Jasmine

by Noboru Tsujihara

  The sound came from the shadow of a pillar in the Mounting Dragon Gate. The younger of the two men in the Benz approached him. Aki likewise veered in the man’s direction. He had already guessed that they were representatives of the Chinese government.

  “I’m Zhang Liang,” he announced, holding out a card. Consul in the Osaka Consulate of the People’s Republic of China, it said. Aki offered a card of his own in return.

  They walked off together towards the front gate where the other man – the consul general – was waiting.

  The consul general greeted Aki then quickly took his leave, heading off towards the waiting car. Aki and the man named Zhang Liang remained where they were. Beside their heads was a carving of a carp being transformed into a dragon.

  “I just got here in August, from Beijing. Cai Fang told me to look you up.”

  “Cai Fang?”

  “Yes. He sends his best wishes. No better man, he said.”

  Aki thought back. Cai Fang was that brown-eyed fellow he’d met on the boat to Shanghai. “You mean the Director of the Beijing People’s Foreign Friendship Association?”

  “That’s right. Actually, he used to be there, but now he’s back in the head office.” Zhang lowered his voice slightly. “Ministry of State Security. He’s deputy director of the Department of Foreign Affairs. My direct superior.”

  Aki mentally steeled himself. This guy knows all about me, then.

  Zhang’s eyes were deep-set, and in their depths the pupils moved constantly, like minnows.

  Maybe this had something to do with ODA? Aki cast about in his mind. A representative of Chinese intelligence would not single him out for no good reason, call out his name like that. Zhang had used a voice just loud enough to carry to his ears without attracting general attention. There had to be a knack to it.

  “Congratulations on your promotion at Huxley. We look forward to continued good relations with you in the future. Although I work in the Osaka consulate, I often travel to Tokyo on business, so maybe I’ll see you there one of these days.”

  Aki mumbled an answer, trying to figure out why Zhang, or his boss, had contrived this contact.

  China’s ninth five-year plan would begin in 1996. In step with this, Japan was now settling on a plan for its fourth yen loan to China as ODA. This loan would determine the total amount of capital aid to that country for the period 1996–2000; the deliberations of the General Council on Issues Relating to China would carry a lot of weight. The aid package was expected to total around one trillion yen.

  There was one serious obstacle: China’s plan to carry out an imminent A-bomb test. In Japan, with its persistent “nuclear allergy,” public opinion inclined to the belief that unless China promised to call off such testing, all economic aid should be frozen – even though Japan itself enjoyed a peaceful existence under the US nuclear umbrella.

  “You’ve stopped going to China, haven’t you?” said Zhang. As his eyes moved, his upper body also swayed, giving the impression that he might at any time lean closer. Funny thing to say, thought Aki. Of course I have, everybody knows that.

  Just then, from a slight distance, someone’s voice called out to Aki. At some point the side doors of the funeral hall had opened, and there stood Xu Liping. Zhang took off.

  It was time for the casket to be borne away. Mitsuru and Aki went back inside. The casket was now open, and again the mourners filed by one by one with chrysanthemums – blossoms only this time, no stems – and placed them around the body. Old Mrs Xu looked tiny and shrivelled, a dried-out walnut taken from its shell.

  Xu Luping, his eyes swollen and his nose red, picked up the dark cloth slippers that his mother had worn and gently laid them in the casket at her feet, like a pair of black butterfly wings. Aki remembered seeing them before. A sudden thought flashed in his brain as though for the first time: This woman was Li Xing’s lao popo. Her mother’s father’s mother.

  Mitsuru stopped at a flower shop by Mikage Station to buy their mother an armful of chrysanthemums.

  “More?” said Aki. “Haven’t we had enough for one day?”

  “She likes them.”

  “Surely she doesn’t need so many.”

  “Oh, but she does. She eats them, remember?”

