The Witches' Book of the Dead

by Christian Day

  He abhorred the indomitable secrecy of his country, that reticence that implies everything and says nothing, yet even so, to him, as to every Japanese, foreigners were deeply suspect on account of their soullessness—if, however, one could exploit them and their obtrusive irrelevance to carry out one’s unwavering duty to emperor and nation, well, then so be it.

  A moth had lost its way in the kitchen and flitted around the refrigerator in circles, its wings beating faintly. Amakasu dried off his plate and glass, returning the dishes carefully to the shelf, and he listened to the steady rap of the rain on the roof of the house.

  On second thought, this whole business with the Germans was acceptable after all. Yes, he would send the film to Berlin first thing tomorrow. In the end, it did ultimately boil down to the fact that real sensations coalesce more around a photograph or a film than, say, a verbal utterance or even a slogan. The sufferings of the officer in the film were simultaneously beatific and unbearable, a transfiguration of horror into something loftier, something divine—the Germans would understand this well in their pristine longing for death.

  Amakasu walked through the corridor to the bathroom, blew his nose, and twisted a plug from tissue paper to clean out his ears in a bit of Dostoyevskian abandon. He sniffed at it, detecting no scent in those yellow-stained spots, wadded up the paper, and tossed it into the bowl of the modern Western toilet, flushing it and watching as the maelstrom of water, swirling and gurgling indecently, sucked it all down to the final bars of the Bach sonata.

  5.

  The next morning he rode the streetcar through the rain to the Ministry. Once there, he hung hat and coat behind his office door, ordered tea and some rice, and spent the whole day preparing a letter, in German, to Universum Film AG, which for security reasons that struck even him as a bit exaggerated he did not dictate to his trim (but unfortunately somewhat short-legged) German secretary from the typing pool of the Foreign Ministry, but instead composed himself, on his typewriter, with pale, neatly manicured forefingers that hovered over the keys in two curved arcs.

  It was, as Amakasu realized with some satisfaction, a masterwork of manipulation. Self-abasement alternated with flattery, reluctant demands with completely untenable promises.

  He requested that they please send specialists from Germany, with all haste, who were ready to work in Japan with the excellent lenses of Carl Zeiss and the wholly superior film processing of Agfa, to shoot and produce here, and thereby—if one might phrase it like this—counteract the seeming omnipotence of American cultural imperialism, the manifestations of which had spread like a virus throughout the Shōwa empire, most especially within the realm of film, thus of course making its way onto the street and among the people. This was why, for example, a quota had recently been implemented to protect and foster the beleaguered Japanese film industry.

  The catalyst for his decision to approach Germany, that great nation of cinema, he wrote, had been a secret meeting with representatives from the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and a consul general of the United States, during which they had advised Amakasu to reopen the domestic film market (which naturally included the old colonies of Korea and Taiwan as well as Manchukuo, the new overseas territory) to American motion pictures, which were being shut out by introducing said quota, lest they find themselves forced in the future, so sorry to say, to cast not only all villains, but also generally all negatively connoted roles in each and every U.S. production, solely with Japanese-born actors.

  Although this, Amakasu wrote, had been a truly elegant chess move that Japan would quite certainly also have chosen to make itself had it been in the American position, their domestic film productions aimed at the Asian market were unfortunately not nearly as influential as those of the United States. We lack, he wrote, the timelessness of plot, the exportability, the universally comprehensible craftsmanship; Japanese films were, if one might put it so simply, just not good enough for them to keep pace with the Americans.

  And thus arose the compelling notion of allying oneself with Germany, the only country whose cultural foundation deserved as much respect as one’s own, hence the wish, hereby stated officially (he bridled at actually putting such nonsense down on paper), to establish a celluloid axis between Tokyo and Berlin.

