This Scorching Earth

by Donald Richie

  But they were often separated, despite Dave. He had his job, and she had her work. His job was that of an editor on Stars and Stripes and a stringer for Field and Stream. He had once been on the Washington Post. Her work was the opera. She was the premiere diva of her own group, "The Cocktail Hour Singers," and founder of the not-too-flourishing Dorothy Ecole du Voix. She was from Wyoming, and he was from Chicago.

  At the moment they were separated as usual, sitting back to back on two of the love seats and not talking to each other. They had come together and would go together, and Dorothy would have resented any implication that she was not giving her husband sufficient attention.

  She had just come from the Dispensary and was giving Mrs. Swenson, the other occupant of her love seat, a display of her fine temper: "... and then the fool told me that this breaking out—if that's what it is—god knows, he didn't—is just nervous trouble. Me! Nervous trouble!" She was furious and slapped the furniture in her irritation. "And as though that wasn't bad enough, I had to wait hours on a sedan—I spent the night, you know, out with those orphans. Such charming children—all Negro and Japanese and White—sort of dappled, you know. And, then, come time to go home to my old one and faithful here and—no sedan. Well, you can just believe me that that driver got a nice fat DR out of the thing. There he was back at the Motor Pool, had gone to the Naka Hotel—by mistake as he said it. And then—this damned itching. Oh!"

  Dave Ainsley turned to Mr. Swenson, an old-Japan-hand, former society editor of the Japan Times before the war and at present connected with the New York Tribune. "Funny isn't it," said Dave, wrinkling his Irish nose, "how all beautiful women hate to see themselves marred." He slid over the word "beautiful" carefully, as though the loveliness of his wife were taken for granted. Then he turned and looked at her. She was pouting. He was intensely proud of her, proud to be seen with her, proud sometimes to have her in the same house, proud to be her husband. "No matter how unimportant the flaw," he finished softly, as though to himself.

  Dottie, as usual, had caught just one word. "Unimportant?" she called over her shoulder. "Well, I'd like to see just how you'd react, David Ainsley, when you're all covered with some loathsome tropical disease."

  He laughed easily, from long practice. At the same time, above the grin, his eyes wrinkled as though he expected to be hit. "Well, not every place, beautiful," he said and turned to Mr. Swenson again, this time man-to-man: "It's not been like sleeping with an elephant—not yet."

  Mr. Swenson opened his mouth and laughed shortly.

  Dottie had turned back to Mrs. Swenson, who likewise sat with her back toward her husband. "Oh, god, what stupid jackasses those colonels are. Nervous troubles!" She could no longer contain herself and, standing up, made a circle through the love seats, elbowing her way through the crowd. As always, her stride was a bit absurd because she was so small. "Four hours—four whole hours, from eleven to now. Just waiting, and then he tells me to stay in bed, fold my hands and—" She could think of nothing dreadful enough. ". .. and twiddle my thumbs!"

  "There are so many incompetents over here nowadays," said Mrs. Swenson sadly, shaking her head. Whenever it became necessary to sympathize she usually retreated into generalities.

  "Did it just appear?" asked Mr. Swenson turning around,

  "About nine or so," said Dorothy, miserable.

  "And where might it be?" asked Mrs. Swenson, now being motherly.

  "It might be on my twat, but it's not. It's on my tummy."

  Dave laughed loudly, so loudly that several passing people turned and looked. "Give it time," he shouted, and Dottie giggled. Any reference to the privates usually reduced her to helpless merriment.

  "You're going to the opera tonight, I suppose," said Mrs. Swenson quickly.

  Dottie groaned. "Oh, god, I suppose so. I do owe it to the public. But, believe me, I'm not looking forward to it."

  Mrs. Swenson was bewildered. "But—Madame Butterfly and all, and you with the opera."

  "Well, Mrs. Swenson," said Dave patiently, as though all the words were of one syllable, "that's a kind of opera, to be sure. But I'm afraid my wife has what we must call advanced tastes. It's a bit too—well, shall we say old-fashioned for her." He didn't mention that Dottie always wept from sheer nostalgia whenever she heard any part of Cavalleria Rusticana. "Besides," he continued, "Puccini, you know. It isn't as though Beautiful here weren't musical, after all."

