The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  The young woman was named Sung Chin-hua, and she was a fifteen-year-old prostitute who welcomed clients into her room night after night in order to help supplement her family’s meager income. No doubt there were many women as beautiful as Chin-hua among the numerous prostitutes who worked along the Ch’in-huai Canal. But it is rather doubtful that there was another woman in this area with as gentle a disposition as Chin-hua’s. Unlike her fellow ladies of pleasure, she could not lie, nor was she willful; rather, each night with a pleasant smile she dallied with the various clients who called on her in this cheerless room. She was very happy on those rare occasions when the money they paid her exceeded the agreed-upon price, for then she could treat her father to at least one cup of the liquor he so loved.

  Certainly Chin-hua’s nature was inborn. Yet if there were another reason to be found for her actions, it would lie in the fact that from her childhood she had adhered to the Roman Catholic faith she had inherited from her late mother, as evidenced by the crucifix hung on her wall.

  This past spring, a young Japanese tourist who had come to the horse races at Shanghai had also taken some time to enjoy the scenery in southern China and ended up spending a capricious night in Chin-hua’s room. With a cigar clenched between his teeth, he had held the willowy Chin-hua on the lap of his Western trousers, but when he caught sight of the crucifix on the wall, a dubious look spread across his face, and in his faltering Chinese he asked, “Are you a Christian?”

  “Yes. I was baptized when I was five.”

  “And you’re still pursuing this profession?” For a brief moment, an ironic tone seemed to creep into his voice. But Chin-hua, her dark-haired head resting on his chest, broke into her customary pleasant smile that revealed her eyeteeth.

  “If I didn’t have this job, both my father and I would starve to death.”

  “Is your father an old man now?”

  “Yes. He can’t even stand up anymore.”

  “Well, but . . . but don’t you think that by doing such despicable work, you won’t be able to go to Heaven?”

  “No.” Chin-hua cast a quick glance at the crucifix, and her eyes suggested she was deep in thought. “Because I think that Lord Jesus in Heaven understands completely what’s in my heart. . . . Otherwise, there’s no difference between Lord Jesus and the officers at the police station at Yao-chia Harbor.”

  The young Japanese tourist smiled. Then he reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a pair of jade earrings and clipped them on her ears.

  “I just bought these to take as a present back to Japan, but I’m going to give them to you in memory of tonight.”

  Since the night she entertained her first customer, Chin-hua had taken comfort in this assurance that Christ knew what was in her heart.

  Sadly enough, however, for about a month this pious prostitute had been suffering from a virulent strain of syphilis. Hearing of her comrade’s affliction, the harlot Chen Shan-cha instructed her to drink opium wine, which was said to be good for curing pain. Later, another prostitute named Mao Ying-chun was kind enough to share what remained of the mercury chloride pills and calomel that she herself had been taking. But for whatever reason, even though Chin-hua kept herself confined and stopped receiving clients, her malady grew no better.

  One day, when Chen Shan-cha had come to while away some time in Chinhua’s room, she suggested in the most plausible of terms that her friend try a remedy that smacked of superstitious belief.

  “Since you got this from a client, you need to pass it along to someone else as quickly as you can. If you do, you’re certain to get better within just two or three days.”

  Chin-hua continued to sit with her chin cupped in her hands, and her gloomy expression brightened not in the least. But it appeared that Shan-cha’s words had stirred a glimmer of curiosity in her, for she casually asked, “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s true! My sister was just like you, and she wasn’t getting any better. Once she’d passed the illness on to a customer, she got better right away!”

  “What happened to the customer?”

  “You have to feel sorry for him. They say he went totally blind as a result.”

