by Rain, David
Yamadori moved towards me through the steam. ‘Mr Sharpless, I’ve told you my story and you’ve understood not a word. Your ships in Edo Bay had dark and terrible powers. But your empire is over and ours has begun.’ His hand, a darting fish, slithered under the scalding water, alighting on my hip. ‘I could kill you, American. You’re Sharpless, the consul.’
‘His son. I was a child.’
‘You’ll always be a child.’ His voice was a whisper. ‘Look at you, what are you? Chicken bones, fit only to be left for the dogs! A weakling. A cripple. How can you even pretend to be a man?’
‘Stop it! Keep away!’ I flailed from the side of the pool, but the darting hand was adroit, threading between my spindly legs and closing upon my testicles.
Pain shot through me like electric volts. I shrieked and thrashed. I sank. He pushed me down, then wrenched me up, twisting and crushing with brutal, thick fingers. I floundered for the side of the pool; I crashed through the water, down and down; I surged up, yowling; I lay on my back, kicking and writhing; and all the time Yamadori twisted.
Then came the flash. Incandescence scythed the steamy air. There were scufflings, shouts. What was happening? I didn’t know, but the distraction was enough for me to break from Yamadori. Outraged, he bellowed in Japanese, but not at me, and only when I had ripped myself from the water did I see Le Vol, holding his camera above the desperate servants’ heads.
Flash! Flash! Le Vol took a second photograph, then a third, just as Yamadori whiplashed a hand over the pool’s slimy edge. Grabbing my bad leg, he gouged into the scars. I screamed. Le Vol joined the fray and tugged me by the arms. I feared they would tear me in two.
Le Vol had the advantage. Yamadori was half out of the pool. With a mighty splash he fell back, and I slithered like an eel towards the changing room as Le Vol flung first one, then another, of the servants into the water. He wrenched me up, ready to hustle me away, but Yamadori, as if infused with occult power, reared up before us. Cries tore from his throat; his sumo bulk charged at Le Vol and flipped him to the floor. The camera smashed.
Yamadori raged. In an instant, he would be upon me. His uniform hung from the wall, and beneath it, gleaming in the steam, was the sword. I seized it, ripped it from the scabbard. Like lightning the blade flashed – just as the door behind me burst open and a new voice rang out.
I lowered the sword. At first I could not believe the saviour that appeared before us, dapper in Japanese military uniform: breathless, and a little astonished, but not too much, at the scene he had encountered. My scars burned, but worse was my sudden, absurd shame at my nudity.
‘I’ve been entertaining our American friends,’ said Yamadori, as if he had been presiding over a tea ceremony. ‘You’ll see they’re somewhat ignorant of our etiquette.’ Flagrantly he advanced over the tiles, feet slapping, genitals swaying, huge-nippled breasts wobbling against his sides like folds of cloth. He gestured to the new arrival.
‘My secretary. But perhaps you’ve met before.’
Familiar, violet eyes looked at me, amused.
‘What I don’t understand,’ said Clifford T. Arnhem, ‘is what you thought you were playing at.’
‘Why should we be playing at anything? The interview took a peculiar turn – a bath, for Christ’s sake!’
‘The prince is a busy man. He bathes at odd times.’
‘He wouldn’t let Le Vol in with us.’
‘So your friend insisted? He’s disappointed me, Mr Sharpless. I thought he had some sense.’
We were in the Lincoln; Goro drove, aimlessly it seemed, about the city. It was late afternoon. Until then I had spent all my time on the east side of the harbour. Now we had reached the west, and I wished we could stop; at every rut in the road, at every pothole, pain shot up my injured leg and throbbed between my thighs. My testicles, my balls, would be black for weeks.
Rain shivered down, pattering the windows. Shabby stores, a succession of holes in walls, reeled slowly by; yellowish faces loomed in at us through the glass. There was another pothole, a nasty one.
‘Goro, drive carefully!’ I rapped the dividing glass, and Mr Arnhem glowered; I was too ashamed to tell him what Yamadori had done to me. ‘But Le Vol,’ I urged. ‘Surely they’ll let Le Vol go?’
