The Girl Who Played Go (6 page)

When Masayo arrives, I am torn away from a conversation that was becoming unbearably painful. She bows to the ground in front of her employer, who is weeping silently, then drags me by the sleeve and leads me up to her room.

The Resistance partisans withdrew into the mountains before nightfall, and were followed by those soldiers who had rebelled. In the space of an evening the town’s patriotic fever has abated.

The very next morning Japanese patrols are parading through the streets. A provisional government has been constituted; they are noisily tracking down and dealing with the rioters. If they fail to find any true rebels, they vent their anger on thieves and beggars.

The new mayor decides to rekindle Manchurian- Japanese relations and announces a series of cultural exchanges. The Japanese army, publicly praised and flattered by the Manchurian authorities, consents to forgive and manages to forget. We slip back into normality virtually in the wink of an eye. April brings us its radiant clarity. At school we start Japanese lessons again.

This morning I wake up late. My rickshaw boy runs breathlessly, fast as he can, so that I am not late for school. Sweat runs down his back and great blue veins crawl over his arms, and I am so overcome with guilt that I ask him to slow down.

“Please don’t worry, miss,” he replies haltingly, “a good run in the morning is the secret of eternal life.”

In front of the Temple of the White Horse I catch sight of Min heading in the opposite direction on his bicycle. I am so amazed that I don’t even think to wave a greeting… Our paths cross for a moment and then we are carried away from each other.

The order to leave is given. I have no time to say good-bye to Madame Violette and Masayo before our unit leaves the barracks and heads for the station. Whistles shriek on the platform and several companies of men push and jostle to get into the trains laden with tanks and munitions. We manage to climb up into a double-decker carriage.

The chill air of a hesitant, stuttering spring makes it impossible for me to sleep. I place my hand over my tunic pocket where I have put the last two letters I have received: they are still there. In Mother’s, her fine, clear writing reassures me that she is well, at least temporarily alleviating my anxiety. Akiko has somehow got hold of my address and has written at length.

Before I left, this young woman came to bid me farewell, and I deliberately went to hide, hoping it would make her hate me. She was my younger sister’s best friend and, having lost her brothers in the earthquake, she had become attached to me. Her family was related to the shogun Tokugawa,
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and her modesty and elegance had appealed to Mother, who secretly hoped we would be married. Encouraged by her own parents, the young girl already believed she was my intended. Once I had left the military academy and had taken up my post on the outskirts of Tokyo, she started to write to me at the barracks-I replied to one letter in four. When I was away she would come to visit my sister, and her smiling and bowing won over my landlady, who willingly opened my door for her. She would wash and iron my dirty laundry, and darn my socks. Like most well-brought-up women, Akiko never spoke to me of her feelings, and her discretion permitted me to put her squarely in her place: she would be a sister, and nothing more.

A few words from Miss Sunlight would certainly have given more pleasure than Akiko’s endless missive. But I know that the geisha will never write to me. The life she has chosen is a whirlwind of parties, banquets, laughter and music. When will she have a quiet moment to think of me?

I passed through her life, but it was a one-way trip.

I have been going past the Temple of the White Horse every morning for years, and Min has been taking the same route but in the other direction, although we have never seen each other. For the last week he has appeared just as the bells in the shrine have started to ring.

Before I leave the house I slip into Mother’s bedroom and look at my reflection in her full-length oval mirror. My bangs look childish now and, with the help of two barrettes set with tiny pearls that by dint of sighing and begging I have managed to borrow from my sister, I hold them back to reveal my forehead.

As I reach the crossroads my heart beats so hard I can’t catch my breath and I scour the streets anxiously for Min’s bicycle. At last I see him toiling up a hill and, as he reaches the top, he stops and waves to me. At that moment, he is sharply silhouetted against the sky. The wind trips lightly through the branches, which are full of birds singing their joyful little score. Some young Taoist monks walk past in their gray tunics, eyes lowered. A street peddler stokes his fire, and his fried rolls steam, a delicious smell.