  After Shan-cha left her room, Chin-hua knelt all alone before the crucifix hanging on her wall, and while gazing up at the tormented Christ, she offered the following fervent prayer:

  Lord Jesus in Heaven. I am doing despicable work in order to care for my father. But my job, aside from defiling me, does no harm to anyone else. And so I have believed that even if I were to die in my present state, I would surely be able to go to Heaven. But now, unless I pass my affliction on to a customer, I won’t be able to keep working. So, even if I starve to death—which, I understand, will cure this disease, I know I have to make up my mind never to share my bed with a customer again. If I don’t make that resolution, I will bring sorrow upon a person who has done me no harm just for the sake of my own happiness. But when it comes right down to it, I’m a woman. You can never tell when I might fall into some temptation. Lord Jesus in Heaven, please protect me. I have no one else to depend on.

  Having set herself to this resolution, thereafter Sung Chin-hua stubbornly refused to take on any clients, no matter how much Shan-cha and Ying-chun encouraged her to do so. Even when a regular client showed up at her room to enjoy the evening, she would submit to his will no further than sharing a smoke with him.

  “I have a terrifying disease. If you get too close to me, you’ll catch it!”

  Whenever a client, often one who was intoxicated, tried to force himself on her, she would always issue him this warning, and she had no qualms about showing them physical evidence of her disease. As a result, little by little, clients stopped visiting her room. Her household budget grew simultaneously tighter with each passing day. . . .

  Again this evening she sat absently for a long while at her table. But as always, there was no indication that a customer might be coming to her room. The night unceremoniously deepened, and the only sound that reached her ears was the distant chirping of a cricket. The coldness of her unheated room gradually crept like rising waters from the stone floor up her gray satin shoes and to the delicate feet encased in them.

  For some time Chin-hua had been staring at the light from her dim lamp, but then, after shuddering for an instant, she scratched her ears that still wore the jade earrings and smothered a tiny yawn. At that very moment, her painted door was thrown open, and a foreigner she had never seen before staggered into the room. The momentum of his entry must have accounted for his unsteady steps. The light from her table lamp flared up, filling her narrow room with a strangely red smoky haze. With the light full in his face, the visitor stumbled toward the table but quickly recovered, only to retreat and lean heavily against the painted door that he had closed behind him.

  Without thinking Chin-hua rose to her feet, her eyes staring in amazement at the foreign stranger. He appeared to be thirty-five or thirty-six years old. He wore a brown striped suit and a tweed cap of the same material. His eyes were large, his cheeks tanned, and he sported a beard. The only peculiar thing about him was that although there was no question he was a foreigner, it was oddly impossible to say whether he was a Westerner or an Asian. The way he stood blocking the doorway, his black hair streaming out from beneath his hat and an extinguished pipe clenched between his teeth, made him seem just like a drunken passerby who had lost his way.

  “Is there something you want?” Assailed by a somewhat eerie feeling, Chinhua remained standing behind the table and asked in a reproachful voice. The man shook his head and gestured to indicate that he did not speak Chinese. Then he removed the pipe that jutted from the side of his mouth and fluidly spoke some words in an incomprehensible language. Chin-hua had to be the one to shake her head this time, the jade of her earrings flickering in the lamplight.

  When the visitor saw her uneasiness and the way she knit her beautiful brows, he suddenly gave a loud laugh, casually discarded his cap, and moved toward he
r with faltering steps. He collapsed into the chair across the table from Chinhua. She felt a sudden close familiarity with this foreigner’s face in that moment, though she had no recollection of when or where she might have met him before. The visitor helped himself to the melon seeds from the bowl but did not chew on them, staring instead at Chin-hua until finally he began talking in a foreign tongue, waving his hands eccentrically in an attempt to convey his meaning. She had no idea what he was saying, but she was vaguely able to guess that this foreigner had some understanding of the profession she pursued.

  It was not unusual for Chin-hua to spend a long night with a foreigner who did not understand Chinese. When she sat back in her chair, therefore, she smiled the warm smile that had become all but second nature to her, and she began telling jokes that in no way her client understood. But one might almost have suspected that he did understand her jests, for he would utter a word or two and then laugh gaily, all the while flashing even more bewildering gestures.

