Quin?s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  Their house was small. Their two or three servants lived with them more like aunts and uncles than retainers. The scroll on the wall might be the gift of an emperor, the Go set in the cupboard might be the work of a master craftsman who had made no more than eight such sets in his career, the koto in the closet might be a thousand years old, the bowls used in the tea ceremony might be so exquisitely turned as to be of inestimable value.

  Yet the room where the scroll was hung, where the koto was laid out in the mornings and the Go set in the evenings, where the Baroness performed the tea ceremony for her sons every day at sunset, was a small room made of wood and straw and rice paper, as severe in line and simple in design as that of any peasant living on their lands.

  And so with the other rooms in the house, with the bare corridors and the plain entrance and the narrow garden where one weathered stone lantern received the blossoms of the fruit trees in spring, the hard sun in summer, the Siberian gales in autumn, and the heavy snows in winter.

  The effect the Baroness had on her sons was lasting, particularly the strength they felt in her presence.

  From the Baroness the elder twin acquired his passion for painting, to which he devoted the first half of his life, and his love for the koto, which was his principal form of relaxation after he returned from Jerusalem as a rabbi.

  From her knowledge of the game of Go the younger twin evolved his fascination with military maneuvering, while it was the rigorous discipline of her tea ceremony that proved to be his only escape, later in life, from the massive headaches that tormented him.

  So excruciating were those headaches they would have made invalids of most men. And in fact when the General eventually revealed the cause of the headaches to Mama, a secret known only to his brother and to a doctor long since dead, he confessed that he would probably have committed suicide years before had it not been for a memory he carried within him, a vision of his mother turning a teacup three times at sunset, gently brushing the green tea into foam, her face utterly calm and at peace.

  It was the memory of those moments that gave him the will to live through the attacks that were so blinding they seemed to be the lightning of death itself, an ultimate pain most men might experience only once in their lives but which the General knew would be back with him the next day and the next, next week and next month, a daily ritual of torture and execution that humbled him under a sword and hewed his mind.

  The twins grew older, the time came for them to receive their formal education. Together they traveled south, the elder to study fine arts in Kyoto, the younger to enter the military academy. When the younger brother received his commission in the army, the two returned to the Tohoku to spend the holiday with their mother. It was toward the end of the holiday that she died, to them, unexpectedly.

  It happened at sunset. The Baroness was performing the tea ceremony as always at that hour, the sliding doors open to the warm summer air. She prepared their bowls and then her own, turned it three times in her hand, sipped, stopped moving.

  Three or four minutes went by. Simultaneously the twins rose and knelt beside her. Her eyes were open, her face was calm, the bowl rested in her cupped hands. She was gazing across the garden but she was dead.

  That evening the servants told them the truth. Since before her marriage the Baroness had been suffering from an internal disease that kept her in constant pain. She had never told her husband or her sons about the disease because nothing could be done about it. The disease was incurable and in the end would be fatal.

  As the twins made arrangements for the funeral of the Baroness they pondered this last lesson of hers, the mystery of pain and peace in life, the manner in which one might overcome the other, a mystery the elder of the two would one day penetrate, the younger never.

  After the death of their mother the two young men drifted apart in their separate careers. Although they seldom saw one another, the bond between them remained strong, as Mama eventually discovered.

  The elder twin, now Baron Kikuchi, pursued his study of painting both in the Orient and in Europe. The younger twin served routinely at various army posts in Japan until the war with Russia broke out in 1905, when he was sent to Manchuria to command a company of infantry. He was in Manchuria only a short time before he became a national hero.

  On a barren plain near Mukden his regiment was surrounded by Cossack cavalry. The fierce horsemen swept repeatedly through the Japanese lines, cutting down the soldiers with their pikes. Kikuchi alone was able to hold his unit intact, a triumph attributed to his decision to use the dead horses of the Cossacks as a barrier against their attacks. Like most of the Japanese officers, his Buddhist background had bred in him an abhorrence of meat, but that didn’t stop him from saving his men in the only way open to him.

  At the end of three days and three nights Japanese reinforcements broke through the Cossack encirclement to find the lost regiment largely massacred. Only Kikuchi’s company had survived, safe behind the walls of rotting meat, eight feet high, that he had erected. The young Captain was awarded Japan’s highest combat decoration and singled out as an officer likely to become the youngest general in modern Japanese history.

  In any case there was little doubt he would someday sit on the General Staff.

  In time Kikuchi fulfilled both these expectations, but not in a way anyone might have expected. It turned out that his decision to defy Buddhist custom on the plains of Manchuria had an immediately harmful effect on him. A fly feeding on the rotting carcass of a horse during the siege had infected his right eye. He was not back in Japan many days before the sight in the eye began to fail.

  Kikuchi went to a specialist who was also a family friend. The doctor told him that the infection could be treated and the eye saved but that nearly total blindness was inevitable. He would be left with a gray film over the eye, an ability to distinguish light and darkness but not shapes.

