His brown eyes were somehow bigger. He had a grin that went from ear to ear.
I grabbed Jim’s arm. Red grabbed me. We jumped up and down, without really knowing why. You would have liked seeing us enjoying our happiness, Yuki-chan.
Then the squawk box on the captain’s bridge came to life. ‘Now hear this! Now hear this!’ someone announced. Then a high-pitched boatswain’s whistle blew, which was usual when there was an important announcement such as, ‘Comnavforjapan departing’ (the admiral commanding US naval forces in Japan leaving the ship).
‘Attention! Attention!’ an official voice barked. To me, it was a familiar bark. ‘We have just been advised that a young woman from Tokyo, Akiko Kojima, was selected over four other finalists, including Miss USA and Miss Brazil and Miss England and Miss Norway, for the Miss Universe title in Long Beach, California.’
There was a pause, and a cough.
The voice resumed. ‘According to press reports, when asked what she wanted to do with her life, Miss Kojima said, “I want to be a lovely wife.”’ There was another pause and another cough. ‘So, if we can get this cruise to Hong Kong out of the way and keep everything shipshape and keep our noses clean, maybe . . . maybe . . . one of you goddamn swab jockeys [vernacular for “sailor”] can get lucky when we return to Japan and make Miss Kojima your blushing bride.’ Silence. Cough. Cough.
We three friends shot glances at each other. I mouthed the name ‘Crockett’.
Cheering erupted up and down the corridor. It occurred to me that all this joy indicated that many members of the crew were in love. Their hearts had been stolen, somewhere, by someone, some sweetheart, back in Yokosuka. I had a sweetheart too, and what a sweetheart! No one was as special as Yuki. I wanted to jump up and down as well, but I was cautious. Were you my girlfriend? Well, not exactly. Had you stolen my heart? How wild and dramatic that sounded. But there was no doubt that the selection of Kojima Akiko was vindication to those among the crew who had an ‘only’ (a girlfriend ashore); it meant they had made a good choice, and maybe even their mothers would approve now if they brought a Japanese bride back home. I knew, however, that my mother, who cherished her complete set of cruel and dark novels by Charles Dickens bound in green and gilt gold, would never approve. I had written to tell her, happily, that I had made an ‘important’ woman friend in Yokosuka, and she had written me back quickly, and curtly, to tell me that I was being an ‘idiot’. Yes, an idiot. At least she did not call me a gnat!
The jubilation was continuing aboard ship. Some men began comparing love letters. Those lucky enough to get a red lipstick kiss on the paper flashed that around in triumph. We were all about eighteen to twenty years old. Evidently, we had all been severely bitten by spiders.
I wondered if there was equal excitement in Yokosuka. I imagined a scene in Honcho with hundreds of bar hostesses in their cocktail gowns running out onto the streets in a near riot. And you, you . . . you would be reading a book, no doubt. Maybe you were reading the Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, which I had purchased across the street from the White Rose in Japanese translation, spending an entire week’s salary, because you had told me that elements of your most intimate dreams could be found in Rilke’s verse. For example:
THE COURTESAN
The sun of Venice will prepare
with gracious alchemy gold in my hair:
a final triumph. And my slender brows
resemble bridges – can you not see how
they span the silent danger of my eyes
which cannily with the canals arrange
a secret commerce so the sea may rise
in them and ebb and change?
Who sees me once is envious of my hound,
on which betimes in a distrait caress
my hand (which never charred to any passion),
invulnerable and richly jewelled, rests.
And youths, the hopes of ancient noble houses,
are ruined on my mouth, as if by poison.
Yes, you would be reading, I thought. If there was a celebration you would be shaking your head dismissively and telling Reiko-chan that she would be foolish to believe that Japanese girls were only now being looked at as the most desirable women on earth. ‘Of course we are,’ I knew you would be saying. ‘I already knew that! Japanese women are the best. But we should be appreciated for our minds and our loyalty and dedication, Reiko, and not for our bodies and our teeth, as if we were horses.’
The typhoon was mostly gone when I woke up, groggy, in my bunk, from an intermittently sleepless night. I showered and got into my dungarees and had a breakfast of stale scrambled eggs, cold French toast, and maple syrup that had the consistency of carpenter’s glue. This came with obligatory slabs of Dole pineapple that were a startlingly bright yellow. I also had two cups of scalding hot coffee that did nothing at all to wake me up, unlike those tiny shots of super-sweet espresso served with such gusto by Mr Ito at the Mozart café.
