December 6 (4 page)

From the peak of a ladder, a fireman swung his pole like an executioner’s ax and the house next door came down, front punched in, sides sliding together, a house of cards in a city of cards. Glutted, the fire took on a rosy glow that made Harry feel thoroughly baked. He noticed that his pants and sleeves were wet and smudged. He finally noticed by a reflection of the fire in sequined lapels that Michiko was in the crowd, watching him instead of the flames.

H
ARRY STANK SO MUCH
of smoke that he went straight up to the apartment while Michiko closed the club. He undressed and soaped thoroughly at a bucket, sucked in his balls and sank into a tub of water so hot the steam was suffocating. When he was settled against the velvety wood, he lit a cigarette and let his head rest against the rim. A bath for Harry was both ritual and amniotic fluid. It was his context, the sea he swam in. His missionary parents had been too busy wearing out shoe leather on the byways of Japan to enjoy salubrious moments in a bath, but Harry had been brought up on his nurse’s back. That was how Japanese learned how to behave, bowing whenever their mother —or nurse— bowed. Who had washed him but his nurse? And what followed the washing? A bath veiled in steam, where Harry was as Japanese as the next man.

Through the steam, he noticed Michiko enter the narrow bathroom with Hajime’s gun. She aimed it at Harry. “Did you call her?”

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“Ah, this is one of those circular conversations.”

“
Her
.” The gun bobbed for emphasis.

“She couldn’t talk. Her husband was there.”

A Japanese face could be flat as paper, slits carved for the eyes and mouth. Michiko showed no emotion at all. “If we were married, you could have a mistress, I wouldn’t care. But I am your mistress. I could kill you and then me.”

She aimed at his head, his heart, his head. It was distracting. Also, he was too old for this. Suicide was for the young.

“Have you ever fired a gun before?” Harry asked. It was amazing what he didn’t know about Michiko.

“No.”

“I’ll bet you a hundred yen you can empty that gun at this range and not hit me.”

“Your life is worth that little? A hundred yen?”

“Eight shots, Michiko. You’re not going to get better odds than that.”

“I could do it so easily.”

“Keep your elbows flexed. You know, it’s moments like these that make me wonder what marriage with you would actually be like. Michiko, if you’re not going to shoot me, could you get me a drink?”

“So irritating. Why do you have a gun?”

“An old friend came by.”

“And left you this?”

“I’ll give it back tomorrow.” He pointed to the water. “Michiko, I do believe there’s room for you.”

“Harry, we know from experience there is not. Why are you giving a speech to bankers tomorrow?”

“Why not? I’m a respectable businessman.”

“Respectable? Have you ever looked at yourself, Harry?”

“Well, you’re not exactly the girl next door, either. Okay, I’m going to see bankers in the morning to screw them out of some money. I’m going to be charming and well rested. That means that right now I will enjoy a soak and a cigarette. Unless you are going to shoot me, of course.”

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

“I explained before that I can’t.”

“But you always have an angle.” The Nambu had a dart-shaped sight. Harry waited for it to waver. Not a millimeter. “Who is this?” Michiko asked.

Harry wafted steam aside and saw that in her other hand, Michiko held the newspaper picture of Ishigami. “Where did you get that?”

“Your German friend. Who is it?”

“An officer we knew in China. I guess he’s back.”

“Yes. He came to the club tonight after you left.”

As the news sank in, the bath seemed warmer.

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Exactly what happened?” Harry asked.

“He went to the bar and asked for you. Kondo said he didn’t know where you were. The colonel asked where you lived, and Kondo said he didn’t know that, either. They talked a little.”

That was okay, Harry thought. The bartender had four sons in the military. Ishigami wouldn’t hurt Kondo. “Did he talk to anyone else?”

“The German.”

“Willie? What did Willie say?”

“He doesn’t speak Japanese. The colonel saw this picture on the table and was amused.”

Ishigami amused? That didn’t sound pretty.

“Was he in uniform?”

“Yes.”

“Did he threaten anyone?”

“No.”

Harry was relieved at that. Sometimes soldiers busted up cafés out of patriotic fervor. Harry paid for protection from that sort of agitation, and whether he was leaving town or not, he disliked being out good money.

“As soon as he was gone, I came looking for you.”

That was pure Michiko, Harry thought. She saw no contradiction in holding a gun on him while expressing concern for his safety.

“Then nothing really happened, right?”

Her eyes narrowed, and Harry waited. He could tell she was mustering an attack on a new front. “If there’s a war, what will you do?”

