December 6

by Martin Cruz Smith

  The artist offered Gen and Harry cigarettes.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Oharu said. “They don’t smoke.”

  “Don’t be silly, these are Tokyo boys, not farm boys from your rice paddy. Besides, cigarettes cut the pain.”

  “All the same, when the gaijin feels better, they have to go. I have work to do,” the manager announced, although Harry hadn’t seen him budge. “Anyway, it’s too crowded in here. Hot, too.”

  “Damn.” The artist felt his jacket pockets. “Now I’m out of fags.”

  Harry thought for a second. “What kind of cigarettes? We can get them for you. If you’re thirsty, we can get beer, too.”

  “You’ll just take the money and run,” the manager said.

  “I’ll stay. Gen can go.”

  Gen had been dignified and watchful. He gave Harry a narrow look that asked when he had started giving orders.

  “Next time,” Harry said, “I’ll go and Gen can stay.”

  It was a matter of adapting to the situation, and Harry’s point of view had altered in the last ten minutes. A new reality had revealed itself, with more possibilities in this second-floor music-hall changing room than he’d ever imagined. Much better than playing samurai.

  “It would be nice for the girls if we had someone willing to run for drinks and cigarettes,” Oharu said. “Instead of men who just sit around and make comments about our legs.”

  The manager was unconvinced. He picked his collar from the sweat on his neck and gave Harry a closer scrutiny. “Your father really is a missionary?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, missionaries don’t smoke or drink. So how would you even know where to go?”

  Harry could have told the manager about his uncle Orin, a missionary who had come from Louisville to Tokyo’s pleasure quarter and fallen from grace like a high diver hitting the water. Instead, Harry lit his cigarette and released an O of smoke. It rose and unraveled in the fan.

  “For free?” the manager asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Both of you?”

  Harry looked over to Gen, who still held back, sensitive about the prerogatives of leadership. The door to the stage flew open for a change of acts, singers dressed in graduation gowns rushing out as ballet dancers poured in. The ballerina Harry had seen before didn’t even bother with the privacy of a screen to strip to her skin, towel herself off and pull on a majorette costume with a rising sun on the front. To Harry, her change of costumes suggested a wide range of talents and many facets of personality. Gen had been watching, too.

  “Yes,” said Gen. “I’m with him.”

  “You should be. Look at him, a minute ago he was about to lose his head, and now he’s in Oharu’s lap. That is a lucky boy.”

  Was it only luck, Harry wondered? The way the fight had unfolded, the stumbling upstairs into the theater’s roost, encountering Oharu and the artist, the transition of him and Gen from would-be samurai to men of the world all had a dreamlike quality, as if he had stepped through a looking glass to see a subtly altered, more defined image from the other side.

  Otherwise, nothing changed. The following day he and Gen were at school again. They marched onto the baseball field in the afternoon and had the usual bayonet drill with Sergeant Sato. Harry put on his padded vest and wicker helmet so that, one after the other, Jiro and Taro, Tetsu and Hajime could take turns pummeling the gaijin. Gen beat Harry into the ground more viciously than ever.

  At the end of the drill, the sergeant asked what their ambition in life was and, to a boy, they shouted. “To die for the emperor!”

  No one shouted more fervently than Harry.

  1941

  2

  HARRY AND MICHIKO were dancing barefoot to the Artie Shaw version of “Begin the Beguine,” the Latin sap taken out of the music and replaced by jungle drums.

  There was room to dance because Harry didn’t own much, he wasn’t a collector of Oriental knickknacks —netsuke or swords— like a lot of expatriates in Tokyo. Only a low table, oil heater, gramophone and records, armoire for Western clothes and a wall hanging of Fuji. An oval mirror reflected the red of a neon sign outside.

