The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  “Isamu loves our food,” said Nambetsu, “but then he’s got a Japanese spirit. It must be different for foreigners. I know I couldn’t eat hamburgers all the time.”

  “We don’t just eat hamburgers,” I said, feeling a little defensive. Nambetsu ignored me.

  “What about Ozu’s pictures? I think he’s the best director we have. Still, like sashimi, you have to be Japanese to appreciate him.”

  I knew I was in danger of being rude, but couldn’t stop myself: “Oh, but I like Ozu very much. His films may be about Japanese, but he expresses feelings that we can all share.”

  I sensed that Isamu was getting irritated. Nambetsu was not used to being contradicted, especially not by a young foreigner like me. Perhaps to appease the old man, Isamu said: “I agree with sensei. Some of the feelings may be the same, but the nuances are impossible for foreigners to grasp.”

  He used the word “foreigner” (gaijin), as though he himself were a full-blooded Japanese. Now it was my turn to feel irritated. I didn’t much care whether I was being rude. “But I’m a foreigner, and I understand Ozu’s films perfectly.”

  Nambetsu examined me again at leisure, but this time with amusement sharpened by malice: “Ah, what we have here is a crazy foreigner who knows our ways.”

  Yoshiko, darling Yoshiko, thinking perhaps to save my face, said: “Well, I’m Japanese, and I think Ozu’s films are a complete bore.” Isamu stared intensely at the lovely plate in the middle of the table, lined with slices of silvery sashimi, a plate crafted by Nambetsu’s own masterly hands. It had a shiny chocolate brown and dark green glaze. Nambetsu looked at Yoshiko, almost pityingly, and said: “Yes, yes. Well, I suppose Ozu would be hard to understand in China.”

  He took a sip from his glass of chilled Pepsi. Perhaps sparked by Yoshiko’s remark, he began to hold forth. “Chinese culture is like a thick, spicy sauce; rich, heavy, a blend of many tastes: sweet and sour, hot and mild. Think of their elaborate traditional dress, the many layers of cotton and silk, the intricate embroideries, the violent colors. Our Japanese kimono is simpler, but more refined. We pare things down to the essential. Look at this piece of raw bonito. To smother it in sauce, the way the Chinese do, is to kill its essence. Our crazy foreign friend here talks about feelings shared by all men. He is right, there are things we all feel, but to express the universal you have to go for utter simplicity. As Basho said: ‘The whole world is in a blade of grass.’ To savor the pure taste of the bonito is to understand the fishness of things.”

  At least, I think this is what he said. I’m not sure I understood “the fishness of things.” Isamu gazed at his host with a look of sheer adoration. “Tofu!” he shouted, as though he was onto some great new discovery in Japanese culture.

  “What’s that?” asked Nambetsu, distracted from his train of thought.

  “Tofu,” cried Isamu. “Japanese culture is like cold white tofu, dipped in a tiny splash of soy sauce and lemon.”

  “Exactly!” said the old man. “Very well put. Isamu-kun understands us perfectly, even as most Japanese have drowned themselves in an ocean of American vulgarity. Look at our artists, running after every foreign fad like dogs sniffing shit. Ever since the war, we’ve been trying to snuff out our own culture. We’re a nation of suicidal maniacs, that’s what we are, stabbing our own hearts, strangling our spirit.”

  “I don’t see why we have to choose,” said Yoshiko. “Why not have the best of Chinese culture, American culture, and Japanese culture? I like all of them. Why not mix them up?”

  Isamu, looking at Nambetsu, said: “But first you have to know who you are.” Even I could hear the grammatical mistakes in his Japanese. It came out sounding something like: “But the first time you must see who I am.”

  Nambetsu declared that Isamu was absolutely right, that it was no use discussing culture with women, and that Tomoko should hurry up and bring some new bowls (beautifully crafted with a mud-colored glaze of simple bamboo patterns) for the fish stew.

