Leaving the Manazuru Station

Was I the only one who got off the stop at Manazuru?

I was priced out of the posh hotels in Hakone. So I looked on Google Maps. Just down the coast, I recognized the name nearby. Manazuru.

Someone close to me had stayed here. But now that I think about it, I didn’t ask her whether she liked it or not.

And in her novel of the same name, Hiromi Kawakami had a way of describing Manazuru as a slightly decrepit seaside town, with the same starry-eyed tone that she used in novels like The Nakano Thrift Shop and Strange Weather in Tokyo. Yet in those, it felt a bit too fluffy. Manazuru, though. It hit me across the jaw.

I do adore slightly decrepit seaside towns. I imagined, as I booked my hotel, long days of sightseeing finishing with Asahi and grilled fish by the pier, shops getting ready for high season, goofy statues of Poseidon.

And now that I think back on it, it seems a bit embarrassing. Letting a book choose your fate has the potential to be a shitty trope. Something from a saccharine NYT-bestseller magical realist book, something sufficiently “young adult” to prevent any meaningful challenges seep in.

But I am a fatalist. Even if I don’t believe in fate. So I booked a hotel.

It had been a long day of travel. First, Kanazawa to Ueno Station, where the homeless day laborers who had, decades earlier, built Tokyo, dozed against the art deco columns, where the crowds of tourists crammed onto the subway after taking their cherry-blossom selfies in the park, and where I switched trains to the pokey local on the old Tokaido Main Line, past the endless drip of Tokyo suburbs, through faceless Shinagawa, Kawasaki, Yokohama, before crossing into open countryside around Odawara, and eventually arriving at this little town on a little peninsula, hard pressed between the mountains and the sea.

“In Tokyo, we have a life. We can hide in our everyday life. There is nothing in Manazuru.”

What the hell was I doing here?

I had no other choice. I dragged my suitcase through the street. The streets, empty. The port, empty. The hotels, boarded up. The plum trees were in full bloom and the rain fell on them, scattering the petals to the ground.

My hotel was left over from Japan’s economic boom years in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The online reviews all mention how good the food is. They were not serving food.

The only way to shower is at the communal onsen. One would say this was a bit awkward, but it turns out that I am the only guest. The doors of each room are left open, lights off, futons neatly folded, carpets perfectly vacuumed, waiting for no one in particular, the hum of the ice machine the only sound.

The rain falls heavier. I find a sushi place down by the empty harbor, which supposedly closes at 9. I’m here at 7, and the old man behind the counter barely acknowledges my existence. He is already closing up shop.

“Le meilleur ‘sushi’ de nos vacances!” says an enthusiastic note accompanied by a yellowed photo of a Frenchman with a much younger version of this chef. From an era when “sushi” had to be put in scare quotes.

It wasn’t bad sushi.

I pour myself a little glass of Old Overholt and stand out on the balcony of my hotel, and I can hear the waves crashing 100 meters or so below.

The next morning the rain dissipates enough for me to walk down to the cape at the tip of the peninsula, across the putting green and through the woods. A torii gate is perched high on an impossible spire over the sea. It was built by the Tokugawas to protect Japan from the unknown menaces of the exterior world.

And then I return from whence I came. I cross the putting green again. Ancient Japanese men in flat caps and cable sweaters play out like projected holograms, and I wonder if someone is going to ask me if they saw me last year at Marienbad.

I spend the next few days making my way around this odd little stretch of coast west of the Tokyo metropolis, where fairytale railways and funiculars make their way up steep slopes to the old leisure towns of the Tokyo middle classes – to Hakone, like a version of Japan as seen in a Viewmaster of an old World’s Fair, cozy, manicured, with its old shrines in the cedars, and its futuristic sculpture garden with children of many nations hiding behind Henry Moore reclining figures, to the old restaurant in Odawara with its dusty light fixtures and grandmotherly porcelain-cabinet plating of simmered snails and delicate fishcakes, to the hideous, raggedy tourbus parking lot town of Kawaguchiko at the foot of Mount Fuji that took me five long train rides to get home from due to overcrowding.

Although I just learned that that very raggedy tourbus parking lot town is blocking certain views of Fuji due to the omnipresence of slackjawed yokel tourists with no sense of propriety. Much in the same way that, a few weeks previous, I was one of the last foreign tourists to walk the back streets of the Gion in Kyoto before our banning. And nothing will make you feel more reprehensible in your status as an outsider than seeing a poor geisha getting mobbed by dickheads with cameras like she’s a Kardashian when she’s just trying to go to her job that evening.

