December 6 Read online

  Kato noticed. “We have a real discovery, Oharu. He’s like an urchin out of Dickens, and he’s right here in the middle of Tokyo. He has a guardian who’s always drunk, so Harry gets the money orders and pays the bills. I’ve heard him on the telephone. Do you ever wonder how a boy his age buys sake? Harry calls the sake shop and, in the voice of a Japanese woman, says a boy, a gaijin, no less, will be by to pay and pick up the sake. That’s when Harry doesn’t out-and-out steal it. We may be rearing a monster, Oharu, you and I. I suspect so. I think our Harry has all the morals of a young wolf. The real question for me is, is he a monster with sensitivity. I can’t waste my time with someone who has no eye for color.”

  On hot days, Kato, Harry and Oharu stayed in Asakusa and went to the movies. Asakusa boasted more theaters per square foot than anywhere else on earth. The three friends sat in the dark, eating dried fish with beer and watching Buster Keaton take pratfalls on the screen while, in the back of the theater, a fan blew cool air from a block of ice.

  At all foreign films a Movie Man sat onstage to translate the dialogue titles and what the audience was seeing. “Now Buster is running after the train. Now the train has turned around, oh, now the train is after him. Puff, puff, puff! Puff, puff, puff! He calls out to Mary, ‘Save me! Save me!’ Mary calls, ‘Run, Buster, run!’”

  “Have you noticed,” Kato would inquire loudly of all the nearby viewers, “that, according to the Movie Man, the heroine in American movies is always called Mary. Is this likely? Don’t they have any other names in America? Why is the villain always named Robert?”

  “Kato is an expert on villainy,” Oharu said to Harry. “He says an artist has to try every vice.”

  “In Paris we drank green absinthe and smoked hashish,” Kato said. “It was the happiest time of my life.”

  Three rows ahead was the dancer Harry had seen his first day backstage at the music hall, the girl who changed with such naked cool from ballerina to majorette. Despite the dark he saw every detail, the wavy perm of her hair, a hat that was not much more than a feather, the shadow of her neck, her ear like a curled finger beckoning him, although she had never spoken to him other than to send him for cigarettes.

  Kato followed Harry’s attention. “You like little Chizuko? Too bad, it looks like she already has an admirer.”

  The admirer was an army officer. Harry immediately cast for explanations: father, uncle, family friend.

  “Chizuko’s not for you,” Oharu whispered.

  “Chizuko could be perfect for him,” Kato said. “A playmate his own age, inventive, full of energy.”

  “Leave him alone,” Oharu said.

  “I’m sure something can be arranged,” said Kato. Oharu pinched his arm.

  Afterward they took in the theater of the streets. Kato taught Harry to appreciate the storyteller with his slide show and never-changing tales, the candy maker who turned and tugged rice dough into cats and mice, the publicity bands who banged through the alleys with saxophones, drums and spinning umbrellas to sell soap, seltzer, cigarettes. The twenties were a loud, bright time of modern girls —mogas— who worked at new telephone exchanges, sold French perfumes in department stores, punched tickets on buses. Fashion was war. On one corner, a corps of Salvation Army uniformed like majorettes would shake tambourines and sing “Rock of Ages” while, from the next corner, the Buddhist Salvation Army in saffron robes tried to drown them out with bells and chants. No one knew how the next social advance would take place. In a Ginza department-store fire, salesgirls burned to death rather than leap down to nets and embarrass themselves. Immediately a law passed requiring salesgirls to wear panties, and two thousand years of fashion changed. There was, as Kato pointed out, nothing more beautiful than a kimono. A woman in a hand-painted kimono and obi was wrapped in a work of art. Western fashion was drab by comparison, but as color leached out of modern clothes, it spread into billboards and movie posters, matchboxes and postcards, race cars and airplane banners. And, of course, each word, each character in every sign or delivery boy’s jacket was a picture. Every street was a flood of images.