  An erotic zone for the Japanese was the nape of the neck. Harry slipped behind Michiko and put his lips to the bump at the top of her spine, between her shoulder blades, and ran a finger up to the dark V where her hair began, black and sleek, cut short to show off the delicate ivory whorl of her ears. She was skinny and her breasts were small, but her very smoothness was sensual. At the base of her neck where it pulsed were three pinpoint moles, like drops of ink on rice paper. Michiko took his hand and slid it down her stomach while he shifted behind her. When a Japanese said yes and meant it, the word “Hai!” came directly from the chest. It was the way she said “Harry” over and over. In Japanese prints, the courtesan bit a sash to keep from crying out in passion. Not Michiko. Sex with Michiko was like mating with a cat; Harry was surprised sometimes afterward that his ear wasn’t notched. But she did possess him, she claimed all of him with a backward glance.

  How old was she, twenty? He was thirty, old enough to know that her heart-shaped face was offered as innocently as the ace of spades. And if Saint Peter asked him at the Pearly Gates, “Why did you do it?” Harry admitted that the only honest answer would be “Because it fit.” Before lovers leaped into the red-hot mouth of a volcano, did they pause to reconsider? When two addicts decided to share the same ball of opium, did they ask, “Is this a good idea?” His sole defense was that no one fit him like Michiko, and each time was different.

  “Harry,” she said, “did I tell you that you were the first man I kissed? I saw kissing in Western movies. I never did it.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Not really,” she said and bit his lip, and he let go.

  “Jesus, what is this about?”

  “You’re leaving me, aren’t you, Harry. I can tell.”

  “Christ.” It was amazing how women could turn it off, Harry thought. Like a golden faucet. He felt his lip. “Damn it, Michiko. You could leave scars.”

  “I wish.”

  Michiko plumped herself down on a tatami and pulled on white socks with split toes. As if those were enough wardrobe in themselves, she sat cross-legged, not knees forward like a woman should, and took a cigarette and her own matches. She was the only Japanese woman he knew who made love naked. Polite Japanese women pitched their voices high when talking to men. Michiko talked to men, women, dogs all the same.

  “I can’t leave. There are no ships going to sea, there haven’t been for weeks.”

  “You could fly.”

  “If I could get to Hong Kong or Manila, I could catch the Clipper, but I can’t get to Hong Kong or Manila. They won’t even let me leave Tokyo.”

  “You go all the time to see your Western women.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Tell me, are they fat German fraus or Englishwomen with faces like horses? It’s the Englishwoman you’re always calling, that cow.”

  “A horse or a cow, which is it?”

  She sucked on her cigarette hard enough to light her eyes. “Westerners smell of butter. Rancid butter. The only good thing I can say for you, Harry, is that for an American, you don’t smell so bad.”

  “There’s a lovely compliment.” Harry pulled on pants for dignity’s sake and fumbled for cigarettes. Michiko had a physical horror of Western women, their color, size, everything. They did seem a little gross next to the fineness of her hands, the sharpness of her brows, the inky curls at the base of her white stomach. But, call it a breadth of taste, he liked Western women, too. “Michiko, I hate to remind you, but we’re not married.”

  “I don’t want to be married to you.”

  “Good.” She was an independent free-love Communist, after all, and he was grateful for any dry rock he could stand on when talking to her. “So what the hell are you talking about?”

  She had the kind of gaze that penetrated the dark. Harry sensed
there was some sort of silent conversation going on, a test of wills that he was losing. Michiko was complicated. She might be Japanese, but she was from Osaka, and Osaka women didn’t mince words or back down. She was a doctrinaire Red who kept stacks of Vogue under a Shinto shrine in a corner of the room. She was a feminist and, at the same time, was a great admirer of a Tokyo woman who, denied her lover’s attention, had famously strangled him and sliced off his privates to carry close to her heart. What frightened Harry was that he knew Michiko regarded a double suicide of lovers as a happy ending, but she’d be willing to settle for a murder-suicide if need be. It seemed to him that the safest possible course was to deny they were lovers at all.

  “You’re never jealous, are you, Harry?”

  “How do I answer a question like that? Should I be?”

  “Yes. You should be sick with it. That’s love.”

  “No,” Harry said, “that’s nuts.”

  “Maybe you just wanted a Japanese girl?”

