Please Enjoy Your Happiness

by Paul Brinkley-Rogers

  The two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers, regardless of time, place, or circumstances. This magical cord may stretch or tangle, but never break.

  I know why you never gave me an explanation. It was a goodbye and yet not a goodbye. As far as you were concerned, we would be linked until the end of time.

  Please enjoy your happiness.

  25

  Can You Find It in Your Heart?

  What the finer nature of the Japanese woman is, no man has told. It would be too much like writing of the sweetness of one’s own sister or mother. One must leave it in sacred silence with a prayer to all the gods.

  LAFCADIO HEARN, FROM SOME NEW LETTERS AND WRITINGS10

  It was mid-September 1959. We were back in San Diego. At the dock, ecstatic families were waiting to greet the Shangri-La. There was no one there for me, of course. I was single and uncomplicated, not single and complicated as I am now. Three thousand four hundred and forty-eight of us stood at attention in our navy blues in formation on the vast flight deck led by Davy Crockett and Charlie Peeples. Only the chaplain marched nervously around and around and up and down, searching for someone – his wife, maybe – in the shrieking and leaping crowd of women with kids in tow on the quay far below.

  There had been one more letter from you the day before we arrived. The mail plane flew out from California and touched down on the ship. The aircrew kicked out a dozen canvas mailbags. A few hours later the words ‘Mail call! Mail call!’ came over the intercom and, surprise, there was the letter. It took me a while to summon up the courage to open it. I was still bruised, I suppose, by the abrupt farewell and by my inability to say what I had wanted to say, but which I did not remember now that I was opening your letter.

  Dear Paul,

  How are you? Are you still in the Shangri-La? Are you in America? Maybe someone will let me know. This little bird singing in the tree is half expecting someone to come to the bar to tell her what you are doing and how you are thinking now that you have gone. Are you well? Are you happy? Oh no. I am sounding like an old woman now. Forgive me for writing to you again, but when we parted that last evening we did not say the word “goodbye.”

  And that last time, when we parted, we did shake hands. When our hands touched, my thoughts were saying you were going and yet my heart was hoping that you were not because I did not want to be losing you. I did not dare to cry. Reiko told me I had to be a happy strong woman. How hard that was for me! In films there is always one last incredible embrace. But Mama was a very strict schoolteacher that night and like a good Japanese woman she wanted to make you happy.

  I am really joyful now to say that we had so many happy times enjoying every tiny second of every minute of every long day . . . and now we have such a beautiful relationship built from our memories. Yes, no matter what happens to me, I will always cherish the truth about what we were. My father and mother, my brothers, my dear daughter, have all been telling me in my dreams that we were beautiful together.

  Tonight I listened to my favorite record. I am sure you remember that I sometimes played it for you. It is an old scratchy record which is why I love it so. Since you have gone, I have played it so many times. Billie Holiday sings the song so slowly, no faster than her breathing or her beating heart, I think. That record is from 1944, you know. I was yet a young girl in Manchuria, and you were only 5 years old. But like the memory of you and me, this song will live forever. So, now I will let the record speak.

  I’ll be seeing you

  In every lovely summer’s day,

  In everything that’s light and gay,

  I’ll always think of you that way [. . .]

  You know, sailor boy, I can tell you now that it is not easy to get an experience like we had when life becomes poetry. I know that because I am an old woman who has been knocked down many times. All around me I see unhappy people. But now when I see women cry I think, “Yuki! You are such lucky ugly woman. You are so lucky to find such a nice man whom you could love and who loved you in return.” That is why I need once more to say to you, thank you very much.

  I know one day many years from now, when you see the morning light on the garden of roses you said you want to have, that you will remember me. I have full confidence that we will meet again. I’ll be seeing you in that small café and in all the old familiar places that this heart of mine embraces.

  All my love,

  Yukiko

  I wrote back, bleating like a lamb, but there was no reply.

