Bridge for Passing (14 page)

It was long before I could sleep. The earth tremor had somehow shaken the roots of my temporary world. I recognize the need in myself for roots. I suppose it is the result of my childhood in China. Well as I loved that country and must always so love it, nevertheless I was at the same time always aware of the turmoil over which we lived, the possibility that at any moment the angers and discontents existing for centuries against the western peoples might flame into crises in which we, innocent as we were individually, might lose our lives, as indeed we very nearly did and more than once. Perhaps this childhood remembrance of ever present uncertainty, over which I had no more control than a leaf in a storm, has always haunted me—or did until he came. Now that he was gone, the old subterranean awareness of danger returned again.

He had no such dark shadows. Resolutely cheerful, naturally gay, he never expected or suspected catastrophe. When compelled by the fact, he had an odd habit of deciding when he would face it. The method was simple but absolute. He marshaled all the blackest possibilities and wrote them down in his clear firm handwriting. Then he took from his desk his father’s large gold watch and decided upon the day and the hour when he would attack the total problem. It was always at the last possible moment. Until it came, he was his usual charming self. He always found solution, or at least escape, and if the latter, it was not by any of the Chinese thirty-six ways. He never ran away.

I had come to depend very much on his genius for dealing with the improbable, for solving the insoluble and achieving the impossible and this always without the help of friends. He had friends beyond number, high and low, some of them among the wealthiest men in the world, others poor. The wealthy did not help him in the two financial crises of his life. He weathered his crises alone and triumphantly. The poor borrowed money from him without shame. To my indignation, distributed on rich and poor alike, he maintained a smiling indifference.

“They mean no harm,” he would say.

I hated the earthquake. It roused old fears and old fears reminded me again that his unshakable good humor, his cheerful pessimism, his flashes of impatience, his affectionate cynicism toward mankind, above all his gay acceptance of life as he found it were now no more. The old uncertainty was with me again, and forever.

The most modern theater, by way of contrast to Kabuki, was more of a shock than even I could take. It came about in this manner. We went one day to the production manager with a list of our tentative characters. We entered his office, preceded by a pretty girl, and found him that morning businesslike and dignified. The jovial man about town had totally disappeared. He delayed a proper time to show how busy he was and perhaps how important, and we knew he was both busy and important and we sat waiting. Tea appeared but the production manager was still busy. Finally he joined us and we gave him our list of actors. He pointed immediately to two doubtful names. He could not speak English at all that morning, it seemed. The pretty girl interpreting, he said that he merely suggested, he was not directing—this with a bitter look at the American—but we should make better choices for the two leading men than we had done. We agreed promptly but reminded him that the man we wanted most had not been released to us by his firm. Hearing this, he got up, walked around, rubbed his head, groaned loudly several times and talked through three telephones at once. Nothing happened except no—no—no—from three directions. He attached a pretty girl to a fourth telephone, sat behind his desk, and twisted his hair in both hands and groaned again. Then he knocked himself on the head with clenched fists and turned to us, beaming. He had an idea. The final performance of Japanese rock-and-roll singers and musicians was taking place at that very instant in his own rock-and-roll theater. He would accompany us there, we could see all the best rock-and-roll young men and we could then take our choice. He would command any whom we chose to be our actors. They would listen to him. “I am big producer,” he said loudly and now in English.

We agreed with alacrity, he plunged ahead, a behemoth but amiable, and we followed to be packed into cars and delivered at the theater. It was a huge place, and when I was led to a seat in a box, the last and only seat in the enormous theater and reserved, of course, for the production manager himself, I was simply stunned by what I saw. All the teen-agers in Japan were assembled there, or so it seemed, certainly thousands and thousands of them.

I sat and stared at stage and audience alike. This was indeed a Japan new to me, rock-and-roll, dancing girls and singing boys, American songs, western songs sung in English, and only a very few Japanese songs. The girls screamed just as they do in my own country, and they sounded just as silly. What is this affliction of the young, spreading from land to land? Thousands upon thousands of young Japanese—oh, very young—the performers are in their teens or barely out of them, and very young girls in skirts and blouses ran out from the audience to hang wreaths of paper flowers and paper streamers on their male favorites. Only one girl sang, a handsome girl of eighteen with an excellent voice.

