The China Lover (4 page)

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T
IENTSIN COULD NOT
have been more different from Mukden. First of all it was in China, not Manchukuo. A wide avenue cut right across the foreign concessions like an open sore, the symbol of China’s submission to Western colonial powers. On the south side of the White River (actually black with filth, carrying bits of rotten fruit in its sluggish stream, as well as driftwood, dead cats and dogs, and sometimes human remains) were the Americans, British, French, and Italians. The Russians and the Belgians were on the other side of the avenue, which changed its name as it passed through the various foreign concessions, starting off as Woodrow Wilson Boulevard, and ending as the via d’Italia by way of Victoria Road and rue de Paris.

Tientsin was a city wreathed in smiles, most of them phony. The privileges enjoyed by the white race in their concessions were like dark stains on the honor of all Asiatics. They did as they liked and literally got away with murder. One of the most highly respected Chinese officials, in charge of Tientsin Customs, was assassinated in a cinema by gangsters hired by the British. Like me, he loved the movies, and was peacefully watching
Gunga Din
when he was brutally gunned down. Since the British refused to hand over their hired killers to the police, and Customs affairs were handled by us Japanese, we had no other choice but to blockade the concessions. For this brief period—until we restored full Asian sovereignty a few years later—we could feel proud of ourselves.

Despite such outrages, some contemptible Japanese wished to behave like the Europeans, angling for invitations to the Tientsin Club, where they might be allowed in as “honorary whites” if accompanied by their British hosts. Such people, in my view, were not only contemptible but absurd, looking like monkeys in their ill-fitting tropical suits. You would see them, eating rich cakes at the Kiesling Café, hoping to catch the eye of the British consul, or some other long-nosed bigwig. The most they got, I believe, was a severe case of indigestion.

As for myself, I always thought that Chinese dress was more becoming to my trim Asian physique. Most people took me for a Chinaman and that suited me fine. Indeed, I felt flattered, for I much preferred the company of Asians, who were so much more civilized than the Western riffraff that floated, like scum, on the surface of local society. Tientsin, to me, reeked too much of butter. Before we managed to bring him to his senses and remind him of his duties, Emperor Pu Yi, too, was part of that buttery world, frittering away his time on the tennis court and drinking tea with foreigners. He lived in an old Chinese mansion on Asahi Avenue, where we could watch him as he held court to a variety of European charlatans. One used to come across him also at the Empire Cinema, especially when they showed Charlie Chaplin films. He seemed utterly mesmerized by the little American tramp. I never once saw him laugh, but his fascination never waned. Even after we had restored him to the throne in Manchukuo, Emperor Pu Yi had to be kept entertained in his private cinema at the old Salt Palace with Chaplin movies. He sat through them no matter how many times he had seen them already until, finally, the films were worn out, and new copies had to be ordered from Shanghai. I recognized, in my humble way, a kindred spirit in him, even though I didn’t share his particular passion for Charlie Chaplin.

There was one place in Tientsin where I was able to escape from the stifling atmosphere of the concessions, and forget the shabby intrigues
and general skulduggery that took place there. It was an unassuming establishment behind a crimson gate, on the edge of the Native City, named East Garden. They knew me so well there that my pipes were always prepared without a word needing to be said. All I required was a cup of green tea and my pipe, and I was off into a world of my own. Stretched out in that room filled with the smell of sweet dreams, I quite forgot the war-ravaged country with its stench of blood and excrement, its poverty and degradation, its humiliating submission to the rapacious imperialists. When I closed my eyes, I just let my mind drift, without imposing my will, and the inside of my skull would be filled with images of incomparable beauty. I saw Song Dynasty Chinese landscapes, with soaring mountains and rushing rivers, and boatmen fishing in the mist of dawn. I saw the roofs of Peking, glowing in the dusk of a late spring evening, red and gold and yellow, and I saw the blue hills of Manchukuo, stretching far into the horizon. And I saw my lover, Eastern Jewel, walking toward me, as though in a motion picture, against the backdrop of a garden in Hangzhou. She beckoned me to come to her, as the pan-pipes of a court orchestra keened on the sound track of my mind.

To call Eastern Jewel pretty would be an injustice. She looked much too unconventional for that. Her pale moon face, radiating soft light, combined the fresh beauty of a young boy with the yielding loveliness of a young girl, like those Tang Dynasty sculptures of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. Her body was that of a gorgeous woman, but she had the aristocratic bearing of a young prince. She lived in a handsome gabled villa in the Japanese Concession, not far from the Chang Garden. She, too, went by the name of Yoshiko, or Princess Yoshiko, to be precise. But to me she was always Chin, as in To Chin, or Eastern Jewel, and she called me not Sato, but by my Chinese name, Wang.

Her Japanese was so fluent that many people took her for a native of my country. But in fact, Eastern Jewel was the daughter of Prince
Su, tenth in line for the Manchu throne. Alas, the prince died young, and Eastern Jewel was adopted by a Japanese patron of the Manchu cause, a provincial worthy named Kawashima Naniwa. Renamed Kawashima Yoshiko, she grew up in Japan, where at the tender age of seventeen she was seduced by her fifty-nine-year-old stepfather, who declared that she, as a Manchu princess, had inherited great benevolence, whereas he, the scion of an ancient samurai clan, was imbued with natural courage, so it was their duty under heaven to produce a child of benevolence and courage. Fortunately, a child was not born from that union. To promote the liberation of Mongolia, and perhaps to ward off scandalous gossip, Yoshiko was married off to a plump young Mongolian prince, whom she detested so much that she fled to Shanghai, where she had a passionate liaison with Major General Tanaka, chief of our Secret Service.