  Epilogue

  I had been in love with you and I had not fallen out of love. You had stopped writing to me but you lingered, at first a presence, and then a fragrance I sensed in shadows, and then a faint voice carried on winds that crossed the sea. I also was in love with your country in a giddy way, almost as if I was in love with a woman. You had urged me to study Japanese. But how would that be possible? I had been promoted and soon word came through the grapevine that I would probably be transferred to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Michigan to write press releases sent to the hometown newspapers of recruits training at boot camp there. This was supposed to be a choice posting. But as soon as I stepped ashore in San Diego I immediately went to the Pacific Fleet personnel office to plead for a transfer to any navy facility in Japan that might have a job opening for a petty officer with a journalism speciality like me. I spoke to a veteran clerk who had clearly once been bitten by a spider because he never asked me why I wanted that transfer. Instead, a hint of a grin came over his face as if he had just reverted to his youth. ‘Japan,’ he said. ‘Yes, Japan,’ and he said it with such longing that he might as well have been talking about sending me to Shangri-La itself.

  During the week of Christmas, 1959, Yuki, I learned that I would be reassigned to the navy base in Yokosuka. I had beaten the odds, Red Downs said. He invited me to go with him to San Diego’s old College Avenue Baptist Church the following Sunday when the African-American congregation raised its voice in song to give thanks. I did not know the words to the spirituals, but Red did, and he looked at me and said, ‘Let yourself be lifted up!’ We sang ‘Oh Freedom’. ‘Eyes on the Prize’. Black America was rising up and Red would soon be part of it. He was taking a train to Jackson to ask his hero girlfriend to marry him. My trajectory was different. I was joyful. I was dazzled by the prospect of returning to Japan, and who knows what else. In truth, I knew that my time with you was over and I was positive you would wish me to lead a life as a man – to work, to get more promotions, to study, to have adventures, to write poetry, to meet women, to get knocked down and get back up again.

  I went with the Shangri-La when it left San Diego to dock at Bremerton, Washington, a few weeks later for a refit. Before I said my goodbyes, I read several poems I had written for you in coffee shops in Seattle, appearing a couple of times with the late Allen Ginsberg and with Gary Snyder. I read with a new sense of maturity. There was applause. Jazz records were spinning. Several people were reading paperback copies of Kerouac’s On the Road. This was my brief incarnation as a beat and I enjoyed it.

  The ship would be Atlantic- and Mediterranean-based for a few years, but it would never cruise the western Pacific again except as a hulk. She was towed to Taiwan to be cut apart after she was sold for scrap in 1988.

  Early in 1960, a navy plane flew me and forty or so other young fortunates to Japan. I remember that almost everyone was talking about a woman they had met there. But not me, Yukiko. My summer with you was yours and mine alone and how could I possibly describe what had happened when I did not know the answer to that myself. I had taken a few days of leave but I did not tell my mother any more about you and she did not ask, which was good because we would have argued and she would have made me feel as if I had done something wrong. I began resisting the urge – the need – to think about you. But I was keenly aware that I had changed because of the gift of yourself that you gave me. I had your letters too.

  I could have become melancholy, I suppose. I d
id miss you. But I focused all my energy on my new job writing news releases at the admiral’s headquarters in Yokosuka. Kip Cooper, a navy chief petty officer fond of cigars, kept a grip on me as if he was my father and if I stepped out of line I would hear about it. He could be gruff and caring at the same time. Kip liked it that when I began venturing out of the base I took a notebook with me that I was filling with newly learned Japanese words and phrases. I bought a small, primitive, portable reel-to-reel tape recorder which I used to record conversations with Japanese men in sake bars.

  For several weeks I avoided going anywhere near the Mozart café. I bypassed the bars in Honcho. There was something, just something, holding me back. You had slipped through my fingers and that final night at the White Rose had been so special and so perfect that I did not want to do anything to spoil that moment by revisiting it. And then one day I heard that ‘Un Bel Dì’ aria again from Madama Butterfly. It was as if the voice of Maria Callas was the voice of one of Claude Debussy’s Sirens. The aria wafted down an alley where store workers and apartment tenants were putting out their rubbish in small cans and children were noisily playing ken-ken-pa – Japanese hopscotch. I suddenly heard a woman shout, ‘Urusai!’ It was not your voice, Yukiko. But that shout caused me to wheel about and, in an instant, become determined to find you.

