Later, Ogawa-san suggested that I look for you in the United States. Your English was excellent. You did not have family ties in Japan. You may have met an American serviceman and emigrated to the US, Ogawa-san suggested.
There are many online search engines in the United States. You sign up. You pay a small fee. Then there are often multiple choices of identical names. I was shocked when I found a woman, in the right age group, using your real complete first and last name attached to an American surname: in other words something like Yukiko Kaji Williams. I telephoned her. She said she was hard of hearing and asked me to ‘type’ a letter, which I did, enclosing with it an original carbon copy of one of your 1959 letters. There was silence. Ogawa-san was absolutely convinced that this was you and even I, usually sceptical, began to believe. The woman had used the word ‘type’, which is what you and I did when we used typewriters to write letters. And that voice on the phone – telling me, in measured, beautifully phrased English, ‘I am so sorry that I have this hearing problem. I can’t quite understand what you are telling me about yourself. But if you believe that this is important, please type me a letter. And, thank you very much . . .’ – that voice rang true. But eventually a niece of the woman called me to say that her aunt was already in the United States in 1959 and that she could not, therefore, be you, Yukiko. She added that her aunt already had an American Social Security card in 1959. I asked a friend of mine who is a private investigator to check whether this was true. His assistant confirmed that fact. I am still not 100 per cent convinced that she is not you. I was ready to drive cross-country to meet you. I was crushed. I lost you once. If you are she, I don’t want to lose you again.
American-style online searches for people are not really possible in Japan, Ogawa-san explained. Privacy laws are restrictive. And besides, she said, there are several different ways of writing the kanji characters for your name. I have the kanji for your first name because on one occasion you chose to sign your letter in kanji. But I did not keep the envelopes that your letters came in. I did not have any idea then that having your address might be important one day.
I should mention, also, that Ogawa-san had a conversation with an official of the Japanese government’s social services agency to ask whether there was an association of repatriates from Manchuria, which might have membership lists useful in locating you. She was told that such an association had existed, but because of the passage of time, and the aging of that generation of 1.5 million people who were able to return to Japan from Manchuria between 1945 and 1948, there did not seem to be any reason to keep the organization going.
What became of the others I met in 1959? Paul Feng? I don’t know. Nurse Lydia Wong? I don’t know. Irene Chen? I don’t know. Cloudlet? I am sure she is a good Catholic. Mr Ito? I don’t know although I suspect he is still living, a man in his early eighties cheerfully saying, ‘Please enjoy your happiness.’ Detective Nazaka? I am sure he is smoking cigarettes and drinking cognac and chatting up barmaids in a Japanese version of Heaven, which is where he belongs. Shinoda Yusuke? Long gone, for sure. Chaplain Peeples? He passed away in 1997 and his grave can be found in the Lawtonville Cemetery of Estill, South Carolina. He is probably preaching in a Baptist version of Heaven. Red Downs died in 2012 and is buried in the Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Newton, Mississippi. Jim Fowler, Oscar and Gunther? I have made attempts to track them down, but no luck. Commander Crockett? He rose to the rank of captain and died peacefully in 2005 in Dallas, Texas, where he is ‘entombed’ (according to an obituary) at Hillcrest Mausoleum. I am sure he is ballroom dancing or piloting jet fighters in a Texan version of Heaven.
The names of Shangri-La crew members are real, as is the name of the ship itself. Fortunately, I have the amazingly detailed ‘cruisebook’ from the ship’s voyage to the Pacific in 1959, which lists the ship’s crew and has photos of many individuals. These names may sound contrived, but Davy Crockett, Charlie Peeples, and Bobby Drybread all are authentic, as are the names of my shipmates. The names of the Hong Kong characters appear in books they gave me or are listed in one of my notebooks. I wrote the names of Mr Ito, Detective Nazaka, Reiko, and other Yokosuka personalities in the Japanese phrase-book in which I made entries as you began teaching me fragments of your language. Many other Japanese names are in the notebook, written there by men and women who befriended me.
