Please Enjoy Your Happiness (15 page)

‘Happiness is my destination,’ she said.

She poked me in the side to make sure I was listening.

I could see that you had just entered the White Rose, Yuki. You were shaking the raindrops off your big black umbrella.
The collar of your tan trench coat was fastened high around your neck. You wore a black French beret. I could see the glitter of your cocktail dress – standard attire for the hostesses at the White Rose – as you hung up your coat and scanned the crowd for faces you might recognize.

‘Quick,’ Reiko said. ‘This I say to Yuki-chan a lot. She is my
o-nesan
[honorary big sister], and it is not my place to giving her advice. But she is the kind of woman who has to be guided because she has never accepted that people can be unkind. I tell her, so many person chase love and happiness here. I am a kind girl. I have a warm heart. I am serious about love. I am lovely, sweet, honest, and I can always be nice to my family and friends. I love life. I always have a smile in my heart. Like Yuki-chan, I want to share my life with someone special. But who? Please, can you help me find someone who knows how to cherish the beauty in life, and cherish a little happiness? Especially, please be honest with Yukiko and please be understanding and please remember my rules and remember that lies have short legs.’

Before I could say anything, Reiko slid across the vinyl to the dance floor and ran with a little skip to your side. She had a smile on her face that I was sure every woman in her extended family had under the huge thatched roof of the farmhouse. She whispered in your ear and then she scampered to a table where there were many sailors and started making them laugh. I have wondered many times what happened to Reiko and whether she found a happy man.

You waved at me. I felt the full flush of happiness spread across my face. Could you see it, I wondered, through the shadows and the darkness inside the bar? What did that flush of happiness mean? It was so unexpected. I think that even now, after all these years, that feeling I had on the cusp of adulthood
has never gone away, never faded. I have to tell you that fifty-five years after the long summer of your letters that same happiness still emerges when I think about you. You are more than just memory. You are alive.

Your next letter, by the way, arrived on ship after it docked at Yokosuka. I had read it just that morning, before I went ashore. Why it took so long to reach me I do not know.

11

The Police Know Everything

I walked into the Mozart coffee shop the next day to wait for you. You had made a plan to take me to see a black-and-white film from a Japanese director at a new theatre, where we could hold hands in the dark without getting disapproving looks and comments from those who thought it was unacceptable behaviour.

It was Franz Schubert day at the Mozart. The café was celebrating the composer’s Impromptus Opus 90, to be exact, with its fantastic introductory chapter building upon itself until the complete landscape of Schubert’s vision was made clear. I remember my father saying the world was fortunate that
Schubert wrote all of that just two years before he died, otherwise it would have been lost instead of remembered for eternity.

I looked at the Schubert announcement chalked on a small blackboard posted at the entrance in Japanese script and in English. There were always engaging errors in the manager’s English: ‘Today so wonderful concert. Please enjoy your happiness.’ These errors caused me just the hint of a smile. I did not want to embarrass the manager, Mr Ito. He was one of the few Japanese in those days who appeared to accept our friendship as a harmless fact of life. He also seemed to be in awe of you and your style and your looks.

I opened the door. The manager greeted me with his usual, ‘Mr Anthony Perkins,
konnichiwa
[good afternoon]! So nice to see you!’ which always made me blush deeply. Groups of uniformed high-school girls reading Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and
Gigi
by Colette – in French, of course – suddenly snapped their books closed and looked up with worshipful eyes above rosy cheeks. Their uniforms were dark blue sailor suits with pleated skirts, white ankle socks, and black leather shoes, and the girls wore no lipstick, no mascara, no jewellery, and no other embellishments of any kind.

Mr Ito motioned me to my usual seat by the record turntable. There was always a humming noise coming from the amplifier in this shadowed corner, and the sound provided a good cover for discreet conversation. I slouched down, doing my best imitation of Jean-Paul Belmondo
sans
smoking cigarette.

But then, a real horror, more horrible, maybe, than having to deal with Commander Crockett, or you when you were frightening children with shouts of ‘
Urusai!
’ Seated at the window, about a dozen feet away, was that detective, the one
who yelled, ‘You! You!’ at me at the train station after he had subdued the man who growled like a bear. He was staring right at me, with no trace of recognition on his face – a seasoned skill that froze me in place and prevented me from adopting a cunning or calculating countermove. Then a scowl of some kind darkened his face. It reminded me of the scowl on the face of my family’s cat when it anticipated a live morsel. He lit a cigarette, got up, and thudded across the floor to where I sat. He bent over slightly and produced a business card, holding it out to me with the thumb and forefinger of each hand gripping either end of the card, as if he were a waiter delivering a tray. I could smell liquor of some kind on his breath, and his raincoat reeked of tobacco. I knew nothing, of course, at that time of my life, about the elaborate etiquette involved in exchanging
meishi
[business cards]. But I suppose that did not matter, as seaman apprentices, whose job it was to follow orders without question, did not have business cards. I am sure they do not have them now.

