The China Lover (32 page)

   2   

T
HE TOWN OF
my birth was known for two things: horses and bombers. To these one could possibly add a third, the foggy weather drifting in from the Japan Sea. Otherwise it is a place without interest. I regard having been born there in May 1945 as a mistake, a quirk of fate, or history rather, in which I played no part.

The bombers roaring over our heads when I grew up belonged to the United States Air Force: B-29s, the same steel vultures, gleaming with malevolence, that destroyed our cities in the war. I had a toy gun when I was a child, made of two pieces of wood, which I would point at the bombers pretending I was shooting them down. What right did these bastards have to lord it over us in our own country? Did their pale skins give them a special authority to rule the world?

Not that I felt any sympathy for the previous occupants of the base. Quite the contrary. It always was a blood-soaked place. During the war, the Japanese Imperial Navy flew kamikaze raids out of there. Before that it was a base for Imperial Army bombers on their way to China. Before that it was a stud farm, where they bred horses for the cavalry. The warmongers got what they deserved. They were no better than the Americans, possibly even worse. But why should the Japanese masses have to suffer for what a bunch of militarists and their wretched Emperor had wrought?

The reason for my unfortunate birth in this place all the way up in
the foggy northeast of Japan can be summed up in one word: hunger. I never knew my father. All I have to remind me of his existence before I was born is a fuzzy brown photograph of a handsome man dressed in a white suit. I can see some resemblance between him and myself, but I look more like my mother, the same round face and thick eyebrows. She hails from Hokkaido. We probably have Ainu blood running through our veins. I like to think so. My father was in China during the war. We don’t know what happened to him. If he was captured after the war by the Russians or the Chinese, we would surely have known, for they kept meticulous records. Perhaps he did return to Japan, but just didn’t want to come back to us. I’ve heard of such cases. My mother didn’t seem at all bitter about it. Bitterness wasn’t in her nature. She just got on with life. “No point in brooding,” she’d say. “There’s nothing we can do about it.” I loved my mother. But sometimes it would drive me crazy, this refrain of “nothing we can do about it.” And yet, I didn’t know what to do about it either, whatever “it” was.

You might have thought that I should have been more curious about my father, what he was like, what he did before the war. In fact, I couldn’t have cared less. My mother hardly ever mentioned him, and I never asked. As far as I was concerned, he had never existed. Maybe he was a war criminal, or one of those crazy idealists who thought that the Emperor was God. Who knows? To me he was an old photograph, nothing more. The past was a blank. I wasn’t interested. You could call this a failure of my imagination. But there was enough to worry about in the present.

As a woman alone in bombed-out Japan, with a hungry baby to feed, my mother found work where she could get it. Although she never talked about it, I have reason to believe that she worked in a bar catering to the Americans and may even have struck up a relationship with one of them. Later she managed a movie theater in the center of town.

It was a shabby place, with painted pictures of movie stars stuck
onto a gray stucco front. Inside, it smelled of urine and stale smoke. Yanks used the place to feel up their local floozies and drink beer, tossing the empty cans at the screen when they got angry at something, or just bored. I noticed how they would stick chewing gum under the chairs when they kissed their girls. That is if they were considerate. Most wouldn’t even bother to take the gum out of their mouths. The girls didn’t seem to care. They had a Yank, and that meant goodies from the PX, or straight cash. I don’t blame them really. Like Mother, they had to survive. One of my tasks was to scrape the gum off the wooden chairs with a penknife. The more disagreeable task of scooping up used condoms under the back seats was left to an old lady named O-Toyo, whose toothless grin conveyed that she had seen it all in her time, as no doubt she had.

