Jasmine

by Noboru Tsujihara

  Aki sat on the sofa and opened his unfinished book of Arabic and Persian poetry. Page after page of compass poetry.

  Beloved, you and I are a compass.

  Although we have two heads, we share one body.

  Although now we turn, describing a circle around a

  point,

  In the end we draw our heads together as one.

  For a brief spell, Aki forgot the situation he was in. Then, suddenly concerned that he’d heard nothing from his sister, he tried calling her at work. She had quit her job as of yesterday. In the Ashiya apartment, her answering machine was still on. Had she run off to Belgrade in pursuit of Shuichi? Those wicked thoughts will go away, he had said. How? she had asked. Give in to ’em, he had told her.

  Notebook in hand, Li Xing came into the room. “I’ll make some tea.”

  Yin Dan’s jasmine tea again. The marvellous smell of it spread throughout the room.

  “Making any progress?”

  “So-so.” She put a hand to one cheek and shook her head. “Who did you call, your wife?”

  “My wife died six years ago.”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “I’ve all but forgotten her. There’s the ambience she left behind, that’s all.”

  “Ambience… I see. I think that’s what I need in my writing, too. What are you reading?”

  Aki showed her the thick book and read aloud the compass poem he’d just come across. Quietly she let the notebook slide out of her hand.

  “I told you a little bit about my dad, didn’t I?” said Aki.

  She looked him in the eye and nodded. The compass poem was still echoing in her head. In the end we draw our heads together as one.

  “He was arrested as a Chinese, under the name Han Langen, and tried as a traitor. During the trial, they say he answered every charge with Wang le, claiming he’d forgotten.”

  “Purposely?”

  “Probably.”

  “I wonder. Because I can’t remember even yesterday very well… Actually, it’s funny that we do remember what happens to us every day. Even things that happened hours ago.”

  “That’s true. There is something mysterious about the ability to remember. Xingxing, you aren’t making much progress, are you?”

  She looked down and leafed through the pages. Aki also took a casual look and then exclaimed in surprise, “It’s in Japanese!”

  Again she put a hand to her cheek and smiled. “Yes, didn’t I tell you? I write my diary in Japanese.”

  “I didn’t know. That’s really amazing. How is it that your Japanese is so good, again?”

  “My mother was a Chinese born and raised in Japan, a huaqiao. Didn’t I mention that?”

  “Yes… But don’t tell me her name was Xiaolan.”

  “It was. How did you know?”

  “And she was born in Kobe…”

  “Yes. But why?”

  “Your grandfather’s name is Xu Liping. I know him very well.”

  “What? That’s incredible! I have no idea what he even looks like.”

  Just as Xu Liping’s mother had said that night in Teite on Tor Road, holding a handkerchief with Shantou embroidery to the corner of her eye, Xu Liping’s second daughter Xiaolan had left Japan for China soon after graduating from Kobe College.

  The founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1st October 1949, sparked a growing trend among overseas Chinese to participate in the building of a new homeland. Among young huaqiao in Japan with hopes pinned on a new China, return to the fatherland became immensely popular, and many made the journey over the protests of their parents and other family members. Japan and China did not have diplomatic relations then, and there was no direct sea route between the two countries, so returnees jumped aboard repatriation ships dispatched by the Japanese government to bring home Japanese left behind at the end of the war. Between 1953 and 1959, 3,754 huaqiao returned to China on board these ships. Of that number, 675 were from Kobe. Most were young. Among them was Xiaolan. With few exceptions, they subsequently endured the Cultural Revolution and, simply for being returnees from Japan, were branded as antirevolutionary and subjected to ugly, harrowing experiences.

  “Your grandfather is alive and well in Kobe,” Aki told her. His voice shook a little. “He doesn’t know about his daughter’s death, and he certainly doesn’t know he has a granddaughter named Li Xing.”

  Her mother had given her strict training in Japanese and, during the Cultural Revolution when the family was split up by relocation, sent regular reminders never to forget the language. Her mother had wanted her to write letters in Japanese, but this wasn’t permitted.