  They walked on as far as the Hankyu Railway overpass, where they stopped as an express train bound for Umeda thundered overhead. Beyond, on either side of the tracks, a metre-wide space fenced off by railroad ties and wire was filled with a profusion of cosmos and chrysanthemums. Mitsuru had grown up near here, in a neighbourhood very much like this, and she looked back often as they walked up the steep hill towards Fukada Pond.

  The lights were on in the nursing home. Seated in her wheelchair in the reception room, Yasuko was in good spirits. Nothing in her conversation seemed particularly off the mark.

  “Your father just up and disappeared one day without a word, like a ghost with no manners. What about you?” This blunt comment was addressed to Aki, whose visits to her were irregular. She pulled five or six petals from the chrysanthemum in her hands and put them in her mouth. “Didn’t I teach you any manners?” She eyed her two children suspiciously, each in turn. “And why doesn’t either of you get married, I’d like to know.”

  “Mom,” said Mitsuru, “have you forgotten Sato?”

  Silence.

  Aki said gently, “Sato was my wife, but she’s been dead ten years. Mitsuru will be getting married any time now, though.”

  Mitsuru had been stroking her mother’s arm as it lay on the armrest, but now she looked up at him. “Shuichi and I broke up.”

  Aki in turn was silent, only nodding.

  His sister smiled. “You know who my heart belongs to? You, big brother. Or no – make that your father, one removed from you. He’s the one I really love.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if that man was a ghost from day one,” announced Yasuko. She turned suspicious eyes on her son’s feet as if checking to make sure he was flesh and blood.

  Aki felt a draft around his ankles. Tapping his heels on the linoleum floor, he said firmly, “Dad was no ghost. The proof is, you gave birth to me, and see here? I’ve got two legs just like anybody else.”

  “You know something about your father? He didn’t like scaly fish. Strange, considering he was born right on the sea.”

  Mitsuru murmured in his ear, “She’s forgotten all about mine.” Mitsuru’s father, a law professor at Konan University, had died in a car accident. An unassuming man, not a great legal scholar.

  Yasuko looked Aki up and down suspiciously several times. Impulsively he reached out, took the chrysanthemum away from her, and stuffed it in his mouth.

  “For God’s sake, Aki!” Mitsuru exclaimed, exasperated.

  “Dad was no ghost – and the proof is, he’s still alive.”

  “You saw him?” asked his mother with interest. “Where?”

  He only shook his head, and took her hand in his.

  “I know where he is,” she said. “Shanghai. A woman there sent for him. He was cheating on me the whole time. You know what he was? A gloomy old lecher, that’s what.”

  Aki looked down. He was thinking about the difference between his father’s images in Kobe and Shanghai. Here, he’d been taciturn and gloomy; there, light-hearted, droll, and stylish. Dashed across the street from the Metropole to Hamilton House, dodging raindrops without an umbrella; made puns constantly; knew just where people were ticklish on their arms and legs. Yasuko was unaware that he’d ever been a Chinese comic actor.

  Just then, in a frail voice his father called to him: Help me. Aki was certain that he’d heard it. Across a gap of thirty-eight years and thousands of kilometres, his father’s voice came to him. His mother then reinforced the impression: “Didn’t your father say something to you just now, Aki?”

  Outside, the sky was dark. Light from the hotel on the hill outside the window streamed into the room through the treetops.

  All at once Yasuko’s head sank heavily onto
her breast.

  “She’s asleep,” said Mitsuru. “It’s always like this.”

  21

  Not alive, perhaps, but not dead, either. The idea of his father as a ghost was unsettling. Intellectually, he could accept the image of him as an abstraction, a lifelike construct. But when the door opened, the wind blew in, and darkness settled, who could go on saying this sort of thing seated calmly in his chair? And didn’t reducing your father to a kind of mirage make you, his counterpart, something similar?

  The next day Aki went to Awaji Island. It was his first visit there since a middle-school field trip, twenty-six years earlier.

  On the island bus he chatted with an old couple from Kyoto who had come to see the sun go down over the Seto Inland Sea. Still plenty of time before sunset; they would get off at the next stop, Goshikihama Beach, and wait there. They talked about a “green flash.” The Hotel Anaga had nine little villas, and from the terrace of just one of these, at dusk on a clear day in winter, supposedly you could see it on the horizon. Did he think it was true? Aki had no idea.