Mr Arnhem, summoned by Yamadori, had extricated me with some difficulty from military prison; Le Vol was another matter. ‘What do you think would happen if a Jap photographer muscled his way in to take snaps of, say, Senator Pinkerton in his bath? The crime is comparable. Your friend has grievously insulted Prince Yamadori.’
‘And Yamadori,’ I cried, ‘has insulted me!’
‘You are not a senior member of the Japanese government.’
Another bump. Pain contorted my face. ‘Mr Arnhem, are you telling me that you, as consul, can’t make him see reason?’
‘You presume to know what reason in this case might be.’
‘So that’s it? You’re giving up on Le Vol?’
‘Don’t be silly. Yamadori’s intention, I hope, is just to frighten him. But I can do no more today.’
Storefronts had given way to barbed-wire fences, scrubby fields, and, in the distance, low metallic sheds with half-built shells of ships towering above them. A checkpoint appeared ahead. With a tap at the glass, Mr Arnhem directed Goro to proceed no further; but as we swerved back towards town, I glimpsed a motorcade parked within the shipyards, and Yamadori greeting a line of naval officers. Standing stiffly by his side was Trouble.
In the days that followed, I ate my meals and drank too much and spoke of idle things, as if no desperate uncertainty beat beneath each moment like a drum. Mr Arnhem was preoccupied, busy with consular duties, and it fell to Goro to keep me amused, taking me for long drives around Nagasaki-ken and beyond. Green volcanic valleys unfolded before me, with volatile hills and steam that hissed up foully from the earth. Here, said Goro, the Christians were massacred; here, the samurai met their doom; Japan, I reflected, was a violent land, never the dreamy eternity the world thought it should be.
Goro treated me with a deference that I found humbling. One afternoon, in a teahouse in Takeo, he introduced me to a little girl of twelve or so who was, he said, a daughter of his nephew. Only after the girl had sat with us for some time, eyes downcast, and Goro had barked at her in Japanese, evidently telling her to improve her demeanour, did I realize he was offering her to me in temporary marriage. My face flushed and I did my best to decline the offer graciously. How sorry I felt for the frail, bird-like girl! How amazed I was that Goro could think me another Lieutenant Pinkerton! But I had no thought of castigating him. I feared I had insulted him and was ashamed.
That night, Goro accompanied me to the theatre. I understood little of the Noh drama, with its masked actors and sweeping robes and slow, stylized gestures. We sat on benches, some rows back, to the side of a jutting stage with pillars at each corner and a roof like a pagoda’s. Once or twice I would have asked Goro to explain what was going on, but I suspected a man of his class knew no more than I. Only during the entr’acte, a knockabout affair of squabbling rude mechanicals, did he become animated, parting his yellow, peg-like teeth in laughter. When it was finished, he rose abruptly, bowed to me, and hurried away.
I assumed he had gone to the bathroom, but he did not return during the next act. Watching the robed figures make their exquisite gestures, I wondered if this act involved the same characters as the first.
Then somebody took Goro’s place and tried to help me.
‘It’s a different play, you realize.’ Yamadori’s voice, hot against my ear, was barely loud enough for me to make out the words. Onstage, an actor in a golden cape writhed sinuously, holding aloft a sword that sparkled in the lights. A Noh performance, Yamadori explained, consists not of one play but of a set of plays, demonstrating successively the harmony that attains in the world of the gods, the dissensions of man, then man’s repentance, his redemption, and the glory of defeating all that stands in the way of peace. �
�This is the fall we’re seeing now. But it isn’t all, you see. There’s more to come.’
The actors stamped and leaped, thumping out a ritual dance; the stage throbbed like a drum skin, and Yamadori continued, ‘The play confuses you because you want it to tell a story, but it wants to evoke a mood. See how even in this violence of conflict there is colour, beauty, life? And infinite grace. Think of the story as something that happened long ago. Forget the story. We know what happens next: always the same transience, the beauty of moments passing.’
The resoundings ceased abruptly; there was applause, and Yamadori said quickly, ‘Temple of Shofuku-ji. Tomorrow at two.’
