186 - MERCER STREET
It seemed, however, that the city’s judgments were not as scathing as my
own. Salespeople greeted and conversed with me in Japanese, even though it
was obvious that I was a crudely conversant outsider. They even compliment-
ed my flair for the language. Once, I caught a gaggle of androgynous
teenagers taking pictures of my red trolley bag, their expressions exuding
envy. Communion saturated the night air, and for a moment, I, too, was of the
people.
In my voracious desire to assimilate, I used to delve into tourist guides
and cultural commentaries, absorbing as many details as I could. When I
joined the millions of commuters bustling through the Shibuya subway sta-
tion, I kept an eye out for the one visionary piece of art hanging from its
walls, the very same one my guidebooks told me the people of Tokyo, in their
everydayness, tended to ignore.
Called 明日の神話,or The Myth of Tomorrow, the mural is thirty meters
wide and five and a half meters tall, and depicts the 1945 atomic bombing of
Hiroshima. A stylized human skeleton dominates the center of the painting,
bursting into brilliant squiggly flames as small stick figures suffer a similar
fate against a maelstrom of painted destruction. Frozen at the climax of a
nation’s anguish, the corpse and his companions bear down hopelessly on the
shopaholic citizens of the future.
What would Okamoto Taro, the mural’s artist, have made of the irony?
Drafted during World War II to fight in China, Okamoto came home to find
his works destroyed in an air raid. Embittered, he would later proclaim, “Art
is explosion,” but his other works have little to do with overt detonation
(Interview). Most of his paintings are multicolored depictions of misshapen
faces and objects, and his sculptures, including a 70-meter tall phallus-tower
of white, red, and gold, are garish mutations of familiar forms. Unlike con-
ventional weapons of mass destruction, Okamoto’s art does not reduce every-
thing to dust; instead, like the Hiroshima bomb, it disfigures, transforming
people, moments, and ideas into disconcerting caricatures. His art is not so
much explosion as collision—the dalliance between reality and the imagina-
tion, and their bastard children birthed on canvas and stone.
And on paper, and in my head. My encounter with The Myth of Tomorrow
and my crystalline moment at the ramen-ya in Ikebukuro constitute my own
points of impact. Both nights, I lapped everything up, gulping globules of
time until I was glutted with experience. Moments of beauty collide with my
senses, and I spurt my recollections onto the page. In Okamoto’s mind,