The China Lover (31 page)

Near the South Gate, the picture became fuzzier. Battering against police barricades, discipline appeared to be breaking down. Even as some of the students were crashing the gate with their battering rams, others were throwing their bodies at the riot police with a kind of
recklessness that had to end badly. It was the first time that I saw fresh blood, washing down the young faces of people who had got too close to the police batons. One policeman, trapped in the midst of a group of students wearing headbands that read
Victory or die
, was in danger of being lynched. A young woman was trampled on, screaming for help. A new group I hadn’t seen before joined in the melee. Young men with thick peasant faces, dressed in army fatigues, hacked their way through the student ranks with wooden kendo swords. They did so with the angry relish of country boys who couldn’t wait to teach those pampered students a lesson. I didn’t know it then, but they were the “patriotic” hoodlums working for Yoshio Taneguchi, the same man who had helped Yoshiko with her visa problem.

Whether it was one of Taneguchi’s thugs, or one of the students, I will never know. My memory is a blur of disjointed images. I remember the trampled girl screaming and I tried to reach out to her. I remember someone shouting, “Down with the Anglo-American devils!” I remember it because it seemed like a strange thing to say. Why Anglo-American devils? What did the British have to do with any of this? And I remember seeing a black car passing the demonstrators in the direction of Hibiya Park, away from the Diet. A woman, sticking her head out of the window, was calling out to the students. “Keep going,” she cried, “students of Japan, keep going! We are proud of you!” So many things were going on at the same time, and happening so quickly, that I can’t be sure of this, but I could swear that that woman was Yoshiko.

The next thing I remembered was waking up with a splitting headache in the St. Luke’s International Hospital in Tsukiji. I hadn’t felt the blow to the back of my head. I must have lost consciousness instantly. Dr. Ivanov, a tall Russian doctor, smiled down at me, as though to a wayward child. “That’ll teach you never to get involved in Japanese
business,” he said in a faint Russian accent. “You’ll end up being crushed.” I was hardly in the mood for lectures of this kind, and was disposed to dislike this Dr. Ivanov. But as I slowly recovered from the blow to my head, and he told me stories of his life, I began to like him. Born in Harbin, ten years before the Japanese took control of Manchuria, Ivanov had come to Tokyo as a medical student in 1940. “I’ve done very well in Japan,” he said, “but that’s because I’ve always known my place. I’ll probably die in this country, but I know I’ll always be a guest, an interloper, a permanent outsider. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way I like it. I don’t want to belong anywhere. I don’t bother others, and nobody bothers me. If you wish to stay here, you’d better remember that, my friend.”

I thanked him for his advice. He laughed. “You’re an American, right?” I confirmed that indeed I was. He began to chuckle. “I was a kind of American once,” he said, laughing more loudly. “I died many horrible deaths as an American.” He was laughing so much, I thought he would choke. It turned out that he used to earn his school fees in Tokyo during the war by playing Americans in Japanese movies. “I was very good as a bad guy.” I asked him which films. “Oh,” he smiled, “you wouldn’t know. Even the Japanese have forgotten most of them.” I wanted to know whether any of them starred Ri Koran? “Ri Koran,” he shouted, “she was my idol, already in Harbin. Oh, I can tell you a lot of stories about Ri Koran. She had a Russian lover, you know?”

I didn’t know and was about to ask him for more details. I wanted to hear all about the things she had refused to talk to me about. Whenever I mentioned the war, or China, or the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, she would say something about the need for peace and switch the subject. After several attempts, I simply gave up asking. But Dr. Ivanov was hardly more forthcoming. Instead of answering my questions, he started to sing, very softly, staring out of the hospital
window at the tiled rooftops of the Tsukiji fish market. A blue neon advertisement for a cigarette blinked on and off on a tall building in the distance.

“ ‘
Shina no yoru
,’” he sang in his Russian baritone, “ ‘China nights, ah China nights . . . the junk floating upstream . . .’ ” I recognized the words. It was one of my favorite Japanese songs, even though Yoshiko hated to sing it. So I joined in: “ ‘the ship of dreams, China nights, nights of our dreams, ah, China nights, I dream of my homeland, so far, so sweet, I dream of you . . .’ ”

PART THREE

   1   

T
HE ONE THING
I can’t stand is the coffee, that thick Arab coffee which sticks to the palate like liquid mud. Not that the prison food is much good in general, a dull routine of watery lentil soup and stale Arab bread, and, with luck, once a week, a kebab of skinny meat from who knows what animal; the Arab prisoners call it Roumieh rat, after our present abode in the fragrant pine-forested hills east of Beirut. We can’t actually see the city from where we are. We can’t in fact see anything at all from our cell. The window is too high, letting in just a tantalizing sliver of light which, late in the afternoon, casts a reddish glow on the ceiling while leaving us in the dark. If one were able to climb up and look through the window, one might catch a glimpse of the courtyard where they shoot the poor wretches from death row. You know when it’s about to happen when the cries echo around the prison:
Allahu akhbar! Allahu akhbar!
Sometimes you’ll hear the man about to be executed cry out, begging for his life. Then, a volley of gunfire, followed by silence, complete silence, one of the rare moments in this hellhole when there is no sound at all. One savors it, like a cigarette after a good meal.

The food, as I said, is pretty miserable. But more than anything, I miss a decent cup of coffee, the weak tasty kind we call “American” in Tokyo, not the sweet mud that the Arabs like. I’m convinced that taste
is a reflection of national character. And national character is shaped by the weather. Our crisp climate gives us Japanese a taste for limpidity and subtlety which foreigners often mistake for blandness. That’s why Japanese love the plain unadorned taste of tofu, soft and white, like a woman’s breast. It matches the mildness of our four seasons. The Arabs are a desert people, used to the pitiless sun beating down on them. They aren’t blessed with the clarity of our seasons, and so they find comfort in the opaque, the secretive, the cloying, just like their coffee.

