The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  I didn’t sleep much that night. I kept arguing with Dieter in my mind. There was something wrong with his logic. But I decided to leave it at that. We all have to live with the burdens of our own histories. Dieter and Anke have to live with a German past that is hard for us Japanese to understand. I still don’t see why the suffering of Jews in the Second World War should be an excuse for them behaving like Nazis today. We should be fighting the Jews precisely because they are like the Nazis. That is the honest way to resist fascism. I actually believe that Dieter and Anke secretly agreed with me, but couldn’t bring themselves to say so. For the sake of our friendship and the success of our cause, I decided never to bring up the subject of the Jews with them again.

  10

  HANAKO BELIEVED IN free love. As did I, in principle. But I savored every second we could be together. I wished our nights in the top-floor apartment on the rue Sanayeh could have gone on forever. I thought I knew all about making love to a woman. In fact, I knew nothing. She was my teacher, my mentor, my guide through the portals of paradise. I had never imagined that such pleasure was possible. But she also made me aware that I was still a reactionary at heart. As we lay together, smoking, gazing at the starlit sky over the old city, she made it clear that I could never possess her, since she was a free human being, who gave me her love freely. She didn’t belong to any man. Her only master, she said, was the revolution.

  Of course, I knew I was being a hypocrite, no better than those Japanese salarymen who go home to their faithful wives after jerking off to a pink movie about raping hot schoolgirls. But I wanted to have Hanako to myself. The idea of her melting into the arms of another man, offering herself to his passion, filled me with jealous rage. I knew that she had slept with Abu Bassam, and continued to sleep with Abu Wahid, the chief of propaganda, a thick, dark-skinned man, who took women as his lovers as though it were his natural right. When I told Hanako that I loved her, she said that she loved me too, but not just me. Once, when I argued about this, she got angry. “Who do you think you are?” she screamed. “What do you think we’re doing here? This isn’t a girls’ high school, you know. We’re fighting for our freedom. Not just the freedom of Palestine. Freedom for all of us.”

  I knew I couldn’t honestly disagree. So I tried a different tack. “But Abu Wahid is a bully,” I said. “He does want to possess you.” She walked away in a fury. Days later, when we were back on speaking terms, she said: “Abu Wahid is a hero of the revolution.” Quite why this gave him a special right to Hanako was not immediately apparent, but I stopped arguing. I learned to live with the idea of sharing her. Better a fishtail than no fish at all.

  Not that I saw all that much of Hanako, for she was usually working on various missions, moving from one safe house to another, often with Abu Wahid, who was effectively my boss, since the PFLP cadres had decided that I would best be employed as a maker of propaganda films. I liked the work, even if all the scenes I shot—of commandos shooting at Zionist targets, women working on the home front, children singing revolutionary songs—were staged to show the Palestinians to their best advantage. But this didn’t bother me at all. Bourgeois television was staged as well, to promote consumerism, and the capitalist imperialist system. I saw myself in the same mold as the early Soviet filmmakers. Like Pudovkin. Art is never neutral. Everything is a reflection of power relations. My films, shot on sixteen-millimeter stock, were made to empower the powerless.

  I didn’t miss Japan much. The one thing I did sometimes pine for was a steaming bowl of Sapporo ramen swimming in miso soup. They have Chinese noodles in Beirut, but they don’t taste the same. And sometimes I missed my friends. Once, Hayashi visited us in Beirut, but he felt homesick after three days, couldn’t stomach the food, and flew back to Tokyo. I received a long letter from Yamaguchi-san, full of enthusiasm as usual. She was proud of being the first Japanese TV reporter to interview Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang.