  Li Xing looked down and began to scribble in her notebook.

  “Did your mother tell you anything about Kobe?”

  Li Xing held out the page for him to see. He read aloud: “Rokko, Arima Spa, Suma Temple, Kobe College Chapel, Awaji puppets… ah yes, joruri.”

  “Joruri?”

  “Puppet plays. Awaji Island is between Osaka Bay and the Seto Inland Sea – the second biggest of Japan’s lesser islands, and the birthplace of puppet theatre in Japan. Someone must have taken your mother to see it when she was a little girl.”

  “Is it still going on?”

  “Oh, yes. There’s just one troupe left, though. It’s not what it used to be.”

  The telephone rang. It was Xie Han, wanting Aki to come over to the studio.

  “All right,” he said, his eyes on Li Xing’s face. “Right away?”

  “No, not this minute. Toward evening would be better. How about five or so?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Li Xing quickly realized who the call was from, and when Aki hung up she said worriedly, “It must be something about me.”

  Aki gave a noncommittal answer and looked at the wall clock. Still plenty of time before five. Checking out the window, he saw that the black Peugeot had returned. He lit his first cigarette of the day and blew smoke into the sultry air by the window, wondering as he did so whether they knew that Li Xing was with him. No way they wouldn’t know a thing like that, he had to accept.

  He tried several times to summon Chen on his pager but got no reply, so he was obliged to take one of the taxis camped out in front of the hotel. As they slid past the Peugeot he peered inside, but saw no one there, nor was he followed.

  “Have a seat,” said Xie Han in his office, indicating a small round stool. An air conditioner taking up half the window was rattling away, but the air in the room remained warm and damp. Aki looked at the director, feeling tense. Xie’s jaw was dark with five-o’clock shadow.

  “Xingxing has unloaded herself on you, I understand.” There was an ironic undertone to this.

  “Unloaded herself?”

  “You must find it inconvenient.”

  “Not at all. I discovered she’s the granddaughter of a friend of mine.”

  “Is that right? Who?”

  Aki gave a concise account of the connection.

  “Huh. That explains why her Japanese is so good. By the way, I’ve found out something about your father.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Very much so. What Tao said was true. He’s in a kind of prison out in Jixian.”

  “Tao? Who’s that?”

  “The man I wrote you about before, the one who escaped from there to Shanghai.”

  “So he really is on the Loess Plateau.”

  Xie nodded. “It was 1955 when your father came back to Shanghai after the war, wasn’t it? Someone sent for him.”

  “Who?”

  “Zheng Pinru.”

  “That’s impossible! She was executed way before that, by Agency 76 and the Japanese.”

  “She was alive. All along, that was the rumour. Supposedly, somebody else was executed in her place. But nobody knows for sure. She was alive, and she asked Han Langen – is it all right if I call him by his Chinese name?”

  “Of course. After all, he became a Chinese comic.”

  “Han
Langen was urged to come back to Shanghai by Zheng Pinru. That was his story. Whether she was the one who really contacted him, who can say? From her supposed execution in 1940 to this day, no one has ever seen her alive. It might have all been a setup. In any case, after that he went to Beijing, got arrested on suspicion of spying, and was imprisoned without a trial. Do you know about Ito Ritsu?”

  “Oh yes. It’s a well-known story. A leader of the Japanese Communist Party, held for twenty-seven years in a Beijing prison. Word got out that he was long since dead, so when he finally came home, it caused quite a commotion.”

  It was on 3rd September 1980, that Ito had appeared in Narita Airport in his wheelchair. Aki had watched it on TV. Ito’s two sons went to the airport to meet their father, who by then was deaf and nearly blind.

  Xie Han turned melancholy eyes on his visitor. Having gone only one day without seeing him, Aki was struck by how much the man had aged overnight. What could have happened?

