The Nicholas Linnear Novels (51 page)

He took them to a smallish modern hotel not far from the Dotombori where they checked into separate but adjoining rooms. It being still too early for dinner, they immediately set out to see the city.

Yukio insisted on seeing Osaka Castle, that last bastion of refuge of the Toyotomi family, besieged by Ieyasu Tokugawa after he had already assumed the mantle of Shōgun in 1603. It had been erected by Hideyoshi Toyotomi—as had much of Osaka—and was completed within three years, in 1586.

“There was a time,” Yukio said as they strolled through the park bordered at their backs by the modern Osakan skyline, “when the Lady Yodogimi was my ideal.” The castle loomed through the lowering afternoon, seeming larger than life, a squat pagoda, stolid and boxlike. It was not, Nicholas reflected, the kind of structure that Ieyasu would have had built.

The crowds grew in size as they approached the castle’s outward fortifications. “What I thought was so… special … was how she carried on the will of Hideyoshi, even after his death, just as if she were a samurai herself. She devoted herself totally to the safety of the heir.”

“Oh yes,” Nicholas said. “Yes.” They had reached the first of the stonework, massive and hulking in the lengthening shadows. “To the detriment of the rest of the country. She and Mitsunari plotted—”

“They
plotted
—as you choose to put it—to protect the Shōgun’s son. They did what honor dictated.”

Nicholas shook his head from side to side. “Yukio, Yodogimi was the Shōgun’s mistress, not his legal wife. Her aspirations were a bit grandiose.” He waved a hand as if in dismissal. “In any event, Ieyasu proved a far too potent foe for them.” He stopped.

“You talk as if Yodogimi was some kind of villain in some children’s storybook.”

“Well, she hardly had the best interests of Japan in mind, you must admit that.”

“Perhaps the child would have grown up to be this country’s finest leader.”

Nicholas looked past her. To their left was a small shedlike structure. The arms house. It was here that Yodogimi had brought her son and their retainers when the end had become inevitable; it was here she took her son’s life before committing
seppuku.
“That’s all rather irrelevant, don’t you think? In the years it would have taken him to come of age, without one
daimyo
strong enough to become Shōgun and lead Japan, the country would have been plunged again into the civil war from which Hideyoshi had saved it. Without Ieyasu’s strength, Japan would have been doomed.”

“Still, such a brave woman. Loyal and brave.” Yukio’s voice might have been the whisper of the wind. “So selfless.” She watched the parade of tourists before the shed. “I admire her so much.”

Hidden, the sun slid downward to the earth as if too heavy to sustain its own weight. The sky was like gray ribbons fluttering across an excited girl’s breast, parting at the soft advance of her lover. There was a brief flash of gold, stonework in flickering torchlight, then it was gone.

“Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “Onward and upward.”

Of course, the original Osaka Castle had been razed in 1615, when it had been overrun by the forces of the Tokugawa; a structure, like Nicholas, previously regarded as impregnable. This one they strode had been constructed of ferroconcrete in 1931.

Nightside. Along the Dotombori, jammed with restaurants, shops, newsstands, movie theaters, nightclubs, restless crowds and, above all, the vast spotlit signs glittering in the night, pushing the darkness away as if it held no dominion here. Colors spun, neon lights blinking on, off, on in time to the heartbeat of the shifting traffic.

Time seemed suspended here, as if in a dream these dazzling colored lights, celebrants of power, called here to summit, would brook no outside interference even from such a basic concept.

A great replica of a crab, crimson and white, its spiny carapace gleaming, so many centered spots focused upon it the light seemed to drip from it like honey, hung over them, a temptation to enter and eat the night away.

They dined in a place of glossy emerald-green lacquered wood and thick bars of mirror-bright chrome as incandescent as neon tubing, replicating portions of their faces as they moved. In a private tatami room, shoeless, stuffing themselves with sashimi and sake—did they both appear so much older?—she would not let him forget the castle’s awesome history or its daunting inhabitants.

“I suppose I adore her because I am so little like her.” She poured more rice wine with a steady hand.

“Meaning?”

