Bridge for Passing (10 page)

Why do I say would have? It is possible that somewhere you were laughing. It is still possible. I maintain my stand, until—

Everything was ready for us when we arrived in the quiet place. The birds were singing and flowers were blooming. It did not take long to perform the final ceremony of giving his body back to the earth. Our minister had come with us and he spoke the final words of peace and acceptance. My sons and my stepson stood beside me, strong young men, the stepson to carry on his father’s firm. My daughters walked with me back to the car and we drove away … But oh, that silent last moment, when he must be left behind, and the arrival at the house, now empty! Of these I cannot speak. To other women in like circumstances, who may read these pages, I can only say there is no escape from such moments when they come. They must be lived through, not once but many times in memory. I have been told that they grow easier. I do not find it so. I come back to my home as to a haven whenever I leave it, but it is not the same, and it will never be the same. I know that now. Since there is no escape from the fact, there can only be acceptance. And acceptance comes at last, but not at once—oh, never at once.

I should not, I suppose, have gone to Vermont. But we have always gone there when the summer gets too hot in Pennsylvania. It can grow very hot, for, as someone has said, this State is “the far thin edge of the tropics.” Our woods and fields grow lush as any jungle, and the nights stay hot. Perhaps I felt that I could escape, somehow, from his continuing absence. It took me long to learn how impossible that is, wherever I go in the world. At any rate, after a few weeks I took my three younger daughters with me to Vermont. Years ago, when it became settled that ragweed and I could not exist together, I built a three-room house for him and for me—two bedrooms and a big living room which was also a dining room with a cooking counter. Here he and I had spent good summers, and the children had rooms over the garage for their own. Into this house that had been his and mine, I now went alone, and the girls took the rooms over the garage. I set myself to writing and I practiced my piano, and spent hours on the high terrace facing Stratton Mountain. I do not know why I imagined that anything would be easier here. For one thing, I could not write. My mind, lost in thought and memory and question, simply would not busy itself with the creation of other people’s lives. I was as remote from everyone as though it were I who had died. No, it would not do. Vermont was not the place. And for once I needed another employment than writing. I needed work that I had to do, work with others, compelling me daily to rise early and go to an appointed place where it was my duty to be.

When this conviction dawned upon me I made up my mind. I would go back to Japan and resume my work on the picture. My co-workers had been busy. They had found locations, a fishing village which they thought ideal for our picture, a terraced farm, an empty beach, a fisherman’s house, a gentleman’s house. The volcano we had. They were ready for me to return to the job. When was I corning? I said, immediately. It was nearing the end of August. The girls would go back to school soon, and they could live with their elder sister. There was no family reason to hold me at home and I welcomed the thought of work and Japan.

T
HE ATMOSPHERE INTO WHICH
I descended once more from the jet on the airfield near Tokyo was one of welcome and quiet unspoken sympathy. The deeper the feelings, the Japanese believe, the less should be spoken. We Americans find it necessary to speak, to send letters and cards of condolence. Hundreds of letters had poured into my office before I left home and I had read them all because it was good to know in what esteem he was held and in so many places in the world. And people, friends or strangers, had stopped me on streets and country roads to tell me. “I am so sorry to hear—”

In Tokyo nothing was said, yet everything was conveyed. Consideration was delicate but complete. My room in the hotel was bright with flowers and baskets of fruit. The little maids were ever present and solicitous. I understood, for in Japan even love is not to be expressed in words. There are no such words as “I love you” in the Japanese language.

“How do you tell your husband that you love him?” I once asked a Japanese friend.

She looked slightly shocked. “An emotion as deep as love between husband and wife cannot be put into words. It must be expressed in attitude and act.”

