The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  I wish I could have disappeared, but there was no chance of that. “Stay,” said Yoshiko, quite firmly, when I mumbled something about it being time to get back to Tokyo. I didn’t wish to hurt her feelings, so I stayed, a mute and uncomfortable witness to their marital distress.

  “You think you lost your precious commission in Hiroshima because of discrimination,” said Yoshiko, whose anger was far from dying down. “It wasn’t discrimination. It was your bad manners. I told you to take gifts when you went to see the committee members. They were very hurt. I know. I was there, remember?”

  Isamu, still panting from his fit of hysteria, snorted with contempt: “What do you mean, gifts? This is a professional job. I’m not asking them for a favor. What do you expect me to do? Bribe them? That’s all nonsense.”

  Calmer, but still speaking with a steeliness I had rarely seen in Yoshiko, she replied: “You’ll never understand, will you? We’re not talking about bribes. We’re talking about goodwill, about custom, about tradition. You’re always spinning theories about our traditions. But you don’t understand it in your heart. You only think with your head, like a typical foreigner.”

  If all had been well in the Land of Dreams, I guess this storm would have blown itself out, so to speak, in the conjugal bed, followed the next morning by apologetic smiles. But that’s not the way it was. Yoshiko retired to the bedroom, Isamu went back to his studio to work, and I spent the night drifting in and out of dreams, one of which I can recall because it was so utterly peculiar: I walked into a bar stark naked. It resembled the Après-midi d’un faune in Kanda; or at least the fake antique French tables did. The place was full of men, wearing kimonos. One of them was Nambetsu, who was leading them in a tea ceremony. I wanted to take part. But nobody listened. They totally ignored me, as if I wasn’t even there.

  25

  THE PARTY FOR House of Bamboo in Tokyo was more like a wake. Le tout Tokyo was in attendance, of course, dressed in all their finery, even though everyone knew it was an absolute stinker. This being Japan, no one openly said so, but word had traveled at lightning speed. Remarks after the premiere screening were carefully chosen. “Most remarkable,” murmured Mr. Kawamura. “Quite so, quite so,” added Madame. “Very interesting,” was Hotta’s verdict, “Japan seen through blue eyes.” “The costumes were very nice” was the opinion of dear, loyal Mifune. And Kurosawa just looked amiable and said nothing at all.

  Since none of the American actors had bothered to come to Tokyo for the premiere, poor Yoshiko was left to face the disastrous reception of her Hollywood picture alone. Well, not quite alone. There was always Twentieth Century–Fox’s man in Tokyo, a preposterous figure named “Mike” Yamashita, who sported large gold cufflinks engraved with his initials, wore striped suits in the style of a Chicago mobster, and thumped every foreigner on the back. Mike was of little help in a crisis.

  So there was Yoshiko, at the official press conference in the Hilltop Hotel in Kanda, dressed in her kimono, fielding questions from a largely hostile press about flaws in the film for which she could hardly be held responsible. The many errors—only the Yomiuri Shimbun was kind enough to call them “misunderstandings”—were not just regarded as regrettable mistakes by the Japanese reviewers but as deliberate insults to Japanese honor. The fact that minor Japanese roles were played by Japanese-American immigrants with only a rudimentary knowledge of their ancestral language; the fact that Japanese rooms looked like Chinese restaurants; the fact that a man running in the Ginza turned a corner to find himself almost climbing the slopes of Mount Fuji. These were all taken as American slaps delivered firmly, and quite deliberately, on the national face.

  Mr. Shinoda of Kinema Jumpo: “What do you feel about being in a movie that will make the whole world laugh at us?”

  Mr. Horikiri of the Asahi Shimbun: “Do you agree that House of Bamboo is a typical example of U.S. imperialist arrogance?”

  Mr. Shindo of Tokyo Shimbun: “Do you still think of yourself as a Japanese?”

  Forget national face; every question landed like a stinging blow on Yoshiko’s own face. Although nobody actually used the word, the implication was quite clear: Yamaguchi Yoshiko was a traitor.

