An entry about going to the beach
Black sand [to begin]
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The city is hot.
The old women in the building have retreated inside and changed into dressing gowns. They leave their doors open in this season, so I glimpse them, sitting in the dark, staring into electric fans. Thunder rumbled down the elevated expressway at noon, and I will hear it again at four o’clock, drowning out the ward office’s public address system, which warns us to take steps to avoid heatstroke. The rain is falling far away. The streets are deserted at midday. There are no children, no mothers in the park. Only the homeless men remain, sipping beers, and flipping through foraged manga in the shade of the trees outside the public bathroom.
There are only so many hours that I can sit at home under the air conditioning. There are only so many hours I can waste at the kissaten on the corner, drinking iced coffee, flicking across my phone screen.
I will go to the beach. That is the only way to free myself. The train can take me there. I can emerge from city into suburbs. I can walk down through a deserted commuter town.
Let me step out onto black sand, walk into the green waves, and crawl out as far as I can. I will tread water for a moment, heart racing at the sight of the beach so far away, and then, on my back, lazily kick toward the shore, feeling the waves rolling under me. I will lay on the beach and feel my pale skin tightening.
I will feel for a time like a wild thing.
I would like to return to my apartment sundazed, scrubbed, and half-sick.
Philosophy of the beach [an anchor]
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I thought of this line: “The beach is the only place of enjoyment”—jouissance, the original has it—“that the human species has discovered in nature.” There is not much more. That is from Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
And what is the beach? “A thin ribbon of sand,” Lefebvre says, returning to the topic in Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. But it is something more: a place of comprehensive elemental collision—the earth ending at the sea; the sky melting into the earth and the sea—where “their intersection signals the demise in each other.”
Each element plays a role, receives the others and protects itself from them by sheltering living bodies; water protects the sun and the sandy earth from the assaults of the sun, the waves (such a beautiful name, the waves, always repeated, always different, uncertain, unambiguous, individual, caressing, violent). Fire burns and consumes by its own force, water engulfs, and the air sweeps away and dries. Where they end, the beach begins. Transition, passages, encounters. A space of enjoyment.
At the beach, “bodies no longer experience water alone or earth alone, or air and sun in isolation.”
He is talking about a certain type of beach, it’s worth pointing out. He was in Catalonia. He was surveying postwar resort towns. He is not talking about a fantastic pre-urban beach. He is talking about the beach surrounded by the city, or, let’s say, made possible by it.
And what is jouissance? What is jouissance to Lefebvre? In this case, it is a type of contentment or pleasure, but it is not only those things, since they suggest passivity. “Enjoyment” is the right word. (I suggest reading translator Robert Bononno’s note at the beginning of Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, which attempts to free the word from its Lacanian definition, with its emphasis “on orgasmic relief.”)
But I can’t restrict myself. You don’t need to restrict yourself, either.
Prehistory [the haziest memories]
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I was never on the beach in Catalonia. I know the same resort towns on the Mediterranean in Spain. I spent summers in stucco cabins on the Costa del Sol. I preferred to stay indoors, and my parents didn’t mind, since it meant that they could indulge themselves. They were only too happy to shut me indoors, while they went to drink beer with the other tourists. I didn’t mind, either, since it meant that I could read novels. My only exterior memories are of a pot of paella (it has expanded in my memory into a bathtub-sized monster), and a dead baby bird being devoured by ants, and merciless sun on concrete, and the ritual of selecting ice creams. Of the beach, I can only summon memories of tanned, pendulous breasts (this is also, apart from climbing the piles of gravel at the edge of the quarry, all that I remember of Waldmattensee).
I was not raised to love the beach. “Children discover a form of perfect pleasure” on the beach, Lefebvre insists—and maybe that is true, and maybe I have forgotten, and maybe I was never given the opportunity.