“There won’t be a war.”

“If there is.”

“There won’t be.”

“If.”

A man stands on a rock in a river, and sooner or later he slips. Harry regretted his words even as they left his mouth: “I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to be a sucker, a fall guy, the chump left holding the bag.”

She lowered the gun.

“Ah. That’s all I need to know.”

“Michiko, don’t take that the wrong way. That doesn’t mean I’m skipping—”

But she disappeared from the doorway.

The news that Ishigami hadn’t forgotten was unnerving. Harry had blithely assumed that no one would survive four years of leading bayonet charges on the China front, yet here he was at the Happy Paris. Ishigami, Ishigami, Ishigami. Sounded like the sweep of legs through high grass. It was like walking down through a misty valley and seeing a white kimono far behind but gaining.

Of course Harry was skipping town. Any sane person would. People expected war back in June, and now they were in December, each day like a drop of water trying to fall. The way he saw it, the Westerners trapped in Tokyo were there for a reason. They could have gotten out earlier, but they were grown-ups who had made decisions to stick by their Japanese investments or their Japanese wives. Missionaries wanted to scoop a few more souls. DeGeorge wanted one more Pulitzer. If they were counting on Harry to be their weather vane, forget it. Three more days and there would be no Harry Niles in Tokyo or its vicinity. That was the purpose of his talk at the Chrysanthemum Club, not just to massage an audience of bankers but to earn a million-dollar ticket out of Tokyo. It was a matter of playing his cards in the right order at the right time. He didn’t like the news that Ishigami was in uniform, which probably included a sidearm and sword, but he remembered what the poet said: “I went into my bath a pessimist and came out an optimist.” All he had to do was dodge the colonel for two days, and then it was clear sailing.

Wrapped in a light kimono, Harry wandered with his glass into the living room, which was dark, bedding spread on the floor. Michiko was tucked under the quilt, the gun in her hand. He felt like he was defanging her by easing the gun from her fingers. She stirred, moving her head in dreamy motion.

He had literally run into her when they met, Harry at the wheel of his car, Michiko bloody from a crackdown on the last Reds in Tokyo, a police sweep that scattered the comrades over rooftops and down alleys. Harry had pulled Michiko into the car and driven off, the first in a series of impulsive decisions he regretted, such as taking her home, patching her head, letting her stay the night. She left in the morning and returned a week later, her hair hacked short, with a pack containing a prayer wheel and the works of Marx and Engels. She stayed another night and another and never left Harry’s for good; that was two years ago. If he’d left her on the street, if he’d given her over to the police, if he hadn’t fed her the morning after he’d rescued her. That was probably the worst mistake of all, the fatal bowl of
miso
. If he’d just returned her silence when she left instead of asking whether she liked Western music. Gratitude was always a dicey issue in Japan; the very word arigato meant both “thank you” and “you have placed a sickening obligation on me.” When she returned, she presented him with an Ellington record. What was interesting was that it was one of the few Ellington albums he didn’t own, which suggested the possibility that in the middle of the night, her head bandaged, she had searched his apartment while he slept. Besides admitting she was a Red, she told him nothing about her past. Never did. Harry had seen others like her, tough girls from the mills who organized unions in spite of the owners and police, who got their education from night school rather than Tokyo Women’s College and read
Red Flag
instead of
Housewife’s Friend
. Men, when they went to prison for radical activities, got religion and dedicated their confessions to the emperor. Women like Michiko hanged themselves in their cells rather than give their keepers an inch of satisfaction. Harry had gotten her into the chorus line at the Folies, but she was too argumentative for management, so when the war scare chased his American musicians from the Happy Paris to Hawaii, he replaced them by making her the enigmatic and, apart from lyrics, silent Record Girl.

He heard a scraping outside. The club’s neon sign was off, but in the haze of the street-lamp Harry saw the discreet gate of the willow house directly across from the Happy Paris. A willow house was an establishment where geishas entertained. Harry was no fan of geisha parties, but he occasionally hung out in a back room across the street just to escape DeGeorge, if nothing else. A cart with metal-rimmed wheels went by, the nocturnal visit of the night-soil man visiting homes without plumbing, gathering what kept the rice fields fertile, the cycle of life at its most basic. The cart moved aside to let pass a van with the crossed poles and looped wires of a radio direction finder on the roof. The van sifted the air for illegal transmissions the way a boat night-trolled for squid. Or, Harry speculated, if the van was from the Thought Police, perhaps they were trying to sift dangerous ideas out of the air. They typically liked to raid suspects around three in the morning, but this time they seemed to be just passing through. The surveillance usually annoyed Harry, but with Ishigami on the prowl, the added security was welcome. Anyway, in one week, two at the most, Harry would be in the States. He saw himself driving down Wilshire, having that first martini at the Mexican place around the corner from Paramount where they stuffed the olives with chili peppers. He could taste it.