  She managed to keep her composure during the press conference, but broke down as soon as we were alone. Tears flooded down her cheeks, making a terrible mess of her makeup. Black lines streamed like little rivers down the craggy pink valleys of her face. How could they do this to her? Why did they say these terrible things? Didn’t they know how hard she had tried to improve the image of Japan in the outside world? She had done her very best to tell Sam Fuller about the errors in the film. Why didn’t people appreciate her more? I tried to console her as best I could, as we sat in the back of the Twentieth Century car, an absurdly large, lemon yellow Cadillac Eldorado, rolling past the moat of the Imperial Palace, where only a few years before a GI had been lynched by a Japanese mob after it became known that the United States would be keeping its military bases in Japan. There was no mob there now, just people rushing to and from work in the gray drizzle, and provincials lining up in front of the palace gate to have their souvenir photographs taken.

  My own review in the Japan Evening Post did not come easily. I found a way, though, of maneuvering around the danger areas while remaining essentially honest. I decided to treat the movie as a fairy tale, an American fairy tale set in Japan. To take it as an attempt to show the real Japan would be a grave misunderstanding. Shirley Yamaguchi, I wrote, “brilliantly acts out the Occidental fantasy of the Oriental woman. Not since Madame Butterfly has the loving innocence and gentle submissiveness of this iconic figure been conveyed with such consummate skill.”

  The next time I saw Yoshiko, for lunch at a tempura restaurant in the Nishino Building, she didn’t mention my review, which I took as a silent acknowledgment of my friendly intentions. She was wearing a mauve kimono, and a pair of large sunglasses, presumably as a shield against prying eyes. When she took them off, I noticed that her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. I thought it was the torrid reception of her movie, and was about to commiserate, telling her what unthinking idiots journalists were, but her anxiety turned out to have a different source. Yoshiko had been asked to be in a musical on Broadway, Shangri-La, a musical version of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. It is a variation of the Rip van Winkle story. A plane carrying Westerners from the war in China crashes in the Himalayas. The survivors wake up in a mysterious place where time doesn’t exist and peace lasts forever. One of them, a British novelist, falls in love with a beautiful Oriental woman (Yoshiko). They decide to elope. But the moment they leave the timeless zone of eternal peace, the beautiful young woman becomes a wrinkled old crone.

  I had seen Mr. Capra’s Lost Horizon before the war, with Ronald Colman as the novelist and Sam Jaffe as the High Lama. For months I dreamed of Tibetan temples, Oriental wise men, and snowcapped mountains. It fed my loathing of the world I lived in, its addiction to material wealth and violence. I’d have accepted a one-way ticket to Shangri-la anytime.

  “My dear,” I said, “the part sounds perfect for you. You must do it, of course.” She nodded vigorously. Starring in a Broadway musical had always been her dream. She couldn’t have asked for anything better, she assured me. But she didn’t look happy at all. She kept readjusting her collar, as the truth emerged in bits and pieces. Apparently Isamu didn’t want her to go. He wanted her to stay in Kamakura, and anyway, he said, the musical was just “mediocre American rubbish.” But that hurdle had been negotiated, though not without a few paper doors being torn and crockery smashed on the way. Isamu gave in. He had to. As Yoshiko said: “My career was on the line. We’re both artists, but he doesn’t understand that I work for the public. I need an audience. It’s different for Isamu-san. He just works for himself.”

  Then a second, far more formidable barrier arose: her visa application was denied. No reason given. Strings were pulled. Kawamura wrote to a friend at the embassy. Letters went back and forth between
Tokyo and Washington. It took several months before an answer emerged from the American consul in Tokyo: Yoshiko was “a threat to U.S. national security.” This sounded quite mad. But still no stated reason. More letters were sent, and contacts asked to intervene. It turned out that Yoshiko was suspected of Communist activities. But why? More time, more letters, more interviews. The name of Colonel Wesley F. Gunn came up in the files. He had marked Yoshiko as a suspected Communist agent in wartime Manchuria. Her childhood friend, “the Jewess Masha,” was known to be working for the Soviet government. And besides, hadn’t Yoshiko been conspicuously friendly with Charlie Chaplin, even as his “un-American” activities became known?