  Kikuchi asked if the gray film would make the eye recognizably blind and was told that it would. He then questioned the doctor about removing the eye and replacing it with a glass eye. The doctor said that could be done after they were certain the infection had subsided.

  Why not until then? said Kikuchi.

  Because if we opened it up before then, answered the doctor, while the infection is still virulent, there could be further damage.

  What kind of damage?

  To the nerves.

  But if we wait it will be apparent to everyone I’ve lost an eye, and that means I will have to leave the army.

  Yes.

  Yes, so we won’t wait. We will do what we have to do now.

  The doctor refused to perform the operation but Kikuchi insisted. Finally the doctor agreed. Kikuchi went on leave and the operation was secretly performed. Three days later a shattering pain burst in his head, a shock so severe the doctor gave him a morphine injection. Thereafter, however, Kikuchi refused the injections, it being inconsistent with Bushido, the way of the warrior, for a man to refuse or disguise the pain life brought him.

  Kikuchi returned to active duty and continued to rise in rank and power. To avoid suspicion he trained himself never to move his good eye, to stare directly forward and move his whole head when he wanted to shift his gaze. In this way no one would be able to detect the immobility of his false eye.

  In the end the daring that had first made him a hero, then blinded him in one eye, brought other rewards. Among regular army officers there was the habit of questioning the patriotism of politicians and industrialists in interminable diatribes, harangues so repetitious that even the most resolute careerist was bound to fall asleep at least once during an evening. When this happened the dozing man propped his head in his hands for an hour or so with his eyes closed, excusing himself when he woke up again.

  Not so Kikuchi.

  He napped as often as anyone else, but when he did only his good eye closed. The other stared without blinking at the speaker, at a painting on the wall, at the snow or the cherry blossoms
falling outside in the garden.

  The effect on other officers was uncanny. His juniors were terrified by him, his seniors both terrified and humiliated. The wholly unnatural way he moved his head when he was awake only added to the impression that here was not a man but a demon, unfeeling and remorseless, some sort of determined, bloodless creature the dark powers had placed on earth as their instrument.

  The unclosing, unblinking eye was also responsible for the speculation that Major and Colonel and finally General Kikuchi not only never slept but never ate, that he existed on only one cup of water every three days because suspended before him was the vision of a wall of dead Cossack horses eight feet high, because the stench of rotting meat within him was as strong as it had once been on a Manchurian plain.

  The General could never admit to his glass eye, and thus a sense of total inhumanity surrounded him, false yet inescapable.

  He was an older man when Mama met him, a bachelor who had never married, obviously ambitious. This was apparent from the fact that he had chosen to make his career in the Kempeitai. Mama assumed quite naturally that he had selected the Kempeitai because there was more opportunity for plotting there than in any other branch of the army.

  The position was sensitive, and there were rumors that Baron Kikuchi made free use of the spies and dossiers of the Kempeitai to further his own interests. But the army was notorious for its cliques and jealousies, and any general would probably have acted in the same manner. At least Baron Kikuchi favored no specific faction in the army and this, together with his family name, made him more acceptable to the other members of the General Staff than any of their fellow officers.

  Even for a Japanese of his generation the Baron was small, standing no more than five feet tall. He had always been so devoted to his military life that Mama thought his interest in women would probably be minor. It was likely that he looked on them as someone to relax and joke with and enjoy the traditional arts of music and song. She surmised that either sex would be unimportant to him or that he had long ago sublimated his drives, like so many professional army officers, and become impotent.

  Accordingly, the ruse she used to beguile him the first night was an old one, an artifice that often worked with aging military men who found themselves embarrassed when naked.

  After the bath, while giving him a massage, she pretended to find some fluff in the crevice of his bottom, from the towel perhaps. She rolled the fluff into a little ball and bounced it in the air.

  She giggled and clapped her hands. The General was delighted. For an hour they played with the little ball of fluff, batting it back and forth and chasing it around the room. The next night the General came back to suggest another bath and another massage. Again Mama clapped her hands at what she had found, again the General was enchanted, again they played ball for an hour or two.

  Mama’s campaign progressed as she expected. At the end of a month the General asked her to move into one of his villas in the city. Mama acquiesced. Presents followed, diamonds and emeralds and cameras, which were much more sophisticated than they had been ten years before in Kobe.

  Despite the simplicity of their first days together Mama quickly sensed the General was different from the other high-ranking military officers she had known. He experienced severe headaches, for example, yet at the same time his bowels moved with vigor.

  This was contrary to the usual pattern. As Mama well knew, most general officers never had a headache but they did invariably suffer from constant indigestion, a result of their inability to expel the gases that accumulated in them in the course of a day spent agreeing with everything their superiors said.

