Flavor in Space: Ch 52

At the New Post Station, the city of the night lies to the northeast, the devil's direction. The city here is called Ohcikubak, meaning both "the city of the bizarre" and "the city of song and dance." By one of its many kaleidoscopic colored gates, a huge phoenix splashes across building facades, the symbol of feminine power.

The streets are named for cherry blossoms, alleys and paths spin off at odd angles, lined with pink billboards, blaring multicolored light bulbs, thousands of technicolored doors, each leading to halls of perfumed parlors, each of these hawking fifty different methods of sweet intoxication.

Names on the signs parley double meanings or allude to sticky garden spots of someone's fantasies...

"Moth King/ Ego King"
"Ms. Crimson's Castle"
"Kangaroo Court Decision"
"Marsh/ Chat over Tea"
"Hamelin"
"Striking/ Diversion"
"If"
"Washing Boat"
"Waiting Dream"
"Apache"
"Southern Seas"
"Orange Prince"
"O2"
"Mana"
"Who"
"Hair of the Dogs"
"Baltimore"
"Desert Inn"
"Euphoria"
"Found Night +1"
"Buoy"
"Cat Root"
"Pony"
"Hide"

The rooms are run by women, women who spill out onto the street, glittering in red, pink, purple, and green. Their heads are layered with long loopy blonde locks. To the right, a group of white collared executives are ushered out blushing and laughing, followed by the crowing of lovelies. To the left, men, dressed in silken suits and robes, eyes beaming from bushy orange manes reaching nearly a foot high above the eyebrows, follow the women, trying to syphon off a section of the the lady's earnings in his own plush bar. "Men" are sexual objects here; if they are not passed up for the objects of the sex shop entirely.

This is the city of flowers, of beauty, of art. Those who work in the city of the daylight, rigid with service, status, and accounts; they come to the city of flowers for drunkenness, for equality, for kinship. They are with their brothers here, cared for by their sisters... for a price perhaps... and hence things are really no different here, just status taking another shape, the servants getting served:

One bar has its name written in fat black plastic tape, "Love and Peace: Life is a bitch but I Love bitch and bitch Love me. It's Your Choice."

The city of the night will only be a place for drunken fantasies bred in the oppression of the daylight, froth boiling over from the control of the pressure cooker of the towers of men, unless...

Unless there is meaning in art, in theatre, in play, real shadow and shade beyond the sparkles of color and midnight lights. This is the sober work of Toulouse Lautrec, Okuni, Picasso, Utrillo, Yoshino, Jakuchu, Rikyu....