  She wrote:

  It was an unforgettable experience to meet this great man, who had fought so bravely against us as a guerrilla fighter, suffering so many hardships for the sake of his people. Do you know, Sato-kun, when he wrapped his firm hands around mine, I felt his great strength. It was like standing in front of an open fire, so warm and powerful. His piercing eyes seemed to go right through me. I apologized for what our country had done to his nation, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said he had always admired me and that my songs had given him and his comrades comfort during the war. I couldn’t help myself, Sato-kun, I was so moved that I couldn’t stop myself from crying tears of joy. Then he said he would give me all the time I wanted, on one condition, that I sing “China Nights” for him at the official banquet. You well know how much I hate that song. It’s as if the ghost of Ri Koran will never stop haunting me. But how could I turn down his request? I felt I owed it to the Korean people, as a token of my friendship. Will we ever have peace in this world, Sato-kun? I hope so with all my heart.

  Reading her letter, I was close to tears myself. There was such sincerity in her feelings, so rare among Japanese. Here, among the Palestinians, it was different. There was no time to think selfishly, for everyone was dedicated to the same cause. Perhaps it takes extreme hardships to bring out the best in a people. Peace had weakened the Japanese, made them soft and self-centered, like babies.

  There was no chance of us going soft. Some of my comrades, including Dieter and Anke, had left Beirut to continue the struggle in Europe and elsewhere. Their names would sometimes crop up in the newspaper headlines. When that happened, you usually knew it couldn’t mean good news. Our commandos prefer to stay anonymous. Those of us who stayed behind were kept busy in the camps, lecturing on world politics, practicing rifle drills, learning how to detonate car bombs, working in the free clinics, making propaganda. If I had any complaint in those days, it was that I grew tired of training. I longed to practice the skills I had acquired. Making films was fine. But films don’t change the world. Films can’t deliver a direct blow to the enemy. Films can’t kill.

  I was reassured by the men in the PFLP office. “Your time will come, Comrade Sato,” Abu Wahid said one day, when I’d pestered him yet again for a more important job. “We have plans for you.” But he didn’t tell me what they were, and I knew it wasn’t my place to push him for more information. Secrecy was essential. Hanako always knew more than I did, because of her proximity to the leaders. “One day we’ll be very proud of you,” she said with her sweet smile that never failed to get my spirits up.

  11

  MY DAY DID indeed come. But first I should relate an extraordinary event that came as a complete surprise to me. In the late summer of 1972, I received a letter from Okuni. It was written in his typically feverish style, coming straight to the point, dispensing with mention of the weather in Tokyo or other pleasantries. While reading his letter, I could picture his face in my mind, his eyes blazing. He was ready to come to Beirut, he wrote, with Yo and the others. They would perform The Ri Koran Story in a Palestinian refugee camp. Would I quickly prepare the way and organize a proper venue? The play had been rewritten somewhat, he explained, and was translated into Arabic. A team of language coaches was already teaching the actors to speak their lines phonetically. With luck and application, they should be ready in another month.

  The idea sounded so absurd that at first I didn’t know how to respond. What was he thinking? Didn’t he realize how serious the situation was in the camps? These weren’t playgrounds for theatrical experiments. We were at war.

  Still, I felt duty-bound, for the sake of our friendship, to at least put Okuni’s proposal to Abu Wahid. We had a meeting in an office at the Shatila camp in central Beirut. Hanako was with us. I tried not to notice Wahid’s dark hairy arm brushing her left thigh. They had coffee. I had mint tea. I told him of Okuni’s plan, and tried to describe the play, which, in Tokyo, was unusual enough, but sounded utterly preposterous in Beirut. A Manchurian movie star trying to find herself in the lower depths of Tokyo. What
could this possibly mean to an Arab people fighting for their lives? There was a painful silence. Hanako looked at Abu Wahid, shaking her head in disbelief. Feeling embarrassed and a little guilty, I looked out the window at a bunch of children in dirty T-shirts playing in the street. One tiny boy was aiming a sling at something. Another was shooting off a plastic gun. I was fully expecting Abu Wahid to say no. Then I heard a slow chuckle, which quickly grew into bellows of laughter. Wahid’s outburst of honking, hooting, hiccuping mirth gathered such steam that the children stopped playing and looked in our direction. Hanako, clearly relieved, started giggling as well. “Why not?” he shouted between spasms of coughing and knee-slapping. “God knows our people need entertainment. A Japanese theater! About a movie star in China! Why not? Why the hell not?”