  This was a cue, and Dottie, standing up, performed what she called a parody of "One Grand Day." She clasped her hands: "Oh, one grand day, he'll come along. .."

  Dave laughed very loudly. "It will be just as fine as that Swan Lake we were permitted to view last month. Boy, that's one lake that needs dredging."

  The Swensons laughed politely at the performances of both the Ainsleys.

  Dave himself had reached the last Beethoven quartets and Wozzeck through a very real appreciation of good jazz and saw no reason why Beautiful should not reach Bartok through Mascagni. He was doing his best to detour her past Puccini, had in fact carefully formed her musical tastes until now she thought that late Stravinsky was cute and found that bit in the Prokofieff piano concerto just darling—meanwhile humming Franck to show the part she meant.

  "Well, I for one like Madame Butterfly," said Mr. Swenson suddenly and positively.

  As a matter of fact, Dave did too. But whenever anyone obviously enthusiastic asked him how he liked something, he at once answered with disagreements. If this enthusiasm was stated positively enough, however, he would at once change his mind and find just as many things about it to praise as he had formerly found to condemn.

  "Well, of course," he said, smiling, "I think the second act is about the best thing of its kind ever written by anybody, be it Bach or Beiderbecke."

  This satisfied both of them, for Mr. Swenson had been thinking of a 1918 performance, and Dave, though he refused anything pure admiration on principle, could very easily revive dead enthusiasm for times gone by, whether represented by Puccini or by Glenn Miller.

  "Of course, the performance won't be like the one I saw a few years back with the ever-lovely Galli-Curci," said Mr. Swenson laughing.

  Dottie, taking this for a cue, stood up again and resumed her parody. But Dave interruped her, saying: "After all, it is rather a shame the Japanese try to sing. For naniwa-bushi they have the finest vocal equipment in the world—but just imagine a Mozart opera here at the Imperial Theatre!"

  Mr. Swenson was unconcerned. For him Mozart was never opera, but a kind of vaudeville, like that hectic and trivial Don Giovanni. The real opera was Verdi, Mascagni, Wagner, Gounod, and of course, the late lamented Richard Strauss.

  Dottie, seeing that she wasn't going to get to perform, sat down again and pouted. She sighed and then, to irritate her husband, said: "You're so right, dear. Oh, these Japs!"

  The Swensons sat up straight, as though they had just heard a four-letter word, and Dave glared at her. Here he was without pity. Through the years of their marriage he had corrected her when she made the social mistake of disliking Kikes, Niggers, queers, Japs. And he knew well how to correct these little backward slippings.

  "Honey, I think you got a run," he said leaning backward to speak to her in a half-whisper.

  She did. He'd spotted it before they'd sat down and had been saving it for just such an emergency.

  "Oh, my sakes," she said, reverting to Wyoming, as she always did under stress. "I go to stop it. 'Scuse me." And she hobbled quickly from the room.

  Dave, very experienced, at once began repairing the damage. He shook his head lovingly. "Poor kid—all wrought up," he said. Then he added: "She works so much with the Japanese, you know, that I expect her to come home and bend right down on the floor to me any day. Of course, learning anything new—like opera—they're naturally a little slow—just as you and I would be if we tried to learn the Kabuki, say—if, indeed, we could at all. But she has the patience of a saint, I will say that." He smiled fondly in reminiscence. "
And, then, there are days when she just comes home radiant. When she's been able to give a part of herself. Like last night."

  "Poor orphans," said Mrs. Swenson, mollified. "Well, giving is what counts."

  Mr. Swenson, however, was anxious to prove that he was completely open-minded on the burning topic of the Japanese. "No, in her way she is correct," he said. "They are slow. There is just no denying that. But they are thorough—I'll say that for them. They are thorough!"

  "That's right—thorough," said Mrs. Swenson.

  "You know that newspaperman you're staring at?" asked the Major, leaning toward Gloria,

  "Of course. His name is Pygmalion."

  "It's not either, begging your pardon, Miss Wilson. It's Dave Ainsley."

  "Wrong again. And he's talking to Lafcadio Hearn."

  The Major smiled slowly. "Oh, that name's familiar. What outfit's he with?"

  Mr. Swenson took a deep breath. That meant he was going to explain something. "The differences between the two races, theirs and ours, are almost as profound as the similarities are startling."

