by Rain, David
I cried out to the rickshaw-puller, but he paid me no heed, struggling as best he could to liberate us from the fray. Something slammed the side of the rickshaw, sending it rocking. I gripped the arc of the canopy, wondering if I dared jump into the street. Could I make it to the sidewalk? But on the sidewalk, there was only the same swarming, angry crowd.
Horns bellowed, loud as the shouts and screams. Then, blasting through the throng, came a long, dark sedan, like a president’s car, sweeping one hapless fellow on to its hood.
The Lincoln! I had no way to reach it.
Soldiers had appeared, mounted on horses. One struck at rioters with a club. One fired shots. My rickshaw-puller lost his grip on his vehicle and was carried away from me, sinking under the human tide. I was flung against one side of the chair, then the other, then out into the street. The rickshaw overturned and covered me like a shell.
I scrambled out. I struggled to my feet. I was pushed down again; I forced myself forward. Where was my ashplant? A camera flared, burning my eyes. I lost my footing. Shots rang out again. Rearing over me, whinnying, was a horse. The rider, a Japanese officer.
I would be crushed. Horse and rider blocked the sun, then veered away, and I whispered (for, after all, I knew that rider, that officer from the bar): ‘Isamu... Isamu.’
Another figure fought its way towards me. Le Vol! He wrenched me upright. We plunged through a door. The chaos was muffled; leather protected us, brown and slithery as polished brogues.
‘Pleasant afternoon, Mr Sharpless?’ said Clifford T. Arnhem.
I lay, breathing heavily, in Le Vol’s arms. His camera, big and boxy, jutted at my spine, and through a glass partition I studied the back of Goro’s neck: like the upholstery, it was leathery, brown.
‘Communists.’ Mr Arnhem bit the end from a cigar. ‘Communist agitators. What do the fools want? Don’t they understand this country is on the brink of greatness?’
To my surprise, Le Vol made no protest at this, only extricating his limbs from mine, winding down the window, and taking more shots. The riot had subsided, leaving a street strewn with debris. Goro drove on slowly. We passed corpses and overturned vehicles, one on fire.
Glumly, I thought of my missing ashplant.
‘This is just the beginning,’ Le Vol was saying. ‘Mr Arnhem’s arranged an important interview for us tomorrow, Sharpless. Big wheel in the government, this fellow. No drunken philandering tonight, eh? This is where you come into your own.’ He tapped the window. ‘Who better to explain all this? And China too! The inside story, from their point of view.’
‘Great Temples of Kyushu, indeed!’ I said.
‘I love temples,’ said Le Vol. ‘Without them, would the Geographic have stumped up for our tickets? Don’t worry, I’m shooting temples too. Anyway,’ he went on, ‘this fellow you’re interviewing, he’s a Jap nobleman. Years ago he was a rootless playboy, living in the West. Back home, he’s the fiercest patriot. What did you say his name was again, sir?’
‘Yamadori,’ replied Mr Arnhem. ‘Prince Yamadori.’
‘This isn’t like Yamadori,’ I said.
‘Yamadori isn’t like Yamadori – politics, Sharpless!’
‘Since when does a playboy get up at five?’
We trudged through early-morning streets. Gravely, I placed my ashplant ahead of me. Last night before dinner, Goro had appeared in my room, bowed, and presented me with the gnarled black stick, held horizontally across his upturned palms; he was a servant, I realized, of exceptional powers.
Deserted in the dawn, the broad thoroughfare with its trolley-car tracks might have been anywhere. Only the hand-painted signs above the stores suggested Japan. We were a few streets back from Dejima Wharf, somewhere between Chinatown and Nagasaki Station.
I asked Le Vol the name of Yamadori’s hotel.
‘City’s finest. Built over thermal springs.’
We crossed the road. Between stores selling fish or rice or radios, an imposing façade stretched the length of a block. Festooned with statues and Doric columns, it looked like an Austro-Hungarian palace, but for the sense that it was all lathe and paste: Vienna via Hollywood. As Le Vol led me through a pair of mighty doors, young men in bow ties bent low, and a desk clerk, proud in pince-nez, gestured to an ugly ottoman.
‘We’re expected,’ Le Vol said, impressed.
The young men resumed their tasks: one, polishing a brass plate by the elevators; one, wiping with a damp cloth each leaf of an aspidistra; one, fluffing cushions on sofas and chairs. The desk clerk, pince-nez glinting, scratched solemnly in a ledger, as if recording deeds of conquest in imperial annals.
