In the Floating World

A few months ago, in Osaka, I explored the quiet local museum of ukiyo-e woodblocks in the heart of the entertainment quarter depicted by so many of those same prints. These depicted the so-called “floating world,” the society of courtesans, geisha, boozy rakes, louche actors, petty criminals, and profligate sons of the samurai class as it existed in the twilight years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, before the Tenpo Reforms of the 1840s largely put an end to the production of woodblock prints of the floating world, part of a larger-scale series of attempts to shore up the hermit kingdom and failures to resolve the contradictions of a feudalist society by restricting consumption and declaring war on what was perceived as the degeneracy of the nascent bourgeoisie. 

And upon my return to my equally louche tropical city, I once again found myself among a population not too different – decidedly spendy when it comes to food and drink and entertainment, artistic in ethos if not in production, with a significant number of moneyed people who are awfully bad at keeping their hands on their money and a significant number of less moneyed people who are awfully good at cadging their way through this particular iteration of café society – a population I’ve come to call the Negroni Caste, owing to the standard drink of choice.

Not that this is anything local or particular. The idea of a decadent and glittering society is pretty baked into the public consciousness, in whatever manifestation you can imagine – Weimar Berlin, ‘70s Downtown New York, Lost Generation Paris, Hollywood throughout its history, and all the rest. Where Christopher Isherwood was a camera with its shutter open, where Eve Babitz used to be charming. We’ve heard plenty of enchanting stories of coquettes and absinthe.

But even in those stories, you can find allusions to a different perspective on dissolute lifestyles and Dionysian pursuits. When Fritz Lang made Metropolis, he called his pleasuredome high above the slums “Yoshiwara” – an allusion I have no idea how many 1920s German filmgoers would have gotten, to the licensed pleasure quarter of Tokyo, in the old “low city” zone of Shitamachi along the Sumida River, where so many of those ukiyo-e are set.

 

 

Rather, the key is in the name. Floating. Not decrepit and corrupted, as in the writings of, say, Zola or Baudelaire, but simply floating there.

The term has different cadences in English and Japanese. In English, “floating world” sounds rather pleasant, a dreamy and serene land among the clouds. And yet within the Japanese and more specifically Buddhist context, it implies a fundamentally temporary and fleeting mode of existence, one stop on the great wheel of samsara. This can be something treasured for its transitory beauty, and it can be something illusory, something that ought not to be held onto or attached to, lest the suffering set in, the cherry blossoms falling on the path.

But while this concept may not have been fully metastasized into the Western (broadly speaking) context, how different, really, is the (originally) American cult of youth? In its more wholesome form, this would be the eternal manic grin of Dick Clark on New Year’s Eve, but it seems more frequent that eternal adolescence takes on a more grotesque form, the thing that has spent far too long in the liminal space.

When I was maybe 18 or 20, I spent a lot of time getting drunk and high. This, of course, is correct. It is known that American 18-20 year olds enjoy getting drunk and high. I’d seen the same dumb movies we all had, and recognized that these were to be the dedicated beer-bong years, with the assumption that at some point fairly soon, this would cease to be. The idealized line-graph of the classic male American dream would state that after the relatively brief secularized rumspringa known as “college,” one proceeds to seek out a picket-fence existence with the gal – whether as a loving father-knows-best or a neurasthenic Willy Loman.

It didn’t cease to be. When I look around me, what I see are people in their 30s, 40s, and hell, 50s, still living in the same way, which of course can quickly become a grotesque aspect – the lecherous and beer-bellied C-suite executive pawing at the intern freshly graduated from Michigan State, an elderly Madonna still trying to prance about like a Disney Channel starlet.

Part of me is tempted to say that this is part of a larger-scale liminalization, of an increasingly uncertain and precarious and frenetic world in which, with our planning capacities diminished and pessimism setting in, our behavior becomes increasingly adolescent, whether that’s through chemical recreation, various deeply unhealthy sexual and romantic patterns, or getting lost in the electronic mirror maze. Maybe this is just a stoner thought, but it suggests to me a psychic response among the educated and generally anxious classes. Either that or they frantically protect their status, barricaded into cultural or physical garrisons.

Which again takes us back to the river banks and alleys of Tokyo’s Shitamachi, where, in countless Japanese films and novels, the attitude towards life was also transitory. What you’ve got is here today, gone tomorrow. An attitude reflected in the gruff working-class accent of the neighborhoods lined with crushed wooden pallets and flowerpots, occupied by alley cats and daytime drunks, to be contrasted with the polished tones of the wealthy Yamanote districts further west.

It's a class distinction highlighted in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days – the main character, the stoic toilet cleaner who seeks refuge in Lou Reed cassettes and Patricia Highsmith stories, also seeks refuge in his tiny tatami-mat apartment in a rundown Shitamachi neighborhood. We know little of his origins, but in the brief encounter with his elegant sister, we can assume he’s from wealthier Yamanote stock (can’t speak to his accent, my Japanese is nowhere near good enough), and he commutes every day to urbane and cosmopolitan Shibuya to clean its toilets.

The emotional climax of the film (this really doesn’t count as a spoiler) comes with him, isolated and inconsolable, with a pack of Peace cigarettes and a few cans of Strong Zero, the cheap canned shochu-and-mixer popular among drunk salarymen, along the banks of the Sumida River at night. Where he’s joined by one such salaryman, dying of cancer, sharing his cigs and cheap chuhai.

I had been there – definitely that exact spot, equally inconsolable in my mood. I recognize these places intimately – the bridge, the peculiar big concrete cone, the view of the neon-streaked Tokyo Skytree. On some chilly Novembery evening a long time ago, cold moonlight and the Asahi sign flickering in the murky water. I’m pretty sure I had a Strong Zero in my hand.

The moonlight too seemed to float.