Occasionally there would be a brawl in the theater between local toughs and the Yanks, usually provoked by the latter when their fooling around with the local girls became too blatant. These fights could get out of hand, especially if a local boy had caught his own girl in the arms of a Yank. To keep me away from trouble when I was small, my mother would park me behind the movie screen, where I would be left alone for hours while she tended to her business. This was the start of my cinematic education, sitting behind the screen in a movie theater that smelled of piss, trying to make sense of the flickering shadows of Gary Cooper or Joan Crawford, speaking in muffled voices in a language I couldn’t understand. But to me they were like family, these foreigners in black and white.

Most people see the movies as an escape route from reality. For me it was the other way round. To me, the movies were real. I once read something about small children whose parents leave them for hours in front of a TV. Soon they start jabbering to the TV screen. To cope with the confusion of talking to people who fail to respond, they develop a private language, inventing conversations with imaginary people. Perhaps
I was a little like those children. Confronted with people of flesh and blood, I was hopelessly tongue-tied, and around the age of five or six I developed a stammer. I imagined that everyone around me, apart from my mother, was a faker of some kind, a hypocrite, wearing a mask. I was especially afraid of older people who wore benign masks, smiling grotesquely as they tried to press me in their clammy embrace. All my life I’ve wanted to rip off those masks, and expose the bloody reality hidden behind them.

I loathe pop psychology, but I need to make one confession. Although I hated the Yanks, and their bombers, their hard clots of chewing gum, and the arrogant way they treated my mother, holding her around the waist, trying to kiss her and calling her “Mama-san,” I secretly admired them. I couldn’t help noticing how cool they looked in their pressed uniforms and shiny shoes, their sunglasses and leather jackets, a Lucky Strike dangling casually from the corner of their mouths, speeding around in their jeeps, one leg outside the door, nice and easy, shouting, “Come on!” or, “Let’s go!” or, “Hi baby!” Compared to them, our men looked pathetic: craven, scrawny little guys bowing and scraping to their white masters. I should have been on their side, and felt sympathy and even rage on their behalf, but I didn’t; I wanted to be like those superconfident, long-legged, suntanned, laughing Yanks. I, too, wanted to wear those cool aviator shades and leather jackets with a picture of a nude woman or a map of Japan on the back, and shout, “Come on, baby!” They may tell you otherwise now, but most of us felt the same way. Most boys of my age weren’t even ashamed of their hero worship. They loved to hang around the entrance of the base, hoping for handouts, a stick of gum, a Hershey bar, a movie star photograph, or just a pat on the head. The difference between me and them was that I wouldn’t admit it. I would stammer out my protest against such abject behavior. The other boys, almost always stronger than me, would just laugh, or beat me up. And they
were right, for I was more contemptible than they were. I was the hypocrite.

The biggest worshipper of Uncle Sam at our school was a boy named Muto, spelled with the same Chinese characters as the famous general’s name. Muto was a tall, wiry fellow, good-looking, with a mean grin on his face. In spite of my stammer and general awkwardness, I wasn’t one of his usual victims. My ability to smuggle the boys, including Muto, into our movie theater offered me a degree of protection against bullying. Neither a victim nor an accomplice, I always observed Muto with horrified fascination.

One thing about Muto, he had an imagination. He was always inventing new games to torment the younger kids. One day he arrived in the school playground with a short, chubby boy named Inuzuka, or “Inu,” as we called him. Inu was a fat, placid, smiling sort, not too clever, but full of goodwill. In this latest game, Muto had figured out a new way to inflict pain. By squeezing the two sides of Inu’s palm together, Muto made him yelp and jerk forward as though he were bowing. They became an inseparable pair, Muto and Inu, casually going about the playground. “Meet Inu, my pet dog,” Muto would say, before squeezing his slave’s hand. “Aaaagh!” went Inu, as he made his bow, much to the amusement of the other boys.

