The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  Isamu and Yoshiko were even late for their own wedding reception. It was held at the Manyo’en, an old aristocratic mansion which had somehow escaped undamaged from the war. The garden, dated around 1700, is one of the most famous in Japan. Designed to evoke in miniature the imaginary landscape of an ancient poem in the Chinese Book of Songs, it has miniature mountains and miniature lakes and miniature trees, miniature temples and shrines, and a tiny teahouse for contemplating the poetic vistas, brightened in their seasons by rows of cherry blossoms and azaleas. Since the wedding was in winter, the trees were protected from the snow by bamboo umbrellas. I had never seen trees with umbrellas before.

  Before the banquet, the bride and bridegroom sat formally in front of a gilt screen, Isamu in a gray kimono with rather odd-looking black pantaloons, and Yoshiko in a white kimono with a thick golden sash. They were like two beautiful sculptures, sitting absolutely still, blending Western practicality and Oriental beauty in a perfect mix, quite literally, since Isamu had designed the clothes himself and even applied the makeup to his bride’s face. Isamu’s hakama was a kind of Westernized version of the skirts worn by courtiers on the Kabuki stage. Yoshiko’s kimono was actually constructed like a Western evening gown, with hooks and buttons. And her makeup was highly unusual; Isamu said that he was inspired by the Tale of Genji. She looked like an exquisite Japanese doll, her face painted white, with bright red lips, like rose petals, and her eyebrows painted high on the forehead, like twin moths, in the style of a tenth-century court lady.

  Apart from myself, there were no other foreigners at the wedding, certainly not Murphy or Colonel Gunn. But I saw several of Yoshiko’s Japanese admirers. Ikebe was there, and Hotta, looking as emaciated as a martyred saint, and Mifune, splendid in his dark kimono with a large white family crest. Kurosawa, never one for small talk, made polite little bows when people addressed him. Yoshiko’s father was absent. So Kawamura, looking suave in his hakama, presented the bride in loco parentis with a flowery speech about their mutual love of China and Yoshiko’s lifelong dedication to peace. Hotta also referred to China in his speech and expressed his joy that peace and justice had finally come to “the New China, under the leadership of Chairman Mao, the greatest Asian of the twentieth century.”

  After the speeches, Isamu hopped from table to table, looking like a big bird with his long sleeves and black pantaloons flapping wildly behind him. He spoke to me in something resembling formal Japanese, with a thick American accent, and I replied as best I could. Kawamura, who overheard, chuckled and said: “You both speak perfect Japanese.”

  “Better than us Japanese,” said a venerable old painter, Umehara Ryuzaburo.

  To which Mifune, with his usual barking laugh that expressed goodwill rather than mirth, added: “We are international now. That is good. That is very good.”

  There was only one brief moment that threatened to blight the festive air. When we filed out of the main hall, called the Crying Deer Pavilion, and were met by a phalanx of photographers asking a smiling Yoshiko and a scowling Isamu to look this way and that, a man in a well-cut but very shabby suit suddenly made a dash toward Yoshiko. It happened very quickly, so I didn’t get a close look at his face. But I remember his wild eyes, like those of a hunted animal. I remember Yoshiko’s face more clearly, a picture of sheer astonishment. “Satosan!” she cried, before turning away. All he could shout back was “Yoshiko-chan, I must talk to you!” He was swiftly dragged off by a burly member of the Manyo’en staff, who scolded him as if he were a bad dog.

  I asked Yoshiko afterwards who this gentleman was. For a moment I thought he might have been her father. She said that it had all been so long ago. What was? She didn’t reply for some time. Then she said that she had known him slightly in Manchuria, during the war, but it was all so long ago. She didn’t wish to talk about it now, maybe some other time. Since she was still in visible distress, I didn’t probe. Not a word appeared about this incident in the following day’s papers, which didn’t stint on other details, including a full guest list. Once again I marveled at the way Japanese ignore what they choose not to see. The frantic look on the man’s face stayed with me for a long time. He seemed to be persecuted by something or someone. The extraordinary thing was that the next time I asked Yoshiko about him, she claimed to have no recollection of the incident. She even joked about it: “Maybe you saw a ghost, Sid-san!”