Le Vol was nervous, his hands twisting as he asked me, in a murmur, whether I had my questions ready. I was irritated but not worried. Le Vol would do the talking; my task was to take notes, and afterwards put them in order. ‘You don’t think he’ll tell us much, do you?’
‘This is where you come in, Sharpless. The human touch. Old pals, aren’t you?’
‘Hardly. What’s he doing in Nagasaki, anyway?’
‘Inspecting the shipyards, says Mr Arnhem.’
I expected we would be called up to Yamadori’s suite, and was confused when the young men fell into formation by the elevators. A counter clicked from top floor to ground. The desk clerk, straightening his jacket, joined the line of young men; Le Vol rose and prodded me to my feet, just as the doors slid back to reveal a stately figure illumined in the mirrored box.
Yamadori had changed since the Manhattan days. The Playboy of the Western World had vanished beneath a military bearing. There was something of the samurai about him. The huge, toad-like head, with its livery lips and staring eyes, had stiffened, like a carving; a tight collar circled the jowly chins, and his squat, broad torso had been shoehorned into a blue uniform, heavy with epaulettes, medals, and braid.
The boys, the desk clerk, and Le Vol and I bowed as the prince strutted forward. A sword in an elaborate, curving scabbard jutted from his left hip, and his boots were high and gleaming. Emerging behind him were three impassive servants, each in grey-green military uniform.
Yamadori, with a faint smile, inclined his head to Le Vol and me, then turned to the desk clerk and barked harsh-sounding words in Japanese. The exchange ended with Yamadori dealing the fellow a blow and the fellow, cringing and cowering, accepting his fate as if it were deserved.
‘My secretary,’ the great man explained, ‘has been delayed in Tokyo – government business, you understand. He was to have joined us this morning. But, it seems, is late. Come.’ He snapped his fingers and pointed not to the elevator, but to a far wall of the lobby. Dutifully, with hotel staff bowing all the while, we trailed after the prince and his retinue. Carved doors, sleekly lacquered, loomed from dark-papered walls; young men, like compliant machines, opened them at our approach, revealing an antechamber of glowing marble. Confused, I stole a glance at Le Vol as we made our way down a curving staircase into a windowless, subterranean realm.
Everything below was as fine as in the lobby, but stark and simple: Japanese, not Austro-Hungarian. Broad corridors, lit dimly by lanterns, stretched in several directions. The air was humid, oppressively so, and I heard, from somewhere out of sight, a soft lapping of water.
‘A bathe!’ cried Yamadori. ‘Always the best way to begin the day, don’t you find? Especially when one has spent the night not in sleeping but in talking on the telephone to this minister and that.’ He sighed. ‘But such are the times. Soon, none shall sleep.’
A servant opened a slatted door.
‘We’ll change in here,’ declared Yamadori.
‘Prince’ – Le Vol, I could see, was losing patience – ‘we arranged an interview.’
‘Mr... Levi, is it not?’ – Yamadori smirked – ‘you will appreciate that I am a busy man. Here we are, imperial affairs at a critical pass, and I choose to speak to two Americans.’
‘What better time,’ Le Vol swept on, ‘to explain yourself? China’s changed everything
, for Japan and for the world. You know that, don’t you? Once you were exotics, charmingly so. The world wished you well. Now we see you as beasts, ravening beasts.’
Yamadori’s nostrils flared and he spoke rapidly to a servant, who skittered forward and took Le Vol’s arm.
‘The interview will be dull for the photographer,’ said Yamadori. ‘Besides, am I to be depicted in the act of bathing? Your American audience would find it indelicate. This hotel has a tea chamber, Mr Levi, with most diverting woodblocks on the walls.’
Le Vol protested, but the servant’s grip was firm.
‘Your friend is a man of political passions,’ Yamadori observed when we were alone. He seemed amused.
‘But fair,’ I said, ‘and just. He’s not here to judge.’
‘And nor are you?’
In the room with the slatted door, a bench, varnished darkly, ran around the walls; there were hooks for hanging clothes. Through a wide opening at the far end of the room was a steaming pool.
I had thought servants would be on hand to undress Yamadori, but he tugged efficiently at his collar and the many buttons of his tunic. Embarrassed, I half-turned from him as I removed my own clothes. Cursing Le Vol, I tried to think what questions I should ask. Manchuria: check. Korea: check. War with America: likely or no?
