The Heat of the Sun (19 page)

‘That was the dark bargain of Meiji: iron horses, clanking factories, telegraph wires that webbed the sky. We turned on our land as if we hated it – we had to, in order to save it.
Did you know, Mr Sharpless, that your Commodore Perry was a hopeless drunkard? He died raving, eaten by the ravages of his weakness. And this, this foul-breathed swaggering American, was the man
who plunged a great and ancient people into shame!’

As Yamadori’s words crept over me I suspected this was a monologue he had delivered often. But should I – American, though I barely felt it – hold myself responsible for
Commodore Perry?

Yamadori continued: ‘I grew up in ignorance, Mr Sharpless. Cosseted product of a tendril of royalty that had withered on the vine, what chance had I? Yes, there were our family lands, our
old retainers; I wanted for nothing, but nothingness gnawed at my heart. My tutors encouraged me in the callow paths of pleasure. At an early age I was sent to America. Travels in Europe followed.
By the time I came into man’s estate, I was thoroughly cosmopolitan. Some would call me deracinated, though how deracinated can a man be whose very appearance – his skin, his eyes
– proclaims his origins at every turn?

‘Oh, I was not given over wholly to my foreigner’s life; there was business to attend to here and I came back often in young manhood, if always with an eagerness to be off again to
Vienna or Paris or Rome, and the mistresses and boon companions who beguiled my hours there. I admit I partook of the pleasures of this port – how many marriages did I contract, flickering
affairs of a few weeks or months, with the sweet little protégées of a fellow called Goro?

‘Then came the one girl I could not forget. I dare say I appeared a bumptious fool the day I stood before her, offering my hand. I blush to think of it. Here was my heart, enraptured, and
all I could display were the gestures of the libertine, taking his pick among playthings in a house of ill-repute – for such, Mr Sharpless, is the power of vice to pollute our attempts at
purity, to coarsen our overtures to our own salvation.

‘Hear me, speaking like a Christian! But when that girl stood before me in a kimono embroidered with a dragon’s coils, I knew I had lost myself long ago and only through her could I
find my way home again. What beauty that girl possessed: a girl whose ruin, like mine, stemmed from the days of the Satsuma Rebellion and the alliances contracted by her father then – a girl
fallen low, but one whom I could raise up, restoring her to her rightful place! For yes, this I would have done, had the American Pinkerton not stolen her heart.

‘I was abandoned by history, Mr Sharpless. Love, when at last I found it, might have compensated for my losses. But love, too, was snatched from me by history. Could I, like my country a
half-century before, have been more abjectly cast down? I vowed to leave Japan and not come back.

‘And I almost kept my vow. Never once, through what remained of Meiji and the effete years of Taish
ō
, did I return. My exile was lonely, a stage, perhaps, through which
I had to pass, for while I frittered my time away in city after city, slowly something stirred in me. Yes, I had been weak. Yes, I had been a fool. But I am a prince of samurai blood. Only for so
long could I be oppressed by a foreigner. In Manhattan, at the Blood Red Ball, I confronted the treachery that had worked against me for so long. Afterwards, I returned to my homeland and found, as
if in echo of my own turning spirit, that the passing of Taish
ō
had brought a new age. Under Emperor Hirohito, Japan would become a nation fit to command the world. And I would
be a part of it, shape it, direct it. My time had come.’

Would Yamadori never shut up? I longed to rise from the pool and go. My flesh felt boiled, and in my irritation I blurted out, ‘This can’t be your time, it can’t! You spoke of
torii and sacred stairs. In China, Hirohito’s soldiers skewer children on bayonets. They rape. They murder. They fling gasoline over houses and set them blazing. Can’t you see what
you’re doing? You’re killing the Indians. You’re enslaving the Negroes. This is the logic of Meiji – the iron ships, the airplanes, the mile after mile of railroad track.
This is where they lead. You haven’t turned your back on America. You’ve become America.’

Yamadori moved towards me through the steam. ‘Mr Sharpless, I’ve told you my story and you’ve understood not a word. Your ships in Edo Bay had dark and terrible powers. But
your empire is over and ours has begun.’ His hand, a darting fish, slithered under the scalding water, alighting on my hip. ‘I could kill you, American. You’re Sharpless, the
consul.’

‘His son. I was a child.’

‘You’ll always be a child.’ His voice was a whisper. ‘Look at you, what are you? Chicken bones, fit only to be left for the dogs! A weakling. A cripple. How can you even
pretend to be a man?’