But now I was in Manazuru, and I was alone. And the contempt could only be directed inwards.

I spent the next few nights taking the train back to the deserted Manazuru Station, past the gravel parking lot with the stroad-side Nepalese restaurant and the smell of reheated butter chicken, up the mountain road to my softly lit and utterly empty hotel. I would slip into the burble of hot spring water coming into the onsen.

“On a date one month before his disappearance, in a ballpoint pen’s thin strokes, he had written ‘Manazuru.’ I fold the sheet of paper into a square and stick it back between the diary’s pages. Ma. Na. Zu. Ru. I whisper the syllables. I hadn’t noticed. Or had I forgotten?”

The central question of Kawakami’s novel is what happened to the protagonist’s husband, who had disappeared without leaving a trace some years earlier.

It was only a week or so before I arrived in Manazuru, that, by coincidence, I was reading about the johatsu, the population of the disappeared in Japan. Numbering in the tens of thousands, these are those who, like the missing husband of the novel, simply disappear. Sometimes they flee debt. Sometimes they flee shame. Either way, it is, like hikikomori, an almost uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Supposedly they wind up in large part in the fly-by-night quarters of Sanya in Tokyo and Kamagasaki in Osaka, refuges of quasi-homeless, quasi-employed Japanese men living in rundown boarding houses, something akin to the Bowery or Bunker Hill in past iterations of America.

There, they can live unbothered. They can pay people to disappear them: I looked up one of their corporate websites, as sunny as a suburban real estate office (I was originally going to link to their website, but that seems unreasonably edgelord even for myself, search for yourselves, it’s not hard you filthy ghouls).

Just as incidentally, I found myself, in the sunny, piney mountains above Manazuru, compelled to listen to a song by Connie Converse. I, too, was in between two tall mountains.

And I had somehow neglected the fact that having been wracked apart by her personal failures and disillusioned by an America that stubbornly remained just as ugly and racist and warmongering as ever, she, too, became johatsu.

“Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it. So let me go, please; and please accept my thanks for those happy times that each of you has given me over the years; and please know that I would have preferred to give you more than I ever did or could – I am in everyone’s debt.” – Her last letter, left behind in her home in Michigan

It occurred to me, then. I was in a ghost town of the elderly, dying on the seashore below Tokyo, plums in blossom, the winter’s citrus rotting on the tree. A coastal town they forgot to bomb.

And before I left, on the way out, I stopped on the hillside above, where Hiroshi Sugimoto collected and arranged his artifacts – ancient Japanese architectural features, allusions to local history and primitive astronomy, fossil beds, representative flora, representations of the mathematical forces that govern our universe, a remnant of a Shinto shrine scarred by the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

I have been there many times in my dreams. Chances are you have too.

Only as I was typing this did I learn that this approximate site – not mentioned at the installation itself – was the approximate location of a landslide that killed hundreds in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1922, among other things crushing a passenger train at the little station where I had alighted.

Now all that is left are mandarin orange trees. The oranges are excellent.

“What was it there, in Manazuru? Momo asked. I don’t know. I remember it, and yet I can’t remember.”

To Tokyo – to the rundown room near Shinjuku Station, in dense streets where Korean signs dominated and an ajumma who spoke neither English nor Japanese slept behind a partition down the hall. There is a sad Thai streetwalker who stands in the next door down, behind the vending machine, barely murmuring her come-ons to passing salarymen.

Before switching to a discount “art hotel” in Shibuya with faux-graffiti art, subway tile, lo-fi hip-hop, complementary Keurig cups with only the shitty flavors left, and free IPA for an hour.

A place where one could so easily disappear. And one where you’re reminded of the futility of doing so.

When you travel, you are, to a certain degree, not you. In the tribal imagination, you could get lost forever if you didn’t complete the ritual and come back home.

So I flew home. And in the vicious summer heat, waking up after a few hours’ sleep, putting on my H&M buttondown to go into the office, running a brush with my hair, I have to stare at myself in the mirror and confront who I am.

The Flight of the Black Swan

Chances are that when you hear the word “tropical breeze,” you think of the rustle of palm fronds, the billow of a floral-printed skirt, white sand, a sun-dappled sea, distant laughter.