  Yesterday he’d received a summons from an old friend in the central committee of the Shanghai Communist Party and, together with the results of the investigation regarding Waki Tanehiko he’d requested, had been given an order to cease filming Moving Shadows. Well, worse things can happen, he told himself. On either side of this event, the flow of days would continue with little change. As the song says, “Everyone dies, everyone dies…”

  “After Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong died one after the other in 1976,” Xie said, “Deng Xiaoping was gradually rehabilitated, as you know, and Hu Yaobang became General Secretary of the Party. Hu set about clearing the names of people who were branded as antirevolutionary or as spies and killed or imprisoned at the time of the Cultural Revolution. He undertook a survey of all the prisons and labour camps around the country, granting amnesty to everyone confined on a trumped-up charge. In Qincheng Prison in Beijing they discovered a Japanese national named Ito Ritsu. Who was this? That’s how Ito came to light. But there’d been another Japanese prisoner in Qincheng, before that. After leaving Qincheng, he was transferred from prison to prison over a period of years, and so he slipped through Hu’s net. It’s been established that a few years back he was moved to a secret prison in Jixian, near Hukou waterfall. The middle of nowhere. His cell is a cave carved into a cliff. They say he’s still there…”

  Xie Han stood up, went over to the window, and stood as if sunk in thought. When he returned, he said huskily, “They say he can’t remember anything at all. Even his own name.”

  “He has two,” put in Aki quickly, the statement a question. “Han Langen and Waki Tanehiko.”

  “Neither one. So of course he has no idea whether he’s Japanese or Chinese, either. No identity.”

  “Like the Man in the Iron Mask,” murmured Aki. “I want to get him out.” The murmur was more of a groan.

  “I know. But not now. That’s not a place that ordinary people can easily get to at the best of times. And tension is running high just now. Long-distance travel is under strict limits for Chinese and foreigners alike. It would be different if Hu Yaobang, the reformer, were still around. He would’ve ordered an immediate investigation and done whatever it took to free him.”

  “Roughly, how do you get to Jixian?”

  “It’s about two hundred kilometres west of Linfen…”

  Slowly Aki raised his head, a thought forming in his mind. “Even if they were both accused of spying,” he said, “my father’s case has got to be different from Ito’s. After he went back to Japan, he had nothing to do with the Japanese Communist Party. Whether Zheng Pinru sent for him or somebody else, I can’t believe the Japanese Communist Party smuggled him in, did they?”

  Xie explained: “Back then, there were various routes. One was through the Japanese Communist Party, others were the intelligence agencies of the Chinese Communist Party, and then there was the huaqiao route, through overseas Chinese.”

  “The huaqiao route!” he couldn’t help exclaiming.

  Like a mole bringing up dark earth, he dredged up a memory – a remark his mother had once made: Xu Liping and the others are very kind, but I can’t get over the feeling that they’re hiding something about your father’s trip to Shanghai.

  “In Beijing, was my dad arrested because of the old prewar charge of spying?”

  “No. That was already dealt with in the traitors’ trial. And anyway, who was he spying for? Japan, the Comintern, the Kuomintang? No, it was something else. In a despotic regime, when they pin a crime on you it’s always espionage. That’s what happened in the Cultural Revolution… Tanehiko was lured back by someone claiming to be Zheng Pinru. Naturally, he was prepared to risk everything. He’d received a letter from the woman he loved, a woman he thought was dead. Even if he still had his doubts, he would – ah, I’m sorry, this whole episode must have been painful for you and your mother.”

  “It’s all right,” said Aki.

  The melancholy in Xie’s eyes deepened. “This is how I see it. Han Langen may indeed have forgotten everything, as he said at his trial, but they hadn’t forgotten him. They asked him back, lured him back out of his quiet life. Something like that must have happened.”

  “Who is they?”

  “The top echelon of Mango could be involved. I can’t be specific, but even if I had some idea, in this country it’s not possible to name names.”

  Aki lit a cigarette and said nothing until he’d smoked it through. With his mouth twisted out of shape, Xie stared down at a pool of sunshine on the desk. He looked as if he’d have liked to curl up in it.

