On the morning of the seventh day of his detention, after a muggy, sleepless night, Aki sensed all of a sudden that he couldn’t take these conditions any longer. He had reached his limit. The desire for relief was bound to break through during questioning. He would not be able to resist.
Yet when Ma came in that morning, his attitude seemed completely changed. Suddenly he was using polite speech and, without referring to the charges against Aki, he talked genially about all sorts of other things: his hometown, his wife and two daughters, the time he saw the Snow Festival in Hokkaido. His wide, striped necktie was sporting a large brown stain from coffee or soy sauce. Aki interpreted the change in tactics as a signal that the investigation was proceeding to another level – harsher interrogation, mixed with physical abuse. He resigned himself to what was to come and kept his eyes fixedly on the stain on the tie dangling in front of him.
The next morning, he was led out of his cell and taken outside the building. Was he going to be put on trial? Or sent off summarily to Chaidamu or a yaodong prison? He was bundled into the black Peugeot. As he was looking at the Shanghai cityscape, thinking it might be the last time he ever saw it and trying his best to imprint it on his memory, the car went over Garden Bridge and pulled up in front of the Broadway Mansions Hotel. He was then taken up to his old suite on the fifteenth floor – “This is the room you and Li Xing ran away from, hand in hand,” said Ma with a touch of malice – apparently to resume his old life as a hotel guest.
The rooms themselves were not the same as before. Everywhere he looked, there were obvious signs that things had been ransacked, torn up, ripped apart, and hastily thrown back together. The sun visor and the drape suit she had worn had both been carried off somewhere.
Ma opened the window. The door to the corridor outside was standing open, so the wind blew straight through the room. Papers sticking out of drawers and lying on shelves rattled noisily. The wind swept away the last traces of Li Xing’s presence – yet the fact that she had once been here only hit him all the harder, and he propped himself against the wall for support.
Ma spoke slowly and distinctly. “You are free to use these rooms. But no telephoning. You are welcome to dine in the restaurant on the eighteenth floor. For the time being, you will not be able to go to any of the lower floors. And of course you may not set foot out of the hotel… Would you like to contact the Japanese consul general?” he ended.
“No,” said Aki shortly.
Ma nodded. “Good. As a matter of fact, we haven’t gone public with any aspect of your case. No one knows.”
“Why not?”
Ever since his arrest, Aki had been subjected to steady questioning; this was the first real question of his own. Ma’s only answer was a vague smile. Then he looked down and lit a cigarette, frowning deeply. With difficulty Aki managed to suppress the urge to say, Send me to the secret prison in Jixian, Shanxi Province, where my father is being held. If that ever happened, he thought cynically, he would have succeeded brilliantly in tracking him down, wouldn’t he?
The lines between Ma’s eyebrows seemed fixed in place.
“We’ve temporarily requisitioned these rooms.”
“To confine me in?”
“Think of it as a type of house arrest.”
“Residential surveillance.”
“As you say.”
“When will the trial be?”
“There probably won’t be one.”
“Why not? You’re sending me to prison without a trial?”
“No. At present I’m waiting for instructions from above.”
“Above?”
“Yes, from the Central Committee. Xiansheng, it turns out you’re a very important man. You surprise me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t answer that.”
The frown lines on Ma’s face finally dissolved into a little smile. He took off his necktie, rolled it into a ball which he stuffed in a pocket, then leant back on the sofa. Aki remained standing. Ma sat, not with legs outstretched, but like a proper gentleman. So began their strange time together under one roof. It would continue until the instructions from the Central Committee came, Ma said.
“I’ll use the sofa. You go ahead and make yourself comfortable in the bedroom.”
The housekeeping staff blinked in surprise, which was only natural. His roommate was no longer a beautiful actress but a sweaty, vulgar, middle-aged man.
A week passed. Ma turned out to be surprisingly good company. Every morning, the prisoner would look out the window at the locals doing tai chi in the park across the way and mimic their movements in his room. The warden joined in. It was good exercise, and they made rapid progress. In that ironic sense, he gained some physical freedom.
One morning Ma said: “You’re being released. You’re to be deported. So get ready to go back home.”
He drove Aki to the airport in the black Peugeot. The springs had gotten even worse; now it seemed as if his own bottom, not the car’s, was scraping along on the ground.
“What happened?”
“Mei yo. Nothing at all. It’s been decided that nothing ever happened. You’d do well to take that view, too.”
“I would’ve liked to say goodbye to Director Xie Han.”
Arms crossed, Ma said nothing.
Since Ma stayed glued to Aki’s side the whole time, baggage inspection was waived, and at Immigration, Aki used the counter reserved for diplomats and other VIPs. At the gate, the two men shook hands like two old friends who had just renewed their acquaintance, and went their separate ways.
17
Why had he been let off, allowed to return home without fanfare? When Aki found himself back home, pinching himself to see if it was real, just two weeks remained of his sabbatical. He used the time to recharge his batteries and to hold belated memorial services for his wife, and then went back to work. No one in Japan, at any rate, had any inkling of his deportation. With no indictment hanging over him, he had nothing to worry about.
