The Translation of Love

by Lynne Kutsukake

  The girl on the ground yanked her arm free, swiveled around, and gave the other girl a hard shove. That girl stumbled backward one or two steps and fell on her rear end. Now both girls were sitting on the ground.

  What on earth was going on? Girls of their age shouldn’t be out on their own, should they? Hey, you two, hurry up and go home, he wanted to yell. It was getting late. Friday evening was not a good time to be out.

  He grabbed his things and ran down the stairs, emerging from the building to find the two girls in the same state.

  “Good evening,” Matt said in polite Japanese. He was a little out of breath. “Are you girls lost? Do you need some assistance?”

  Upon seeing him, they scrambled to their feet.

  “Please don’t be frightened. I’d just like to help. Are you lost?”

  “We’re not lost!” The shorter of the two girls spoke in a voice that seemed unusually loud and sharp. He was momentarily taken aback. Weren’t Japanese girls supposed to be more reticent?

  “Oh, that’s good. Well, I’m sorry. But it’s getting late, you see. I think that you young ladies might want to head home. Would you like me to get a policeman to escort you?”

  “No policeman!” She was practically screaming.

  “Okay, okay. No police. I didn’t mean to offend you. Would you like a chocolate?” He rummaged in his pockets only to realize that he didn’t have any on him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I don’t have anything.”

  “That’s okay.” The girl spoke in a more friendly tone.

  “I saw you from my window.” At this, Matt gestured toward his building across the street.

  “You work there?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s where the Amerikajin are.”

  “That’s right. Let me introduce myself. I’m Corporal Matsumoto. I’m very pleased to meet you. What are your names?”

  “Fumi,” the girl with the loud voice replied. The other girl did not speak.

  “Do you two girls live nearby?”

  “Sort of. Not really.”

  “What are you doing here? Were you waiting to see General MacArthur’s car?”

  “Are you an American soldier?” the girl Fumi suddenly asked.

  “Yes. I’m with the Occupation forces.”

  “With General MacArthur?”

  “Yes, with General MacArthur.”

  “General MacArthur is the most important person in Japan.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  “He is,” the girl said emphatically.

  “All right, yes, he’s very important.”

  “Do you know him?”

  Matt shook his head.

  “But he’s your leader. You’ve seen him, haven’t you? In person.”

  Matt thought about how whenever he opened The Stars and Stripes, it was impossible not to see MacArthur’s face staring out at him. And yes, he’d seen him in person, too. Shortly after he arrived in Japan, Matt had marched with his unit past MacArthur on the parade plaza in front of GHQ, saluting smartly at the tall figure standing on the podium.

  “Yes, I’ve seen him,” he said.

  “A lot?”

  Matt couldn’t help smiling. Now this was unexpected. The little girl was interrogating him!

  “Let’s just say that he’s hard to avoid. He’s everywhere. He’s the big boss.” He chuckled at his own wit.

  The girl’s eyes brightened. “He’s your boss, isn’t he?”

  “I suppose so, in a manner of speaking.” Matt smiled again. This was pretty funny. “He’s the commander in chief, so in a sense you could say he’s my boss.”

  He watched the girls turn their heads away and whisper to each other. They seemed to be having a disagreement. Then suddenly it was over and the talkative girl, Fumi, approached him. She bowed very low and extended both arms toward him, offering him something. It looked like a piece of paper folded lengthwise.

  “Sir, I beg of you, please deliver this to your general, to General MacArthur. It is of the utmost importance.”

  Matt looked at the other girl, but her eyes gave away nothing.

  “Please.” Fumi pushed the paper into his hands. “Please deliver this.”

  “What is it?”

  “A very important message for General MacArthur.”

  “Well, I’m really not sure what I can do.” He tried to hand the paper back to her but she refused to accept it.

  “Please give it to him. You have to. I think you are the only person I can trust to deliver it to him.”