  Honcho was different, somehow. This was midday on a Saturday. Not much was happening. The light was harsh. The facades of the nightclubs and bars looked shabby, forsaken, forlorn, garish. The White Rose had closed, although I discovered some months later that it had re-opened in a different location. The door was locked. There was no notice there explaining what had happened. I asked at neighbouring bars for you, for Reiko, for Mama – but nothing. I climbed the 101 steps, but you were not living there. There were no crows in the trees. The paulownia looked forlorn. Your prayers written on neatly folded pure white paper were gone. I spent some frustrating hours with my limited Japanese trying to ask questions. This was the nightmare I experienced in the aftermath of you. That summer of innocence and rain we shared now seemed so remote, almost not real. I searched for Nazaka Goro and discovered that he had been reassigned because of poor health. Mr Ito was still running the Mozart café but he said, regret clouding the usual cordial smile on his face, that he had not seen you for weeks. The sign outside was still there: ‘Please enjoy your happiness.’

  And so you became the woman who occasionally, and then less occasionally, haunted me. We were sharing that beautiful memory you spoke of in your letter and you were happy, happy, happy with that memory. Is that true? You were somewhere, maybe almost within reach. I sometimes had the thought that if I turned such and such a street corner, you would be there, clad in your yukata, clip-clopping along in your wooden geta, with a bag of books slung over your shoulder, and that you would look at me with a strange nod and pass on by without a word. But the premonition was false. Maybe it was wishful thinking. As the weeks went by and the rainy season of midsummer, 1960, came and went, you became less of a presence and maybe even less of a memory.

  I only spent a few months in Yokosuka, Yuki. There was a second promotion and it meant that I would be living as a virtual civilian in Tokyo. Pacific Stars & Stripes, the daily newspaper written and produced by a mixed gang of young military guys and their mentors – a hard-drinking, scrappy, cigarette and liquor-drinking gang of characters who had mostly been in Japan since the start of the US Occupation in 1945 – snapped me up and made me a reporter. I am sure my escapades would have amused you. They were evidence of manhood. There were two bar fights that resulted in reprimands. I was yanked back from Taiwan after being sent there to cover the official visit of Robert F. Kennedy: I wrote that his aggressively driven limousine knocked several Chinese off their bicycles instead of writing about diplomacy. I also was pulled back from the Philippines because the Pacific Stars & Stripes Ford sedan I had parked outside the home of an American missionary couple who put me up overnight was stolen.

  The man you helped create had his share of early loves. Do you remember the sultry singer Matsuo Kazuko? I met her at Club Rikki in Tokyo. I have been playing her records, hearing her voice again and remembering her tobacco kisses flavoured with cognac and how she slapped an astonished gangster’s face in the club when he tried to buy her.

  Koga Yasuko, a shop girl who looked so good in pink angora sweaters, read Romeo and Juliet out loud in English on the subway as a way of flirting with me without embarrassment.

  And then there was Asaoka Michiko, who was really not Japanese but Korean. I called her ‘Michi’. She sang blues in cheap nightclubs reeking of spilt beer and foul cigarettes. One day – after I spent the night with her while a typhoon rattled the shutters in her tiny apartment – she led me proudly to a pro-North Korea rally where everyone was denouncing the United States. She won my admiration that day, and I bought a bottle of sake that we drank later. I told her she was brave and pretty and bold and wonderful, which made her cry because no one had told her that before. I could have so easily fallen in love with her.

  But one day Michi simply disappeared, with no hint and no note and no trace except for a comb on the floor thick with a tangle of her long black hair. That image has remained with me for all these years. It is only recently, after I mentioned the scene to Japanese friends, that I learned that among the many thousands of Japanese superstitions is a truly ancient one involving combs. A comb falls – for some women that is a bad omen. They will not pick up the comb. If you break the complex kanji used for the word kushi [comb] into its associated parts, one part (ku) means bitter and the other part (shi) means death. Also, kushi sounds a lot like kushin, which means trouble or pain.