  And I must confess, on second thoughts, that even though I failed to see what was quite so hilarious, the idea of Okuni’s theater in a Palestinian refugee camp did have a certain surrealistic appeal. The question was where to stage it. There were few open spaces in the camp, and they were vulnerable to Israeli attacks. Their Phantoms were constantly streaking over Beirut, like little silver birds of death. Nothing escaped from their prying eyes.

  Various spots were considered—a disused cinema in West Beirut, a marketplace in Sabra—and rejected as too impractical. It would have to be outside Beirut, thought Abu Wahid. Then he hit on an idea. Why not go where the enemy would least expect such a thing? There was a camp near the front lines in southern Lebanon which had an abandoned school playground in a fairly secluded place. The Israelis had bombed the camp several times, but the rubble had been cleared, and there had been no attacks for almost a year now. If the Japanese actors didn’t mind taking the risk of dying in a bombing raid, they were most welcome to set up their stage in there. This thought, too, filled him with helpless mirth. The hand that had been squeezing Hanako’s thigh was slapping the wooden table with merriment.

  When I saw my old university friend emerge from the Customs Hall at Beirut International, with his beady eyes and his broad grin, I thought I would cry with happiness. This was only his second trip outside Japan. He had visited Taiwan once with Yo. And I must say, even in cosmopolitan Beirut, Okuni and his actors, with Nagasaki in a purple woman’s kimono, and Shina Tora wearing high Japanese clogs, like a sushi chef, looked like a very odd bunch indeed.

  As we sat around in his room, drinking Suntory Whiskey, eating Japanese rice crackers (I hadn’t realized how much I had missed those), and gossiping about old friends, even I felt a wave of nostalgia for the world I had left behind. In the thick blue smoke of their duty-free Seven Stars cigarettes it was as if a little part of Tokyo had come to life in a dreary business hotel in West Beirut.

  Even though it was his first time in the Middle East, Okuni had no desire to be shown around our splendid city, which he treated with an air of total indifference. When I suggested a tour, he said: “If Tennessee Williams came to Tokyo, do you think he’d go sightseeing?” The analogy struck me as far-fetched, but still, Okuni wouldn’t be persuaded. When he wasn’t drinking with his actors, he was working on his next play, alone in his hotel room. Still living in his own head, I thought, not without a twinge of envy for a man who could be so self-contained. I had always admired his intensity, the way he concentrated on his actors during rehearsals, silently mouthing every word of the lines he had written, his eyes locked onto the stage. I wondered whether I would ever be capable of such absorption.

  The trip south, in a hired bus, through some of the most stunning scenery in the world, left him equally cold. Okuni barely even glanced at the lush green vineyards and ochre-colored hills. Only Nagasaki peered out the window from time to time. Okuni, Yo, and the others talked about the play, and rehearsed their lines in an Arabic that made Khalid, our driver, laugh out loud. And after this improvised rehearsal in the bus, Okuni strummed his guitar and sang songs from his older plays, while the others sang along with him. We might as well have been traveling from Osaka to Fukuoka, for all they cared.

  And yet there was not much that escaped Okuni’s attention. He observed, without appearing to be looking, and what he saw was not usually what others would have seen. The public toilets, for example, held a peculiar fascination for him. He came up to me, soon after we had arrived in the camp, to comment in his high-pitched giggle on the interesting differences between Arab and Japanese shit. “Our turds,” he pointed out, “are small and hard, whereas theirs are softer but with more body. Do you think we’re different inside? Or is it just the food we eat?” I honestly told him that I had never given this any thought. He walked off, unsatisfied, sniffing his finger, the question still very much on his mind.

