Jasmine

by Noboru Tsujihara

  “He took me out one time for a really superb gimlet.”

  “In Shanghai? No kidding. I seem to remember you couldn’t get a gimlet in the Peace Hotel bar, or in the Jin Jiang, either.”

  “This was the Metropole.”

  “Metropole? Never heard of it.”

  “That’s the old name, from before the war. You know, the Xincheng Hotel, over on Fuzhou Road.”

  “That place. I’ll stop in next time I go,” said Shuichi, and then snapped his fingers. “What am I saying? – there won’t be a next time, I’m on their shit list.”

  Actually, so am I, added Aki silently.

  There was nobody behind the counter, and Shuichi leant over and called for the bartender. With no result. Resignedly, he twirled his empty cocktail glass in his fingers as he talked about the changes in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his characteristic way, he spoke in the clear, distinct style of a schoolteacher.

  Aki listened without comment. The bartender returned to his place. There was the brisk sound of the martini shaker, and then a second gimlet was poured out for each of them.

  “I read your ODA report.”

  Aki nodded.

  “Sounded like the only thing to do was reinstate the ODA. But there must have been a secret side report.”

  “No, there wasn’t one… You just stick to the war in Yugoslavia. That and—”

  “And what?”

  “See that Mitsuru is happy.”

  “I know, I know. Did something happen to you in Shanghai?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a question.”

  “Nada. Nothing at all.” There was a sardonic edge to his quiet voice. After a pause, he said, reminiscing, “There weren’t any limes, so Wang made our gimlets with lemon.”

  “Who’s Wang?”

  “The bartender. Xie kept calling him ‘old fellow,’ though actually he’s quite young. Xie said he was his dead son’s friend.”

  “A lemon gimlet. It’s years now since I got deported from Beijing.” Shuichi said this with such evident warmth that Aki gave him a quizzical look, but Shuichi went on without reacting, one hand rubbing the nape of his suntanned neck: “It was that scoop.”

  “You mean Deng Xiaoping’s speech in autumn 1988, the one he gave at the Central Working Conference of the Chinese Communist Party?”

  “That’s the one. I was so excited. Never thought about the consequences.”

  Aki had read Shuichi’s article based on the scoop, without feeling the information it imparted was crucially important. But then, the Central Committee’s documents were classified as top state secrets even if they read, “Military advisor So-and-so forgot to bring any tissues with him and blew his nose on some paper for official communiqués belonging to Whozis of the Politburo, seated next to him.”

  Shuichi said, “They came straight up to me and insisted I reveal my source. No use lecturing them on the freedom of the press or journalistic ethics – and the confidentiality of news sources – it wouldn’t have sunk in. They badgered me for a month and a half. Then I was arrested, hauled in for questioning. The interrogation lasted three days – and then all at once they tell me I have three days to leave the country. I never did reveal my source.”

  “Ever feel yourself weakening?”

  “No.”

  “You did get scared that time they came after you on bicycles, though, you said.”

  “Yeah, but that was different. Once you’re behind bars, your nerves settle down.”

  Is that a fact? thought Aki. Bully for you. Mine sure as hell didn’t.

  “One thing always bothered me,” said Shuichi in a thoughtful way. “Not a pang of conscience so much as a kind of thorn in my side. After Tiananmen, I heard he was on the most-wanted list. Feared the worst. But I shouldn’t have worried.” Shuichi rolled his eyes upward and chuckled. Gone was the thoughtful look. “The lucky bastard managed to get out of the country in one piece. Amazing!”

  Aki turned towards Shuichi and stared at him.

  “I saw him in Paris. In August of ’89 he escaped through Yining, in Xinjiang Province, to Almaty in Kazakhstan. He was helped along the way by an underground organization supporting Uyghur secession and independence.”

  “Who’s ‘he’?”

  “My source. A guy with a name like a girl’s. Liu Hong. Didn’t I introduce you to him in Beijing once?”

  “No. Was it really Liu Hong?”

  Shuichi nodded, looking puzzled.