  “I think I could have found an easier one.”

  Some Americans did take up with Japanese women for the exoticism. Harry, though, had been raised in Japan. A corn-fed girl from Kansas was stranger to him.

  Michiko’s long look continued, as if she were sending out small invisible scouts to test his defenses.

  “The Western woman, is she married? If she’s here, she must be married.”

  “I had no idea when I found you on the street and took you in like a wet stray that you were going to be so suspicious.”

  Suspicion was in season. Harry moved to the side of the window to look down on the street, at the flow of figures in dark winter kimonos. The evening was balmy for December. The warble of a street vendor’s flute floated up, and at the corner a customer in a black suit shoveled noodles from a box into his mouth. In front of a teahouse at the other end of the block, a taller man nibbled a bun. Plainclothesmen had always watched missionaries, too. It was as if he’d inherited a pair of shadows.

  “I saw them,” Michiko said. “Are you in trouble?”

  “No. Harry Niles is the safest man in Japan.”

  “You’ve done nothing wrong?”

  “Right or wrong doesn’t matter.” He remembered his father, a Bible thumper with never a doubt in his righteousness. Harry’s confidence was in his unrighteousness, his ability to dodge the consequences.

  “So, are you going to leave?” Michiko asked. She took a long draw on her cigarette and rearranged her limbs, leaning back on her hands, legs forward, ankles crossed. He could just make out her eyes, the dark caps of her breasts. “You can tell me. I’m used to men who disappoint.”

  “What about the men in the Party, your local Lenins?”

  “The men in the Party talked all day about the oppression of the working class, but every night they headed to the brothels. You know why I chose you, Harry? Because with an American, I had no expectations. I couldn’t be disappointed.”

  Harry didn’t know quite what she meant. The big problem with Michiko was that she acknowledged no rational position, only emotion in the extreme, whereas Harry regarded himself as pure reason.

  “Do you want us to burn down, Harry?”

  It took him a moment to notice his cigarette carried an ash an inch long. People who lived on straw mats had a ready supply of ashtrays. The one he picked up was ceramic and said PACIFIC FLEET OFFICERS CLUB — PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII around a gilded anchor. Hawaii sounded good. Sunday would be the pre-Christmas party at Pearl, the same as at all U.S. Navy officers clubs around the world.

  “Know what?” Harry said. “We should have a party. We’re too tense, everyone is. We’ll have a few friends over. A couple of the old reporters, artists, movie people.”

  “That’s like the club every night.”

  “Okay, Michiko, what would make you happy? I’m not going anywhere, I promise. The entire Japanese Empire has marshaled its forces to keep me here. I’m blocked by land and sea and air. Even if I went to the States, what would I be, what would I do? My talent is speaking more Japanese than most Americans, and more English than most Japanese. Big deal. And I know how to buy yen and sell a movie and read a corporate ledger.”

  “Harry, you’re a con man.”

  “I’m a philosopher. My philosophy is, give the people what they want.”

  “Do you give women what they want?”

  Michiko was capable of retroactive jealousy. She had nothing in common with the mousy Japanese wife or mincing geisha. Harry slipped behind her and picked his words as carefully as a man choosing what could be a necktie or a rope. “I try.”

  “With all women?”

  “No, but with interesting women I try hard. You are interesting.”

  “Other women?”

  “Boring.”

  “Western women?”

  He slid a hand around her. “The worst.”

  “How?”

  “Too big, too busty, too blond. Just awful.”

  She took a deep drag, and her cigarette flared. “I should burn you every time you lie. They’re really awful?”

  “Unbearable.”

  “There won’t be a war?”

  “Not with the United States. Just war talk.”

  “You won’t leave?”

  “No, I’ll be right here. Here and here and here.” He put his lips to the beauty marks on her back. “And do the things I really might.”

  “So you’re staying?”

  “As long as you want. I’m telling you true…” He dug his fingers in her hair, soft and thick as water.

  “You swear?”

  He whispered, “If I could be with you.”

