Please Enjoy Your Happiness (32 page)

That afternoon at your house, in which we did nothing but sit with each other as day slowly became night, resulted in my most vivid memories of who you were. It was as if I had been treated to a box of the finest Belgian chocolates, and I was unwrapping the silver foil from them, one by one, to discover what was inside.

For a while I tried talking to you about how you had faced down Shinoda Yusuke, but you were having none of it. You would not show me your sword. You would not accept any praise or admiration from me. You just shrugged, and tightened the
grip of your arm round my shoulder. ‘Hush,’ you said. ‘Hush.’

I also tried talking about the fact that we would be saying goodbye tomorrow. But you dismissed that too. It was as if for you there would be
no
final goodbye.

‘Will you be sad?’ I asked with no accompanying words, like a child.

‘Don’t ask me, please. You will not want to hear that I will be happy when you go.’

‘Happy?’ I asked, startled.

But you would not explain. You only hugged me tighter. For the first time I got a sense of the roundness and weight of your hips and the smallness of your waist and the straight strength of your back. Your small breasts were pressed against my arm. I did not dare to move for fear of losing you. The night breeze that always started on your hill when the sun began going down was rustling the paulownia. It responded by showering us with petals, as if we were betrothed.

I knew I soon had to report back to the
Shangri-La
, but I could not move. I did not want to move. I wanted to dream where I was and fall asleep with you, but that was impossible. The surface of the sea around the ship was sparkling in the moonlight, and all across the dark sky stars were signalling to us from the heavens.

You said to me: ‘If you go now, you will break the spell.’

I put my arm round you, and we sat like that for a while. You were still humming songs. A dense mist was descending on your hill. The trees and the shrubs and the grass began glistening with dew. There was a chill that now blew in from the sea, as if to remind us that I was being called. We stood up and looked at each other with just traces of a smile. I thought I heard a chorus of voices somewhere far off. It was something like the
fabled song of the Sirens. It would start and then fade in and out as the breeze stirred your Garden of Grand Vision, which you told me existed in your lost city of Harbin.

‘What kind of garden was it, Yuki?’ I asked, once again the child.

‘Well. It was a garden with a wall around it, and there was a plaque high above the entrance gate identifying it as the Garden of Grand Vision. The Chinese writing expressing that name was very beautiful. It was built to celebrate the grandeur of five thousand years of Chinese civilization. But the truth was that when we Japanese came and created the Manchukuo Empire [Manchuria], something terrible happened. We Japanese grew rich. The Chinese people became poor. That wonderful garden filled up with drug addicts and prostitutes and drifters. Someone told me later there were two thousand prostitutes living in the garden. They would pick the red roses and put them in their hair. Those poor women felt secure inside those walls and the garden shared its beauty with them so that it made their life more bearable while they were struggling to survive or giving up to die.’

You stopped talking for a few moments. The mist was now moistening your hair, giving it a sheen and a look of wildness, as if you had just ridden into Harbin on horseback, straight from the wastes of Mongolia where Kubla Khan once ruled. Now the tears were coming. You could not stop the tears.

‘I remember that when I was a little girl, I asked my father to show me the garden. It was on an afternoon – a long hot and humid one, just like this one. He did not put on his uniform but he slipped a pistol into his pocket before he took me by the hand . . . How old was I? Maybe seven or eight years old . . . I had on a white dress and my mother had tied my hair in pigtails.
We set off walking towards the Garden of Grand Vision. The shopkeepers were greeting my father with a great deal of respect, but here and there from other people – Chinese people – on the streets I could hear hissing or the whispering of words that I could understand because I spoke Chinese. They were cursing my father but they were doing it discreetly. I told my father I was frightened, but he told me we were Japanese and we should hold our heads high. We were proud. We were invincible.