  The common Japanese verdict on the wedding was summed up in the headline of the social pages of the Asahi Shimbun: “American avant-garde artist marries Japanese movie star in a beautifully abstract wedding party.” I was not sure quite what was meant by “abstract.” I meant to ask Yoshiko later.

  20

  THE HOUSE IN Kamakura was almost too perfect—a picture of traditional rustic beauty, a scene from an Edo Period scroll, a modern Japanese-style painting expressing a dream vision of “Old Japan,” or a set for a historical movie. The main house, nestled between emerald green rice paddies and the purple Kamakura hills, belonged to a distinguished Japanese-style painter (as opposed to the Western-style kind, who typically goes in for ghastly sub-Impressionism with academic earnestness) named Nambetsu Ogata. He was so famous that people dispensed with his family name and just referred to him as Nambetsu. His pictures of birds and fish in black ink or rock pigments on Japanese paper were highly prized by wealthy collectors. A spry little figure, with long pepper and salt hair and a wispy beard, Nambetsu looked quite benign, like an old Chinese sage, but he had a reputation for being difficult. Money, as such, didn’t impress him. He once threw a cabinet minister out of his house for calling a picture “pretty,” a picture, moreover, that the said politician had fully intended to buy for a very large sum. The man was, as Nambetsu put it, “too vulgar to own a painting of mine.”

  More than for his pictures even, Nambetsu was known in Japan for what people nowadays would call his “lifestyle,” which was entirely traditional. The eighteenth-century farmhouse with its lovely thatched roof was featured frequently in the weekly magazines. Dismantled before the war in a remote village in western Honshu, the house had been carefully reconstructed by carpenters in Kamakura. Not one nail had been used; every piece of timber, sliding screen door, plastered wall, or bamboo fence, every rafter, brace, girt, and purlin, had been joined together like a gigantic puzzle of cedar, cypress, plaster, and teak. The bath, made of solid iron, was heated from below by a wood fire. Even the toilet, of camphorwood filled with boughs of fragrant cedar, was a work of poetry. Squatting in the semidark, listening to the insects buzzing and the rain softly dripping from the eaves, was worth the trip.

  Not only did Nambetsu use only traditional pots and bowls—some of them priceless antiques, and some from Nambetsu’s own kiln, constructed for him by Bizen potters from Kyushu—but he also manufactured his own paper in the Tosa style. His Tosa Tengujoshi, “Wings of Day Flies” paper, was especially fine. He was a superb cook, too. In his traditional country kitchen, two great wooden vats, one filled with sea-water, the other with sweet water, contained live fish, which he would scoop up with a net to prepare for dinner with freshly cut vegetables and homemade pickles. To watch Nambetsu tackle a fish was to see an artist at work, cutting and stripping the scales with his favorite knife, made by a famous Kyoto knifemaker, whose family had been forging knives since the early sixteenth century.

  Nambetsu never wore Western-style clothes, of course. At work, he wore a traditional indigo cotton artisan’s smock. On the rare occasions that he set forth from his house, he wore only kimonos of the finest cottons and silks, all woven in Kyoto. The only concessions he was prepared to make to modern life were electricity—even though he often stated that the beauty of Japanese lacquer and ceramics could be appreciated only by candlelight—and an eccentric fondness for Pepsi-Cola—not Coca-Cola, God forbid, but always Pepsi, which had to be served to him at exactly the right temperature as soon as he emerged from his scalding iron bath. A few degrees too warm or too cold could provoke a ferocious rage. He
would scream at poor Tomoko, the maid, and send the unwanted glass crashing to the wooden floor. Once he even struck her in the face, so viciously that she needed stitches, which, full of remorse, he applied himself, without anesthetics, naturally (“new-fangled rubbish”). It must have been excruciating. She didn’t utter a sound.

  I mention all this because the old rice storage house, opposite the main house, was where Isamu and Yoshiko started their married life (and ended it, too, but we’ll get to that later). Much smaller than the main house, though just as old, this too was a rustic place of great traditional beauty. They called it their “love nest.” To get to it you passed through an Edo Period gate bearing a plaque in Nambetsu’s grass-style calligraphy that read: Land of Dreams. The gate was as far as a car could go. From there you had to walk along a narrow path through rice paddies, and up some very steep steps for several hundred yards, past an old disused shrine guarded by stone foxes covered in thick velvety moss, thence up the hill for another hundred yards or so, and finally, panting with exertion, especially on a humid summer’s day, you would reach the love nest. Looming behind was Nambetsu’s farmhouse. And behind Nambetsu’s house was a small hill, with a cone not unlike that of Mount Fuji. This was Taishan, or rather a replica of the sacred Chinese mountain, constructed by Nambetsu as part of his private landscape garden.

