The Sun Gods (28 page)

29

THE RIVER OF JAPANESE
people flowed on and on, covering every square inch of the gravel crunching underfoot. The New Year's Day crowd carried Bill and the Greens down the Meiji Shrine's broad, tree-lined avenue. The river took a sharp left turn beneath a towering Shinto shrine gate. Far ahead, it made another sharp turn, this time to the right, where Bill imagined the main shrine building must lie. The orderliness of the crowd was remarkable—and indispensable: panic would have been fatal in a situation like this.

“This is the biggest wooden
torii
in Japan.” David Green pointed up to the huge wooden cross-pieces towering fifty feet above them as they passed underneath. The gate's giant pillars straddling the crowd would have been impossible for a man—perhaps even two men—to put their arms around.

“I believe it,” Bill said, but David was grinning for a woman staring at him, his walrus moustache stretching from side to side. She was another of his TV fans, no doubt.

Martha, walking between them, was beginning to struggle carrying Peter on her shoulders. Almost six feet tall herself, she held Peter high above the crowd. She had dressed her sandy-haired son in a necktie and wool vest under a brass-buttoned, navy blue blazer. He looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

“C'mere, Pete!” Bill called, holding his arms out to the boy, whose desperate arm-hold around his mother's forehead threatened to send her black-framed glasses down to be trampled by the relentless horde. At first, he seemed reluctant to leave his mother, but Martha leaned toward Bill, who caught him under the arms and raised him up until he could straddle Bill's shoulders. Now Bill had to walk with two short arms wrapped tightly around his head.

“I needed that,” Martha groaned. “Thanks.”

“Half of Tokyo must be here today,” Bill said.

“All ten million!” David laughed. Talk to anybody tomorrow, and they'll tell you they were here.”

“But why?” asked Bill. “Is the cult of the Emperor Meiji still so deeply rooted?”

“Don't be ridiculous, it's just a tradition. Nobody's thinking about the Emperor Meiji.”

“That's hard to believe,” Bill said. Something more than “tradition” had to be behind the turnout of this many people. And if they weren't thinking about the Emperor Meiji, what were they thinking about? The puzzle only deepened for Bill as he neared the main shrine. People were tossing coins into the wooden grille of the offertory box, clapping their hands together and bowing briefly before the austere wooden building upon which no images were displayed, and in the depths of which could be discerned nothing but gloomy empty spaces. He had heard that the Meiji Shrine was one of the holiest pilgrimage sites in the country, but the “pilgrimages” being performed here were so swift and simple that there could be no time for what he had always thought of as “praying.” Whatever these people were experiencing, it was wordless. And yet, undoubtedly, it was every bit as real as the elaborate masses he had been observing at Saint Ignatius or the Nicolai Cathedral. It was a moment of reverence—to what, or for what, it didn't seem to matter. With little Peter on his shoulders, he stepped forward and bowed his head, bringing his palms together and closing his eyes.

In the few seconds he stood there, the tiny person on his back seemed to grow enormously heavy, as if the power of gravity had suddenly increased or the boy's flesh had unexpectedly doubled or tripled in density and begun pressing down upon him. He had to plant his feet more firmly upon the earth to support this burden of flesh. And he knew that, if it cost him his life, he must continue to support this infinitely precious burden, this palpably holy child who had been entrusted to him.

Then everything was as it had been. Casting one last glance into the empty building, he moved away from the railing to follow David and Martha into the broad, stone-paved courtyard, where the press of the crowd relented and people were standing in small groups, taking each other's pictures or milling about aimlessly.

“Down!” ordered Peter, who must have spied the other children dashing back and forth among the adults now that they no longer had to fear being crushed to death.

“Let Daddy take a picture,” said David.

Peter fidgeted on his shoulders while Bill waited for the click.

“All right,” said David when it was done, and Bill set Peter on the ground.

“Let me take a picture of the three of you together,” Bill said. After snapping the family portrait, he walked up to the Greens, put his arms around David and Martha, and practically knocked them all off balance with a big hug. “I can't tell you how glad I am you brought me here today,” he declared, smiling. Peter squirmed his way out from among the six long legs that caged him and the three of them stepped back, laughing.

Bill felt a new kind of joy, a euphoria he was aching to share with the Greens, if only he could find the words. “Today I learned the meaning of ‘holy infant so tender and mild,'” he said, smiling broadly. “Peter is one of those.”

“Uh, sure, Bill,” said David, rubbing his moustache.

“No, I'm not kidding. It's wonderful, let me tell you.”

“You should try changing his diaper sometime. You've heard the expression ‘holy shit,' I presume?”

Martha shrieked and swatted David on the back with her purse. “Let's buy some arrows,” she said, pointing to a small stand where shrine workers were frantically handing out long, white “demon-quelling” arrows and collecting money from outstretched hands.

Bill followed the Greens to the stand, still searching for the words he could speak to them that would say what he felt and not make him sound like an absolute idiot. But it was true—Peter was a holy infant. All the hundreds of thousands of people pouring through the Meiji Shrine today—all the people who had ever felt the warmth of the sun —had been holy infants. And they all needed to eat and to urinate and to defecate and die. Century after century, men had been too stupid to see the miracle of this. They told themselves fairy stories of virgin births and gods-become-men and visitations to and from heaven in a vain attempt to make what was already holy seem holier, and all they had succeeded in doing was blinding themselves to the miracle of life. Today he had seen it. Carrying a genuine holy infant on his shoulders, he had flowed with the river of humanity, seen thousands upon thousands of the sons and daughters of man come to worship the fountain of holiness: the life throbbing within themselves.