When I was no longer a child, I went to the beach again. There were no waves on Diefenbaker in August, though. It can’t fit the definition. The sun never came out at Tofino. It was missing at Jericho, where I remember only the gabbling crabbers on the dock. There was a hint on the public beach at Bamburi, but the paranoia was too much. I never felt it on Lamma, watched over by surveillance cameras and smokestacks.
History [1, memories never recycled into literature]
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Somewhere outside Stephanville, I turned off the Number One, parked my overheated Civic on a muddy shoulder, and walked through the forest, until I came to the shore. There was a thin ribbon of sand. I walked for miles. I stripped nude and crouched in the icy water. I would have been happy never to make the trip home. I was nineteen that year, and desperate.
There is no story here and the true revelation is too private.
History [2, memories already recycled into literature, lianyungang]
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I have told this story before. I recognize now, having written it so many time, that from the first version, I put together days and people that didn’t match. So, further than ever from those points in time, and from those people, I will tell it again, hopefully as a more genuine fragment. I will tell it again, realizing what it means, finally. This is a story about the beach.
This is a story about going to visit a girl on the coast.
Her name was not Tingting, but that was her nickname. She was a village girl, with a square jaw. I have described her so many times in my unpublishable private writing. In one half-finished novel, she is "Jiajia," who appears in Adidas tracksuit and crucifix—the way that I still picture her—telling stories about pirate atrocities on a haunted island, and in another, she is “He Ting,” a girl that lives with her friend in Lianyungang, running a night market stall, spending her days on hidden beaches. In a short story never seen by anybody but myself, she is "Cai Wen," the daughter of a guest house landlord, who might be the illegitimate daughter of the sixteenth richest man in Xuzhou. I am sure she has appeared in other places.
She was a girl that I met because we both found ourselves going to school in the same city. She was learning to look after children, and I was learning to speak and read. She was a friend of a friend. We were never friendly, but precisely because of some vague animosity or mistrust between us, we kept in touch. As we both fled the city we sent increasingly lengthy and sentimental messages to each other’s phones. I was in Dalian, then, I guess, or still in Nanjing. She was in Lianyungang, which was not far from her hometown.
I begged her to visit me when I was in the city again, but she refused, so I went to visit her. I hitchhiked, or I took the train. She lived with a coworker—Xiao Hua, from the same hometown—in a rented room on an alley south of the train station. She and Xiao Hua had no furniture. They had arranged on the floor colorful pads, decorated with shapes and animals, lifted from the daycare where they both worked. I bought them a meal and we ate it on the floor. We went out that night, and in the morning, Tingting wanted to take me to the island that sat out in the harbor. There was not much to do there, I thought. I had been there before, years back. But we could pay for a meal of seafood in one of the guest houses, I knew, and we could hike the single road that circled the island, and maybe peer through the fence into the abandoned resort on the sea-facing side.
We went across the causeway, Tingting and Xiao Hua and I. Xiao Hua knew the island better than we did. She guided us through an abandoned village to a beach accessible only at certain tides by picking along the rocky coast. It was a closet cut out of the cliffs. The sand was brown and cool. The water smelled like sewage. Tingting and Xiao Hua got undressed to their underwear and folded their clothes neatly and placed them on a rock. I left my clothes in a pile on the beach. We looked at each other for a time. I was naked. I was pale and out-of-shape. The sun felt hot on my back. I felt vulnerable. That is what they saw. I wonder if they remember those moments. I wonder if Xiao Hua, slight and dark, remembers being admired. Tingting’s Her body was more mature than I had imagined. Her breasts hung heavy. Her stomach was round. A dark line ran from her navel to the wild mess of her pubic hair. I remember wondering if she was pregnant. We waded out until we were waist deep and stood there for a while, swaying with waves. The water was cold, but not cold enough to chase us out. Looking east, all we could see was the muddy ocean and the blue sky. We swam out until we felt that we were in danger. We lay on the beach together on sheets of newspaper prepared by Xiao Hua. Tingting unpacked the gimbap she’d bought before coming over the causeway. We smoked cigarettes. We felt like wild things.
