Brain Candy

Following the advice of two J.E.T. veterans, Col and I paid 200 yen (about $2) each and bought train tickets for the next stop away from Ueda, rode the train seven or eight stops past where we should've gotten off, switched trains, and rode about an hour down to Tazawa, a station that never has a regular night attendent to collect passenger tickets. Feeling elated from pulling one over on the ever-expensive Japanese transit system, we walked for a hour past dozens of chain soba and ramen shops, yaki restaurants, and other Sizzler-type restaurants that frighteningly reminded me of American establishments to reach our friend Brandon's house. Later that night, we went to a bar that specializes in importing foreign bottles of beer from all over the world. A few drops of drool dripped from my gaping mouth onto the menu and landed on the pictures of bottles of dark, German beers, some of which cost upwards of 5,000 yen (about $45). We each had two beers from places very far away, savoring every last drip of the rare, dark liquid that filled our glasses, and meandered back to Brandon's house through the tiny, winding alleyways of Toyoshina, a town that sits just on the outskirts of Matsumoto, the second largest city in Nagano-ken with a population of about 300,000 people.

When we awoke the next morning, we drove to Matsumoto and walked to the Yayoi Kusama exhibit. The artist was born in Matsumoto and is a bit of a town hero, with her pieces included in the permanent collection of the Matsumoto City Museum of Art (the location of her current show). From a young age, she has suffered from visual and aural hallucinations, and as a result, her art is dominated by spots and circles of all sizes. As we approached the museum, we were greeted by her massive, spotted, fluorescent flowers that watch over the museum's entrance. Little did we know that these flowers were merely the tips of many multi-colored, flashing icebergs that awaited us inside the museum, which at the moment, is solely filled with Kusama's work. Her art is playful, bright, and intricate and often seems as if its painstaking repetition and large scale could have only been achieved by someone who uses marathon art sessions as a way to cling to tiny, fleeting shreds of sanity. Kusama created most of her art while living in a mental hospital and has described her creative process as one that is rooted in survival instinct; she makes art to prevent her from completely losing her mind. Knowing this, upon seeing her flowers overflowing with pubic hair pollen, her delicate mirror rooms that distort reality using flashing lights, her massive vagina wall hanging with a strobe light for a clitoris, and her rowboat covered in phallic, silver growths, one cannot help but wonder about the thoughts that swim freestyle, full speed, through the bubbling waters of Kusama's mind.

left: Over-sized kids demand the attention of a regular-sized kid.

This exhibition was easily one of the coolest I've ever seen. I highly recommend checking it out. It's a fireworks show without fireworks and all of the loud noises and pieces of ash in your hair. It's a Merry Pranksters playground, complete with oversized Day-Glo children and awe inspiring optical illusions. It's an orgy of paint and color, the kind armies of colors would surely engage in the day before the world officially turned to dreary shades of black and gray. Needless to say, after leaving the Kusama show and going to an Ikebana flower show that was filled with bespectacled Japanese women in those drab smock/jacket pant suits that you see on sale everywhere, our afternoon proved to be a bit more mellow than our morning.

Ikebana is a beautiful, soothing art form that attempts to bring the natural world inside through the arrangement of flowers, fruits, branches, and any other plants found in a natural setting. Some of the arrangements were so fragile, so precariously balanced and perched atop ornate vase towers, that I feared the baby breezes swirling from the tips of the old ladies' fans would surely topple them to the ground, splintering and squashing masterpieces that take hours upon hours and thousands of yen to create. Two Ikebana artists saw us looking lost in the middle of the showroom after we first arrived and invited us into the Ikebana VIP lounge for tea, cakes, crackers, and dried fruits. Sitting there with a belly full of tasty green tea and three too many butter cookies and five too many slices of raisin-nut bread, surrounded by VIP-worthy Ikebana masters dressed in their finest kimonos, watching gleefully as old women got their jollies off practicing their accommodating "Please, please take" and "You like?" lines on Col and I, I felt content knowing I had made the best of yet another day in the life of an overpaid J.E.T. Thank you Japanese people of the world! Your obsession with mastering English made this day possible for me!

left: The woman on the left created the Ikebana display over her right shoulder. She said the main branch was picked out of her backyard and the other flowers were purchased for $2oo.













left: Click on this one to get a better glimpse of one of Kusama's amazing light creations. This was a room surrounded by mirrors with water on the floor (except for a narrow walking path). Col and Brandon like being in electric outer space.