  He insisted on shooting a Kalashnikov. The Palestinians were amused by Okuni and happy to take him to the shooting range. He was like a child with a new toy. I warned him not to burn his fingers on the barrel, and watch for the kick. “Fantastic!” he shouted to Yo, as he took aim at a target marked with the star of David. “Fantastic! Do you think we can smuggle one of these through Haneda? Ban-chan would love it! What do you think, Yo?” Yo told him not to be ridiculous. He pursed his mouth, a child deprived of his new toy.

  Meanwhile, the stage was set up on the abandoned playground. The actors were followed by hundreds of wide, hungry eyes of children in rags, who stood there watching their every move as the yellow tent took shape. Old people, too, observed the proceedings, looking tired and uncomprehending. There was a small concrete building that had somehow survived the Israeli attacks, which the actors used as a dressing room. We had to start at four, because it would be too risky to perform at night; the lights would attract too much attention. Besides, electricity was at a premium in the camp, and blackouts were a constant nuisance.

  A slight afternoon breeze took the edge off the daytime heat when the play began inside the tent, which was packed with people of all ages, people who had never seen a play before, let alone a Japanese one. They seemed to enjoy the music, and the lighting effects. At least some of the words must have got through, and even if they didn’t, the actors hammed it up so much that they made the Palestinians laugh anyway. They laughed and they laughed, more than I’d ever seen a Japanese audience laugh, as though these Arabs had been starved of laughter, and their natural joy came gushing back through a broken dam.

  I didn’t recognize much from the original Ri Koran Story. The play had been changed almost beyond recognition. Ri Koran went looking for the key to unlock her amnesia in a Palestinian refugee camp, instead of Asakusa. The evil puppetmaster, Amakasu, played by Shina Tora, wore an eyepatch, like Moshe Dayan’s, and a star of David was pinned to his chest. When the evil puppetmaster is overthrown, the actors sing the Palestinian guerrilla anthem, with Ri in the middle, dressed as a Palestinian commando, brandishing a gun.

  All went well until about halfway through the last act. No one who was there will ever forget it. Okuni couldn’t have staged a more dramatic effect if he had tried. The stage went dark. A sinister blue spotlight was switched on to the tune of the Israeli anthem; Shina Tora, as Moshe Dayan, stepped onto the stage holding Ri as a puppet on his string. The arch enemy had entered the camp. First the children screamed, then they pelted poor Shina Tora with gravel and stones picked up from the ground. Yo, as Ri, tried her best to stay cool, but I could see panic in her eyes. Shina Tora ducked, while pulling evil faces at the audience, which agitated them even more. Near the edge of the stage was Abu Wahid, waving his big hairy arms, trying to calm people down, telling them it was just a play. But the crowd was far too excited for such niceties. They were ready to lynch the Jewish villain with the David star. This was the moment when Okuni showed his genius for improvisation. Standing behind Shina Tora, as one of his henchmen, he ordered the actors to duck behind the scenery. The stage went dark once more, and a minute or two later Yo reappeared, dressed as a Palestinian commando, holding the villain’s star in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other, while the cast sang the Palestinian anthem.

&
nbsp; It was a master stroke. Every man, woman, and child in the tent joined in, some of them crying their hearts out. A few of the younger guys blasted a few rounds with their guns. I had learned the song too, during my training, and could hear myself screaming the words: “Howling storms and roaring guns, our home soil soaked with martyrs’ blood, Palestine, oh Palestine, my land of revenge and resistance.” Tears were streaming down Abu Wahid’s face. I had never experienced anything like it: theater had broken through into real life at last. Yamaguchisan would surely have loved it. I filmed the whole thing, but the movie stock got lost in an air raid. Most of the Palestinians who were there that night are dead.

  12

  GOOD NEWS USUALLY comes when you least expect it. Perhaps I should have known something was up when Hanako spent a whole night with me without a moment’s sleep. Always a passionate woman, on this particular occasion she just couldn’t stop. She was like a love demon. I was totally exhausted, and she was still begging for more. When I asked her what had got into her, whether she had been drinking some love potion, she just tightened her legs around me and whispered that she loved me, that she was mine, all mine. When I asked her about Abu Wahid, she put her finger to her lips and went: “Shhh.”