Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (26 page)

“See, now, that’s improvising. It’s also so very you. And when you don’t come back?”

“He’ll call me, I guess. He has my cell number. I’ll tell him, ‘So sorry, our wakagashira put the kibosh on it, later, dude.’ What’ll he do, sue for breach of contract?”

“He’ll wish he hadn’t kicked us to the curb,” said Bill.

“Or given away the kitsunebi-dama,” I said. “Now he has no leverage to get your sister to help him, either.”

“Hey,” said Yokoshiro. “That thing—you don’t mean you think it’s really … ?”

“Depends,” said Tadao. “You’ve met my sister. Think she’s a fox?”

Yokoshiro grinned and reddened, so his opinion was clear.

We drank our lattes, we admired the globe, Tadao rewrapped it in the silk cloth, and we all got up to leave.

“I need to get home and wash off this damn stage paint,” Tadao said. “It itches. Kenji, I swear I don’t know how actors do it.”

“Hazard of the trade.”

“What are you guys going to do?” Tadao asked me.

“We’ll give this back to Moriko, then we’ll head home.”

Moriko practically jumped up and down when I handed her the wrapped globe. As she was untying the cloth her smile lit her whole face. “This is it, I can tell without even seeing it, oh Lydia—Oh, oh, oh! Thank you, thank you!” She cupped the kitsunebi-dama in both hands and gazed into it. Looking up, she said, “You saved my life.”

“No,” I said. “We stopped you from wrecking it by marrying a jerk. Could you please put that thing away someplace safe?”

After lunch, a lot more thank-yous until I finally had to cut that off as embarrassing, (“And you’d better be all over your brother, too, by the way”) and promises to visit more often, Bill and I left Moriko to dress for a late-afternoon function.

“Sure you don’t want to come view the cherry blossoms with us?”

“I so wish I could. But I have to go to this gathering.”

“What kimono are you wearing?”

“Completely different crowd, so I’m wearing the blue one again. Sort of to celebrate. Can I say thank you one more time?”

“No.”

“Okay. Goodbye, and thank you.”

We needed to pick up our bags at the B&B and head for the train station, but first, as afternoon gave way to evening, we went down to the Tidal Basin to view the cherry blossoms. The rain had been falling heavily while we were with Moriko, but, maybe since I’d be leaving soon, it had backed off and seemed to be giving up. By the time we reached the Tidal Basin it wasn’t raining at all. The trees along the walkways were swaddled in a thick mist. It made each new set of branches a surprise and the blossoms on them seem like somebody’s good idea. We strolled for a while in silence, enjoying the quiet and the softness.

“Look,” I said to Bill, pointing off into the distance, “Those lights over there. What’s going on?”

He peered where I pointed, and grinned. “I’ll be damned. It’s foxfire.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a kind of bioluminescence. Glowing fungus on dead wood in swampy soil.”

“How poetic.”

“But also, in Japanese art, it’s what the artists show when a group of
kitsune
gather in the woods. To view the cherry blossoms or whatever. They run away if you get too close, but if you see them from a distance it’ll look like that. Because they’ll all be carrying their kitsunebi-dama globes on their tails.”

“Now
that’s
poetic. Especially given why we’re here.”

We stood watching the flickering lights in the distance until a movement in the mist between the cherry trees caught my eye. “Hey! It’s Moriko!”

“Where?”

“Between those trees. I’d know that blue kimono anywhere. With the yellow flowers.”

“I don’t see her.”

“Right there—No, wait, I don’t anymore either.” I blinked. “I lost her in the mist.”

“You sure you saw her?”

“In that kimono? Definitely. I wonder where she’s going? Is there someplace here in the park where her gathering could be?”

Bill didn’t know, and I didn’t either. But as we stared through the trees, I could have sworn I saw an isolated flicker of flame moving away into the mist. It approached the glimmering group in the distance, they gathered around it—at least, that’s what it looked like—and under the cherry blossoms, the foxfire danced.

