I was outside, pacing in the brutal sunlight while they were switching out the sets, when the producer clapped me on the shoulder.
“Your name’s getting bigger and bigger, kid. Pretty soon we’re gonna have to get you doing one a month.”
“Great. I can’t wait.”
“Whenever the president goes out to have some fun, he always takes along a few photographs of you to hand out to the geisha girls, to see how they react. In his mind, geisha are the most self-centered and honest type of girl. ‘A geisha never lies.’ That’s his motto. Could be worse. But listen to this. When he pulls out the photos of you, the girls fight over who gets to keep them. He said it makes him feel like Mr. Moneybags, throwing coins into a crowd.”
“You don’t say.”
“I guess the geisha got pretty worked up last time.”
The producer was an amicably cynical man, but it wasn’t until recently that he’d begun to speak with me this casually.
It was strange to have a day this clear. The rainy season had come early, with almost daily showers since the start of May. Lucky for us, we were done with most of the location shooting. Inside, the studio was unbelievably humid, the air thick with a promise of mold.
Here’s how things progress after the scene I mentioned earlier, where I head out to confront my enemy in the face of certain death. Keep in mind that some of the later scenes had actually already been filmed, to accommodate the schedules of certain members of the cast: I bid farewell to Neriko and leave the dress shop. Off into the city lights, as if we’ll never meet again. Once she’s alone, Neriko finally realizes how much she loves me. She runs out after me, grabs ahold of me, confesses her love, and tries to get me to abandon my mission. Eventually I give in and put it off for one more day, to spend the night with Neriko in our first “passionate embrace.” Things get pretty hot and heavy.
Trouble is, the next morning, the guy dies anyway, in a car accident. You’d think I’d be relieved to hear he died without my intervention◦— Neriko sure thought so◦— but instead I resent her for stripping me of my life’s purpose. After just one night together, I toss Neriko aside and set my sights on the runaway girls who hang around Ueno Station. I lure them in, set them up as streetwalkers, and make a living as their manager. That’s where Neriko finds me.
On this particular morning, the scene was set in a dingy hotel room in Ueno, where I’ve taken one of the runaways to bed. Everyone was saying that these next fifteen shots could take all afternoon.
Ken, the wizard of the lighting crew, was sure of it.
“It’s our first day on set. No matter how fast he tries to go there’s no way we’re finishing this morning.”
Takahama liked filming out of order. Say, for example, the camera setup is the same for Shot 5, Shot 8, and Shot 10 of a given scene. His method is to shoot all three in quick succession, out of sequence. In a pinch, he has no qualms about burning through shots from completely different sections of the movie. If Scene 60, Shot 5 and Scene 75, Shot 5 use the same setup, he shoots them back-to-back. When the cast for the scenes is identical, the effect can disorient the uninitiated. Without actually going anywhere, you hop into a time machine and blast into the future, then back into the past, then back to the future, forced all the while to keep track of where you are in the script.
Habitually deferring to efficiency and economy can make life start to seem less consequential. Let’s say somebody’s just cut me up and I’m in serious pain. In the next shot, without moving an inch, I’m miraculously healed, but in the shot after that, I’ll have to start wincing again from the freshness of the wound.
If you get too used to living life this way, the steady flow of real time◦— where there is no turning back◦— begins to feel boring and stale. Let’s say I meet a girl. I want to skip ahead to when we’re sleeping together, but I can’t, which makes me antsy, and it feels absurd that I can’t jump ahead to where I’m sick of her, or back to the freedom that I had before we met.
I recall a rare afternoon off: I went shopping on the Ginza, where I witnessed a man being arrested for stealing a pair of cufflinks, under the cover of the crowd gathered there to see me. It felt like we were in a dream: a star and a shoplifter is each a rare encounter, but seeing us together cracked the superstructure of reality. Everyone was watching. The shoplifter was a grungy middle-aged man, and at the time I was still twenty-three, a burning beacon of youth. When they arrested him, the crowd cheered and our eyes met. His face was in agony.
At that moment, it felt like this middle-aged man and I were pulled loose from reality, from the gleaming store displays, from the racks lined with shirts of every color, from the uproar of the crowd. Like a rose being plucked down to its stem, the world tore back before my eyes and showed me its interior. It felt like we were in a scene being shot out of order, at the mercy of some unseen director.
That shoplifter was me, only twenty years older! The moment he reached out to touch those handsome cufflinks with their precious stones, reality began to slip away, and he and I switched places. The next shot in the scene was rolling, only he was playing me.
“Please forgive us for all the excitement,” the store manager begged me, once the shoplifter had been apprehended and taken away. “There’s such a crowd today that I’m afraid you won’t be able to have a proper look around. Why not make yourself comfortable upstairs? It’s a bit of a mess, but at least up there you can take your time and look things over.”
We walked through towers of cardboard boxes and up a steep and narrow staircase to a disorderly office area on the second floor, where I was offered a chair. Since I’d come to find a necktie, the manager personally fetched me a selection of skinny club ties from America, Germany, and Italy. A girl from the shop brought tea and asked me for an autograph. I signed her piece of paper and she slinked off. The manager told me to take my time and disappeared, leaving me alone with my decision.
Up there in the office, the bustle of Ginza kept its distance, and the music and the people dancing at the neighboring cabaret, separated only by a window, felt like they were in another world. I was alone, my head cocked staring at a mirror on the wall◦— if there’s a mirror in the room, I notice it right away and answer its passionate gaze. In that messy little room, it was like the ratty burlap sack of Ginza had been emptied inside out.
Again I felt the strange sensation of filming out of order. I stroked the fabric of a German tie in an elegant silvery gray and ran its length between my fingers… through the mirror, head still cocked, I took a careful look around the room.
But when I heard the manager climbing the stairs, I pulled the necktie from my pocket and carefully returned it to its box. Even if I’d really stolen it, no one would have labeled me a thief. The manager would merely have sent along an invoice and had a blast telling his friends about the funny trick I’d played.
Three rookie actresses◦— Aiko, Baba, and Chie◦— stood around me, dressed up in fancy outfits that gave them away as country girls too far from home. Soon each of them would “taste my venom.” They were trembling, eyes fixed on their scripts, no time to listen to the jokes I made.
When me and the first one, Aiko, were called to the lofted upper level of the set, Aiko almost lost her footing on the shoddy ladder.
“Hey babe, watch your step!” Ken said, touching her hips as if to catch her. “Tokyo is a dangerous place.”