He was killed, you said, after Emperor Hirohito of Japan went on the radio and announced the surrender. He called on all Japanese ‘to bear the unbearable’ ignominy of defeat – the first defeat in their two-thousand-year history.
‘I believed he was killed because he was hated for torturing Chinese people,’ you said. ‘My mother always said his death was an accident. But I have heard that even when they were hacking him to death with kitchen cleavers he refused to show fear. Some witnesses told my mother that he stuck his chest out and took the blows in silence.
‘I am his daughter. This is why I say I am a bad woman.’
There was silence. I hoped your daughter was looking down on you from the stars. I hoped that she would kiss your forehead and call you ‘Mama’. I wish now that I had told you that.
‘Do you know where your father died?’ I asked.
‘In the Garden of Grand Vision, under a huge acacia tree covered with golden flowers.’
I had to pick my way carefully down the steps to reach the street below. A light rain had started that chilled me. I began shivering. I had a long walk ahead of me. I glanced back and I could see that you were standing at the top of the steps, probably much as you had done when Shinoda Yusuke turned up to try to drag you back to Hiroshima. I knew that he had been sent to make you return. I also thought there might be more to this story. Maybe he was in love with you even though he had forced you to work for him as a prostitute. Maybe he was one of those men you would not give yourself to even if he showered you with gold and diamonds. Maybe in some strange way you loved him too. But I knew I would never know.
You had faced him with a sword in your hands. But when you watched me descend the stairs there was no sword. It was just you, standing there as if you were the statue of Kannon, the much-loved Buddhist goddess of mercy, her head bowed modestly, her hands clasped under her breasts, that had once graced Harbin’s Garden of Grand Vision.
I walked quickly through the wet streets towards the lights of the city, the umbrella you gave me over my head. The sound of men laughing drifted out of the small sake bars. I caught glimpses of the warm scenes inside as I passed by. There was room for no more than eight or ten customers at the typical sake bar. Behind the bar was a mamasan, but she was not like the typically older ones who ruled the sailor bars on Honcho with compassion and an iron fist. These mamasans looked as if they were in their mid-twenties. They had done their best to appear glamorous. As I passed I heard several of them call out a loud ‘Irasshai’ [‘Welcome!’], followed by a chorus of giggles and drunken male comments because they realized they had invited an unwanted US Navy sailor to step inside. There was a sudden power outage, and all along this street of bars I heard the hostesses shouting out in English, amid laughter in the dark, ‘Chance! Chance!’ – an invitation to patrons to steal a kiss.
If only I could speak Japanese, I thought. I would step inside and be funny and cheerful. It was my duty to study Japanese, I decided there and then. It was an idea that thrilled me and inspired me to whistle a happy tune that I made up as I went along.
Tomorrow, you told me, I should meet you at the White Rose at exactly eight p.m. That was unusual. You had set a time for something. But you gave me no clues. You set the hour almost as an afterthought, in fact. Yet another subtle version of your ‘happy’ smile passed over your face.
24
We Are Very Sorry
Echoes of my shadow, the memory of you wanders through the alleys of my thoughts.
Your life and mine are two opposite paths, two silhouettes cast by the same poetic light.
Lost in a delicate romance that never begins, a romance unfulfilled in silence conveyed.
Luck sends us on different paths:
I, unseen by you, you unseen by me.
Our lives shall meet on the same horizon to await the glowing light of our own love.
FROM THE SONG ‘SOMBRA DE MIS SOMBRAS’ (‘ECHOES OF MY SHADOWS’), CIRCA 1934, BY THE MEXICAN MUSICAL GENIUS AGUSTÍN LARA9
Nazaka Goro had shocked me with details of the dramatic confrontation at your house. But then he had told me you were free and he had signalled me with a heroic gesture – in the way of an officer in the heat of battle urging his men forward – to climb your steps. You had told me tearfully about the horror of the Garden of Grand Vision in Harbin, but as a result we had never been as close as we were that day, sitting side by side on your mountain. What was that you told me? Oh, yes: ‘We are two lost souls who are now united.’ Violence and sweetness. Sweetness and violence. I would encounter the coupling of those two opposites all my life, through wars and marriages, again and again and again.