She met his gaze for a moment before her eyes slid away. “I’m not loyal and I’m not in the least brave. I am only Japanese.” She gave a tiny deprecatory shrug. “I am a Japanese coward. No one is interested in that. A Japanese without any family: therefore without loyalty.”

“You forget your uncle.”

“No.” She shook her head; her black hair gleamed in the low light. “I don’t forget him. Ever.”

“He’s family.”

Her eyes flashed. “Must everything be spelled out for you? I hate Satsugai. How would you feel about an uncle who would not have you with him, who put you into the hands of—” She swallowed sake convulsively.

“One day,” he said, eyes on his plate, “you will find someone. Fall in love.”

“No loyalty, remember?” Her voice held a tinge of bitterness. “I was born without it just as I was born without the capacity to love. They are alien concepts to me.”

“Because you think that sex is the only thing you have.”

“The only thing that makes me happy,” she corrected.

He looked up. “Don’t you see that’s just because you think of yourself as worthless?” He reached out, covered her hand with his. “What you really can’t conceive of is anyone caring about you—I mean you as a person, not wanting to be with you because of what you can do with your body.”

“You’re being an idiot.” But she did not take her hand away and this time she did not look away either.

“If that’s what you choose to call it.”

“I do. I have no trust. Truly. Can’t you just accept me for what I am? You can’t make me over.”

“It’s not a question of that. I want what I feel is inside you to have a chance to come out—”

“Oh, Nicholas”—she put her fingers against his cheek—“why torture yourself by thinking about some future that will not come about. Who knows? I may be dead in a year—”

“Shut up,” he said quickly. “I don’t want to hear you talking like that, understand?”

“Yes,” she said, surprisingly meekly. Her head dipped as if in penance and her thick hair slid across one side of her face like a midnight waterfall. She was the model Japanese wife bowing before the inevitable authority of her husband’s words.

“And anyway, who says you’re not brave?” He wasn’t used to this. He wanted desperately to lean over the table and kiss her half-open shadowed lips but lacked the nerve. “Just think of what you’ve been through, growing up with that couple. That took a lot of strength.”

“You think so?” A little girl now.

The waitress rustled in and knelt by the side of the low table, delivering more food and drink. Nicholas watched her leave as she slipped on her
geta
at the threshold.

“I just said so,” he whispered fiercely. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know.” Dark eyes on the tabletop. “I don’t know.”

He filled her porcelain sake cup, white and tiny.

They went out walking, she chattering on animatedly as if nothing untoward had happened, clutching his arm, aimlessly drifting from topic to topic.

Stealing the dark, hiding it in their side pockets as they filtered through the honky-tonk night life, through swirling colors and blaring noise. The air smelt of incense and petrol fumes, the walls of the evening brilliant with the unrelenting marquees here in the city of merchants, erected almost overnight, this new class universally despised by the noble samurai and the lowly peasant alike.

An enormous arcade of pinball wizards they passed up after staring for long moments like the most ignorant of country bumpkins and, farther along, the electronicized insistency of American rock ’n’ roll, a quicksilver pulse projecting from a music store’s loudspeaker. The wail of harmonized black voices drenched by a wave of strings and the backbeat, always the backbeat like a burnished path guiding you through the melodies. They dance before the lighted window on which is taped a black and white publicity photo, streaked by reflected light: John, Paul, George, Ringo.

“Who are they?” says Yukio, slightly out of breath.

“The Beatles,” says the shopkeeper. “A new band from England.”

And he buys her the record, imported and exorbitant.

But down the next block they heard the stentorian tones and the intermittent music of the
samisen.
Culture shock. And turned in to investigate.

It was the Bunraku, the traditional puppet theater, indigenous to Osaka, as the Kabuki was to old Edo. Yukio was delighted and, clapping her hands together as if she were a child, implored him to take her inside. He dug into his pocket, bought them two tickets.

The theater was nearly full and they had some difficulty finding their seats. The play had just begun but he knew from the billboards outside that it was the famed
Chūshingura,
“The Loyal Forty-Seven
Ronin
.”

The puppets were magnificent, the principal ones dazzlingly dressed, so complex that they required three men to manipulate them successfully. The master puppeteer for the head, body and right arm, a second for the left arm and the third for the legs or, in the case of the females, the kimono skirts.