  21

  EVERYONE WHO LIVES in Tokyo has his favorite district for nocturnal mischief. Some like the raffishness of Shibuya, or the dives of Ueno. Others prefer the equally seedy but more international atmosphere of Roppongi, where Tony Lucca holds court in his pizza place. Partial as I am to the plebeian low city along the Sumida River, my usual hunting grounds are in Shinjuku, once an entrypoint to the city of Edo, where the horses were fed while their weary masters visited the brothels. The brothels are still there, though not always in the same places they used to be. After the war, the areas to the east of the station were divided into so-called blue lines and red lines, one licensed, the other not, run by different yakuza gangs, which regularly came to blows. The alleys in these warrens, smelling of vomit and blocked drains, were so narrow that one could almost touch both sides of the street at once. Actually, one would have had little opportunity to indulge in such experiments, since the girls lined up on either side tried their best to drag you into their lairs by clutching your tie, or other more intimate parts, screeching: “Boss! Boss! Come, come. I’ll show you good time.” When they spotted a foreigner, the ones who didn’t instantly recoil in horror shouted: “Hey you, Joe! America number one.”

  One of the attractions of the blue lines was the offer of so-called live classes in “art academies.” For a fee, girls would pose in the nude. Pencils for sketching and cameras without film were provided on the premises. After all, these were respectable establishments and the proper forms had to be observed. What the art lovers did afterwards with their models was of course their own affair, and subject to various complicated financial negotiations.

  Having no intention of sketching these painted trollops, let alone doing anything else with them, I still liked to sit myself down in one of the bars and watch the action with a beer in one hand and a skewer of pig’s heart in the other. My eyes were drawn less to the girls, of course, than to their pimps, tough-looking boys in white pants and dark shades, which they wore even at night. Once in a while I got lucky and one of them allowed me to be used for his pleasure, in a nearby hotel room, or, if I really struck gold, in one of the rooms of the brothel, which reeked of sweat, sex, and cheap cologne. Even then, as I knelt reverently at their feet, they sometimes refused to take off their shades.

  There were some establishments, near the blue lines, that catered to gentlemen of my persuasion, but they tended to be filled with young screamers of the kind that I loathed with a passion. Who needs a mincing little assistant hairdresser pawing the hair on your arms like some cheap harlot? I like men, not fake girls, or “sister boys,” as the Japanese called them. Men were to be found lurking in the grounds of the Hanazono Shrine, a tradition that goes back at least three hundred years and, I’m happy to say, still persists. Truck drivers, construction workers, and the like went there to get quick relief from the old drag queens, who made up in technique for what they might have lost in looks. They were also much cheaper than the whores in the red lines. If they were drunk, or horny enough, the men would allow me to pleasure them for nothing.

  I had to be careful, though, for the drag queens could be vicious. Getting a beating from one of the men was never a serious concern. This was Japan, after all. But I did have to duck more than once from a sharp high heel. One venerable queen of the night even pulled a knife on me once. It happened very quickly. She hitched up her skirt, reached into her garter, and flashed a switchblade, missing my face by inches. Mostly, though, we got along. As long as I didn’t get in the way of their business, the drag queens regarded me with amused tolerance. With a few of them, Fellatio Yoko and Shinjuku Mari, I even became quite friendly. Fellatio Yoko had been a soldier on the Burma front. God only knows what she had been up to in the jungle. She told me a story once about her platoon getting stuck during the monsoon rains in the Irawaddy delta. When the water rose, the men had to climb the trees to escape from the crocodiles. Debilitated by hunger and fatigue, many failed to hold on, and you heard them screaming while the crocs f
easted. Such reminiscences were rare, however. Usually we just discussed tricks. Fellatio knew a hundred different ways to make a man come, without even bothering to take her clothes off. When doing what she was best at, she always made sure to remove her dentures. “More better,” she assured me.

  I loved those Shinjuku streets, especially at night, when the neon lights threw a purplish haze over the city, and the promise of adventure hung in the air like the heady smell of magnolia in summer. Even the most depraved pleasures were offered innocently, as natural parts of life, like eating and drinking. Shinjuku was my turf, as much as the shrines and temples of Kamakura, or the moviehouses of Asakusa. One was for the body, the others for the soul. I did, naturally, venture out into the more respectable areas of Japanese society, too. I knew how to be a good boy. But nothing delighted me more, before attending some important social function, than a little wallow in the Shinjuku mud. There I was, fresh from a hot encounter with a rough young hood behind Hanazono Shrine, bowing to the president of the Japanese Motion Pictures Association, or discussing the tea ceremony with the Dutch ambassador’s wife.