‘Stop it! Keep away!’ I flailed from the side of the pool, but the darting hand was adroit, threading between my spindly legs and closing upon my testicles.

Pain shot through me like electric volts. I shrieked and thrashed. I sank. He pushed me down, then wrenched me up, twisting and crushing with brutal, thick fingers. I floundered for the side of
the pool; I crashed through the water, down and down; I surged up, yowling; I lay on my back, kicking and writhing; and all the time Yamadori twisted.

Then came the flash. Incandescence scythed the steamy air. There were scufflings, shouts. What was happening? I didn’t know, but the distraction was enough for me to break from Yamadori.
Outraged, he bellowed in Japanese, but not at me, and only when I had ripped myself from the water did I see Le Vol, holding his camera above the desperate servants’ heads.

Flash! Flash!
Le Vol took a second photograph, then a third, just as Yamadori whiplashed a hand over the pool’s slimy edge. Grabbing my bad leg, he gouged into the scars. I
screamed. Le Vol joined the fray and tugged me by the arms. I feared they would tear me in two.

Le Vol had the advantage. Yamadori was half out of the pool. With a mighty splash he fell back, and I slithered like an eel towards the changing room as Le Vol flung first one, then another, of
the servants into the water. He wrenched me up, ready to hustle me away, but Yamadori, as if infused with occult power, reared up before us. Cries tore from his throat; his sumo bulk charged at Le
Vol and flipped him to the floor. The camera smashed.

Yamadori raged. In an instant, he would be upon me. His uniform hung from the wall, and beneath it, gleaming in the steam, was the sword. I seized it, ripped it from the scabbard. Like lightning
the blade flashed – just as the door behind me burst open and a new voice rang out.

I lowered the sword. At first I could not believe the saviour that appeared before us, dapper in Japanese military uniform: breathless, and a little astonished, but not too much, at the scene he
had encountered. My scars burned, but worse was my sudden, absurd shame at my nudity.

‘I’ve been entertaining our American friends,’ said Yamadori, as if he had been presiding over a tea ceremony. ‘You’ll see they’re somewhat ignorant of our
etiquette.’ Flagrantly he advanced over the tiles, feet slapping, genitals swaying, huge-nippled breasts wobbling against his sides like folds of cloth. He gestured to the new arrival.

‘My secretary. But perhaps you’ve met before.’

Familiar, violet eyes looked at me, amused.

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Clifford T. Arnhem, ‘is what you thought you were playing at.’

‘Why should we be
playing
at anything? The interview took a peculiar turn – a bath, for Christ’s sake!’

‘The prince is a busy man. He bathes at odd times.’

‘He wouldn’t let Le Vol in with us.’

‘So your friend insisted? He’s disappointed me, Mr Sharpless. I thought he had some sense.’

We were in the Lincoln; Goro drove, aimlessly it seemed, about the city. It was late afternoon. Until then I had spent all my time on the east side of the harbour. Now we had reached the west,
and I wished we could stop; at every rut in the road, at every pothole, pain shot up my injured leg and throbbed between my thighs. My testicles, my
balls
, would be black for weeks.

Rain shivered down, pattering the windows. Shabby stores, a succession of holes in walls, reeled slowly by; yellowish faces loomed in at us through the glass. There was another pothole, a nasty
one.

‘Goro, drive carefully!’ I rapped the dividing glass, and Mr Arnhem glowered; I was too ashamed to tell him what Yamadori had done to me. ‘But Le Vol,’ I urged.
‘Surely they’ll let Le Vol go?’

Mr Arnhem, summoned by Yamadori, had extricated me with some difficulty from military prison; Le Vol was another matter. ‘What do you think would happen if a Jap photographer muscled his
way in to take snaps of, say, Senator Pinkerton in his bath? The crime is comparable. Your friend has grievously insulted Prince Yamadori.’

‘And Yamadori,’ I cried, ‘has insulted me!’

‘
You
are not a senior member of the Japanese government.’

Another bump. Pain contorted my face. ‘Mr Arnhem, are you telling me that
you
, as consul, can’t make him see reason?’

‘You presume to know what
reason
in this case might be.’

‘So that’s it? You’re giving up on Le Vol?’

‘Don’t be silly. Yamadori’s intention, I hope, is just to frighten him. But I can do no more today.’

