The Sun Gods

by Jay Rubin

  Peter fidgeted on his shoulders while Bill waited for the click.

  “All right,” said David when it was done, and Bill set Peter on the ground.

  “Let me take a picture of the three of you together,” Bill said. After snapping the family portrait, he walked up to the Greens, put his arms around David and Martha, and practically knocked them all off balance with a big hug. “I can’t tell you how glad I am you brought me here today,” he declared, smiling. Peter squirmed his way out from among the six long legs that caged him and the three of them stepped back, laughing.

  Bill felt a new kind of joy, a euphoria he was aching to share with the Greens, if only he could find the words. “Today I learned the meaning of ‘holy infant so tender and mild,’” he said, smiling broadly. “Peter is one of those.”

  “Uh, sure, Bill,” said David, rubbing his moustache.

  “No, I’m not kidding. It’s wonderful, let me tell you.”

  “You should try changing his diaper sometime. You’ve heard the expression ‘holy shit,’ I presume?”

  Martha shrieked and swatted David on the back with her purse. “Let’s buy some arrows,” she said, pointing to a small stand where shrine workers were frantically handing out long, white “demon-quelling” arrows and collecting money from outstretched hands.

  Bill followed the Greens to the stand, still searching for the words he could speak to them that would say what he felt and not make him sound like an absolute idiot. But it was true—Peter was a holy infant. All the hundreds of thousands of people pouring through the Meiji Shrine today—all the people who had ever felt the warmth of the sun —had been holy infants. And they all needed to eat and to urinate and to defecate and die. Century after century, men had been too stupid to see the miracle of this. They told themselves fairy stories of virgin births and gods-become-men and visitations to and from heaven in a vain attempt to make what was already holy seem holier, and all they had succeeded in doing was blinding themselves to the miracle of life. Today he had seen it. Carrying a genuine holy infant on his shoulders, he had flowed with the river of humanity, seen thousands upon thousands of the sons and daughters of man come to worship the fountain of holiness: the life throbbing within themselves.

  “This is not Shinto,” said Bill, still frustrated at the nonsensical sound of his own words.

  “You’re right,” said David, “it’s Mass at St. Peter’s. That guy over there selling arrows is the Pope.”

  “I mean, nobody here is thinking about Meiji or the sun goddess Amaterasu, or how Izanagi and Izanami created the earth, or any of that stuff.”

  “And?”

  “Being here doesn’t have anything to do with your other beliefs.”

  “Who ever said it did? Bill, are you all right today?”

  “I’m fine, really fine.”

  “I’m just here to see the sights and to wish for a Happy New Year like everybody else,” David said. “You seem to be worried that coming in here compromises you as a Christian, but the Japanese learned long ago that you can practice Shinto and any other religion without conflict. It’s hardly even a religion—not since it was taken out of the hands of the militarists after the war. They distorted it into a big state cult, but now it’s more what it always used to be, just a generalized feeling of gratitude for the nice things in life. It leaves all the problems of death and guilt to the Buddhists and a few Christians. But even they bring their babies to their local shrines, and weddings are usually Shinto or at least have some Shinto elements. I’m no less a Quaker because I just clapped my hands and bowed at a Shinto shrine. The trouble with Westerners is we’ve gotten into the habit of thinking if you believe in one thing, you can’t believe in anything else.”

  “That’s just what I was saying.”

  “Oh, yeah? I would never have guessed it. I thought you were going to start singing ‘Silent Night’ for all the folks here.”

  Bill threw his head back and laughed at the top of his lungs.

  Until New Year’s Day, Bill had tried his best to avoid the trains at the most crowded times, but after his experience at the Meiji Shrine, he almost welcomed the prospect of riding at rush hour. Sometimes, squeezed in among the warm bodies until he could hardly breath, he would imagine that, indirectly, he was in touch with his Japanese mother again. Perhaps someone he was touching was touching someone who was touching Mitsuko. He would try to catch the eyes of women in their late forties or early fifties, hoping Mitsuko would recognize him after twenty years and throw herself into his arms. Mostly he succeeded in making a number of permanent-waved matrons nervous.