  His breath stank of liquor. But the flushed mellow face brimmed with such masculine energy that she almost felt the atmosphere in her dreary room had brightened. At the very least, this man was more obviously splendid than any of her countrymen from Nanking whom she saw every day, and even more so than any Asian or Western foreigner she had ever met. And yet she could not shake the feeling that she had at one time or other seen this face before. Even as she lightly entertained her guest while staring at the black curls that hung down his forehead, Chin-hua tried with all her might to call up the memory of when she had first encountered this face.

  Could he be the man who was riding on the excursion boat the other day with his pudgy wife? No, no, his hair was much redder. Or maybe it was the fellow who was pointing his camera at the Shrine of Confucius at the Ch’in-huai Canal. But I think he was a lot older than this man. Wait—yes! A while back, in front of the restaurant by the Li-she Bridge, I noticed a crowd of people, and a man who looked just like this fellow was beating the back of his rickshaw driver with a thick rattan cane. So perhaps . . . but I think that man had much bluer eyes. . . .

  While Chin-hua was absorbed by these thoughts, the persistently cheerful foreigner had packed some tobacco in his pipe and was blowing a pleasant-smelling smoke from his mouth. Then suddenly he made some remark and grinned sheepishly, after which he stretched out two fingers on his hand and thrust them in front of Chin-hua’s eyes, adding gestures to suggest he was making an offer. It would have been evident to anyone that the two fingers indicated two dollars. But since Chin-hua was no longer taking customers, she shook her head twice in refusal, a smile still on her face and the melon seeds clacking crisply in her mouth. Her visitor, with elbows propped arrogantly on her table, thrust his drunken face near hers and stared at her in the dim light from her lamp, but finally he stretched forth three fingers and indicated with his eyes that he awaited a reply.

  Chin-hua slid her chair back a bit, and with the melon seeds still in her mouth she returned his look with one of consternation. He seemed to have concluded that she would not yield her body to him for only two dollars. But since she could not make herself understood to him, she knew there was no way she could get him to grasp the intimate particulars of her dilemma. So Chin-hua, regretting yet another time her indiscretion, shifted her aloof gaze away from the man and, having no other recourse, once again shook her head emphatically.

  The foreign visitor maintained his thin smile but looked hesitant for a time, and then he displayed four fingers and said something in his foreign tongue. Chin-hua was at a loss for what to do; she covered her cheeks with her hands, no longer having the energy even to smile, but she quickly made up her mind that at this point her only option was to continue shaking her head and wait until the man finally gave up. Even as the thought formed in her mind, the visitor’s hand finally opened up, as though reaching for some invisible object, to reveal all five fingers.

  This haggling with gestures and body movements continued for a long while. Toward the end the man tenaciously increased his offer by one finger at a time until ultimately he indicated his willingness to offer ten dollars with no regrets. But even the offer of ten dollars, an enormous sum for a prostitute, did nothing to sway Chin-hua’s resolve. During this bartering she had risen from her chair and was standing off to one side behind the table, but when the visitor held up the fingers of both hands she stamped her feet irritably and repeatedly shook her head. As she did so, it chanced that the crucifix hanging from a nail slipped loose and fell with a slight metallic clang to the stone floor at her feet.

  She quickly reached down and retrieved the precious crucifix. When she caught sight of the face of the suffering Christ carved on the cross, it was, strangely enough, the very image of the face of the foreigner who sat opposite her table.

  So what I thought was a face I had seen somewhere before was actually this face of Lord Jesus.

  With the brass crucifix pressed to her breast against her black satin robe, Chin-hua cast a look of surprise at the face of the man across the table. Her visitor’s flushed, intoxicated face was reflected in the light of the lamp as he alternately blew smoke from his pipe and flashed her a meaningful smile. In addition, his gaze seemed to move ceaselessly over her body, from her white neck to her ears decorated with jade earrings. And yet Chin-hua also felt as though his demeanor was suffused with a certain tender majesty.