You're not likely to think of a Saturday night on Sukhumvit Road, an abnormally strong wind thick with tropical humidity, doing nothing to ameliorate the heat, nothing to refresh. It's a couple of hours before all malls, restaurants, and bars are ordered to close, and quite a few places are still open, trying to get a last bit of trade before the tough times begin.

The staff at the malls are dejected, trying to shutter their shops. The escalator stirs to life as I place my foot at the base.

In August, the katabatic wind known as the Foehn blasts out of the Alps, turning people – according to legend, at least – to migraines, wifebeating, suicide, murder, a phenomenon known as the Foehnkrankenheit. It is a meteorological brother to the Santa Ana winds of Southern California, shown to lead to the dispersion of the spores of the fungus Coccidoides, which grows in the lungs, primarily asymptomatically, but causing pneumonia in those with weakened immune systems.

The trains have emptied, traffic is reduced, the Chinese tourists are gone, and if it wasn't so damn ominous, you'd say, on this Saturday night, that Bangkok had never been more livable.

A go-go bar plays pounding music, neon lights flashing for no one, a woman in a gold lame and pancaked skin whitener pouting desperately for me to come in.

I step into an izakaya around the corner where the staff are mostly milling around, a handful of customers remaining. Sitting next to me, a chubby Japanese man shares a mackerel and a beer with a transsexual hooker, the two attempting to banter in equally broken English, each dropping a few lines of the other's native tongue in. She gets a bit frustrated as the price negotiations begin. She manages to get him to agree to 7,000 baht, and then gives him her bank account number for him to transfer money to.

Camgirls must be making a fortune right now.

The nice woman in my bed turns over under the duvet and puts a Taylor Swift song on her phone, and threatens to cough on me if I change it. “It was fun,” she says, and gives me a perfunctory kiss on the way out the door. I still drink the last of the bourbon she wanted in her morning coffee that she'd left in the mug on the patio table.

I was going to go to China to see my sister, tuck into Sichuan hotpots, climb holy mountains. That obviously got canceled. I was going to go to Sri Lanka to explore tea plantations and colonial alleyways. That got canceled too.

“War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this Spring, I get so bored I could scream!” – Scarlet O'Hara

I hunker down. I'm supplied with gin, frozen duck breasts, dried lentils, and jasmine tea. My Internet connection is good, and there's relatively little work to do from home – something that will change in a few months as every company in the world will be passing liabilities around like a hot potato. In the hot season my pool is cool in the depths and warm at the surface.

At night, every light in the Banyan Tree Hotel is off. It stands there like the black monolith from 2001 at the end of the bed.

I shut my laptop and collapse into a restless sleep, only to wake up the next day, my sheets twisted, my heart pounding, to the chirps of the orioles.

In the Islands

This is how it went.

I arrived in Manila early in the morning, sleepless, with an upbeat taxi driver, vaguely Latin-sounding radio in Tagalog announcing NBA games (“Kyrie Irving, wowwww!!!”), before segue'ing into what I have long-known in Bangkok as “Filipino karaoke music,” those cheesy '80s power ballads that have been completely forgotten in the rest of the world, but remain close to the hearts of the 100 million-odd inhabitants of this benighted archipelago. The sun is rising, and Starship's 1987 number 1, “Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now” is playing. The kick drums come in, and Grace Slick starts to sing.

“Let 'em say we're crazy, I don't care about that

Put your hand in my hand, baby don't ever look back”

We come down off the freeway into a tangle of shacks and machine shops and freeway exits and railway sidings, and as we pull into our first stoplight, a gang of street urchins surround the taxi on all sides.

“Let the world around us fall apart”

“Lock the door! Lock the door!” the cab driver screams. I'm slamming the manual locks down, reaching over my luggage.

“Baby we can make it if we're heart to heart!”

The American-style street signs with Spanish names are smeared with smog, nine-story high slum towers spiral above us, tiny shops on their ground floors, young men of questionable mental capacity squatting on the curb, staring into the distance with vacant expressions.

“And we can build this dream together, standing strong forever, nothing's gonna stop us now!”

That is what set the tone for Manila. Mabuhay, motherfucker.