In class, instead of listening to the teacher, I review the image of Min on his bicycle a thousand times inside my head. I remember his eyes shining out from under his hat, the way he raises his arm in greeting with his books in his hand. My cheeks are burning, and I can’t help smiling stupidly at the blackboard, where I think I can see him showing off as he weaves between the words and numbers.

After the earthquake I began to feel repulsed, but also fascinated, by death. These thoughts pursued me night and day: I would suddenly be overwhelmed with fear, I would have palpitations and I would cry for no reason.

The first time I touched a gun, I felt its strength in the chill of the steel. My first shooting lesson was outside, on an empty range. I was profoundly fearful, like a pilgrim preparing to touch the feet of a deity. With the first shot, my ears started to hum and, as the weapon kicked back, it struck me violently. That evening I went to bed with a sore shoulder, and a feeling of appeasement.

Every man has to die. Choosing oblivion is the only way of triumphing over this.

When I was sixteen I began to live again. At last I had stopped dreaming about tidal waves and ravaged forests. For me, the army was a giant arch capable of withstanding every kind of tempest. I was initiated into the delights of physical love in my very first year of cadet training, and I discovered the pleasure of abandoning myself inside a woman. Then I learned to sacrifice pleasure to duty. The
Hagakure
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was like a beacon guiding me through adolescence towards maturity.

I prepared myself for death. Why should I marry? A samurai’s wife kills herself when her husband dies. Why send another life hurtling into the abyss? I am fond of children, they are the continuation of a people, the hope of a nation, but I could never have my own. Children need to grow up with a father’s guidance and protection, and to be spared from grief.

The appeal of a prostitute has the transient, furtive freshness of the morning dew. Prostitutes have no illusions and this makes them a soldier’s natural soulmates. They respond with a blandness that is reassuring; as the daughters of poverty and misery, they have an abiding mistrust of happiness. Already damned, they dare not dream of eternity, and they cling to us like shipwrecked mariners clinging to flotsam. There is a religious purity in our embraces.

After our training we no longer had to hide our recreational activities. High-ranking officers openly kept geishas, and second lieutenants made do with more fleeting encounters.

I met Miss Sunlight in June 1931. We were in a teahouse celebrating our captain’s promotion, and the screens slid silently backwards and forwards, revealing a steady stream of geishas. As one group arrived, the previous group was swallowed up in the shadows. Night had fallen along the Sumida, and boats with lanterns glided slowly downstream. I had been drinking and my head was spinning. We were getting one of the officers drunk as he lost his hand at cards, and I kept roaring with laughter. I was just about to run outside to be sick when I caught sight of an apprentice geisha
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in a blue kimono with wide, flowing sleeves with an iris design on them. She bowed deeply in greeting, moving slowly and with great nobility. Despite the white powder on her cheeks, the beauty mark that stood out against her chin made her look somehow melancholy.

She took a samisen from its case, picked up her ivory plectrum and tuned the instrument. She struck the strings abruptly and they reverberated loudly; it was like a clap of thunder in a summer sky. The wind blew, bending the trees and tearing open the inky clouds. The quiet clipping of the plectrum produced flashes of lightning that hurtled down the mountains. Waterfalls became torrents, rivers swelled and the sea, whipped up by the wind, hurled itself on the foaming shore. A husky voice began to sing of disappointed love, of abandonment and the underworld. I was seized by the misery that sometimes overwhelms a happy drunkard, and I was moved to tears by the desolate passion she described. Suddenly the music stopped, as abruptly as a vase breaking, and the voice fell silent.

All around me the officers were looking at each other, stunned and at a loss for words. After bidding us farewell, the apprentice geisha put away her samisen, gave a little bow and slipped away with a rustling of her kimono.

Moon Pearl keeps begging my parents to let me go with her to the new mayor’s birthday celebrations. She is convinced that her husband will be going with his mistress, and is determined to catch him in the act.

Mother couldn’t resist her tears. I find my sister’s jealousy despicable, but I do want to get out and see people… and Min may be at the party.