  Kato lived in the Ginza above a bookstore in rooms that he said were very French, very art nouveau. Harry didn’t know what France or nouveau was like, but he didn’t doubt it was exactly like this. Armchairs seemed wrapped in vines. Sconces were glass flowers on stems of brass. Even the teapot looked alive enough to hop from the brazier. French posters of ballet and cancan dancers had places of honor on the walls. Japanese prints of a young woman teasing a cat, and a geisha offering her shoulder to a tattoo needle, were strewn on a table.

  Kato said, “Hokusai and Yoshitoshi, all the great Japanese artists, were inspirations for Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Modern art is Japanese art through French eyes.”

  The lecture was wasted on Harry. He much preferred the simple lines and secret messages of the Japanese prints. How the girl innocently batting with the cat revealed the provocative nape of her neck cowled in red. How the geisha bit into a cloth to stifle pain the same way lovers stifled cries of ecstasy.

  “Do you paint here, too?” Harry asked. He saw no easel, paints or canvas.

  “Open your eyes.”

  Harry noticed how Kato had positioned himself by the poster of a French cabaret, a line of cancan dancers with blue faces and red hair. In a corner, however, was the Japanese calligraphy of Kato’s name. The poster was an imitation.

  “You did that?”

  “Good, you aren’t totally blind. There’s hope for you yet, Harry. You help me deliver the prints on the table and we’ll meet Oharu and go to a Chinese restaurant. She loves Chinese food.”

  Harry didn’t meet Kato’s customers. It was a warm day in May, and he was happy to go along and wait outside while the artist took prints, boxed and loosely wrapped in silk cloth, around town. The last delivery was to the museum in UenoPark. UenoPark was famous for its hills of cherry trees, although the flowers had passed and the branches, dark as patent leather, were going to green. What Harry liked about the park were its drunken rickshaw men, street magicians, beggars and “sparrows,” prostitutes who carried a ready rolled-up mat. Kato seemed to know each fire-eater, mendicant and whore.

  This day, however, the usual transients had disappeared, the park was empty, sparrows flown. In a city of crowds, Ueno Park was mysteriously quiet until Harry saw red flags march over the hill, so many that the cherry trees seemed to toss in waves of red. These were followed by ranks of men wearing red bandanas tied around their heads and carrying signs that read RICE IS THE PEOPLE’S PROPERTY, a surprise to Harry, who had been taught at school that all the rice in Japan was the emperor’s. Some marchers were university students, but most were life-hardened workers holding their strong fists high. As they marched, their song spread across the landscape of the park: “Arise ye workers from your slumbers / Arise ye prisoners of want…”

  ” ‘The Internationale,’” Kato said. “It’s May Day. They’re Communists.”

  It was thrilling, the unity of voices, the forward motion of history that swept up Kato and Harry. Flags seemed to set the park on fire as the phalanx swung down a wide flight of steps to the street, where a row of police waited. Like the bank of a river, the blue line of uniforms redirected the course of the march, containing it along a high stone wall. Demonstrators ran ahead to outflank the police, but they were checked by the arrival of flatbed trucks bearing men in black headbands, with shirtsleeves rolled back from tattooed arms. Newspapers always identified groups like this as patriotic citizens; their tattoos revealed them as yakuza, initiated members of the underworld, but criminals could be patriotic, too. All Harry knew was that it was like watching a painting of a battle come to life, in place of warring samurai the modern armies of the streets. Demonstrators raced, waving and snapping their flags. Men in black headbands jumped off the trucks, shouted, swung ax handles. As the two forces collided, individuals turned to indistinct forms grappling with each other. A red vanguard plunged through the black ranks, and
Harry felt the flags surge, bearing away all opposition. Red paint splattered the trucks.

  Kato clutched his package. His eyes lit up. “We’ll see some action now.”

  As the battle became more equal, fighting became more vicious. What the thugs in black headbands lacked in group discipline, they made up for in back-alley experience. Anyone who fell was stomped before he rose, but Harry saw how oblivious to danger Kato was, and the sense of invulnerability was catching. Besides, Harry was proud to be part of any event that entertained Kato so much.

