ONE
Serving Bodies

Sashimi, ginger, wasabi. Breasts, legs, slightly bent knees. Thousands and thousands of dollars.

Her act of serving is a haiku of nourishment.

She is laid out like a sacrifice on a long, low-to-the-ground dining table, her naked body littered with sushi wrapped in seaweed coils.

Far more seductive than any nightclub of the moment, this restaurant is in an area of Tokyo not often frequented by the glitterati. Very close to the Zenpokuji-gawa ("the river of the temple of happiness"), in an old neighborhood called Horinouchi- literally, "within the hole," as if referring to one of the Inferno's more unmentionable rings-this place can only be found by those who know the way. But unlike most exclusive places, the key to this realm is neither wealth nor power; nor fame, talent, notoriety. Instead, the people who find their way here are somehow chosen, marked from birth, or, more likely, by too many nights of unsettled dreams. Having money is only incidental, but the prices are flabbergasting, even for Tokyo. Not even the hostess bars of Ginza or Akasaka, where would-be foreign models and struggling Japanese starlets serve drinks with swan-smooth dives of the arm, would dare charge so much.

But that is part of the beauty of an admissions policy that has nothing to do with financial solvency (unlike the Ginza clubs, which would slam the door on a pauper if one were so foolish as to approach their gilded lanterns). Because the people who find their way here will return regardless of the price, and no matter what their means-they will find a way to pay, even if it is by gambling or theft or murder or the sale of their very organs.

Such things have been known to happen, even in the few short months that this place has been in existence. The pull is that strong, the hook that sharp and sure and deep.

1990s, Yokohama, Japan. Oshima Kenzo was beaming with a mischievous, transported smile breaking it only to shout "Don't move! Don't move!" The near-centenarian dance master raised his arms with frantic jerking motions, as if he were conducting an orchestra of mythical animals with make-believe instruments. Despite his commands to stay put, his assistant put on his state-of-the-art sound system the most beautiful music: songs by French boys' choirs, the hymns of Arvo Pärt, arias by Maria Callas-all of which compelled the students to dance ever more physically, fervently, and thus in the opposite direction of his wishes. It was always dif- ficult to get things right at Oshima's studio-I found that out right away.

Eyes ancient and ageless, full of distance, a saint's glance. Face pale and wrinkled, but hair still dark gray. Limbs whispering that despite his ninety plus years, his was a short tenure on this planet. The co-creator, in the late 1950s, of the avant-garde Japanese dance form known as ankoku butoh (translated into English as "the dance of utter darkness"), Oshima was captivating in his Yokohama dance studio, a one-room structure just across a colorfully tiled alley from the house he shared with his wife; his fifty-seven-year-old son, Hideo (a fellow dancer and co-conspirator); and his son's wife.

In this place, he urged his motley group of students to create the impossible over and over again.

In the corner, trying to be, like always, as mysterious as possible, I moved against a flock of costumes stilled in their lace-winged flight across one wall, counting on my fingers and toes my luck at being in this very place, in the presence of a living legend, an undesignated cultural treasure who I and all the other dancers-Japanese college students, Brazilian artists, worldly French vagabonds, German street urchins, itinerant Australians, and curious Americans-had the fortune to embrace.

Still, I would have admitted how strange it was that my entire life had hinged on something called the dance of utter darkness: an art apophatic, often defined only by what it is not. The practitioners of this dance, their faces and bodies painted dead-white, were known to shave their heads, shed their clothes, dress in drag, speak in tongues (while distending their own), flail their limbs, contort their faces, spit roses, dance on glass, hang from buildings, spend hours without moving, rehearse by night, go mad by day. And it was just this dance that had made me abandon my too-safe life at Princeton University and come to Japan. It had seemed the one thing that might be outrageous enough to save me.

Whether or not I can find anything of use to me here, I thought as I danced, it was worth it to come. It is worth it if I can bathe in the overwhelming strangeness of it all, the foreignness, the dark twists and trapdoors whose paths and breaks I do not know by heart, not yet.

1926, Tokyo, Japan. A department store in Ginza: not as shiny as the prepack- aged, multistoried, city-block-long, whole-wide-world-within-one-building department stores that dominate Tokyo by the end of the twentieth century, but obviously reflective enough, for in one of its mirrors a twenty-year-old man from Hokkaido-Japan's equivalent of the American Wild West, though it's an island to the north-happens to catch his reflection. Like a cat who cannot understand that the image he sees is of his own body, Oshima Kenzo stares at it, taking inventory of its unknowable contours and lines, and a feeling flickers within him that this terrain is something he owns but has not explored. At that moment, the determination to make it completely his own takes root in him, along with the inkling that dance might be the solution to the anxiety created by his own body.

Having been in Tokyo only a week and a half, I remained throughout the day in a constant state of wonder over the turns my life had lately taken. With only a year left at my university, I departed (with no promises as to when I would return, because I always liked to keep people guessing) for Japan-a region I had been marginally studying, it's true, as part of my comparative literature major, but somewhere I never thought I'd actually live. It had happened suddenly. The possibility and the decision overcame me almost simultaneously, and I left a few weeks later, at the beginning of June. I had never been out of the country before, though people often assumed I'd lived abroad-at the very least they never guess that I'm from Florida. I have always been far too dream-lost for my own good; people sense that right away-it makes me seem foreign to them somehow. And I've always liked that.

During my first week or two in Japan I often remembered a conversation I'd had with my ex-boyfriend Michael before I left, one that was burned into my mind because the pain of our breakup was still raw when we talked (and now). When pressed for details by my friends, I said that our split was mutual, but perhaps this just masked a truth I didn't want to face. True, I had tired of his insistence on seeing me and my desire for intensity as neurotic (even if that's what it really was), and he had tired of my constant alternations: one week pulling away from him in fits of insecurity, and the next week clinging close. What neither of us had tired of was our shared sense of humor and maddeningly perfect physical compatibility, the memory of which rang through both of us, I could tell, during our last conversation before I left America.

On that day he accosted me as I was taking shelter from a sudden end-of-May rainstorm in the spacious archway of one of the campus's oldest buildings, site of decades of a capella performances. We were the only two people in that dry nook of the campus, and our voices ricocheted across the curved stone walls, in a space left free of falling rain but which re- tained barely inaudible traces of all songs sung there over the years.

Before the storm's interruption I'd been in the middle of returning my last library books and vacating my dormitory so that I could return home briefly to Florida and then leave for Japan the following week. Shyly, Michael asked about my plans for the summer, so I explained what I was doing, both this summer and probably for at least the next year as well. But I found it difficult, mostly, it occurred to me, because what I would study-dance, and particularly, this kind of dance-was so physical and intimate. In describing it to him, I felt as if I were trespassing on some taboo that existed between us now, by emphasizing the body and the physical-those things we yearned to share again but couldn't. I knew that at some level Michael had felt guilty about our extreme sexual compatibility, taking it to mean that our relationship could never transcend a passionate affair to become a comfortable, lasting relationship. I had felt nothing of the sort-at least I thought I hadn't. But now, explaining to him that I was going to be studying dance in Japan, I felt suddenly self-conscious and uncomfortable, as nostalgia for our physical joy seeped through my limbs.

Excerpted from The Floating World © Copyright 2004 by Cynthia Gralla. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.