“This is not Shinto,” said Bill, still frustrated at the nonsensical sound of his own words.

“You're right,” said David, “it's Mass at St. Peter's. That guy over there selling arrows is the Pope.”

“I mean, nobody here is thinking about Meiji or the sun goddess Amaterasu, or how Izanagi and Izanami created the earth, or any of that stuff.”

“And?”

“Being here doesn't have anything to do with your other beliefs.”

“Who ever said it did? Bill, are you all right today?”

“I'm fine, really fine.”

“I'm just here to see the sights and to wish for a Happy New Year like everybody else,” David said. “You seem to be worried that coming in here compromises you as a Christian, but the Japanese learned long ago that you can practice Shinto and any other religion without conflict. It's hardly even a religion—not since it was taken out of the hands of the militarists after the war. They distorted it into a big state cult, but now it's more what it always used to be, just a generalized feeling of gratitude for the nice things in life. It leaves all the problems of death and guilt to the Buddhists and a few Christians. But even they bring their babies to their local shrines, and weddings are usually Shinto or at least have some Shinto elements. I'm no less a Quaker because I just clapped my hands and bowed at a Shinto shrine. The trouble with Westerners is we've gotten into the habit of thinking if you believe in one thing, you can't believe in anything else.”

“That's just what I was saying.”

“Oh, yeah? I would never have guessed it. I thought you were going to start singing ‘Silent Night' for all the folks here.”

Bill threw his head back and laughed at the top of his lungs.

Until New Year's Day, Bill had tried his best to avoid the trains at the most crowded times, but after his experience at the Meiji Shrine, he almost welcomed the prospect of riding at rush hour. Sometimes, squeezed in among the warm bodies until he could hardly breath, he would imagine that, indirectly, he was in touch with his Japanese mother again. Perhaps someone he was touching was touching someone who was touching Mitsuko. He would try to catch the eyes of women in their late forties or early fifties, hoping Mitsuko would recognize him after twenty years and throw herself into his arms. Mostly he succeeded in making a number of permanent-waved matrons nervous.

Fantasizing chance meetings was going to get him nowhere. For one thing, women of any age had good reason to be nervous on Tokyo trains. More than once, he had seen the
chikan
in action—the molesters who exploited the jam-packed conditions of the trains to run their hands over women's bodies. This was one shock he had not been prepared to describe in his letters to Frank. The first time, he had watched in horrified silence as an ordinary-looking, bespectacled man had thrust his hands under the coat of a girl no more than twenty, indulged in some heavy breathing, then relied upon the press of the crowd to keep himself standing while his eyes rolled back in his head. Bill had considered intervening, but no one else seemed to notice. It occurred to him that the girl, who uttered not a peep, was perhaps enjoying it. But the two had parted when the crowd poured out at Tokyo Station, and Bill had seen her rubbing at a stain near the front of her coat, eyes full of tears. When a similar event occurred a few days later, he reached out over the crowd and knocked the man in the side of the head, expecting to be cheered by the other passengers and thanked effusively by the maiden in distress, but everyone—including the girl and the molester—pretended as if the whole thing had never happened.

Although it was not more likely to work than hoping for a chance encounter on the subway, contacting all the Nomuras in the Tokyo phone book seemed the only avenue open to him. Frank had tried it when there were fewer phones in the country. Perhaps Bill would stand a better chance.

He found twelve pages of Nomuras in minuscule type but only a few Goros and Yoshikos. After those were exhausted, he went back to the top of the list, systematically phoning ten a day and delivering the same speech each time in his politest Japanese: “Excuse me, but I am an American named William Morton. I am searching for a Mr. and Mrs. Goro and Yoshiko Nomura who used to live in Seattle, Washington, in America, until about the year Showa twenty or twenty-one.”

Most people would allow him to deliver his introduction in full, then apologize for being unable to help him. Others hung up as soon as they heard the word “American,” and he worried that it was precisely those reacting strongly who were most likely to be the ones he was searching for. He imagined the person at the other end cutting the connection on impulse, then regretting the rash act but having no way to re-establish contact once it was broken.

More time-consuming were those people whose curiosity was aroused by the strange caller and who wanted to hear whatever bizarre tale it was he had to tell, but who, in the end, could offer nothing. One man speaking a crude street argot that Bill could hardly understand offered to lead him to the Nomuras for a fee, and that time Bill was the one who hung up. A woman whose hoarse voice suggested that she was the right age asked him to meet her at a coffee house in Sugamo. He waited for her with a mingled sense of anticipation and dread, but his heart sank when he saw the diseased street woman in her twenties. Some of the most heart-rending calls ended in hysterical denunciations of all Americans for having killed “my husband” or “my whole family.” Bill wished that he could do something to heal the wounds still festering from the war.

And then there was the obvious objection, which his landlady, Mrs. Niiyama, never tired of pointing out to him (though he paid her ¥10 for each of the calls and was careful to return the telephone book to its proper place when he was through with the day's allotment), that the Nomuras he was seeking might not even be in Tokyo.

On one particularly frustrating day, he tried escaping to the Noh theater with its refined lyric plaints of cherry blossom spirits and court ladies in distress. He and his friends Keiichi and Haruo went to see
Obasute
. One of the loftiest plays in the ancient repertoire, “The Abandoned Crone” was an astringent exercise in detachment and abstract beauty with its cool, silver imagery of the moon and the ghost of an old woman left to die on the mountain. As the play drew to its climax and the traveler left the stage, the white-robed ghost turned in perfect synchronization with the traveler, who was abandoning her in death as she had been abandoned in life. She intoned: