Please Enjoy Your Happiness
Read Please Enjoy Your Happiness Online
Authors: Paul Brinkley-Rogers
This story is dedicated to those Japanese women from all walks of life who with grace, warmth, and kindness helped Japan rise to new greatness after the disaster of World War II.
Contents
25
Can You Find It in Your Heart?
Selected Readings, Films, and Music
Prologue
In the private world of a sweetheart I once had there was a secret valley, much like Shangri-La. She told me that in that valley her family lived happily and all her lost friends waited for her, their faces happy. Her youthful secrets were there, locked in the ice and snow that ringed her paradise. This imaginary valley was not in Tibet. It was not in Japan. It was somewhere in vast landlocked Manchuria in northern China. It was there that Kaji Yukiko was born. She knew she would never see it again.
Yukiko was almost a woman when she fled from Harbin, a sophisticated city of Manchuria. Japan surrendered in September 1945, its puppet state in Manchuria was abandoned, and massive Soviet forces moved in, together with vengeful Chinese guerrillas, forcing the 1.7 million Japanese colonists there to flee for their lives. Repatriated, after many hardships, back to Japan, Yukiko became the ultimate outsider in a homeland she did not know. Tall, beautiful, poised, ferociously curious, gifted in languages including Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, and English, she became a plaything of Hiroshima criminals and wealthy businessmen. But, finally, one terrible day, she ran away. In her chest of drawers, on top of her favourite books of poetry, she kept a short sword – a
tanto shira
– wrapped in deep violet silk, for the inevitable day the gangsters came for her.
Her past was catching up with her when I met her. She had
created a new private world around her interests in literature and music. But she desperately needed someone to confide in, someone to love. She had lost everyone and everything she loved. For her, love had no future.
I was an outsider too: a young English kid who had enlisted in the US Navy. I was nineteen. The year was 1959. Yukiko was thirty-one when she picked me out of the crowd of sailors in the White Rose, the bar in the seaport of Yokosuka where she worked. She walked up to me with a tired smile and said, ‘Hello.’ I was so inexperienced and tongue-tied I did not know what to say. I was focused completely on how near she was to me, and how her eyes were focused only on me. I still remember the mix of fragrance and heat, and it still has the same effect on my aging body as it did then when I was young.
‘What is that book in your hand?’ she asked, in the sort of delicately phrased English that foreigners sometimes speak, unaware that they are putting native speakers to shame.
‘It is poetry,’ I said, my face red.
‘And who is that poet?’
‘I don’t know if you know him. It is Dylan Thomas, the favourite of many young men.’
She looked at me quickly and in disbelief, not as if I were a fool, or clever, but as if I were a blank sheet of paper on which she could write. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said brightly. ‘Mr Dylan Thomas. The wild man. The free man. I envy him. He once wrote to a woman, “Poetry may not appeal to the intelligent mind more than to the unintelligent.” Isn’t that wonderful! Yes. Let’s go! Let’s talk about that.’
I looked around the bar. There were about thirty sailors like me, dressed in their white summer uniforms, some drunk, some loud, some sitting cheek to cheek with girls in bright
glittery gowns. I could not imagine a discussion like this one was really happening. It was like some kind of dream. And yet, here was this intimidating woman, dressed entirely in black, asking me, ‘How old are you?’ and saying, when I answered, ‘Come with me, sailor boy. Come on!’
She told me I was without a doubt the first man in the history of the US Navy who dared to enter a Japanese country-and-western bar with a book of poetry in his hands.
‘You may need a friend,’ she said. ‘Sailors do not read verse. Someone might pick a fight with you because you carry that book. You are not normal,’ she added, in a kindly manner.
Thus began an unfinished romance that was also a friendship. It started right there, in a darkened corner booth upholstered in black vinyl as if it were the back seat in a teenager’s Chevy. As I have grown into my seventies, I have come to accept that this romance is still going on. Even now it haunts me. It survives, bobbing up and down on the surface of my life, which has had its share of disappointments. At times it becomes spectral, and now it is compelling me to write about what happened in the middle months of 1959. I heard that voice again, full of excitement and anticipation: ‘Come on! Come on!’