Storefronts had given way to barbed-wire fences, scrubby fields, and, in the distance, low metallic sheds with half-built shells of ships towering above them. A checkpoint appeared ahead. With a
tap at the glass, Mr Arnhem directed Goro to proceed no further; but as we swerved back towards town, I glimpsed a motorcade parked within the shipyards, and Yamadori greeting a line of naval
officers. Standing stiffly by his side was Trouble.

In the days that followed, I ate my meals and drank too much and spoke of idle things, as if no desperate uncertainty beat beneath each moment like a drum. Mr Arnhem was
preoccupied, busy with consular duties, and it fell to Goro to keep me amused, taking me for long drives around Nagasaki-ken and beyond. Green volcanic valleys unfolded before me, with volatile
hills and steam that hissed up foully from the earth. Here, said Goro, the Christians were massacred; here, the samurai met their doom; Japan, I reflected, was a violent land, never the dreamy
eternity the world thought it should be.

Goro treated me with a deference that I found humbling. One afternoon, in a teahouse in Takeo, he introduced me to a little girl of twelve or so who was, he said, a daughter of his nephew. Only
after the girl had sat with us for some time, eyes downcast, and Goro had barked at her in Japanese, evidently telling her to improve her demeanour, did I realize he was offering her to me in
temporary marriage. My face flushed and I did my best to decline the offer graciously. How sorry I felt for the frail, bird-like girl! How amazed I was that Goro could think me another Lieutenant
Pinkerton! But I had no thought of castigating him. I feared I had insulted him and was ashamed.

That night, Goro accompanied me to the theatre. I understood little of the Noh drama, with its masked actors and sweeping robes and slow, stylized gestures. We sat on benches, some rows back, to
the side of a jutting stage with pillars at each corner and a roof like a pagoda’s. Once or twice I would have asked Goro to explain what was going on, but I suspected a man of his class knew
no more than I. Only during the entr’acte, a knockabout affair of squabbling rude mechanicals, did he become animated, parting his yellow, peg-like teeth in laughter. When it was finished, he
rose abruptly, bowed to me, and hurried away.

I assumed he had gone to the bathroom, but he did not return during the next act. Watching the robed figures make their exquisite gestures, I wondered if this act involved the same characters as
the first.

Then somebody took Goro’s place and tried to help me.

‘It’s a different play, you realize.’ Yamadori’s voice, hot against my ear, was barely loud enough for me to make out the words. Onstage, an actor in a golden cape
writhed sinuously, holding aloft a sword that sparkled in the lights. A Noh performance, Yamadori explained, consists not of one play but of a set of plays, demonstrating successively the harmony
that attains in the world of the gods, the dissensions of man, then man’s repentance, his redemption, and the glory of defeating all that stands in the way of peace. ‘This is the fall
we’re seeing now. But it isn’t all, you see. There’s more to come.’

The actors stamped and leaped, thumping out a ritual dance; the stage throbbed like a drum skin, and Yamadori continued, ‘The play confuses you because you want it to tell a story, but it
wants to evoke a mood. See how even in this violence of conflict there is colour, beauty, life? And infinite grace. Think of the story as something that happened long ago. Forget the story. We know
what happens next: always the same transience, the beauty of moments passing.’

The resoundings ceased abruptly; there was applause, and Yamadori said quickly, ‘Temple of Shofuku-ji. Tomorrow at two.’

Abruptly, he was gone, and Goro appeared once more. Furious, frightened, I wanted to ask him what arrangement he had come to with Yamadori, what bribe had made him leave me like this, but Goro,
at once, was laughing loudly over the second entr’acte. Resentfully I studied his jutting larynx, his thousand pleated wrinkles, his yellow teeth with their many gaps.

All I cared about was what happened next.

In the morning I dismissed Goro and made my way about the town alone. Filling in time, I wandered along canals, sat on a bench by the harbour and drank too much Japanese beer
over lunch in a restaurant with flyblown windows and meticulous table-settings. What awaited me at Shofuku-ji I could not imagine, but I felt as if I, and not Le Vol, faced criminal charges. I
feared I was being watched. In the restaurant I looked suspiciously at the other diners; none looked back at me.

Shofuku-ji appeared deserted. Set back from the street over a wooden bridge, the temple gathered about it an air of quietness. A gold-painted gable, catching the sun, flashed like a signal as I
ascended stone stairs. I found myself in a broad, dark hall. I moved carefully, but the varnished floors, sleek as violins, thrummed at the smallest movement.