Jubilee Hitchhiker (189 page)

“He was quite desolate about it,” Hodge remembered. “Kicking himself for that being his only copy.” The judge was shocked and “feeling this great sense of loss.” Everything turned out okay in the end. One of Brautigan's drinking companions in The Cradle had been an editor at Japanese
Playboy
. During the course of their conversation, he'd opened his portfolio, spreading papers and manuscripts across the bar. Richard's notebook got shuffled together with the other stuff and packed away. When the editor discovered it a day later, he returned Brautigan's work-in-progress to The Cradle.

On another occasion, Takako brought Hodge and Brautigan to a film set to see a Japanese movie in production. The director was a friend of hers. They spent the entire day watching take after take of the same scene. For anyone not involved, watching a film shoot ranks just below observing paint dry as an interesting pastime. When the actors speak a strange language, the boredom factor dials up several notches.

Their fun began when the day's work ended. The director invited Brautigan and Hodge to his home for something to eat. “He was pretty famous, I guess,” the judge recalled. The director had an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs and on the way, they stopped off at a supermarket and bought a load of “Japanese goodies” and several bottles of Philippine sake “that everyone was very proud of.” The director's party consisted of his lead actor and actress, the composer of the film's score and the two Americans.

They prepared sukiyaki, sitting around the cooking pot on tatami mats in the traditional manner. “Richard got drunk,” Hodge recalled. “Boy, everybody was drunk.” Gathered about the low
table, the Japanese began singing. They favored opera and the songs of Stephen Foster, harmonizing on “Old Black Joe” and “Camptown Races.” This became one of Richard Hodge's most enduring memories of Japan. “Every one of those people,” he said, “particularly the music director, knew all the words.”

Later in the evening, Brautigan made a drunken pass at the leading lady. “Ticked off,” the film director asked his American guests to leave. Out on the street, drunk in the middle of the night, the two Richards had no idea in hell where they were. Hodge and Brautigan started walking, singing together off-key to keep up their spirits. “Doo-da . . . Doo-da . . .” They felt lucky to be in Tokyo where there was no chance of getting mugged at three in the morning. Sometime before dawn, they found a taxi and were safely delivered to the Keio Plaza.

Richard Hodge felt troubled by the changes he observed in his old friend in Tokyo, “My relationship with [Brautigan] was one of gravity,” he said, remembering the years he'd been Richard's lawyer, “so I probably saw him at his best, when he was really being intense and productive and careful and intelligent; a businessman. I never thought of him as an alcoholic.” There had been plenty of drinking together over the years but Hodge considered it fun, two guys socializing. What he “perceived in Japan was a change of mood about the drinking. It was every night. And there was a real sadness to it that I hadn't seen before.”

Around the end of May, a week or so after Richard Hodge returned to California, Brautigan received a letter from an assistant program development director for the United States Information Agency at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. Having received a cable from the USIA informing them of Richard's visit, the Program Development office contacted American Centers all across Japan and received numerous enthusiastic replies regarding a Brautigan presentation. Kyoto, Osaka, Nagayo, Tokyo and Fukuoka all extended invitations to Richard. Travel expenses would be paid, along with a $113 per diem payment and a $75 honorarium.

Brautigan got in touch with the USIA people at the embassy, accepting their offer. He would travel to Kyoto on June 20th as requested, but wanted the Osaka date in July changed to June 21st, so he could do them both on a single trip. Tokyo in July was fine with Richard. Nagoya and Kukuoka both wanted him to come in September. Brautigan said that was too far into the future for him to make a commitment at the moment.

Not long afterward, Richard prowled the interior city of the Keio Plaza one morning and came across an American television crew filming an episode of
Love Boat
outside the lobby entrance. He recognized Ted Knight and an actress whose name he couldn't recall. Brautigan stood and watched them prepare to shoot another scene. Ted Knight waited next to the camera, getting ready. The actress who looked familiar walked past Richard to join Ted Knight. On her way outside, she said, “It's freezing out there.”

