Part III:
Far forward and away in Kyoto a yellowing Moso, a sympodial bamboo garden clumps proud and tall against the reluctant rear of the square, famous restaurant of less than willing waiters, a deliberant disbelief of normal Japanese food distribution, just within the odd Ionic pillared , entrance hearth, welcomed without the usual public false warmth, the mix of Gaijin’s entered with slender gallantry into the thick skinned red brick’ overlay, a three story restaurant, a retired bank long gone south , with dueling vault entrances, , one above as an armored air vent, one hole below the Vitruvian, was for upright pace, a decorative space sometimes reserved as a desired destination for a “Wandering about”, a brief barricade in satin and silk Shinto garb and beyond bachelorhood, a wedding space “Harmoniously held” in temporarily rented Edo costumes similar to big Korean dress up affairs.
Purposely noisy and twenty feet tall within, Lucca’s initial thought, imitating the pugnacious’ Palm of Sicilian’ New York. He dined with some slick and some not so slick male German and American others as a somnambulist of their aged kin in certain cerebral slumber, silver tongued and mobile as if on roller skates in a verbal motion, slow, soft, and said, “so steady”. “The next ten years will be my greatest, New York, Rome, Washington and Tokyo, all the largest figurative, sculpture exhibitions ever.”
All of Kyoto recognized him with or without his tall chauffeurs with cauliflowered’ ears, ex-Sumotori stood stoically around him everywhere in back lit corners, he in their not so slim shadows. He was so comfortable in his unlaundered ballast and descending displacement. A fiercely competitive art collector who others in the same occupation disliked for his “thorny” personality and back stabbery.
Lucca had met him in his forties, in a restaurant in Los Angeles, owned by a son of a famous sixties rock group, a songwriter/singer superstar. He was introduced by a handsome Mongolian manager, actually of the Oirat clan, another almost lost tribe, thankfully not of Israel. The food was certainly special, the area way east of Culver city. It closed permanently after they met though through no fault of their own. Restaurant owners typically stay up late after work and partake in more stay up late curricula. Some situations sink.
In Kyoto pudgy and ruddy Australians, New Zealanders, and very white British’ husbands in dingy, slight three button down’ cotton/wool conservative, American Republican replicants recon in this restaurant. These too short/tight sleeved affairs carefully controlled and corralled discontent, mediocre looking, temporarily naked ring fingered, local Japanese women, and choreographed audio antics architecturally, using the darkness and surround sound of the over stained, rubbed satin red oak bar as an elbow embankment leaning towards infinite infidelity further east, nearer the narrow, dual entrance to the two white tile Toto dominated toilets. Two select tall stalls for sex.
Some men’s collars were starched up as if pursuing past Polo print ads, tailored like 1980s east coast U.S.A.’ white Anglo Saxon’ Protestants or barely hatched honeybees in buzz around a long ago spent, odorless, pistil less, wrinkled red rose. The famously poor dental hygienics of the nationalities gnashed from the line of nose’ plumb as minor mouth’s meshed bar side over gilded gimlets, a drill of a drink by minor mixologists to usurp the continuous contenders for linear bar space for service felt frontally and formally as visitors to Africa on a true 1910 safari were dealt dinner.
The horse crossed teeth, gold and amalgam above and below yeast coated tongues in twist and the unkempt oral hygiene were held hidden by uplifted, beautiful, fuzzy round ice cubes in square leaden cut, cropped glasses shadowed under poor Chinese taxidermy of little leopards, tigers, pandas, and dancing crocodiles served to supervise severe embraces on Velcro-like stationary stools hex-headed bolted into lead lags through competent concrete to compete with the tug and tide of any others choosing more or less space between. All was orderly and swarthy bar side. The bar back held a sour, soapy sentiment above grimy, grippy floors. Cigarettes were no longer extant within however the wood held the past. On the right entrance wall was a scotch ad in Japanese with a picture of Joseph Beuys.
An Asian rendition of toy piano plinking, twilight-like Tom Wait’s Rain Dogs was the undercurrent imitative annoyance, if Waits was dead he would have rolled and rolled in his grave, “but the (Pacific) ocean did not want him today.”
Within Japan (in sub-surface storage) some enormous, perfectly packed (coffined, concealed and enshrined in their homeland(s) some since 500 A.D.) wooden, once upon a time, white pine crated with black-smithed, three or four hundred iron “T” nails, historical pieces that had not been viewed or been restored since stolen under the official order of the Japanese Showa Emperor by past Princes, (And cousins by the dozens) scouted (pre-invasion) and unceremoniously located, then inventoried by monotonous’ monks on a “mostly military mission” within a most massive Pacific Ocean Japanese’ culture, nationalism and militarism take over. In paramilitary motion and in the pretense of tried trail and prayer and then acquired at beyond bayonet point and some later actually auctioned, viewed by his highness (all art and future atrocities) often in 1926 on. A parental’ pattern from the rising of light on their formal right (facing north) that prevailed until the oh so very sunny summer day of 1945. Henry Stimson thought Nagasaki a fourth-rate target. Ironically decimating a Catholic cathedral in the process which Hirohito wanted all along. Only the Moso bamboo and Camphor trees rejuvenated. New radioactive shoots appeared the very next day and were gobbled up.
After, there was no fear of more atomic might, the real fear came through the virtually undefended north, from the Shina , and the three thousand T-34 Soviet tanks , 1,500,000 hardened veterans accompanied by Communism and a historical defeat before, a thorn still stuck in a Russian paw by those same unscrupulous Japanese.
