Jasmine

by Noboru Tsujihara

  When a large, steamed, blue-skinned fish was brought in, the director swiftly used his own chopsticks to serve the fish head – a choice bit – to Yang. After expressing his thanks with droll exaggeration, Yang conveyed a morsel to his mouth with evident appreciation.

  Yin Dan gave a groan. “Some people put ‘101’ on their scalp, others say thank you for a fish head, some smoke opium. Oh, this is a land of freedom, all right. Free even to spit on the floor!” His eyes were on Aki. A genial light in them belied the harshness of his words.

  “Freedom, gentlemen,” he said, after actually spitting on the floor, “does not exist in a country like Japan that has lots of money but nothing else of any value. And where there’s nothing, there’s no memory of anything. Freedom is from the Almighty. From the Party! Ah, my friends – you know, a ‘friend’ in Persian means a ‘god’ – our misery has great scope! My own heart sinks, right down into my boots.”

  Just then a platter even larger than the one with the blue-skinned fish on it arrived at their table; at the sight, Yin fell silent.

  “Beggar’s chicken!” someone shouted.

  Everyone jumped to their feet at once, as if on cue, and peered at the great plate. This was a dish that Aki had never seen before. He was bewildered, as it seemed to consist of nothing but an enormous piece of baked clay.

  Xie Han explained: You clean a chicken and stuff it with delicacies like shiitake mushrooms, ginkgo nuts, walnuts, and bamboo shoots, then seal it with crepinette and wrap the whole with lotus leaves. Next you add salt and wine to clay, mixing it to the consistency of paste, and spread it thickly all over the wrapped bird before baking. Long ago, a beggar in Changshu first came up with the idea of cooking a chicken this way, and so it’s called beggar’s chicken.

  “Go ahead, Mr Waki, please crack it open,” said Xie. “That job always goes to the guest of honour.”

  Aki accepted the mallet offered him, but he couldn’t bring himself to swing it down. People called out encouragement. Not knowing how much strength to use, he tried giving the thing a light tap at first. It emitted a konk, and that was all. The clay shell was surprisingly hard. Next time he swung harder. This time, bits of clay flaked off. Uncertainty over how much strength to use threw off his timing. He gave an embarrassed laugh.

  Then something unexpected happened. At the next table, Li Xing got up and came striding over. She picked up the mallet, swung it high over her head, and brought it down with all her might. The beggar’s chicken broke open beautifully, pieces of clay flying through the air. After a short, startled silence, everyone burst into applause, Aki joining in with the rest. Li Xing quietly slipped the mallet back in his hand and hurried back to her seat. Her warmth lingered in the handle, and Aki hung onto it as Xie Han peeled off the lotus leaves with a practiced hand, carved the chicken, and divided it up on small plates. Servings were carried over to the other table as well.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” said Xie. “In Guangzhou we call this ‘nobleman’s chicken.’”

  The beggar’s, or nobleman’s, chicken was gobbled up in no time, leaving only clay shards and lotus leaves. The seal was broken on yet another bottle of maotai. As the strong drink took its effect, people spoke out more and more openly.

  Gao Yong said with some bitterness, “Yuan Mu said there are only criminal offenders in China, no political offenders.”

  Other voices chimed in. “Mao Zedong pretended to be dead, and then jumped up and swam across the Yangtze. Fifteen kilometres to the other side, and he made it in an hour and five minutes! A world record if ever there was one.”

  “Zhou Enlai had nude photos of Jiang Qing. That’s why he was the only one she could never lay a hand on.”

  Slightly tipsy, Aki half listened to these remarks while mentally tracing the plot of Moving Shadows. The two former lovers, Han Langen and Zheng Pinru, meet up again as spies. Although they are on opposing sides of the conflict, their love revives. What would that be like, living the thrill of espionage and the thrill of romance at the same time? If he pursued the story beyond the limits of the film, would he find his real father somewhere at the end of it?

  Encouraged by the drink, Aki put this last question to Xie.