  After my four years in the navy were up in 1962, I studied Japanese history and language at the University of Illinois, and I received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study ancient Japanese history and culture at Harvard. Between 1968 and 1970, my poetry was appearing in prestigious literary journals alongside work by the likes of W. H. Auden, Thomas Kinsella, Anthony Kerrigan, Stanley Cooperman, Joyce Carol Oates, and Dilys Laing. I turned down Harvard’s offer of an additional grant and selected instead a summer internship with Newsweek in Chicago. That internship resulted in ten years of writing for the magazine, including two more years based in Tokyo and several years in and out of Cambodia and Vietnam doing war coverage. That is where my poetry writing ceased, Yukiko. My sister Mary blames the magazine, arguing that, ‘it should never have sent a poet to cover a war’. In the early 1970s, when I was based in Tokyo for Newsweek, I made one personal visit to Yokosuka. But I went there only because I was curious to see how the city had changed. I did not have an expectation that I would find you and so I made no attempt to look for you.

  I have related how in these later years of my life, in the midst of conversation about lost loves with friends in Costa Rica, I remembered that somewhere I had your letters. I found them, I had an epiphany, and I began writing. There were immediate questions asked by people interested in the story. Where are you, Yukiko? Are you still living? Who were you? Am I going to try to find you?

  Because I do not know what happened to you after we last saw each other, I do not know if you moved to Tokyo or some other city or if you went back to the Hiroshima area: the city from which you had escaped. You had no reason to return, I believe. The yakuza gang in Hiroshima had washed its hands of you. I suppose that it is possible that a relative, maybe from your ancestral town, may have emerged. I will never know, probably, whether you and Shinoda Yusuke really were lovers and if you might have chosen to be with him again.

  According to Detective Nazaka, you were a courtesan to the Japanese elite in Hiroshima. You were a woman of culture because you were brought up in Manchuria. You were not a prostitute in Yokosuka. You were not a geisha. You poured drinks, listened to sobbing sailors, danced with them too, and earned money from tips and your cut of the drinks they ordered. Geishas are not prostitutes. They sometimes become the lovers of wealthy patrons but they are a
rtistes and highly trained in all of the arts. They were a national treasure really, and are still regarded as such in Japan, where to have the pleasure and prestige of an important geisha’s company for one evening can cost a man as much as round-trip airfare between Los Angeles and Tokyo.

  Many people ask why I kept your letters. They sometimes say that was unusual. After they read the letters they ask if it was really possible that a woman like you, working in a grim occupation for the Japanese mafia in Hiroshima, would read Kafka and Rilke, be familiar with the ancient Japanese women poets, appreciate Maria Callas, Debussy, and Beethoven, and speak Mandarin Chinese and Russian? Why didn’t you teach school, or work in a library, or marry a college professor, they want to know.

  A few young people ask why I did not use email to keep in touch with you after I left Japan in 1959. A woman in her thirties said to me, ‘Come on, Paul. You mean you didn’t put the moves on her?’ I am not going to bother to talk about the email notion. The answer to the other question is a simple, ‘That’s right!’

  Is it possible that you are living? If you are alive, you are not living as Kaji Yukiko, the name I gave you in this story. You are under your real name. Last year, Ogawa Wakako, my friend in Tokyo, who is in her late sixties, said when we were exploring the possibility of tracing you, ‘Paul, eighty-five is pretty old. But Japanese women are young and strong!’ That wonderful statement came about after Ogawa-san became so intrigued that she took a train from Tokyo to Yokosuka in the hope of finding you. I had not asked Ogawa-san to make that trip. She talked to the police. But there were apparently no records that would give clues. Ogawa-san then made a second trip to Yokosuka to see a nostalgic photography exhibit at the city’s Museum of Art titled Memories of a City. Many of the photos showed Yokosuka as I remember it, and the catalogue from the show enabled me to identify the White Rose.