“What do the parents think of this?” I asked the production manager.

“It disgusts them,” he said, “but what can they do?” What can they do indeed, here or anywhere! Our business, however, was to find actors. After the grand finale we went downstairs into a small hot room and interviewed three or four young men viewed on the stage through opera glasses as possibilities. We were hopeful, for they sang in English so well that we were led to think they might speak English. Such was not the case. The only sentence they spoke well was the same one. “I cannot speak English,” and they had each studied English six years in school. Then we found one bright exception, a gentle-faced boy who is called the Eddie Fisher of Japan. He spoke beautiful English. The explanation was that his mother was half-English and he had learned at home. We asked him to come the next morning for an audition.

While all this was going on, I observed a change in the production manager. He was softening. He saw our problem of the six-year English and he felt concern. He invited us to have dinner with him, and asked if we wanted to go where he always goes, or to some more elaborate place. We accepted with grateful surprise, saying that we wanted to go where he went. We climbed in cars, again pushing through oceans of young people waiting for their favorite singers to emerge from the stage door, and soon we drew up before a restaurant which was not like any I had seen before. Obviously it was not a tourist resort nor perhaps a place for women. I was not daunted, however, and the production manager evidently reigned here as everywhere. It was a fascinating place, small but clean as only Japanese know cleanliness, the rough wooden tables and counters made of six-inch-thick unpainted log slabs scrubbed to snow whiteness. The production manager gave orders in the manner of one always obeyed but he was obeyed, two slabs were put end to end and he assigned our seats. Mine faced him, and so I had full opportunity to observe this extraordinary man.

For now a new man appeared. He even announced that he was not the same man we had seen heretofore, and proceeded to explain himself and his life. He was not married, he told us, and he insisted that he was the loneliest man in Tokyo. He lived with his mother, a wonderful woman whom he adored, but he was fifty years old. He did not look that age. He looked a somewhat battered thirty-nine. Meanwhile he continued to tell us about his wretched life. All day long he went from one conference to another, preparing the weekly film picture he was compelled to produce. He woke early every morning in spite of late nights, and in the cold chill of dawn he read.

“What do you read?” I inquired with interest. Perhaps he read poetry or Zen Buddhism. He answered between clenched teeth.

“I read screen play only—hundred—hundred—hundred—pouring on me every day. … Always I am depressed afterward. So every night I am here, drinking.”

The more he drank the better English he could speak. It was never perfect but it was expressive—and explosive. He did not cease also to speak Japanese. Indeed, he carried on an extraordinary bilingual monologue with the Japanese around us. He joked and when he saw that I was not drinking sake he ordered a wine jug filled with water and then announced loudly that I was drinking outrageously and he bellowed laughter at his own wit. Suddenly he poured advice on the American director. A director, he said, cannot be a pure artist—not pure, not pure! He must have evil in him—outside nice, inside evil, evil, otherwise people will not be afraid of him. The American listened without reply, smiling. Suddenly the production manager struck his own head with clenched fists. He had an idea again, a glorious idea!

“Drinking, I am fountainhead for idea,” he declared, enraptured with himself.

His idea concerned my friend’s son-in-law, a young actor of promise. His wife was proficient in English and could be very useful to everybody. If we would place them in our cast, all feelings could be saved and all hearts assuaged. He reminded us that he had suffered much pain when he had to tell great Japanese director he was not to work on the film with us. He had to assume full responsibility himself for a sad mistake and he had to bow to the lowest level and this hurt. But he could forgive us if—

We replied that of course we would like to see the two young people but the picture must be considered before feelings. He was already on the telephone, however, and after an outburst in Japanese returned to us, all good cheer and satisfaction.

“Now,” he exclaimed. “We must be happy. Bar or geisha house?”