  Mr. Swenson's life was devoted to the Japanese, and he was the Authority speaking. Dave involuntarily yawned, but changed it into a cough, then into a monosyllable of interest.

  "Now," continued Mr. Swenson, coughing professionally, "take this curious matter. We are proud to say that we owe no man nothing—"

  "Anything," corrected Mrs. Swenson.

  "But they are proud to owe everyone something," he continued, ignoring his wife completely. "Emperor, father, on and on."

  "Yeah, ancestor worship," said Dave.

  The baby-blue eyes of Mr. Swenson looked offended and he bent over Dave with a mixture of pity and gentleness. "Oh, no. That's Chinese."

  "Sorry," said Dave.

  "No, with the Japanese it is different. It is nothing that localized, shall we say? Rather, the entire people have a national debt to the past. Look around you." He indicated the flower shop, which displayed orchids flown from Brazil; the bar, its chromium from Pittsburg; the Harris tweed and Dior-fashioned clothing standing near the windows or sitting in the chairs. "You see, for them there is no present and little future. That is why the country is a living museum, why we can see a man using a 12th-century hammer and a woman wearing an obi which has not changed its style since the late Tokugawa. That is why a battle cry of one of the Yorimitsu clans of the eighth century is still used as a common salutation on the street. Why, even the lowly peasant in his field pens the most exquisite haiku, just as did the sages in days gone past."

  Dave had never seen one of these peasant-penned poems and doubted there were any. At any rate, he must remember a cute remark he'd just thought up: "For old man Swenson the Noble Savage turns out to have a yellow streak up his back." No, that wouldn't do. He'd have to work on it a while before it could become "one of Dave's."

  "A debt to the past," said Mr. Swenson, looking into the Coca-Cola machine as though it were a roaring fireplace. He was bemused for a moment, then recovered himself and added, with a smile: "Consequently, they are more bowed under their obligations than we are under, say, the idea of Original Sin. We feel guilty, it is true. But they—they feel ashamed. It is the same thing. In this way we are alike."

  Mrs. Swenson, used to this, nodded sagely, gratefully basking in the rays of wisdom.

  He went on: "Except, of course, they don't have sin!" This was a favorite thesis of his. The sinless nation, like Sparta, or better, like Athens under Socrates. "At least," he continued, anxious to give the devil his due, "not as we know it. Every man is pure—as in Heraclitus—and all his emotions, be they e'er so base, are good! You see the difference in conception. Now, we feel that every man is sinful—"

  "Like in Milton," interrupted Dave.

  "Precisely. And that we can obtain the state of grace only by a virtuous life and, shall I say, a propitious death, for which we are suitably rewarded. Now, I think it quite significant that there is no Japanese afterlife." He paused significantly, a half-smile on his lips.

  "Ghosts!" said his wife suddenly.

  "Nonsense! Poppycock! Peasant superstition!" shouted Mr. Swenson, furious, the shattered remains of a very carefully contrived Golden Age lying at his feet. In despair he began at once reassembling it and even retraced the conversation that he might get a better grip. "Look you. The Japanese condemns nothing he finds within himself, that is, he find all things good. But at the same time he has an obligation. Obligation? What am I saying! He has a million of them. And he must live up to them. Self-indulgence, as such, is unknown."

  He smiled in reminiscence. Cold baths under waterfalls at two in the morning, when the gods are bathing; beautiful young priests kept awake for a week; golden youths wrestling nude for honor in the palestra .. . the scourging of the flesh!

  "I suppose," he continued, more mildly, "you've noticed the prevalence of the suicide theme in their literature."

  "Sure," said Dave. "Hara-kiri."

  Mr. Swenson pursed his handsome lips. "Oh, no, do forgive an obvious pedantry, but the word, like jujitsu, is just not Japanese. They themselves never use it."

  "I know," said Dave angrily. "Judo!"

  "Well, my dear fellow," said Mr. Swenson, attempting to mollify and correct at the same time, "in the same way, not hara-kiri, but seppuku."

  Dave made a show of shrugging his shoulders. Actually he tucked the thought carefully away, just as he had previously carefully folded up the idea that it was permissible to like Puccini. Thus did he change his opinions and add new thoughts.

