found Charley a quilt and went on to tell me that Japanese carpenters are often—unlike their visualist cousins in Shinjuku—very religious. A great many Shinto ceremonies are associated with the construction of a house and these are part of Kenji’s life in Tokyo today He began describing ceremonies with rice and salt and sake and I later found the same information in William Coaldrake’s Way of the Carpenter , which is far more quotable than my so-called reporter’s notebook: “Young bamboo stalks are used to mark the four corners of a sacred enclosure on the building site,” he writes. “These are joined by a sacred rope of new straw (hymenia) bearing sacred, folded white invocatory papers. An altar is erected with a separate table for offerings of rice, salt, fruit and sake…. The most important ceremony celebrating completion of the assembly of the timber frame, is the ridge-raising ceremony (Joutoushiki or muneageshiki) . It includes the ceremonial raising and positioning of the ridgepole, thanksgiving for the safe erection of the frame, and prayers for the long life and well-being of the building and its inhabitants…. In traditional practice, the chief master carpenter himself frequently officiated at the ceremonies, donning the robes of a Shinto priest…. The chief master carpenter was formerly responsible for making the ritual implements and decorations for these ceremonies, such as the ridge plaque and sacred bow and arrow that were attached to the ridgepole during the ridge-raising ceremony, but this practice has largely lapsed.”
Sometime around ten we rewound the tape, still only one-third played, and Kenji, kind as ever, drove us back to Asakusa, where we slipped through the narrow lanes moving bicycles aside as if playing a life-sized game of checkers that would finally lead us to our tatami-matted room where all seven pounds of Gundam Officials, Limited Edition was placed reverently in the tokonoma.
“I feel sorry for Takashi,” said Charley “I think he might be mad at me.”
“Why? For visiting Kenji instead of his grandmother?”
“No, because I’m going to see Mr. Miyazaki.Maybe he thinks I am not loyal to Mr. Tomino.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sure that’s not true. Did you clean your teeth?”
“Yes,” he lied, and immediately fell into a sleep from which he would not be woken.
10.
We would have been wiser to have breakfasted on fish and miso. There was a long, long day ahead, an interview with the elusive Mr. Kitakubo of Blood: The Last Vampire and then a tour of the Ghibli Museum and a visit to Miyazaki’s studio. Our schedule hadprotein written all over it, but we were weary of live fish and dead fish and battered fish and fish with skewers stuck up their little bottoms. So we left the ryokan, and headed in search of Mister Donut, stepping wide of the early-morning alcoholics feeding their hundred-yen coins into the sake machine on the corner, past the kids with their black hair stripped back to a dangerous-looking anime brown, then crossing over the bridge at the Asakusa View Hotel to the other side of Kokusai Street, where weaving bicyclists sliced between us, quiet and polite as death itself. At last, thank God, we finally located Mister Donut, where we discovered, to our huge surprise, none other than he who had so subtly steered Charley to Starbucks.
There stood Takashi, no longer a Mobile Suit pilot, but a teenage employee, dressed neatly in a multicoloured uniform with Mister Donut™ embroidered on its pocket. In this role he would not acknowledge us, unless you interpreted the rising glow in his cheeks as a form of recognition. Takashi was in character, completely. He was Mister Donut himself. He greeted us as customers, as strangers to be respected and served, issuing that singsong welcome that Paul told me had its origins in the Yoshiwara Pleasure Gardens, whose courtesans developed a kind of lingua franca understood by all the powerfulvisitors from distant
Sometime around ten we rewound the tape, still only one-third played, and Kenji, kind as ever, drove us back to Asakusa, where we slipped through the narrow lanes moving bicycles aside as if playing a life-sized game of checkers that would finally lead us to our tatami-matted room where all seven pounds of Gundam Officials, Limited Edition was placed reverently in the tokonoma.
“I feel sorry for Takashi,” said Charley “I think he might be mad at me.”
“Why? For visiting Kenji instead of his grandmother?”
“No, because I’m going to see Mr. Miyazaki.Maybe he thinks I am not loyal to Mr. Tomino.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sure that’s not true. Did you clean your teeth?”
“Yes,” he lied, and immediately fell into a sleep from which he would not be woken.
10.
We would have been wiser to have breakfasted on fish and miso. There was a long, long day ahead, an interview with the elusive Mr. Kitakubo of Blood: The Last Vampire and then a tour of the Ghibli Museum and a visit to Miyazaki’s studio. Our schedule hadprotein written all over it, but we were weary of live fish and dead fish and battered fish and fish with skewers stuck up their little bottoms. So we left the ryokan, and headed in search of Mister Donut, stepping wide of the early-morning alcoholics feeding their hundred-yen coins into the sake machine on the corner, past the kids with their black hair stripped back to a dangerous-looking anime brown, then crossing over the bridge at the Asakusa View Hotel to the other side of Kokusai Street, where weaving bicyclists sliced between us, quiet and polite as death itself. At last, thank God, we finally located Mister Donut, where we discovered, to our huge surprise, none other than he who had so subtly steered Charley to Starbucks.
There stood Takashi, no longer a Mobile Suit pilot, but a teenage employee, dressed neatly in a multicoloured uniform with Mister Donut™ embroidered on its pocket. In this role he would not acknowledge us, unless you interpreted the rising glow in his cheeks as a form of recognition. Takashi was in character, completely. He was Mister Donut himself. He greeted us as customers, as strangers to be respected and served, issuing that singsong welcome that Paul told me had its origins in the Yoshiwara Pleasure Gardens, whose courtesans developed a kind of lingua franca understood by all the powerfulvisitors from distant
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