They were seated near the back and, some time after they arrived, a couple of marines drifted in. Why they had come to the Bunraku on leave Nicholas could not imagine. One was white, the other black. They might have been waiting for their girls or, perhaps, a third buddy. The white man slid into a row but the black marine turned, stood waiting in the center aisle.

Nicholas saw Yukio’s eyes drifting from the color of the stage. He saw where she was looking. Like a retriever on point, her gaze locked on the large bulge of his crotch. Colors swam in reflected light, reminding Nicholas of an aquarium his parents had taken him to in Tokyo. It all seemed so unreal. Her lips slightly open, he saw the sharp rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed, as she watched.

In the dimness, he felt her fingers between his thighs, caressing, the zipper of his fly being drawn down, the heat enveloping him. Hard. And still she stared, never turning her head, her eyes wide and glittery. His loins turned to water. He wanted to shout to her:
Stop!
But he could not. Had she blinked in all this time? He wanted to take her fingers away from him but he did not. Just sat there watching the Bunraku, the black marine’s crotch in the periphery of his vision, ballooning ominously. How big was he? How big could a man be? Was that a criterion for sex appeal, the way Americans felt about big breasts? Did it drive women wild?

The
samisen
played on. The
ronin
fought with proper valor. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah!

“You know what it is I hate about being Japanese?” she said. Street-light, blue-white through the blinds, threw angular bars of light-shadow-light across the top of the far wall and part of the ceiling.

He turned in the bed. “What?”

“Not having light eyes.” She sighed and he knew her wide, sensual lips were drawn in a pout. “The French girls I see in Kyoto and the American ones, too, with their short hairdos and their blue eyes. Funny, I’ve always dreamed of having green eyes like emeralds.”

“Why think about it?”

“It makes me realize, I think, just how much I dislike myself. Here”—she reached out, took his hand in hers, guided it to the heat between her legs—“this is the only thing that matters. Right here.”

“No,” he said, taking his fingers away, “that’s not important at all.”

She turned on her side; her voice was light now. “Not even a little bit?”

He laughed. “All right, yes. Just a little bit, then.” He rose up, leaning over her slightly. Her skin was pale in the half-light, her thick hair a black forest. “Look, Yukio, I was interested in you before we danced that night.”

“Before I—”

“Rubbed yourself all over me.”

She put her hand out, lightly stroking his chest. A muscle fluttered and he felt the familiar tightening of his stomach. It felt as if a hand were pressing against his lungs, pushing powerfully down so that he had difficulty breathing. He might have been an asthmatic in fog.

“What is it?” she said just before he whirled away to sit on the edge of the bed. “What are you afraid of?” She sat up and he felt her looking at him. An odd way to put it. “Is it me, Nicholas? Are you afraid of me?”

“I don’t know,” he said miserably.

And that was the trouble.

They left Osaka on an old prewar train which, despite its perfect cleanliness, was in marked contrast with the super-liner that had brought them to the city.

There were rattles, squeaks and a fair amount of jounces. The swaying, too, was more pronounced but, oddly, the added vibration produced in him a calming effect. His mind kept returning to the Bunraku performance; to, more accurately, Yukio’s performance. Was she a nymphomaniac, he wondered? But how could he tell? He did not even know the clinical definition. Was someone who was sexually insatiable a nympho? Could it be that easy to define? He couldn’t even say that Yukio was insatiable. Her sexual thirst
could
be slaked. It just took an enormous amount of energy. And, anyway, what if she was? Would that make any difference to him?

He turned away from her presence, staring out the window. Rattle, rattle. Someone came down the aisle, half-fell against her as the train lurched around a turning. The land fell away in a sharp gradient here, giving onto flat fields and rice paddies. He thought he saw cattle standing motionless in the distance. In less than an hour the tracks would turn southeast toward the sea.

The day was bright, the sun burning away the white ground fog by late morning.

Kobe, along with Yokohama, the busiest port in Japan, was already far behind them with its scores of freighters and its international settlement comprising fully a quarter of the city’s population.