  "Well, as I was saying, the suicide theme is very common in Japanese literature. In literature, I say, because it has come to my attention that the rate of actual self-destruction is much higher in Scandinavia, of alI places, than it is here and, for all I know, always has been."

  Dorothy returned and sat down again. She had heard the last sentence and, after turning it over a moment in her mind, said: "That sounds like something I read in a book not long ago."

  "I'm not surprised that someone wrote it up—finally," said Mr. Swenson.

  "What book, I wonder?" She turned a petulant profile toward Dave. "You must remember, Dave. It was that one all about the Jap-an-ese. Could it have been The Rose and the Sword or something like that?"

  Dave looked at his wife, unable to decide whether she was being witty or had just forgotten. He decided the latter. It didn't make any difference, for the Swensons hadn't read a word on Japan—except their own articles—since they'd come out, twenty years ago.

  "The Ring and the Book?" asked Mrs. Swenson anxiously.

  "My wife's such a Browning addict," said Mr. Swenson, and Dave went into private convulsions.

  "But no, my dear," continued Mr. Swenson, smiling at Dorothy. "We were just discussing suicide."

  "Oh? Whose?"

  "No, my dear—the institution, or rather, the ideal, since in Japan no one ever really commits it."

  "But lots of times, in the newspapers—" Dorothy began.

  "Oh, those!" he said, with scorn, then, suddenly disconcerted, looked at Dave and thought of their respective newspapers. He managed to turn his stare into a wink of connivance.

  "I guess you're both right," said Dave easily. "After all, to ego-centered people suicide, either the act or the idea, seems attractive."

  "Well, if you're going to talk Freud..." said Mr. Swenson smiling, anxious to show himself right up with the times, yet equally anxious to communicate the fact that he didn't for an instant subscribe to these ridiculous notions. Ego-centered. His Japanese. Indeed!

  "Yes," said Dottie eagerly, "they're just as ego-centered as anything—like children."

  There was a slight pause, then Mrs. Swenson, measuring her words, said slowly: "I suppose that their immaturity is what makes them so appealing. I'm sure that is why so many Americans, for example, like them. It's a—a sort of feeling of kinship."

  There was another pause, this one longer. Mrs. Swenson had hit all too close for comfort. "Well, my
dear," said Mr. Swenson, "after all, you're a woman."

  Mrs. Swenson wisely let this lie, and Dottie, examining her run, hadn't heard.

  "Get it fixed?" asked Dave pleasantly. "Took you long enough to get lots of things fixed."

  "Yup! Borrowed some nail polish from the girl on duty. Turns out she knew one of my pupils and recognized me. So we chewed the rag for a while. Showed her my tummy, but she doesn't know what it is either. Can't see anything anyway."

  Dave laughed uneasily. "My wife's such a tomboy—always running her socks. Keeps me up to my ears in bills. This nylon's expensive."

  Mrs. Swenson, who was wearing service-weight, hid her legs as best she could under the love seat.

  Mr. Swenson was anxious to reassert his authority on the Subject. "A strange and wonderful people—" he began.

  Dave disliked sentimentality. It was part of being a newspaperman: take the bitter with the sweet, and be damned for personal feelings. "A strange and wonderful war they waged too."

  "Yes, an oddly warlike race. Primitive, yes. Barbaric in their own way too, I'll agree. Even brutal.. . for I don't pretend that some of those atrocity stories aren't true. But what we tend to forget of course is that they treated their own men just as badly. But, then, with all of that, a sensitivity that is rare in history, in the history of the world, and which is absolutely fantastic in modern times." He liked the sound of the word and bit it out a few more times: "Fantastic, utterly fantastic."

  He continued: "And perhaps it is that sensitivity which allows them, when they turn to things Western, to grow impatient. They want to hurry through. They are too swift, too fast. Fast, but not thorough. Not at all."

  It was enough to make one hate the Japanese for life, thought David Ainsley, their innocently having a spokesman like Swenson. Then he indulged in a gambit which usually extricated him from his difficulties. "Well," he said, sounding homespun and scratching his Irish nose, "of course I don't pretend to be a literary man—I'm just an old newspaper hack. In fact you might even say I'm a prostitute, because in my work I'm forced to be a lot more whorish than any of the pom-poms at Yuraku-cho."