Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (26 page)

- The police do. A cop actually came to my door.

- He was only doing his duty, he explained: Come on, now, this happens to all of us occasionally. We all have to live together peacefully. Japan's a small country. You've just got to learn to put up with it.

- But I'm not guilty, I said, upset, using somewhat dramatic language.

At this point his wife came and pulled him away. Though she whispered, I heard quite plainly what she said: Now you stop—we don't want to get involved.

A short period of peaceful coexistence followed. Then one night, very late, there was a great pounding at my door. I was asleep but I knew who it was. Rushing to the door, barefoot, in shorts, I caught the scurrying Mrs. Shiraishi before she reached the stairs.

- Look, I said, holding on to her, speaking softly, carefully, as though to an upset child, or an excited animal: Look, just come and see for yourself. There is no one here. I am alone. I was asleep. No one was making any noise.

She allowed me to pull her to the door. I turned on the light. She seemed to be searching for signs of a party, but I also saw that curiously greedy look which solitary people have when peering into others' homes.

- They're all on the balcony.

I turned and stared, realizing that she did not believe what she was saying. She merely did not want to be in the wrong.

- Then come over here, I said, crossing the room and opening the balcony door.

She peered into the dark.

- They climbed down.

- Mrs. Shiraishi. This is the eighth floor. There's no way to climb down. You've been hearing things.

- I know what I heard, she said—a round ball of a woman with eyes like knives.

- Look, I replied, seeking to understand what was making her behave in this fashion: This apartment is old. Sometimes I too hear things. They seem to come from just above. But they don't. They're coming from some other apartment. So maybe someone really is having a party and it sounds as if it might be here, but it's not. It's somewhere else.

I was hoping not only to give her some kind of reason for having mistakenly bothered me, but even perhaps to send her out to pound on other doors.

But she stood there in her nightwear, small, compact, her gray hair a helmet: I heard what I heard, she recited, and I know what I know.

In the morning I woke up the head of the Shuwa Mansion Residents' Association and told him what had happened. Clutching his robe about him, shifting on his bare feet, he said: Oh, Mrs. Shiraishi. We know about her.

- Well, if you know about her then can't you stop her banging at doors and waking up members of your association?

It was not until this was said that I realized I had done the same to him, woken him out of a sound sleep to complain. He seemed unaware of this, however:

- The fact is that when we've got a country as crowded as this, one has to learn to get along. Now, I know that Mrs. Shiraishi can be a nuisance. But, even so, the woman has had a pretty hard life. Though it isn't generally known, actually, her husband killed himself.

- I'm not at all surprised.

The head of the residents' association looked at me sadly, as though my attitude was one of the things the matter with this otherwise peaceable world.

- Look, I said, deepening this impression: I can call the police too, you know.

He shook his head: Oh, we wouldn't really want that.

- Well, I didn't really want that old woman banging on my door in the middle of the night either, you know.

Back in my apartment I slammed the door and let my own suspicions have their way. Oh, I knew why this was happening to me. I certainly wouldn't be treated like this if I wasn't foreign. It was because I was a foreigner that this crazy old woman had unleashed her paranoia on me. And it was because I was a foreigner that I was being fobbed off with talk of how tiny Japan was and how we all ought to be living cheerfully together. And this from the man who by rights ought to have been protecting me.

I told the piano teacher as much. She nodded in a sympathetic way, then remarked: But it's true, what he said. Don't you think you could put up with it, a little thing like this?

- A little thing! I cried: That crazy woman pounding on my door in the middle of the night! Is that a little thing?

- But if she thinks you are making all that noise... not, of course, that you actually are.

- Look. You live next to me. Have you ever heard any of my wild all-night parties?

- No, I haven't. But you must remember that these apartments have very thin walls and so one can hear a lot. Perhaps it's just the usual everyday noises that she's complaining about.

- Perhaps you're right, I said, now confirmed in my own paranoia: Because I can certainly hear all yours!

After that I talked to the retired postal worker:

- And the head of the residents' association will do nothing at all about her. Nothing. She's a menace!

- I know, he said, looking very unhappy: But we're all in the same boat. We've all got to make the best of it.

- Oh? Well, why then do
I
have to make the best of it and
she
doesn't—if indeed I am making all that racket every night?

I knew why, all right: it was because I was foreign and she wasn't; because I was an interloper and she wasn't. This I did not say, perhaps only because I had no opportunity—for at that moment his wife called out
(Anata!)
and with a show of helplessness he closed the door.

I stormed back to my room, and heard the telephone ring. It was, of course, Mrs. Shiraishi. This time, however, she was not complaining. She said, surprisingly:
Naka yoshi ni narimasho
—Let's be friends.

At once I was at her door, anxious indeed to be friends. She stood there, small, round, neat, and invited me into the kitchen. I stared about me, eager to see what kind of lair the monster had.

And there I was introduced to her daughter, a person about my own age, with rimless glasses, cold as ice, staring at me with open belligerence.

- I asked her to come all the way down from Gumma, I was in such a state, no sleep, every night those horrible noises, and she said that if we became friends maybe you would somehow be more quiet and I could get at least a little sleep. Here.

And she put a small glass of plum brandy into my hand.

- All right, Mrs. Shiraishi, I promise not to make any noise and you must promise not to telephone me or call the police or come banging at my door.

- But the noise, the noise.

- Look, Mrs. Shiraishi. There is no noise. It's in your head. You think you hear it.