  Aki clenched his fist centimetres above the bar and slammed it onto the wood. He lied to me after all. Yin Dan, that little shit with a face like a shivering monkey.

  In September 1989, refugees from China had gathered in Paris and formed the “Democratic Chinese Front.” In 1993 Shuichi happened to return to Paris at the time of the group’s annual conference and decided to cover it, in the process running into several old acquaintances among the pro-democracy activists. One of them was Liu Hong.

  The effect of Aki’s brooding silence was to make Shuichi go on talking as casually as before. But to Aki, what he said was anything but casual.

  “Seems Liu intended to leave the country with his girlfriend, but that didn’t pan out. She’s an actress with a Shanxi troupe, name of Li Xing. I met her once, in the coffee shop in the Beijing Hotel. Very good-looking.”

  “What happened to her?” His voice was husky.

  “Dunno. I heard she stayed in China, went underground.”

  Something flickered in Aki’s eyes, like a pilot light.

  “You know, actually,” said Shuichi, “I thought she looked a little like Sato.”

  No way am I taking that bait. He reached for a far-off ashtray and flicked a long ash from his cigarette into it.

  “I’m on my way to see Mitsuru after this,” said Shuichi.

  “Oh? She in town?”

  “No, we’re meeting in Gora. I’m off for Moscow day after tomorrow. Won’t be back for a while.”

  Shuichi had received word that the Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, who seized power following the collapse of the USSR, had decided to open the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. If so, this was a groundbreaking event. There would be information on Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, and the records of the Comintern as well; and since the CPSU controlled Party branches worldwide, there were certain to be secret documents about its Chinese and Japanese counterparts.

  “You’re in a hurry, right?” said Aki lightly. Like two rowers in a boat, they pushed away from the bar at the same time. They looked at each other, exchanging awkward smiles. The smiles were a sort of tribute to one other, a silent acknowledgment that while everything they had discussed today was certainly important, they were both middle-aged men whose most passionate feelings were elsewhere engaged, who were caught up in matters of less central concern.

  It was still only three in the afternoon. They parted inside Tokyo Station, Shuichi to take the bullet train to Odawara and transfer to the Hakone Mountain Railway, Aki to return to the office and chair a meeting.

  19

  Aki presided over a series of meetings at Huxley, debating, persuading, making promises. He kept an eye out for who among his staff was decisive and who was merely self-important. He gave orders and noted how efficiently they were carried out. He attended government councils, patiently listening to long-winded speeches with no idea what point was being made until finally it would dawn on him that the speaker was merely boasting, or making empty, self-serving statements. He endured it all with good humour, but refrained from chiming in or nodding in agreement. Politicians and bureaucrats asked for time with him. He himself could see whom he chose, without an appointment.

  The Chinese made no move to contact him.

  Had anyone asked him what happened during these four years, his answer would have been, “Nothing.” But if the next question was, “How did you fill the time?” would he have had an answer?

 
; The years had been consumed in forgetting Li Xing. Was that filling time? He had met her around the sixth anniversary of Sato’s death and, just like that, had let her slip away. He had loved two women and he’d lost them both.

  Ironically, each time the anniversary of his wife’s death came around it was the image of Li Xing, vanished in the fog of a boat journey, that haunted him. His time with the two women had not overlapped, and yet now they blurred together in his mind, creating the illusion that they were one person. There were moments when he would stop to look over his shoulder, and peer into a world bleaker than anything he’d ever known – yet comforting, in a way, too. This, presumably, was the world of the dead, the world that had swallowed Sato. To descend into it and fetch her back was the stuff of old myths. But the one that Li Xing was in seemed no less inaccessible, not the land of the dead, but a vast continent where all means of searching for her were closed off to him.

  Back when China still lay behind the Bamboo Curtain, a crucial source of information about it for the West, apart from spy satellites, was the People’s Daily, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party. Every day, the CIA and Japan’s Cabinet Research Office would dissect it, compiling statistics, making comparisons, trying to read between the lines – looking for signs of power struggles, natural disasters, famine, and so on.