As I settled into my rack – which is what we called our bunk beds – deep inside the Shangri-La, I realized that you had at last been able to open the vault where you kept your deepest secrets. I was sure you had never told anyone that story before. My body felt cold. I gripped my pillow for warmth and then I realized that it was wet with tears. Happiness and sadness. Sadness and happiness. I was leaving in two days. It would be impossible to know more.
Fortunately, while lost in those regrets, I was not old enough to realize that the way was now clear for us to become actual lovers. But that could never be. I was still a child, mourning my loss – that I would no longer have you looking over me, urging me with a mix of forcefulness and tenderness to make something of myself in this life that had robbed you of the opportunity to have a love that would last forever. As I now look back through the years, the love I had for you is still as ardent as it was back then. ‘Do you remember me?’ you often asked. ‘Do you remember me?’
In the morning there was a blur of activity on the ship. Sailors had been making last-minute purchases ashore: excellent cameras by Canon and Nikon made in Japan that far outclassed anything manufactured in the USA, early reel-to-reel tape recorders by Akai and Sony, chinaware by Noritake to keep the wife happy, and dolls with downcast eyes dressed as geishas to give to mothers. Jim Fowler had bought a bolt of purple silk for his girlfriend and he had surprised me by presenting me with a copy of Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century by Donald Keene. I still have the book, which is signed by Jim: ‘Let this from the past be a window from which you can see the future.’ Red Downs had been worried because his girlfriend in Jackson had not written him in recent weeks, and then, suddenly, there was a letter from her telling him she had been bitten by a police dog as she was being arrested in a civil rights demonstration. He was a proud man. I had not seen much of Oscar and Gunther but I had heard from tittering girls at the White Rose that those two guys were ‘skivvy honchos’ – a vulgar Japanese expression for Lotharios.
In the afternoon Chaplain Peeples stopped by the News Horizon office to tell me I had passed the written test to become a JO3 – a third-class petty officer with a special rating in journalism – one of the rarest of all categories for enlisted men. There was a woeful look on his face, but he shook my hand.
‘You have been a difficult handful this summer,’ he told me. ‘You have a big responsibility now. I only hope that you behave wisely.’ I thanked him. But it occurred to me at that same moment that promotion from gnat to wasp might enable me to apply for a transfer from the Shangri-La to someplace else, maybe even here in Japan, where there were lots of US Navy facilities needing someone who could spell and write speeches for ambitious commanding officers.
The clock was ticking towards evening. I searched my locker for a farewell gift. I discovered that other than books and a shamisen – an elegant three-stringed instrument with a sound akin to a banjo and a body covered in snakeskin that I had bought from a startled music-store owner on the island of Okinawa – I had not acquired much in those port cities during the seven-month cruise of the USS Shangri-La. I had been too busy writing to you and editing and mailing your letters. I had been preoccupied with long nights in which I attempted to write poetry. I had gone ashore and I had wandered much farther afield in th
ose cities than any other sailor I knew. The ship made five visits to Yokosuka between 15 April and the third week of September. I had spent virtually all my time getting to know you in those forty-four days the ship was anchored in your harbour. I got to the bottom of my locker and I realized that I really did have nothing for you. I tried writing a letter and enclosing some of my poetry, but I could not find the words to express how I felt about you and our friendship. These feelings were too profound. I had not experienced them before and I could not think of anything to say except ‘beautiful’ and ‘thank you’. I was not equipped with the language to dazzle a woman. I was myself, newly twenty, bedazzled.
Night was approaching. Commander Crockett came by the office to ask me whether I was going ashore. I gave him a quick explanation of what had happened at your house and I told him I did not have a gift for you. ‘What young man would have such a gift?’ he asked with a snort. He told me to wait a few minutes, and then he returned with a record that included Lena Horne’s 1941 recording of the Rodgers and Hart song ‘Where or When’.