Nor are there Japanese equivalents of our love words—sweetheart, darling, dear, and all the rest. Certain young Japanese are beginning to use the English words, but even they not seriously, perhaps. But perhaps again no one uses these words seriously any more. I hear American directors scattering them carelessly and casually upon the loved and the unloved alike, in the fashion of Hollywood and Broadway, and I always remonstrate. To a writer all words are significant and valuable, individual words as well as words in association, each to be used only in its fitting place, like jewels. The English language is peculiarly rich in the words of love, their roots deep in ancient Anglo-Saxon soil. To hear a man call a secretary or an actress or perhaps only a girl whose name he does not remember by the precious words of love always makes me—well, angry! It is a desecration of true feeling, the deepest in the human heart. For me nothing in life equals or even resembles in value and treasure true love between man and woman, with all it implies. The words we have used for centuries to express this love are not to be tarnished, for they belong to all of us. If they are tarnished by careless misuse, how shall we express true love? We are robbed of something that cannot be replaced. Any woman who has heard the man she loves call her his sweetheart, his darling, his love, can only be profoundly angered when these words are destroyed.

“How can you misuse these words?” I demanded of an American.

He laughed, uncomprehending. “It makes the girls feel good,” he said lightly. “It’s informal—like—you know—friendly.”

The Japanese girls did not feel “good” about it, nor did they consider it friendly. Those few who did were problems. They thought that love words meant love, and they became serious and consequently troublesome. The others, who were not looking for love from American men, with consequent benefits, considered such an American unduly interested in sex and therefore insulting. It took explanations before they could be placated. They were usually too polite to complain in his presence but behind his back what scorn!

“I’ll sue him if he says it again,” a young actress exclaimed, her black eyes bright with fury … And sue him she did. Yes, we had our problems.

Our locations were set, although I had not yet seen them except on film; the next task was to find our cast. Since the story of
The Big Wave
is altogether Japanese, the cast was to be Japanese, and we had already engaged a Japanese crew and cameraman. For the first time an American film company was making a picture in Japan, co-produced by a Japanese film company, the largest and in some ways the best, and with Japanese crew and cameraman. It was an experiment, a profoundly interesting one. I had seen motion pictures made before of my books, but none like this, and with me. I did not intend to interfere with directing or in any of the professional aspects, for I know my areas of ignorance, but I was to have the privilege of being anywhere I liked, and to speak when I wished. On the whole, I believed my fellow workers had confidence in my ability to be silent. I would not speak much or often. I am, in fact, a quiet woman by nature, unless oppressed by what I consider injustice when I become, I am told, excruciatingly articulate.

Certainly I enjoyed sitting in on the casting. We were given office space in the handsome building owned by our Japanese co-producers, and each day I went there early and stayed late, looking, listening, judging, disapproving or approving, while those in command gave auditions to actors and actresses, adults and children. Our first concern was to find the children, two boys, two girls, who were to begin the story. Therefore children came to us, accompanied by mothers.

I have seen many stage children, and they can be sad children. These Japanese stage children, however, were not sad. They were like all other Japanese children, healthy and happy and exuding a general atmosphere of being much loved. Neither they nor their mothers were tense, as so many of our American stage children and mothers are tense, which difference I can only ascribe to the possibility that competition is not as important in Japanese life as it is in ours, and the desire to excel is second to the consideration of human feelings.

They came in, one after the other, each mother unobtrusively following her particular star, and they bowed with the grace bestowed by that extra hinge which seems to have developed in the Japanese back. It is unique, this bow. The Chinese bobs his head cheerfully at greeting and parting and the Korean makes a proud inclination. The Japanese performs obeisance, deep but also proud.

Only one boy in the endless procession seemed reluctant or rebellious. He came in early one morning, flanked by his mother and his aunt, the only boy who needed the escort of two women and it soon became evident why. He was a handsome fellow, but sulky, his bow was just short of courtesy and at first he would not talk. His mother and his aunt, in gentle distress and apology for such behavior, informed us eagerly that he was a champion swimmer. This was good, the part called for a good swimmer and we congratulated the boy, who only continued to look sulky. We invited him to sit down and he sat down, still sulky. He condescended, after several whispered pleadings from his lady relatives, to answer our questions briefly—too briefly—all the time staring at the wall. Yes, he said in answer to direct question, he was in school—Japanese school. Yes, he did speak English—sometimes. He had been three and a half years in Cairo, Egypt, and there he went to English school but he preferred not to speak English. … He liked Japanese school better than English school. … He did not wish to remember Cairo. Well, it was a city, and that’s all. … He grew more and more sulky. Something occurred to us. We put a final question.