Looking on, Brautigan noticed John Ritter, a popular American television actor, having a conversation about stage makeup with a young Japanese woman ten feet away. Richard approached him from behind. “Excuse me, Mr. Ritter,” he said.

The actor turned, “slightly surprised” at encountering Brautigan. “I evoke that sort of response in people,” Richard wrote later. “I'm kind of a strange-looking man, awkward, obviously uncomfortable in this world, not good-looking. I wear western clothes, Levis, cowboy boots, and a cap that I got at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, in the winter that says on the brim ‘Fighting Irish, Notre Dame.'” John Ritter regarded him curiously.

“Is that actress,” Brautigan nodded his head at the scene underway outside, “Rita Moreno?”

“Yes, sir,” Ritter replied, oddly charming and formal. “She certainly is.”

“Thank you,” Richard said, and they walked away into their separate lives.

Back in his room, well past the noon hour, Brautigan's phone rang. It was Masako. She hadn't been able to call during her lunch break and suggested they get together again that evening. Richard's sense “of ominous foreboding,” lingering since the incident at the train station the previous night, evaporated like ground fog in the heat of the rising sun. Around 7:15 pm after work, Masako arrived at room 3705. Brautigan ordered takeout Chinese food. After eating they made love.

Kano had to catch an early train. She wanted a nap first. Richard set his alarm clock, and “she fell asleep instantly.” Brautigan held Masako in his arms, listening to her gentle, relaxed breathing. Unable to sleep, Richard was “almost envious.” When the alarm went off, Kano got up and took a shower. After she dressed, Masako kissed Brautigan and left around 10:15, “quite contented.” Richard went back to bed and fell into a deep sleep, “only to be pursued by nightmares too terrible to remember.”

In his search for West German models, Brautigan spent an evening with “a beautiful Japanese porno star” at The Cradle. Earlier, he'd attended the premiere of her latest “soft core” film, watching her naked as she performed simulated sex on the big screen. “She was so beautiful.” Richard was a fan of this kind of movie. In person, he found the star shy and demure. Brautigan spent half an hour teaching her to pronounce three words with sounds difficult for the Japanese. Staring at her lovely lips, he made her say words hundreds of times until she pronounced them perfectly. Richard thought of her inaccessible beauty, watching the delicate star repeat over and over and over: “Already . . . I love you . . . River . . .”

This all went into the handwritten manuscript Brautigan now called “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo.” Eventually it filled two complete notebooks, 179 manuscript pages, nearly the length of one of his novels. Little of the text involved modeling or models. West German women turned out to be in short supply in Tokyo. The narrative became a quasi journal about his relationship with Masako Kano, whom he referred to only as “the Ninji” throughout his meandering discourse. Whole paragraphs described his arousal upon seeing her take off her watch before getting into bed (no mention made of Marcia Pacaud, the girl who never took off her watch) and when showering together, the pleasure of soaping down with a beautiful unselfconscious young Japanese woman.

Brautigan continued this project until the end of July. What he didn't mention proved of greater interest than his meticulously recorded amorous details. He didn't include the many trips and local excursions made with Masako or ShÅ«ji Terayama's funeral or an uncomfortable meeting with Masako's mother (“the Japanese Sophia Loren”) when she backed him into a corner or the night he and the Ninji stargazed from the roof of the Keio Plaza, sneaking up the back service stairs. Due to Richard's “rather big tummy, he could not catch me easily running up the stairs,” Kano recalled. “I think I was too much for him physically.” On their next attempt at rooftop astronomy, they were caught by the hotel staff and “shooed away.” This episode never made it into the manuscript.

Brautigan finally made contact with a genuine West German model in Tokyo. He spent an evening talking to her and taking notes. What he gleaned from their interview became a six-page piece, also called “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo.” Never published in English, it
was one of his most powerful short stories. Like “The World War I Los Angeles Airplane,” written more than twenty years earlier, it took the form of an enumerated list of quotes, all in the voice of the expatriate model.