  The need for this sort of analysis had diminished. Even so, Aki regularly scanned, in addition to the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other major papers, the People’s Daily, the Beijing Guangming Daily, and the Shanghai Wen Hui Bao.

  One day on page three of the Wen Hui Bao he found an article stating that the hideout of a dissident ring in Zhouzhuang had been searched by Shanghai Public Security authorities. The entire group was rounded up, it said, listing the names of over thirty detainees. With bated breath, Aki searched for Li Xing’s name. It wasn’t there. Neither was Yin Dan’s – so the police had failed to get the ringleader.

  After riding out the second Tiananmen Square incident of August 1989, the new leadership in Beijing had grown to a monstrous size, thanks to ODA and an enormous influx of capital from Japan and the West. All were in search of cheap labour and a market of 1.2 billion consumers. Despite the sensational collapse of the USSR and East Germany – or perhaps because of it – the regime had only grown harsher, its system of domination becoming increasingly refined. Political systems were like life forms, constantly evolving in order to survive. In modern China, a paradoxical form of government had come into being, one where the more autocratic the regime became, the more affluent the citizenry got to be. Ordinary standards of good and evil, right and wrong, did not apply. Later generations would see that Nero’s reign was in fact beneficial.

  Was it okay to breathe a sigh of relief that Li Xing’s name wasn’t on the list, or was this a signal that all was lost, that she was no longer alive?

  A month later, Aki read in the Wen Hui Bao that five members of the dissident ring had been sentenced to death.

  20

  Xu Liping’s mother had died. The family grave was in Kobe’s Chinese cemetery. The body, packed in ice, had been flown home from Boston. The funeral would be held in the Chinese temple in Nakayamate, Kobe. Learning of these arrangements by phone from Mitsuru, Aki hesitated for scarcely a second before deciding to attend.

  His last encounter with Xu Liping had been some time ago. During the four years since returning from Shanghai, he had made several trips to Kobe and always made a point of stopping by to say hello. He never failed to send him a New Year’s card and seasonal gifts – but couldn’t bring himself to talk about Li Xing. For a while, he’d been tempted, looking up the number time and again in his address book and reaching for the phone, only to think better of it. Hello, Xu Liping? Surprise – while I was in Shanghai I met a young woman who might just be your granddaughter. Actually, I am sure she is. Unfortunately I lost track of her. How could he say this? Her name’s Li Xing; her mother, Xu Lan, died in 1975. “Xiaolan” was what they called her.

  Old Xu Liping had by no means forgotten his daughter, but he had long since abandoned any hope of seeing her again. But Aki had by no means abandoned any hope of seeing Li Xing, even as he was trying to forget her. So let it go.

  He took the bullet train from Tokyo and met Mitsuru in the lobby of the New Kobe Oriental Hotel. It had been a while. Seeing him, she said that he’d put on weight. Flustered, he came up with the standard excuse: “Middle-age spread, I guess.”

  “Better than skin and bones. Don’t worry, you haven’t lost your devilish good looks. One can still see your cheekbones.”

  “Devilish good looks? Sounds like something Mother would say.”

  Mitsuru was all in black. The second time he’d seen her in mourning, he reflected. Should it be this becoming on a woman so young?

  “Shuichi still in Moscow?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You mean you don’t know.”

  Aki had reserved a room in this hotel, and while Mitsuru waited in the lobby, he checked in and went up to change. Then they got in a taxi, and he told the driver to take them to Kanteibyo.

  “What’s that, a hospital?” the cabbie asked

  Aki was dismayed. How could any Kobe taxi driver worth his salt not know the old temple?

  “Sorry,” the man said. “I just came here from…” His words faded into unintelligibility.

  “From where?”

  “Wakayama.”

  Mitsuru tugged at her brother’s elbow. Patiently, using the familiar local dialect, he gave the driver instructions, then turned back to her for confirmation. “Right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  The taxi went west along Kitano Street, turned up Kitano Hill, and entered Yamamoto Street.