Abruptly, he was gone, and Goro appeared once more. Furious, frightened, I wanted to ask him what arrangement he had come to with Yamadori, what bribe had made him leave me like this, but Goro, at once, was laughing loudly over the second entr’acte. Resentfully I studied his jutting larynx, his thousand pleated wrinkles, his yellow teeth with their many gaps.
All I cared about was what happened next.
In the morning I dismissed Goro and made my way about the town alone. Filling in time, I wandered along canals, sat on a bench by the harbour and drank too much Japanese beer over lunch in a restaurant with flyblown windows and meticulous table-settings. What awaited me at Shofuku-ji I could not imagine, but I felt as if I, and not Le Vol, faced criminal charges. I feared I was being watched. In the restaurant I looked suspiciously at the other diners; none looked back at me.
Shofuku-ji appeared deserted. Set back from the street over a wooden bridge, the temple gathered about it an air of quietness. A gold-painted gable, catching the sun, flashed like a signal as I ascended stone stairs. I found myself in a broad, dark hall. I moved carefully, but the varnished floors, sleek as violins, thrummed at the smallest movement.
‘Prince Yamadori?’ I said, emerging into a courtyard lined with pale gravel. A gong, bronze and immense, glimmered by the far wall. In the centre of the wide space, an old man in orange robes raked the stones with meditative calm. As I approached, he did not look up.
‘I was told to come,’ I said, my voice low.
The old man kept raking, face averted, head down. I touched his arm and he giggled; he was senile, or perhaps had acquired so great a tranquillity that every reaction was at tortoise-speed. The bent head rolled towards me, revealing eyes sleek with yellow film. ‘Sharpless-san?’ he said at last, and pointed to the shrine that lay across the courtyard.
Shadowy eaves overhung the entrance. Inside, sweetness hovered on the air. Light, pale and smoky, seeped through high lattices and, from the dark back wall, above an altar laid with flowers, loomed a Buddha, impassive and vast. Prostrate before the statue was a solitary saffron form. A peculiar composure filled me, and I thought how I had misjudged what awaited me.
‘Trouble,’ I said, when the saffron form rose. If his blondness appeared incongruous against the Zen robes, I did not consider it. There was a rightness to him, a naturalness, as he came towards me.
He smiled. ‘I see you’ve met the Bonze.’
‘Bonze?’ Hovering outside was the old man, still holding the rake.
Trouble said, ‘You knew he was my great-uncle?’
‘How could I know that?’
Moments later the raking resumed, the languorous scrape... scrape. Trouble and I were meeting in a dream: it did not seem strange that we had not said hello, not shaken hands, not embraced.
He led me out of the shrine. We would walk in the gardens, he said, and explained that his great-uncle, now a servant, had once been a priest of this temple, but gave it up after Trouble’s mother died. ‘He’d denounced her, you see. Cast her out of the family for becoming a Christian. He never forgave himself.’
We passed beneath cypresses, Trouble keeping a slow pace by my side. Shadows and sunlight flickered over his robes.
‘So, you’re a Buddhist now?’ I said. ‘You believe all that?’
‘What’s believing? You think you have to trust in something, be convinced of it absolutely.’ I was not sure he was talking to me: by you, perhaps, he meant Westerners generally. ‘Here, you learn that it’s practice that’s important. Forget belief. There are things you just do. All else follows.’
I said, ‘But Yamadori, you believe in him?’
We had come to a stony platform overlooking a lawn. Trouble gestured for me to sit on a bench. Far out on the lawn, three young men in monks’ robes competed at archery. As they stretched back their bows, it seemed to me there was no element of play in their actions, but care, a care as meticulous as the Bonze’s in his interminable raking of the gravel. Punctuating my talk with Trouble came a muted thop-thop of arrows striking targets.
‘I’d expected Yamadori,’ I said. ‘To see him, I mean.’
‘We thought you might. But I’m the one who has to tell you.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Sharpless, what did you expect to happen?’ he said.
‘That I’d hear about Le Vol.’ I had barely thought about him.
‘Oh, they’ve released him. I dare say he’s waiting for you back at the consulate. Better be quick, though. Tomorrow, he must leave Japan. He’s been lucky. I was able to change the prince’s mind.’
‘Thank you.’ I gripped his hand.
