Please Enjoy Your Happiness

by Paul Brinkley-Rogers

  ‘Oh, no,’ you said. ‘In this story – Rashomon – I have read that no one knows who did what to whom. A man is killed. A woman is raped. There are four witnesses. They all tell a different story. But you never really know who did what to whom. Do you understand?’

  You so delighted in saying the word whom. ‘No American ever says that word,’ you exclaimed. ‘That is why I love to say it. I say it at the White Rose too, you know – “To whom should I bring this beer?”’ You giggled. ‘Sailor boys always treat me with respect after that, you know! I can wear a very sexy dress but no sailor is going to pinch the bottom of a woman who says “whom”.’

  My face turned scarlet.

  Number one, I could not imagine anyone ever pinching your ‘bottom’. That was the truth, believe me.

  Number two, I did not even know you had a ‘bottom’. You had a face and eyes and lips, a long neck, and small narrow hands with enamelled fingernails. You wore lipstick the colour of flames. Your perfume was still a mystery; ‘Ancient China’, you once called it. I was vaguely aware of your legs and your back. That was it. After all, I was still a virgin.

  ‘So to whom should I ascribe this film?’ I asked. You giggled again.

  ‘Oh . . . The director is a great man. Great in Japan. But not great in America, I am soooo sure. Kurosawa Akira. A very great man. Japanese, of course!’

  ‘I see,’ I said, not knowing that Rashomon, released in 1950, won first prize at the Venice Film Festival for the ‘unknown’ Kurosawa, or that the film afterwards received international acclaim (though maybe not so much in the United States, where it may have flickered briefly at a few art houses and college campuses). So I sat back, listened to mice foraging for titbits, squirmed in the seat a little after one mouse bumped my shoe, and waited to see a film that no one could understand. The understanding factor, of course, was made even more Byzantine in my case because there would be no subtitles – just you occasionally whispering guidance in my ear while my brain was short-circuiting as it might if this theatre had been on Venus and this film made by aliens.

  Rashomon burst onto the screen in naked black and white with shimmering silver shadows and one thousand shades of grey. There was constant motion in the leaves and branches of the forest where the murder and the rape occur. The sun’s rays stabbed at the unfolding scene and blinded the protagonists. Drums were beating. I could smell the mildewed interior of the theatre. I could also smell the rotting ferns and leaves on the screen, the sweat of the rapist and his victim, the stale scent of tears, and even the odours of despair, exultation, and fear. But who was telling the truth? Who had really murdered whom? Which of the four witnesses to the crime were giving accurate descriptions? Were they describing reality as they saw it, or did they have ulterior motives? And how could the murdered man – the husband of the woman raped by the bandit – speak at a court hearing if he was dead?

  I staggered out into a fast-fading sunset, intoxicated. I could smell rain advancing from the sea. ‘You were right, Yuki. You were right!’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ you said, poking my chest with your finger. ‘Do you feel that?’ you asked, as if you had stabbed me with a knife. ‘That was a tanto with a very sharp point. I have returned you to reality!’

  We made our way to the Mozart coffee shop through the late-afternoon sidewalk crowd of people going back home after work. There were a lot of haggard faces. Those were hard days. But everyone, good and bad and those who were a mixture of both but did not know it, had a purpose in life. The men in their white shirts and suits had endured yet another day at an office and they longed to swap that straitjacket for a yukata. The women in straight skirts below their knees, simple blouses, and flat-heeled shoes were coming home to their babies and husbands, exhausted from the office too. The workmen in hard hats and oil- and rust-stained tough cotton pants and work shirts were walking in groups, headed to their favourite sake bars, where the mamasan could soothe their pain with sweet talk and professionally perfected flirtation. There were bar girls in heavy make-up, too, headed in the opposite direction, towards the garish lights of the Honcho entertainment district, to which sailors were just arriving. It was a living.