  “Is it true that no copies of my dad’s films have survived?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not one?”

  “Not one.”

  “What about other Huaying films?”

  “There may be a few. Some say the Kuomintang hid a large number of confiscated goods from Shanghai somewhere in Xian. They could be there. Nothing’s turned up so far.”

  “Then why do you say that no copies of his films survived?”

  “Because he destroyed them himself.”

  “My God.” His head slumped, then slowly came up again. “Why do you think he ever became a comedian?”

  “Hah! I was sure you were going to ask why he burned all his films.” Xie Han closed his eyes. He seemed to be going to sleep. Yet when he spoke, his voice had strength in it:

  “That era, from about 1930 till the mid-1940s, was a time of great folly. One would have expected an actor, under those circumstances, to choose a tragic role for himself. Only an exceptional man would choose comedy. The person who takes a hard look at things, who tries to think them through, is drawn to the comical side of human nature. He develops an apprehension – no, that’s not right. What is the word…?”

  Aki joined him in searching for it. “Acumen? We usually use it in a rather different sense.” The Japanese word he suggested was used to describe a child reaching the age of discretion.

  “Yes, good. Acumen.”

  “How would you say it in Mandarin?”

  “Dongshi… So, the question is whether one passed through that period of great folly or without acquiring a certain acumen. Once when Tanehiko was drunk he told me: ‘The ideal life would be to live in Shanghai embracing a woman, and one’s conscience, with both arms.’ He was a spy and a comedian, and on top of that he loved a female spy. Did anyone ever survive an age of folly with as much acumen as he did? And now, fifty years on, we’re going through a similar time.”

  “You’re not thinking of turning Moving Shadows into a comedy, by any chance?”

  “Who knows what could happen?” The director sidestepped the question with a bitter smile, knowing the order to cancel the film was already in the works. “These things can only be understood, my friend, through the prism of experience. For a young Japanese like yourself, there may be no way to understand.” He gave a small, reedy laugh. “The film’s been stopped. The new general secretary used to be the mayor of Shanghai. A spy film set in Shanghai during the Japanese occupat
ion, and not an out-and-out anti-Japanese film, either – it’s not something he’s likely to appreciate. Or so the city fathers have judged, and made their decision.”

  “Does Xingxing know?”

  “No. Nobody does.”

  Aki dragged hard on the cigarette he’d lit. Exhaling smoke, he said with bleary eyes, “You say someone Japanese like me wouldn’t understand. Has that got something to do with the question of war responsibility?”

  “Nothing whatsoever. If it seems otherwise to you, go ahead – draw your own conclusions. My father was killed by a Japanese soldier in Nanjing. Responsibility is something that can only be verified through actual experience. In that sense, maybe I was thinking about that.”

  “You mean Japanese people haven’t acknowledged their own responsibility?”

  Xie Han neither nodded nor shook his head. Just then a roll of thunder sounded along the edge of the sky. The two men remained silent, listening.

  “Let’s all stop bandying words about. We Chinese are at fault, too. For one person to tell another forcibly not to forget this or that, and keep pushing for an apology, is undignified. Not that there’s any reason to expect Mango to behave with dignity. I believe that true religion was devised to confer dignity on mankind. The holiest rite in the Christian faith has to do with the removal of sins from the book of memory. And Buddhism teaches that in the final days, all the scriptures themselves will disappear. So there we are.”

  He changed the subject. “Incidentally,” he wanted to know, “what in the world is Xingxing up to? What’s she doing at your place? Is she smitten with you?”

  “Hardly! I suppose she needed a quiet place to learn her lines in.”

  Xie took it for granted that the two were already lovers. And he hadn’t the slightest intention of complaining about it. In fact, this development was one he was inclined to encourage. Even if the movie was cancelled, he’d like to see the actress he’d cast in the role of heroine fall in love with his old friend’s son. Now that Liu Hong was on the move, heading this way, their story might actually be more exciting than the film.