Taro, the big boss, always has the most beautiful handkerchiefs. They really are something, silk or linen, embroidered with the letter
T
in Western style. That’s why I was surprised to see him lay one of his best across the guillotine splicer when Goro and Oni-Chan dragged that hapless fool theater owner across the projection booth.

“I can understand a small business owner like yourself fearing the expense of insurance,” said Taro in that ribbiting thunder voice of his. He is fat, big-bellied like a bullfrog, and the succulent immensity of him buttoned beneath a fine Italian shirt makes me tingle with pleasant recollection. He lights a cigarette and the
clik-fsshh
of the butane flame rides above the fool’s yammering pleas like the clear peal of a temple bell, above all his stupid entreaties as they put his hand down hard on the splicer and spread his trembling fingers. I think it is so interesting how some people’s hands swell like blood sausages and others turn white and clammy when gripped hard by the wrist for so long. You really cannot guess by looking at them first.

“We are only a thirty-seat theater,” the fool drools. “Please, this is a family endeavor. I only want to see my children eat rice again.”

Taro snorts. “If you wanted your children to eat rice, you should have paid fealty and come to me for aid.” He bends over the sobbing man. “The
gaijin
occupation will feed your family, huh?” He sees me looking and darts his eyes to me, and I enjoy a moment of frisson over how my cherry lipstick and emerald silk dress are a rich distraction for him in this dull booth, with its floor-to-ceiling racks of funereal film canisters and stained cinder-block walls and the camphor stink of decaying celluloid. But the projector is oiled and immaculate. The fool is smart enough to take good care of that.

Taro gives me a measured stare, and I know him intimately enough to recognize anticipation in his expertly impassive face. He knows how I am like him, how the part of our hearts that flinches at atrocity has no electric quickness anymore, and the secret that only people like us understand: how all that death has left us austere and shining, like ivory. He loves how my face moves only when I will it to do so, and no pleasure or horror can persuade it otherwise.

For instance, I can see that the blade of the guillotine splicer is going to be dull, and won’t gain enough momentum on its tiny arm to sever the top knuckle of the fool’s left pinky finger, no matter how hard Goro or Oni-Chan slams it down, or how many times. And even though there’s a pair of scissors on the table I make no move to suggest swapping one for the other, because I know Taro intends to make this man pay with the tools of his trade. And I’m right about the splicer, and the fool’s screams rend the air—it’s going to take forever—but then Oni-Chan surprises me by placing his whole weight on the blade beneath his palm and, red-faced,
ssnnnTHOK,
there’s a satisfying snap, like a crisp stick yielding beneath your feet during an autumn stroll.

And as they haul the gibbering, bleeding fool down the stairs, Taro steps behind me and seizes the breasts I’m so proud of, touches under my skirt to ascertain how wet I am, betrays nothing as he pats my cheek,
pat, pat, PAT,
until it stings. “We’ll burn this place down in a week,” he says, licking his curious finger clean. “In the meantime, show something.”

So I run my hands across the dusty stacks, looking for something complete in six reels. Not like it matters, but I have projectionist’s pride. Even if this is the last theater standing in Asakusa’s sixth district, even if Taro’s yakuza owns the “Turkish bath” to the right and the “hostess bar” to the left, even if anyone coming in here will be looking for the cheapest, darkest space they can find on the quick, I will still show a movie the way it’s supposed to be shown. My father would expect nothing less.

And I find it: something foreign, complete in six reels, the celluloid seething only slightly at the edges from nitrate decay. I heft the first pungent reel onto the projector, snapping shut the fireproof sarcophagus before threading it through the machine’s metallic guts. The sprocket holes are buckled but not too damaged to catch on the teeth of the gears. I flip the switch and the metal lurches to life. The glass in the booth window is broken but the still-clinging shards don’t hurt the picture quality too much. I quickly cover the lens so the audience won’t see the leader: the crosshairs ending in arrow points, the fluttering numbers winking in and out, the final “3” blinking and departing. The only spectator in the audience is a bundle of old trash bunched up in one seat, but I still block the projection beam with my small hand because the leader is not meant to be seen. It is a private communiqué between film and projectionist. It is its final kiss out the door before meeting the big wide world. This is the proper way. He taught me.

