I still have my copy of the Chinese history book. The final paragraph in the book reads,
The victory of the revolution of the Chinese people and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China is a victory of Marxism–Leninism in China. It is the most important event in the world after the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Russia). It is a source of inspiration for the oppressed people of the East as well as other people in the rest of the world and affirms their confidence in the ultimate victory of their struggle for liberation.
I remember reading that passage and thinking a forbidden thought: ‘I suppose that includes me.’
I’ve just remembered another book acquired on that same Hong Kong visit. I still have that, too. It is The True Story of Ah-Q (Q). You know my habit, which you started, of wandering into used bookshops not in search of any particular book but in search of the great unknown. ‘I always have a book with me,’ you said mischievously in the White Rose. ‘When the world becomes too much, I open the book and slip inside. Would you like to know how to do that? Watch! See! Look, here is the book. I open the book. I start reading. I am in a trance. Now look at me. See? I am invisible.’
When I die I want to be buried with The True Story of Ah-Q, the Outline History of China with the blood spots from the battle over literature, the Senryu with your fingerprint inside, and the antique bronze vase with the green patina you bought me because I said that if I ever was a writer I would use it to store pens and pencils and rulers and ink brushes and a long thin paper knife I would use to slit open the envelopes containing your letters. You can still write to me, you know. I am here, waiting, waiting.
‘You want to talk to interesting people as much as you can,’ you told me. ‘The best way to do that is to walk into a bookstore, pick up a book – any book – and ask the person next to you if he has read it. A stupid person will just shake his head. An intelligent person will say, “No, but I would like to read it.”’
I did not buy the Ah-Q book, which was written by Lu Xun and had been published as a magazine series in 1921 and 1922. It is considered a masterpiece in China. The story traces the ‘adventures’ of Ah-Q, a peasant with little education and no definite occupation. He is a bully to the less fortunate but fearful of those above him in rank, or power. He persuades himself that he is spiritually ‘superior’ to his oppressors, even as he is hauled off to be executed for a minor crime. Inside the book I wrote, ‘Paul Rogers, Victoria, Hong Kong, 6/17/59. Bought for me by Paul Feng.’
Paul Feng happened to be standing alongside me in that Hong Kong bookstore. He looked surprised, and pleased, when I not only asked him if he had read the book but I asked questions about it after he said Ah-Q was a classic. ‘This is wonderful,’ Paul Feng said. ‘A young American wants to read the most famous book in China. Please let me buy that book for you.’ We talked for a while. We sipped bitter tea from small cups. It was good to feel like the equal of an educated man, I recall telling you. It was good not to be the stereotypical young American but to be the object of friendly curiosity. Nonetheless, because I had tasted the fruit of seduction-by-book with the volume of Chinese history, I raced back to the Suzie Wong bar, sat down at the same table, pulled out Ah-Q, and attracted yet another swarm of Sobranie smokers. In the midst of these adventures, I received an extraordinary letter from you, dated 5 June, 1959.
Dear Paul,
I envy you because you can visit many new places. These places should be exciting for a creative mind with the desire to be the poet I want you to be. They are especially interesting for a journalist. You can be a journalist too, you know. It is not as wonderful as being a poet, but I will allow that. Journalism is a side pocket of culture. It is not appreciated very much. But it is thrilling. Thank you very much for the nice letter (May 27th) from my utopia, Shangri-La. I think just reading your letter is better than writing to you because me . . . I am having such good feelings when I read your letter.
When I am writing to you every time there become funny sentences every time, and mistakes all over and of course rotten grammar all the time. Are you not yet tired of my letter? I am sorry for my errors. But I simply just have to write to you because, first of all, I enjoy it, and secondly because I don’t want you to forget me.