  The time it took for the sun to climb over the Ikoma-Kongo mountain range and sink beyond the horizon of the Seto Inland Sea corresponded exactly to the time it took him to leave Kobe by boat, tour the island by bus, and make it back again. The place was the ideal size for an autumn day of exploring. In the course of circling the island, his thoughts had gelled into a decision.

  As soon as he got off the boat, he went straight to call on Xu Liping.

  The condominium building where Xu and his wife now lived was old, but substantial and luxurious. Xu was the property manager for the real estate he still owned after the liquidation of his business – including Suwayama Court, this ten-story building with eighty units. Xu was at home. Services for his late mother would continue for some time, but this afternoon the old man was taking a quiet break. Despite the suddenness of the visit, he seemed genuinely glad to see Aki.

  Against two of the walls was mahogany furniture fitted with dark red velvet cushions and built-in ceiling-high bookcases. Comfortable-looking chairs were arranged around a large, oval rosewood table as though in readiness for guests. The keyboard of the black upright piano was exposed; Xu had just been playing.

  Enveloped in a silvery grey light, the room was not very Chinese in decor. The discovery surprised Aki, but he soon realized that the Xus had not deliberately set out to exclude all trace of their origins. Undeniably elegant, the decor was intended not just to please the owners but to give pleasure to others as well. This was the home of people with the means and discrimination to indulge a sophisticated taste.

  The old man listened in silence as Aki told him, with unconcealed pain and regret, about his daughter and granddaughter. When it was finished he said, “No apology needed. The story of your escape together in the night sounds like a fairy tale.” He smiled, his fingers fumbling with the lace cover on the armrest.

  Aki let out a long, slow breath. “You could be right. Maybe it was a fairy tale. But I won’t let it stay one. Not anymore.”

  Xu shook his head. “Forget about her.” He repeated the advice, then said, “I tried to forget Xiaolan, and I succeeded. You, too, must forget this girl.”

  “I should have told you sooner.”

  “No, it’s all water under the bridge. At my age, I have no desire to burden my memory with sad things. I’ve reached the state of mind of Prospero.” In his younger days Xu had put on a series of Shakespeare’s plays in Mandarin.

  There was a sound in the hallway.

  “My wife’s back. I don’t intend to tell her what I’ve learnt from you today.”

  Aki nodded, and for a time the two men sank into silence.

  Footsteps drew near. The door to the living room was open, so Xu’s wife saw from behind that someone was seated on the sofa, but who it was she couldn’t tell.

  Aki enjoyed the sound of the soft padding of her cloth shoes. This was Xingxing’s laolao, her maternal grandmother. He got up.

  “Good heavens, we have a guest, and you’re as quiet as if you’d been smoking opium!”

  Xu Liping was no opium smoker. The figure of speech was similar to the French un ange passe, said when conversation breaks off and silence fills the room.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. It’s you, Akihiko!”

  He rose and bowed respectfully. She was a silver-haired old lady with a full face.

  “And you haven’t even offered him a cup of tea…” With this reproach, she quickly excused herself. Aki and Xu Liping took advantage of the opportunity to step out onto the balcony for a smoke. Beyond the balcony lay a grove of large camphor trees, maples, oaks, and wingnuts; feathering brightly between them were the lights of Motomachi and the waterfront Meriken Park. If the trees were removed, there would have been a panoramic view of Kobe and the sea, but Xu preferred it as it was. He had a deep and abiding affection for these hills where his father and grandfather had lived before him, but to look down on the city the way Westerners liked to do struck him as in poor taste.

  Xu propped his long cigarette in the ashtray and made a startling remark: “You kept quiet for nearly five years, but I’ve been quiet for more than thirty.” He picked up his cigarette again, flicking off the ash, and put it back in his mouth. “A letter from a woman definitely came.”

  “A letter to my father, you mean. How do you know that?”