Looking through my notes of our conversations that I made in 1959, I see that you often reached into your journal so that you could express certain thoughts in English that had been translated from the Japanese. One of your favourite statements was a line from Lady Murasaki’s long novel The Tale of Genji. Murasaki started writing the novel at the end of the tenth century and continued writing it into the beginning of the eleventh. You often told me that line inside the Mozart café, a smile rippling across your face. ‘There are as many sorts of women as there are women,’ you would say with a knowing chuckle, as I laughed, still the child.
Another of your favourites from The Tale of Genji, which you recited in the week before I returned to the United States, was: ‘Did we not vow that we would neither of us be either before or after the other even in travelling the last journey of life? And can you find it in your heart to leave me now?’
Last year, I made a working trip to Las Vegas with my younger son, Alexander, who is an attorney geographer, and I brought your letters with me. I read some of them to my son while we were driving – especially those in which you predicted that I would write – and I told him, ‘You know, when I am gone please make sure these letters are not thrown out, so that if you have children your kids can read them and learn something about their grandfather and what a woman who was pure of heart saw in him when he was a young man.’
Endnotes
1 From Oku no hosomichi [Narrow Road to the Interior], 1689, published in Anthology of Japanese Literature. Bashō believed that art could create an awareness that permitted seeing and communicating the elusive essence of experience.
2 I always thought that the Romany connection was, in reality, a myth. However, late in 2005 I visited David Brinkley in Plympton, Devon, who confirmed the connection. David has done extensive research over the years into various branches of the Brinkley family (one branch is Gypsy) and he sometimes helps organize gatherings of Brinkleys in the village of Brinkley, Cambridgeshire.
3 In the early 1970s, when I was working as a Newsweek correspondent in the magazine’s Tokyo bureau, I remember several conversations I had with my boss there, Bernard Krisher, who often said that many of his close friendships with the elite of Japan came about because he was Jewish. Bernie, who married a Japanese woman, was always bemused by comments made by people in Tokyo about his religion – it was almost as if they were in awe. But as for the supposed filial linkage between Judaism and Shinto, that topic never came up with Krisher. By the time I worked for Newsweek, I had already received an undergraduate degree in Japanese history and I would have rejected any notion that Shinto – a nativist religion centred on the belief that the members of the imperial family are direct descendants of a sun goddess – had anything in common with the Jewish religion.
4 An article in The Asia-Pacific Journal explains how in August 2015, China opened a new museum documenting the crimes of Unit 731, located on the same site in Harbin where Japanese scientists and medical personnel conducted ‘experiments’ on Chinese prisoners during the Second World War. A handful of American and other Western prisoners also suffered the same fate. No one was brought to trial for these atrocities after Japan surrendered.
5 There were no zippers back then in sailor pants, the reason being that the metal crocodile teeth in early zippers could severely injure private parts, a danger that persisted until the Japanese company YKK [Yoshida Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha] perfected mass production of toothless nylon zippers.
6 After I wrote to my friend and classmate Ogawa Wakako, in Tokyo, about these films, she expressed a strong interest in your history. At the end of the war, she said, w
omen could either stay in traditional marriages, if their husbands had survived, or for the first time in Japanese history they could chose ‘to go out’ into the workplace and make something of themselves, without marriage. The workplace in those years included the vast mizushobai (literally, the ‘water trade’) night-time entertainment scene, where jobs ranged from geisha, which is a true art form, to cabaret or bar hostess to massage-parlour girl. Today that industry, geared to pleasing men, is more complex and brutal than in any other country in the world. Yukiko believed she was one of the emancipated – emancipated, at least, in her own mind.
7 Kenzan Ogata was a genius of Japanese ceramics and master of Zen, who died in 1743. This poem was found the next day by a lodger at the tenement house they shared on the Sumida River near Tokyo. The translation is from Kenzan and His Tradition, by the British potter Bernard Leach, on whom the Japanese bestowed the title of the Seventh Kenzan in 1913.
8 Kawabata won the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature. He killed himself four years later in Kamakura.
9 Translated for this book by Carmen Barnard Baca. ‘This is the opposite of waiting for the dawning light of love,’ Carmen notes. ‘It’s waiting for the glow of that light of love, after it has gone over the mountains.’