Covering myself with a small, thin towel, I prodded my ashplant over the slithery tiles, then lowered it, discarded the towel, and was about to ease myself into the steaming water when the great man appeared beside me, gripped my arm, and said, ‘No. First you wash.’
‘I’ve washed,’ I said, ‘earlier.’
‘You wash,’ he declared, and I limped after him, naked, to a bank of showerheads that protruded from one wall. Ice-cold water struck me like a blow, and I gasped and whimpered while Yamadori, unperturbed, threw out remarks about the weather and the stock market; once, in a rich baritone, he boomed out a melody from La Bohème: ‘O Mimì, tu più non torni...’
He reminded me, I decided, not so much of a samurai as of a sumo wrestler. Lathering myself, I tried not to look at his ponderous swaying belly and the surprisingly large genitals that impended beneath it, like obscene fruit, from a frizz of wiry black; but he, I could tell, was looking at me. Acutely, I was aware of my spindly arms, my sunken chest, the disfiguring scars on my injured leg, and was relieved when he gestured at last towards the pool. No steps led down from the sides, but he slipped his bulk into the water with unexpected grace. I followed, squelching my buttocks to the tiles and pitching forward, floundering, crying out at the sudden, startling heat.
The water was opaque, a greyish green. Steam coiled around us, infused with sulphurous scent; Yamadori lay back, luxuriating, and closed his eyes. The time had come for my questions, and I struggled to recall phrases Le Vol had used, babbling out at last, ‘Many of us in the West have been alarmed by the rise in Japanese militarism. Should we be – in your view?’
Yamadori sniffed, hummed.
I tried again: ‘Japan, to the world’s astonishment, became the only non-Western nation to defeat a Western nation in war, in the Russo–Japanese war of 19...’ (1904? 1905? I decided not to risk it.) ‘Is the world more inclined to censure Japanese military adventurism than that of other nations – in your view?’
He sighed; his belly rose and fell. ‘Young man, why ask me this? My secretary has the answers, prepared in press releases. Am I to weary myself by repeating what has passed my lips already countless times?’
The bathing chamber was vast, greenish like the water, with a high, vaulted ceiling. Through crisscrossed panes of skylights, a dawn pallor glowed. Still we were alone, and I was both relieved and alarmed; other bathers might be banned from the great man’s ablutions, but I had expected attendants, slim boys in loincloths or naked, aquatic geishas, ready with scrapers and back-scrubbers, like slaves in ancient Rome.
Yamadori sang Puccini again; his voice was remarkably pleasant. In his old life he must have spent many a night at the opera. Cautiously, I asked him whether he missed his playboy days.
For a moment I thought he would not reply; the great whale body stirred not a jot, and I felt content: I had done my duty by Le Vol. No Pulitzer Prize would come from this scene. It was over.
The pallor from the skylights grew golden; buttery shafts of radiance sank into the steam. Yamadori’s baritone came again – speaking not singing – bearing pictures of an ancient culture: pagodas like dragons’ scales, stacked tier on tier; the flick of fans in strange ceremonies; suits of armour flashing like jewelled crustaceans; giant torii jutting from the sea; robed figures ascending sacred stairs. This, said Yamadori, was the time of Tokugawa, the feudal regime that had ruled in splendid isolation from the world before the coming of Meiji and the birth of modern Japan.
‘After Tokugawa... ah, but all of us come after Tokugawa now!’
He shifted, and the slosh of water startled me.
He went on: ‘There are those who see me as a superficial man’ (I had never, I wanted to assure him, entertained such a thought), ‘idler, skimmer of the surface, seeker after vain pleasures. Call me butterfly if you will – a fluttering thing of no weight, no consequence!’ (I never would, I almost said – no, never; but held my breath, as if some revelation were about to come.)
‘I was born, Mr Sharpless, some sixty years ago: 1877 on your American calendar. A year that perhaps means little to you, but in Japan it is the year of the Satsuma Rebellion, when Takamori, last of the samurai, led his army of forty thousand against the forces of the new Meiji government. My father died in that rebellion – yes, on the losing side. Naturally, I never knew him; I was an ugly fat baby, clamped to my nurse’s breast, far away in our palace at Omaru. But often I have wished I could speak to him. I should tell him he was a fool. Why cast in his lot with Takamori? Already the Meiji had entrapped us, an age of iron and lead; Tokugawa and all its gold lay as deep in the past as Lady Murasaki and The Tale of Genji. The golden world was over, crushed by time, from the moment the Americans in their black ships appeared in Edo Bay.