The movie is a Western, cowboys shooting pistols over wide un-Japanese vistas. I hate it. It’s a sound picture. I find the speaker switch.
Pow, pow.
The Victor lurches to life.

They are filtering in now, American sailors on the arms of hungry local girls. They don’t care about the movie any more than I do. But I like it in here. I can pretend I am a child in Niigata again. My father’s theater was magnificent: parquet ceiling, velvet curtains, the smell of incense and the fragrant taste of Sakuma Drops, sugar gemstones spilled under the seats by rapt moviegoers, rescued by my small fingers and rolled sweetly on my tongue. And the faces in the movies: suffering wives, grim samurai. The world of adults was full of roiling passions and fevers expressed quietly in tatami rooms. I was too young then to know what made the women bite their lips bitterly or duck their heads in shame. I know now.

I check the sixth reel and, sure enough, it’s not rewound. I swipe the bloodied splicer to the side and spool the reels up on the rewind table. I spin the handle and remember my father in the projection booth, his small eyes peering through the window, squeezing his mouth into a stroke of ink as he twists the focus ring.
Pay attention,
he says,
soon you’ll be in charge of this grand machine
. And me, small, pigtailed, cheeks pressing close to him and the hot white light, the mush-edged grey world on the screen snapping to startling clarity at my father’s command: faces cut out from backgrounds like paper dolls, surfaces swimming lively with grain. The rewinding film passes between the cloth in my fingers but I don’t feel it. Some part of me could still leap in delight then, before Tokyo, before men and bombs and hunger. And Taro, dark tutor. Something in my memory breaks and melts in the gate.

There’s a sudden snap of sparks in the corner of my eye and I turn, hoping to watch the reel burst into an unquenchable nitrate flame. But the film is still chugging away merrily. I hear the crackle of downed wires, the burst of white smoke. A low roar of dismay wafts up from the audience, unhappy there’s no cowboy gunfire to cover the sound of sucking. The Victor speaker is dead. I look out over the audience. The cowboys race around in funereal silence, their feather-light horses making no hoofbeats upon the ground, their guns emitting gentle puffs of smoke as if exhaling.

And then I hear the cultured voice wheeze up, a gentle Kyoto warble feeble with age: “Ladies and gentlemen, let us allow our orchestra to rest, so that men may continue our tale.” What I thought was a bundle of trash unfolds itself out of the seat and staggers towards the stage. It’s an elderly man wrapped in a brown
yukata,
tabescent chest drunkenly bare. He veers alarmingly off course into the shadowed edge of the theater, but his voice rings out clear from the dark. “Our hero!” he cries out, and blunders back into the light, saluting the cowboy. “Our hero of the Western invasion!” His pale, pockmarked flesh reflects the projector’s light like the surface of the moon.

I remember: the
benshi
.

My father’s theater had a benshi. He arrived on a Tuesday in a taxi, the first time I’d ever seen someone ride in one. He was ragged and elegant in his hangover. My father served him miso soup with clams and shooed me out of the projection booth and let him watch the week’s movie in advance. I’d never met anyone so important that he could have a movie all to himself. I hid behind the curtains under the stage and watched him watch: whispering lines of imagined dialogue to himself, waving his hands in gentle swan wings as if to the music of an invisible symphony, nipping from a bottle under his jacket. That night he stood before a thousand patrons, bathed and shaved and sharp in a Western suit, and narrated the movie, voiced every part, colored silent scenes with his descriptions until his words bled into the audience’s imagination. He would do every show, five or six times a day, Tuesday through Sunday. On Monday he would disappear, and my father would oil the projector and repair broken seats. “No one wants to see a movie without a benshi,” he’d shrug.