10 Translated for this book by Carmen Barnard Baca. ‘This is the opposite of waiting for the dawning light of love,’ Carmen notes. ‘It’s waiting for the glow of that light of love, after it has gone over the mountains.’
Acknowledgements
Many friends helped me throughout 2013 and 2014 with the writing and also refreshed my memories of Japan in 1959. Thank you to my sister Mary Finke and my friend Kimberly Rice for reading each chapter diligently and making important suggestions. Thanks to Zona Tropical natural history publisher John McCuen in San José, Costa Rica, who spent one year in Japan himself, for endorsing my idea for the book one morning in his office in April 2013. Thank you to my agent, Michael V. Carlisle of InkWell Management in New York City, for a phone call that startled me one day and for his guidance thereafter, and to Carole Tonkinson, publisher of Pan Macmillan’s Bluebird imprint in London, for insightful editing and encouragement. Special thanks to Ogawa Wakako in Tokyo, my classmate at Columbia University, for attempting to track Kaji Yukiko and for sending films and books that helped me remember Japan circa 1959, and also for her translation of the lyrics to ‘Ringo oiwake’ [‘Apple Folksong’]. Hearty thanks to Patricia Trumps in Florida for excellent editing suggestions and for her enthusiastic support. Special thanks also to writer Emily Benedek in New York City for the generous amount of time she spent reading the manuscript and for the idea of going to YouTube to listen to music mentioned in the book. Thanks to two California author friends: Geoffrey Dunn in Santa Cruz, for his wizardry; and the late Larry Engelmann of San José, author of Daughter of China, and Linda Lee, for their hospitality. Like me, Larry had a habit of recording much of what he saw and thought about in notebooks. Thank you very much to Amy K. Hughes of New York City, who edited a late version of the manuscript in September 2014. Thank you also to Pan Macmillan staff members James Annal, Anna Bowen, Claire Gatzen, and Olivia Morris for their talents and care.
Thanks to former Yokosuka nightclub hostesses Fujiwara Mie and Koreyama Hanako in California for their vivid memories of 1959. Thank you to Michael W. Donnelly who served with me in Yokosuka and who later became a political science professor specializing in Japan at the University of Toronto, for commenting on Yuki’s letters. Thanks also to Roger Goodman, Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies at Oxford University, for his encouragement after reading the manuscript on a long flight to Asia. Thanks to Christopher Bauschka in California, son of Mieko Nishii Bauschka and the late US Navy Captain Patrick F. Bauschka, for an email I quote in the book. Thank you to my old friend Shawn Hubler in Los Angeles for giving the book a sensitive reading in the month I completed writing the story. Thanks to Janelle Rossignol of Phoenix, an authority on kabuki, for helpful comments on the story.
A big thank you to avant-garde composer Cedric Lerouley in Paris, France, who is an enka fan, for mailing vintage LPs recorded by torch singer Matsuo Kazuko and also by Misora Hibari. Thank you to ‘Muppet’ of Oldskool Japanese Music Thread (1920s–1980s) at forum. jhip.com for the translation of ‘Dare yori mo, kimi wo aisu’ [‘More Than Anyone Else, I Love You’]. Thanks to writer Linda Style and screenwriter Marvin Kupfer (who, like me, is a former Newsweek correspondent), both of metro Phoenix, for important critiquing and advice given at crucial moments. Thank you to Ryan Seki of Phoenix for help with translations of book, film, and music titles, and to Vivian Seki for detecting errors. Thanks also to the remarkable Mehta family of Phoenix – Ajay, Momoe, and Sumi – for their comments and encouragement, and to Barbara Urso in Illinois who every January celebrates a special happiness. Thanks also to Phoenix residents Bob Golfen of classiccars.com and Ed Bergman of cruising66.com, and to San Diego resident Eduardo Aenlle MD; all of whom understood why I wrote the book and my obsession in old age for Alfa Romeos.
My thanks to writer Miguel Ongpin and to Lila Shahani in Manila, Philippines, for their thoughts. Thanks also to Chris Burnside in Crown Point, New Mexico, for giving me the Navajo point of view on love affairs.
