The Sun Gods

by Jay Rubin

  There is another brother, Jiro, who pays for Yoshiko’s upkeep. (The family name is Fukai, by the way. Come to think of it, I am not even sure whether Yoshiko is living in the old family home under the name of Nomura or Fukai.) He lives in a Tokyo suburb, and I am planning to look him up–probably tomorrow after visiting one of the famous cherry-blossom viewing spots nearby. I think perhaps the beauty of the blossoms has been helping me the past few days.

  The Japanese academic year ended shortly after my departure from Tokyo, and the new one has just begun, so I have not had school work as a distraction over the past few weeks. One welcome diversion has been supplied by my friend, David Green, who finally convinced me to appear on his English TV show. It was gratifyingly time-consuming, what with memorizing my little skit and going in early to have my face made up and to be coached by the Japanese teacher who runs the show and does the interview at the end. Apparently, Tamura-Sensei thought I did well enough to invite me back again. Now they’re talking about a third appearance. The pay is all right, but I don’t think my visa status allows me to make a regular habit of this, and once my seminar starts, I doubt if I will have time for such things.

  My seminar. I wish I could say I was looking forward to it. You know that I love the literature, but it is not what brought me to Japan in the first place, and now that my original purpose is gone, I wonder if I have enough innate interest to continue with the work. Odd: a few years ago, I might have been able to console myself with the thought that Mitsuko and I would be reunited in heaven. I can hardly believe that I was ever so literal-minded. I was brought up to decry “humanism,” but the people who taught me that view are far more guilty of a humanist bias, as if the entire universe were designed with the salvation of us puny human beings its only purpose. No, I am afraid that the God who put rings around Saturn was not aware of the moment the lives of Mitsuko and her family and the other victims in Nagasaki were snuffed out. The best we can do is to love and remember each other. It is with that in mind that I will seek out Jiro Fukai, so that I can learn and cherish more of the woman who gave so much of her love to me.

  I will write again if I find out anything worth sharing tomorrow. Please let me hear from you. I enjoy your letters with their news of the folks at Maneki. And try to remember that you are not alone with your memories of Mitsuko.

  Yours,

  Bill

  Musashi-Koganei was only six stops out from Bill’s Ogikubo neighborhood on the Chuo Line. Half a mile north of the station were Tokyo’s most famous cherry trees, stretching for nearly five miles along the Tamagawa Canal. A similar distance south was Maehara-cho, where Jiro Fukai lived. The blossoms, though doubtless very beautiful, would be mute. The man might have something to tell him.

  Bill turned south. He bought a fancy tin of rice crackers from one of the little shops along the main street. With his obligatory gift and his double-sided calling cards (English on one side, Japanese on the other) he walked through the treeless neighborhood dotted with new middle class houses.

  As in the older sections of the city, the numbering system designated tracts and blocks, not individual houses, and the parcels of land were numbered in the order of their development rather than their physical location. This meant that his map was useful only to a point, and he hoped to ask people on the street for directions to Tract 1, Block 11. But here, where houses were still separated by undeveloped stretches of mud, there were few people. He followed the narrow, graveled streets to a dead end at a large, fenced-in area where cars were driving around on the artificial lanes of an auto school.

  Backtracking, he questioned a housewife carrying a shopping basket and then an old woman walking her dog, who finally showed him the way to a brown house with a small cherry tree of its own in the tiny front garden behind a six-foot cinder-block wall. Embedded in the wall was a small nameplate with the characters for “deep well”: Fukai. He opened the gate to find the cherry tree in full flower. The flagstone path and moss-covered 2 8 8

  ground were dotted by round, pink petals. He had made the right choice: he could see cherry blossoms and meet Jiro Fukai.

  Still not comfortable with the Japanese way of opening the outer door of a stranger’s house and shouting for permission to enter, he pressed the doorbell and waited, gift in hand.

  Nothing stirred in the house.

