Soldiers in Hiding (6 page)

When the doctor left, Kazuko and Jimmy sneaked out again too, leaving, for once, some distance between their hands. “Come get your cat,” I called but Kazuko did not return, so the cat remained, calm in the corner. I slept and woke and slept. When it got dark the monks began to moan. The one in whose room I stayed crawled in and took up so little space in the corner that I could barely see him.

“Sorry for the intrusion,” I said. “I would gladly go home now if you'd show me the way.”

The monk sat staring but he would not speak. Indeed, all day it was only the master who had spoken.

“My cat is hungry,” I said. “Is there milk? Something for it to eat?”

“We are vegetarians,” he said.

“Is there a vegetable then, that it could eat? I wouldn't ask for myself.”

The monk studied me, then stood and sat again in the doorway where he would be seen by someone passing. “The master may not like it,” he said.

I must have slept for several hours during the day, for now, at dusk, I was wide awake. My wound was still aching but since I knew my stomach would not slip I was inclined to get out of that solitary cell. The master came out of the shadows quietly and laid a bamboo rod on the nimble monk's shoulders.

“Why do you sit in the doorway?” he asked.

“The cat is hungry. Our guest says so.”

The master motioned to the monk and they both went off, and in a moment the master was back by himself with a little bowl of milk and a large sack of oranges.

“Do you like Zen parables?” he asked me, putting the oranges between us and peeling two.

“I don't know any,” I said. “I'm from the United States. I've only been in Japan a week.”

“Once the monk Nansen saw the monks of the eastern and western halls fighting over a cat. He seized the cat and told the monks, ‘If any of you says a good word you can save the cat.' No one answered so Nansen cut the cat in two. That evening Joshi returned and Nansen told him what had happened that day. Joshi removed his sandals and placed them upon his head. Nansen said, ‘If you had been there you could have saved the cat.'”

I looked at the master but there was so little light in the room that I could not see his face. My cat, unconcerned, kept lapping up the milk in the corner.

“You get it?” asked the master.

“Don't fight over cats? Let them live as they will?”

“In this case it is true that the cat would have made a fine
shamisen
. Listen.”

Magically the master pulled a
shamisen
from beneath his robes. He was a large man and when he put the instrument against his middle I could not see it. He began to play. My father on his farm had played a
shamisen
, but its strains had never been like this. Where my father's music had been slow and stumbling, the master's was smooth and wonderful. All the monks around us in their cells were listening, I could tell. I assumed he'd play for just a moment, so that I could hear all the uses the hide of a cat could be put to, but he continued, without stopping, for half an hour. He played the tunes my father could play and the ones he just listened to as well. And indeed, even the cat, when it finished its milk, wandered closer, put its head across my foot and began to purr.

As the master played I began to fear that he might also have a sword or a knife stuck somewhere under his robes and when he finished he'd pull it out and cut the cat. But when he did stop the cat crawled up on his lap and he merely put his heavy hands around it and began to stroke.

“Your playing is so beautiful,” I said. “Though I have never lived in Japan it made me feel at home.”

“My playing is part of it, but the calico cat that sleeps across the center of the instrument is part of it as well. This
shamisen
itself once purred in my hands, once caught mice under the Buddha and lapped up the milk the monks gave it. Its hide is so wondrous that it can contain a cat of any size. It will stretch. It could accommodate an even larger
shamisen
”

“Why not just leave it alone?” I said, hearing a certain whining in my voice.

“Do not fool yourself into thinking that the cat cares. Life and death are one to it.”

The master waved his hands above him and laughed, somehow ending the discussion. I picked up the cat and tried to look at it in the dark. “If this cat were yours would you kill it?” I asked.
“Would you fatten it up and then steal its skin so that you could have another
shamisen
as fine as the one you played tonight?”

“Certainly not,” said the priest.

“You see. Once the cat got close to you you'd give it a name and there would be no more talk of killing.”

“No,” he said. “It would simply be silly to have two
shamisen
. And if the cat were mine I'd be very surprised. This
shamisen
is mine but the cat could not be.”

I sighed and decided to stop. What kind of repartee could I accomplish with this man?

“Forget the cat,” I said. “It is people we are supposed to care about.”

“Come what may,” said the priest.

I was thinking suddenly about Kazuko and Jimmy again and was surprised when the priest said, “Of course the secret of receiving is in not wanting.”

I sat there again, smiling a little. This man made his living saying things like that to all the new monks of the temple.

“You've been very kind in caring for my wound. Do you think the doctor would mind if I went home now?”

“He would not mind,” said the master.

I stood, knowing after only a few hours that I could not lead a life like this. The master moved a bit to the side and stood in one motion. I was surprised by how short he was. “Take your cat,” he said. “It could come in handy.” He laughed a little and so did I.

The master motioned to the others as we walked back through the building, so they all fell in behind. The Buddha was brighter than I expected it would be at night, and I worried that maybe that man was still out there somewhere, waiting to wedge his knife into me once more.

“The moon is up,” said the master.

The little cat was tucked inside my shirt, sleeping around the soft edges of my wound. I decided to say one thing more to the master.

“I don't not care for the cat. You don't think that, do you?”

This time I made him laugh hard so the other monks laughed too. For a moment they held their laughter in, then it burst, echoing a little way over the fragile garden, over the low trees.

“Good night,” called the master as I started down the steps.

I didn't like their laughing, so without saying anything I started to walk away. The moon was everywhere and I forgot my fear. The night air was invigorating. It was cool. Even the cat must have felt it, for within my shirt it began to stir. It stretched a little and pushed its head between the buttons. It wasn't a bad cat, its eyes wide, its whiskers white. When the monks stopped laughing the cat seemed startled. When I stepped onto the main street it was inside my shirt again, but its claws were wide now, and pushing a little into the flesh around my wound.