We asked him to decide for us. “Bar, of course,” he declared. “Geisha is too old-fashion. In bar, relaxation. Top class bar. I go every night there.”

We took cabs again and rocked through crowded streets. Japanese taxi drivers are described in agitated detail by every American tourist, and I need not add to these descriptions except to say that everything said about them is true. They are zealously kind, emotionally involved with every passenger, and utterly careless about life, limb or property of anyone, including themselves.

The bar, as we entered, seemed to be a number of small comfortable rooms clustered around a bar. The production manager began relaxing immediately by loosening his belt and taking off his tie. The bar was small and crowded with business men and with pretty girls, of whom there were many. I was introduced to a slender handsome woman of young middle age, whom the production manager declared was best madame in Tokyo. She looked competent and modest and upon hearing my name fell into a state of emotion, declaring that she had read all my books. I had been her idol, et cetera. I was touched but slightly embarrassed. She introduced her girls to me after we were seated, very crowded, into a circular bench against the bar itself; these girls sat by me, one by one, and through one of them who spoke English, I became somewhat acquainted with them. Most of them were married and had children. No, they did not enjoy bar work, they said, but their husbands had poor jobs, or no jobs and this was easy work. I detected or imagined a certain patient sadness in their eyes and was reminded of a visit I made once in Paris, many years ago, to the Folies Bergère. I was humanly curious then as now, and after the show I left my escort and went backstage to get acquainted with the show girls. They too were not girls. They were women, most of them married, with home problems of deserting husbands, sick husbands, poverty, illness—and most of them were not young.

“Why such work?” I had inquired.

“At night the children are asleep and safe.”

“It is better than leaving them all day,” and so forth, the same in Paris as in Tokyo—

Our talk was now interrupted by the production manager. “My best friend,” he announced, and presented a very small girl.

Her face was a cameo of sadness. I had already noticed her. She had been sitting beside a fatuous business man and serving him with liquor and condiments. Once, with my accursed, noticing, novelist’s eye, I saw him put his arm around her too closely and she shrank away with a look in her eyes that for pity’s sake I will not describe. She sat beside me now, saying nothing, just looking at me with such deep quiet that I felt communication. Of this I do not speak.

The night wore on. I rose to leave. The madame, whom the girls call “mama,” assembled a line to bow farewell. She herself came with me to the car and leaned in the window to talk, speaking English rather well. She had had an education and was not a shallow or silly woman. She kept looking at me with warmth and affection, pressed my hands, gave me a great bouquet, and let me go reluctantly.

Alone in the car I pondered upon this phenomenon of Japanese life, the night life of men apart from their families. It is a force destructive to family life, a relic of feudalism. The modern Japanese woman hates the bars and geisha houses which take their men away from home. Old-fashioned Japanese women accepted them as they accepted anything men did, but modern Japanese women long for real companionship with the men they love. Yet men still continue to stay away from home, “and I have learned,” as my little Japanese secretary said one day with a cold calm, “to nag him no more. I have even learned how to greet him with a happy smile at two o’clock in the morning.”

Yes, she could do it. The Japanese woman has always been stronger than the Japanese man, for, like the Chinese woman, she has been given no favors. She has never heard of chivalry or knights in golden armor. She was born a female—that is to say, an inferior person, a bearer of burdens, an obedient slave. In centuries of such existence, while she compelled herself to devotion and duty, she accumulated an inner strength which cannot be surpassed. She gave birth to man, tended him and cared for him, shielded and defended him without question. Why should she question when there was none to answer? She was betrayed by only one person, another kind of woman, the woman who did not marry, the woman who was not bowed down with household cares and children, the woman taught and trained and groomed to amuse men. She was betrayed by geisha. All that a man could not find in his uneducated houseworn wife, whom he needed, nevertheless, for comfort and household ease, he sought and found in the geisha, whose only duty was to please him, to attract his eye, to entice him with music, to win his mind by her education. The best geisha is a brilliant and intelligent woman. She has her counterpart in the Greek hetaira, against whom Greek wives also wailed their accusations.