  “Whatever happens,” he was told, “my movie will never go that far. As a matter of fact, the script still isn’t finished. As you can see, I’ve assembled some top people for the cast and crew. Financing should be okay, too. It’s only the storyline, the crucial element, that’s unresolved – still being rewritten. The writer, Guo Fuhai, is about at the end of his rope. You see, in China, the political situation has a direct impact on the story, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. When we started this project, the reformer Hu Yaobang was still in good health. He’d have let us do as we liked. Right, Mr Guo?” he called across the table to the scriptwriter, who sat downing maotai, his left hand at his temple.

  “Yeah, well, whatever we do,” Guo replied, “it won’t hold a candle to the Great Wall. The desert’s better than a sidewalk, a thief’s better than a barber. Stands to reason. Tell you what I’m gonna do, Director. First I’m gonna crumple myself up like a used napkin, then I’m gonna knock myself out.” He stood up, took the napkin from his lap and crushed it in his hand, then tossed it on the table; the next thing they knew, he crashed to the floor with a thud. Everybody laughed; no one got him up.

  Li Xing was saying something to the other actresses in a low voice. Now and then a quick little smile would appear on her face, lighting her features with gaiety.

  Sweetness and charm, murmured Aki to himself. Could one steer it in one’s own direction, keep it for oneself? That was the thought that had struck him back when he first laid eyes on Sato. Ready to try again?

  “What do you think of Li Xing?”

  Aki jumped at this sudden query. Had the director read his mind?

  “You saw how she cracked the beggar’s chicken,” Xie continued. “She’s clever. As she should be – she is a spy, after all.”

  Li Xing was from Taiyuan, and her Japanese was good – better than his own, even if he was a graduate of the East Asia Common Culture Academy. Her command of the language went well beyond what you could learn in school.

  Aki asked why that was.

  “She doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  Xie just shrugged. The question was left dangling.

  “I saw her this morning at the pier.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, at Waihongqiao International Pier.”

  Xie looked dubious, but said nothing.

  Aki stood up, screwed up his courage, and went over to Li Xing at the other table. He thanked her for her help with the chicken, but this was only a pretext. “I saw you this morning,” he said in Japanese.

  She tilted her head quizzically.

  “At Waihongqiao International Pier. Weren’t you there to meet someone arriving on the Xin Jian Zhen?”

  Slipping out of her chair, she stood and looked Aki straight in the eye. “No, I wasn’t at the pier.”

  “You weren’t? I beg your pardon. My mistake.”

  After that, he found it difficult to keep the conversation going and had no choice but to beat a retreat. On the way back, he noticed that Yin Dan’s seat was now empty. The empty plates and cup were neatly stacked, with a carefully refolded napkin laid ostentatiously over the top. Fantastic. The fellow had simply disappeared, like a well-behaved ghost. When had he gone? No one else seemed to have noticed his departure.

  Jasmine tea was brought in. Xie Han poured it out carefully into fine porcelain cups. Aki, with his passion for jasmine tea, had caught the fragrance while the tea was still being carried down the corridor and had felt an immediate prickle of recognition. This was very like the tea served last year by old Zhao. Stronger smell, though. “Curious,” he murmured to himself.

  The director heard him, and peered into his face. “Are you familiar with this tea?” he asked.

  “What could it be? It’s simila
r to White Snow Bud… but no, not that…”

  “If you know about White Snow Bud, then you obviously know a thing or two about the subject. This particular tea is handmade by our Yin Dan. Whenever he’s invited to a party like this, he brings some along as a treat. It has no name yet. I invite him just for the sake of this stuff.”

  Apparently, Yin Dan had once been the ablest cameraman in Shanghai Film Studio. During the location filming of Empire of the Sun, he’d served as an assistant cameraman. Five years ago, after suddenly abandoning his camera in the middle of a shoot, he built a little shack in a corner of the studio and settled in there. Everyone loved him – even Mango. One day, he abruptly started digging holes all over the studio grounds. Crew members would go around and fill them in. Then one time he broke through a water main and nearly drowned in the hole he was digging. This caused such a ruckus that he gave up hole-digging and took to gardening instead, planting jasmine all around his hut.