Since we become friend I feel from you every time something that remind me of an emotion that we almost be forgetting here at this kind of work I do. I appreciate it profoundly. You make me cry with joy. The girls at the bar worry about me crying. But I say “No. This is happy crying. Happy!!” Because they are good girls, they understand. They are so kind to me even though I am a bad woman. After they see me enjoying your company and after you have gone, always they talk about you. This makes me jealous but I love it so. Yes, I do. I love watching you walk out the bar because no one walks the way you walk and at the last moment you always turn and give me such a shy smile that I have to hold my heart because I am almost fainting. But of course, I am Japanese, so I would not be fluttering and torn like a woman’s precious scarf caught in the thorns of this thing foreigners call LOVE. No one has ever said I LOVE YOU to me, by the way.
Now I have to tell you, Paul, that sometimes I saw in your eyes a special glittering. I hope you can translate what I try to say here. I can’t express this very good in English. So this is the secret I give to you today. TAKUSAN (much) NO SAINOO (ability) WO MOTTA (have) HITO (man) GA, SONO KANOOSEI (possibility) WO DEKIRU-DAKE (as much as) HAKI (exhibit) SHITOO TO (to do) KIBOO (hope) NI KAGAYAITE (glittering) IRU KOKORO (mind). There. Can you understand that? I know I am also your teacher, but I know your mind was made up – your good mind existed, sailor boy – even before you left the United States to come to Japan.
Dare I say it? I am WAITING your letter from now on. I HATE that word WAIT!! I am WAITING. I am hating that word. No! No! An ugly woman like me should accept she will spend her whole life WAITING!! I wish I could write more but I’m tired of my bad English. Even sometimes when I don’t write to you Paul, I am always thinking about you. Take care of yourself.
Love,
Yukiko
P.S. Please remember always and forever, for all the years you live, this simple thing: in my womb there will be a memory of who you were and everything you could be. Maybe some day, many years from now, some tiny thing will remind you of me. Maybe you will read this letter again. Maybe you will remember me: a certain woman from a such long time ago. Maybe you will hear the sound of my voice. Maybe you will remember how hard I fought to vanquish the demon of broken English.
Again Love,
Yukiko
You were laughing very hard on the train platform at Yokosuka station as I told you stories from the cruise. You clutched my arm and squeezed it tight. ‘My plan is working,’ you said. ‘You met me when you are a boy. Now you are becoming a man. I am responsible for that. I am so happy.’ If there is one image of your face that has persisted over the years it is the way you looked at that moment. The way you looked at me remains – the look a woman of the world gives a man in his youth that can never be repeated again.
We were waiting for the train to Hayama, a small resort town with a beach south-east of Kamakura. You had reserved rooms there.
‘Yes, I am a wicked woman,’ you said, with a sly smile, when I looked embarrassed. ‘But don’t worry. We will read books and write poetry all night because we cannot be lovers.’
You were chuckling. I was even more embarrassed.
‘Do you know that many hundreds of years ago at the court, there were always beautiful women reading books and keeping diaries and writing poetry? Love affairs often began when a gentleman saw beauty in a woman’s calligraphy before he even saw her face. In the diary of the aristocratic woman Shikibu Izumi, there is a poem. I can remember this poem. Yes, here it is in my notebook. Please listen carefully.
‘Thinking of the world
Sleeves wet with tears are my lovers
Serenely dreaming sweet dreams:
There is no night for that.’<
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I remember many stories you linked to your recitation of verse, Yuki. Sometimes I wondered if you had been a schoolteacher at some point in your life. I would listen closely, very closely, because these tales often were magical and you delighted in my delight as I listened. You created a hush of silence by putting your fingertip on my lips. And then you told me that many of these women were locked away with nothing else to do but think and imagine a world outside those great court walls and castles. Lady Murasaki, for example, wrote the world’s first novel, the first psychological novel, the first modern novel: Genji monogatari [The Tale of Genji], an esteemed classic about love and intrigue familiar to Westerners doing Japanese studies. Also, you said that a noblewoman, Shōnagon Sei, wrote Makura no sōshi hyoshaku [The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon], a journal packed with poetry, gossip, observations about court life, and lists of things to do. Both books were first published almost exactly one thousand years ago. Here is the brief passage from the Pillow Book that has always made me laugh, even as it did the first time we discussed it, Yukiko, when you behaved, in a fit of giggles and tickles, as if you had written it yourself:
It is important that a lover should know how to make his departure. To begin with, he ought not to be too ready to get up, but should require a little coaxing: ‘Come, it is past daybreak. You don’t want to be found here’ . . . and so on. One likes him, too, to behave in such a way that one is sure he is unhappy at going and would stay longer if he possibly could. He should not pull on his trousers the moment he is up, but should first of all come close to one’s ear and in a whisper finish off whatever was left half-said in the course of the night . . . Then he should raise the shutters, and both lovers should go out together at the double-doors, while he tells her how much he dreads the day that is before him and longs for the approach of night. Then, after he has slipped away, she can stand gazing after him, with charming recollections of those last moments.