  When the visitor finished his pipe, he tilted his head knowingly and said something in a laughing voice. His words had virtually the same effect on Chinhua’s mind as the suggestions that a skillful hypnotist has on his subject. She seemed to have utterly forgotten her firm resolution, and with lowered eyes that glimmered with a smile, she bashfully made her way to the side of this questionable foreigner, still groping at the brass crucifix she held in her hands.

  The visitor reached into the pocket of his trousers, where the sound of silver jangled, and with his smiling eyes he looked with pleasure at Chin-hua. But in the same moment that the smile in his eyes changed to a hot luminosity, he leaped from his chair and pressed Chin-hua in his powerful arms against his suit that reeked of alcohol. She threw her head back as if in a daze, yet with a fresh tint of rosy color glimmering from the base of her cheeks, and looked rapturously into the face pressed up against hers. She of course had no time to ponder whether to give her body to this curious foreigner or to refuse his kiss so as not to transfer her affliction to him. Surrendering her lips to his whiskered mouth, she knew only that the searing elation of love, the elation of a love realized for the first time, came turbulently cascading into her heart. . . .

  2

  Several hours later, the faint chirping of crickets added a forlorn autumnal tone to the breathing of the couple on the bed that reverberated out into the darkened room. But Chin-hua’s dreams drifted upward like smoke from the dusty curtains of her bed and into the starry nighttime sky that spread above her roof.

  Chin-hua sat in a rosewood chair, sampling the varieties of foods lined up on the table before her. Swallow nests, shark fins, steamed eggs, smoked carp, boiled pork, sea-cucumber soup—there was no way to count up all the dishes to be enjoyed. Each of the plates was of the finest manufacture, embellished from edge to edge with paintings of green lotuses or golden phoenixes.

  Behind her chair was a window draped with filmy red silk curtains; there must have been a river outside the window, since the sounds of gentle water flowing and the slapping of oars were transmitted ceaselessly to the room. Somehow it made Chin-hua feel as though she were on the Chin-huai Canal she had known since her childhood. Yet there was no doubt that she was now in Jesus’s house on a street somewhere in heaven.

  From time to time Chin-hua would put down her chopsticks and gaze around the table. But no human figure appeared to her eyes—only columns carved with figures of dragons and pots of giant chrysanthemums that shimmered dimly in the steam from the various delicacies piled before her.

  Although there was no one to be seen, each time she
cleaned off a plate, a new platter of food that gave off a warm aroma instantly and inexplicably appeared in front of her. Before she even had the chance to reach into the new platter with her chopsticks, a flock of roasted pheasants flapped their wings and flew toward the ceiling, lowering a bottle of Shaohsing wine to her as they ascended.

  As she observed all this activity, Chin-hua sensed that someone had noiselessly moved into a position behind her chair. With her chopsticks still suspended in the air, she quietly glanced behind her. There at her rear, for some reason the window she had thought was there was gone; in its place, an unfamiliar foreigner sat indolently on a damask pillow atop a rosewood chair, puffing on a brass hookah.

  A single glance told Chin-hua that this was the man who had stayed the night in her room that same evening. The only thing different about this man was that a ring of light, shaped just like a new moon, hovered about a foot above his head.

  Then, before her eyes yet another large platter of steaming food appeared suddenly and succulently before her, as though it had boiled up from the table itself. She quickly picked up her chopsticks and reached to pick up some of the delicacy on the plate, but suddenly she thought of the foreigner behind her and, looking back over her shoulder at him, hesitantly asked, “Won’t you join me?”

  “No, you go ahead and eat by yourself. When you eat that, your illness will be cured before the night is over.”

  The hookah pipe still in his mouth, the haloed foreigner showed her a smile of infinite love.

  “Then you won’t have anything to eat?”

  “Me? I hate Chinese food. Don’t you know me yet? Jesus Christ has never tasted Chinese food before.”