  “But I really don’t think I should…”

  She reached into her chest pocket and pulled out a small square of yellowed tissue paper. She seemed to be unsure of what she wanted to do, for she put it back in her pocket, then pulled it out again. She touched her lips to it just before pressing it into his palm.

  “What’s this?” Matt said. There was something in the tissue paper, he could feel it.

  In the second that he glanced down, the girls turned around and ran away like rabbits bounding off into the shadows.

  He unwrapped the tissue paper. It was a photograph. A typical shot of a GI with his Japanese girlfriend. The piece of paper he’d been given was a little crumpled. He unfolded it and saw immediately that it was a letter. Dear General MacArthur, it began.

  To his surprise, it was written in English.

  Two weeks passed and Matt still had the girl’s letter. He didn’t know why he was holding on to it. It was in English, which meant it was supposed to go straight into the basket for English-language mail. All correspondence addressed to MacArthur was supposed to be sent to GHQ without delay. The envelope (if there was one) and the letter itself were to be stamped with the red oval ATIS stamp and the date of receipt inscribed in blue ink. Simple mechanical actions performed by the office secretaries that gave the letters legitimacy and turned them, irrevocably, into government property. But this letter from the girl was different. He couldn’t bring himself to submit it. It was written in pencil in a neat cursive script slanted slightly to the right. Every time he read it, he couldn’t help but smile. It was rather charming in its quaint language, its earnestness.

  Dear General MacArthur,

  I am writing to ask for your great and kindly help. I have a serious problem. My sister is missing! Please help me find her.

  My sister’s name is Sumiko Tanaka and she is twenty-two years old. She works in the Ginza but I don’t know where. She used to visit me at home but she doesn’t come back anymore. I want to find her. Please find her for me.

  I am very, very worried. Maybe she is sick and cannot move or talk? Maybe she had an accident and lost her memory?

  She is the kindest sister anyone could have. She made money to take care of me when I was sick. She took care of my mother and my father too. I miss her and want her to come home.

  You are the only person in Japan who can help. You said you want to help all the Japanese people. Please help me. Please find my sister. Thank you very much.

  Sincerely,

  Fumi Tanaka

  First-year student at Minami Nishiki Middle School

  Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo

  P.S. I am already twelve years old and I promise to work hard for our new democracy.

  He always chuckled when he got to the postscript. And then he would feel bad. Oh, that poor kid, that poor little twelve-year-old. She was waiting to hear about her sister. She was waiting for help. She was waiting for a goddamn miracle. Honestly, MacArthur was scarcely going to drop everything to send out search parties for a missing bar girl.

  Sometimes he looked at the letter and the accompanying photograph when he was by himself in his barracks, taking a short break in the middle of the day. Matt’s sleeping quarters were rooms on a different floor of the same building in which he worked, former offices that had been converted into barracks for some of the men in his division. The room was outfitted with six narrow bunk beds; twelve guys, all Nisei, shared the
same space. He felt lucky to have drawn the straw that gave him a lower bunk and a measure of privacy.

  He took the photograph out of its tissue wrapping and brought it close. The woman was looking directly at the camera with such seriousness of purpose that he couldn’t help but feel she was staring straight at him, challenging him in some way. She was an attractive woman, for sure, with delicate, well-proportioned features, and he enjoyed studying her face. But something was missing. He was increasingly aware of how different he was, and how the things that aroused him were not things he could easily share with others.

  “Hey, lookey, lookey. This your girl?” Eddie Takagi’s head swung down from the upper bunk like a monkey in a tree and his arm sliced through the air. Before Matt even knew what was happening, Eddie’s nimble fingers had snatched the photograph.

  “What the hell! What are you doing here?”

  “Went to sick bay and they told me to go to bed, my own bed. I think they think it’s just a hangover, but it’s not. It’s the flu. I’m sick.”

  “Give me my document back!”

  “Document?” Eddie’s guffaw echoed off the ceiling.

  “Yes, give it back. Before I—” Matt began climbing up to the upper bunk.