It is a city of greasy noodles and traffic-choked streets, Diego Rivera-type murals and hand-painted signs alternating with gorgeous mid-century graphics on the billboards, screaming transsexual hookers on Adriatico Street, cheery groups of youths harmonizing Taylor Swift songs and playing guitars at early morning coffee stands, jeepneys painted in peacock tones announcing “CHRIST IS KING!,” solitary teen mothers on park benches, the only other Westerners being beer-gutted American expats sweating through their tucked-in polo shirts, a cathedral full of schoolboys screaming English-language hymns with the lyrics on video screens, and ruin after ruin after ruin, dating from the Golden Age of Spanish exploration to just last week.

But the Philippines in general are an assault on the senses, and I say this who has spent years in Southeast Asia. It is a riot of color, a sublimely beautiful landscape subjected to every form of destruction known to man – earthquakes and volcanoes, typhoons and tsunamis, mudslides, insurrections both Maoist and Islamist, countered by even more horrifying state violence, most recently in Rodridgo Duterte's death squads sent for small-time drug offenders, political clan wars, petty street crime, far less petty mass-scale exploitation by the insulated, grotesque ruling classes (safely ensonced in the freakishly clean, heavily policed, Singapore-aping streets of Makati and Bonifacio) with the quiet backing of countless Chinese- and American-based multinationals, a vicious Spanish colonial regime, the suppression of Emilio Aguinaldo's revolt by the American “commonwealth,” the corrupt dictat of Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-collecting wife, the naval assault on Corregidor, the largest naval battle history in the Leyte Gulf, the soldiers left by the wayside on the Bataan Peninsula, and in the case of Manila, wholesale destruction, a city savaged, bombed, and gang-raped into oblivion by both the retreating Japanese army and the American bombers at the end of World War II, leaving a city of smoldering craters and cordite-scarred marble Virgins Mary wondering what became of their shrines.

The Catholics came in the Spanish colonial quest for gold and soul, and they imprinted the ideals of Spain at the height of the Inquisition on the populace, bringing with them the icons of Medieval Catholicism, the eerie-eyed doll that would become the Santo Niño of Cebu, and the dark-faced Christ figure that would become the Nazareno Negro of Manila, and the combination of religious zeal and bodily mortification that continues to play out in the processions of penitentes flogging themselves, in the men who crucify themselves each year during Holy Week on the high plains of Pampanga, blood and sweat hitting the volcanic-ash soil in the height of the hot season.

Then came the Americans, winning the islands in William Randolph Hearst's manufactured war, Rooseveltian men with bushy mustaches in broad-brimmed cavalrymen's hats suddenly filling the islands, occupying the country for a few decades with all the brashness of a newly ascendant empire, leaving a city plan for Manila modeled on Chicago – subbing Manila Bay for Lake Michigan, and Roxas Boulevard for Lake Shore Drive, along with streets named Taft and McKinley, Forbes and Lawton, Babbittian institutions like the Rotary Club and the Jaycees, diners and art deco hotels and billboards taken straight from Humphrey Bogart film noir, archaic English-language first names left as if preserved in amber from the Coolidge administration, men named Archie and Gilbert, women named Edith and Daisy, along with odd constructions that sound like English names but which aren't, “Marzee” and the like, along with a taste for Hormel corned beef and Del Monte canned pineapple, the Jackie Gleason diet still going strong.

And so the whole country becomes a whirlwind tour of the 20th Century in all of its disastrous unfoldings.

Yet as soon as you get out of Manila, the country reveals itself to be a marvel. I ran into relatively few international tourists. Most of those that come stick to the beach towns of the South, Coron and El Nido, Puerto Princesa and Boracay. I was alone as I walked along the rim of the volcanic caldera in Tagaytay, overlooking the island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island. I was alone as I walked through the streets of Taal lined with ancient, earthquake-proof houses with oyster-shell windows and whitewashed arcades, the belfries of its Spanish basilica crumbling, ancient women in dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves fanning themselves in the doorways. I ran into few other tourists in the rice terraces of the Cordillera that tumble down the sides of the deliriously high mountains like giants' stairwells, or in Sagada, where coffins are perched on piney cliffs, or in cozy Baguio, another town planned by the Americans and heavily bombed during the war, where I sat in the appropriately named “Cafe by the Ruins,” where elderly Filipino bohemians drank coffee brewed with cardamom and listened to Joan Baez, where I ate freshly made sweet potato rolls and local buffalo cheese and chocolate rice porridge to stave off the evening chill.