I headed straight for the office. I wanted to see if anyone had been able to beg, borrow, or steal a photograph of Kojima Akiko.
Chaplain Peeples was sitting on my chair with his feet up on my desk, scanning the several copies of China Reconstructs – the monthly picture magazine published in Peking by America’s ‘Red Chinese enemies’ – I had acquired the last time we were in Hong Kong.
He put his left hand up in the air, with his index finger pointed straight up. His gesture stopped me in my tracks.
‘To tell you the truth, Rogers,’ he said, ‘I am not convinced that you are an appropriate person to be working for the News Horizon. I found this photograph of Akiko Kojima on your desk this morning. I hope you are not planning to use it in the next issue of the newspaper.’ He continued, clearly alarmed, ‘I am going to have to report that you are reading Communist publications. We don’t do that in the United States. SEAMAN ROGERS!’ he shouted, his voice suddenly loud. ‘I know you are English – or is it British? But that is not an excuse.’
‘An excuse?’ I asked politely, but insincerely.
‘Yes, England – Britain – is full of Communists. Marxists. Socialists. Free-thinkers. Radicals. Freemasons. Spiritualists. Gypsies. Fortune-tellers. Homosexuals. Fakirs. Feminists. Fu Manchu. Eccentrics too, I suppose. They are all really bad, unfortunate people who want to destroy our way of life. Do you want to destroy the American way of life, Rogers?’
I have often wondered how Chaplain Peeples got that way. I never really made an attempt to probe further during that summer because he was a senior officer and I was nothing, although he did take a peevish interest in me. Whenever he and I talked, he was angry at me, or upset, or anxious, or offended, and he always laced his words with a strange kind of venom. I could never decide whether this was the way he really was, and he really believed what he was declaring, or whether he was doing this for effect. If it was all play-acting, it did not make me falter. Commander Crockett was different. He too had taken an interest in me. The only time he addressed me was when he was upset also. I was not accustomed then to barrages of four-letter words. But he gave me glimpses of a Texas-size humanity that always caused me to look at him as a hero and a guardian. But Peeples was a living myth, a caricature created by himself and not created, I have always thought, by a merciful God.
‘You have been to England?’ I asked the chaplain, trying hard not to say that with a sneer or smirk.
‘Of course not!’ he said loudly. ‘I am a Baptist!’
‘Oh,’ I said, not knowing what a Baptist was. ‘I see.’
‘Why is this photograph of Miss Japan on your desk?’ Chaplain Peeples demanded.
‘Umm, she is now Miss Universe,’ I said.
‘Are you trying to correct me?’ There was a hint of outrage there. I could sense he was trying to lay a trap. Maybe he would accuse me of insubordination or something devilish like that.
‘Oh no, sir,’ I said respectfully. ‘It is obvious that you know she has been selected by the judges as the most beauti
ful woman in the world.’
There was a silence as cold as a severe frost clamping down on the earth, the kind of frost that froze the surface of the goldfish pond in my Auntie Nancy’s garden back in England every year, leaving the fish under the ice motionless, as their life-support systems closed down to almost zero.
The chaplain picked up the photo of Kojima Akiko. I got a quick glimpse of her – such elegance. He inserted the photo into one of my copies of China Reconstructs – the one with a pretty girl on the cover wearing an olive drab cap with a red star on it and a dazzling smile on her face designed to corrupt young male Americans, no doubt. He rolled up the magazine and tucked it under his arm. He looked back at me with some hostility.
‘Come with me, Rogers,’ he said, as if he had divine power that could move Heaven and Earth. ‘There is something sinister about you, young man.’
I followed him into the officer’s quarters, where there was a lot more mahogany panelling than there was grim grey metal. Two funny fliers I knew passed by. They gave me a thumbs-up. ‘It must be time for prayers,’ one of the fliers remarked. Chaplain Peeples unlocked the door to his office. It was full of toys and boxes of playthings he had been collecting in Hawaii and California to hand out to poor Chinese and Filipino children on behalf of the US Navy under what he called ‘Operation Handclasp’. We often ran photos of the tall, severe Peeples shaking hands with various small Asian gentlemen in suits, who looked both embarrassed and intimidated by the sheer size of Shangri-La generosity, backed up by nuclear weapons.