We fell asleep with our legs intertwined. When we woke up, the tide was rolling slowly up the beach. We climbed the cliffs out of desperation. We found the road around the island again. When a Renault hatchback rattled by, Tingting waved for it to stop. We climbed into the backseat and rode back to the causeway.
Returning to definitions
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But I am only trying to give you an example of jouissance, here, as I understand it, as I understand Lefebvre understands it. Jouissance can’t be individual. Jouissance is the soul free of alienation and domination. It is the body breaking out of all temporal and spatial shell, Lefebvre says. It is when the “total body” can appear. It is something sensual. Jouissance is innocence of the senses. I need to recapture that perfect, wild pleasure.
On the Japanese beach [1]
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The sand is black. The waves are green. Constantly, there is the sound of the elevated expressway. There is a vague sense of safety, since these beaches are opened only for brief periods, when they can be staffed by lifeguards. There is a vague fear, reinforced by the gates that can be shut against tidal waves, and by the volcano above.
On the Japanese beach [2, sun tribe, zushi, a glimpse of the dystopian beach]
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Years ago, I would have gone to Zushi instead.
I charge myself with morbid Showa nostalgia.
Zushi was where the sun tribe inaugurated postwar beach culture in the form of young men and young women with only faint memories of the war making pilgrimages to the coast from well-to-do Tokyo neighborhoods to mix with suburban kids, and to coordinate premarital sex, inhalant abuse, surfing, and sunbathing. They spent their time in reckless leisure. Their tans were a mark of difference. They dissolved barriers between classes. They forsook the mountains and the hot springs for recreation on the black sand. I was realistic: the images of the pulp movies were tempered with how it might have ended. I conjured dropouts in neon bikinis, and men tanned deep-red. I imagined cigarettes and switchblades.
I wanted to be an anthropologist. I wanted to experience delinquent passion. But the rebellious beach was dead. The sun tribe was gone. The rich kids stopped showing up, I imagine, and so did the upwardly mobile middle-class. Cheap air travel is to blame. Anyone could afford to holiday in Okinawa or Guam or Cebu. The beach was turned over to the suburban working-class. Zushi is a place for Kanagawa high schoolers. It is patronized by young men that work in the warehouses and factories that remain in the prefecture. It is patronized by the beautiful young women that work at commuter hub sex industry operations. There is not much rebellion. A bad reputation required a crackdown. There are signs all over, advising visitors; no tattoos, no smoking, no drinking, and no boisterous behavior. Tighter regulations meant success for entrepreneurs. There is a Red Lobster. There are nightclubs. It is a good place to produce social media content. Tourists go there because it is famous.
There is another type of jouissance, but not the one that Lefebvre grants the beach! The city has consumed it. There is no longer any possibility of transcending the border, in reality, or through fantasy, into wild space. The thin strip of sand is unimportant. It is mostly covered. It will someday be completely covered and terraced someday to allow more opportunity to entrepreneurs.
“Beaches can support no constructions other than those that are forgotten,” Lefebvre says. Only the temporary and forgettable can be tolerated. Structure obliterates the space of enjoyment by destroying “its most characteristic feature: fluidity, transition.”
There is no reason to go to Zushi.
On the Japanese beach [3, hiratsuka]
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Shonan stretches on, though. Zushi, or Enoshima, right beside it, is only the beginning
Enoshima has a small beach, but it is sheltered by an island in the bay and by concrete piers. It is used mostly by Tokyo daytrippers soaking their ankles, or by tourists, who take pictures of themselves eating novelty snacks. At the castle town of Odawara, the beach is too cold to swim. The mountains provide shade. Most travel that far out to visit the ferrocrete castle, the hot springs, and the kamaboko factories.
There is a lot in between.
There is not much sand. This country cleaned up most of its coast. It dumped concrete over everything. The rivers are all cement canals. The view of the ocean is blocked by an elevated highway. Failed development projects hint at what dreams people have had for it.
