The master waved his hands above him and laughed, somehow ending the discussion. I picked up the cat and tried to look at it in the dark. “If this cat were yours would you kill it?” I asked. “Would you fatten it up and then steal its skin so that you could have another shamisen as fine as the one you played tonight?”
“Certainly not,” said the priest.
“You see. Once the cat got close to you you’d give it a name and there would be no more talk of killing.”
“No,” he said. “It would simply be silly to have two shamisen. And if the cat were mine I’d be very surprised. This shamisen is mine but the cat could not be.”
I sighed and decided to stop. What kind of repartee could I accomplish with this man?
“Forget the cat,” I said. “It is people we are supposed to care about.”
“Come what may,” said the priest.
I was thinking suddenly about Kazuko and Jimmy again and was surprised when the priest said, “Of course the secret of receiving is in not wanting.”
I sat there again, smiling a little. This man made his living saying things like that to all the new monks of the temple.
“You’ve been very kind in caring for my wound. Do you think the doctor would mind if I went home now?”
“He would not mind,” said the master.
I stood, knowing after only a few hours that I could not lead a life like this. The master moved a bit to the side and stood in one motion. I was surprised by how short he was. “Take your cat,” he said. “It could come in handy.” He laughed a little and so did I.
The master motioned to the others as we walked back through the building, so they all fell in behind. The Buddha was brighter than I expected it would be at night, and I worried that maybe that man was still out there somewhere, waiting to wedge his knife into me once more.
“The moon is up,” said the master.
The little cat was tucked inside my shirt, sleeping around the soft edges of my wound. I decided to say one thing more to the master.
“I don’t not care for the cat. You don’t think that, do you?”
This time I made him laugh hard so the other monks laughed too. For a moment they held their laughter in, then it burst, echoing a little way over the fragile garden, over the low trees.
“Good night,” called the master as I started down the steps.
I didn’t like their laughing, so without saying anything I started to walk away. The moon was everywhere and I forgot my fear. The night air was invigorating. It was cool. Even the cat must have felt it, for within my shirt it began to stir. It stretched a little and pushed its head between the buttons. It wasn’t a bad cat, its eyes wide, its whiskers white. When the monks stopped laughing the cat seemed startled. When I stepped onto the main street it was inside my shirt again, but its claws were wide now, and pushing a little into the flesh around my wound.
WHEN I THINK ABOUT THOSE EARLY DAYS OF MY ARRIVAL, those weeks when war was folding around the world, the vision that I have of myself is as my son is now. The thoughts that found me then were fatuous at best, yet passionate and strong were my emotions. When an old man views the young in himself, there is much he can find to disdain, much that will make him laugh, more that will make him cringe.
My son is all Japanese, his language, his habits, his ways. Yet I must not be too hard on him for acting whimsically, for the poor quality of his music, or the ease with which he is distracted. When he was little I’d look at him and see the traces of another man’s face in his small one, but I loved him just the same. His mother would hold him out to me and I would take him and feel all the lighter for it.
When my son made his first recording I gave him little help, but he was able to release it because of me nevertheless. The record jacket was gold with a picture of Milo standing at the seaside with the wind all rough in his hair. He was holding in his hands another record, and, of course, it was one of mine, my first, and if you looked carefully you could see, in turn, a small likeness of myself at the same sea. Until the time of my son’s record, modern music in Japan had been poor. With it, however, a downward spiral was started, the bottom of which is still not visible. And now my son’s music is no longer the worst that can be found here. I, in my way, have tried to make him feel better by making my television show his music’s equal, but the efforts seem lost on him. He and I have both become popular for the damage that we do, though I, of course, am trying, and my son, I’m afraid, is not.
When Milo was little, when he was six, he fell a story from the school window and I can remember waiting for his recovery. The war had been over a while but I still was not ready, not nearly ready, to renew the awful agony of feeling. I can remember my wife saying that from six-year-olds the world should withhold its anger, yet that Milo would roll from the window made me mad at Milo and as soon as he was well enough I slapped him. And that simple slap, so unforgivable, has stayed between us all these years. Its echo, sometimes, sends dull sensations through my fingers when I see my son.
By the time Milo recovered from his fall I had already begun my rise from the ranks of out-of-work entertainers. I was on my own after the war but by then the nation’s interest in English had been born. And jazz seemed central to the underpinnings of the new society, as if by adopting it the Japanese could prove to the occupiers that they too were truly human. I was held up as an example of a good Japanese because I could sing so nicely in English, I could sing so accent-free. And yet, by the Americans I was held in contempt. A short while after my songs began to circulate, a little while after a large segment of my society began making furious forays into the world of late-night dancing, I, along with others of my kind, was called to a perfunctory hearing. We stood before American officers while a staff artist drew a depiction of our poor postures, our unrepentant attitudes.
“Teddy Maki of Los Angeles,” the court clerk called, so I stepped forward.
A colonel spoke softly, asking me, “Did you, Mr. Maki, fight for the Japanese during the recent war?”
“No, sir.”
“You did not?”
“I didn’t fight, sir.”