‘We passed through the gate to the garden and my father pointed out the plaque, which was painted in gold. It looked so elegant. But do you know that just a few metres beyond the gate there was a dead person. My father said he died from the famine. I asked him how it was possible that people did not have enough to eat if we had a dinner table piled high with fresh fruit and big bowls of pure white rice and all the chicken and pork you could imagine. My father said it was because we were Japanese. He said it as if being Japanese was so special, which of course it was, because
we are
a special people. After a while we saw more dead people in the garden, and I told my father I wanted to go back home. And do you know what he said? He said that we could not do that because we were Japanese, and if we ran away it would show that we were afraid. We can never be afraid, my father said. That was the way it was, I believe, on the day that he was killed soon after the Soviets seized the city without firing a shot.’

He was killed, you said, after Emperor Hirohito of Japan went on the radio and announced the surrender. He called on all Japanese ‘to bear the unbearable’ ignominy of defeat – the first defeat in their two-thousand-year history.

‘I believed he was killed because he was hated for torturing Chinese people,’ you said. ‘My mother always said his death
was an accident. But I have heard that even when they were hacking him to death with kitchen cleavers he refused to show fear. Some witnesses told my mother that he stuck his chest out and took the blows in silence.

‘I am his daughter. This is why I say I am a bad woman.’

There was silence. I hoped your daughter was looking down on you from the stars. I hoped that she would kiss your forehead and call you ‘Mama’. I wish now that I had told you that.

‘Do you know where your father died?’ I asked.

‘In the Garden of Grand Vision, under a huge acacia tree covered with golden flowers.’

I had to pick my way carefully down the steps to reach the street below. A light rain had started that chilled me. I began shivering. I had a long walk ahead of me. I glanced back and I could see that you were standing at the top of the steps, probably much as you had done when Shinoda Yusuke turned up to try to drag you back to Hiroshima. I knew that he had been sent to make you return. I also thought there might be more to this story. Maybe he was in love with you even though he had forced you to work for him as a prostitute. Maybe he was one of those men you would not give yourself to even if he showered you with gold and diamonds. Maybe in some strange way you loved him too. But I knew I would never know.

You had faced him with a sword in your hands. But when you watched me descend the stairs there was no sword. It was just you, standing there as if you were the statue of Kannon, the much-loved Buddhist goddess of mercy, her head bowed modestly, her hands clasped under her breasts, that had once graced Harbin’s Garden of Grand Vision.

I walked quickly through the wet streets towards the lights of
the city, the umbrella you gave me over my head. The sound of men laughing drifted out of the small sake bars. I caught glimpses of the warm scenes inside as I passed by. There was room for no more than eight or ten customers at the typical sake bar. Behind the bar was a
mamasan
, but she was not like the typically older ones who ruled the sailor bars on Honcho with compassion and an iron fist. These
mamasan
s looked as if they were in their mid-twenties. They had done their best to appear glamorous. As I passed I heard several of them call out a loud ‘
Irasshai
’ [‘Welcome!’], followed by a chorus of giggles and drunken male comments because they realized they had invited an unwanted US Navy sailor to step inside. There was a sudden power outage, and all along this street of bars I heard the hostesses shouting out in English, amid laughter in the dark, ‘Chance! Chance!’ – an invitation to patrons to steal a kiss.

If only I could speak Japanese, I thought. I would step inside and be funny and cheerful. It was my duty to study Japanese, I decided there and then. It was an idea that thrilled me and inspired me to whistle a happy tune that I made up as I went along.

Tomorrow, you told me, I should meet you at the White Rose at exactly eight p.m. That was unusual. You had set a time for something. But you gave me no clues. You set the hour almost as an afterthought, in fact. Yet another subtle version of your ‘happy’ smile passed over your face.