  Just as life’s misfortunes ambush a person without warning, help too can come from the least expected quarters. There is a certain rough justice in this, I guess. A year or so before Yoshiko’s visa problem, she had played the part of a mistress of a British merchant in Yokohama in an utterly forgettable Japanese picture called, for some reason, Autumn Wind. Ikebe was in this movie as well, playing the merchant’s handsome Japanese servant. The foreigner is cruel. The mistress falls for the servant. They try to elope. The foreigner is about to kill the servant. She threatens to kill herself. The foreigner hesitates. The lovers get away in the fog.

  A forgettable picture, as I said, but a fateful one. For the British merchant was played by a fellow by the name of Stan Lutz. I knew him slightly. He had held a position in Willoughby’s intelligence section. A shady character, with straw blond hair and thin lips, Lutz had stayed on in Japan after the occupation ended. I spotted him once or twice at Tony Lucca’s place, eating pizzas with Japanese men with big necks and flashy neckties, the kind one doesn’t pick a quarrel with. I didn’t much care for Lutz. But Yoshiko appears to have got along with him all right. He played in a few other Japanese movies, many of them a trifle louche, the kind of thing we would call “soft porn” today, all pretty bad. There were other ventures, too, in businesses of one kind or another.

  Lutz was not unusual. I knew the type. Japan offered rich pickings for men who weren’t too fussy about the way they made their money. As Lucca would say, it was all a matter of connections, and Lutz had more powerful ones than most. One of them was a man named Yoshio Taneguchi, an indicted war criminal who had written a well-known memoir while awaiting his trial. The Allies arrested him for crimes committed in China during the war: torture, assassinations, looting, that kind of thing. Rumor had it that he was very rich. During the war, the Imperial Japanese government had been grateful enough for his services to give him the honorary title of “Rear Admiral.” The translator and publisher of Taneguchi’s memoir was Stan Lutz.

  Anyway, Taneguchi never had to stand trial. Willoughby had him released, because of his wartime reputation as an avid hunter of Japanese Communists, just the kind of man the Americans thought they needed when China fell in the late 1940s and Japanese trade unions were beginning to get troublesome. It turned out that Taneguchi had a soft spot for Yoshiko, whom he remembered from her Ri Koran days in China. When Lutz told him about Yoshiko’s visa problem, he said something about having been a member of Ri Koran’s “fan club” in Manchuria. He promised he would have a word with friends in the U.S. government. The visa came through in a week. What Lutz got out of the transaction, I don’t know. Perhaps he had acted purely out of friendship. But neither “purely” nor “friendship” are words I would normally apply to an operator like Lutz.

  To thank him for his kind help in this personal matter, Yoshiko hosted a small dinner for Taneguchi at a discreet Japanese restaurant near the Hattori Building in the Ginza. We had a private tatami room. Lutz came. Kawamura had been invited, but when he heard the name Taneguchi, he suddenly remembered a previous engagement. Isamu was there, reluctantly, one felt. The party was never going to be convivial. It was one of those ceremonial occasions without which Japanese society could not function. Yoshiko made sure only the most expensive dishes were served. The service was impeccable and the food tasted, well, expensive. Yoshiko, as a token of her gratitude, handed a beautifully wrapped gift to Taneguchi, a short porcine man with a crooked mouth and little, shrewd eyes. I noticed that he was missing a finger on his left hand. “This is from my husband and I,” said Yoshiko. “No, it’s not,” said Isamu, pulling a face like a stubborn child, “it’s just from Yoshiko.” Yoshiko laughed, flashed him a look of anger that pretended to be mock, and said something to the effect of “Pay no attention to him.” Taneguchi grunted and put the parcel aside without opening it. Grunting was in fact his main contribution to the conversation. Lutz would sometimes translate a grunt, which put Isamu in an even worse mood. “I know,” he said, “I speak Japanese.”

  26

  SOME COUPLES THRIVE on frequent separations; absence sharpens their passion. Others can’t bear to spend even one night apart. Myself, I wouldn’t know. I’m just an observer. I can’t say I’ve ever really been in love. I’ve been in lust many times, of course. In Japan, that is my normal state. But love, living with a person to the exclusion of others, having a soulmate who shares my bed, making love to my most intimate friend, that is something I’ve never experienced, nor ever wished to. In love, the self of one person is transformed into another self, a collective one, the self of the couple. In lust, I too lose myself, but, satisfied after possession of the other, I like to have myself back again. So I have lovers, and I have friends. I am content to observe how others attempt to become couples and fail, only to attempt the same thing all over again with new partners. I admire their fortitude, or should I say, foolhardiness. I have learned to live without illusions myself, but cherish them in others.