  Eddie was sitting up in bed. He held the photograph over his head, and his hand almost touched the ceiling. “So she’s the reason you never want to have any fun. How come you never told us you had a girlfriend?” He flapped the photograph in the air and grinned.

  “Give it to me, Takagi. I’m warning you.”

  “Wait a minute. Let me have a good look at your gal. She must be something if you’ve kept her a secret like this.” Eddie squinted at the picture. “What the heck?”

  “That’s government property. Give it back.”

  “Matt, you’re a pathetic sack of shit. What are you doing with some other slob’s photo?”

  “Come on, Takagi. I’m not kidding.”

  Eddie turned the photo over and smirked. “ ‘Babydoll’? You stole this, didn’t you.”

  “I did not.”

  “Oh, I’m supposed to believe this is your sister?”

  “Cut it out. It’s none of your business.”

  “Yeah, well, I can tell you a thing or two about that guy.”

  “Are you serious? You know the man?”

  Eddie brought the photograph up close and made an exaggerated show of scrutinizing the picture. “Okay, let me get a good look here.”

  “Are you sure? He’s got his eyes shut, it’s hard to make out his face.”

  “I can see enough. Yup, I know him.” Eddie paused. All trace of his earlier jocularity had vanished. “Maybe not him personally, but I know that type.”

  Matt exhaled heavily. “Oh, yeah, that type.”

  “They’re everywhere. I know the woman, too.”

  “Her type’s everywhere, too, I guess.”

  “Well, not exactly.” Eddie brought the photograph close again. “No, I’d say she’s a little special. A looker like that.”

  For a moment Matt felt an irrational jealousy at the sight of Eddie staring at Sumiko’s picture.

  “Actually, she reminds me a bit of someone who used to work at the Midnight Club.”

  “The big dance hall in the middle of the Ginza?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “What?”

  “That you saw her.”

  “Oh, this was months ago. Could be even a year ago.”

  “Do you think she might still be there?”

  “Wait a minute. I’m not sure it was her. Not at all. Just someone who looked a bit like her.”

  “But you just said she was special. You’d remember her, wouldn’t you?”

  Eddie set the photograph down on the bed and slid it in Matt’s direction. “Did I? Matt, they’re all special. And they’re all the same. For God’s sake, she’s a bar girl.”

  The weeks passed, and nobody complained when the summer heat and humidity gave way to the crispness of autumn weather. Like everyone, Matt enjoyed strolling up and down the main Ginza boulevard, which during the daytime was packed with people from all walks of life. GIs and Japanese alike were especially fond of congregating in front of the Hattori Watch Building, which had been converted into the Tokyo PX. You could get anything you wanted at the PX—it was hard to imagine a busier intersection in all of Japan. A private named Barrymore told Matt he saw lots of potential here. “Clean it up and get some lights, we could fix it up like Times Square in New York,” Barrymore had said eagerly, somehow conveniently forgetting about the stretch of flattened structures only a few blocks away. “My uncle back home is in real estate. He would know what to do.” Barrymore and his buddy had fashioned a handwritten sign out of a piece of broken plywood. BROAD WAY, JAPAN, the sign said in big, slightly crooked letters, accompanied at the bottom by a crude line drawing of a wavy female figure. They had managed to hang their sign over the main entrance to Ginza station but the MPs took it down the next morning. No sense of humor, Barrymore complained.

  On the Ginza, everyone was watching everyone else. The Japanese were studying the Americans, and the GIs were eyeing the Japanese women. There was an element of theater to the tango of humanity that, depending on Matt’s mood, alternately amused and depressed him. The Japanese clearly didn’t know one rank from another, and the way most of the GIs swaggered, you could bet the stories they told were far from true. No doubt, everyone was a general or at least a colonel. The women only saw well-fed, healthy young men who looked like giants compared to their own fathers or brothers. You couldn’t blame them for believing the lies they were told, for wanting to believe. Their own stories might not have been entirely truthful, either.