  Fantasizing chance meetings was going to get him nowhere. For one thing, women of any age had good reason to be nervous on Tokyo trains. More than once, he had seen the chikan in action—the molesters who exploited the jam-packed conditions of the trains to run their hands over women’s bodies. This was one shock he had not been prepared to describe in his letters to Frank. The first time, he had watched in horrified silence as an ordinary-looking, bespectacled man had thrust his hands under the coat of a girl no more than twenty, indulged in some heavy breathing, then relied upon the press of the crowd to keep himself standing while his eyes rolled back in his head. Bill had considered intervening, but no one else seemed to notice. It occurred to him that the girl, who uttered not a peep, was perhaps enjoying it. But the two had parted when the crowd poured out at Tokyo Station, and Bill had seen her rubbing at a stain near the front of her coat, eyes full of tears. When a similar event occurred a few days later, he reached out over the crowd and knocked the man in the side of the head, expecting to be cheered by the other passengers and thanked effusively by the maiden in distress, but everyone—including the girl and the molester—pretended as if the whole thing had never happened.

  Although it was not more likely to work than hoping for a chance encounter on the subway, contacting all the Nomuras in the Tokyo phone book seemed the only avenue open to him. Frank had tried it when there were fewer phones in the country. Perhaps Bill would stand a better chance.

  He found twelve pages of Nomuras in minuscule type but only a few Goros and Yoshikos. After those were exhausted, he went back to the top of the list, systematically phoning ten a day and delivering the same speech each time in his politest Japanese: “Excuse me, but I am an American named William Morton. I am searching for a Mr. and Mrs. Goro and Yoshiko Nomura who used to live in Seattle, Washington, in America, until about the year Showa twenty or twenty-one.”

  Most people would allow him to deliver his introduction in full, then apologize for being unable to help him. Others hung up as soon as they heard the word “American,” and he worried that it was precisely those reacting strongly who were most likely to be the ones he was searching for. He imagined the person at the other end cutting the connection on impulse, then regretting the rash act but having no way to re-establish contact once it was broken.

  More time-consuming were those people whose curiosity was aroused by the strange caller and who wanted to hear whatever bizarre tale it was he had to tell, but who, in the end, could offer nothing. One man speaking a crude street argot that Bill could hardly understand offered to lead him to the Nomuras for a fee, and that time Bill was the one who hung up. A woman whose hoarse voice suggested that she was the right age asked him to meet her at a coffee house in Sugamo. He waited for her with a mingled sense of anticipation and dread, but his heart sank when he saw the diseased street woman in her twenties. Some of the most heart-rending calls ended in hysterical denunciations of all Americans for having killed “my husband” or “my whole family.” Bill wished that he could do something to heal the wounds still festering from the war.

  And then there was the obvious objection, which his landlady, Mrs. Niiyama, never tired of pointing out to him (though he paid her ¥10 for each of the calls and was careful to return the telephone book to its proper place when he was through with the day’s allotment), that the Nomuras he was seeking might not even be in Tokyo. />
  On one particularly frustrating day, he tried escaping to the Noh theater with its refined lyric plaints of cherry blossom spirits and court ladies in distress. He and his friends Keiichi and Haruo went to see Obasute. One of the loftiest plays in the ancient repertoire, “The Abandoned Crone” was an astringent exercise in detachment and abstract beauty with its cool, silver imagery of the moon and the ghost of an old woman left to die on the mountain. As the play drew to its climax and the traveler left the stage, the white-robed ghost turned in perfect synchronization with the traveler, who was abandoning her in death as she had been abandoned in life. She intoned:

  O give me back

  My autumns of yesteryear,

  To them I cling,

  To memories implacable

  The night wind cuts

  Through me, the past

  Is all I ask for now,

  Upon this mountain of despair

  Alone, deserted, aged crone!

  Bill’s chest tightened with sorrow. Was the woman that he sought alone somewhere, abandoned, growing old and bitter, perhaps on some mountaintop far from the city with its trains and telephones?