“Ladies, good evening…”

The footmen at the bottom of the stairs greet us with effusive little bows. One of them goes ahead of us, inviting us to enter through a red lacquered gateway, and we walk across three successive courtyards. As Moon Pearl doesn’t want her husband to see her, we have arrived after dark.

We are shown into a huge garden where about a hundred tables are dotted around under the trees and lit with good-luck lanterns to wish the mayor a long life. An orchestra in evening dress is battling desperately with its waltz tune against an opera troupe singing at the top of their lungs.

We wend our way discreetly towards a table sheltering under an umbrella pine and settle there like two huntsmen waiting for their prey. To dispel the chill of early spring, our host has lit braziers and torches, and as soon as she sits down my sister complains that the flames are blinding her and she won’t be able to recognize her unfaithful husband. I scour the area around us, looking for my brother-in-law, and I suddenly catch sight of Jing wearing a European suit and sitting alone at a table, away from the crowds. He is watching me.

I go and join him.

“Would you like some rice wine?” he asks.

“No, thank you, I can’t stand it.”

On a sign from Jing, a waiter appears and dots a dozen dishes around the table. With a pair of chopsticks, Jing serves a few slices of translucent meat into a bowl for me.

“Taste it,” he says. “It’s the pad of a bear’s paw.”

This meat, which is highly prized by the Manchurian aristocracy, slithers over my tongue. It doesn’t taste of anything.

“Here,” he says, “this is camel’s foot marinated in wine for five years. And this is the fish they call black dragon, taken from the depths of the River Love.”

Instead of tasting the food, I ask him whether Min is here.

“No,” he says.

To hide my disappointment, I admit that I was dragged here by my sister and that I don’t even know what our host, the new mayor, looks like. He points out a short, fat man of about fifty wearing a brocade tunic.

“How do you know him?”

“He’s my father.”

“Your father!”

“You’re surprised, aren’t you?” says Jing with a cold little laugh. “Before the rebels attacked, he was a council member to the former mayor. One man’s death is another man’s making. My father would manage to get himself promoted even in hell!”

Embarrassed by his admission, I can’t think how to move away.

“Look, that’s one of my stepmothers,” says Jing, pointing rather obviously at a woman who is greeting the guests like a butterfly alighting on flowers to gather nectar. She is wearing too much makeup and a richly embroidered tunic lined with fur, and a fan-shaped headdress sprinkled with pearls, coral and muslin flowers-clearly a priceless antique.

“She was a whore before she became my father’s concubine,” says Jing derisively. “She sleeps with a Japanese colonel now. Do you know why she dresses herself up as an imperial lady-in-waiting? She has always claimed to be descended from a deposed family of the pure yellow banner
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… Now, this is my mother coming over. How can she accept that harlot under her roof?”

Following Jing’s gaze, I can make out the silhouette of a middle-aged woman. Behind her I suddenly catch sight of my brother-in-law with his hair slicked back and wearing an ostentatiously elegant suit. I ask Jing whether he knows him.

A smile appears at the corners of his mouth.

“Is that your brother-in-law? The informer?”

“Why informer? My brother-in-law is a respected journalist.”

Jing doesn’t answer. He pours himself a large glass of wine and drinks it down in one. He is a friend of Min’s, but he inspires a disturbing mixture of disgust and admiration in me. When I leave him, I am so confused that I can no longer find my sister’s table.

My friends persuaded themselves that I had fallen for the apprentice geisha and they invited her to our banquets as often as possible. I flushed every time she appeared. The winks and stifled laughs that my brother officers exchanged irritated me, though they also inspired an obscure feeling of pride and happiness.

Sunlight was shy and always left quickly after she had sung, but as time went by she agreed to serve us food and to have a drink. She had tiny hands, and her fingernails were like antique pearls. When she brought her glass up to her lips, the sleeve of her kimono slipped down her arm, revealing a dazzlingly white wrist. Would it be like gazing on a snowfield to see her naked?