Don Quixote
Just finding the entrance to Don Quixote is disorienting, well-guarded
as it is by stacked trays of Pez dispensers, boxes of chocolate
covered macadamia nuts, and columns of oversized coffee cans. Free-for-all
piles of snorkeling gear and rows of aluminum camping chairs hide
a clear view inside. Between all these, shoppers can just slip in
and squeeze out of Don Quixote's consumer labyrinth.
With every single interior space packed with goods, Don Quixote
encapsulates a certain aspect of Tokyo's character: the overcrowded,
plastered-over, ever-practical, consumption-obsessed, architecturally
chaotic, throwaway intensity of hovering right up to the brink of
total sensory overload.
Once inside, all is goods and more goods. Half-hidden metal grates
hold clipped smiley face scented deodorizers, bosom and butt-shaped
lighters, red flicker light bulbs, pink kitty nail clippers, Indian
incense, glow-in-the-dark characters, 3-D stickers, key rings that
both pop open beer cans and peel oranges (a common combination one
wonders). Shelves overflow with cardboard boxes stuffed with pajamas,
backpacks, cotton underwear, plastic wiffle-ball bats, and lacey
underwear. In that order. A floor-standing cage brims over with
pink, orange, green, blue stuffed giraffes, elephants, dogs, fish
and non-descript animals.
A new variation in retailing, Don Quixote is the wild cousin of
the 100 yen shops, 1000 yen clothing shops, Uniglo, vending machine
plazas, and "conbini" that have sprouted in every half-unused space
in the city. Don Quixote's shrine fair atmosphere, though, makes
the average corner convenience store feel like a Zen meditation
hall.
The floor offers little stability. Plastered over the entirety are
big, white arrows pointing towards bargains and orange-yellow-pink
hand-scrawled signs covered in shiny strips of clear tape. Dance-step
foot-shapes point in different directions through the maze. Elevator
doors, too, are covered, decipherable as doors only when the Day-Glo
katakana signs accordion open briefly, imploringly. Of course, the
walls of the elevator are coated in more cheery encouragement.
Overhead hovers an artificial jungle. The first floor vines are
soft enough, rows of silk Chinese dresses and gently swaying circles
of plastic-wrapped ties (300 yen and just as ugly). But upstairs
on the second floor, three-meter-long, bean-filled snakes languidly
wait to thump the inattentive forehead. Sinuous gray hoses filled
with blinking colored lights hang even lower (300 yen per meter).
Long lines of hand-in-hand plastic monkeys reach down mischievously
(500 yen for two). A string of Tabasco bottle lights loop down next
to a string of hooked fish lights (3,000 yen a string) . Beach balls
blown up in convenient string carriers (cheaper than at the beach)
bounce around the shoulders. Dangling soccer balls roped with nylon
mesh need a solid header out of the way to get by.
Contact with things is physically unavoidable. Bumping into things
is part of the ploy. Everything's at hand. Movement is slow. The
flung-around discontinuities feel like a busy week's worth of clothes
tossed on a chair. The shelves are too-close, never allowing any
objective point of view. As in a Chinese garden, there is no vantage
point from which to find an overview. The impression of variable
visual concatenation at every angle disrupts, delights and eventually
exhausts. Visually, it's not one big store, it's a million.
Tripping over a stack of DVD players while reaching for cold medicine
but ending up with a hand on affordable garden tools blurs any distinction
between needs and wants. Ordered searching for an item slips in
significance to the sheer cathartic bursting of categorical order.
Nothing is where it should be. It is just where it is. You don't
find what you want, you want what you find.
The third floor holds electronics and miniatures in phenomenally
incoherent juxtapositions. Cascading clip racks of bunched up underwear,
cartoon ties, and metal socket sets surround a display shelf of
talking cemetery ghost heads which chatter unintelligibly for a
few seconds above large, open-mouthed washing machines. Sleek Maglite
flashlights dribble down a wall rack in order of size and power.
Batteries, of course, are found on another floor. Radios and alarm
clocks in sleek box shapes, multi-colored, and complexly dialed,
wait unplugged. Next to this practicality, lava lamps bubble in
oily profusion beside a large selection of hand-held vacuum cleaners.
Extension cords hang coiled over by the register. An extensive collection
of lighters fills a museum-like glass case, well-lit and locked.
Across from the case is an even larger case filled with sharkskin
men's handbags, gold belt buckles and white collared dress shirts.
The mind searches for order, and is keenly resisted.
In the next diorama, bras different from the first floor bras hang
unfulfilled next to a stack of ski poles next to a box of leather
dress gloves next to a stack of metal camping stoves. Perfumes inside
a glass cabinet are tucked behind the stoves above which hovers
an 11,200 yen clinging, Budgirl miniskirt, in a range of sizes.
Is this the outdoor section?
The stairwells back downstairs are transformed into a pop-culture
poster gallery: sneering Clash; unshaved Kurt Cobains; the Doors
next to peyote-button cactus; Bob Marley with a cigar-sized spliff;
the Sex Pistols spitting; Jimi Hendrix posters, though, are over
by the blacklights, apparently for historical veracity.
Downstairs, the basement floor displays an unbelievably immense
variety of snack packages and perhaps the single largest collection
of instant noodles and canned drinks in the entire consumerist world.
Even while wrapping itself in the banners of practicality, convenience,
and low pricing, ultimately most of what you buy (and you do buy)
at Don Quixote are simply souvenirs from the land of impulse. Of
course, most items in Don Quixote make life, home and play more
comfy, livable, lively, amusing, and somehow, in a roundabout way
(the only way there is at Don Quixote), more human.
--Michael Pronko
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