Please Enjoy Your Happiness (12 page)

It was you, I suppose, who hung the small bells in the bushes and in the lower branches of the paulownia, together with little jagged, folded strips of pure white paper on which, you told me, you wrote your prayers. A breeze came up from the sea with the smell of brine and the coolness of the ocean, and your prayers and bells waltzed in the bright light. Many years later, when I was listening to the pianist Cristina Ariagno’s performances of Erik Satie’s mathematically precise pieces, I was reminded of that scene. I also remembered that when you came out onto the porch again, the yukata was draped loosely around your shoulders so the nape of your neck was exposed to the top of your spine. Your hair was piled up and held in place with four long metal and tortoiseshell
kanzashi
, which stuck out like chopsticks at odd angles. Long strands of wet hair hung down over your cheeks. Your eyes were moist, and so were your lips. Your face was flushed, as if with excitement. When you moved you took such short steps, confined as you were inside the yukata. You held the upper part of your body above the narrow sash cinched tightly round your waist extraordinarily erect. You glided towards me, luminous, as the bells tinkled. This was all so new to me. For the first time I realized how profoundly different we were: you, the older woman from a culture I knew almost nothing about, and I, the young man so keenly aware that he was totally out of place, defenceless, dependent, enchanted. I tried to remember Commander Crockett’s dramatic warnings, but they were entombed in that great mass of steel called the
Shangri-La
and they did not resonate up here on the hill, which was, I was sure at that moment, much closer to paradise.

‘Are you all right?’ you asked. I sat down to mask the fact that I was trembling. How funny, I thought, that in front of Crockett
I was petrified but I did not tremble. Here, however, in front of this woman with that exposed neck and beads of glistening sweat moving slowly down her skin towards her bare shoulder, I was truly awed, and frightened. We were no more than two feet apart.

‘Do you like my yukata?’ you asked, a little amused. I nodded. ‘Are you sure you are OK?’ you asked again. You lit a dark green stick of temple incense. The trail of fragrant sandalwood smoke curled round and round, turning into near nothingness as it gathered around you. I shook my head slowly in response to your question and I tried to smile. But I did not have enough experience in this world to tell you what was on my mind. In fact I did not know what I was thinking. I still do not know, although if I look out into my garden and see the dense, deep red blossoms on the Rouge Royale French rose, I get a hint.

‘In Japan,’ you said, ‘this is not supposed to happen. You are really a child, you know. An older person does not confide in a younger person. It is supposed to be the other way around. But I do owe you some kind of explanation. It is the polite and correct thing to do. You are very young, but in the last few weeks you have become wiser . . . Not cynical, like me, but wiser, maybe like a cat.’ You laughed. ‘Yes, like a
kuroneko
, like a black cat, cautious but curious and ready to pounce.’ You laughed again as the bells clinked in the breeze and your prayers fluttered, attracting the attention of celestial beings, I suppose. ‘My friends ask me about you, and I tell them, he is really my pet. But be careful of his sharp teeth and his very sharp claws.

‘I am going to tell you something,’ you said. ‘I am going to start talking. I am going to use my broken English to tell you about three parts of my life. This may take a while, and also I
have to use your so stupid language. You will struggle to understand. Maybe I will give you a severe headache. Don’t worry, though. I have aspirins, and if you are in pain, I will so good massage your head and your shoulders.

‘My life has been full of pain and I believe that you have been sent to me to share that burden. You are still like the sheet of writing paper that you were on the first day we met. You don’t know about we Japanese. You don’t know that according to our religion, life is supposed to be happy. If your life is not happy, and the place where you are is not happy, and there is no harmony, we clap our hands and we pray and we are purified. Yes, Mr Paul, you will share with me and you will be instantly unhappy. But in the end, maybe many hours or even days from now, we will say a prayer together and we will be happy. So happy. Do you remember when I did not die on that day – when I decided to die so that I would be happy? That was a mistake. You . . . a nice simple boy . . . you gave me one more chance at happiness so brief that I will almost die from that happiness. But first you have to suffer.’ You laughed yet again. You reached out and touched my hand. ‘Don’t be scared,’ you said. ‘I will show you the way.’