I was about to slip his
meishi
into my wallet, when he stopped me with a command in English: ‘Read!’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, my face bleached with fear, I am sure.

The printing on one side of the card was in Japanese. I turned the card over. On the other side, in Latin letters, was:

‘There is no telephone number,’ Detective Nazaka said. ‘The important thing for you to remember is that the police know everything. Just ask for me, anywhere. Everybody knows who I am. If you want me, I am just minutes away, all the time, every day. Do not make the serious error of forgetting that in Japan the police know everything.’

Thank God, I thought, Commander Crockett is not here to see this now, because if he were here they would have to call an ambulance to take him away. The other thought that flashed like a streak of lightning was the description of a Yokosuka jail cell given to me by my pal Red Downs after one of his friends spent a night there, for ‘insulting a policeman and offending the public’, whatever that meant. ‘They put you in a cage,’ Red said, ‘and you have to sit there with your legs crossed, not moving, for many hours, while they threaten you with castration . . . although that is probably just your imagination because the interrogation is done in Japanese until they acknowledge you don’t speak it and they have to hand you over to the US Navy shore patrol. So, in other words, your life, as you know it, is over.’

Nazaka sat down at my table with a sigh, as if he was devastated by weariness.

After telling me with some satisfaction that Japanese business cards are ‘vastly superior’ because they are a standard 91 by 55 mm – ‘much larger’ than Chinese business cards, which measure, he said, exactly 90 by 54 mm, and ‘many times larger’ than American business cards, a mere 88.9 by 50.8 mm – the conversation went like this:

‘You have not ordered your coffee,’ he said. ‘Please order!’

‘Yes, sir.
Kohi kudasai
[coffee, please],’ I told the manager, who was looking at me with amusement.

‘Oh,’ Nazaka said. ‘You speak Japanese. Very impressive.’

‘Oh no, sir. That is just something that Yukiko taught me.’

‘Yes, Miss Kaji Yukiko. You are both troublemakers. But you are interesting troublemakers. That is why you caught my attention. I don’t like trouble. But I do like to have my intelligence challenged. My imagination is important too. Thank you for stealing my patience.’

‘I am so sorry. I did not mean to do that.’

‘Well . . . I see. There is evidence that you are not an American. You apologize rather well.’

‘Oh! Thank you. Good detective work! I am British.’

‘British! British . . . A noble island people with a long history, like we Japanese. Of course, you were savages until the Romans came to conquer you. Your warriors were decorated with blue dye. So your cultural history is not as long as ours. We have never been conquered!’

‘That is true, I suppose,’ I said.

I forgot on purpose that Japan had very recently been conquered – or maybe it was just defeated – by the United States of America. Because I was not sure who had conquered and who had been seduced and ravished after the end of the fighting, I decided not to raise this as an issue.

But I did remember the heroics of Boadicea, queen of the Iceni, who was, in effect, the last queen of the Britons in those ancient times. After her daughters had been raped and she had been flogged, she fought the Roman legions in her chariot. Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote that she was ‘possessed of greater intelligence than often belongs to women’, I recalled from my English schoolboy days.

‘We had Boadicea,’ I said, trying to sound proud.

‘Oh, yes,’ the detective said. ‘She was tall and had red hair to
her waist. Boadicea also had a piercing glare, like your friend, Miss Kaji.’ There was a sudden smile, which just as quickly vanished.

‘That is an interesting thought,’ I said, wondering what you would look like, Yuki-chan, wielding a spear in defence of your house on the hill. I also wondered again whether I should remind Detective Nazaka that although it was true that Britain had been conquered by the Romans, Japan had been conquered by the Americans. But I did not, fortunately.

‘Boadicea was an excellent national hero for the British,’ Nazaka said. ‘She was defeated. Of course, we Japanese had Amaterasu, the sun goddess, the founder of our imperial dynasty. Yes. You had a queen. But we had a deity! Deities cannot be defeated!’