‘I take books like those when I travel by train so I can also be transported back to those lovely times as well as to my destination,’ you said, slipping that big fat notebook full of pillow-style notations into your purse. ‘Those great women were strong. Sei Shōnagon was a court official. Many of these women writers carried swords. They knew how to use them . . . like me. That is one new secret about me, Paul-san. I have a sharp sword. I can fight. I have fought. I am a fighter . . . Do you like my use of tenses?’
I was listening to you like a tall, thin fool. I think you sensed that I felt deeply inadequate. I felt as if I were a tightrope walker trying to get from one side of a cultural chasm to the other. So to help steady me – maybe even to make me laugh – you said, ‘But what else do you think these women from ancient times were doing? They were WAITING. They were waiting for their lord to call them to his chamber. So patient are Japanese women. Always WAITING! Waiting women wrote so many great poems and books because they were thinking and thinking while they were waiting and the men were fighting. Silly men!’ Yes, it was the women who were the writers, you said, but they were also the concubines and mistresses and playthings of the highest calibre for those men.
You shivered. You had apparently just remembered something.
‘I . . . am . . . a . . . ghost,’ you said, very carefully and slowly, making me wobble over the chasm again. ‘At one time in my life I . . .’ But you did not complete the thought.
It was just after nine in the morning. You told me this was the beginning, according to the Chinese zodiac, of the hour of the serpent, so named because it is when the sun warms the earth and snakes slither forth. My British brain was declining to comprehend, even though my spirit was willing. How could I accept ‘hours’ that were two hours long and were named after animals? I was born in the late afternoon hour of the monkey and therefore I would always be irreverent and mischievous, you told me. ‘Take a look at yourself, sailor boy,’ you said. ‘Maybe then you will understand that there are truths even in ancient things.’
We were waiting. We were talking. We were laughing. The train, which had come down from Tokyo, rattled and whirred to a halt. A loudspeaker was announcing the identity of the station. This happens every day, all across Japan. If I close my eyes I can remember, ‘Yoh-kooo-skah! Yoh-kooo-skah! Yoh-kooo-skah!’
Sleepy people rubbing their eyes tumbled out of the train into the daylight. Some of them were drunk or looked drunk or looked as if they had hangovers. I felt your hand grip me even tighter.
One of the passengers getting off the train was a heavyset man in his early forties with very short hair. He was wearing an undershirt with sleeves, a kind of heavy tan woollen belly warmer round his middle, and grey slacks cut tight round the ankles. On his bare feet were stiff zori sandals. He stood in front of us, his legs apart and rooted to the ground. There was no expression on his face at first. He looked at you. He looked at me. He looked at you again. And then he reached out and seized hold of your shoulder with a grip so powerful that he pulled you off balance. This was so unexpected I was frozen in place. He began dragging you to one of the exits. You looked at me with an expression I had not seen on your face before. It was an expression of complete hopelessness and submission. Passengers began running. I started to move towards him, and he growled at me like a bear, swung his other arm out towards me, and began saying something to me in the crude language of the streets – the language, in fact, of the yakuza, the violent gangsters whose code of honour governed murder, drug trafficking, black marketeering, gambling, smuggling, running nightclubs and massage parlours, pornography, and prostitution, in addition to making lavish ‘donations’ to corrupt politicians.