  Again he pressed the button and waited. Now that he thought about it, if Mr. Fukai lived like most Japanese men, he would not be home until ten or eleven at night after a long day at the office followed by enforced socializing with his colleagues. But it was rare for houses to be completely empty. Usually there was someone—a wife, a maid, a neighbor—doing rusuban (“absence-guarding”), who could accept a name card and suggest a more appropriate time to call. He tried sliding back the glass-paneled front door, thinking to leave his tin of crackers and a card in the entryway, but the door was firmly locked.

  There were footsteps in the gravel behind him, and he turned to see a young woman round the corner of the cinder-block wall and stop at the open gate.

  A single petal dropped from the cloud of blossoms overhead, its path through the motionless air a slow, sinuous diagonal. Nothing could stir so long as that pink disk was airborne, as if some ancient, unwritten law demanded that he and the young woman standing before him suspend all movement until the fragile membrane surrendered to the pull of the earth.

  She was beautiful, her clear, oval face framed in straight, glossy black. The hair was parted in the middle and clung lightly where the sculpture of the throat began. The lovely, rounded cheekbones marked her unmistakably as a Fukai, but the delicate curve of the nose was something she did not share with Yoshiko or Mitsuko, and the mouth belonged to a face that had never known pain. The lower lip was slightly full and ready to smile.

  She wore a blue-gray blazer of thickly woven material over a pale pink sweater, and a narrow, gray skirt. In shoes with a touch of elevation in the heels, she was unusually tall for a Japanese woman. Her right hand held the handles of a thin briefcase, and hooked over her left elbow was a small purse of brown leather.

  After the petal floated down to the bed of moss at their feet, Bill bowed properly at the waist. The young woman hesitated for a moment before returning his greeting.

  “Excuse me,” he said in his politest Japanese, “is this the Fukai house?” He had seen the nameplate, but it was all he could think of to say.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Can I help you?” Her voice was soft yet confident.

  “I was hoping to see Mr. Fukai, but no one seems to be home.”

  “My father is at work, and my mother was going to go shopping at the Ginza today. Aren’t you Mohton-san? I never miss Tamura-Sensei on NHK.”

  He smiled and said in English, “Then perhaps we should be speaking in English.”

  “Oh, no,” she replied in English, switching immediately back to Japanese. “My English is terrible. But your Japanese is excellent.”

  “You must be a student,” he said, looking down at her briefcase.

  “Yes, but don’t ask me what I am studying.”

  “What are you studying?” he asked, smiling broadly.

  “English literature,” she said in Japanese with a little laugh. “I study at Tsuda College. It has an excellent English literature program, but I’m just a beginner in conversation. You’re here studying Japanese literature, aren’t you? I remember what you said when Tamura-Sensei introduced you.”

  “That’s right. I’m taking a seminar on Noh drama at the University of Tokyo.”

  “I don’t know anything about Noh,” she said, then added with a smile, “But I have read all of Fitzgerald’s works.”

  “All I’ve read is Gatsby,” he confessed.

  “Good. Now I don’t feel so bad about the Noh drama.”

  “Do you mind if I ask your name?”

  “It’s Mineko,” she said without hesitating.

  “Mineko. I like that. ‘Child of the mountaintop.’”

>   “Yes, maybe,” she said. “Miné does mean mountaintop.”

  “Which Chinese character do you use to write the miné part?”

  “I wish you hadn’t asked me that. It’s a little embarrassing. My parents decided not to write that part of my name with a character. They used the katakana syllabary. That way it looks like an exotic foreign word. It’s actually very pretentious.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You are not pretentious at all.”

  She blushed slightly.

  He wished that they could go on like this, talking about each other all day, but she said, “I believe you wanted to see my father?”

  “Yes, I was in Itsuki a few weeks ago and got his address from his sister,” which was not exactly true, but close enough.