  “Okay, okay, Harry.” Michiko let her head loll in his hand. She stubbed out her cigarette and pulled off her socks. “You win.”

  THE HAPPY PARIS had originally been a tearoom. Harry had transformed it with saloon tables, a bar stocked with Scotch instead of sake and a red neon sign of the EiffelTower that sizzled over the door. Half the clientele were foreign correspondents who had been blithely assigned by the AP, UPI or Reuters without a word of Japanese. Some were mere children sent directly from the Missouri School of Journalism. Harry took mercy on them as if he were their pastor and they were his flock, translating for them the gospel of Domei, the Japanese news agency. The other regulars were Japanese reporters, who parked motorcycles outside the club for a quick getaway in case war broke out, and Japanese businessmen who had traveled the world, liked American music and knew one Dorsey brother from the other. The closer war seemed, the more people packed the Happy Paris and all of Tokyo’s bars and theaters, peep shows and brothels.

  They didn’t come for geishas. Geishas were a luxury reserved for financial big shots and the military elite. But if it was a rare man who could afford a geisha, a couple of yen could buy even a poor man the attentions of a café waitress. Waitresses came in all varieties, sweet or acid, shy or sharp, wrapped in kimonos or little more than a skirt and garter.

  Many came for Michiko. Michiko was the Record Girl for the Happy Paris. Her task was simply to stand in a sequined jacket by a Capehart jukebox as tall as she was and, at her own mysterious whim, push the buttons for music— “Begin the Beguine” followed by Basie followed by Peggy Lee. Seventy-eights changed in slow motion from tone arm to turntable under an illuminated canopy of milk-blue glass, and dropped down the spindle with an audible sigh. Michiko did virtually nothing. The waitresses, Kimi and Haruko, circulated in short tricolor skirts. Haruko patterned herself from her hair to her toes on Michiko, but her legs were sausages in contrast to Michiko’s in their silky hose. While Haruko and Kimi had actually been geishas and could simper and giggle with the best, Michiko cut customers dead. She played only records of her choice, a balance of swing and blues, closing her eyes and swaying so subtly to a song that she sometimes seemed asleep. The year before, there had been a fan magazine devoted to her —”The Sultry Queen of Jazz: Her Music, Her Hobbies, Her Weaknesses!”— totally fabricated, of course, with some snapshot
s. What made Michiko stand out most, Harry thought, was that even in the middle of a crowded club, with a dozen tables and booths full of voices, food and drinks shuttling back and forth on trays, she could have been alone. Michiko maintained a lack of self-consciousness that, added to a complete lack of morality, lent her a feline independence. She replaced “My Heart Stood Still” with “Any Old Time,” Shaw’s clarinet made lush with a saxophone reed.

  Harry turned away to deal with Willie and DeGeorge. Al DeGeorge was the correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor and as stir-crazy as a zoo bear. Willie Staub was a young German businessman headed home from China via Japan and looked like an innocent among thieves.

  DeGeorge was saying, “Harry runs a pool on when war will start between America and Japan, Tokyo time. Say there’s even military action. The Philippines are on our side of the dateline, Hawaii’s a day behind, doesn’t matter, has to be Tokyo time. There’s got to be at least ten thousand yen in there now. Of course, the house —that’s Harry— takes five percent. Harry would take five percent on the apocalypse. Today’s the fifth. Hell, Willie, you’ve still got most of December. I got Christmas Day.”

  “You’re a sentimentalist,” said Harry.

  “The only problem,” DeGeorge said, “is that if we’re still here when the war begins, we’re fucked. No way out.” He directed a baleful gaze at Harry. “Rumor is, they’re going to get Nippon Air flying again. Put on a show with champagne, cute air hostesses and photographers, and fly some foreign bigwigs to Hong Kong as if everything is absolutely normal. My question is, who gets on that plane?” He turned to Willie. “The embassy sent special-delivery letters telling all Americans to leave. But no, we waited to see what Harry would do. We figured the boat Harry takes, that’s the last boat out. Now all the boats are gone and we’re down to a single plane.”