I know about the yakuza now. But I did not know about them in 1959. To me, this snarling character, who had grabbed you as if you were a runaway, was an unknown force of evil. I followed for a while. He never took his eyes off me. I had no idea what was happening.
‘Yuki! Yuki!’ I shouted. I had a bad case of the jitters. I could barely speak.
‘No,’ you cried. ‘No! Go away! Go away!’
But even then I did not believe you wanted me to go away. I made another move. He growled again, louder. Even the uniformed station workers were scattering. He let out another stream of threats, or obscenities, or maybe even something worse. You screamed. You screamed again. Your shoes fell off.
I actually tripped over myself, sprawled on the concrete surface of the station platform, and skinned both knees.
Out of nowhere, just as suddenly as the gangster had appeared, came the same police detective who two months earlier had investigated your suicide attempt and who had told me, like a father talking to his son, to leave and go back to the ship. He was wearing the same trench coat and black beret he wore when he came into that shabby hotel room where you were stretched out on the floor, blood everywhere. He skidded across the platform and wrenched the man’s hand from your shoulder. They spun round and round in circles – his hands round the man’s neck and the man’s hands round his neck – until both men stood panting and shaking and cursing, facing each other. You leaned against the wall, crying and sobbing. Some station hands came up to help the cop. Out came a pair of handcuffs. The growls continued. I was convinced the man was telling me he would kill me if he ever saw me again.
‘You!’ the cop said loudly to me. ‘You!’
You were too badly bruised and shaken to go to the beach. My confidence and sense of well-being were totally upended. This time I had not come to the rescue. I was no hero. I had a glimpse of the consequences of yet another of your secrets. I got a taxi, and took you to the foot of the hill where you lived. I felt that the friendship with you was suddenly over. You waved me away as you started climbing the hill. You did not even look back at me.
But then, halfway up the steps to your house, you stopped, and in a small voice said, ‘Come back tomorrow. I will explain. I told you I was a very bad woman, but you were too young to know I was telling you the truth.’
7
Spider Woman
I remain in a state of surprise, and this leads to heightened interest and hence perception. Like a child with a puzzle, I am forever putting pieces together and saying: ‘Of course!’
DONALD RICHIE, FROM THE JAPAN JOURNALS, 1947–2004
Young men are likely to be attracted to the ripe beauty of women older than themselves.
TANIZAKI JUNICHIRŌ, FROM ‘PORTRAIT OF SHUNKIN’, SEVEN JAPANESE TALES
I could hear your voice above me on the hill. You did not sound like a little bird in a tree. You were rehearsing something.
‘Dayne-jerrr-oooos! No, no, no! Abunai!
‘Dayne-jerrr-oooos! Nooooooo. Abunai! . . . Yes! . . . Abunai!
‘Day-uhhhhn-jerrr-oooos!
‘I hate English,’ you said angrily, after you became aware that I was there. ‘I hate it. It is a stupid language. By the time you shout “dayne-jerrr-oooos” you are dead. Abunai is a wonderful Japanese word. Abunai. It is quick. Like danger. It is like ripping a page from a book when you shout, ABUNAI!’
It was the morning of the day after the incident at the train station. It was the day after the danger. You were outside your room, sitting on a ledge in the bright sun. Your black eyes looked deep violet. You looked devious. You looked different. You looked like a showgirl. Your hair was tied up behind your head in a ponytail. You were wearing a brand-new pale blue cotton dress with a flared skirt over pale blue high heels. You leaned back and put your feet up on a rock. Your lipstick was thick and scarlet. You wore red plastic earrings shaped like hearts and a red plastic necklace. You looked almost like a teenager, and I, after climbing the hill, was wheezing like an old man.
Please Enjoy Your Happiness Page 7