route to Japan.

Lucian walked out into the snow.

© William Pittam
Reproduced with permission