His voice hardened. ‘I’m not coming back. You know that, don’t you? In America I was incomplete, always at a loss. And Mama could have told me so much. But all she told were lies. And the senator’s no better. He’s worse. Why does he hate me so much?’
‘He doesn’t. You can’t forgive him – ever?’
‘There’s a saying we have in Japan, Shikata ga nai. It can’t be helped. Too bad. I know what you’re doing. You want me to go back and I can’t. I won’t. It’s not about forgiving. Once I lived in the wrong world. Now I don’t.’
A flush spread up my neck. ‘No. You’re half-Japanese, but half-American too. You grew up in America. Your family’s American. How often do you play this game, dressing up in monk’s robes?’
‘It isn’t a game. I’m at school.’
‘I get it. Renounced your religion, like your mother.’
‘You don’t understand my mother. Don’t think you do.’ He reached into his robes and withdrew a small, glittering object: the dagger. Casually, he held it out to me. How beautiful were the handle and scabbard: the gold, the silver, the precious stones. I drew out the blade.
‘See that writing in Japanese?’ Trouble’s voice seemed to come from afar. ‘To die with honour when one can no longer live with honour. I think all the time about those words.’
I said abruptly, ‘There’s a war coming.’
‘Japan and America? All America cares about is keeping the profits flowing. Any war that’s coming, they’ll keep well out of it.’
The bowmen had left off their contest and stood talking; they could have been any three young men, relaxed after play. One of them waved a hand to Trouble, and Trouble waved in return.
‘Tell Kate it’s no good, all right?’ he said. ‘Tell her it’ll always be no good.’
‘You thought I came for Kate?’
‘You did, didn’t you? You’re her ambassador.’
The bowmen were splitting up; one, the one who had waved, walked in our direction. His robes glowed in the sun and I thought how beautiful he was: a loose-limbed, carefree boy, bow and quiver hooked across one shoulder. How different Isamu appeared, dressed as a monk!
I began to tremble. The dagger glittered in my hand, as if I meant to stab myself and was hesitating. ‘Trouble, this is all unreal. War will come. There’ll be no place for you here. Come home. Save yourself.’
‘But I have. I am home.’ He took back the dagger, concealing it in his robes again as Isamu reached us. Addressing Trouble in Japanese, Isamu mimed an arrow-shot, cuffed Trouble playfully, raised a hand to me, then made his way back towards the temple buildings.
Envy and sorrow burned in me like fire. What Trouble had said was true: all the ti
me, but unknowingly, I had been Kate Pinkerton’s ambassador, and my mission, I realized now, had failed.
That evening, Le Vol, Clifford T. Arnhem and I indulged in a long, drunken dinner. Mr Arnhem, doing violence to a samisen, yammered out the one about Naga-sacky where the fellers chew tobaccy and the women wicky-wacky-woo; Goro, joining us, laughed over everything and nothing, then sobbed between gluggings of sake for his dead friend Yakuside. The girl Kiku, covering her mouth, told jokes in broken English. The night was hot, the doors open; insects plunged and darted about the lamps. Mr Arnhem, growing sombre, played the one about the Japanese sandman, an old second-hand man, trading new days for old.
In the morning I said goodbye to Le Vol.
‘You’re sure you won’t come home?’ I asked him.
‘They’re only throwing me out of Japan, not making me go to America. I can’t pass up this chance. You should come too. Come on – China! It’s the story we’ve been waiting for.’
Was I a coward? Was I a fool? I held up my ashplant, my excuse for everything, and said: ‘Be careful, old friend.’
My own ship, for San Francisco, was to sail a week later, but before it left, a restlessness claimed me and I departed early, bound for Hong Kong. Goro, by the gangplank, bowed to me deeply and urged on me again the charms of his niece in Takeo. Tearfully, he babbled that she would wait for my return.
A suspended period in my life began. I lingered in Hong Kong, that peculiar British outpost that seemed so disconnected from the massing bulk of China; I travelled overland to the French city of Saigon and by ship to Singapore, secure in the embrace of the British Empire; further south to Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies; east, to Port Moresby in the Australian protectorate of Papua; north-west to Manila, in the American islands of the Philippines.