He poured all his energies into the ODA report. By immersing himself in it, he hoped for a while to forget, and he did forget. Copies of the completed 570-page report sold well. Specialists praised it, and the number of times it was quoted in print set a new record for his company, Huxley. In the report, Aki marshalled all his powers of logic to press the case for a swift resumption of ODA to China. Nor, of course, did he neglect to file the secret side report. Containing, among other things, the results of his investigation into the suspicious “high-quality cottonseed plant” in Tarim, Xinjiang – which despite an outpouring of funds, had never been built – his side report was sent to the head office in New York and sealed away in Pandora.
Around the same time, he was asked to join the Study Group on Assistance to China set up by the Japan International Cooperation Agency. The group was headed by a bigwig – a onetime foreign minister now serving as advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They were commissioned to investigate the state of yen loans to China, and weight was given to Aki’s opinions, which meant he was soon involved in the writing of this group’s report, as well.
Why had he been permitted to return safely to Japan? In the end, he didn’t know. It was impossible to go easy on a country for something you didn’t understand. Nor did he mean to do so. While he had no idea what the Chinese might be thinking, it was apparent that China could not manage without ODA. Since Aki had a strong desire to see his father and Li Xing again, he recognized that it was necessary to forge friendlier personal ties between himself and the country where they were living as virtual hostages.
At the end of July 1990, roughly one year after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Japan became the first nation in the Western alliance to remove sanctions against China, and November saw a full reimplementation of ODA. This enormous political decision was influenced by the report of the Study Group on Assistance to China.
Some people view all world events as part of a conspiracy of some kind. Everything in the wo
rld is connected in a vast spiderweb, and every event, however insignificant, has a hidden meaning. If only I’d picked up that crumpled flier on the road that day, says such a person to himself, the message it contained might have solved the whole mystery. Others hold that events are the result of coincidence, and seek to apprehend them on their own terms.
Aki, a political sceptic, belonged to neither camp. Conspiracies exist, but only for those who believe in them: this had always been his attitude. Yet, since returning from Shanghai, his view had changed slightly. There was no doubt that some things were indeed easiest to account for as part of a conspiracy.
For example, the 1955 letter summoning his father back to China. Thirty-four years later, a letter again had brought the son to Shanghai. The author of the first one was ostensibly the spy Zheng Pinru, but at the time, she’d been officially dead for fifteen years. None of the comic actor Han Langen’s papers survived, nor any copies of his films. Had he really existed? What about Liu Hong’s solo escape and capture, and Li Xing’s subsequent disappearance? What did all this mean?
The conclusion was inescapable: that he, Aki, had been co-opted on the orders of the Chinese public security authorities, or possibly someone even higher up. He had cooperated only by doing his job conscientiously and honestly and in accordance with his personal creed of political scepticism, putting aside any prejudice as much as possible and allowing his abilities full play. He had nothing to be ashamed of.
Opposition was strong: reimplementation of ODA now would play straight into the hands of a Communist dictatorship that had used military force to oppress the students, workers, and intellectuals who rose up in Tiananmen Square to demand democracy. At the same time, it would further fatten the swarm of Japanese politicians and corporations with a vested interest in ODA. Before the cut-off, Japanese ODA vis-à-vis China had been increasing rapidly, even surpassing aid to Indonesia, where the postwar establishment was formed by special interest groups supported by war reparations from Japan in the 1950s. The reparations business was sheer gravy to them. Now Chinese ODA was about to follow the same unsavoury path.
Aki voiced his opinion at various meetings. The decision of whether to reinstate ODA or cut it off should not be based on a simplistic sense of justice. People locked away in work camps and secret prisons of course deserved our sympathy, as did anti-establishment activists on the run, and the greed of special interest groups was abhorrent. Yet it was also true that the lives, the very existence, of hundreds of millions of Chinese depended on ODA-related projects. Moreover, swift reinstatement of ODA would provide Japan with a golden opportunity to seize the initiative in relations with China.
What if he had ignored the letter from Xie Han hinting that his father was alive and had never gone to Shanghai? Presumably, his pride as a member of a world-class team and his conscience as a researcher and analyst would have induced him to write up the same report from the same perspective. As a result, ODA would have started up again in the same way. Nothing would be any different – though the difference in his own state of mind would be as night and day.
What was his present state of mind? Sometimes he was seized by the fancy that everyone else was walking through a lobby with the soles of their shoes flat on the floor, while only he was tiptoeing. The feeling came to him when he was immersed in paperwork, when he was attending meetings, when he was reading foreign poetry.
Everyone with a secret feels that way, to a greater or lesser extent, but in Aki’s case the sensation was rather more pronounced. Whenever it occurred, he had another, parallel thought: Li Xing is alive.Somewhere, in some dim interior, she too is walking on tiptoe.
Shortly after this, Aki was promoted. Huxley was not listed on the stock exchange, but operated as a partnership. Huxley Japan had four partners. Before his sabbatical Aki had been a senior consultant, but now he was singled out to become a fifth partner, leapfrogging over eight men.
