And I went to New York for several days one cold winter and stayed in the hotel room for most of my time there, and at that time, too, I wasn’t sure why I had come to New York and what I wanted there. Feeling a certain kind of comfort in a hotel room that was cleaned every day, removing of all traces of the person who had stayed there the night before, and in which a neutral world of objects was maintained, regardless of the distinctive or indistinctive nature of the room, I took note of what difference that was there, if any, between the perplexity you feel in everyday life and the perplexity you feel in a somewhat unfamiliar place, and dared not go outside, trying to decide if I should plunge uncomfortably or willingly into the somewhat new feeling of perplexity. And I was led to contemplate a thought that wasn’t new at all, that the perplexity was a result of the boredom that arises from a vague state in which you don’t know what to do, and the awkwardness that arises from a state so comfortable that it makes you shudder.
Looking at the curtains flapping in the open window, I thought that I wouldn’t go outside unless a gigantic sailboat, with a full load and the sails taut with wind, entered through the window. So that was the first time I came up with a specific and metaphorical reason for, and tried to justify, staying somewhere doing nothing, feeling so alone, and at the same time, befogged, and much later, on that early morning when a thief tried to break into my house, I felt the same way again. (When traveling, I liked to spend a lot of time looking out the window and watching people pass by, or just staying in the hotel room, not doing anything different from what I did when I was home, and the same was true of the time I stayed cooped up in my room, looking out the window all day and watching flocks of big black birds flying at regular intervals, crying dismally, as I listened to Messiaen’s string quartet, which I hadn’t heard since I heard it very long ago on the radio, which I normally almost never listened to, but had turned on and kept on because I didn’t want to bother turning it off, the morning after being greatly disappointed at a museum exhibiting the works of a famous surrealist painter, which I’d visited the day before, while staying in Brussels for just two days in the middle of one winter.)
And I turned on the television thinking that there were things I could do because I didn’t know what it was that I wanted, and while randomly flipping through the channels, I came across a movie. It was a movie called “Trash,” directed by Paul Morrissey, who had also worked with Andy Warhol. The movie was one without much of a storyline, in which trashy hippies who spent time mostly in a room, stoned, looking at something or staring off vacantly, or saying or not saying something that did or didn’t make sense, did nothing but say trashy things to each other and do trashy things, from the beginning to the end, just as the title indicated — they actually lived off trash, buying drugs with the money they got from selling the trash they picked up. But the movie, which I watched without any expectation, about completely degenerate, lethargic people, and made you feel despondent, was one that showed you how powerful saying nothing could be, and became one of the best movies I’ve seen.
After watching the movie, I thought once again that living as a Buddhist monk at least once in your life, as most men do in a certain Asian country, or as a hippie for a period in your life, could be something essential in life, that brings out two things that are the most deeply rooted in human nature and are considered polar opposites, but in fact aren’t that different from each other.
After that, while watching a program introducing the most skilled tattoo experts in various parts of America, on a channel specializing in tattoos and aired tattoo related programs all day — after I returned from the trip, I wanted to get a tattoo, and although I’ve decided on what shape and size I want, I haven’t gotten one yet because I can’t make up my mind as to where on my body I want it — I felt an urge to go outside, but I made a simple, but in its own way big, resolution that I would never go see the Statue of Liberty, one of the things that represented New York — the resolution could be as big as the resolution to visit New York and see all the works in the possession of the Museum of Modern Art — and I was able to keep the resolution.
After spending the day in this way I woke up the next morning, feeling pleased that I hadn’t done anything that a first time visitor to New York should do as a matter of course even though I was in New York, and I went to the bathroom and ran a bath in the tub, and while taking a bath, I thought that it might be nice to get a small live octopus and spend time with it in the water. There was a big tub in the bathroom, and it seemed that an octopus would look well in it. The octopus could come out of the bathroom and roam around the room if it wanted, and we could stay in the room together without any regard to each other.
And I thought it would also be nice to wake up from a little nap in a room with an octopus in it, and be lightly, pleasantly surprised upon seeing the octopus on the sofa or the bed. Then I could perhaps take the octopus where it belonged, to the sea. But after finishing my bath, I thought that there were ideas that were good in themselves, but not good for carrying out into action, the idea about an octopus being one of them. Seeing an octopus roam around the room may bring me a light thrill, but the octopus would shudder at the selfish act.
After agonizing for a long time over what to do or what not to do that day, I ended up leaving the hotel without a destination in mind, and followed a sign indicating that there was a park nearby, and arrived at the park in the end. In the park, there were people pushing strollers, people sitting on benches, and people walking, holding hands, as if to say that the park was no different from any other park. But there were also people protesting there, half naked and carrying pickets, people against using animal fur and animal abuse. They were talking about how much people abused animals and getting people’s signatures, and although I supported them in my heart, I thought that I couldn’t join them in something so meaningful. All I could do regarding all efforts seeking change was sympathize in a detached way from a distance.
I went on walking, leaving behind the people who were against animal abuse, and suddenly, I wanted to go to an amusement park in Coney Island — was it because of a memory of a certain movie that seems quite dull now, or because of the thought I’d had about an octopus? — and took a subway there, but seeing that the gates were firmly shut, although I wasn’t sure if it was because it was too late, or because it was winter, I turned away in disappointment — but on the platform at the subway station, I saw a black girl turn round and round to unwrap the long scarf she was wearing while her mother held it by the end, which was very touching, and enough to make up for the disappointment in Coney Island — and returned to my hotel room. No, that wasn’t all. Before I did, I wandered around a street in Coney Island that seemed a bit dangerous, and saw a good number of people lined up in the darkness, each carrying a wooden chair somewhere for some reason. I felt very lucky at that moment, because I could imagine, without any grounds, that they were taking them to the night sea to bury them underwater, which was the sort of thing I wanted to see while traveling, or in everyday life.
Actually, watching the people carrying the chairs simply for some reason, perhaps for an event to be held the next day — no, actually, there were only two black men carrying wooden chairs — I imagined that they could be doing it to calm some monsters that appeared every night in the nearby sea and devoured chairs, and chairs were one of the things in the world that stirred up my imagination. Once I imagined creatures from a planet somewhere in the universe, more intelligent than humans, invading the earth and taking away all its chairs, or visiting the earth for the peaceful purpose of obtaining a few chairs from it, in order to further their research on chairs. When I thought about aliens I imagined aliens on the earth pulling pranks, such as pulling all the screws out of all the things humans have made, or shooting a strange beam to leave only the shadows or outlines of all the life forms on the earth.