Still, I musn’t complain. After the first eight months, our conditions were much improved. Roumieh was built in 1971—one year before our triumph—to hold about fifteen hundred men, including the boys in the juvenile wing. We now share our temporary address with five thousand men. Being stuffed into a cell so full of guys that there is no room at night for everyone to lie down on the concrete floor is pretty unpleasant, especially if you’re a newcomer, or
pissoir
, as the new boys are called here. They are called that because they have to sleep sitting upright, knees drawn up, next to the toilet. This is actually just a stinking hole in the floor, which gets slopped out twice a week, by the
pissoir
of course. If it overflows, as it almost always does, the
pissoir
is held responsible by the cell boss and gets a beating. To avoid this punishment, the
pissoir
will have to mop up the slimy muck with his own shirt. Hence also, possibly, my allergy to Arab coffee; it reminds me of my first months in Roumieh. And my cell boss wasn’t as bad as some. Khalil al-Beiruti had murdered a family of eight in Saida—some matter of family honor. He wasn’t a bad sort, more the elder brother type who would take care of you, if you didn’t cross him, and did what he wanted, like washing his feet or massaging his hairy back at night. Other cell bosses were worse. Morioka’s boss used his underlings as footstools. Another notorious lifer, Mahmoud, insisted on having his ass scrubbed.

They were a mixed bunch, the hundred-odd guys in my cell: professional hit men, drug smugglers, rapists, forgers, kidnappers, bank robbers, murderers; and then there were the “politicals,” revolutionaries of various stripes, some religious, some not, a few Palestinians, usually picked on by the other Arabs, an Australian of Lebanese descent who had hijacked a bus, and so on. The addicts were the worst, for they screamed at night. I was lucky in a way. Japanese were exotic, and as members of the Japanese United Red Army, the victors of the battle of Lydda Airport, we were treated with a certain respect. But rules were rules and we too had to pay our dues as
pissoir
s.

Things are better now. I share my cell with three other Japanese commandos: Morioka Akio, Nishiyama Masaki, and Kamei Ichiro. We try to keep ourselves as clean as we can, picking the lice from each other’s hair, giving each other rubdowns with a wet rag. The scorpions can kill, so we take care not to lie down without careful scrutiny of the floor. The fleas are the worst. You just can’t get rid of them, however many you manage to kill. This takes a certain finesse: you maneuver the little pest between your thumbnails, and crack its hard little spine, producing a trickle of human blood. Satisfying, to be sure, but insufficient. Fleas resist extermination. My legs are red and swollen to twice their normal size because of the fleas, which drive me half mad. Strangely, Kamei and Nishiyama are plagued by lice, but are left alone by the fleas. I don’t know which are a greater torment. But catching the lice is a little easier.

We try not to talk about women. Actually, no matter what anyone outside may think, hunger trumps sexual desire anytime. We close our eyes, and each of us imagines the perfect menu for lunch or dinner: yellowtail sashimi or succulent sea urchin wrapped in seaweed, or juicy red cod’s roe, followed by shabu shabu of thinly sliced prime Kobe beef, accompanied by crisp light tempura of Ise lobster and sweet
potato, and a thick red miso soup with freshwater clams. This would typically be Morioka’s choice. He’s a traditionalist. Nishiyama went to Tokyo University and has Westernized tastes. We tease him that he reeks of butter. He can go on for hours about the perfect pâté de foie gras, or steak garnished with fresh truffles, washed down with a 1970 Château Something or Other. Kamei is crazy about Korean food, so he’ll dream of barbecued ox tongue and red-hot stews with tofu and pork. Me, I’m a country boy at heart, so my perfect meals are not so refined. My dream is to have a bowl of rice with a slice of salmon drenched in Japanese tea, or Sapporo noodles in a dense brown stock of soy sauce and scallions. It’s amazing what the human imagination can do. If you concentrate hard enough, you can even make a crust of Arab bread taste like a delicious white tuna sashimi, but only for a few seconds, after which the hard stale bread just tastes like hard stale bread again. But those few moments are priceless.

When we’re not imagining great meals, we remember the good times, when we were back home, or in Beirut, celebrating the battle of Lydda Airport, when we got twenty-six enemies for the loss of two of our soldiers. One was shot by the Zionists, and the other, Okudaira, blew himself up with a hand grenade. We were sorry to lose our comrades. But in May 1972, we were the kings of the Middle East. People would come up to kiss us in the street, and offer us gifts. Women looked up to us as war heroes, and named their babies after us. Okudaira is a common name now in the Palestinian camps.

When we remember the good times, we sing the old songs of our student days. Morioka has a beautiful baritone voice and a real gift for singing Japanese ballads: “Nagasaki Blues,” “Tears of Shinjuku,” “Mother’s Farewell,” “Tears and Sake” . . . A few of these, and we’re all blubbering. Another favorite is the “Song of the Japanese Red Army”: “United for victory, we must fight on . . .” My favorite song, however, is “Let It Be,” by the Beatles. Nishiyama always makes fun of
my faulty pronunciation. But who cares? I’m Japanese: “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, Speaking words of wisdom, Let it be, let it be . . .” Some of the Arabs in the other cells know the song too and will join in. This feels so good! You know you’re not alone in the struggle. United for victory, we must fight on!