This drunken benshi was older than the one my father hired: even from my perch in the projection room I could see his toothless mouth was a dark theater with only one ivory seat remaining. But he had the same courtly distinction, the same twinkle of conspiracy with the audience. “But what is this?” he feigned surprise as the Comanche warlord circled the wagons. “Our hero is surrounded. His bravado and arrogance have failed him. His bullying has brought just desserts. Go ahead and discharge your little weapon, bully. The ancient people outlast you.”

I can’t help but smile. The devil with my father’s six-reel rule. I delve into the stacks again and uncover cans scrawled with names like sutras: Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse. I snap reels out of safety coffins and kill the cowboy monstrosity. Before the groans rise up again I’ve already threaded up the film I want.
Dragnet Girl.
It’s only one reel, the last reel, the shootout, the rooftop escape. Tokiko, baby-faced in her smart striped dress, begging Joji to come to his senses. The benshi is tickled by my choice.

“Joji, let’s give up!” he says in the moll’s girlish purr. “A new life is waiting for us, right?” And then, burying his chin into his chest to growl in the voice of that callow gangster bastard breaking her heart: “You can get arrested, girl, but not me.” I think about my poison-green dress and gore-red lips and how a bold girl like me in shy Niigata loved
Dragnet Girl,
how much I wanted to be Tokiko and have the world look up at me from where I’d pinned it beneath my pointed heels. I didn’t know then what one must endure to be burned down into something bright, clean, shining, the white-hot atom pinprick at the start of a chain reaction that tumbles into clouds blossoming like jellyfish up into Nagasaki skies. I wear heels so I can forget what it’s like to walk barefoot on rubble already sticky with other people’s blood. The things I have seen … the woman I have become to wear this dress and never, ever move my face …

The benshi can see me, through the jagged window. “No regrets, my jade angel above,” he cries, the clairvoyance of the drunk. “Your fortune smiles down upon me.” He is sending me love letters, from one cinema lover to another. The movies made us and saved us. They are why we are still standing when nothing else stands on the scorched circle of glass, they are why we will die with our heads high in this dead, raped city, dreaming …

A beer can zings by the benshi’s head. “Aw, shaddap, grandpa.” A sailor staggers up out of his seat, his two girl companions reaching up to him to calm him, their slim silhouetted arms like plants straining for the sun. “And put that cowboy picture back on!”

I clench my jaw. I’ll do no such thing. I reach for an empty film container to throw through the window at the gaijin when I see he’s pulled a gun: skinny muzzle, a Nambu. There’s better American guns afloat in Asakusa but he’s so pleased with what he snatched off a Japanese casualty. His girlfriends squeal and cower. “Go ahead, Jap,” he snarls, waving that corpse-stolen gun. “Keep on talking.”

I grab the scissors. I wanted to stay in this projection booth until Taro burned the theater down. I know how the safety devices work: the soft-linked chains will melt and drop the metal shutters, and while the theater evacuates I alone will cremate in this coffin of dreams. But now, I have a noble death. I will die in defense of a benshi. The purity of this flutters up in me like crane wings. I tighten my grip on the scissors as I tear out of the booth and fly down the stairs. I will bury the scissors in the meat of the gaijin’s back if I’m quick, I
must
be quick, I must hurt him as much as I can before he shoots me and I die here in this dying theater, I am right behind him, he does not see me, I raise the scissors, I am ready to die for black and white and dreams—

I have never heard a shot so loud. It breaks the last thing in me left to be broken.

I look up at the benshi. He doesn’t know. He is in that spellbound state I have seen before, the body’s grace numbness before the realization hits. He is looking at me, perplexed, as if he can’t understand what has just happened. For the first time in years I can’t stop the hot tears spilling down my cheeks. All my murderous rage has soured to shame. “Forgive me,” I say, barely able to keep looking into his eyes, “please forgive me.”