  Just when Harry was sure the red flags would carry the day, horses with blue riders moved down the park steps. Mounted police carrying bamboo rods. It was wonderful, he thought, to hear the sound of hooves on stone, the muffled breathing of the horses like the Battle of Sekigahara, when Ieyasu, the founder of Tokugawa rule, crushed his enemies. It was a scene with everything except flights of arrows and the smoke of matchlocks. As marchers noticed the closing trap, confusion spread. They tried to organize a stand around their banners, but the impact of the horses was too much. Black headbands waded in with their shafts. Flags swayed. Toppled. One moment Harry stayed upright amid contending men, the next he was sucked under a truck like a swimmer out at sea. Between tires he saw Kato go down, walking stick and package wrested from his hands. Harry didn’t see Kato’s adversary, only the walking stick as it broke over Kato’s head. On his elbows, Harry crawled to the package and covered it with his body. He hadn’t kept track which prints had been delivered. The one he shielded could have been the girl with the cat, the strolling girl, the geisha with the tattoo artist. On the ground he recalled each one completely, the embossing of their golden kimonos, the shadowed pink around their eyes, their tremulous lips as if they were alive and asking for protection.

  Once the issue was decided, the rout was swift. Demonstrators scattered, bearing the wounded they could carry. Those that didn’t escape were dragged onto trucks for further beating at a less public venue, or pushed into vans by police. In a matter of minutes the street was cleared, except for strewn shoes and banners and bloody shirts. Kato staggered and giggled as if drunk on survival. A dark stripe of blood ran from his beret.

  Harry looked up. “I saved the picture.”

  “The print?” Kato rocked on his heels. “Harry, there are hundreds of prints, every print is a copy. You risked your life for nothing, which proves you have true Yamato spirit.” With his own blood, using a finger as a brush, Kato put a mark on Harry’s forehead. “Because you have proved yourself a true son of Yamato, I declare you, I baptize you, Japanese.”

  It was, as far as Harry was concerned, true glory.

  5

  BY FIVE IN THE MORNING Harry was shaved and out the door, leaving Michiko asleep.

  Asakusa had the hollow sound and desultory look of an empty stage. Marquees that had pulsed with electric light were dark canopies. A couple of workmen engaged in hanging a loudspeaker from a streetlamp. A pair of geishas staggered home, face-white almost luminous in the morning twilight, their elaborate coifs lurching with every step. Holding hands, the women maneuvered around paving stones strewn with fish bones, toothpicks, lists of auspicious numbers and a pack of scrofulous dogs tugging a squid in opposite directions. One geisha hiccuped good morning to Harry, who was on his way to the car.

  Harry often dressed in a casual kimono, but for breakfast at the Chrysanthemum Club, he wore a single-breasted suit because the club members, those captains of Japanese trade and finance, were expecting a true-blue American. He carried Hajime’s gun in a box wrapped in a furoshiki, the same sort of cloth he used to wrap Kato’s prints in. Harry was virtually at the garage when his sleeve was tugged by a boy in a sailor sweater. The boy was joined by a small woman who executed a bow of such respect that Harry was thrown into confusion until he smelled the smoke on her and realized he had reached the corner where the tailor’s shop had burned the night before. Where the shop had stood was a near void. A girl with a lantern sifted through the rubble of roof tiles and iron pans and the blackened body of a sewing machine. Harry saw no other indication that a family had inhabited the spot, not a sandal, photograph, workbench, bolt of cloth, not even a thimble. Nothing was left of the neighboring tattoo and eel shops, either. The entire corner of the block had been reduced to a wet black smudge.

  In whispers, the tailor’s wife apologized to Harry for the inconvenience of the fire. Thanks to his generosity, they would be able to find a new shop and to help the people next door. All the time she talked, the boy tugged at Harry’s jacket.

  This was the sort of conversation Harry hated. First, he was on the move. He had things to do. Second, this woman’s house had burned down, and she was thanking him for a few lousy yen, money that he had been on the way to gamble with. He looked around as if a magic exit sign might start flashing. To change the subject, he asked about the grandmother he had seen going off in an ambulance.

  “She is much better, thank you. Thank you very much for asking. Grandmother also thanks you for your help. She also apologizes.”

  “It was nothing, please.”

  “One thing,” she said and hesitated.

  “Yes?”

  Harry wasn’t sure in the poor light, but he thought her face flushed. “My husband does not know about your help. He would not understand.”

  About accepting money from a gaijin? Everyone knew that the entire point of the campaign in China was to free Asia of Western entanglements. Every patriotic man took this cause as his personal mission. Women were a little more intelligent.

  “Ah,” Harry said.

  “Very difficult.” She lowered her head.

  “Well.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “I understand.” But there was no mention of giving the money back, and Harry had to smile. “I’m sure you’re doing the right thing. I leave it all in your hands.”

  “You are too kind.” Her relief was so naked that Harry was embarrassed all over again. “I will say a prayer for you.”

  “Then we’re even.”

  The boy kept tugging on Harry’s jacket pocket and saying “For you” until Harry pulled free.

  TEN THOUSAND CUTTLEFISH, dried on lines, rattled in the dawn. A year before, the Tokyo fish market had been rich in red salmon, eels in silver coils, crabs the size of monsters, rockfish, monkfish, needlefish laid like cutlery on beds of ice and massive blue-skinned tuna. No more, not since marine gasoline was reserved for the navy. The fishing fleet had gone back to oars and sails, plying the coast instead of deeper water, and the general nature of the catch had changed to mounds of shellfish, clams and oysters, mussels and cockles, as if the boats had gone for stones instead of fish. Regular gas was as tight. The week before, Harry had seen farmers pushing a truck heaped with sweet potatoes. It seemed to him that in its effort to lead the world, the entire country had gone in reverse.

  He found Taro aboard his boat. It wasn’t hard. Taro had been big even as a boy, as one of the faithful ronin who had hunted Harry down, and he was huge as a man, a sumo with a high forehead, topknot and tent-size kimono. An open firebox lit the fishing boat’s simple lines: the low gunwales, single oarlock, seining pole at the stern.

  “Tanks are drained,” Taro said.

  “What do you care?” Harry asked.

  “You can run a taxi on charcoal, you can’t run a boat.” The boat had no wheelhouse, only a canvas shelter that Taro stooped under to trim lines and nets. “If my father could see this. Remember the time you came out with us and a shark got on board?”

  “We jumped then.”

  “We jumped high. Now they want us to go out and catch shark for shoe leather. Shoe leather! I won’t do it, Harry, not on my father’s boat.”

  Harry hadn’t heard Taro be so filial before. He also hadn’t heard what was so urgent that Taro had to see him this early in the day. It was the same way sumos wrestled. Before the actual grappling, there might be ten minutes of glaring and stomping around the ring. Taro sat by the firebox,
lit a cigarette and took a flask of sake from a tin pan on top of the box. He poured the sake into two cups that looked like doll china in his hands.

  Harry squatted and tried to keep his pant cuffs clean. “It’s a little early.”

  “Not for me,” Taro mumbled. “A good fisherman would be bringing in his catch by now. Fish, not shoe leather. Kampai!”

  “Kampai!” Harry threw the cup back. The last thing he wanted was to match drinks with a sumo. Sumos trained on sake. It was a breach of their etiquette to turn down a drink. Also, there was something particularly abject about Taro this morning, like an ox on its knees.

  “The fishing is pretty bad?” Harry asked.

  Taro poured another. “The fish are there. Fish are everywhere, but it’s too far without gas. Even the bays are open.”

  “All the bays?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “Every bay?”

  “Yes.”

  “HitokappuBay?”

  “Wide open.”

  “Banzai!” Harry said. Hitokappu was where the Combined Fleet had gathered in November and then barely stirred for lack of fuel. If the warships left there but hadn’t appeared at any other bay in Japan, Harry wondered where an entire fleet had gone.

  Taro tipped forward and became solemn. “Harry, remember Jiro?”