In 1884, a graduate of the local merchant marine academy from the Ilocos region in the Northern Philippines named Juan Luna de San Pedro y Novacio Ancheta went to Madrid to show his painting Spoliarium. He followed the old Spanish style of bloody and aquiline saints, of chiaroscuro and martyrdom, as pioneered by El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya, and painted the dead gladiators of the Roman Colosseum being stripped of their armor and dragged through the sand.

It hangs on the first floor of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rizal Park, near where the park's namesake was executed for his resistance against the sclerotic Spanish regime, where it stands as a metaphor for a long-suffering people struggling for freedom.

And yet when I looked at it on that sweltering day it still seemed hopelessly modern. The incomparably sweet, wonderful people with whom I drank shots of gin and San Miguel beers, the betel-chewing guitarists who bade me to sing Merle Haggard songs with them, the balut vendors who chuckled as I tried to suck down a half-formed duck fetus in the shell on the streets of Ermita, I saw them all in the painting.

I don't put much stock in the Bible, but it comes to mind when I'm in a Catholic country, and I'm always struck by Ecclesiastes 1:9.

“The thing that has been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.”

And it says something that in 2019, I see the greatest of truths in a 140 year old painting of a dead gladiator and the weeping Christians in the catacombs beneath Rome.

Main Street USA

When I was in the fourth grade, I went to Disneyworld for the first and only time. For the most part it was a pretty standard experience. Like all kids, I was both totally pumped and completely shit-scared on Splash Mountain, I was just as shit-scared on the It's a Small World ride for completely different reasons, and I somehow realized, even then, that the Epcot Center reflected a kind of techno-optimism that already seemed passe, even to a child in 1996.

But my first view of Disneyworld was Main Street USA. This isn't exactly a hallmark attraction, but it's what you see when you first come through the gate, and its equivalent, which I'd experienced much younger, is also what you see when you first come through the gate at Adventureland in Altoona, Iowa, where I had my formative funnel cake and log-ride experiences.

And maybe that's because the welcoming experience is designed to be a comforting, familiar Americana, reproduced at 3/5 scale. It is an imagined America of the sort that Ronald Reagan invoked in his speeches about the horse-and-buggy days in Dixon, Illinois. We want to believe that at some point in America, there was this transcendent and indivisible notion of community. Nowadays, we think of the 1950s. But when the first Disney park opened, in the actual 1950s, the time of nostalgia was the 1910s, a time when Main Streets were indeed more vital, when small towns were still served by the railroad. And even in the 1910s, in the era of Fords and suffragettes, nostalgists invoked some kind of vaguely Jeffersonian or Jacksonian ideal.

It's hard to escape this particular cultural delusion. Both left and right political currents continue to appeal to “Main Street,” despite the fact that this is by and large a hologram.

Sure, there was a Main Street in my hometown – the “Main Street Cultural District” as it was eventually re-branded. What was “cultural” about it I never quite figured out. What it actually is and was is a strip, a few blocks long, of largely characterless early 20^th Century buildings, occupied by an American Legion hall, full of shops selling things like quilting supplies and diabetic footwear, and a clutch of bars at one end under the shadow of a coal-burning power plant -- an area I remember from my childhood as a vaguely sinister but somehow thrilling strip smelling of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer, filled with the sound of clacking billiard balls and the roar of trucks from the nearby lumberyard.

Maybe the people in the 1950s or 1910s thought differently. But even in the 1910s... that was when Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street, the landmark work about the hypocrisy and loneliness of life in a small Minnesota town, considered a classic, but increasingly little-read as that world becomes a memory of a memory.

Yet fewer books have had a greater impact on me. His store-by-store description of the Main Street of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota on a hot summer day, as experienced by the young doctor's wife, Carol Kennicott, of the rotten bananas in the shop-windows, the feckless locals at the saloon door, the rusticated masonry designed to provide a semblance of architectural manners. More than anything else, this seemed to be something that related to what I knew.

At that age, 15 or 16, I devoured books that seemed to get to that idea, reading nearly forgotten writers like Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe and Booth Tarkington – writers whose books I found on dusty library shelves and under cats at used bookstores. And I didn't just love them because they spoke to my experience, I loved them because they seemed to see through the veil in a way that contemporary writers didn't (and still by and large don't, but I'll leave that for another day).

We look to the Main Street iconography nowadays because of the spiritual poverty and hopelessness of the present, in the same way that people of Lewis' and Anderson's day looked to Main Street because it seemed to represent a purer America than the industrial cities. And more often than it ought to, it forms the backbone of a grotesque and reactionary politics.