  There were times when social or professional obligation forced me into straighter forms of entertainment. These occasions were endurable if one took an anthropological interest in them. One of my more memorable nights of this kind was spent in the company of none other than Nambetsu-sensei. After several more dinners in the Land of Dreams, he had decided that I was all right after all, a crazy foreigner who truly did have some understanding of Japan. I was honored to have earned his approval and had warmed to him, too. Since he did not get up to Tokyo very often, I was particularly honored to be included in his party at an exclusive and no doubt absurdly expensive hostess bar in the Ginza, called Kiku no Shiro, or “Kiku’s Castle.” O-Kiku was the Mama-san, who ran the place with the discipline of a first-rate military commander. If any of her girls slipped up, dropping a tray or even just a napkin, or failing in any way to burnish the egos of the pampered customers to a bright enough sheen, the Mama-san made sure they paid the full price of her fury. A slap in the face, I was told, was the least they might expect. Always dressed in an immaculate kimono, O-Kiku, an elegant woman in her forties, treated her loyal customers with the elaborate manners of a royal courtesan. As the recipient of countless intimacies, she knew more secrets behind the bland facade of Japanese politics and business than the prime minister himself. Although there was never any hint of this in public, apart from a certain air of familiarity between them, Yoshiko had told me that Nambetsu was in fact O-Kiku’s patron. I found her as terrifying as I often found him.

  We sat around a black lacquered table in a rather too brightly lit fawn-colored room, with soft jazz playing in the background. There was not much decoration apart from some hideous flower arrangements of camellias in shiny pink vessels. Our party consisted of Nambetsu himself, of course, and his business manager, a thin man in pince-nez glasses named Tanaka, who asked me the occasional question about Paris, where he had been several times, and I never. Then there was a young gallery owner, whom I suspected of being a gentleman of my persuasion. Nambetsu was flanked on either side by kimonoed hostesses, who tittered annoyingly, while feeding him little snacks with their chopsticks, and making sure his glass was regularly topped up with Pepsi-Cola mixed with an expensive brand of French cognac. Sitting back in the soft-cushioned sofa, smiling away as he opened his moist lips to receive another morsel of dried cuttlefish or raw tuna, this often ferocious man, on this occasion, looked oddly babyish and wholly benign. The two other men, the manager and the nelly gallery owner, said very little, but, like the hostesses, laughed at all the sensei’s jokes and told him how right he was whenever he expounded on any subject that took his fancy.

  My own role in the proceedings was not entirely clear until many hours had passed, and we all had had too much to drink. I was still enough of a foreigner to believe that silence was bad manners, so I offered my opinions on this and that, which were received by the old man with indulgence. Once in a while, he would look at me with mock severity and say: “Always remember that I’m the sensei here.” As if I could forget. The longer the evening wore on, however, the more it became clear that one of Tanaka’s professional duties was to be the butt of Nambetsu’s cruel jests, not all of which were amusing. “Tanaka here knows less about culture than our crazy foreigner.” The hostesses tittered. Tanaka grinned awkwardly. Not wishing to be left out, I laughed along with the rest of them. “Tanaka is like the proverbial frog in the well, quacking with pleasure at the shadows in the dark. Quack, quack, quack, he goes . . .” Tanaka’s smile froze on his face. “Go quack, quack, quack, frog!” Nambetsu ordered. Tanaka began to perspire and reached for a napkin. The hostesses told Nambetsu to open his little mouth wide and fed him more snacks. The gallery owner, sensing danger, tried to humor Nambetsu. “Oh sensei,” he said, “you are too severe. Not all of us can be men of the world like you.”

  “Men of the world?” Nambetsu shouted. “What do you know about the world? The crazy foreigner, he knows. He’s traveled all over the world. He’s international. That’s why he has something to say, unlike you bumpkins.”

  From then on, the two men, Tanaka and the gallery owner, were ignored altogether, and Nambetsu addressed himself exclusively to me. The Pepsi and cognac had worked their effect. His speech was slurred, as he beckoned me to move closer, which meant that Tanaka, doubtless with a certain sense of relief, had to change places with me. “Sid-san,” Nambetsu said confidentially, breathing brandy fumes into my face, “it’s time for me to branch out, to break away from this narrow little island country, in short, to become international. I know that foreigners like my art. After the war, the Americans bought my paintings. I even sold some to General MacArthur, you know. But the Americans have gone home now. It’s time for my art to cross the ocean. You know people in New York. I’m appointing you to be my representative. I want you to introduce my art in foreign countries.”