  Every so often a young woman would smile at Matt, and he would quickly turn away, embarrassed and flustered. He realized he might have been at fault for staring at her and giving the impression that he was interested. Unconsciously at first, and then with increasing awareness, he found himself scanning the faces in the crowds for the woman in the photograph.

  22

  It was always too hot in the dance hall where Sumiko worked, it didn’t matter what season it was. To prevent anyone from peeking inside, Harada kept the windows tightly shut with all the curtains drawn, and the temperature quickly rose from the heat of so many bodies packed into a single small room.

  Why give them a free look? he said. Anyone wants to see, let them pay. But the heat made it hard to breathe, and when she first started to work here an unfamiliar smell assaulted her senses. She asked the other women what it was, but nobody knew what she was talking about. Over time, instead of getting used to it, Sumiko’s sensitivity only grew. Finally she identified the odor as a foreign smell, a GI smell. For the longest time she thought the Americans gave off a special odor because of the food they consumed, all the milk and butter and beef and bacon leaking out of their pores as they perspired in the tight confines of the dance hall. Later she came to understand that what her nose detected was more than sweat. It was lust. On a crowded night the dance hall was pungent with this odor. The women smelled different, too, different from ordinary Japanese women. Their bodies oozed a salty perfume of cigarettes and liquor.

  Despite his ambitions, Harada’s operation was quite modest compared to the really big nightclubs and dance halls. It consisted of one long narrow room about thirty feet by fifteen, with a wooden floor that had been hastily constructed out of scrap lumber and plywood. A coat of watered-down red paint had been slapped on the walls in an attempt to make the room look lively and sensual, but it only highlighted the bumps and fissures in the uneven walls. It reminded Sumiko of the way a woman’s lipstick faded and cracked by the end of the night. Every evening she joined the line of women leaning against the red wall and waited to be picked for a dance.

  In those early days, she had enjoyed learning how to dance and how to banter in bar-girl English. At first she practiced with other women who were newcomers like her. They h
eld hands and shuffled their feet and pressed their cheeks against each other. One of the women in her dorm, Namie, taught Sumiko how to hide a long sewing needle in the lapel of her blouse which, if necessary, could be used to poke a dance partner who was getting fresh.

  “You jab it through their shirt around the midriff like this. They get real startled, don’t you know. They can’t figure out what’s happening. The needle is small so they can’t see it.”

  Sumiko tried it once, but it didn’t work.

  “That needle’s too short,” Namie said when Sumiko showed her. “Get a longer one. Loop some thread through the eye so you can pull the needle out fast when you need it. Tuck it under the collar of your top.”

  Sumiko quickly learned that to dance meant to touch. That was her job—to touch and be touched. Hand clutching hand, hand on her back. Cheek against shoulder, cheek to cheek. Dancing with a GI was different from practicing with one of the dance-hall women. Sumiko would find her face pressed against the buttons of an olive shirt or her nose shoved into a smelly armpit. If the man bent over to shorten his height, her face would end up rubbing against a stubbly beard. Sometimes it scratched like sandpaper.

  There was all kinds of touching, she learned.

  As they swayed to the music, a hand might start to roam like a curious animal exploring the terrain of her body. If the man held her too tightly and she couldn’t reach for her needle, she gave him a kick in the ankle. “Oh, sorry” was the usual mumbled response. And the hand would move up to its proper place, temporarily.

  This was the job, and she got used to it.

  If a man was decent and polite—and didn’t touch too much—she didn’t mind dancing with him. Some GIs were barely older than teenagers, with gangly arms and sweaty palms and feet that were too big. She didn’t feel bad letting someone like that press his cheek against hers if it meant she could ask for a package of cookies or a jar of jam. She might even let them run their fingers through her hair for nothing more than a box of Cracker Jack. But she didn’t get to choose her partners. Whoever bought a ticket was entitled to a dance. There were plenty of scary men with huge arms and greasy smiles who clenched her in a too-tight embrace.