Thanks to two dynamic Mexicanas. The first is writer and bolero singer Carmen Barnard Baca in California, who visited Japan in her youth, for identifying so passionately with Yukiko and for translating Mexican composer Agustín Lara’s lyrics to his ‘Sombra de mis sombras’ [‘Echoes of my Shadows’]. The second is editor and music lover Elvira Espinoza in Phoenix, who said that the lyrics of ‘Tango Uno’ from 1943 could well have been written for Yukiko, ‘who loved you in her own way inside her own very small and private soul’.
Thank you to photographer James Caccavo of Los Angeles, who worked with me during the Vietnam War, for reading the manuscript and immediately understanding everything. Thanks also to the grizzled denizens of the Blue Marlin Bar (Arnold and Dexter especially) in Costa Rica and to my neighbour, Mrs Gloria Loeser, for their encouragement, and for frequently feeding me and offering wine and liquor when I neglected to provide for myself.
Thank you to the many scores of Japanese – mizushobai mamasans, salarymen, bar hostesses, cops, and gangsters big and small – who listened with interest, and often with tears, when I first started telling bits and pieces of this story in small sake bars across Japan during the 1960s and 1970s. Thanks to the gracious residents of Hong Kong, especially Paul Feng, who befriended me in 1959.
Finally, thank you to Kaji Yukiko, wherever you are, for writing the letters more than fifty years ago that appear in this book. I changed your name. But if you read your letters again you will know that almost everything you predicted came true. I would enjoy so much having coffee with you again at the Mozart café.
Music and Film References
Chapters 1, 20, 22 Maria Callas sings ‘Un Bel Dì’ [‘One Fine Day’] from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR0SlCTj1Bo
Chapters 3, 6 Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, ‘Ode to Joy’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFX8S9aAgvw
Chapters 3, 5, 14 George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFHdRkeEnpM
Chapter 3 Matsuo Kazuko and Wada Hiroshi sing ‘Dare yori mo, kimi wo aisu’ [‘More Than Anyone Else, I Love You’]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOt91HjOtIE
Chapter 4 The Genies sing ‘Who’s That Knocking?’: http://www.youtube.comwatch?v=SX1RbXhvFIA&list=RDY3Wgs KEDg5Q
Chapters 4, 8 Eric Satie, Vexations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBhjGIdL5cM
Chapters 4, 8 Eric Satie, three Gymnopédies and six Gnossiennes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtLHiou7anE
Chapters 4, 22 Misora Hibari sings ‘Ringo oiwake’ [‘Apple Folksong’]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9D0sDgY2eU
Chapter 4 Matsuo Kazuko sings ‘Again’ in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xrJsjJrEwI
Chapter 4 Puccini, La Bohè
me, ‘Si, Mi Chiamano Mimi’ [‘Yes, They Call Me Mimi’]: http://www.youtube.com watch?v=6tFGGPY1AEs
Chapter 5 Fats Domino sings ‘Whole Lotta Loving’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOONKeST1DM
Chapter 8 Yamaguchi Momoe sings ‘Hitonatsu no keiken’ [‘Experiences of Summer Youth’]: http://kayokyokuplus.blogspot.com/2013/03/momoe-yamaguchi-hito-natsu-no-keiken.html
Chapters 8, 19 ‘Ginza kan-kan musume’ [‘Ginza Street Girl’] on 78-rpm record: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNfdH9nockE
Chapter 11 Franz Schubert, Impromptus Opus 90: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDVJkxGz_Tc
Chapter 12 Kurosawa Akira, trailer for the film Rashomon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCZ9TguVOIA
Chapter 14 Trailer for the film Sands of Iwo Jima: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZoRnZ6Jw0w
Chapter 14 Final scenes of Imai Tadashi’s film Himeyuri no tō [Tower of Lilies]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhg_SBGKgz8
Chapters 15, 16 Trailer for the film The World of Suzie Wong: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnepiAcqb_g
Chapter 17 Billie Holiday sings ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P96s6bIeQk
Chapter 18 Frank Sinatra sings ‘All My Tomorrows’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNz1DI0ph0s
Chapters 18, 21 Claude Debussy, Nocturnes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtL_enacFn8
Please Enjoy Your Happiness Page 27