Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (13 page)

Then, with a quick, housewifely glance around, Ichiro tested his smile before unlocking the door and swinging it open with practiced grace. Minoru straightened his tie, smiled, stood slightly awkward, for he had already learned that innocence, real or seeming, attracts.

He never did finish school, and his mother in the provinces is pleased with the well-paying job he has though she doesn't know what it is. The widow and, after that, the bored wife of a Yamaha executive helped him open his own place. It is very expensive, very popular.

He recently put in a series of ads for new helpers. You too can live a modern life, they said. Easy hours, tips, perks. And, after hours, he gathers these fresh, young, unformed faces about him and imparts the secrets of the craft as handed down to him.

- Oh, no, she was saying: It spoils the line if you wear panties, so we never do. Me, I simply wear a
koshimaki
under this.

She indicated her kimono, a green so dark it was almost black, her sash a pale tan secured with lilac-colored braided cord.

- What color is your
o-koshimaki
? I asked politely, referring to the single sarong-like sheath around her torso, next to her skin.

- Red, she answered, then, explaining: It's traditional. But nowadays the younger entertainers wear anything they like, even white—if you can imagine.

An entertainer, that was how Oharu referred to herself. Not a geisha, though she could probably sing, play the samisen, dance; not a waitress, certainly, though she poured saké and helped with the serving. We were at a table in an elegant Akasaka
ryotei.
It was grand—one entertainer for each guest.

Oharu was older than the rest of them and very handsome. Also very intelligent, I thought. The other girls were laughing and carrying on, covering their giggling mouths with their hands, but she and I were having an interesting conversation.

- I took a bath with Toshiro Mifuné once, I volunteered: He wore BVDs under his armor.

- How interesting, said Oharu: And how anachronistic of him.

Back then, it appeared, samurai wore nothing under their kimono and only a pair of linen shorts under their armor.

- But what about the
fundoshi?
I wanted to know, referring to the traditional loincloth.

Well, the
fundoshi
with tie strings only came in during early Meiji, designed for the new army, for hygenic reasons, she understood. And the old
rokkushaku
not only would have bunched terribly but was far too plebeian. Only porters and runners and fishermen wore it.

- Then the aristocracy wore nothing under their clothes? I asked, pleased to be talking to someone so well informed.

- So it would seem, said Oharu, half smiling: And convenient too it must have been. Court ladies back then still wore those Heian-style layered kimono. You know, with twelve layers. Can you imagine what a bother underwear would be if you wanted to go to the toilet?...

And she gracefully pantomimed the raising of all these kimono skirts and indicated the ease of simply squatting.

How, I wondered, had she come to know so much about this subject? Of course, entertainers traditionally knew what to talk about to amuse or interest the guest. She could probably have spoken equally well on the stock market or the current baseball season.

- Yes, I said: I can see how it would help.

- Particularly with a job like mine where you have to drink all evening, she said with a smile.

The other girls were growing rowdy now, slapping playfully at the men, laughing loudly, accusing them of only thinking about
that.

And here Oharu and I were having this serious and absorbing conversation about underwear in Japanese history or the lack of it. I was enjoying myself and so was she. There were no laborious innuendos, no flirtation, no coyness. We were simply two adults talking about a subject not much mentioned.

- Did you ever hear why? she asked, pouring me another cup of saké.

- Why the lack of underwear?

- No, why it's now so common, whether it ruins the line or not.

- Drafts? I wondered, thinking of winter.

She smiled: A little discomfort has never discouraged a fashion. No, much worse.

Then she leaned forward, still smiling, and told me about the notorious event of 1937 that had introduced panties into Japan.

There was a fire in the Shirokiya Department Store in Nihombashi and a number of the kimonoed salesgirls had fled to the roof. The fire raged, out of all control, and the only escape was by leaping into the safety nets held out by the firemen far below. The trapped girls, however, refused to jump. All were in kimono. These would certainly open dur ing the fall and the fact that they were wearing nothing under them would become apparent. They would be exposed to the public gaze, and all chose death before dishonor.

- At least that's the story, Oharu concluded: And as a result women all over the country began wearing Western-style panties.

I spoke unthinkingly: What would
you
do if this place caught fire? Expose yourself?

She looked at me, a long level gaze, as though she were seeing me for the first time. It was the look of someone who has mistaken you for someone else and is now politely retreating. The half-smile faded.

Then it curved into brilliance as she leaned forward, slapped my knee, laughed and, in a high voice I was hearing for the first time, said: Why, you silly. We're on the ground floor. If I jumped it would only be into the carp pool!

Confronting me now was the typical would-be geisha who laughed loudly at every sally and would soon be showing the cunning way she could peel a tangerine.

- Foreign women sometimes go around without anything underneath, I said, desperately trying to recover that grave lady who until now had been sitting opposite me. It means, I said recklessly, that they're making a statement.

- Oh,
yada
, she cried, impersonating someone much younger than herself: You awful man.
Etchi!

This last is the Japanese pronunciation of the English
h
and refers to the word
hentai
, which in the dictionary means "perverted" but in its milder, abbreviated form means only "naughty," with certain overtones. It is also shouted out, as it was here, with laughter or a roguish expression.

I looked at her, hurt.

Had I done something so awful, to be punished like this? Yes, I had.

She had perhaps wanted to step out of her usual role, had wanted to just talk about something, to stop being girlish. She had perhaps thought I was intelligent enough to understand. And I had shown her that I wasn't. Having indicated what I expected of her, she complied. And so the free discourse of two grown-ups, a conversation with no ulterior purpose, an exchange of information, no matter how arcane, all this came to a full stop and we were back where I apparently thought we were supposed to be.