So I decided to go back to where it all began – not in person, but through the all-seeing eye of Google Street View. And not to Disneyworld's Main Street USA, which is probably the same simulacrum it has always been and always will be, but to the basis for Main Street USA, Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri.

I knew what to expect. Few areas of America have been as thoroughly depopulated over the past 100 years as Northern Missouri, an area of soil too poor to compete with the rich black loam of Northern Iowa and Minnesota, and rangeland too constricted to compete with the plains of Kansas and Texas. Lacking in substantive industry, mineral resources other than a sulfurous coal only suited to steam engines, or towns of any size to serve as hubs, largely isolated from major transit routes, and without the mountains and lakes of the southern part of the state that attract droves of tourists, Northern Missouri, along with adjacent areas of Southern Iowa and Western Illinois, has become a dead zone.

What one sees in Marceline, Missouri, is a town, like many others, destroyed, with a vacated town square, American flags fluttering outside abandoned shops.

 

Meanwhile, in Anaheim and Orlando, and at the versions Disney has exported to its properties in the greener pastures of the Far East, it is still a place of parades and baton-twirlers, barbershop quartets and soda fountains. Somewhere in the distance, "In My Merry Oldsmobile" or "Daisy Bell" plays.

Most of the clientele has never seen a quartet sing in a barbershop, never been to a soda fountain, and the songs that are playing were hits before even their grandparents were born. But the nostalgia is not their nostalgia, it's the national nostalgia. And like most nostalgias, it acts as a cover for the fact that we have given up hope.

A Volcanic Island

I arrived in Jeju, halfway between Japan and the Korean peninsula in the midst of a heat wave. I'd known that this wasn't an ideal time to travel in this part of the world, especially given my love of autumns in East Asia, but I'd feared typhoons more than anything else. Which was why I didn't go to Taiwan or Okinawa or Luzon, all other options I'd considered, but here.

It's a peculiar little island, well-known in this part of the world owing to its frequency as a setting in KBS soap operas, but completely obscure outside of it. I knew little other than that it looked pretty, with a complex volcanic landscape, that flights were cheap, and that I had a few days to spare. So with little preparation, I packed up my tweed suitcase, downed three Tigers, an Asahi, and a Gordon's and tonic, and boarded a redeye.

The heat of more continental climates is somehow more oppressive than the tropics, where the sultry humidity is balanced by afternoon showers. It's a heat and a sunlight I'd largely forgotten, that I associate with the Middle American landscape I grew up in. I'd forgotten the sort of heat that demands an ice cream after a long walk more than a beer, the sort of heat that leaves sweat streaming down my face instead of lightly gathering at my temples.

And in spite of it, I did what I always do when I travel by myself, and, as so often occurs, I'm not really sure what the fuck I'm doing where I am -- I wandered.

Of course, I did the expected tourist things -- I saw the mountains, the crater lakes, the lava tubes, the “sea” of fir trees, the waterfall where the sage Xu Fu reflected on his journeys, having been sent by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang to look for the elixir of life, and where he finally said “fuck this,” sparked a fat blunt, and booked it back to the motherland.

And I ate the expected regional dishes, the abalones and the sea urchin noodles. I drank makgeolli, the viscous rice wine of the region, flavored with peanuts and with local Hallabong oranges. I had the famous barbecued black pork, which tasted like any other decent quality pork. And most memorably, I went to the central fish market for a raw fish feast, where the ajumma in charge insisted on rubbing her mitts all over my sashimi, wrapping it into shiso leaves and spreading it with ssamjang to show me how to eat it properly.

But to talk about all these things is to miss the heart of the place. They are the window dressing, the superficial level. What interested me far more were the micro-textures of the island.

Each evening, I walked down the road past the city hall, past rows of concrete buildings with makeup shops blasting Seoul's latest pop anthems, chicken-and-beer joints, shuttered storefront evangelical churches, posters for sex shows, all the trappings of a provincial Korean town. Night after night, I watched the waves crash over the breakers in the harbor, young couples on dates, groups of friends drinking on tarps, black cars gathered outside the casinos with signboards showing grotesquely made up lady croupiers, tinny electronic music pulsating from the rooftop discos on the hotels with their bisexually pink and ice-blue floodlights, all punctuated with the screams from the kids on the boardwalk rides, the flashing neon of the seafood palaces reflecting across the harbor.