  “Look, Aki, the Xu family’s old house.”

  He craned his neck to look up at a striking, white Western-style building behind a stone wall. A prime example of Kobe’s ijinkan – foreigners’ mansions from a bygone era – it had been converted into an Italian restaurant: Ristorante Siena. Kobe’s basic design had been laid out by expatriate Westerners and Chinese. Xu’s grandfather and great-grandfather had each played an important role in the city’s formation.

  By this stage, Yamamoto Street had turned into a narrow, twisting lane with the mountains on one side, the sea below. Xu and his wife now lived somewhere near here, on the mountain side of the street. The road suddenly widened again. Potted chrysanthemums lining the sidewalks to right and left were a vivid yellow, lit by the slanting rays of the early October sun. Flowers for the deceased. Mourners walked along in little clusters beside them.

  “How pretty,” Mitsuru said. “Look, the flowers go all the way to the temple. Makes a nice contrast with the dark clothes.”

  “Let’s get out and walk,” suggested Aki.

  They left the taxi and, looking up, saw the white twin dragons on the temple roof in the distance. Blending in with the others, they moved slowly in that direction.

  “Quite a crowd,” he commented. “Just look at all these people – you can tell Kobe isn’t really Japanese at heart. That’s what I like about it. I wonder if the old lady was sick long?”

  “I heard she was fine the night before, talking about the old days. In the morning when her oldest daughter went to wake her, she was gone, lying peacefully in bed.”

  A large Mercedes-Benz with a diplomatic license plate passed by with a light tap on the horn. Aki glanced over in time to make eye contact with two men who turned simultaneously to look out the rear window. They seemed to know him. Or rather, he had the impression that one of them had recognized him and informed the other, “That’s Waki from Huxley.”

  “Aki, did you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll stop by?”

  “Where?”

  “Bad boy, you weren’t listening. Stop by to see Mom.”

  “I was planning to go and see her.”

  “Was?”

  “Am.”

 
“Bet you don’t remember how old she is.”

  “Seventy.”

  “Seventy-one. That’s twice now. When was the other time? Oh right – when we had dinner at Teite, just before you went to Shanghai. You got it wrong then, too.”

  “Did I?” he said absently. “You know, I’ve got a little spare time. While I’m here, I might make a side trip to Awaji.”

  Before long they could hear the chanting of a sutra, and the smell of incense floated on the air. Merging in with the now denser crowd, Aki and Mitsuru filed through the gate with its bright red pillars and square, blue-tiled roof. Prayer beads in hand, palms pressed together, they proceeded towards the Mounting Dragon Gate, its pillars and lintel elaborately carved with images of the legendary carp that leapt through the Dragon’s Gate of the Yangtze and became a dragon.

  Beyond stood a great incense burner. They lit sticks of incense before entering the main building, where they knelt formally on cushions and bowed before the seated image. After that, they moved into the hall on the right. The altar was a mass of yellow chrysanthemums, with a photograph of the deceased and a plain wooden coffin. Amid the grieving relatives on either side was the figure of Xu Liping, his familiar monocle and stooped shoulders. A quiet calm seemed to radiate out from him to fill every corner of the hall. Time spent quietly like this was long gone from Japanese funerals.

  Each mourner received a small yellow chrysanthemum at the entrance and then filed across the cool brown marble floor towards the altar, holding the flower by its long stem. Aki and Mitsuru laid their chrysanthemums on the altar and bowed their heads. Turning around, they bowed to Xu Liping, who smiled fondly at them. Quietly, he said, “Stay and see her off with us, if you can.”

  The remains would be cremated. In the past, the bodies of wealthy Chinese were encased in stout wooden coffins specially ordered from the mainland, then shipped back for proper burial in the home province. Not anymore.

  People who were staying on after the service to see Mrs Xu off found seats in a courtyard enclosure or stood on the fringe in little groups. Crossing by the great incense burner, Aki distinctly heard someone whisper his name. One’s name is audible even from a certain distance.