“Did you wear the Japanese army uniform? Did you eat with the Japanese soldiers? Did you speak Japanese with them and share their jokes?”
“I had no choice.”
“Then the answer is yes.”
“Yes.”
“Are you aware that taking up arms against the forces of the United States is grounds for imprisonment? Grounds for loss of citizenship?”
“I have recently been told so.”
“You are a popular singer, are you not, Mr. Maki? Do you think it is right that you should go free after having turned against your country so?”
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. “I’ve turned against no one. Circumstances caused me to do what I did. Any other course would have cost me my life.”
I had said, already, more than I wanted to, more than I’d told myself I would when I arrived. Most of my acquaintances were dead. Who would care what happened to me?
The colonel looked back and forth, his face all haughty from my listlessness, my lack of remorse.
“What would your family think, Mr. Maki, if they knew what you’ve done?”
From what I could gather my father had lost his land and my uncle his grocery store a few months before they’d enlisted. My mother and brothers and younger cousins waited for them in a makeshift prison, somewhere in the desert, east of where the farm had been.
“They are all scattered,” I said. “Victims of the war.”
The colonel seemed to tire of me but cleared his throat and asked, “Are you a communist, Mr. Maki? Have you ever been?”
“I am not a communist. I don’t care,” I said.
The colonel stood and stretched his legs but let me stay standing before him. Finally he asked, “Do you swear that everything you have said is true?”
“Do you mean today?” I asked him.
He was irritated
by my insolence but there were many others waiting so he let me go, keeping with him my American citizenship, invisible though it was. When I turned toward the small and silent audience the first face I saw was Milo’s, and he was smiling.
“You did well, Daddy,” he said, as we were leaving by the back door. He held by its broken strings a toy guitar I’d given him and trailed it slowly along the lockers that lined the hall.
JIMMY AND KAZUKO WERE MARRIED AND I WAS BEST MAN. Jimmy and I had never talked about my feelings for the woman he would wed but he knew, and I kept thinking I saw a soft smile of satisfaction crossing his lips. They were married at the end of November, 1941, when the mood in the city was one of caution. Crowds stood in front of public bill boards where the daily newspapers were pinned up, and though my reading was slow, I could read the characters for America in the headlines, and knew there were embargoes. I saw the steaming face of Admiral Yamamoto, and read the word war.
Jimmy and Kazuko stood in the same Buddhist temple where I’d received my wound. There were others waiting; it was a day of weddings. As soon as the ceremony was done we left by the side door and walked through the garden just as we had on the day of the cat. All of Kazuko’s family was there; her tea ceremony teacher was the only other outside guest. The weather was cold and the sky was high and clear. People smiled at us, mothers pointing out the formal kimono, one child crying when she saw the powder-white face of the bride.
On the day of Pearl Harbor, on that Sunday when the sailors and civilians of Hawaii were turning their heads skyward, it was Monday in Tokyo and I was on my way to the public bath. Since the wedding the week before, I’d been living alone, though the building which housed me held hundreds of students, boys from the countryside, up to Tokyo for an education. Jimmy and Kazuko had taken the back room of her mother’s house. It was a small room, but big enough for them to unfold their futon and lie together, big enough for them to fold into each other in my imagination and make me miserable.
The public bath was three city blocks away by Los Angeles standards, though the road that got me there was small and snakelike, winding near the rice merchant’s, past a few neighborhood restaurants and bars. I was taking the walk calmly, keeping the married Kazuko out of my mind, when I noticed that the streets were more active than usual, that even some of the students from where I lived were lounging about, their uniform collars askew and their hats tipped back.
“Hey!” one of them called when he saw me. “What do you think?”
“I’m headed for the bath,” I said. “What? No school today?”
The student and two of his friends came over and stood on the street with me, their faces bright. I had rarely seen them at the dormitory, but they knew I was from America.
“He doesn’t know,” the student said. “How could he not know?”
They all shook their heads. “We are at war with America!” they said. “We are all going into the army. We are finished with school forever!”
With Jimmy’s wedding on my mind I hadn’t thought of politics in a while. I knew there was tension between the two countries, but war was ridiculous. The United States was so much bigger, so much stronger.
“War?” I asked. “Who told you? You’re joking.”
“You have been to the United States,” one of them said. “You speak English. You could be our spy.”
“Yes,” said another. “You must go to that country and tell us what they say. There aren’t many people who can speak both languages.”
The students laughed at the prospect, but then got caught up in the logistics of it and while they were working it out I slipped away.
My God, war. I’d been getting some mail from home; Uncle had written that my mother and father were having trouble on the farm, were in need of their son’s help, but no one had ever mentioned war. What would happen to all of them? I had to get home. I turned off the street that led to the bath and headed for Kazuko’s. I would leave tomorrow, but what would Jimmy do now that he was married? There were so many unanswered questions. War was something we had with the Germans, not with the Japanese. War was to be fought against a country’s enemies, not against its friends, and America and Japan had always been friends. Surely the students must have been mistaken. It was a tease. Something to keep me from asking why they weren’t in school.