  Bar owners were putting out signs such as, ‘Ugly Girls. Lousy Beer. Rotten Music’ and ‘Special Stinko Express Night Train’. One carefully painted sign on a folding easel read, ‘The following practices will not be condoned by this establishment . . . picking nose at table, scratching nuts with swizzle stick, indiscreet petting, indiscriminate goosing, failure to button pants, hunting female navels, taking off pants, loud farting, biting hostess tit, wiping ass on curtain, screwing hostess out of turn . . . Failure to comply will result in a fine of 500 yen ($1.40) to be presented to the manager.’ You detested these signs and disapproved of me copying them into my notebook. ‘Gangsters write those signs,’ you exclaimed. Bar owners were also posting in their windows the bow numbers of the destroyers, cruisers, oilers, supply ships, and the occasional aircraft carrier, as if the bar were reserved exclusively for those crews.

  Shangri-La’s number was CVA 38. What did CVA 38 mean? In military-ese: Carrier, Attack, hull number 38. I never knew what the letter V stood for. They never told us. V for valour? V for victory? V for vicious? It was as much a mystery to me as the name of the ship itself, Shangri-La, which came from a 1934 British novel, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, and not from an American battle or a president or some famous warship from the Yankee past. Shangri-La was the novel’s mythological, permanently happy land of virtually immortal sages lost in time, somewhere in Tibet. This ship was an enigma to me, but not to you, Yuki. ‘Oh, yes,’ you said. ‘Yes! Shang-ri-ra. Shang-ri-ra! Oh, yes. Sound like a Korean name, or a Chinese name. But never mind. Shang-ri-ra is a very nice name. So nice for a big ugly ship with too many bombs.’

  Many years later I discovered that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had claimed that the famous Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, launched in the tightest secrecy in April 1942 from the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet, had originated from ‘Shangri-La’. The audacity of the raid – it was the first time American bombs were dropped on the Japanese homeland and was just months after the attack on Pearl Harbor – stunned Tokyo and boosted American morale. Roosevelt later named his retreat in Maryland Shangri-La (now Camp David). Today, hucksters have seized upon the name: for example, Zhongdian, a remote mountain region in south-western China, has been renamed Xianggelila, in hope of luring gullible tourist dollars.

  We pushed open the door to the Mozart just before the heavy rain came down. But we were still wet. I was in my illegal civvies. I shook myself, spraying water as if I were a dog. You wore your trench coat, buttoned up to just below your chin. The manager stepped up to help you remove the coat. You were telling him we had just seen Rashomon. He was nodding in excitement to everything you said.

  ‘See,’ you said proudly. ‘He too knows nothing. He doesn’t know the meaning of that film. Do you know why? I will tell you. It is art – like a modern sculpture, or a modern painting. People are always saying “What does that mean?” It means what the artist – the creator – meant it to mean, and it is up to us to enjoy the pleasure of discussing that. For every single mystery of art there are ten thousand opinions, most of them worth hearing. Isn’t that wonderful?’

  You outlined the film to me and gave me your thoughts. It wasn’t easy for you. But I understood what you were saying. Your English was sometimes limited, but you spoke with such enthusiasm and force that my mind lapped up everything you said as if I had a terrible thirst. ‘There,’ you said suddenly. ‘Now I have given you a complete picture. Your job is to think about it. Please remember that there is no truth in our lives. Many things happen. You may never know why. You may be in love, but you don’t know why. There is no answer. No truth. Nothing! For example, there is me. There is you. Your eyes show you things that I will never know. There will be things you will not be able to define, like love. For me, love is a kind of surrender. It is like the interior o
f a nunnery at night. Think about what I said . . . When I see you again, I expect you to be enlightened.’

  Enlightened, I thought? Where did you get that word?

  But then I remembered that at your house you showed me a small stone figure of the Buddhist deity Jizo, which you said nourishes the souls of dead children while simultaneously comforting their mourning parents. Your Manshu Jizo [Manchurian Jizo], you said, represented the dead child of a parent born in Manchuria, as well as the sorrow of that child’s parent.

  ‘This is my Manshu Jizo,’ you said. ‘This is for my daughter. She died but her spirit lives with me.’ You pointed to the black night sky and to the myriad of stars. ‘With this Jizo we will always be connected.’ I didn’t know whether you were talking about your daughter or me. ‘How do you call that when you suddenly understand something?’ you asked.