‘Son,’ he said, ‘I do believe from what I know about your lady friend that she would appreciate this. You are a very fortunate young man.’ And then he gave me one of his big Texas grins and exited quickly, disappearing before I could even give him a salute or say thank you.
I clicked on the power to the record player, and I listened. I listened again, and then again. I realized that all those inexplicable emotions I was feeling at that moment, which were almost halting my beating heart, were happening because, suddenly, I was no longer a boy. I was a man.
It seems we’ve stood and talked like this before
We looked at each other in the same way then
But I can’t remember where or when.
The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore
The smile you are smiling, you were smiling then
But I can’t remember where or when.
Some things that happened for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
And so it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before and loved before,
But who knows where or when?
Some things that happened for the first time
Seem to be happening again . . .
So it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before, and loved before,
But who knows where or when?
There was a notice attached to the door of the White Rose. It read: ‘We Close Tonight 2000 to 2200 Hours. We Are Very Sorry.’
I had a moment of panic. I looked at my wristwatch. It was almost eight o’clock. Twenty hundred hours in navy-speak meant eight p.m., but why was the White Rose closed? I approached the door and then noticed Mama’s nose and eyes peeking through a little sliding hatch, head-high to the average Japanese.
I stuck my nose forward to where it was almost touching Mama’s nose, and she let out a series of giggles. I heard her voice. ‘Mr Anthony Perkins is here.’ She unlocked the door and slowly pulled it open. She was dressed in her customary white apron and baggy pants and sandals but she had newly permed her hair and she did something she had never done before: She hugged me and kissed me on the cheek.
I heard the excited voices of the hostesses inside the bar.
Suddenly all the lights came on. I could see you waving wildly in the background. Reiko was skipping towards me with her country-girl laugh and her rosy cheeks aflame. Everyone was shouting, ‘Irasshai! Irasshai!’ [‘Welcome! Welcome!’] That scene and that cry now so familiar to me was one of the many reasons I have always had a special place in my heart for things Japanese.
Inside the bar, attached to the pillars, the mirrors, the balconies, the booths, and even around the doorway to the benjo [toilet], someone had hung scores of bright pink balloons, each one of which bore the words ‘Happy. Happy.’ Nowadays, I suppose, balloons like that would have smiley faces.
I especially liked the large, crudely painted silhouette of the Shangri-La hanging over the cash register. Whoever had done the work had painted the ship pink and on the hull of the ship, which everyone knew had a cache of nuclear weapons, had spelled out, in deep red, the word Happiness.
The girls were clapping. And then they joined in a spirited Japanese-language rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, which I realized was more familiar to the Japanese than it was to me, followed by a chorus of affectionate exclamations and smiles so sentimental I had to gulp to keep from bursting into tears. The jukebox was not playing country and western: It was loaded with Japanese pop tunes for dancing. It was slowly dawning on me that this was a goodbye party that you and Mama and Reiko had organized. But for me? Just for me?
I placed myself in front of you and I gave you the record with the cut of ‘Where or When’.
‘Oh, déjà vu!’ you exclaimed. ‘I love that song that you and I never heard together.’
We stared at each other for a long, long time. ‘Yuki,’ I said. ‘When I am gone and you listen to that song, remember me.’
There were tears in your eyes, but you did not weep. The tears made your eyes flash. You were more ron-pari than ever before. You were wearing a tight black dress with a pattern of small sequins that glittered as your body slowly moved to the rhythm of the music. Long black hair. Eyes the colour of coal. Scarlet lipstick. Black high heels. I was dressed in my white US Navy uniform, which emphasized the thinness of my frame and my youth. You took me by the hand and led me to the dance floor while everyone clapped. You nestled your head into my chest as we slow danced to enka blues that as far as I was concerned had been written especially for sweetheart moments like this.
