For me, Tokyo Story 7: Nightfall (after Hiroshige) by Emily Allchurch evokes very personal feelings of nostalgia and déjà vu. I’ll explain why in just a bit. But first, some context.
Allchurch’s piece is from her re-imaginings of Hiroshige’s A Hundred Famous Views of Edo, a series of woodblock prints detailing scenes in Edo (Tokyo) a few years before the Meiji Restoration. Though Allchurch’s scenes are ostensibly contemporary, there’s an idealistic old-school cast to her Tokyo. She eliminates the blocked sightlines of Tokyo’s claustrophobic clutter; in one piece, you can see Mt. Fuji from downtown Tokyo. Her city is a quieter, emptier version of this jampacked, crowd-infested metropolis, where conductors at rush hour stand on platforms and smash the last few commuters into a train car as if they were pliable rag dolls.
Tokyo Story 7: Nightfall is a prime example of her quieter, emptier Tokyo. There’s a concrete Shinto gate entrance to a backstreet of yakitoriya (bar and grill) and little shops. An ukiyo-e styled image of a sumo wrestler is painted on one wall; at the right, a slightly more modern ad of a Japanese woman with her hair chignoned in traditional style. There’s a cherry tree before the gate and a well-trimmed shrub. There are two soda machines, one a red Coca-Cola. Certain colors, like the sky, or the streak of water/oil on the street give off an iridescent light. Indeed the lighting in general feels artificial, with the look of a movie set or some display (“Tokyo side street”).
Emily Allchurch’s “Tokyo Story 7: Nightfall (After Hiroshige),” one of a series of 10 transparencies made in 2011, in the MIA’s collection.
Oh, and there are no people. None. In a city where you can never escape people on a commercial street, especially at “nightfall” when people have left work and are going out to carouse with coworkers, the street is empty.
For me this transparency on a light box, fashioned from manipulated photographic images, brings up the year I spent in Tokyo in the mid-1980s. The Japanese term for nostalgia is natsukashii, and my natsukashii is for that life-changing year, a year I detailed in my memoir Turning Japanese. I spent many evenings eating and drinking in yakitoriya on streets like Tokyo Story 7, with friends who were artists, magazine publishers, professors, Noh musicians, activists, writers. The memoir also recounts my reimagining of my Japanese American identity in light of my experiences with the Japanese and Japanese culture. It explores the ways Japan made me reflect more deeply on my family’s history in America, including the World War II internment of my parents and their families.
Even more specifically, Allchurch’s back street evokes for me a fictional dream, a fragment that never made it into my Coffee House Press novel, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire. I’ve used this fragment in a poem in my new collection, The Last Incantations. This poem, “Things that Lose By Being Painted,” explores a fictional affair between two Sansei—third-generation Japanese-Americans. The poem is in the form of a theme and variations. One variation has the protagonist looking for his lover Mayumi and entering an eerily empty side street just off the commercial thoroughfares of Shinjuku:
I’ve turned a corner which looks familiar and should put me in the right direction, but instead of the glaring sex trade of peep shows and sex barkers and neon blaring various off color suggestions, I’m confronted with a somewhat eerie empty street—tiny bars and mahjong parlors and tea rooms, entrances with ivy vines and tinny loudspeakers piping shamisen and koto music, traditional tunes that seem so out of place amidst the neon po-mo sex trade of the area. Descending through the winter dusk I can still catch the stench of trash and alcohol, ramen stands from the other streets, but the street itself looks dead, like a ghost town out of some fifties Japanese movie, the nihon version of the Twilight Zone.
For me, Allchurch’s Tokyo Story 7: Nightfall is this street where my protagonist runs into an old obaachan (granny) fortuneteller. He thinks the fortuneteller is going to tell him what will happen to him and Mayumi. What he doesn’t realize is the fortuneteller is Mayumi.
When he leaves the fortuneteller’s parlor, pushing aside the shoji, he finds the street still empty.
As in Tokyo Story 7: Nightfall.
David Mura is a Minneapolis memoirist, poet, playwright, performance artist, and author, acclaimed for his insightful analysis of cultural identity and its historical connections. His books include the novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire (Coffee House Press) and The Last Incantations, a forthcoming collection of poetry (Northwestern University Press).