Yes. You would show me the way – a pathway, maybe – as you talked about your past. But I knew enough about your ways to realize that I would have to be patient. I remember that one day you were reading a magazine, and you pointed to a full-colour reproduction of Monet’s famous painting of water lilies. ‘There is too much beauty in this painting,’ you said, suddenly. ‘It is too overwhelming, too bold. Beauty is best presented when it is concealed. And secrets? Secrets are like beauty. You will never know the reasons for beauty. They are so secret, no one knows.’

If you were going to show me a pathway it would lead to someplace unknown. Would it lead to happiness? Again, I realized I was in such an unfamiliar place. The
Shangri-La
, with its hoard of nuclear weapons, was close at hand but so far away. Neither prospect was comforting. So I stood my ground.

‘I have been thinking about this for several days,’ you began, sitting down beside me, so close I could feel heat from your body. ‘Please forgive me.’ I could smell just a hint of that perfume you used whose name I did not know and will never know. ‘I have been planning what to tell you, in my own way, so that you will understand who I am. I hope so. Please try. You will remember all of this, one day, long, long after you sail away and I am a memory.

‘Once upon a time a small girl was born in Harbin. This was a beautiful city in north China, in the land of the Manchus. This was my home. This is where I came from. I am “Japanese”, but also I am not Japanese. I am like you: You are “American”, but you are not American. First, Harbin belonged to China. Then it belonged to Russia, and then it belonged to Japan when it created Manchuria. Those were very confusing times. My father was a policeman – a military policeman. We call them
kempei.
You call them . . . ?’ You looked at me closely for a response. I gave none. You adjusted the temple incense. You clapped your hands to attract the attention of your deities, which I am sure were now attentive. ‘I am going to pray now,’ you said. ‘For a few minutes I will be pure. This will permit me to tell the unpleasant truth.’

What did I know then about
kempei
? Absolutely nothing.

You plunged into the truth with such determination. I still could not take my eyes off the back of your neck. I could tell that you had done some rehearsing, as you had rehearsed the
English word you detested so much,
dangerous
. I could sense that you were laying out history as if opening a window and allowing light to fall on your statement in Kamakura that your father had been an ‘executioner’. Further down the pathway would be new light, spilling on the evil man at the train station and who knew what else.

‘My parents were Japanese, of course. We were from Otake, a small town near Hiroshima. My mother married below her class. Her father – my grandfather – was a doctor, who had studied in Germany. Like my father, he loved Beethoven, especially the piano concertos played by the great Artur Schnabel.’

That was a shock. ‘Really!’ I exclaimed. My father also loved Beethoven, and when he was a young man he held a short conversation with Artur Schnabel outside the Royal Albert Hall in London and told him how much he admired his technique. ‘And do you know—’ I began, before I thought better of it and silenced myself. Maybe I can end that sentence for you now. It would have been, ‘And do you know that Schnabel’s mother was deported from Austria to the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt in 1942, where she quickly perished, which was one of the reasons Schnabel never returned to your grandfather’s beloved Germany or to Austria after the war.’ How can it be, I asked myself, that two human beings from countries so distant from each other could share the fact that their forebears admired the genius of Artur Schnabel?

By the time my thought was stifled, you were already explaining why your mother married your father. ‘You see,’ you said, ‘one evening my grandfather heard a young student pianist play at a concert in Hiroshima, and he admired his determination to finish the piece even though he made many mistakes. His
mistakes were ‘brilliant’, my grandfather said. After the concert, my grandfather invited the student, my father, to play piano at his home.’ You said your mother, who was only sixteen at the time, shared that admiration, because in those days your father always played piano with a lot of mistakes, as did Schnabel. He did that until the marriage was arranged with your mother. Your father could not find work as a pianist, so he did the next best thing – he joined the military police intelligence service, where he used his mathematical skills to become an expert at breaking codes, and then he started playing Erik Satie and seldom made mistakes again.