But Shonan has romance. It is not the romance of the sun tribe. It is the romance of the commuter-surfer. These are men that live in commuter suburbs near the rare beaches. They surf and fish in the limited free time they have between long hours at work and punishing commutes into the city. They transform eventually into the retirees that you see at the tops of beaches, too lazy to walk down to the water, but addicting to tanning themselves golden.
I thought once that I could live that Shonan lifestyle. I was living in Kanagawa then. I found that I could ride my bike to Hiratsuka.
The width and flatness of Hiratsuka made it the first choice to land an amphibious force for a strike on Tokyo. In the days before the beach officially opened for the season, I went anyway, and stood there many days and imagined the landing craft coming over the horizon. I imagined the defenses. I wanted to hear the clack of heavy machine guns.
When summer came, I bought a bathing suit from Family Mart. I tried to go every day to the beach. I was not yet married. I had no job. I tanned myself brown. I borrowed a board and thought I could learn to surf. But I could never commit to it. I could not afford to live near Shonan just for convenient jouissance. I moved to the city.
It is better to live away from the beach.
On the Japanese beach [4, oiso]
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I go to Oiso, usually. It is as neglected as Hiratsuka. It is hidden by the same elevated highway. It is too far from the city to have many trippers. It is not ideal for surfing.
Parents with children mostly go to a nearby water park, which has at its center a long, shallow pool. It is called Oiso Long Beach and admission costs fifty dollars. It might be taken, like Zushi, as an example of failed modernization. The resort is the last remnant of a scheme by Baron Matsumoto Jun, who had heard about the practice of ocean bathing from military physicians trained under the Dutch. He ordered pools to be dug. Nobody swam in the ocean before that, unless they needed to. Nobody swims in the ocean now, either, I could conclude.
I have never been to Oiso Long Beach. I have never been to the cheaper municipal outdoor pool nearby. I will admit only to stepping foot in the glass cube erected by the prefectural government to sell local seafood and microbrewed beer.
I prefer the deserted beach.
It is used mostly by people that live nearby. These are people with free time in the summer.
There are local kids that come out to swim, or to collect junk and crabs and sand dollars. High school girls come down and wade out in their clothes. High school boys run drills and wrestle in the surf. Young women make attempts at the waves and photography before retiring to tarps and towels. There are mothers that put flimsy tents up over their toddlers and lay out on blankets nearby. There are Brazilian immigrants that work in the warehouses inland.
There are people that fear the sun. That is wise: they go to the beach often, so they want to protect themselves. They cover themselves in wetsuits and floppy hats. There are people that don’t fear the sun. Their skin is dark. They are healthy. They go to the beach to show their bodies to people.
Two shacks under the highway sell cans of beer and fried food. There is a muddy shower on one side, where people scrub the black volcanic sand out of their hair and bathing suits.
It is fascinating to see people captivated by what is around them. I watched today a pair of girls—sixteen, seventeen, maybe older—walk carelessly into the waves, get knocked over, sit in the surf, rise, and walk out to do it again. They continued for an hour. Near them, a young mother in a bikini was absorbed in hand digging a canal. Her son, about five or six, neglected, distracted himself with a soccer ball. Kids near the pier chased crabs.
Even if you are not brave, you can swim out quite far. A long concrete pier for the fishermen shelters it from heavier waves. It is shallow for a quarter mile out.
This is a place of enjoyment.
On the Japanese beach [5, terugasaki]
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I go to Terugasaki sometimes. The waves are much higher. It is nice to feel a bit of danger. It is good to put your foot down and feel nothing. The beach is always deserted. Few make it past the illegal barbecues collected under the overpass beside the beach. Kids sneak down from the nearby apartment blocks to hide among the tetrapods to make out or smoke cigarettes. I feel wild after I return from the swimming there.
This is why we need to escape
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I need to remember these things. I would like to plan my life around the beach. That is my simple dream.