Richard used nothing from the two notebooks he spent months compiling. It was all art and instinct now. What made the piece potent and poignant was the unknown model's repeated, enumerated assertion, “I am not a prostitute.” Using his long-standing habit of list making, Brautigan keyed into the emotional heart of the story. A lonely young woman adrift in a foreign capital where she can't speak the language, sleeping with men who aren't attractive to her in a desperate attempt to bolster an already faltering second-rate career: “I am not a prostitute.”

Masako Kano had her day job. Richard Brautigan had his nightlife. Often, after she left his hotel room, he headed out to The Cradle for a long night of the unknown. One early morning after the bar closed, Richard and Takako found their way to the Golden Triangle, a section of narrow lanes and ramshackle two-story buildings in Shinjuku, where “thousands of little tiny bars [were] beautifully tucked next to each other.” A final remnant of the old Tokyo now lost forever in the wake of Japan's postwar “economic miracle,” the Golden Gai provided a popular meeting place for artists, writers, musicians, and actors.

Brautigan and Shiina went into “a small but very elegant bar.” Although dark and disreputable in appearance, the Golden Triangle was not a cheap area to find a drink. Certain establishments catered to celebrities and welcomed only regular customers. Takako proved the perfect ambassador, guiding Richard into unfamiliar territory. A stranger sat talking with a woman at the back of the pocket-sized bar. He was Kōbō Abe. Brautigan had long admired Abe's novel
The Woman in the Dunes
and was a big fan of the movie based upon it. The two internationally known authors were quickly introduced. Neither knew the other's language. Abe's companion volunteered as a translator.

Richard wanted to tell Abe a story. It took place in the Colorado summer of 1980, when Brautigan first met Masako Kano. She was not in the story. Richard rode in a Jeep with two other men, driving up a steep, remote dirt road to visit a ranch. From out of nowhere, around a narrow bend came “an extraordinarily beautiful young Indian girl” mounted bareback on a galloping horse, her black hair “streaming in the wind.” She was barefoot and wore fringed buckskin, a look of ecstasy on her face as she galloped toward them.

It was a perfect Richard Brautigan story. No characters or plot, only a sudden moment of unexpected beauty. It took Richard “an unusually long time” to tell his story because he wanted to communicate it exactly, to “get the feeling of what happened.” Brautigan and Abe parted company around 5 AM. Takako headed for home. Richard returned to his room on the thirty-seventh floor of the Keio Plaza.

Throughout his four-month stay in Japan, Brautigan depended primarily on the mail for conducting business. Long-distance phone calls were too expensive, and the time difference didn't align with office hours. Joel Shawn wrote to Richard, explaining the high cost of sending correspondence ($29 per mailing) to Tokyo by express mail. Shawn proposed sending Brautigan's accumulated letters via air mail on a weekly basis.

Helen Brann sent Shawn copies of recent translation rights contracts. In a curt, businesslike way, she pointed out to the attorney that, over the years, she had mailed Richard copies of all his contracts. It was unnecessary now for her to send duplicate copies to him. It was Brautigan's
responsibility to keep a complete record of his publishing career. Helen insisted it was Richard who had left her, not the other way around. She offered to be cooperative, suggesting Shawn “tactfully” point out to Brautigan his own responsibilities in the matter.

Helen made no mention of any of this when she wrote to Richard on the same day, sending along a contract for the Greek edition of
Trout Fishing
for him to sign. Becky Fonda wrote to Brautigan on the eleventh of May, mostly local news seasoned with a dash of Hollywood gossip. She reported that Nicholson and Ashby had asked for fifteen to twenty million to make
Hawkline.
Their take would total seven to eight mil in salary. Universal declined, budgeting eight million with Michael Haller in the director's chair. “No star cast as of now,” Becky wrote. “Gatz (regardless of personal diffs.) who is so capable will be working on the screenplay.”

Brautigan returned the signed Greek contracts on “a beautiful spring day in Tokyo.” A couple days later he wrote Brann again. This letter was more concerned with finances. He asked about his English
Trout Fishing
royalties and if Helen had heard anything about the
Hawkline
film project. Richard mentioned that Becky told him “Universal Pictures had allotted $80 million for a production,” a gross exaggeration of what Fonda had actually written and wishful thinking of the most desperate sort.