  ‘Enlightenment,’ I said. ‘Yes, enlightenment.’

  ‘Oh . . . thank you. Thank you! Enlightenment is so beautiful. Enlightenment! Light! Shining a light so that you can see. Enlightenment is such a pleasure. I try to have enlightenment every day. How about you, Paul-san? Do you like that kind of pleasure too?’

  It is a tragedy, I think, that most Westerners and probably most Japanese have not seen the films you took me to that summer. In the past three months I have bought more than thirty DVDs, thinking I would be able to identify the films we saw. Some of my purchases were chanbara – films about samurai with slashing swords. I realized quickly that those were not on your list. But every now and then, I would pop a disk into the player, watch for ten or fifteen minutes, and then with a flush of excitement say, ‘Yes. I know I have seen that before.’ Every time that happened, I was swept up in a flood of nostalgia. The scenes would fade and dissolve, fade and dissolve, but as that happened my memory would come alive with your comments, your explanations, your unyielding efforts to have me understand these classic films with no subtitles. Of course, the DVDs I have been ordering do have English subtitles. So I have two layers of understanding: the Kaji Yukiko version, which enables me to remember your voice and how pretty you looked when you were perplexed, and the official translated version, which, although fine and useful, does not have quite the same charm and insight.

  I am sure that modern Japanese think of these films – if they think of them at all – as hopelessly outdated. We exist in a time of cheap thrills after all. Every year in Japan there are scores of vapid pinku eiga (pink films), which depict women tied up, gang-raped, sodomized, slapped. Those films are now, apparently, a norm. The yearly crop of yakuza films becomes increasingly violent and bloody as audiences demand more gangster gore. It is just as bad in the United States. Almost every Hollywood film features high-speed pursuits, crashes, explosions, vampires, zombies, and romance so saccharine, so stupid, and so unappealingly sexual that I sometimes wonder whether the kind of romance of two minds we had is even possible any more.

  THE KAJI YUKI LIST, 1959

  Rashomon, 1950, Kurosawa Akira

  Nihon no higeki [A Japanese Tragedy], 1953, Kinoshita Keisuke

  Bangiku [Late Chrysanthemums], 1954, Naruse Mikio

  Ukigumo [Floating Clouds], 1955, Naruse Mikio

  Akasen chitai [Street of Shame], 1956, Mizoguchi Kenji

  Yoru no onnatachi [Women of the Night], 1948, Mizoguchi Kenji

  Kurutta kajitsu [Crazed Fruit], 1956, Nakahira Kō

  Himeyuri no tō [Tower of Lilies], 1953, Imai Tadashi

  Ningen no joken I–III [The Human Condition: No Greater Love, the first film of three], 1959, Kobayashi Masaki 6

  We said a quick goodbye outside the Mozart. This was not the time to discuss your boyfriend, or the detective, or how you would deal with a threat. It was my impression that you were resigned to handling that problem alone. You had not shown any new alarm. You had not laid out a plan of action. Instead, in a sudden change of mood, you appeared to be focused on the fact that I would soon be gone again. Early the next morning, the Shangri-La would steam slowly out of the harbour, round the headland, and head south by south-west again for two weeks, to the Taiwan Strait and to Hong Kong once more. We sailors would line up on the deck in our pure white uniforms and gaze back through the cold morning mist at Yokosuka. Many of us were convinced we were watched by hundreds of pairs of womanly eyes. The idea of romance dies hard on a ship made for war.

  The rain had stopped.

  You hid in the shadows of the alley and would not let go of my hand.

  It was cold. There was a wind. I tried to hug you one last time, but you pulled back and shook your head. You seemed to be smaller. It was as if you had shrunk by a foot. It was as if your verve for life was spilling out onto the ground.

  You pulled the belt of the trench coat very tight round your waist. I could not see your face. ‘Go now,’ you said. ‘Do not forget.’