  The jasmine tea he made by hand was of outstanding quality. He used the finest grade leaves, Dragon Well green tea leaves fresh-picked in April. To scent them, he picked jasmine buds before dawn, while they were still drenched in dew, and then mixed them in with the tea leaves he’d set out to dry, thus permeating them with their fragrance. Later, he removed all the buds, repeating the procedure seven or eight times, being careful to leave no petals behind. One brewing of Yin’s tea was enough to fill a room with the aroma for days, and there was never a single petal in the cup.

  Yin Dan himself had left, but behind him he left the redolence of a tea that Aki thought he would never forget and could detect from quite far off. The banquet continued. He told jokes, knocked over his glass, fell silent, and smiled sardonically at their tales of incidents taking place under martial law.

  He tried to get up, and staggered slightly. “Too bad I couldn’t try any malantou,” he said.

  “You must come again in the spring,” said Xie Han jovially. “All right, everyone, let’s call it a night, shall we? All good things must come to an end, even banquets. Time for me to take my sly old head home and lay it on my cheap pillow.”

  They trooped noisily down the stairs and exchanged handshakes in the vestibule. Moist hands were laid atop dry hands, hot hands atop cold. Aki searched casually for Li Xing with his eyes, while shaking the actors’ hands. At some point, however, she had vanished. Feeling let down, he started off on foot in search of Chen’s taxi.

  Even after ten at night, the congestion along Fuzhou Road showed no sign of letting up. Families and sweethearts, all-male and all-female groups, blended into one common whole, eating and drinking, then out on the sidewalks talking, joking around, and arguing, as pangolin sellers wove back and forth through the crowd. The pangolin, also called the scaly anteater, was a food animal, but Aki had never tried its meat. From ships and steam launches on the Huangpu came the sound of chugging engines and whistles, so near that it seemed the boats might come all the way into the street.

  Jostled by the throng, Aki searched for Chen’s cab. Finally he spotted it on a dark corner some way off, and after elbowing his way through the crowd, he reached it and got in. However, the cab was unable to make much headway. Chen blasted away on the horn. In aggravation, he opened his window, stuck his head out and yelled, but to no avail. As aggressively as it could, the Cedric inched ahead.

  Someone rapped on the rear window. The sound reminded Aki of the tapping the mallet had made on the beggar’s chicken. Thinking it was someone angry at Chen’s driving, he turned around. The darkness and a large, racetrack-style sun visor kept him from seeing right away but in a moment he recognized who it was.

  Hastily, he opened the door. Li Xing slid into the slowly moving car. A pleasant scent filled the air. Aki breathed it in as he closed the door.

  She was breathing hard. Aki felt as if he had captured a rare animal.

  Taking off her sun visor, she said, “Thanks. I got separated from the rest. I hope this isn’t too much trouble.”

  Aki answered in Mandarin, “Hardly surprising, in this crowd. No problem at all. Let me take you home.”

  “That would be wonderful. I’m staying in housing on the film studio grounds.”

  Aki told Chen the change in destination. The studio was in the opposite direction from his hotel. Chen furtively adjusted his rear-view mirror, checking out the new passenger. “It’s Li Xing,” he said under his breath, his voice just audible. Then, with a determined nod, he leant heavily on his horn and lunged forward as if making a run at the pedestrians, picking up speed. It was amazing he didn’t run anybody over.

  The car cut across Fuzhou Road, turned left by People’s Park, went south on Xizang Road, and then crossed Canton and Yan’an streets to come out on Huaihai Road. The fog thickened. Li Xing leant back in the seat and stared out the window. Neon signs rose up blurrily, one after another, and fell away again behind them. A moment ago Aki had been muttering about the fog, wishing it would clear away, but now the simple thought that it lay directly in her field of vision was enough to lend it a certain charm.

  “Where does this fog come from?” he asked Chen. “From the sea, or the Yangtze?” He felt the need to impress upon her that Chen was a close friend of his, someone who could be trusted at the wheel.

  “Neither. It comes from Lake Taihu and the creeks. It’s a damn nuisance.”