When Harry left the window and approached the bed again, he saw that Michiko had moved the quilt aside in her sleep. The looseness of an underkimono made her limbs ghostly thin, half submerged in silk. Wouldn’t it be a relief to be with an American girl, a big blonde built for a convertible? He knelt and, with no more pressure than the weight of the air, ran his fingertips around the base of her thumb and up her arm to the warmth and soft hair in the hollow under her arm, then along her collarbone to the line of her cheek as if committing to memory her shape and smoothness, a calligrapher writing in the dark.

4

T
HE THEATER
’
S DRESSING ROOM
was an entry to a new world for young Harry Niles. He and Gen ran errands for singers, dancers, musicians, comedians and magicians, fetching cigarettes, beer by the case, cough syrup for the codeine. Vitamin B was the rage. Soon Oharu would let no one but Harry give her injections. She twisted in her chair, offering her soft, smooth bottom.

Harry’s guide to this new Japan was the artist Kato. With his French beret, color-stained fingers and silver-headed walking stick, Kato cut a consumptive, sophisticated figure. Looking back, Harry realized that Kato must have been only in his twenties at the time, but he was the first person Harry met who had actually been to France and seemed to know about the world. Harry’s father, the pastor Roger Niles, knew about heaven and hell but not so much about the here and now. In turn, Kato took an interest in Harry the way a man might adopt a monkey. The idea that a gaijin could speak like a Japanese, eat like a Japanese and shoplift cigarettes like a born thief entertained Kato on a philosophical level, and the fact that Harry was a missionary’s son amused him enormously.

Harry lived for Saturdays between shows when he, Kato and Oharu walked around Asakusa like the royalty of a raffish kingdom. Asakusa stood for pleasure, for theaters, music halls, ballrooms, tearooms, licensed and unlicensed women. Everyone could afford
something
in Asakusa. And everyone, of course, admired Oharu in her pillbox hat, white gloves and long French dress that slithered over her like a snake. She had a dancer’s athletic body. Silk hugged her legs and slid across her body while she looked blandly out from under her painted brows.

Sometimes they would step outside Asakusa to a French patisserie in the Ginza to devour éclairs or visit the Tokyo Station Hotel, which was built into one of the station’s domes. The hotel had an elevator and a plush lobby with velvet chairs, but its greatest attraction was a wrought-iron balcony that ran around the inside of the dome below a crown of plaster eagles. Harry stood on one side of the balcony, Oharu on the other, and her merest whisper would bend around the dome to his ear as if she perched on his shoulder. Once they went to HibiyaPark for a concert of
modanjazu
, modern jazz. American Negroes played a brassy, speeded-up music before an audience both stupefied and curious. When the band left the stage, people reached with a total lack of self-consciousness to touch the skin of the musicians as if their color might rub off. There was a sense at the time of change and exhilaration. Japan had been on the winning side of the Great War. Fortunes were being made. The future was at hand, nowhere nearer than in Japan, the new great nation, and especially in Tokyo, the seat of the Son of Heaven. If anyone in this center of industry noticed Harry, they saw a pale, unusually round-eyed Japanese schoolboy with a typically shaved head, ratty sweater, knickers and clogs.

Kato noticed. “We have a real discovery, Oharu. He’s like an urchin out of Dickens, and he’s right here in the middle of Tokyo. He has a guardian who’s always drunk, so Harry gets the money orders and pays the bills. I’ve heard him on the telephone. Do you ever wonder how a boy his age buys sake? Harry calls the sake shop and, in the voice of a Japanese woman, says a boy, a gaijin, no less, will be by to pay and pick up the sake. That’s when Harry doesn’t out-and-out steal it. We may be rearing a monster, Oharu, you and I. I suspect so. I think our Harry has all the morals of a young wolf. The real question for me is, is he a monster with sensitivity. I can’t waste my time with someone who has no eye for color.”

On hot days, Kato, Harry and Oharu stayed in Asakusa and went to the movies. Asakusa boasted more theaters per square foot than anywhere else on earth. The three friends sat in the dark, eating dried fish with beer and watching Buster Keaton take pratfalls on the screen while, in the back of the theater, a fan blew cool air from a block of ice.

