Aspirin

You can get sciatica pretty easily, so don’t worry about that part. You can get it like I did, by tossing around a lot of roof-beams like you were still in college, which basically takes one of those way postgraduate spinal discs (pulpus nervous for the uninitiated or anybody who might want to talk about this at a higher level, at which point you can count me out, I have to go lay down) and squashes it like a semi-truck ran over a jelly donut, and that now very pissed-off disc just pokes out there where it shouldn’t and jabs that extremely touchy nerve and keeps on jabbin like two kids in church, and all of a sudden you are, as the preacher says, lying on the ground screaming your fucking brains out. As I indicated, you can get sciatica any number of ways, but mine is as exciting as any. Which brings us, more or less, into the general neighborhood of aspirin.

Now sciatica, as you might expect, is pretty much the same all over the world, I mean you get sciatica in Wichita, you can compare notes no problem with a sciaticized individual in Kuala Lumpur, or, in my case, Kyoto, which, believe it or not, brings us even closer to the subject of aspirin. It should be stated at this point, so as to debaffle the inattentive, that when you have sciatica, proximity to aspirin becomes a major interest in life. Which brings us to money. Because when it comes to aspirin in Japan, money isn’t quite the same thing as it is in Wichita. Well, not only aspirin. Or Wichita either, for that matter. For example, the price of enough land to park your car on in central Kyoto is roughly equivalent to the price of Wichita, or maybe Washington DC, depending on whether it’s 1995 or 1996. The other day, to get back to the subject, I was purchasing aspirin for the new ruler of my existence, before whom I humbly abase myself and whom I honor with my entire being and to hell with every other leg in the country, and asked the price of the only leading American brand, in fact the only aspirin, for sale in the pharmacy nearest my leg. The druggist informed me, without the slightest sign of falling on the floor laughing, that the 24-aspirin box cost ¥700, the 48-aspirin box cost ¥l 100 and the 96-aspirin box cost ¥1900! I did not let my feelings show as I reflexively calculated the price in dollars: TWENTY DOLLARS for 96 aspirin!!! And 96 is the largest size!!! Why, in the US you can buy a bucket of aspirin!!! I know in some generally unexplored part of my education that aspirin is cheap to make, you just mix some stuff together that you get free out of the ground or off a tree or something, so I know that the real price of 96 aspirin, in terms of the legal tender nearest my heart (does one ever abandon one’s native currency?), is around 25 cents, allowing for inflation.

So was I going to pay this outrageous price? YOU BET, said my leg with a voice way lower than Darth Vader’s, though I got the small box, you’ve got to put your foot down somewhere, each aspirin costing about 30 yen, or 28.6 cents at the then-current exchange rate. As I limped home under the added weight of knowing that I had just paid seven dollars for 24 aspirin (actually I think the packaging, in which each aspirin has its own hotel room, eats up most of the expense), my sciaticated mind obsessively traced the uniquely Japanese system by which aspirin (and countless other products), in an impenetrable process of premarketing prestidigitation, are sold and resold several times before reaching the con¬sumer way up there at the top of the pyramid, a single carton of aspirin thereby generating suffi¬cient income to send a middleman’s kid to college to get rid of a chronic pain. I felt touched, somehow, and in a place where I must say I don’t like being touched.

Later I sent to the US and got 500 aspirin, mailed to me across the entire American continent and the entire Pacific ocean, or halfway around the world, for $2.95 (¥310), about .6 cents (¥.7) per aspirin. To the astute expatriate, the differences between cultures can often be a lot like sciatica.