Behind our school, on the far side of a field where we played baseball in the summer, was a small wooden hut, used to store various bits of equipment: brooms, pails, baseball bats, that kind of thing. Late one afternoon, strolling along the field on my own, as usual, I heard a wailing sound. It came from the hut, and it sounded like Inu. I watched from a distance, wondering what was going on. Once in a while older boys opened the door of the hut and came out with grins on their faces. I made sure they couldn’t see me. Then there was more wailing, and boys going in and out. I was transfixed by the scene and couldn’t move until it had reached a conclusion. Finally, after about an hour, Muto
emerged from the hut. He was followed by three of his comrades, slapping him on the back and laughing. After they had gone, Inu came out, patting his clothes, which looked dirty. He didn’t seem too unhappy. I waited for him to pass me by. “Hello,” I said. He looked at me, with his round doggy eyes. I don’t know what possessed me, but I grabbed his hand and tried to squeeze it, as I’d seen Muto do so many times. Furious, Inu pulled himself away. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you idiot!” he hissed, and walked off with a look of total disgust. I broke into a sweat and looked around to see if anyone had noticed this shameful encounter.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to leave my hometown. I knew very little about the rest of the world, but it had to be better than this, or if not better, at least more interesting. Two classmates from my high school, one named Kaneko, the other Kaneda, went “back home” to North Korea with their parents. It wasn’t really home to them, of course. They had never been anywhere outside our home-town. I didn’t know either of them well. They kept to themselves. Kaneko was the victim of a certain amount of bullying. Once, Muto made him eat an earthworm, one of those slippery pink ones. “A Korean snack,” Muto called it. The other boys laughed. I walked away. A few days later, Muto was badly beaten up by a gang of boys, led by Kaneko’s elder brother. His jaw was dislocated, and he wasn’t able to speak for a month. Many of us observed this with quiet satisfaction. After that Kaneko was left alone. The boys were not missed when they left for North Korea. But I felt a pang of envy. Lucky bastards, I thought, leaving school and going abroad like that. We never heard from them again.

People say my native country is beautiful. I suppose it is. We have plenty of lakes and snowy mountains and rice fields. But natural beauty still leaves me cold. I prefer neon to sunlight, concrete to wood, plastic to rock. Only one place still haunts my dreams, even here in my
prison cell in Beirut. Every Japanese has heard of it. It is called the Mountain of Dread, a sulfurous volcano not far from our home, where blind women talk to the spirits of the dead, and pilgrims lay flowers at the Buddhist temple to comfort the souls of aborted children. My mother would take me up there in July, during
O-Bon
, when we feed our ancestral spirits. Even in broad daylight, the mountain seemed to be shrouded in darkness. It was altogether a gloomy place. Large black ravens caw from the branches of leafless trees. Yellow vapor drifts across the rocky landscape, leaving a smell of rotten eggs. My mother told me to stay put as she wandered off with one of the old crones dressed in a dark gray kimono. I couldn’t hear what the blind woman was muttering while she fingered her beads. After about fifteen minutes my mother came back to me, her eyes red from weeping.

What little I did know about the world outside came from the movies; the skyline of Manhattan, the palm-tree boulevards of Los Angeles, the streets of Tokyo, these were familiar to me, as though I had actually been there. One film in particular changed my life. I must have seen James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
at least a dozen times. I would go in the afternoon and again in the evening. Alone in my room, I practiced all James’s mannerisms and could recite every line, in Japanese of course. I would spend hours in front of the mirror trying to get my hair to sit like his blond ducktail, but my stiff black bristle always proved too stubborn for the task. I tried to walk like him, smile like him, sit like him, frown like him, and wave like him when I saw someone I knew, or even someone I didn’t. Where I lived, guys didn’t wear red jackets like James’s, so I got a girl’s jacket, which didn’t look remotely like his, but was the closest thing I could find in our country town. No doubt I cut a ridiculous figure. Girls giggled behind my back and boys jeered, calling me “Jaymu”: “Hey, Jaymu, where’s your jackknife?” But I didn’t care. I knew that James would understand me. I felt closer to him than I did to anyone else, including my
mother. He was, in a way, the elder brother I never had. I often dreamed that James would come swooping down on my hometown to take me away with him, me riding on his back.