BOOKS
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That is grandiloquently lost-generational, but for the fact that Greg
too has a home, from which an occasional cake arrives in the mail. Roll
over Fitzgerald, tell Picasso the news. Sloshed to the gills though he is,
and in training
to
become a bum, Greg in the end is a frequent flyer who
will be happy to find an American gutter to lay his head in.
John Burnham Schwartz's
Bicycle Days
is very much cast in the same
mold: the novel of post-adolescent rebellion in which revolts against the
flabby privilege of an upper-middle-class background arc simply detours
along the road to submission. Not unlike Leithauser's Danny Ott,
Schwartz's Alec Stern has just graduated from Yale and gone to work for
something called Compucom as a trade specialist. He is primed for, and
has, the generic experience ofJapan. His office, which never rises above
cliche, is a gallery of textbook Asiatic types. His employer, Joe Boon, is a
displaced American who has fled from his own failures at home to sub–
merge himself in high-tech trade work. He is a sadly typical ex-pat; the
man who has squandered his opportunities in the U.S. and is gambling on
a new life in the East. Among Alec's office mates are the chain-smoking
Takhara-san, a weekend sailor who bought a boat after reading some–
where that women arc secretly excited by water; Park, a Korean who fre–
quents the "Turkish b:lth" establishments in Shinjuku and whose ambi–
tion is
to
star in a live sex show; and Kiyoko Kawashima, the only woman
in the finn (except for the five secretaries named Satoh), who at thirty–
three is past her prime for marriage and considered "old and boring" by
the men in the office. Having spent six ye3rs in America, she is aware of
her place in Japanese society and reminds Alec: "You have
to
understand,
Alec-san , that I am a woman. In Japan sometimes that is the most impor–
tant thing about me." With the exception of Kiyoko, this office is a ship
offools sailing in the strange waters of Tokyo.
Where Schwartz succecds is in creating vivid camcos of Tokyo life.
He takes us down into the Tokyo subway, where the heat and crush arc
borne in stoic silence. He sketches in sharp relief the offices of MITI
(Ministry of International Trade and Industry), where decisions that shape
the world 's econolllY arc made daily, and the sex shows in Shinjuku
where Filipino women perform with volunteers from the audience. At his
best, Schwartz is a touring anthropologist who to pass the time is studying
Japanese culture, particularly the rules of dating. Twenty-one-year-old
Alec is told:
"First date , second date, third date , on ea ch one she expects that you
act a certain way, that you do and say certain things.
You must
walk up to her slowly and compliment her. Not like a big movie star,
but quietly.
So,
YOll
compliment her beauty and her clothes, ev-