  And then came the heart of the matter, the truly important detail amid all the window dressing: they should send him, if he might ask, a German director, or several of them if they liked, but he was thinking primarily of Arnold Fanck, whose Stürme über dem Mont Blanc he had watched with deep admiration. Something was conveyed there, behind the things depicted, that had touched his soul; with Fanck behind the camera, one enters a forbidden, mysterious, Hölderlinian zone; this echo chamber is German through and through, but universal as well, which even he as a Japanese can appreciate quite clearly.

  He will take the liberty and put it bluntly: If Fanck is not available, might he then hope for Fritz Lang? Friedrich Murnau and Karl Freund are of course already hopelessly and irretrievably in Hollywood, alas, Murnau having even recently died there in an automobile accident.

  Oh, the picture Mädchen in Uniform also made an extraordinary impression on him and reminded him, if he might be permitted the personal remark, of his own time in boarding schools; to create a film so radical and yet so personal would be of course entirely impossible in this country.

  They could also send him Austrian or Dutch directors if they liked. Hotel expenses, travel costs, per diems, lump-sum honoraria—everything would be paid for by the Ministry. That this cultural exchange has the support of the highest echelons is entirely self-evident, and should certain German officials want to visit as well and thereby get to know the Japanese Empire in all its excellence, then they’d be most wholeheartedly welcome.

  In closing, he is sending along with the letter a short, modest film to foster a deeper understanding of Japan in the open and honest hope that it might pique the interest of Universum Film AG and thereby the admirable, superior nation of the Germans.

  When he had finished the document and signed at the bottom of the very last page with spidery but still elegantly formed ceremonial letters, he replaced the ink ribbon and stashed the used one in his briefcase to burn later, slipping beside it the letter and the film reel he had sealed with wax in a ministerial pouch.

  The small package, addressed to the director of UFA himself, was dispatched by diplomatic mail to Berlin that very same day; there, a week later, it was received by the Japanese embassy after largely uneventful flights via Shanghai, Calcutta, and Istanbul and ferried by courier through the well-proportioned avenues of the German capital, though it initially ended up at the film company stuck in an exceedingly managerial pigeonhole clad in elegant mahogany, which was affixed with an understated brass placard. Herr Direktor Hugenberg was out of town on vacation, skiing the glaciers of Switzerland.

  6.

  Nägeli had cried for three days and no more. At night, when sleep eluded him, he read Walser at length and dosed himself with Veronal at around four thirty in the morning. Was it possible he despised his father for having suddenly become so powerless as his life waned, as though the old man had been bitten by the black tarantula of sleep and insensibility? And what had he wanted to say to him at the very end? Had that H been the beginning of a word or, perhaps, a sentence? One final thought that might have resolved everything, a sentence if not of pardon, then perhaps at least partly of absolution?

  God, there would’ve been so much to discuss even then, but there was never time for that (at this he kneaded and wrung his hands until they went painfully pink), misunderstandings had piled up (probably also on account of his never publicly voiced insistence to himself that his father had perhaps been inclined toward love between men) that would’ve taken ten lifetimes to untangle; there you have it, it was a recursive loop, the whole thing, and for that reason he terminated his mourning after three days and dedicated himself wholly to the tasks relating to burial, which he alone,
in the Protestant trepidation of his heart, saw himself capable of executing in a humane and proper fashion.

  The Swiss Reformed Church duly and conscientiously interred Nägeli senior in the native soil of Bern as Emil had wished. It had been a radiant and sunny winter day, and yet they had had to use pickaxes that morning in order to excavate the frozen earth for the grave.

  The Geneva bands of the parson, who with the thoroughly decent iciness of his eulogy took, so to speak, the wind out of the sails of any and all hostile thoughts among the mourners regarding potentially ongoing disagreements, gleamed whiter still than the newly fallen snow of the previous night, which had blanketed memory with a forgiving, powdery layer of oblivion.

  The oration had scarcely concluded when someone pulled the cord of a bell, upon whose steadfast tolling the figures dressed in black dispersed like shadows onto the whiteness, to the left and right of the snowbound, refulgently glowing exit.