He told me to sit down on one of several swivel chairs. He went out to the wardroom to order coffee and cookies. I glanced at the objects on the chaplain’s desk. There was an assortment of obviously heavily read pulp novels, each one showing white American women – blondes mostly – partially unclothed, sometimes with a leering man in the background. I knew instinctively that these novels were not written by Marxists, but I decided to save that thought for future discussion. Titles included Hard to Get, Red Bone Woman, The Night and the Naked, The Chiselers, Strip for Violence, and A Matter of Morals. Standing vertically between bronze bookends cast in the image of Abraham Lincoln were smut magazines: Confidential, Rave, Stare, Foto-Rama, Hit Annual, Whisper, Adam, and Eyeful, whose lead story on the cover, which featured a voluptuous brunette some men might call a broad, was ‘Are You Broad Minded?’
There were, in addition, two copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by the British author D. H. Lawrence. That was a novel I had not read. In 1959, in the United States of America, it was a brown-wrapper book, sold from under the counter in shops that specialized in men’s magazines, horse and greyhound racing journals, and stinking cigars rolled in Tampa by Cuban women whose signature finishing touch in the rolling process was rubbing Robustos and Lusitanias against the skin of their inner thighs – or so a tobacconist once told me. Up until 21 July, 1959, two days before my birthday, it had been illegal to even send this book, deemed ‘lustful, lewd, lascivious and prurient’, through the US mail. In other words, the book was obscene, and not ‘art’, until the US Supreme Court ruled that even ‘ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion’ were protected by the First Amendment. Mr Ito had told me about that at the Mozart coffee shop. I have to confess I sorely wanted to slip one of those copies of Lady Chatterley into the pocket of my dungarees, but I figured I was in enough trouble already and that if I was reading something prurient as well as something ‘Communist’, I would be flogged or made a castaway on one of the many small Pacific Ocean islands US Navy vessels used for target practice.
After taking a quick look at the reading material, I sat there, trying to look innocent. I was innocent. I was innocent of, and about, everything. But chaplains, I remembered, do not deal with the innocent. They deal with sinners, the depraved, and the guilty.
Chaplain Peeples re-entered his cabin, whistling merrily. He had a shiny metal hotel tray in his hands upon which sat two pure white mugs of coffee with USN stencilled on the side, a dainty pitcher of milk, a small ceramic bowl of sugar cubes, and two dozen buttery cookies encrusted with sugar particles. I thanked him for the coffee and started sipping. It was not up to Mr Ito’s standards, Yukiko!
‘Well,’ Chaplain Peeples said. He made a motion towards the lurid publications on his desk. ‘Here, you see, is reading material confiscated from frustrated young men who do not understand that this is pornography. Your soul, Rogers, is like a piece of cheese. Obscene publications are like worms that eat holes in that cheese. Masturbation follows. You can imagine what comes next.’
‘No,’ I said, truly shocked. ‘What comes next?’
‘Consorting with loose women . . . prostitutes . . . Japanese girls . . . bar girls.’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said. It was another one of those moments when an older person – a superior officer – was addressing me as if he thought I understood what he was talking about. But I did not understand at all. So I said, ‘Oh, I see,’ and waited for clues.
‘Yes. We will forget for the moment your relationship with a woman in the White Rose bar. I have heard that it is not a proper relationship. That woman also apparently speaks Russian, and she may have an understanding of Hebraic grammar. Where there are Jews there are Marxists. Are you aware of that? Also, you are clearly violating the rules against entering off-limits areas, although I can’t prove it yet.’
Here we go again, I thought. I was close to panic. I did the Zen thing and let an inner voice inside me say ‘saaaaaaa’. I found repose. I stayed silent.
‘You are reading Communist material,’ he continued. ‘You have opened up to brainwash. Clearly, someone has gotten to you . . . upset your balance of mind, and your judgement. That is not good if you are working on the ship’s newspaper. Also, this matter of the photograph of Akiko Kojima. This is not good. We can’t have a photo of a Japanese woman in our newspaper, Rogers. That newspaper is read by our wives and girlfriends back home, not to mention our mothers and all the other wonderful women in the United States.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
But there was no way I was going to allow Chaplain Peeples to prevail.