‘Manifest destiny, that was your name for it, your progress of pillage and plunder, first across one continent, then around the world. Were you to be denied the rich ports of Asia?’ He snorted. ‘Ports! In the beginning, that was all. But the doors were flung open then. Our hemisphere fell into the clutches of your race. Was it our destiny to be your colony? Were we Chinamen? Were we Indians? No! We would never surrender. We would adopt your ways. Modernize. Compete.
‘That was the dark bargain of Meiji: iron horses, clanking factories, telegraph wires that webbed the sky. We turned on our land as if we hated it – we had to, in order to save it. Did you know, Mr Sharpless, that your Commodore Perry was a hopeless drunkard? He died raving, eaten by the ravages of his weakness. And this, this foul-breathed swaggering American, was the man who plunged a great and ancient people into shame!’
As Yamadori’s words crept over me I suspected this was a monologue he had delivered often. But should I – American, though I barely felt it – hold myself responsible for Commodore Perry?
Yamadori continued: ‘I grew up in ignorance, Mr Sharpless. Cosseted product of a tendril of royalty that had withered on the vine, what chance had I? Yes, there were our family lands, our old retainers; I wanted for nothing, but nothingness gnawed at my heart. My tutors encouraged me in the callow paths of pleasure. At an early age I was sent to America. Travels in Europe followed. By the time I came into man’s estate, I was thoroughly cosmopolitan. Some would call me deracinated, though how deracinated can a man be whose very appearance – his skin, his eyes – proclaims his origins at every turn?
‘Oh, I was not given over wholly to my foreigner’s life; there was business to attend to here and I came back often in young manhood, if always with an eagerness to be off again to Vienna or Paris or Rome, and the mistresses and boon companions who beguiled my hours there. I admit I partook of the pleasures of this port – how many marriages did I contract, flickering affairs of
a few weeks or months, with the sweet little protégées of a fellow called Goro?
‘Then came the one girl I could not forget. I dare say I appeared a bumptious fool the day I stood before her, offering my hand. I blush to think of it. Here was my heart, enraptured, and all I could display were the gestures of the libertine, taking his pick among playthings in a house of ill-repute – for such, Mr Sharpless, is the power of vice to pollute our attempts at purity, to coarsen our overtures to our own salvation.
‘Hear me, speaking like a Christian! But when that girl stood before me in a kimono embroidered with a dragon’s coils, I knew I had lost myself long ago and only through her could I find my way home again. What beauty that girl possessed: a girl whose ruin, like mine, stemmed from the days of the Satsuma Rebellion and the alliances contracted by her father then – a girl fallen low, but one whom I could raise up, restoring her to her rightful place! For yes, this I would have done, had the American Pinkerton not stolen her heart.
‘I was abandoned by history, Mr Sharpless. Love, when at last I found it, might have compensated for my losses. But love, too, was snatched from me by history. Could I, like my country a half-century before, have been more abjectly cast down? I vowed to leave Japan and not come back.
‘And I almost kept my vow. Never once, through what remained of Meiji and the effete years of Taishō, did I return. My exile was lonely, a stage, perhaps, through which I had to pass, for while I frittered my time away in city after city, slowly something stirred in me. Yes, I had been weak. Yes, I had been a fool. But I am a prince of samurai blood. Only for so long could I be oppressed by a foreigner. In Manhattan, at the Blood Red Ball, I confronted the treachery that had worked against me for so long. Afterwards, I returned to my homeland and found, as if in echo of my own turning spirit, that the passing of Taishō had brought a new age. Under Emperor Hirohito, Japan would become a nation fit to command the world. And I would be a part of it, shape it, direct it. My time had come.’
Would Yamadori never shut up? I longed to rise from the pool and go. My flesh felt boiled, and in my irritation I blurted out, ‘This can’t be your time, it can’t! You spoke of torii and sacred stairs. In China, Hirohito’s soldiers skewer children on bayonets. They rape. They murder. They fling gasoline over houses and set them blazing. Can’t you see what you’re doing? You’re killing the Indians. You’re enslaving the Negroes. This is the logic of Meiji – the iron ships, the airplanes, the mile after mile of railroad track. This is where they lead. You haven’t turned your back on America. You’ve become America.’