The China Lover (41 page)

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Poor, poor Yamaguchi-san. All her life she had been exploited by cynical men who used her for their own nefarious ends. Tanaka Kakuei, that most corrupt of all politicians
, the man who would cover Japan in concrete, the former black marketeer who had bought his way to the top, the party leader who invented the term “money politics,” the friend and associate of Fascists and gangsters, had now, like his predecessors, exploited the very qualities that made Yamaguchi-san so special: her sincere wish to do good, her internationalism, her purity. He is just the latest in a long line of puppetmasters playing her like a Bunraku doll. And for what? Well, I’ll tell you what: oil. That’s the only reason why he cares about the Arabs. I hope OPEC never sells a drop of oil to Japan again. May Tanaka and his gang rot in hell!

I wrote her back. When I didn’t hear from her, I wrote again, and again, until I realized it was no use. They must have got to her. I was too dangerous, even as a harmless correspondent. And yet I didn’t feel bitter toward her. I knew her intentions were good. I was even pleased to read in the papers that she had been granted her wish. She did return to China, with Tanaka, to shake Chairman Mao’s hand. The Chinese received her like a long-lost child. There was a photograph of her, in the Great Hall of the People, toasting Zhou Enlai. They must have had their reasons. The revolution works in mysterious ways. And so do the Chinese.

There was one other news item that caught my eye not long after Yamaguchi’s “homecoming.” A friend from Ban-chan’s production company had sent me a clipping from the
Asahi Shimbun
. The headline ran: “Right-wing Actor Crashes His Plane in Suicide Attack.” It happened in Tokyo. A right-wing nut had crashed his plane into the house of Taneguchi Yoshio, the war criminal and Fascist fixer. This in itself was not of particular interest. Tokyo is full of right-wing nuts, and Taneguchi richly deserved to be attacked. What arrested me instantly, however, was the madman’s name: Maeno Mitsuyasu. I had known him as an actor in Ban-chan’s pink films. Maeno was not handsome, and had no acting talent, so far as anyone could see, but he did have an unusually
large penis—if he could put it to the purpose for which it was designed, which was by no means guaranteed. Maeno was a serious type. Once, when nothing, and I mean nothing, could prod his member into the required state of readiness, not even the most sophisticated techniques of Yuriko-chan, our most desirable star—techniques involving a double-headed vibrator, ice cubes, and her own oral ministrations— he still tried desperately to get some kind of tumescence through a punishing round of hand-jerking. Finally, the crew couldn’t take it any longer and burst out laughing. Beside himself with rage, he screamed: “Silence while I’m at work!”

This Maeno, then, this loser from the porno circuit, had dressed up in a Second World War kamikaze pilot’s uniform, probably swiped from some movie studio, hired a single-engine Piper Cherokee, and blew himself up in a ball of flame after crying: “Long live His Majesty, the Emperor!” Taneguchi, alas, remained unscathed. According to the report, Maeno’s extreme right-wing politics had been identical to Taneguchi’s. Both wanted to restore the Emperor’s divine authority and rebuild the Fascist state. But Taneguchi did one unforgivable thing in the eyes of his fellow ultranationalists: he had taken bribes from a Yankee aircraft company on behalf of his friend the prime minister, Tanaka Kakuei. The middleman was an American named Stan Lutz, identified in the press as a “former movie actor.”

Maeno was probably mad. But even madmen are sometimes worth taking seriously. I felt a twinge of sympathy for old Maeno. Everyone with any moral sense is disgusted by the corruption of modern Japan. Being bribed by American businessmen to buy their aircraft is just a symptom of a deeper sickness. Our entire system is rotten to the core. Maeno should at least be commended for his courage. He gave his life for what he believed in. How many of us would do the same? Who can claim that their lives have any meaning? The modern Japanese is nothing but a blind consumer of goods he doesn’t need. In the consumer
society, even death loses its redemptive force. The death of a consumer is as meaningless as his life. We have lost our honor. Maeno, in his confused way, tried to get some of it back.