  “Feels like being underwater, or floating in air, don’t you think? Unsettling. Do you ever get lost in it?”

  Chen did not reply to this, still using his horn as he wove through the traffic. In no time they left Huaihai Road, turned a corner unexpectedly, and were zipping along another street that seemed to be taking them farther and farther away from the film studio. Having a film actress as his passenger must have gone to Chen’s head.

  Aki said foolishly, “Thanks again for doing such a brilliant job of smashing the beggar’s chicken.” He would have liked to talk to her in Japanese, but that wouldn’t have gone down well with Chen.

  “I’d never had beggar’s chicken before, either, you know. I just wanted to try my hand.” Li Xing gave a little laugh. His tension eased a bit.

  “Would you mind telling me something about your father?” she said. “I need to know more about the character I’m cast opposite. It would help me flesh out the part. Do you mind?”

  Aki looked momentarily perplexed, but answered with a smile: “Actually, I hardly know anything about him myself. Not much more than you do. That’s why I came to Shanghai, to find out what I can.”

  She studied his face. The look in her eyes was much livelier now than when she was staring out the window. Unable to resist, he told her what he knew:

  “There’s a report that he may be alive.”

  “What, he’s alive!” The words slipped out in Japanese. “Where is he?” Back to Mandarin.

  “Somewhere on the Loess Plateau, evidently.”

  “But that’s where I’m from. My parents are both dead, but my nainai lives there alone. She’s eighty now. It’s a place called Yangquan, in Shanxi Province.”

  “Yangquan?” He’d never heard of it.

  “What about your father?”

  “I don’t know exactly where he is. The information isn’t one hundred per cent reliable, anyway.”

  Suddenly a section of fog cleared, and they emerged into the moonlight. Overhead loomed the twin spires of Xujiahui Cathedral. Aki realized that their driver had taken not a detour, but a shortcut.

  When they arrived at the gate of Shanghai Film Studio, which was naturally closed, Chen honked his horn three times and the same guard as before came out. On ascertaining that Li Xing was in the car, he opened the gate and waved them on through.

  Li Xing issued rapid instructions to Chen. They went past two traffic circles and five studios, coming to a drab, oblong two-story building. Chen pulled up at the entrance. This was the actors’ guesthouse. Every window was dark, and even the entrance was unlit. Li Xing got out of the car, and Aki followed unhesitatingly behind her
.

  “No one’s back yet,” she said. “Even though I got separated from everyone, it looks like I made it back first after all. Thanks to you.” In the beam of the headlights, she bowed gracefully in the Japanese style.

  “I’ll see you to your room. I can’t leave you here alone in the dark. Besides, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”

  She fumbled in her bag for her key as they walked into the building. She reached out a hand, and there was the click of a switch; then, after slowly flickering several times, a feeble fluorescent light came on. They walked side by side down the hall.

  “Let me get this straight. Are you positive you weren’t at the pier this morning?”

  She stopped and turned to him with what seemed to be a look of real bafflement. “I’m quite sure – it’s a case of mistaken identity. I mean, I don’t even know where the pier is.”

  Aki smiled weakly and shook his head. So he had seen a vision not just of Sato, but of this woman, too? How could that be? How could you see a vision of a person you’d never met?

  She came to a halt at one of the doors. Her key rattled in the keyhole. He felt a momentary urge to see her room.

  “There’s something else, too.”

  “What is it?” she said, pulling the door open. A stifling smell seeped out, heavy with summer humidity and just a hint of jasmine.

  “Can you tell me a bit more about the Loess Plateau?”

  “Well… it extends on the east from Taiyuan across Shaanxi Province in a crescent shape, on the west as far as Ningxia and Gansu Provinces, with the Yellow River running vertically down the middle. It was built up over millions of years from sand blowing off the great deserts in the northwest. Since ancient times people there have lived in caves in the cliffs called yaodong, which have arched roof and no pillars—”

  “That answer I could find in a book,” he interrupted with a smile. Did she want him to come into her room, or not? Tentatively, he said, “I’d like to tell you some more about my father.”