24

We Are Very Sorry

Nazaka Goro had shocked me with details of the dramatic confrontation at your house. But then he had told me you were free and he had signalled me with a heroic gesture – in the way of an officer in the heat of battle urging his men forward – to climb your steps. You had told me tearfully about the horror of the Garden of Grand Vision in Harbin, but as a result we had never been as close as we were that day, sitting side by side on your mountain. What was that you told me? Oh, yes: ‘We are
two lost souls who are now united.’ Violence and sweetness. Sweetness and violence. I would encounter the coupling of those two opposites all my life, through wars and marriages, again and again and again.

As I settled into my rack – which is what we called our bunk beds – deep inside the
Shangri-La
, I realized that you had at last been able to open the vault where you kept your deepest secrets. I was sure you had never told anyone that story before. My body felt cold. I gripped my pillow for warmth and then I realized that it was wet with tears. Happiness and sadness. Sadness and happiness. I was leaving in two days. It would be impossible to know more.

Fortunately, while lost in those regrets, I was not old enough to realize that the way was now clear for us to become actual lovers. But that could never be. I was still a child, mourning my loss – that I would no longer have you looking over me, urging me with a mix of forcefulness and tenderness to make something of myself in this life that had robbed you of the opportunity to have a love that would last forever. As I now look back through the years, the love I had for you is still as ardent as it was back then. ‘Do you remember me?’ you often asked. ‘Do you remember me?’

In the morning there was a blur of activity on the ship. Sailors had been making last-minute purchases ashore: excellent cameras by Canon and Nikon made in Japan that far outclassed anything manufactured in the USA, early reel-to-reel tape recorders by Akai and Sony, chinaware by Noritake to keep the wife happy, and dolls with downcast eyes dressed as geishas to give to mothers. Jim Fowler had bought a bolt of purple silk for his girlfriend and he had surprised me by presenting me with a copy of
Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to
the Mid-Nineteenth Century
by Donald Keene. I still have the book, which is signed by Jim: ‘Let this from the past be a window from which you can see the future.’ Red Downs had been worried because his girlfriend in Jackson had not written him in recent weeks, and then, suddenly, there was a letter from her telling him she had been bitten by a police dog as she was being arrested in a civil rights demonstration. He was a proud man. I had not seen much of Oscar and Gunther but I had heard from tittering girls at the White Rose that those two guys were ‘skivvy honchos’ – a vulgar Japanese expression for Lotharios.

In the afternoon Chaplain Peeples stopped by the
News Horizon
office to tell me I had passed the written test to become a JO3 – a third-class petty officer with a special rating in journalism – one of the rarest of all categories for enlisted men. There was a woeful look on his face, but he shook my hand.

‘You have been a difficult handful this summer,’ he told me. ‘You have a big responsibility now. I only hope that you behave wisely.’ I thanked him. But it occurred to me at that same moment that promotion from gnat to wasp might enable me to apply for a transfer from the
Shangri-La
to someplace else, maybe even here in Japan, where there were lots of US Navy facilities needing someone who could spell and write speeches for ambitious commanding officers.

The clock was ticking towards evening. I searched my locker for a farewell gift. I discovered that other than books and a
shamisen
– an elegant three-stringed instrument with a sound akin to a banjo and a body covered in snakeskin that I had bought from a startled music-store owner on the island of Okinawa – I had not acquired much in those port cities during the seven-month cruise of the USS
Shangri-La
. I had been too
busy writing to you and editing and mailing your letters. I had been preoccupied with long nights in which I attempted to write poetry. I had gone ashore and I had wandered much farther afield in those cities than any other sailor I knew. The ship made five visits to Yokosuka between 15 April and the third week of September. I had spent virtually all my time getting to know you in those forty-four days the ship was anchored in your harbour. I got to the bottom of my locker and I realized that I really did have nothing for you. I tried writing a letter and enclosing some of my poetry, but I could not find the words to express how I felt about you and our friendship. These feelings were too profound. I had not experienced them before and I could not think of anything to say except ‘beautiful’ and ‘thank you’. I was not equipped with the language to dazzle a woman. I was myself, newly twenty, bedazzled.