  An added complication is the particular nature of my lust. In Ohio, I could be arrested for what I like to do. In Tokyo, I am free to do as I please. Not that I didn’t arrive with all the baggage of my American Puritan past. Since that glorious first day in ruined Yokohama, I’ve managed to throw some of that overboard, but not all of it. I sometimes wish I could be like those married couples, happy as cows grazing in the fields. And sometimes I wish I were Japanese, taking my Japaneseness for granted, soaking in the huge warm communal bath of my collective self, along with millions of others who look and talk and think just like me. That, too, is a way of losing oneself.

  But I’m not Japanese and not a happy breeder. One of the great blessings of living in Japan is that the sexual deviant is not placed in a neat little box. There are certain obligations, to be sure. But as long as a Japanese acquires a wife and starts a family, how he finds his sexual pleasure is his own business. As a foreigner, there are no boxes, except for one very large one that is very clearly marked: gaijin.

  In the case of Isamu and Yoshiko, I could see the end of their happy coupledom approaching some time before it actually occurred. The plastic sandals incident already revealed cracks that would soon widen to serious rifts. Isamu’s notion of the perfect Japanese life was a fantasy that Yoshiko could never have shared for long. She was a movie star. She needed more than one role. The one Isamu had written for her couldn’t hold her forever. Broadway and Hollywood still beckoned. It was time for her to move on from the Land of Dreams. Some couples drift apart, like two rivers parting ways. With Isamu and Yoshiko, the break was more like the culmination of a series of storms that brought the crumbling edifice of their marriage down in a heap of rubble. The night of the biggest storm was also the last time I visited the house in Kamakura.

  A Hollywood producer named Norman Waterman had come to Tokyo. He was considering Yoshiko for a possible role in a movie, something about GI wives. Yoshiko had invited him down for dinner in Kamakura without asking Isamu first. I was to accompany him.

  Waterman was not exactly my type. A small, compact man with a loud voice, and a taste for expensive shoes, he half expected me to match him up with a local “cutie.” Girls were very much his thing. He didn’t actually use the phrase “kimono girls” (he said “cutie”), but that was what he was looking for. I put him in a taxi with the addres
s of a well-known massage parlor scribbled on a piece of paper. Tokyo taxi drivers have to be given precise instructions to get to most places. Not this place, however. Everyone knew it. Waterman came back with a wide smile on his neat little face, like a frisky dog wagging his tail after having had a nice juicy bone to chew on.

  But Waterman wasn’t so bad, really. We shared a taste for Preston Sturges movies, especially The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, in which Waterman had played a minor part as assistant to the assistant of the producer. As long as we stayed off the subject of “cuties” and talked about the movies, we got along fine.

  It was a sultry night. The last of the cicadas were crying lazily under a starlit sky. Isamu, who had no interest in Preston Sturges, or movies, or Yoshiko’s prospects of a Hollywood career, hated Waterman on sight. He barely acknowledged his presence, as Yoshiko told stories about her good friends Charlie Chaplin, Yul Brynner, King Vidor, Ed Sullivan, and so on. Waterman was charmed. “You’ll love working in L.A.,” he said, his voice booming all the way across the rice field to Nambetsu’s house, where the sensei was cutting our sashimi. “I hope you like our Japanese food,” said Yoshiko. “Like?” said Waterman. “I love it! Sukiyaki, tempura!” Isamu stared at him as though he were a wild ape.

  Nambetsu, to my relief and, it must be said, surprise, behaved well for once, even when Waterman mispronounced his name. Nambetsu just smiled, exuding benevolence, in the manner of a grown-up at a children’s party. Waterman was the kind of American Japanese know how to handle, not like those crazy foreigners who try to be just like them. Waterman actually behaved like a foreigner. There were no surprises there. Nambetsu, like all Japanese, cherished predictability. He poured saké into Waterman’s cup. Waterman protested mildly: “I’m not much of a drinking man, Mr. Nambis. If you keep pouring like that, I’ll get bombed in no time.”