I turned to her daughter for some kind of understanding. Surely she must know how crazy the old woman was—she was her own child. I met with none, however, merely a cold and rimless stare.

- Oh, I saw Mrs. Watanabé on the street, cried Mrs. Shiraishi: And she said you're getting neurotic, Mrs. Shiraishi, and I said to her yes I certainly was, and why not, me without a wink for weeks because of all the noise going on every night. So as a last resort Mariko here said we should try to become friends.

Despite my earlier eagerness, I did not in fact want to become friends with her or her rimless daughter. I wanted never to see either of them again. And yet I wanted to stop tiptoeing about my own apartment and wincing when I flushed the toilet. I wanted to take back from this old witch the power that I had given her.

Did she herself believe any of this business? I still wonder about that. Perhaps it isn't even a relevant question. She had merely found something, finally, to which to devote her life: me and my noisy ways. Her paranoia had found a perfect object.

And so, I now see, had mine. Mad Mrs. Shiraishi, her chilly child, the piano teacher, the postal worker and his spouse, the head of our ineffectual little organization, even the cop on the beat—all were united in this great plot against me, whose only sin, after all, was that of being a foreigner. This would not have happened to me, was my belief, if I had been Japanese.

As indeed, I realize now, it wouldn't have. For then I would have behaved quite differently. For one thing I would have taken no watermelons to crazed and dangerous neighbors, and even had I done so, I imagine I would then have moved skillfully through the association and among the neighbors until enough social pressure had accumulated to crush the old hag.

As it was, I finally did the thing that Japanese do when they fail. I gave up. When the phone calls began again with tearful pleas for me not to flush my toilet with quite such vehemence, when a new cop appeared and had to be informed, when the postal worker was out whenever I asked, then I did what any ordinary citizen would have done. I moved.

My apartment had become as though haunted. I was creeping silently about in it, sliding doors open and shut ever so carefully, and actually refraining from pulling the chain except when absolutely necessary.

The place is probably haunted still. Whoever was unfortunate enough to move into it probably received visitations from the same old body with her hair in a bun. And if they are fully and successfully Japanese they are probably putting up with it.

For that is the true difference. The problem is not simply whether one is foreign or not, but rather whether one can grin and bear it—whatever "it" is. This is what counts. That foreigners notoriously cannot do so makes the matter seem more fraught with prejudice than it perhaps is.

Now moved elsewhere, with nice quiet neighbors in the apartment below, I sometimes think of Mrs. Shiraishi. Old, alone, with only that cold child to call her own and relations not too good there either, shunted off into an apartment, forgotten—is she not symptomatic, in her way, of these times, of this society?

Well, maybe, but I am not interested in that. Mrs. Shiraishi remains for me a real person, not some representative of her people. A real person who in several and highly uncomfortable ways resembles me. We both cause disharmony. Perhaps that is the real reason why I could not put up with her, why I could not somehow manage to live peacefully with my neighbor in this small country.

Busy behind his desk, he always had time for the foreigner. Leaning back, he smiled indulgently.

- Well, what is it this time? he wondered, showing his even teeth: More about Ozu?

He knew that I liked the work of this film director and was concerned that it was never shown abroad, though he had told me often enough why it wasn't.

- They wouldn't understand, he had said, smiling: It's just too Japanese for them. You know that all our critics call Ozu the most Japanese of all film directors. So there we are.

This had been stated with such finality that I could think of no reply except: I'm not Japanese and
I
understand.

He had looked at me as though about to challenge the latter part of the statement, then seemed to think better of it, opting instead to laugh and say: Oh, you. You aren't a real foreigner any more. You've stayed far too long for that. If we tried to judge them all by you we'd be in big trouble.

Big trouble he wanted to avoid. The trouble of having prints subtitled. The trouble of sending them abroad. The trouble of having them fail, as they certainly would. And his position as head of a department in the large motion-picture company that had produced, among many others, the films of Yasujiro Ozu did not permit this sort of failure.

So today, as always, he visibly braced himself when he saw me, and gave me his best smile: More about Ozu?

I nodded. The people at the Berlin Film Festival were interested. Wouldn't the company permit a retrospective?

- But why? he wanted to know: The whole idea is wrong. We'd simply be wasting our time. And money. Making those prints, having them subtitled. And for what?

- For getting Ozu's films known abroad, I repeated. Then, anticipating his next comment: Why can't foreigners understand Ozu's films anyway?

- But I've told you. They're just too Japanese. They haven't been adapted for the foreign market. Look. Foreigners like our sword-fight films, our action dramas. They can make sense of them. They're almost the same as their own pictures except for the swords. And they like that. Exoticism. That's what they like.

- But what about
Rashomon?
What about
Ugetsu?
What about the other films by Kurosawa and Mizoguchi? They were successful.

- Exoticism. That's what foreign audiences want. And Ozu just hasn't got it. His films are realistic. They're about the way we really live. And they're just as slow as life is. Look, films like that would go over nowhere else.

And so it continued during the following weeks; but eventually I had my way and some Ozu films were sent to Berlin—not the full retrospective I had hoped for, but five of the later films, subtitled. I took them there and the reception was intelligent, enthusiastic. And, more to the company's point, the foreign rights were sold.

When I returned I presented myself at his desk and was greeted with the same big smile. I then thanked him for his cooperation and asked if he was satisfied.