Michael Cantor

I had the enormous good fortune to live and work in Europe, Latin America and Japan as a US expatriate at a time (the Sixties) when my nation was still greatly respected, and often loved, throughout the world; when all the wise and good things done during and in the aftermath of WWII still mattered; when the essential goodness of Dwight Eisenhower and the energy, image and good intentions of John F. Kennedy could even overcome the damage done by Viet Nam. It was a very special thing to be an American abroad at that time, to feel proud of your nation, enormously proud to be an American, and to see that affection towards America reflected in the people you met every day.

Through the Sixties, for example, I would encounter photos of JFK on office walls throughout Latin America, and probably half the workers in various factories I visited would have a small frame with photos of the two Johns — Kennedy and XXIII — somewhere on their tool box or work station, if they had one. Can you imagine anything like that happening today, even with the drama of an assassination? It was another time, another world.

Additionally, when I lived in Belgium, Europe was still physically rebuilding from the war; Japan in 1963 was exploding with construction, and in both nations there was an enormous sense of recovery, rebirth and pure energy — far greater than I have ever experienced in the States — and being in those places at that time allowed me the sense, inflated as it might have been, of actually participating in something new and decent, in a fresh start. (My poem Antwerp, 1961, which appeared earlier this year in Umbrella, was an attempt to capture some of this feeling.)

That feeling towards America also had a less noble side. Doors were automatically open to almost anybody with American citizenship, there was a certain “celebrity” status awarded without qualification. When I moved to insular Antwerp in 1961, a young engineer fresh out of the Bronx, dumber than shit and twice as graceless, I was immediately accepted — pulled — into the petit society of the young, French-speaking baby socialites. It was a very closed and clannish group, but my passport was my passport.

Japan was similarly welcoming, but by the time I relocated there I was a different person, more inclined to use that passport to participate in a different society. And the doors opened. I stumbled into an affair with a geisha who found me (American boy-toys were so cute) at the party celebrating the opening of my company’s Japanese subsidiary. I discovered the mizu-shobai — the late night, all night “floating world” of after-hours clubs and restaurants, cabarets and cabaret hostesses, playgirls and prostitutes and geishas and gangsters, and everything in between — that didn’t even get started until the “straight” clubs closed at 11:00 PM, and their sarariman (salary-man) customers boarded the last commuter train for a two-hour ride home to a tiny apartment and a sleeping family — and that became my playground.

Since I’m an engineering/business type, life was structured. I would normally work until about 6:00 PM, go out for drinks and a snack with the guys from the office (standard procedure in Japan at that time — kill time until the trains are emptier) — be back in my convenient downtown apartment, that few but foreigners could afford, by 9:00 PM, and get three hours sleep before hitting the mizu-shobai scene and playing at Hard-ass Gaijin Intellectual. I spoke passable Japanese in an affected Tokyo dialect, salted with massive amounts of “special” after-hours slang (Japanese is wonderful at using language as a tool to impress and discriminate), I had devoured everything written by story tellers and chroniclers of the floating world like Nagai Kafu, and most of the night was spent trolling for a woman who would go home with me, with the understanding that it was for the sheer joy of sex, not business. No cash transactions allowed. Respect for America. Thank you, George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur.

The two poems in this issue flow from that period of my life. An Incident of Honor is reasonably autobiographical, and Charlie Manos’s bar in the Akasaka district of Tokyo was where I normally hung out (incidentally, they served the world’s best piroshikis as bar food — the cook was a Russian emigre/expat.) I was not the shredee, nor did I actually see the incident. The guy who got sliced and diced was a schmucky German drunk who kept annoying a girl at a table full of gangsters. I wasn’t in the bar when it happened, but I had enough eye-witness accounts during the next week to write a short story about it. I had already been avoiding the downstairs room where the incident took place because of the growing number of gangsters who were making it home — I didn’t think those guys gave a shit about Nagai Kafu — and, after that, I began to find that Player’s piano bar in the Roppongi district was actually more convenient to my apartment, and served grilled matsutake mushrooms that were even better than piroshiki.

Gaijin has broader sources. It is part of a triptych that attempts to deal with individuals in a Japanese structure who are “foreigners” in one sense or another, and the concept of the “gaijin” in Japanese films was really based on an American friend of mine who was getting bit roles (Norman was terrific in Godzilla) when a generic American was required. The geisha reference comes out of what eventually turned into an intermittent and episodic relationship over fifteen years or so with my old friend. My poem Pretty Gaijin Boys Have Often Been Her Weakness, which was in The Dark Horse last year, was a reasonably accurate description of our meeting.

And Two Tales From the East, which is included in my selection at The HyperTexts, is a fictionalized account (owing something to a Mishima short story, Thermos Bottles) of a meeting that never took place but could have. It developed that K., my geisha friend, accompanied her Japanese banker patron to New York for a few years when he was assigned to his bank’s operations there, and that we were living just a few blocks apart on Manhattan’s East Side, but unaware of it at the time. She subsequently fell in love with a young Japanese executive she met in New York, returned with him to Japan, and married. Both our marriages fell apart a few years after that, and K. and I hooked up again. The portrait of her in Two Tales from the East is not incorrect.

I found this theme enormously appealing. We are, some of us, always expatriates.