The important and the trivial, he learnt, tiptoe side by side.
He sealed away all that had happened in Shanghai. Suppressed it, distanced himself from it. One day the receding tide would bear it all away. Yet, to forget something was not to lose it. Even if he forgot it, “something” might remember him.
Three years passed.
18
“Something” reappeared first of all in the form of another letter from Xie Han. After returning from Shanghai, Aki had sent the director a letter of thanks. Naturally, he was silent about his deportation and about Li Xing, only expressing appreciation for the many kindnesses he had received during his stay and asking him to send him any news of his father’s whereabouts.
Xie’s reply was written vertically in the old way, a style of writing one seldom saw in China anymore. The stationery was handmade paper from Duo Yun Xuan Art Studio.
There had been a great change in Xie’s own circumstances: he had been forced into retirement. Old soldiers just fade away, he wrote, and continued:
In the end, Moving Shadows proved as ephemeral as its title. Now, in the solitude of my hospital bed, I let the movie unreel on the screen inside my head.
The tedium of each day makes me think how much I’d love to see your father. Yet there’s been no further word of him. I have cancer, and I can see in my doctor’s eyes that I’ve little time left. “Our misery has great scope. My own heart sinks, right down into my boots.” That’s pretty much how I feel.
What inspired me to make the effort to write this letter was something connected with your father. I told you about Citizen Kane showing in Shanghai. This happened about the same time. A curious event was staged in the city. Back in 1920, a fellow called Archer Samler in Philadelphia founded something known as the Memory Association. When people needed to memorize things, they could call on the association for advice. For a fee, of course. A branch was set up in Shanghai in 1938, and to commemorate the occasion a big tournament was held in the Great World amusement hall to test people’s power of memory. Anyone could participate. Tanehiko won. I’d forgotten all about it.
The Memory Association had branches in Tokyo, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities. They were planning to set one up in Tel Aviv as well, but the local populace were up in arms. How ignorant, how insulting, they said. The Bible consists of a single volume, War and Peace five, but the Talmud has thirty-six! We Jews learn all thirty-six by heart, and we never forget. So pack up your association and leave town.
By the by, I was delighted to hear that Liu Hong and Li Xing were able to get away. I gather they are both in Paris.
Coming to this last sentence, Aki gave the letter a sharp flick with the back of a finger. Yin Dan had said that Liu had been arrested, and Aki still believed that this news had made Li Xing leave him. The twisting corridors of thought that had brought him to this conclusion were hard to explain, perhaps illogical, but it all came down to one thing: If it was me, that’s what I’d have done, too. Which was a rather peculiar thing for a man in love to think. But to be rock solid, love must give rise to an emotion greater than itself, namely sympathy. This latest news opened cracks in the dike of Aki’s sympathy.
Xie Han ended his letter with the words: “Zai jian,wo erzi.” Goodbye, my son.
The premonition he’d felt as he was shaking hands with Xie for the last time in the studio office, that he might never see him again alive, hit now with double force. What mattered, Xie had said, was whether or not one passed through the age in which one lived with dongshi – acumen. What did that really mean? Aki still did not know.
Xie’s death was reported in the Japanese newspapers, although the write-up was small.
After a while, news of Liu Hong arrived from an unlikely direction: in September 1993, Shuichi met him in Paris.
Shuichi was home for the first time in a while after reporting on trouble spots in Europe and Africa. He and Aki got together at the bar Camellia, in the hotel in Tokyo Station. A long vertical window at one end of the bar offered a view of trains pulling into and out of the platforms beyo
nd. They drank gimlets. It was still early in the afternoon, so they were the only customers.
Shuichi’s articles from areas of unrest ran in the major daily papers and weekly magazines. Aki had read every one of them.
“I know you must have been worried about Mitsuru,” Shuichi said. “Sorry.”
“What about your wife and kid?”
“A mess.”
“Another trouble spot, huh?”
An uncomfortable silence followed.
Four years ago in the summer, Aki had left Kobe by ship, heading for Shanghai, and three days later his sister had given in to her “wicked thoughts” and met up with Shuichi in Paris. From there she’d travelled with him to Berlin, where on 9th November they witnessed the opening of the Berlin Wall from East Berlin. In December they were in Bucharest. In their room in the Hotel Bucharest, not a hundred metres from the Ceausescu Palace, they had seen the bodies of the executed dictator and his wife on their TV screen.
Returning to Paris, they stayed a month, after which Shuichi went on to Belgrade and Mitsuru flew back to Japan to take up her old job with the industrial design firm.
The world is studded with as many romances as there are stars in the firmament. Each has its own size and radiance – and lifespan. Some burn out and disappear without a trace; others make a blazing trail of light before plummeting to earth and gouging out a deep hole on impact.
Both Aki and Mitsuru had fallen heavily to earth and ended at the bottom of a crater.
“Xie Han is dead, I hear,” said Shuichi, and Aki nodded. Shared thoughts on this loss began to revive the warmth between them.
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