  The spectators filed out of the theater in silence. Once on the sidewalk, however, only inches from the trucks that came screeching around the corner with headlights glaring in the night, Keiichi and Haruo gesticulated wildly in the wind, competing to see who could best express the mysterious silence of the play.

  “There’s only one way to resolve this,” Haruo proclaimed, his eyes shining behind thick, black-framed lenses. “With beer!”

  “Absolutely!” said Keiichi, pounding his open palm with a bony fist.

  They were going to drag him to a bar again. The three walked from Omagari to Suidobashi Station. In their company, Bill had come to like the taste of Kirin and Sapporo, but also the native rice wine. On winter nights, especially, the comfort to be found in a nice, warm bottle of sake had not been lost on him, and tonight, when sharp gusts of wind were whipping up gritty dust from the streets and sidewalks, was definitely one of those nights. Bill could feel the sand between his teeth. Haruo spit into the gutter once or twice as they walked along.

  The first dispute that needed to be resolved was which way to go on the Chuo Line—west to Shinjuku or east to Kanda. Bill settled that one by choosing Shinjuku, which was closer to home in Ogikubo. He was less help when it came to deciding which bar in Shinjuku to pick. Haruo preferred Club Funky, which specialized in jazz, while Keiichi maintained that such a place, after Noh, would be a desecration. They must, without question, go to the Furusato, where only traditional Japanese folk melodies were to be heard on the sound system.

  Haruo conceded, and they forged into the shadowy labyrinth of Kabukicho, the three of them walking arm in arm with the harsh reds and yellows of neon signs splashing their excited faces. No sooner had they entered these intoxicating environs than their steps became unsteady, and their linked elbows yanked each other back and forth, though not a drop of drink had passed their lips.

  A huge straw sandal, probably five feet long, hung on the back wall of the Furusato. On the other walls were pieces of traditional pottery in a variety of earth colors, and ancient wooden farm implements such as winnowing baskets and threshing sticks. The ceiling resembled the underside of a thatched farmhouse roof, and to the left hung a large, black hook holding an iron pot over an old-fashioned sunken hearth. Music was coming from loudspeakers somewhere in the corners of the warm, dark room.

  Since the bar itself was crammed full, they sat at one of the few remaining empty tables, which was barely large enough for three men to fit their knees beneath. The surface of the small table was done in dark tile—four slate-colored squares, or so they appeared in the murky light. A woman wearing blue-and-white speckled mompe trousers and the white bandanna of a farm worker came to take their order. Keiichi and Haruo both wanted draught beer, and Bill asked for sake.

  “This is a great song,” said Keiichi.

  The single, thin voice on the record was accompanied by the strains of a shamisen, a three-stringed instrument with a cat-skin head. Much of the singing accompanied by the shamisen sounded to Bill as if it were being done by the cat itself—at the very moment of being skinned. The voice now coming out of the loudspeaker, though, was sweet and frail and lovely.

  Once they were settled at the table and the waitress had brought peanuts and tiny rice crackers for them to munch with their drinks, Keiichi launched into his interpretation of why, in spite of the fact that it depicted an old woman—and a commoner to boot—Obasute was considered to be such a lofty work. Haruo observed that it was his favorite Noh play—his favorite play of any kind.

  Bill tried to concentrate on the ensuing discussion, but the music kept breaking in on his concentration. The woman on the record was now singing the lament of a child who has been scolded and sent on an errand, and her voice was perfectly complemented by the breathy sound of a flute. As the warmth of the sake began to circulate, the literary debate at the table sounded increasingly unimportant, though the effect of the beer on both Bill’s companions was to raise the volume at which they offered their profundities to each other.

  Bill was sorry to hear the needle of the phonograph clicking in the final grooves of the record, and the next LP started out disappointingly, with lush strings and electronically exaggerated drums and shamisens.

  “Listen to that shit,” growled Keiichi, his gaunt, bony face flushed with drink. “I hate it when they ‘modernize’ folk music by crapping it up with all those Western instruments.”