I nodded. This I could understand. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘there is no emotion at all in playing Satie. Satie never called himself a musician. He called himself . . . what is that word? A
phonometrician
– a person who measures sound, a technician, a person working with formulaic precision . . . almost as if he had contempt for those who listened to his music.’

You slowly began explaining that Harbin was at the far end of the railroad connecting it and other big Manchurian cities with the port of Dairen, where there was a large Japanese garrison. Dairen linked the industrial riches of Manchuria with resource-poor Japan. In 1932, the Imperial Japanese Army caused consternation back in Tokyo by striking north-eastward from Dairen – without authorization – and seizing all the manufacturing centres of Manchuria, one after the other, including Harbin. The Japanese went to great lengths to establish and legitimize the idea of a Manchurian state, which they called Manchukuo.

I have not forgotten all of this, Yuki. But there were often gaps in my understanding until I began writing to you again, like this. Recent research I did showed that, in 1940, there were
42 million people living in Manchuria, of whom more than 1.7 million were Japanese settlers. According to Japanese government planners, the Japanese population was to have grown to 5 million by 1950. At 380,000 square miles, Manchuria was bigger than Texas by a third. It had its own emperor, P’u-i, of the Manchu dynasty, appointed by Japan to preside over the puppet state. Various Manchu warlords swore allegiance to Japan. Some Chinese patriots joined guerrilla groups to contest control, but the Japanese military was highly trained and well equipped, and its ‘punitive expeditions’ ensured that Japan kept control of urban centres.

You said the army also opened up large areas of forest and farmland for colonists from Japan who, starting in the late 1920s at the dawn of the Great Depression, responded to government-sponsored exhortations to leave Japan and occupy this new frontier as ‘pioneers’. You spent some time laying out all of this. It was as if you were delivering a lecture about a subject dear to your heart that no one cared about any more.

Harbin was a relatively remote railroad hub with an unusual history. You told me it was home in the 1930s to more than twenty thousand Russian Jews who had been living in exile in Siberia. It was also home to a good number of Europeans, including quite a few Polish Catholics, seven thousand of whom had been sent to Manchuria in the early 1900s by the Russian czar to build railroads. The city’s international mix also incorporated a host of adventurers, including many anti-Jewish White Russian fascists who fled Russia in the years after the 1918 revolution. Japan built steel mills and established other heavy industry in Harbin, knowing that it was secure from long-range bombing sorties if war ever came.

The Jewish community had its own schools, hospitals, and
civic centres, you said. Harbin became known to the outside world as ‘The Paris of the Orient’, and also as the ‘City of Music’. The intellectual life was rich and varied. Many Japanese children, such as you, had Jewish friends. Jewish social gatherings were multilingual.

No wonder, I understand now, your English was so much better than that of the average Japanese. No wonder you could make the big leap to forge an intense bond with a young foreigner drifting around the fringes of Asia. No wonder you read Western philosophy and poetry and were so familiar with the great composers, and no wonder you needed to listen to classical music on the radio and to talk about poetry even with an unschooled primitive youth like me. Harbin was an ideal place for your father to continue his piano studies. His rigidly severe Satie recitals at home gave him an opportunity to escape the rigors of the work he was assigned, and to ensure that his control over his household was total.

Because it was out of sight of most forms of scrutiny, Harbin was also an ideal site for the Imperial Japanese Army to establish Unit 731, the military’s so-called Epidemic Prevention Department. You were reluctant to talk about this in detail at first. But it was quickly apparent that your father’s role as a
kempei
, terrorizing civilians – although not the Jews – was as shameful for you as your father’s desire to subjugate his wife and his children. You mentioned briefly again that your father often beat your mother and his sons, but that he never touched you, a fact that caused you to be truly terrified because you were so certain that he would lash out at you sooner or later. Your brothers were fearful, but having experienced his wrath, they were able to live with their terror. You, however, spent a lot of time, even when you were a very young girl, at the homes of
Jewish neighbours, where you were given the love and affection missing at your home.