  13

  The Most Beautiful

  I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for a study of truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things (which is the chief point), and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose, and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admits what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture, so I thought my nature had a kind of familiarity and relation with truth.

  FRANCIS BACON, FROM ON THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE, 1603

  It was 24 July, the day after my twentieth birthday and the day after the Shangri-La left Yokosuka and headed into an approaching typhoon. I could see the storm advancing across a violent sea of bottle green. With every hour the gale intensified. The wind sounded as if it were a chorus of scalded devils. Black clouds swarmed above us, and the rain slashed down through the air in ice-cold squalls.

  I went below deck to get shelter. I took the seat in front of my desk in the cramped News Horizon office. Warnings came over the intercom to tie down aircraft and machinery, and I wanted to make sure the large typewriter there was firmly secured. The ship was groaning and grinding, and every now and then there would be a huge thud and then a shudder as a giant wave crashed over the bow.

  Red Downs and Jim Fowler were quizzing me about my friendship with you, Yuki. I was trying to maintain a low profile, because so many things had been happening to me that were confusing and threatening. I had not announced I was having a birthday. I did not even tell you on which day it would occur because it did not seem to me to have any significance at all in a summer during which typhoons of another kind pushed me to the limits of understanding.

  Jim, who had a gorgeous black-eyed girlfriend named Connie back in Kansas, whose eight-by-ten-inch photo stood watch over him on his desk, did not probe too hard. He liked you. He liked women. Sometimes I would catch him whispering things to Connie’s photograph. He often sat in the White Rose to watch you talking, a smile on his pale Midwestern face.

  One day, he told me after looking at you that he was ‘entranced’. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  He shook his head in disbelief. ‘You, of all people, should know what I mean. If you don’t know, maybe it is because you haven’t slept with a girl before . . . have you?’

  Red could not believe that you and I had not even kissed. He could not understand why, if you and I were close, there was no sex and no one was attempting seduction. If I had tried to tell him about the effect on me of a single bead of sweat running down your neck, he would have laughed in my face. ‘You ever been with a girl before?’ he asked aggressively in his deep Mississippi drawl. ‘What are you doing when you go ashore? Why are you even in the navy? You got that fine woman back in Yokosuka writing you that she loves you. How did you get a woman to do that, if you haven’t slept with her? I just don’t get it. You want me to show you how to chat up a woman – you know, kissing, squeezing, hugging – until she gives it up?’

/>   ‘Gives it up? What do you mean?’

  Red rolled his eyes and laughed. ‘Man,’ he said. ‘In Mississippi that girl would be having my babies!’

  I was too embarrassed to engage in this kind of conversation. I certainly would never have never dared to tell you what Red said. If I gave even a hint of what was going on between us – the drama, the poetry, history lessons, the cops, the boyfriend, the executioner, Commander Crockett – I knew it would circulate like a jet-fuel fire through the ranks of Division X, which included me, Red, and Jim, and the guys who worked in the print shop, in photography, and in the administrative ranks. If they knew I was still a virgin, and that I was actually not on a mission to cease being a virgin, they would be merciless. They would drag me to the nearest Wan Chai bordello in our next port of call, Hong Kong, to experience an important moment of truth; they would probably bribe a Suzie Wong girl who really knew how to wriggle to do whatever women do in the cribs in the darkened rooms above the bar.

  Red continued to probe. He was enjoying it. I stood my ground. There was no way I was going to answer his constant question – ‘Are you are in love with her?’ – because it was a secret and, to be truthful, like the witnesses to rape and murder in the film Rashomon, I did not know.

  Then we heard a sailor running down the all-steel corridor linking the various offices. Soon other crew members were running. They were banging on the metal. There were some rebel yells. What was this, I wondered? Red stuck his head out through the opening left by the watertight door and asked what was going on. Was it a fire drill? One of the planes had crashed on the deck? There was a fight? A mutiny? What?

  ‘Sweet Jesus and glory be to God,’ Red said. He lifted his hands up to a sky we could not see, in a gesture of salutation.

  ‘A Japanese girl has just won Miss Universe!’