  “You met Aunt Yoshiko? I have never met her. I’ve been begging them to take me to Itsuki for years. What were you doing there?”

  Bill wondered where to start, what to tell her, what not to tell her. “It’s a very long story. When I was a young boy, Yoshiko’s sister Mitsuko used to take care of me, but she was repatriated during the war. One of the reasons I came to Japan was to see if I could find her. I did find Yoshiko, but she told me that Mitsuko died in Nagasaki.”

  “Yes, it was a terrible thing,” said the girl. “All I know about her is that she and Aunt Yoshiko had to go to some kind of concentration camp in America during the war. I never knew my grandparents or my Uncle Ichiro, either. It’s amazing that you still remembered a woman who took care of you when you were so young—and that you managed to find Aunt Yoshiko in her tiny village.”

  “I was hoping I could learn more about Mitsuko from your father.”

  “You’ll probably have to come back on a Sunday. That’s the only day he’s not at work. Although I wonder if he will talk to you. He … I’m sorry to say this, but he hates Americans. He blames them for what happened.”

  “I understand. But I want to see him anyway. I’ll come back. Would you be so kind as to give him this?” He held out the wrapped tin of rice crackers, slipping a calling card under the ribbon.

  “Thank you,” she said, bowing.

  Bill looked at the Fukais’ cherry tree. “I have time to go see the cherry blossoms now.”

  “Oh! Do you know about the blossoms of Koganei?”

  “I’ve heard about them, though I’m not sure exactly where they are.”

  “Wait,” she said, smiling and edging past him to the door. She opened it with her key, set her briefcase and the tin of crackers in the entryway, and locked it again.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  He felt his heart thump. He knew that Japanese etiquette required him to insist that she not trouble herself, but he was unwilling to risk having her take him at his word. “That would be wonderful if you have the time,” he said.

  Once they were walking side by side, he could not think of anything to say. Finally he asked, “Have you been studying English long?” Then he realized it was a stupid question. All Japanese children started studying English in middle school.

  “Since middle school,” she said. Of course. “How long have you been in Japan?”

  “Since September.”

  “And how long will you stay?”

  “My Fulbright ends in June. But I may be able to renew it for another nine months.”

  “I’d love to go to America on a Fulbright.”

  “Excuse me, I know this is very rude,” he began, but stopped when it became obvious that she was trying not to laugh. “What is it?” he asked.

  “You’re so formal,” she said. “Men your age don’t have to be so formal with girls my age.”

  “Now that you bring it up, what is your age?”

  “Nineteen. My birthday was yesterday.”

  “Happy birthday! Nineteen is such a nice age. I wish I had known, I would have brought you a present.”

  She smiled and lowered her eyes for the first time. Maybe he was being too obvious. “How old are you?” she asked, looking at him again.

  “Twenty-five. My birthday was last December. On the nineteenth.”

  “Twenty-five is a nice age, too,” she said with a smile. He liked how she smiled without covering her mouth as most Japanese women did.

  They crossed the tracks and continued on north past a row of banks and stores along a busy thoroughfare. They walked with the general flow of pedestrians, but more slowly than the others, who kept passing them.

  “You were about to say something before when I interrupted you,” she reminded him.

  “When I was being too polite.”

  “I’m sorry, my mother is always telling me I have to learn to control myself.”

  “No, I appreciate it,” he said. “Most Japanese people are so reluctant to criticize or contradict. I hope you’ll always …”

  “Yes?”

  “No, never mind. I was just going to ask you your age, but we’ve already talked about that.”

  “We’re coming to Koganei Bridge now,” she said. “It’s the best place for viewing the blossoms.”

  Bill could not see a bridge, just a mass of people. Soon, moving with them, he and Mineko came to the center of a short bridge that spanned a narrow canal.

  Stretching off endlessly on either side of the bridge were masses of pale white blossoms with just the slightest hint of pink. The branches were thick with blossoms that blotted out the sky. Bill and Mineko stood looking up for a while, then crossed to the other side of the bridge.