14
The Tower of Lilies
The manners of the Japanese possess in a very high degree the requisites of true politeness; they are never presuming, officious, nor arrogant; and if they are sometimes bored or impatient in their social intercourse, they possess strong powers of concealment, as no feelings of the kind are ever permitted to become visible . . . And it would certainly appear, that with all our intellectual supremacy, and spiritual enlightenment, we might learn from the unchristianized Japanese the secret of inward happiness and contentment.
LT JAMES D. JOHNSTON, FROM THE CHAPTER ‘MANNERS AND THE JAPANESE’, CHINA AND JAPAN: BEING A NARRATIVE OF THE CRUISE OF THE U.S. STEAM-FRIGATE POWHATAN IN THE YEARS 1857, ’58, ’59, AND ’60
Mr Ito had urged me in the past, when I looked as if I were on the verge of being overwhelmed by events, to adopt a certain aspect of Taoist thought called wu wei. He guessed, I suppose, that wu wei might suit my temperament, even though I was young enough, according to Mr Ito, that I ‘still had the memory of a mother’s love’. He said I needed to toughen up and wise up.
Mr Ito’s English was fragmentary. But he said to me soon after my chance meeting with Detective Nazaka, ‘Something good to remember, Mr Anthony Perkins. If you are pushed, do not push back. Action can also be inaction. Sometimes you win by doing nothing.’
This theory from ancient China, he said, maintains that human beings who live in harmony with all surrounding forces should behave naturally, without artifice. If there is a challenge, such a person will instinctively know when to act. He will not make a conscious decision. He will just do it, and sometimes doing nothing – inaction – is action. Action without effort can also, in effect, be a martial art. Remember the samurai who moves his sword down and steps back, relaxed, right at the moment when his opponent decides to raise his sword and atta
ck with a ‘mighty roar’, Mr Ito advised. ‘Who wins? If you know who wins, and why, you understand wu wei.’
I had mentally typed up this suggestion from Mr Ito and secreted it away in a cabinet of my brain that was never locked. It was filed in the drawer labelled ‘New and Intriguing Ideas’ and placed under the heading ‘Theories to be Tested in Emergencies’.
The discussion with Chaplain Peeples, which now was irritating me as he struck a supercilious pose, was fast becoming an emergency. After trying to determine whether he had knocked me off balance, he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a copy of The Torch of Life: A Key to Sex Harmony, by Dr Frederick M. Rossiter, BS, MD, Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, London, published in the year of my birth, 1939. The dust jacket was midnight blue.
‘There is one thing about Communism and premarital sex,’ Chaplain Peeples said, with a blink and a wink. ‘Good instruction in what it takes to be in love defeats Marxist dogma and running after whores, every time.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, in a state of complete relaxation and inaction. ‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’
He smiled. ‘This is a British publication,’ he said, ‘so it is probably to your liking. I don’t normally give young men this book because it is not American. As you can see, the book starts with poetry, and poetry, even from the Holy Bible, is not something that will grab our attention.’ He had opened it to a passage that went on for seven pages in the front of the book, ‘An Ancient Love Song: The Song of Solomon’. ‘This typeface is much too small for me to read, son,’ he said. It was indeed small. Even I had to squint hard to be able to read:
THE BRIDE: Let him kiss me with the kisses of his lips;
Surely more delicious than wine are thy love favours – your caresses!
Thy renown, like the fragrance of thy own exquisite perfumes, is
Wafted like scent.
Therefore do the maidens love thee.
Because I was furtively employing wu wei strategy I did not question the appropriateness of this gift. I left his office walking backwards, and I gave him a small bow as I nudged the door open, just to be polite, like a Japanese. I was also able to grab one of the pulp novels from a second heap of confiscated books by his door while his back was turned; Morning, Winter, and Night: An Absolutely Frank Novel About the Exquisite Torment of Adolescent Passion (by John Nairne Michaelson), a subject I knew nothing about. The book cover showed a young white male kissing the neck of an Asian woman whose head leaned back in ecstasy.
Please Enjoy Your Happiness Page 14