  Nambetsu had taken a shine to Isamu in a way that was quite un-characteristic of the old misanthrope. Isamu was perhaps the only person who was never subjected to his famous rages. They first met when Isamu showed his new sculptures, inspired by sixth-century burial figures. Nambetsu’s attendance at a Tokyo gallery was such a rare event that it was reported in the national press. Nambetsu never took the trouble to see anyone’s show, no matter how distinguished. But he had been a friend of Isamu’s father before the war. Or perhaps he was just curious to see how this American had reworked the Haniwa style. Whatever the reason, there he was, in his dark blue kimono, scrutinizing the pieces through his Harold Lloyd glasses, while others gazed at him with great reverence, to see what he would say. His only comment was kekko, fine. That was enough. Isamu was launched. And the offer of a place to live was made, for as long as Isamu wanted.

  Isamu and Yoshiko had settled into their new life by the time I went to see them. The weather was sublime, a blue spring day, when the birds sang their hearts out and the cherry blossoms floated from the trees like pink snowflakes. Isamu’s huge lilac Buick convertible— his one concession to American life, a more grandiose version of Nambetsu’s fondness for Pepsi—stood at the gate, as though it had been abandoned by its owner. Isamu was still working in his studio at the back of the house when I arrived. Yoshiko, looking the perfect country woman in her light blue cotton kimono stenciled with a pattern of Xs, greeted me with a wave of her hand, followed by a bow, and then, as an afterthought, since I was, after all, a foreigner, a handshake. I complimented her on her kimono. “Kisses,” she laughed, as she pointed to the Xs. “Isamu designed the fabric for me. We had it made in Kyoto.” As she poured hot water on the tea leaves from an ancient-looking iron pot, she said, “You know how much Isamu loves Japanese culture.” I asked her how she was liking her new life. “Oh, it’s most interesting. I’ve never lived on tatami mats before. In China, we always had Western-style houses. And since I left home I’ve only really lived in hotels. So I have to learn how to live like a Japanese. But Isamu knows so much about Japan. He’s my sensei, my teacher.”

  But it was soon clear to me that she was missing Hollywood already. Everything was so much more efficient there, she said. Things worked in the States, and the enthusiasm of the Americans was so inspiring. “Here in Japan,” she’d often say, with a deep theatrical sigh, “it’s always, can’t do this, can’t do that, that’s not the way we do things here. It’s almost as if they’re proud of it.” Besides, playing a Japanese war bride was so much more interesting. Here she was typecast as an “exotic,” asked to play Korean prostitutes, or Chinese nurses, and once even a native Taiwanese. In America, she felt she was being taken more seriously. “But I’m poor, so I have no choice, Sid-san. I’ll take anything I can get.” She was in a new picture now, entitled Lady of Shanghai, playing a Chinese singer. It was fine, but “I feel a bit like a circus monkey, a monkey that can sing in Chinese.”

  I wondered how she got to the studio from this remote place. “Oh,” she said, “a limousine arrives every morning, to pick me up at the gate. It’s a bit of a walk up and down, but it’s so beautiful, and Isamu’s so happy here. You’ve seen the sign over the gate?” She giggled. “You know, it really is like a Land of Dreams.” She kept rubbing her feet. I suggested that it must be painful clip-clopping up the hill in her tight wooden sandals. “It’s okay,” she said. “Isamu loves to see me in traditional clothes.”

  Isamu was looking pensive as he came out of his studio, wiping his hands on a pretty cloth of indigo cotton. The studio was actually more like a cave hewed out of the rocky hill behind the house. “Tea,” he said, without looking at his wife. “Japanese green tea, the one from Shizuoka.” “Hai, hai,” she answered, and pitter-pattered on her blistered feet into the kitchen to go fetch the iron pot.

  The difficulty with Isamu, or, indeed most artists of my acquaintance, is that you never knew whether he was listening to what you were saying. One would talk and talk, and he nodded, but his eyes were on some distant world, deep inside himself. The more he lapsed into silence, the more one heard oneself babbling away, like some garrulous housewife.