I hurried along the street and saw everyone now as hurrying too. It was no joke. I stopped at the bulletin board by the farmer’s bank, then ran past it once I’d recognized the word for war once again. Now it was easy to read for it was written thickly, not in the paper’s usual print, but by hand, its bold brush strokes sending chills through me, its very size making me admit that it was probably true, there was war between the United States and Japan.
My cat had been staying at Kazuko’s house since the wedding. I’d told them that it was a gift but they’d said that if cats cannot be owned then they cannot be given. When I entered their garden I saw the cat standing coolly at the base of the old fig tree that they had. I could hear other voices so I knocked lightly then coughed once and Kazuko slid back the door.
“Oh, what will we do?” she said, taking my arm and pulling me inside. “Jimmy is so upset. What will we do? What will happen to all of us?”
Even during a crisis you’d think she’d know better than to stand so close. The look of her there in front of me, her naked hand holding mine. I was coming undone so I quickly said, “We’re going to be spies, Jimmy and I. We’re going to be double agents.”
From the living room I could hear the sound of sobs so I quieted, removing my shoes, and stood as tall as I could beside Kazuko on the tan tatami. Inside the room there were teacups everywhere, half empty and strewn about. Kazuko’s mother was crying, her grandfather was remembering the Russian war with photographs placed on the tables and taped around the walls, and Ike was smiling.
When Kazuko’s mother saw me she stepped into the kitchen for a clean cup. Jimmy was sitting silently in the corner.
“Tell me, Teddy,” the grandfather said, “don’t you think we can win? Jimmy has just said that he does not and I’m out to prove him wrong.”
I took the tea and sat on a zabuton near the central table. “America is one hundred times bigger than Japan,” I told him, “one hundred times as strong.”
“But we’ve beaten America already. Admiral Yamamoto is not young but he is smart. He went to Harvard College and knows the American mind better than the two of you. Admiral Yamamoto says we can win.”
The old man began pushing photos of the Russian war into my hands. In one there was a slight young man, standing sober-looking against the side of a captured wagon. “That’s me,” he said. “I fought in that war. We were stationed in Korea. We won against all odds that time too.”
The old man kept talking, but his gaze returned to the pictures, so I took the opportunity to speak to Jimmy.
“What do you think, my man?” I asked. “We’re in for it now, wouldn’t you say?” I tried to grin, tried to stay cheerful, for Kazuko was still near me, her hand still inches from my own.
Jimmy looked at me and then past me at his wife. The calico cat had come in and was walking figure-eights around the grandfather’s legs. I spoke again, a little more urgently, this time whispering. “What will we do?” I poked Jimmy hard on the shoulder and he sighed as if deflated.
“We’re stuck, that’s all,” he said. “Especially me. Most of the official Americans are gone already. There is nothing we can do.”
Ike was next to us, smiling enigmatically, still cheerful and calm. “Don’t take it so hard,” he said. “They’ll issue us fine clothes and train us in karate. When we get out we’ll be able to defend ourselves. No more worries about yakuza in the park.”
Kazuko’s grandfather, sensing his loss of control, came over to us and dropped another bundle of photographs in our laps. “Ike’s right,” he said. “War is terrible but it is romantic. When you boys get your uniforms you’ll feel better than you do now. You’ll
see. You’ll walk tall, step crisply. There is no greater honor than to die in battle for your country.”
“Christ,” said Jimmy.
“Most of my comrades died in the war,” the grandfather assured us. “Those of us who survived have had to live with that knowledge. It is much better to die than to have to explain why you are still alive.”
Jimmy and I kept quiet while the old man talked, and, oddly, the others in the room seemed to calm under his words. Ike nodded like a confidant. Kazuko still sat next to me, but the tension in her body was going, a patriotic persuasion taking her. Finally she said, “That’s what you’ll have to do. Enlist. You are Japanese before you are Americans. Enlist and fight!”
“We’re musicians!” I said, sitting up straight and raising my voice. “We came here to play music. How about it, Ike? You’re our manager. You should be helping us get back home.”
Ike seemed worried by my tone. “Manager maybe,” he said, “but not magician. What can I do?”
I guess I had been shouting, for Kazuko looked at me oddly then slid across the tatami toward Jimmy. She took his arm. “You can’t go back,” she told him. “You are my husband. You are Japanese and must do your duty.”
Even in the heat of the moment I felt the sting of her movement away from me. They had only been married a week. Not enough time for me to mend. Kazuko was breaking my heart but I sighed and said what I had to say. “We may look Japanese but we’re Americans! We speak English! This is too much to ask of anyone. There is a war starting!”
Everyone in the room, even the grandfather, stopped what they were doing and looked at me. The morning newspaper was face-up on the floor, the characters for war still spilling across its front. Kazuko’s mother went to the garden and looked about to see if any of the neighbors had heard me, but the street was empty. “Watch your tongue, Teddy,” she said, coming back. “We mustn’t say things we do not mean. We will be misunderstood.”
The grandfather’s face was quizzical. He alternately peered at me and threw his eyes toward the ceiling in a gesture of futility.
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