  Although flattered by his confidence in my connections abroad, this request made me feel deeply uneasy. I knew I couldn’t just refuse. That would be taken as a snub. I wondered whether he had asked Isamu first. He was much better placed than I was to help Nambetsu get established in Paris or New York. Or did he respect Isamu too much as an artist to make such a request? I was just a critic, a movie critic for a local English-language paper, so I could be asked for such favors without any danger of causing offense. Indeed, I should feel honored. And so I did, to be sure. But how could I possibly deliver on any promise I might make? When Yoshiko asked me for a similar favor, she saved me from embarrassment by employing her own entrepreneurial skills. She was prepared to go out and promote herself, in Hollywood, Chicago, or New York. I was let off the hook. As for Nambetsu, I could see trouble looming.

  When I finally got to bed that night—alone, I might add—I had resolved to write a letter to Brad Martin and possibly Parker Tyler. They might be able to give me some pointers on how to deal with this unwanted burden. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was walking through Yasukuni Dori, the avenue running through the most crowded part of Shinjuku, dressed in nothing but my underpants. This was a disconcerting experience. I don’t remember how or even whether I resolved my predicament.

  22

  TO SAY THAT Yoshiko was happy when she was offered the part of Mariko in House of Bamboo would be a grotesque understatement; she was ecstatic. This would finally launch her Hollywood career, she would be an international star: “Oh, my gosh, Sid-san, Twentieth Century–Fox! In Japan! I will show the world my country. I will show how we have changed, how we have become a beautiful, peaceful country.” When I heard that House of Bamboo was to be a remake of a gangster picture, set in Tokyo instead of New York, and directed by Sam Fuller, master of film noir, I wasn’t so sure that Yoshiko’s vision of peace and beauty would turn out quite the way she imagined. But who was I to spoil her party.

  Isamu failed to share his wife’s joy. The thing is, he wanted her around all th
e time. He didn’t even like it when Yoshiko took off in her limo to be at the Oriental Peace Studios. Fortunately, however, Isamu too had been blessed by a stroke of good fortune, which took his mind off his domestic worries, at least for a while. Kenzo Tange, the architect, asked him to design the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima. Tange said Isamu was the perfect artist to “heal the wounds of war,” an opinion shared wholeheartedly by Isamu himself. On his return to Japan after the war, he had told reporters that he had come not just to make art, but “to reshape Japan.” Here was his chance to do just that, in Hiroshima, in the middle of Peace Park, right above which the fateful bomb had exploded. With this task in hand, he would be more than just an artist in his father’s land; he would contribute to its legacy. His creation would be there for centuries to come, an expression of emotions that were not just Japanese, or American, but universal. That, give or take a word, is how Isamu put it.

  I, too, benefited from fortune’s sudden largesse, for the producers of House of Bamboo had asked me to be the liaison man between Hollywood and Tokyo, to smooth over cultural frictions, make sure no Japanese feathers were ruffled overly much, keep Sam Fuller happy, take care that the right people were paid off to let us work on location—the right people usually being the local yakuza gang. My friendship with Tony Lucca proved to be invaluable when it came to these practical matters.

  The first person to arrive in Tokyo, on a kind of reconnaissance mission, was the main producer, by the name of Maurice “Buddy” Adler. I was bracing myself for boorish behavior: failure to take off shoes in Japanese homes, using soap in Japanese bathtubs, shouting at waiters, that sort of thing. We met at his hotel, the Imperial. Thinking I’d hit the right note of American familiarity, I addressed him as “Buddy,” which did not go down well. An eyebrow was slowly raised: “ ‘Mr. Adler’ will do fine.” I should have known better. Silver-haired and beautifully turned out in custom-made English suits, Adler looked like a high-powered banker. On his first night in Tokyo, he invited Yoshiko and myself for dinner. It had to be Japanese food, he insisted. We went to Hanada-en, where they were used to serving distinguished foreigners.