  It was like that on this occasion. I was chattering on about topics that I thought might be of interest, the Buddhist sculptures I had just seen at the Engakuji Temple, a new movie playing in Tokyo, the modern Japanese art scene. He nodded, as always, and said, “That’s right,” or, “I quite agree,” sometimes in English, sometimes in his heavily accented Japanese, but I could tell he wasn’t really there. Yet he wasn’t oblivious. When Yoshiko said, “Oh, you two, always talking about difficult things,” he turned to her with a smile of great tenderness, and said: “You’re quite right, we should be talking about what’s in front of us, the birds, the sun, the cherry blossoms, the stones. All the answers are right there. You just have to know how to find them.”

  “What about some lunch?” said Yoshiko, full of good cheer.

  And so the afternoon passed, sitting on the tatami floor, by the open screen wall, gazing at paradise. Nothing in this landscape of bamboo groves, cherry blossoms, rice paddies, and fish ponds suggested that we were living in the middle of the twentieth century. Nambetsu had banned telephones, so the vision of loveliness was not disturbed by unsightly telephone lines. If the eye couldn’t detect the modern world, nor could the ears: no radio, no loudspeaker, nothing of the mechanical noise that blighted Japanese life even back then. The room we were sitting in was empty except for a single scroll of a laughing monk. “Ah,” said Isamu, “this is where I belong. I never want to leave this place as long as I live.”

  “But darling,” said Yoshiko. “What about New York, Paris, and all those other places? Don’t you want to stay in touch with the art world?”

  “There is nothing to stay in touch with,” snorted Isamu. “The art world in New York is without interest. They’re like a bunch of mindless dogs chasing each other around the track. Round and round they go, faster and faster, without a clue why they’re running. No, this is the real thing.” He sniffed the air in a rather exaggerated manner, like a wine connoisseur: “The smell of my childhood.” He pulled Yoshiko toward him, hugging her from behind. “And the smell of a beautiful woman.”

  “Oh, you Americans!” she squealed with full-throated pleasure. He grinned. I felt rather relieved when the gong rang from the main house to summon us to dinner. I adored both of them, of course, but the happiness of friends can be endured only in small doses.

  We sat on the floor at a beautifully carved table under a large wooden fish suspended from the ceiling. The fish provided a counter-weight to a suspended cooking pot, in which a s
tew of vegetables and wild boar meat was bubbling away over a charcoal fire. Nambetsu had also prepared the most delicious-looking sashimi, including large translucent prawns that were still so fresh that they quivered nervously to the touch of our chopsticks. “So what does he do, your friend?” Nambetsu asked Isamu, without looking at me. This was one of those Japanese courtesies I’ve never quite gotten used to. Why couldn’t he have asked me directly?

  “He’s a”—Isamu paused. “He’s a film critic,” interjected Yoshiko, “a very distinguished film critic, for the Japan Evening Post.”

  “Ah, a film critic,” replied Nambetsu, who did not look very impressed. “For the Japan Evening Post? So, which film directors does he like?”

  Wishing to show him that I could understand his Japanese perfectly, I jumped into the conversation: “I think this young director, Akira Kurosawa, is very fine. But I also love the films of Keisuke Kinoshita, especially Carmen Comes Home, so funny, and yet so poignant . . .”

  Nambetsu’s wizened head slowly swiveled my way. He examined my face, not with disgust, or even disapproval, but with a hint of surprise. “He speaks Japanese, your friend.”

  Yoshiko picked up an earthenware bottle and made to pour cold saké into our cypresswood cups. Nambetsu growled again, took the bottle from her hand, and poured it himself. “From Aomori,” he said, “the best.” He then poured a glass of Pepsi for himself, after testing the temperature and finding it satisfactory.

  “So you can eat sashimi, eh?” It was the first time Nambetsu had spoken directly to me.

  “Delicious,” I said, as I dipped a flesh-colored piece of bonito into a tiny bowl of garlic and soy sauce.

  “Fresh from the market,” Nambetsu said. “Tomoko went to fetch it early this morning. What do you think, Isamu?”

  Isamu nodded approvingly. “It is very good indeed, sensei.”