Reiko watched, a hand clutching her heart. There were tears – when I think back now, they were happy tears – trickling down her cheeks. Mama was blowing her nose, and several of the hostesses ran to her to give comfort. The dancing, the applause, the weeping and sobbing: all of it continued until Reiko came forward to lead you and me to one of the booths.
We sat there, a spotlight over our heads, our bodies touching.
You reached out, straightened the little finger of my right hand as if doing that was the most normal thing in the world, and without offering an explanation you tied a length of red string to that finger before connecting the other end to the little finger of your left hand.
The girls, even gayer now, were dancing with each other. It seemed as if we had exchanged only a couple of dozen words since the evening began. And then you untied the string and shook my hand, smiling in a way that I had never seen before, as if tears would give you comfort but smiles would break your heart. You shot a quick look at me and then you faded into the background, slowly moving from one table to another until shadows hid you from me.
It took me several minutes to realize that you had not gone to get drinks. You had gone. You were completely gone and I had not had a chance to say goodbye. I leaped up in alarm and started for the door, but Reiko blocked my path.
‘Mr Paul,’ she said. ‘Sit down with me, please. Yuki-chan gave me this letter. It is for you. She said it is only for you. She told me to tell you, “Be happy.”’
Dear Paul,
Now that you are almost gone like a shadow disappearing from my life, it is appropriate for me to say I love you. I am writing this letter inside my house. It is the night before the party. It is dark in my room. I have been watching a beam of moonlight retreating slowly, so slowly from my bed to the window. At the moment that moon ray vanished I thought, I love you. There will be no other.
I am not afraid to send you my love, sailor boy, knowing that there will be silence. I know that you will not come back. You will not reply and I am so happy. I am proud to be telling you this, beautiful young man, because you have grown up. You loved me too, I think. It is true, isn’t it? You don’t have to tell me. I know it is true. How wonderful and precious that feeling is for me to know that I can love again.
You have seen and heard many things this summer. Tho
se were things that most people cannot imagine. Now you will live a long and adult life. You see clearly. Your mind is like a sharp sword. You have strong opinions. You have good judgment. Because you know what a lie is, you know how to use truth.
When you are old you can look back through all the events this summer when you helped me with your innocence to be free. Remember that you so kindly gave me the embrace of a lifetime? That embrace will sustain me until I die. That one strong embrace so gentle and yet so strong that made me a happy woman again instead of a desperate and unhappy creature with no one to love. I will remember you.
Forgive me for disappearing, Paul-san. One day I believe you will understand why I shook your hand before I vanished. I hope you can understand this very bad written letter. I worked many hours with my dictionary. I made many cups of tea. What I want to say is that we are brother and sister. We are like mother and son. We are like man and woman bound together by their love and charity. We are from opposite ends of the world, but we will be together for eternity even in this existence where love affairs amount to nothing more than frost on the ground in late spring.
A Chinese poet from the T’ang Dynasty once told his beloved when he was losing her: “Promise that at the end of every summer when I look up at the inexhaustible night and watch the seasons change, you will be a star looking down at me . . . and if I die before you die, I will wait for you in Paradise.”
Loving You Forever,
Yukiko
Many, many years later (fifty-four years later, in fact), I finally understood. When I typed the words ‘red string’ into my computer’s Web browser, a virtual meteor shot across the sky as I looked at what Wikipedia had to say.
The red string of fate, also referred to as the red thread of destiny, red thread of fate, and other variants, is an East Asian belief originating from Chinese legend and is also used in Japanese legend. According to this myth, the gods tie a red cord around the ankles of those that are to meet one another in a certain situation or help each other in a certain way. Often, in Japanese culture, it is thought to be tied around the little finger. According to Chinese legend, the deity in charge of ‘the red thread’ is believed to be Yuè Xià Lăo (, often abbreviated to ‘Yuèlăo’ []), the old lunar matchmaker god who is also in charge of marriages.
Please Enjoy Your Happiness Page 25