 

WHEN I THINK ABOUT THOSE EARLY DAYS OF MY ARRIVAL, those weeks when war was folding around the world, the vision that I have of myself is as my son is now. The thoughts that found me then were fatuous at best, yet passionate and strong were my emotions. When an old man views the young in himself, there is much he can find to disdain, much that will make him laugh, more that will make him cringe.

My son is all Japanese, his language, his habits, his ways. Yet I must not be too hard on him for acting whimsically, for the poor quality of his music, or the ease with which he is distracted. When he was little I'd look at him and see the traces of another man's face in his small one, but I loved him just the same. His mother would hold him out to me and I would take him and feel all the lighter for it.

When my son made his first recording I gave him little help, but he was able to release it because of me nevertheless. The record jacket was gold with a picture of Milo standing at the seaside with the wind all rough in his hair. He was holding in his hands another record, and, of course, it was one of mine, my first, and if you looked carefully you could see, in turn, a small likeness of myself at the same sea. Until the time of my son's record,
modern music in Japan had been poor. With it, however, a downward spiral was started, the bottom of which is still not visible. And now my son's music is no longer the worst that can be found here. I, in my way, have tried to make him feel better by making my television show his music's equal, but the efforts seem lost on him. He and I have both become popular for the damage that we do, though I, of course, am trying, and my son, I'm afraid, is not.

When Milo was little, when he was six, he fell a story from the school window and I can remember waiting for his recovery. The war had been over a while but I still was not ready, not nearly ready, to renew the awful agony of feeling. I can remember my wife saying that from six-year-olds the world should withhold its anger, yet that Milo would roll from the window made me mad at Milo and as soon as he was well enough I slapped him. And that simple slap, so unforgivable, has stayed between us all these years. Its echo, sometimes, sends dull sensations through my fingers when I see my son.

By the time Milo recovered from his fall I had already begun my rise from the ranks of out-of-work entertainers. I was on my own after the war but by then the nation's interest in English had been born. And jazz seemed central to the underpinnings of the new society, as if by adopting it the Japanese could prove to the occupiers that they too were truly human. I was held up as an example of a good Japanese because I could sing so nicely in English, I could sing so accent-free. And yet, by the Americans I was held in contempt. A short while after my songs began to circulate, a little while after a large segment of my society began making furious forays into the world of late-night dancing, I, along with others of my kind, was called to a perfunctory hearing. We stood before American officers while a staff artist drew a depiction of our poor postures, our unrepentant attitudes.

“Teddy Maki of Los Angeles,” the court clerk called, so I stepped forward.

A colonel spoke softly, asking me, “Did you, Mr. Maki, fight for the Japanese during the recent war?”

“No, sir.”

“You did not?”

“I didn't fight, sir.”

“Did you wear the Japanese army uniform? Did you eat with the Japanese soldiers? Did you speak Japanese with them and share their jokes?”

“I had no choice.”

“Then the answer is yes.”

“Yes.”

“Are you aware that taking up arms against the forces of the United States is grounds for imprisonment? Grounds for loss of citizenship?”

“I have recently been told so.”

“You are a popular singer, are you not, Mr. Maki? Do you think it is right that you should go free after having turned against your country so?”

“I haven't done anything wrong,” I said. “I've turned against no one. Circumstances caused me to do what I did. Any other course would have cost me my life.”

I had said, already, more than I wanted to, more than I'd told myself I would when I arrived. Most of my acquaintances were dead. Who would care what happened to me?

The colonel looked back and forth, his face all haughty from my listlessness, my lack of remorse.

“What would your family think, Mr. Maki, if they knew what you've done?”

From what I could gather my father had lost his land and my uncle his grocery store a few months before they'd enlisted. My mother and brothers and younger cousins waited for them in a makeshift prison, somewhere in the desert, east of where the farm had been.

“They are all scattered,” I said. “Victims of the war.”

The colonel seemed to tire of me but cleared his throat and asked, “Are you a communist, Mr. Maki? Have you ever been?”

“I am not a communist. I don't care,” I said.

The colonel stood and stretched his legs but let me stay standing before him. Finally he asked, “Do you swear that everything you have said is true?”

“Do you mean today?” I asked him.

He was irritated by my insolence but there were many others waiting so he let me go, keeping with him my American citizenship, invisible though it was. When I turned toward the small and silent audience the first face I saw was Milo's, and he was smiling.

“You did well, Daddy,” he said, as we were leaving by the back door. He held by its broken strings a toy guitar I'd given him and trailed it slowly along the lockers that lined the hall.

 

JIMMY AND KAZUKO WERE MARRIED AND I WAS BEST MAN. Jimmy and I had never talked about my feelings for the woman he would wed but he knew, and I kept thinking I saw a soft smile of satisfaction crossing his lips. They were married at the end of November, 1941, when the mood in the city was one of caution. Crowds stood in front of public bill boards where the daily newspapers were pinned up, and though my reading was slow, I could read the characters for America in the headlines, and knew there were embargoes. I saw the steaming face of Admiral Yamamoto, and read the word
war
.

Jimmy and Kazuko stood in the same Buddhist temple where I'd received my wound. There were others waiting; it was a day of weddings. As soon as the ceremony was done we left by the side door and walked through the garden just as we had on the day of the cat. All of Kazuko's family was there; her tea ceremony teacher was the only other outside guest. The weather was cold and the sky was high and clear. People smiled at us, mothers pointing out the formal kimono, one child crying when she saw the powder-white face of the bride.