But what good did his act of self-sacrifice do? None at all, I’m afraid. For nobody cared. People just went on, living in darkness, for their eyes were blinded to reality. In Okuni’s play on Ri Koran, the puppetmaster turns out to be a ghost. But this was an exercise in wishful thinking. The evil puppeteers are not dead at all. Nothing has changed since the war. The same criminals are still running the show. The great temptation is to believe that things would be better if only the puppets took over and became the new puppeteers. But this is just another illusion, another exercise in wishful thinking. All we would get is another generation of puppetmasters in different uniforms. For the revolution to succeed, we must not only kill the puppetmasters, but destroy the puppets, too. Only then can we get rid of the illusions, fed to us by the powerful to keep us enslaved. To find our way back to the real world of the living, we must kill the movies, and all the fantasies they feed. They are the opium that makes us powerless to act, to take hold of our own destinies. We must reclaim reality from the masters who colonize our minds.

   14   

I
THOUGHT BEING
locked up in a Lebanese prison cell might at least have the virtue of isolation. I had hoped that I could reach some core of authenticity, somewhere deep inside myself, stripped of all worldly illusions, like a mystic or a monk. I tried so hard to kill the movies inside my own head.

The fact that we were locked up at all was utterly absurd. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the Lebanese government was put under pressure by the Western imperialist powers to arrest us. So we, who had been leading ordinary lives in Beirut for more than twenty years, were suddenly the targets of the special armed police. I was wrestled to the ground in my own apartment by three gorillas with machine guns, who shouted at me: “Where’s Sato?” Even with a hirsute hand wrapped around my throat, I managed to squeak that I was in fact the man they were looking for. They charged me with all kinds of fabrications: assassination plots against so-and-so, plans for terrorist attacks on this or that embassy. It was too ridiculous even for the prosecutors, who were ordered to convict us, so they got us on a detail: forging an exit visa in our passports. Since our actual passports had been forged for years—mine was Brazilian; Morioka was, I think, a Costa Rican— this was technically true.

People say that prison is the ideal breeding ground of religious faith. Two of my comrades, Nishiyama and Kamei, were living proof
of this notion. They decided to convert to Islam. A great deal of fuss was made over this in the Lebanese press. TV crews and newspaper journalists were never allowed inside Roumieh, but an exception was made on this occasion. It was a complete circus, with the entire press corps of Beirut turning up to witness the conversion ceremony conducted by a sheikh, who arrived in a white Mercedes-Benz.

Six months later, Morioka married his Arab girlfriend and decided to convert to her Christian Orthodox faith. This too drew public attention, and once again the press turned up at the gates of Roumieh Prison to witness the conversion of a Japanese war hero. But this time the prison authorities wouldn’t let them in. Perhaps they were biased against Christianity, or perhaps they didn’t want a repeat of the media circus. In any event, the camera crews and radio reporters were left outside, to file their reports from the main gate, until a tank was sent by the army to force them out of the area. But this was not the end of the affair. Religion is a sensitive issue in Lebanon, so the priest refused to carry out the ceremony without the presence of the press. If the sheikh could have all the publicity, then why not the Christian priest? And so Morioka had to wait for another occasion, when a less fussy priest could take him into the bosom of Christ.

As for myself, I thought about religion, the meaning of our fleeting existence, and all that. But I found nothing. Perhaps I lack a necessary component, a religious gene. Maybe I don’t have the human impulse to believe in gods. I’m incapable of religious worship, even of the primitive faith that my mother had in the powers of the old crones on the Mountain of Dread. I envy my friends sometimes, who have gone inside themselves and found God. I too, as I said, tried to go inside myself, since there is nowhere else to go in prison. But all I managed to dredge up from the depth of my soul were ghosts of a kind. I found images flickering inside my head, as though my brain were a kind of cinema. In the isolation of our prison, I’m transported back to my
childhood, trapped in my chair on the other side of the movie screen. I remember dialogues, monologues, long shots, close-ups, in Technicolor or black and white, grainy or knife-sharp, pictures of compliant women molested in dentist chairs, of Belmondo making faces at the mirror, of Jean Seberg selling the
Herald Tribune
, of Okuni’s tent in Shinjuku, of Okuchi Denjiro flashing his samurai sword, of Jean Gabin as king of the casbah, and so on and so on, until I think I’m losing my mind. Once I spent a whole day mimicking Katharine Hepburn, endlessly repeating one line that struck me as hysterically funny: “Ah, London,” I would go. “Ah, London.” I don’t know why I thought it was hilarious. I think I must have been a bit mad. It certainly drove my comrades crazy. The colonization of our minds by the movies offers a certain solace (one is never alone), but it is terrifying too, for their voices drown out your own.