  He led the way along the green embankment beneath the blossoms, moving farther and farther away from the roar of traffic, where the crowd thinned out to the occasional passerby. Now and then, a breeze would sweep past them, and they would smile at each other through a veil of drifting petals. They walked for long stretches without speaking, hearing only the soft gurgling of the placid water in the canal.

  “What an odd, little waterway this is,” he said.

  “It’s an aqueduct. One of the Tokugawa shoguns dug it hundreds of years ago. It’s also famous as the site where the writer Osamu Dazai committed suicide with his lover.”

  Just now, Bill could not imagine ever wanting to die.

  33

  BILL STARED AT THE TIN of rice crackers resting in the ceremonial alcove in his room. As he and Mineko had walked back toward the station, she had grown pensive and again voiced her doubts that her father would see him. Perhaps the best thing, she suggested, would be to take her father by surprise. If Bill showed up unannounced late Sunday morning, say about eleven, her father would be sure to be in, probably puttering about in the back garden, and would not have a chance to think up an excuse for turning him away.

  Even more than the idea itself, Bill was thrilled that Mineko had taken the trouble to think of it. He walked back to the house with her, retrieved his gift from the entryway, and returned to Ogikubo. The one bit of himself he left with her was his card, which she promised to hide. Of course when he came on Sunday, they would pretend they had never met.

  David Green stopped by on Friday to ask if Bill had made up his mind yet about appearing on television again in a week or two. Knowing now that Mineko would be watching, he accepted, wishing only that he could somehow peer into the camera and look back at her.

  As he thought about looking at her, he began to wonder what it was like for her to look at him. He had seen Japanese paintings of the Portuguese monks and Dutch traders who came to these shores in the sixteenth century, and prints depicting the Americans who came to open the country a hundred years ago, and all of them were grotesque as seen through Japanese eyes: deathly gray skin, monkey-like hair and teeth, bulging eyeballs, enormous beaks for noses. Clare had called him beautiful, but to Mineko, his reddish-blond waves might look like wild flames, and his perfectly ordinary nose a gaping ventilation pipe.

  On Sunday morning he left the house carrying the tin of rice crackers, its neat wrapping somewhat rumpled. He considered buying something else to go with it, something more approp
riate for Mineko, but he was not even supposed to know that she existed, let alone bring her presents.

  It was 10:50 when he walked up to the Fukai house in Koganei and rang the doorbell.

  “Hai!” Slippered feet flapped toward the door. He slid back the frosted glass-paneled door and came face-to-face with Mineko. She wore a white blouse and a simple, knee-length skirt of gray flannel.

  After a quick smile, she said in a loud, clear voice, “Dochira-sama de gozaimashoh ka”— “Who might you be, Sir?”

  He played along, presented his card, and emphasized in his introduction that he was a University of Tokyo student, which should impress her parents. “I have come to see Mr. Jiro Fukai,” he said, matching her tone of voice.

  She took several steps away and glided around a corner into a shadowy passage to the right. The entryway had a slate floor, and there was a large geta-bako, the cabinet for footgear to one side. Three umbrellas stood at crazy angles in a wire stand in the corner, and on another rack were a few pairs of slippers for guests. He hoped that one pair would be placed on the glossy wooden floor for him to step into.

  His heart had begun to slow when a slim, graying man with heavy eyebrows and rolled-up sleeves rounded the corner clutching his card. The man’s sullen expression told him that the time for playing games had ended.

  “Yes?” said Mr. Fukai brusquely.

  “My name is William Morton,” said Bill, trying to smile.

  “I know who you are. You’re the son of that American preacher who killed my sister. What incredible nerve you have to walk into my home.”

  Mineko stepped out from behind the corner, pale and shaken.

  Her father spun around in his stocking feet. “Mineko! Go to your room.”

  “Father, I—”