And now she was picking up the saké bottle and holding it out with a simpering smile, saying: We're going to have to drink just lots to catch up with those folks down there.

- I don't want to catch up with them.

- Oh,
yada!

And that grave, possessed, playful woman who knew how to talk about all sorts of things with detached intelligence—her name was Oharu, family name Kitano, information I later got from the mistress of the
ryotei—
never appeared again.

Shy, plain, wearing an old sweater, speaking with the accent of his private tutor, Oxford perhaps, but sometimes with an invented Texan drawl, perhaps copied from the movies—seeking to amuse, lazy smile, inquisitive eyes. When irritated, speaking Japanese—the flat Tokyo dialect of the Yamanote.

The successfully expatriate Japanese is rarer than the expatriate anyone else. Most of them anxiously await return to the homeland. Some cannot wait—suicides in Queens or Larchmont. Not, however, Taro. He was the kind of Japanese who flourishes abroad—a Foujita who did not paint. And, like most successful expatriates everywhere, he did not have a high opinion of where he came from.

Taro did not speak about it much. When we were together in school he rarely mentioned Japan. Rather, we talked about his enthusiasms. These included Madeleine Grey doing the
Chansons madécasses
, "Le Bestiaire," and Claire Croiza's "Jazz dans la nuit."

These were interests from childhood. They were French because his childhood had been French, though spent in Japan. Father was Francophile, indeed eventually became ambassador to France, and Taro remained loyal to the France of those early years spent in the old Denenchofu mansion, alone but for the maids. He was loyal to Ravel, Poulenc, Roussel.

Even at school in America he remained loyal. I thought this peculiar because he rarely spoke of his father and, when he did, he did so in Japanese. He did not seem to like him, made fun of the French verse this diplomat wrote and published. I do not know what he would have made of the Order of the Legion of Honor and the First Class Order of the Sacred Treasure that his father eventually received from the two governments. I know he wouldn't have mentioned it unless forced to, and then only in Japanese. He did not, it almost seemed, approve of his father's serious and successful career. The result of this—perhaps the reason for it—was that Taro himself refused, in this sense, to be serious. One of his charms, in fact, was his lack of seriousness.

We both admired the useless and ephemeral. We devised impossible opera seasons comprised of works that had never been begun. His included the Beethoven
Faust
, the Verdi
Lear,
and the Wagner
Life of Buddha.
We also cast Proust as a Warner Brothers film—Swann was Joseph Cotten, Odette was Bette Davis, Charlus was Sydney Greenstreet, and Jupien was, of course, Peter Lorre.

What would Taro do when he got out of school, the complaint of the Furukaki family, was a question that did not concern Taro himself. Something would happen.

Something did. After school he traveled and met the girl he fell in love with, married; the woman had his child. Something else happened, too: Taro's troubles began.

When I met him again in Tokyo I was unaware of the problem and was not told. His father did not mention it, nor did his wife. I was consequently unprepared when, one evening, my wife and I had them over for dinner and Taro refused to say anything. It was strange, a friend suddenly dumb. I tried to talk of what we knew. I even talked about "Jazz dans la nuit." Silence, a straight mouth, unfriendly eyes.

The next day his wife telephoned and explained. He had been seeing a doctor. Taro ought to leave Japan, he'd said, ought to go back abroad. But they couldn't, they hadn't the money. Taro was now working at a job his father had found him at a radio station.

Meetings with him were now serious affairs, or would have been if there had been anyone there. But he was like a house when no one is home. Except for once.

I was at his place. We were playing records, things he had liked. We had just done the Ravel
Don Quixote.
I had bought him, as a present, the new recording of Stravinsky's
Le Rossignol
, an opera he had long wanted to hear.

Taro suddenly stood up, rummaged in the record cabinet, hid the jacket and put on the disc. It was contemporary, for piano and orchestra. What is it? he asked—and these were the first words we had heard from Taro that day.

I listened but couldn't identify it. So I said so. Taro smiled, the first smile we had seen that day, but it was not a nice smile, not Taro's. Then: You—you who know so much. You know all about Stravinsky, right? Well, that was Stravinsky. It was the
Movements for Piano and Orchestra.
Here, look at the jacket. See? I'm not lying. So, you're not so smart. Not so smart at all... Then he relapsed into silence.

What had happened? Had I suddenly, somehow, gone over to the other side? Had I become an enemy? Or had the whole world gone over? Was there just Taro left, locked in his childhood, hearing the faint strains of Jane Bathori's songs?

Later, his wife told me that he stopped talking even to her. He stared at the wall, but as though seeing something there. Sometimes he smiled and it was the old Taro again. And he used to hum a tune, though she didn't know what it was. When his family came, however, he hid in the bathroom. The bathroom was America; it was far away. They couldn't come there.

Then one day he left the house. He often did. Took walks. This day he took a walk and the street crossed the railway lines. Taro walked to the crossing just as a train was coming. The train did not stop. Neither did Taro.

The death was listed as an accident. It did not look like a suicide. Such perfect timing, victim and train proceeding at their own rates to their rendezvous, wouldn't seem to have been the work of a suicide. It was simply that, seeing the train, Taro did not stop. But then perhaps he did not see it. He often saw nothing, his wife told me, as though he were looking at a world of his own, or listening to voices she would never hear.