  “Shut up,” slurred Haruo. “S’nice. Sounds like Mantovani.”

  “Your taste is up your asshole,” replied Keiichi.

  “What do you know?” countered Haruo.

  “What is this stuff?” asked Bill, still intrigued.

  “Kyushu minyoh,” answered Keiichi—“folk songs from the island of Kyushu. Isn’t it disgusting?”

  “You got something against Kyushu?” challenged Haruo.

  “Don’t be stupid. I love the music. Just listen to what they’re doing to it. It’s not Japanese anymore.”

  “All of a sudden, you’re a purist.”

  Bill could side with neither of them. This singer definitely belonged to the most authentic cat variety, but the pounding bass and whining violins imported from the West made the whole even more unpalatable than the real music might have been.

  “I’m glad that’s over,” Keiichi groaned as the first selection ended. But when the next number started, it was in the same style. He violently rubbed his face and grumbled, “Okay, I’ve had it!” He dragged himself up from his chair and staggered toward the little booth where the turntable was located.

  Haruo looked at Bill, wide-eyed. “He’s going to make them change the record,” he said, laughing raucously.

  But Bill was not looking at Keiichi anymore. Instead, he was staring into the dark corner from which the music echoed. Beneath all the moaning saxophones and swishing cymbals, something terribly familiar was coming out of the loudspeaker. The harsh, piercing voice of a woman began to sing, “Odoma Bon-giri Bon-giri, Bon kara sakya orando, Bon ga hayo kurya, Hayo modoru.” It was in a dialect that meant nothing to him, and yet he recognized it. More than recognized it. He knew that melody with his whole heart.

  Suddenly the bar was convulsed by the amplified screech of a phonograph needle being dragged across the grooves of a record.

  Bill turned to see Keiichi leaning clumsily over a low partition that surrounded the record center, his hand fumbling with the tone arm. The bartender, overhead lights shining on his bald pate, rushed in his direction, crying, “Please, sir! Customers are not allowed to handle the equipment.”

  “Then don’t make our ears dirty with that phony garbage!”

  Shouts and laughter filled the place.

  Stumbling over outstretched legs, Bill fought his way through the crowd, latching onto Keiichi’s waist from behind. “Stop it, Keiichi! I have to hear that s
ong!”

  “I won’t listen to this shit!”

  With the bartender’s help, Bill lifted his sprawling friend away from the turntable. Apologizing as best he could to the bartender, he begged the man to start the record up again.

  “Look, he’s ruined it,” he replied, holding up the scratched platter.

  “Please,” Bill said. “Just that one song. I have to hear it all the way through.”

  The man looked at Bill oddly and mumbled something about “strange foreigners.” Then he said, “I can’t play a scratched record. It would offend the other customers.”

  “I’ll pay for it.” Bill pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket.

  “This record cost two thousand yen.”

  “All right. All right.” Bill stripped off three ¥1000 notes. “Just play that one track, and I’ll take the record off your hands when it’s through.”

  Keiichi sat on the partition, his mouth agape, observing this incomprehensible transaction. Bill helped him back to his seat while the bartender placed the record on the turntable.

  “What was that all about?” asked Haruo as they came stumbling back.

  “Just shut up and listen,” Bill said, dropping the drunken Keiichi in his chair. Keiichi slumped down on the table, moaning.

  Again the overblown orchestral prelude came flowing through the smoky air, and again the meaningless words came screeching out of the loudspeaker. He was surer than ever now that he knew the song, even punctuated by the sharp clicks that resounded with each revolution of the record.

  “What is this?” Bill asked Haruo, who was looking at him as though he had suddenly gone mad.

  “I don’t know, just some folk song. It’s a lullaby.”

  “Where is it from?”

  “Kyushu someplace.”

  “You ignorant asshole,” mumbled Keiichi, face down on the table. “Don’t you know anything? It’s the Itsuki Lullaby.”

  “What? Say that again?” Bill demanded, but Keiichi simply lay there with his cheek against the tiles, drooling from distorted lips.