At all foreign films a Movie Man sat onstage to translate the dialogue titles and what the audience was seeing. “Now Buster is running after the train. Now the train has turned around, oh, now the train is after him. Puff, puff, puff! Puff, puff, puff! He calls out to Mary, ‘Save me! Save me!’ Mary calls, ‘Run, Buster, run!’”

“Have you noticed,” Kato would inquire loudly of all the nearby viewers, “that, according to the Movie Man, the heroine in American movies is always called Mary. Is this likely? Don’t they have any other names in America? Why is the villain always named Robert?”

“Kato is an expert on villainy,” Oharu said to Harry. “He says an artist has to try every vice.”

“In Paris we drank green absinthe and smoked hashish,” Kato said. “It was the happiest time of my life.”

Three rows ahead was the dancer Harry had seen his first day backstage at the music hall, the girl who changed with such naked cool from ballerina to majorette. Despite the dark he saw every detail, the wavy perm of her hair, a hat that was not much more than a feather, the shadow of her neck, her ear like a curled finger beckoning him, although she had never spoken to him other than to send him for cigarettes.

Kato followed Harry’s attention. “You like little Chizuko? Too bad, it looks like she already has an admirer.”

The admirer was an army officer. Harry immediately cast for explanations: father, uncle, family friend.

“Chizuko’s not for you,” Oharu whispered.

“Chizuko could be perfect for him,” Kato said. “A playmate his own age, inventive, full of energy.”

“Leave him alone,” Oharu said.

“I’m sure something can be arranged,” said Kato. Oharu pinched his arm.

Afterward they took in the theater of the streets. Kato taught Harry to appreciate the storyteller with his slide show and never-changing tales, the candy maker who turned and tugged rice dough into cats and mice, the publicity bands who banged through the alleys with saxophones, drums and spinning umbrellas to sell soap, seltzer, cigarettes. The twenties were a loud, bright time of modern girls —
mogas
— who worked at new telephone exchanges, sold French perfumes in department stores, punched tickets on buses. Fashion was war. On one corner, a corps of Salvation Army uniformed like majorettes would shake tambourines and sing “Rock of Ages” while, from the next corner, the Buddhist Salvation Army in saffron robes tried to drown them out with bells and chants. No one knew how the next social advance would take place. In a Ginza department-store fire, salesgirls burned to death rather than leap down to nets and embarrass themselves. Immediately a law passed requiring salesgirls to wear panties, and two thousand years of fashion changed. There was, as Kato pointed out, nothing more beautiful than a kimono. A woman in a hand-painted kimono and obi was wrapped in a work of art. Western fashion was drab by comparison, but as color leached out of modern clothes, it spread into billboards and movie posters, matchboxes and postcards, race cars and airplane banners. And, of course, each word, each character in every sign or delivery boy’s jacket was a picture. Every street was a flood of images.

Kato lived in the Ginza above a bookstore in rooms that he said were very French, very
art nouveau
. Harry didn’t know what France or nouveau was like, but he didn’t doubt it was exactly like this. Armchairs seemed wrapped in vines. Sconces were glass flowers on stems of brass. Even the teapot looked alive enough to hop from the brazier. French posters of ballet and cancan dancers had places of honor on the walls. Japanese prints of a young woman teasing a cat, and a geisha offering her shoulder to a tattoo needle, were strewn on a table.

Kato said, “Hokusai and Yoshitoshi, all the great Japanese artists, were inspirations for Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Modern art is Japanese art through French eyes.”

The lecture was wasted on Harry. He much preferred the simple lines and secret messages of the Japanese prints. How the girl innocently batting with the cat revealed the provocative nape of her neck cowled in red. How the geisha bit into a cloth to stifle pain the same way lovers stifled cries of ecstasy.

“Do you paint here, too?” Harry asked. He saw no easel, paints or canvas.

“Open your eyes.”

Harry noticed how Kato had positioned himself by the poster of a French cabaret, a line of cancan dancers with blue faces and red hair. In a corner, however, was the Japanese calligraphy of Kato’s name. The poster was an imitation.

“You did that?”

“Good, you aren’t totally blind. There’s hope for you yet, Harry. You help me deliver the prints on the table and we’ll meet Oharu and go to a Chinese restaurant. She loves Chinese food.”