  Before the war more generals in Japan died from the rupture of a vital organ due to excessive gas than from any other cause. And although the public was unaware of it, having always been given more heroic versions, it was not until the very last stages of the war that the American B-29 bomber replaced indigestion as the leading cause of death among generals on the active duty list.

  Baron Kikuchi proved not to be impotent, only inactive. The first year they were together he made love to her as much as once a week, but later this dropped to once a month or less and eventually to not at all. Mama was not bothered by this, however, having had some ten thousand men make love to her in the course of her sixteen years as a prostitute. She had begun early and in that sense she was older than her years.

  As time went on there were other changes in the General. He became less interested in the fluff ball games, preferring instead to spend his evenings listening to her play the koto while he sat beside her in his black kimono staring into space.

  And there were changes in Mama as well, wholly unexpected changes that were all the more powerful because she had never imagined such a thing could happen to her. She was astonished and more than a little mystified, for the truth was that after knowing ten thousand men, after being intimate with every conceivable male combination of spirit and flesh, she had fallen in love with the little General and his gruff, gentle ways, fallen passionately in love for the first time in her life at an age when the love of most women was already turning to the quiet paths of affection and companionship.

  She could not explain it to herself, but it was as if he were the first man who had ever touched her and held her, as if she had come to him a virgin at the age of sixteen and all the other years had never existed. She loved him completely, with abandon. More than anything else she wanted to give him a son.

  She confided this to the General one night and he admitted it was his own secret wish. He wept then, his head on her shoulder, and whispered that for months he had been trying to arouse himself in bed with her but could not. His work, his age.

  Something. He wept. It was too late.

  Mama comforted him, less convinced than he that nothing could be done. She knew many ways with men and in time, she thought, she could bring him to do the impossible. In time she might have been able to, but time turned out to be the only thing they no longer shared.

  On Mama’s thirtieth birthday, the anniversary of their sixth year together, the General announced that he was being transferred to the mainland.

  In his new post he would be in charge of all intelligence activities for the Kwangtung army in Manchuria. At the time Manchuria was controlled by the Kwangtung army, the largest and best in the Japanese Empire. Further, it was the center of all the intrigues against China. It was the most powerful political force within the Japanese military, therefore within Japan as a whole. Much as he didn’t want to leave her, the position was too important to be turned down.

  Mama knew he must feel honored by this great responsibility before him, yet she also sensed something else in his manner, fear perhaps. She knew it couldn’t be a fear of failure. The General was too confident for that, too aware of his own competence and discipline. There was no question of his failing.

  A fear of success then?

  It seemed strange to Mama. Something was out of place.

  Later she never forgave herself for missing that opportunity to help him, to give him love in the way he needed it, by sharing with him his terrible secret. If she had pursued her feelings then, the two years that remained before his death might have been quite different for him, less anguished, at least less lonely. But at the moment she could only think of the son he had said he wanted.

  She thought giving him a son was the way to make him happy. Not until just before the end did she learn that he needed only her, no one else.

  When she had arrived at a scheme she called in the General’s chauffeur, a corporal.

  The corporal was a man about her own age. Although he came from a family of respected surgeons, he had long ago slipped into degradation. The first step was expulsion from a private school for recurrent masturbation in the classroom. His shame over being expelled from the school was so great that he went directly to his father’s clinic and stole a large amount of ether with which to commit suicide.

  Being afraid, he took too sm
all a dose. The next day he tried once more, and the third day he tried again. A week or two went by and instead of vindicating his family’s honor he ended up becoming an ether addict.

  For about ten years following the First World War, a period of relative freedom in Japan, he supported his habit by hiring himself out for masturbation scenes in pornographic movies. During the Depression he blackmailed his relatives into giving him small sums of money by stationing himself in front of their homes and masturbating in full view of the neighbors. More recently he had turned to begging and stealing. He came to the General’s notice when he broke into a Kempeitai dispensary in search of gas to support his habit.

  Baron Kikuchi recognized his name at once, the young man’s father having been the surgeon who operated on his eye in 1905. Out of gratitude to the boy’s dead father he decided to help the boy if he could. He took him into the army and gave him medical treatment. He made him swear that he would never masturbate in public again. The corporal responded gratefully, so the General made him his chauffeur. He often had clandestine meetings in his car and the corporal’s loyalty to him was both deep and personal.

  Mama knew all this. She knew the corporal was an invert incapable of performing the sexual act with a woman. But she also knew he was her only hope. There were no male servants in the house and no other man ever slept there, except the corporal when the General was with her.

  She explained to the corporal that the General very much wanted to have a son but that he was unable to do what was necessary. The corporal understood at once. He hung his head and said he had a confession to make.

  Mama reassured him. She said that she knew about his condition but there was still a way he could help if he wanted to. The corporal replied that he would do anything at all that was within his power.

  She then asked him certain delicate questions. Somehow, despite his embarrassment, he managed to stammer out the answers.