But this is not a ghost story. This is a story about a real young man – myself – and a real woman. It was Yukiko who stripped illusions from the realities of life and showed me what it takes to be a man. It was her ‘duty’, she said, to educate me in poetry, writing, language, and opera, and to familiarize me with films from the golden age of Japanese cinema and those moody songs about broken hearts known as
enka
. Her actions allowed me to appreciate the importance of loyalty, honour, respect, and courage.
She urged me to live life without regret: to live a life without love if need be.
She predicted with a great deal of conviction in her long letters that I would become a writer and said she knew she would read about me some day. She spent hours typing those letters as if they were manuscripts, infusing them with poetry from forgotten ages and those tough
enka
lyrics – about hopeless love, two-timing men, abandoned women, drunken nights, lost innocence, futile longing – that might as well have been written about her own struggle to survive.
She told me she would always remember what we had shared together after I sailed away forever. That inevitable day was coming. I could not stay. If I had jumped ship, I would have ended up in jail. She asked me many, many times to promise that I would never forget her. She asked for that in her letters. She asked me in person, staring at me with an intensity that I, a mere boy, did not understand but which I appreciate now. I have not forgotten her. Do you remember me, Yukiko?
I began considering the idea of writing this book as a series of new letters to Yukiko some time in 2012. I started after a night in the Blue Marlin Bar in San José, Costa Rica, where men my age sometimes go into tailspins talking about their regrets, some about the women they once loved, which also means the women they will always love. Of course, I thought of Yukiko. But where were her letters? I needed them – I needed their magical qualities to help me write with the kind of passion my friendship with her deserved. It took me a while, but a few weeks later I found them in the poetry section of my personal library, tucked into a thick volume of notebooks written by Gerard Manley Hopkins. One letter was handwritten with a fountain pen in the cursive script of disciplined penmanship
taught in classrooms long ago. The other letters were typed.
As soon as my fingers touched the paper the letters were written on I realized what they were. I stepped back from the shelves and propped up the pillows on my battleship grey couch, which is a wonderful place to read and nap. I read the letters one by one, slowly, in chronological order. I have ten of them. There were more, but somewhere in my long life the rest disappeared, although I do have the notes I made about them when I was correcting Yukiko’s use of English at her request. I read the letters again, and then to my surprise I started sobbing. It was almost like having a broken heart, except that I was thrilled and happy and, strangely, also a little chagrined. I realized that I had been so young when she wrote to me that I had not appreciated how much effort she had made, often with the use of her hefty
Sanseido’s Japanese–English Dictionary
, to lay bare her heart on the softness of this paper made from the leaves of mulberry trees.
I read the letters yet again, this time out loud. I could hear the sound of her voice speaking to me through the static noise of half a century of life that included three broken marriages and all the anguish that went with them, but also the joys of fatherhood, living a full life, and professional success. I have had relationships with several remarkable women during those years. But in that moment it dawned on me that none of those relationships was as compelling and challenging as the one I had with Kaji Yukiko. Her letters are the soul of this story.
These chapters are a tribute to Yukiko and my hope is that readers will find that the friendship she shared was a gift to a very young man who would like in sombre old age to say thank you. The chapters are, in effect, one long letter or a series of letters to this woman who so profoundly influenced my life. To
help the reader understand the historical context, geography and the literary interests of Kaji Yukiko, I occasionally make digressions, many of which Yukiko used to help me understand her world. She might not agree with some of my interpretations and conclusions but I know full well she would enjoy debating and discussing them and, if she thought it was necessary, correcting them with her characteristic humour and care.
A Note on the Text
The reader should know that I have changed Yukiko’s real first and last name so that if she reads this some day she can chuckle privately and enjoy her cup of green tea. I have followed the Japanese convention that family names precede personal names, although in practice Yukiko always referred to herself as Yukiko Kaji in conversations with me. However, from this point forward she will be Kaji Yukiko. Japanese people are accustomed to various renditions of their personal names. ‘Yukiko’ is the formal version. ‘Yuki’ is informal and would be used among friends and family. ‘Yuki-chan’ is informal and is used among friends and family to show affection for someone who is endeared. It is also common to add -
chan
to a name when addressing a child. In a respectful setting, Kaji Yukiko would be addressed as Kaji-san – the -
san
being an honorific. None of this I knew in 1959.