  Nägeli, overtired, wearing sunglasses, mumbled some lines from The Tempest that seemed to him appropriate for the occasion, rather than the so very obvious Hamlet (and that indirectly described his father, who lay now several fathoms deep and with open eyes at the bottom of the sea), after which he stole away from the open grave, walking backward (was there a slight bow?), when he saw a tall man, unknown to him, broad, lugubrious, red-cheeked, whispering a few words to the parson, saw him try to kiss the hand of the clergyman, who withdrew it resolutely and in haste, disgusted either at this papist familiarity or perhaps at the man’s long and dirty fingernails, and with his own outstretched forefinger indignantly pointed the ostensible mourner the way to the cemetery gate.

  At a fast clip the man departed; clumsy-footed, limping slightly, and with black jacket skirts aflutter, he hurried down the knoll as if he wanted, as if he just had to touch the glacial waters of the Aare River below, for only through the disinfecting properties of the aseptic, cold currents down there in the Matte district might the insincere Lutheran sermon regarding the death of the elder Nägeli be washed away.

  The clergyman then invited Emil into the well-heated parsonage for a cup of tea and introduced him there to the new young cantor from Hamburg who contributed a bottle of brandy for their tea, likely also in order to bring the quavering of his hand under control. Eight mahogany chairs were arranged in bourgeois symmetry up against the white wainscoted wall, on which hung a barometer.

  The affair with his father was now finally endured and concluded, the German cantor opined, carefully laying two coal briquettes into the woodstove, and Nägeli nodded in affirmation, dwelling no further on which affair was meant, nor on who that ominous man out there might have been.

  The parson snorted the contents of his nose into a floral handkerchief, tugged searchingly at his white-haired earlobe, and lit a cigarette. No, you’re right, one needn’t mention the man again, it’s over, thank God, it was almost a Nachtschreck in broad daylight; cigarette? Nägeli declined with thanks although he would have liked to smoke. A deep drag penetrated the pastor’s lungs and reappeared noisily.

  At any rate, something incomprehensible had been whispered to the parson, it may have been just a single syllable, a single letter (an H, for example? Nägeli shuddered), but they forbade any further thought on the matter and, brandy glasses raised between pointed fingers, hastily toasted one another with Lutheran reserve; there was nothing more to discuss, and even if there were, this was neither the time nor the place for it.

  The only subsequent inquiry made concerned Nägeli’s fiancée, Ida. Aha, yes, of course, she’s in Japan, good grief, that’s dreadfully far away, halfway around the globe. Nods of agreement, silence, perhaps some more tea? And the vicar was now already glancing up at the parsonage clock ticking away in Protestant fashion on the wall above the framed psalm verses.

  But you know, it’s refreshing, it’s very nice indeed that Nägeli wants to marry a German woman, the cantor said briskly; the relationship of Switzerland to his, the cantor’s, vast homeland up north could be described as reverential, yet at the same time peevishly dismissive, as if the Swiss had taken the enormously profound culture of Germany and, in building on it, had improved it, had made it even more flawless, and now no longer knew how to deal with the coarse, crass original. But didn’t his Ida come from an old Baltic, perhaps even Swedish, family?

  The parson cast the cantor a needly glare, as if it did not behoove a representative of the Swiss Reformed Church to utter such thoughts aloud, and the circle fell once more into a leaden silence girded by the frosty ticking of the clock.

  7.

  The parson’s sofa, it was the shade of wilting roses, Nägeli noted, storing away this detail so that one day, many years later, long after color film had been invented, he could reproduce it when selecting from the props department of a theater some items of furniture with which he sought to create sets for his final film, as if memory of a hue, of a rare scent, were a spirit that steadily and eternally traveled along at the edge of one’s life. At the end of his life, Nägeli will say that there had been only five geniuses in a hundred years of cinema: Bresson, Vigo, Dovzhenko, Ozu, and he himself.