And then I walked back up the hill, to a sort-of-dive bar that had a selection of local craft beer -- the kind of “American”-themed joint that has Texas truck license plates on the wall, chips with “guakkamol” on the menu, and the world's last surviving Big Mouth Billy Bass, something like a diner in Arkansas filtered through a Chili's filtered through the Republic of Korea – to write down my impressions, and to read my book for the journey, Gary Indiana's Three Month Fever, an account of Andrew Cunanan's youth defined by a spiderweb of infinite lies, culminating in a murder spree across the country ending in Miami Beach, where he hid out at a hotel that:

“... was faced partly in black glass, and had a ground floor of vacant storefronts. As with many buildings in Miami Beach, it was impossible to tell whether the Clarion Suites was being finished or undergoing an extremely languid demolition.”

A blank spot on a map for Westerners, a dramatic landscape immortalized in film and television for millions of Asians, and for Koreans, their personal Blackpool or Jersey Shore, connected to Seoul by the world's single busiest air route.

I thought it made sense, more or less.

I got to the airport, having had a nice trip, ordered a drink, and turned on the in-flight entertainment.

What I didn't know was that the hills I traipsed around held a secret. In 1948, under the auspices of the Syngman Rhee government, and concomitantly that of my own country, more than 10 percent of the island's residents were slaughtered, with whole villages on the slopes of Hallasan burnt to the ground, their bodies thrown in those lovely craters. A further several thousand fled to Japan, where many of them were fully radicalized, a number of their modern descendants still forming a miniature resistance group adhering to the Juche ideal, widely mocked by the rest of the world, and frequently harassed by Japan's version of 4chan lowlifes. And those who survived the purge and remained in Korea are still awaiting compensation, even as the Seoul authorities gleefully brand Jeju “the island of world peace.”

We form our ideas about what something is, and history always manages to thrust the knife into your gut.

Sunset, Saphan Khwai

Get off the metro at Saphan Khwai at sunset. Walk southwards, towards Pradiphat Road. Lunch shops are selling off the remainder of their curries for the day, signs for windowless “cinemas” down side alleys. New condos loom over the rows of empty shophouses quietly crumble in the humidity, down sois that until recently, terminated at the dilapidated remains of the once glorious New York Theater, a block of high modernism reduced to one of the neighborhood porn theaters before its eventual demolition. And off to the left, the ever-glowing pink neon sleaze of the Sutthisan Road go-go bars.

 

I'd walked this route countless times to visit my friends who live in this area. But it was only recently that I began to pay notice to the grim, lumbering building on the Northwest corner of the Saphan Khwai intersection.

From ground level, it mostly seems to be a row of shops like any other-- food places, wholesalers of cloth, jewelers, all of the normal elements of most Bangkok neighborhoods-- but look a bit closer.

Up above, there are a few more floors than one would expect, and doors to nowhere jut out from masonry walls. A security guard waves cars in and out of an underground parking garage. Looking through to the back of the shops, a large, empty space can be seen, the walls painted institutional green, with a large empty tile floor in the middle. And above a food center, one sees the railings of overhanging floors, the interior space hidden behind hung white sheets.

A little research, and I finally found a photo of this, the Sisupharat Arcade Building, as it was under construction in 1979, right at the start of the Thai economic miracle.

And as it stands today, after its last iteration as the Saphan Khwai Branch of the Merry Kings Department Store, another victim of the 1997 Financial Crisis.

The hivemind of the Internet has become immensely fond of dead malls, those malls that either are abandoned, or, more likely, seriously under-occupied, remnants of a consumer base that has since moved on. It's as if, in the continuing wake of the big collapse in 2007, there's something cathartic about seeing a material manifestation of the total obviation of the suburban, American dream.

Bangkok has contributed to it in the form of the New World Mall, the structure near Khaosan Road that became famous for having partially filled with water, and becoming home to schools of carp.

Thailand's 1997, America's 2007. At the bottom of the business cycle, inefficiencies will inevitably pool. Destruction, sans renewal, emerges as an inevitable characteristic of capitalism. And this is why there is something so compelling about those sites that remind us of this sobering fact. We live among constant billboard, fantasy consumer products projected at us from every angle. Which is why, on warm nights in out-of-the-way neighborhoods, it might not be a bad idea to look at the broken concrete that lurks behind.