Every Japanese knows the story of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, from whom we are supposed to be descendants. My mother used to tell it to me, before I ever saw a movie screen. Although I regard that idea of divine ancestry as total rubbish, promoted in the past as racist propaganda, I have always loved the story of Amaterasu’s cave. Susanoo, her brother, the God of Wind, had created a storm in her realm, smashing the rice fields and pissing during the sacred rites for the Sun. Furious, the Sun Goddess retreated into her cave, plunging the world into darkness. Desperate about what to do, the gods convened a conference, and devised a plan. A tub was placed at the entrance of the cave, and the Dread Female of Heaven climbed on top of the tub to perform a dance. Slow at first, the dance picked up speed, with a great deal of stamping and rolling of the eyes. Finally, the Dread Female, cheered on by the deities, bared her breasts and revealed her private parts, whereupon the gods screamed with laughter. The Sun Goddess, still in her cave, couldn’t bear it any longer, and poked her head out to see what had provoked so much mirth. Instantly, a mirror was placed in
front of her, and the Dread Female announced that a new god was born. The Sun Goddess, in a jealous rage, reached out to the mirror image, trying to touch her own reflection. Her arm was grabbed by the Strong-handed Male, who pulled her out of darkness and once more there was light in the world.

Perhaps my love of this story reveals my peasant roots, deep in the soil of the Mountain of Dread. Okuni may have been right about that, after all. Just as the sun comes up every day to give us light, and just as the seasons will always come and go long after we’re dead, the images we make have a kind of permanence. They are our only shot at immortality. That’s why I cannot kill the movies in my head, however much I try. I’ve wrestled with the angel and lost. For they are part of me, they are what made me. In the isolation of my prison, I finally made peace with myself. For I, too, have a capacity for worship. I worship what religious people call the craven image. This is why Ri Koran will never die. Nor will Yamaguchi Yoshiko, or even Shirley Yamaguchi. Long after my Yamaguchi-san turns to dust, they will live on, wherever there is a film, a screen, and a projector of light.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a work of fiction based on historical events. Some were invented, others took place, though not always quite in the way they appear in this book. I owe a great debt to Otaka Yoshiko, formerly known as Yoshiko Yamaguchi, who graciously allowed me to interview her on several occasions in Tokyo. Her memoir,
Ri Koran, Watashi no Hansei
(
Half My Life as Ri Koran
), (Shincho Bunka, Tokyo, 1987) was an invaluable source of information on her extraordinary life in China. It was a conversation I had with her admirable co-writer, Fujiwara Sakuya, whose own memoir,
Manshu no Kaze
(
Manchurian Winds
), (Shueisha, Tokyo, 1996) was also of great use to me, that first planted the seed of this novel in my mind. For this I owe him my thanks.

Donald Richie, novelist, critic, and the most distinguished foreign writer on Japanese cinema, lived through much of the Allied occupation of Japan. His book,
The Japan Journals: 1947–2004
(Stone Bridge Press, 2004), offers the best personal account of that period. A mentor, and beloved friend of many years, he taught me much of what I know about Japan.

Thanks, too, for the excellent guidance of my editors, Vanessa Mobley in New York and Toby Mundy in London. My friend John Ryle was a careful reader of the manuscript and prevented several infelicities
from going into print. Jin Auh, Jacqueline Ko, and Tracy Bohan, of the Wylie Agency, have provided constant, much needed support.

My dearest critic and supporter throughout the process of writing the book was Eri Hotta, my wife, whose encouragement kept me going at all times, especially when writerly anxieties threatened to halt the momentum. I cannot thank her enough.