  Was he right about that? Yes, yes, of course, always. In one sense. Before us we see Dovzhenko’s Ukrainian ears of grain, swaying idly and gently in the north wind that sweeps through them in silence; then Jean Vigo’s enigmatic, pale wooden barge sailing underneath a shaded bridge; from there, streaming forth, Bresson’s bleak, anxious, sacred twilight; and finally we look into Ozu’s side-lit rooms, the camera in the Japanese position a good meter lower than is typical in the West, the shōji always slid open, but ever present in the frame; in all their endeavors these directors concerned themselves not only with the impossibility of reproducing the color black, but also with depicting the presence of God.

  In another sense, Nägeli was of course only just starting to become a great director; he wasn’t one yet, or only to some extent. Not long ago, in Paris, he had shot the life and death of Marie Tussaud, a film featuring a scene in which the wax death masks she fashioned of Robespierre, Marie Antoinette, Danton, and Marat were concealed behind a curtain from which they narrated the ghastly events of the French Revolution with the help of intertitles.

  That film, however, was censored and mutilated at the behest of the vile archbishop of Paris, and while Nägeli, bristling, reading Flaubert in German translation at night in the Hotel Meurice (a bulbous glass of mineral water opalized calmly on the night table, over in the armoire a moth flitted from suit to sweater and back), was seized with greater and greater pangs of dejection as he internalized paragraph for paragraph just how bad, how incomplete, how guided by vacuous sloth his own work seemed in comparison, he recalled shortly before falling asleep that his father had invited him to spend a few days with him here in Paris many years before.

  He had felt obliged to accept the invitation, despite already then harboring a profound but still unspecified disinclination toward French things in general and Paris in particular, a city that seemed to him worthless, disrespectful, and above all base. Everything was counterfeit with the French, even their commonplaces: Soyez violent et original dans votre vie, afin d’être réglé et ordinaire comme un bourgeois dans vos œuvres.

  Nägeli was altogether nauseated by the snails in red wine sauce, the frog legs, and the odious rabbit ragout, which his father had extolled to him as, if not delicacies, then the highest expression of a far superior, deeper culture.

  Nägeli’s father had thus gourmetized himself through the city while at night in the dingy little guesthouse (for they could only afford such a place), Emil secretly dressed the farmhouse bread he had brought along with shavings of Saanen cheese, with slices of tomato and hard-boiled eggs. For the final evening of their French excursion, Nägeli’s father had booked a table at Maxim’s months in advance (by letter, while still in Bern, with a pale-violet pencil that only he found eccentric).

  Upon entering the sparsely lit, exquisitely furnished restaurant, his father, only
with great effort managing to suppress his increasing nervousness, had grandiloquently announced that he had a reservation; yes, indeed, replied the maître d’hôtel, scrutinizing the short foreign man and his decent but modest dark suit with pity, they did have his reservation right here, one moment please, et voilà, une belle table pour Monsieur Bourgeois et fils?

  No, no, there must be some mistake, his name was Nägeli, Doctor Nägeli, de Berne, if you please, and Emil was ashamed of his father’s pretentions, and it was only for his sake, after running an endless gauntlet through the dissecting gazes of the other diners and finally arriving at their accorded table beside the door to the fetid men’s bathroom, that he bit into the revolting Tournedos Rossini, which were enveloped in grayish bacon, and into the gristly snails (whose rubbery consistency was impervious to chewing, with the result that he swallowed the creatures, almost choking, in a single gulp, as one might a raw oyster), praising the obscenely expensive Bordeaux although he could just as well have drunk fermented grape juice, so little did he understand of wine and so little did it interest him.

  A half-inebriated guest had maneuvered himself out of the lavatory, wobbling, wiping his damp hands on the sides of his trousers, and had then squeezed past their table, colliding with it as he turned his hip; and although red wine had sloshed out of their glasses onto the tablecloth, the man had, as the French do, avoided issuing an apology. The stench of ammonia wafted around Emil, beneath which hung, furtively heavy and sweet, the bouquet of excrement.