Eastern Jewel was particularly useful to us because of her close relationship with Emperor Pu Yi, and more particularly with one of his wives, who had given her the run of her mansion in Tientsin, and later in Shinkyo. Tired, perhaps, of being confined to the grounds of his palace in Shinkyo, impatient to occupy, once more, the dragon throne that was rightfully his in Peking’s Forbidden City, the Emperor sometimes behaved like a willful child, refusing to attend official ceremonies or receive official guests from Tokyo. I could understand his feelings. The officials from Tokyo could be very dull company. But an emperor must do his duty, no matter how tedious. However, after a visit from my Eastern Jewel, who knew just how to dose our demands with the right amount of Manchu flattery, he would invariably decide to behave in the manner of his station. I would then report back to Captain Amakasu in Room 202.

Yet to see my Jewel as a Japanese agent, or even as a spy, as some people still do, is to misunderstand her completely. She was loyal to one cause only, the restoration of the Manchu Dynasty. For that noble
goal, she would have been proud to sacrifice everything, even her own life. Far from being anti-China, she was dedicated to the future of her country, but not under the rule of Chiang Kai-shek and his shabby gang of money-grubbing officials. Her aim, like mine, was to restore China to its former greatness.

Eastern Jewel rarely rose before four or five in the afternoon. Her first act, before rising from her bed, was to drink a glass of champagne and feed a handful of nuts to the two pet monkeys who jumped onto her bed from the yellow velvet curtains. These daily rituals always took place in the presence of at least two or three of her young female companions, whom she called her “Chrysanthemums.” Her dependence on them was total. Without her Chrysanthemums, Eastern Jewel wouldn’t rise from her bed. After her glass of champagne, she would retire to the bathroom, attended by the Chrysanthemums. She would reemerge an hour later, smelling sweeter than a Chinese orchid. On most nights, she wore a male army tunic of her own design, in military khaki or black, with a pair of riding britches, a thick brown leather belt, shiny black boots, a peaked army cap, and a long samurai sword. On other occasions, when she was in a less martial mood, a simple black male Chinese mandarin robe with a silk cap would suffice. When she had finished her toilette, she would examine herself in the mirror, striking poses this way and that, leaning on her sword, as though for an official photograph, sometimes with a monkey perched on her shoulder.

Eastern Jewel had one other peculiar habit. At various stages of an evening, she would sit down, usually in full view of whoever happened to be there for her amusement—myself, her Chrysanthemums, or perhaps one of her favorite Chinese Opera performers—take down her britches or hike up her robe, and stick a needle into her soft eggshell white thigh. It was a gesture of shocking transgression, as though she were taking a knife to a beautiful work of art, and at the same time of delicious sensuality; the sheen of her pale flesh, begging to be touched
and kissed, the penetration of the silver needle, the crimson beads of blood, like rubies on white satin. My passion for her was such that I was in a constant state of desire. I was hungry for her love, a slave to her caresses. Just to hear her voice on the telephone would conjure up visions of pleasure, the nature of which delicacy forbids me to repeat in these pages. The baring of her thigh for the injections she craved took place in a private room in the restaurant she owned near Asahi Avenue, staffed by her former Mongolian bodyguards, or indeed anywhere she felt she was among friends. She called her drug “my little sister,” the morphine without which, she often told me, she would surely die.

Since we shared a passion for dancing, we would frequent her favorite nightclubs on the rue de Paris, and after that, if we felt the urge, an opium den, not my usual one but a smaller place just outside the Native City. Or we would go to a brothel in the early hours of the morning on the rue Pétain in the French Concession, where we paid the owner, a fat Lithuanian Jew, to let us watch through a peephole as White Russian girls were being ravished by Japanese officers, a spectacle that Eastern Jewel found particularly arousing, especially if the men were a bit rough in their amorous attentions. She marveled at the beauty of the Russian skin. “So white,” she would whisper in my ear, as she gripped my hand, “so perfectly white, like Siberian snow.” I was struck less by the whiteness of the Russian skin than by the fact that the officers remained fully clothed, apart from their legs, exposed after they lowered their trousers, as though in a lavatory. Were they ashamed to show their dark Asian skin, I wondered, even to a Russian prostitute?

Eastern Jewel wanted her nights to last forever. The early hours of the morning, when the city was still in deep slumber, and the only sounds were of the creaking wheels of the night soil collectors’ carts, had a tonic effect on her. That is when she was most fully alive, and allowed me to make love to her. Even though the jibbering monkeys
could be rather a distraction, making love to Eastern Jewel was unlike possessing any other woman—and I had had plenty of them. She was skilled in all the erotic arts, as one would expect from such a worldly creature, but that was not what made loving her so peculiarly exciting. I don’t quite know how to put this, but once this proud Manchu princess had discarded her military uniform, taken off her black shiny boots, put aside her sword and cap, she was so soft, so yielding, so vulnerable, so womanly, and yet so mysterious. No matter how much she tried to pose as a Japanese named Kawashima Yoshiko, when I made love to Eastern Jewel, I felt as though I were penetrating the flesh of China. Alas, however, the feeling was as fleeting as a bolt of lightning, for after we had made love, it was as if she were no longer there, out of my grasp, like the fox woman in a ghost story. I loved her more than any woman before, or since. But I never really felt that I knew her at all.