  Without answering the question, Xu went on: “In those days, the Chinese population here was deeply divided between two factions, pro-mainland and pro-Taiwan – not just in Kobe, of course. The two fought bitterly for supremacy. My father had already taken Japanese citizenship before the war. He went to the Peers’ School, where he became friends with Prince Konoe Fumimaro. The prince often came over to our house in Kitano.”

  “The one that’s now the Ristorante Siena.”

  “That’s right. Prince Konoe was an enlightened man, but he was also a member of the old nobility. Terrified of revolution. More than once he told my father, ‘If revolution ever comes to Japan, I want you to hide me.’ Our family had a villa on an island near Amoy where we used to go for three months every winter. The prince must have had that villa in mind.” Xu paused before continuing. “After the war, my father had nothing more to do with politics. Except for his friendship with Zhou Enlai.”

  “Zhou Enlai?” he echoed. Him again.

  “Zhou came to study in Japan in 1917, and left Kobe in April 1919 to take part in the May Fourth Movement. While he was here, he stayed with my family. So you see, although we were anti-Communist, for him we made an exception.” The many wrinkles in Xu’s face seemed to tell not of old age or fatigue, but of determination. “The connection between Zhou Enlai and Kobe runs deep. Maybe even deeper than Dr Sun Yat-sen’s connection with the city. If there’s any possibility that your father is still alive…”

  “Yes?”

  “It may have something to do with the death of Zhou Enlai.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Premier Zhou died in Beijing on 8th January 1976. The cause of death was cancer. A gathering to commemorate the event had triggered the first Tiananmen Square incident.

  “Your father went back to Shanghai in 1955 after getting a letter from a woman – or so a handful of us huaqiao believed. Back then, Communist China had all kinds of spy agencies engaged in clandestine activities in Japan. As you’d have expected. Together with Stalin, they were on a mission to turn Asia red. But the US military was stationed here in Japan. There was also the struggle with Chiang Kai-shek. What to do with Japan? In any event, the promotion of revolution in Japan was a top item on the Communist agenda. And all the intelligence operations here were controlled by Zhou Enlai. Besides the various spy agencies in Japan, he – Zhou again – had another espionage organization, one that was essentially private. Call it Y Agency. Headed by a Japanese.”

  “My father?”

  “No. Y Agency made deep inroads into the Japanese Communist Party and the Japan Socialist Party, as well
as burrowing around behind conservative political leaders of the day. The boat your father took to China was a spy ship belonging to Y Agency.”

  “You mean they went to all the trouble of procuring a ship just for my father?”

  “That I don’t know. But I do know for a certainty that that ship could not have left port without instructions from Zhou Enlai.”

  “Assuming the name on the letter was really Zheng Pinru, as I heard in Shanghai, then Zhou must have known of their affair. But why did he have to use a dead woman – a ghost – to get him back to China? And then have him arrested? What on earth for?”

  “That I don’t know, either. I’ve told you all I can. I’m not hiding anything, I just don’t know. My grandfather aided Sun Yat-sen, but my father was a supporter of Wang Jingwei. So you see, to both the Party and to Chiang Kai-shek, the Xu family were traitors.”

  Aki couldn’t help recalling that his own father, under the name of Han Langen, was also tried as a traitor.

  “In 1959, four years after your father left, our daughter went to China, wanting to participate in the building of the motherland. You know what my mother told her? ‘Motherland? We have no motherland!’ Her going was a shock. Then came the Cultural Revolution. Her letters stopped coming. We did all we could, but nothing, not one word, ever came from her after that. I even wrote to Zhou Enlai, although of course by then he was engulfed in the whole calamity himself. Thirty million people died. There she was, hailing from a family of expatriates living in Japan – and traitors, to boot. What chance did she have? We lost all hope. The Cultural Revolution broke my last tie with the mainland. Yet now you tell me that your father may still be alive and I may have a granddaughter.”

  The old man’s eyes, though restless, stared straight at him. Aki wanted him to go on talking, if only to hear his voice.