“Do you want to be in this motion picture?”

He lifted his head, his face brightened for the first time. He shouted.

“No!”

We put one more arrow question. “Do you ever want to be an actor?”

He shone now like a neon light. “No!”

We burst into laughter and he looked at us hopefully.

“The interview is over,” we told him, “and you are a wise man. You know what you don’t want.”

He tramped out, unsmiling, a lordly male, his female relatives trotting after him, pained but acquiescent. It was obvious that he had won a family victory and that he was accustomed to such victories.

Days passed and the actors narrowed down to the impossibles and the possibles, the latter by far the smaller group. Japan has many excellent actors of both sexes and all ages, but we were looking for excellent actors who also spoke English, since the dialogue was to be in English. At first we hoped, unrealistically, that their English would be perfect. Later we merely hoped their English could be understood well enough so that it could give the illusion of Japanese.

Which illusion reminds me of an incident of my own life in China. I was stopping to rest one day at a wayside inn in a remote province. An old woman came to pour tea into my bowl. I thanked her in Chinese and asked her how she did. She stared at me in terror and dropped the teapot. “The gods save me,” she gasped. “What is the matter with me? I can understand English!”

Something of this we hoped to achieve, but there were times when we wondered if we were fools to hope. The variety of accents in English-speaking Japanese is astounding but they have one characteristic in common. The consonant “L” seems foreign to the Japanese ear as well as to the Japanese tongue.

In such diverting work the day passed until evening fell, and the trouble with every day was that at the end of it there was always night.

For the first time in my life I was sad when evening came. The others went to their husbands and wives, but I came back alone to my hotel room. The windows looked over the roofs of new Tokyo—as I have said, not beautiful, for there has not been time enough to create beauty. The city was hastily rebuilt after the war, a pity, for after it was thoroughly flattened by bombing it would have been well, if possible, to design a city with wide streets and parkways, a modern city but beautiful in the Japanese fashion. It was not done. The war had been harsh, people were desperate to begin living again, and the government was all but bankrupt. Houses went up helter-skelter. Today it is still almost impossible to find a house by its number or even by its street. One can only entrust one’s self to the unknown.

Evenings in lonely hotel rooms are impossible, at least for me. I had friends in plenty, and invitations in plenty, more than I could accept, but these did not fill the need. One had always to maintain a front, or a poise, and this could be done during the day’s work when the mind was engaged. It was different when one had to respond individually to others. In despair and loneliness I took to wandering the streets at night, unknown and free. Tokyo is rich in theaters and motion picture houses and usually I stopped by in one or the other. Though I did not understand the dialogue, the drift of the story was easy to catch, and I could be mildly amused, superficially at least, by what I saw. The houses were always packed, the audiences grave and intense until a comic moment brought loud, staccato laughter, stopped instantaneously by intent gravity again.

On one such evening I chanced to see an American woman of about my own age wandering as I was wandering. We stopped, startled each by the other, then I spoke. She was from Los Angeles, her husband had gone to Formosa, where she did not wish to follow, her daughter had a dinner date with a young American man, and she was indulging in a long-concealed wish to wander about Tokyo alone. By this time, however, she looked uncertain, though not frightened, and I proposed that we see the picture together, which we did, to our mutual enjoyment. The acquaintance ripened into a friendship, and later a dinner with her family, and another still later in Los Angeles. The point of this incident is that I did not realize how an American woman looks in a Japanese crowd. When I saw her, I forgot, of course, how I also looked among thousands of Japanese.