Harry didn’t meet Kato’s customers. It was a warm day in May, and he was happy to go along and wait outside while the artist took prints, boxed and loosely wrapped in silk cloth, around town. The last delivery was to the museum in UenoPark. UenoPark was famous for its hills of cherry trees, although the flowers had passed and the branches, dark as patent leather, were going to green. What Harry liked about the park were its drunken rickshaw men, street magicians, beggars and “sparrows,” prostitutes who carried a ready rolled-up mat. Kato seemed to know each fire-eater, mendicant and whore.

This day, however, the usual transients had disappeared, the park was empty, sparrows flown. In a city of crowds, Ueno Park was mysteriously quiet until Harry saw red flags march over the hill, so many that the cherry trees seemed to toss in waves of red. These were followed by ranks of men wearing red bandanas tied around their heads and carrying signs that read
RICE IS THE PEOPLE
’
S PROPERTY
, a surprise to Harry, who had been taught at school that all the rice in Japan was the emperor’s. Some marchers were university students, but most were life-hardened workers holding their strong fists high. As they marched, their song spread across the landscape of the park: “
Arise ye workers from your slumbers / Arise ye prisoners of want
…”

” ‘The Internationale,’” Kato said. “It’s May Day. They’re Communists.”

It was thrilling, the unity of voices, the forward motion of history that swept up Kato and Harry. Flags seemed to set the park on fire as the phalanx swung down a wide flight of steps to the street, where a row of police waited. Like the bank of a river, the blue line of uniforms redirected the course of the march, containing it along a high stone wall. Demonstrators ran ahead to outflank the police, but they were checked by the arrival of flatbed trucks bearing men in black headbands, with shirtsleeves rolled back from tattooed arms. Newspapers always identified groups like this as patriotic citizens; their tattoos revealed them as yakuza, initiated members of the underworld, but criminals could be patriotic, too. All Harry knew was that it was like watching a painting of a battle come to life, in place of warring samurai the modern armies of the streets. Demonstrators raced, waving and snapping their flags. Men in black headbands jumped off the trucks, shouted, swung ax handles. As the two forces collided, individuals turned to indistinct forms grappling with each other. A red vanguard plunged through the black ranks, and Harry felt the flags surge, bearing away all opposition. Red paint splattered the trucks.

Kato clutched his package. His eyes lit up. “We’ll see some action now.”

As the battle became more equal, fighting became more vicious. What the thugs in black headbands lacked in group discipline, they made up for in back-alley experience. Anyone who fell was stomped before he rose, but Harry saw how oblivious to danger Kato was, and the sense of invulnerability was catching. Besides, Harry was proud to be part of any event that entertained Kato so much.

Just when Harry was sure the red flags would carry the day, horses with blue riders moved down the park steps. Mounted police carrying bamboo rods. It was wonderful, he thought, to hear the sound of hooves on stone, the muffled breathing of the horses like the Battle of Sekigahara, when Ieyasu, the founder of Tokugawa rule, crushed his enemies. It was a scene with everything except flights of arrows and the smoke of matchlocks. As marchers noticed the closing trap, confusion spread. They tried to organize a stand around their banners, but the impact of the horses was too much. Black headbands waded in with their shafts. Flags swayed. Toppled. One moment Harry stayed upright amid contending men, the next he was sucked under a truck like a swimmer out at sea. Between tires he saw Kato go down, walking stick and package wrested from his hands. Harry didn’t see Kato’s adversary, only the walking stick as it broke over Kato’s head. On his elbows, Harry crawled to the package and covered it with his body. He hadn’t kept track which prints had been delivered. The one he shielded could have been the girl with the cat, the strolling girl, the geisha with the tattoo artist. On the ground he recalled each one completely, the embossing of their golden kimonos, the shadowed pink around their eyes, their tremulous lips as if they were alive and asking for protection.

Once the issue was decided, the rout was swift. Demonstrators scattered, bearing the wounded they could carry. Those that didn’t escape were dragged onto trucks for further beating at a less public venue, or pushed into vans by police. In a matter of minutes the street was cleared, except for strewn shoes and banners and bloody shirts. Kato staggered and giggled as if drunk on survival. A dark stripe of blood ran from his beret.

Harry looked up. “I saved the picture.”

“The print?” Kato rocked on his heels. “Harry, there are hundreds of prints, every print is a copy. You risked your life for nothing, which proves you have true Yamato spirit.” With his own blood, using a finger as a brush, Kato put a mark on Harry’s forehead. “Because you have proved yourself a true son of Yamato, I declare you, I baptize you, Japanese.”

It was, as far as Harry was concerned, true glory.