Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (2 page)

- I wonder if she's Benten, I said.

- But just look, it's like the Garden of Eden...

And now, on the next day, prepared for innocent magic, I stood above these sleeping children in the clear dawn of a midsummer morning.

All sign of the adults of the day before had gone, all the boats, all the racks for drying nets. It was as though the set had been dismantled, leaving only these inhabited sand castles as the scene of some strange nocturnal play.

A wave slapped and a child sat up, dark against the brilliant yellow east. Then another, and another, as if responding to a signal I could not see, some hidden sign. Soon all were awake, looking eastward, waiting.

I knew what they were waiting for. The sky shone in expectation, for there, in the wings of the ocean, was the sun itself, ready to make its due appearance.

As the sea swayed and lapped, each child, I saw, was now sitting formally, his legs beneath him. And as I gazed out across their ranks, it seemed as if those tiny figures had all been cut off at the waist and planted there, to face the sun.

Then, slowly, each half-child turned a solid black as—first a narrow, piercing sliver, then a growing, blinding wedge of light—the sun rose.

The boys, kneeling, looked ahead. I had perhaps expected them to bow or chant some prayer, but nothing happened. They knelt and watched the slow sun appear.

Overhead the plovers dipped and cried, as if also in answer to some summons. Then, when the sun, like some great radiant balloon, left its perch upon the sea and miraculously began to soar, the mysterious children stood up and, yawning, shaking off the sand, became themselves again.

One of them turned and saw me standing there. He stared without surprise, as if I were expected, then pulled on his baseball cap.

- What were you doing? I asked, as best I could.

And, unselfconsciously, as though he met white, round-eyed creatures every day on the beach, he explained as best he could. But my Japanese was primitive and he spoke with the ripest of country dialects. All the same, some understanding did pass between us, and now, knowing more, I can reconstruct what was said.

- We've been waiting for the dead, he would have answered: They come at dawn in big boats we can't see, and they're happy when they find us here, asleep. Then we take them back with us to our houses. That's where we're going now. You see, today is the first day of
Obon.

Obon
is the feast of the dead, a Buddhist rite held in the middle of summer, when the spirits are welcomed on their annual return to the land of the living and, three days later, bade farewell. There are round dances, the altars hold flowers, dumplings, fruit, and at the end there are lanterns to light the departing spirits on their way.

This was why the parents had moved their boats and taken down their racks and left nothing behind. They had swept the beach clean for the arrival of these ancestors, the older generations, to be greeted by the new.

- Did you see them?

- No, but they see us. We sit and wait and they come and then we take them home.

- Where are they?

He smiled, a small boy's smile, proud of an accomplishment. Here, he said, indicating perhaps himself, perhaps the brilliant sky, the shining sand, the glittering sea—or nothing in particular.

Now all the little boys had gathered in a quiet ring, filled with their own importance. It was suddenly full morning and the surf slapped and the happy dead were all around us.

And that was forty years ago, that morning on the Chiba beach. Even the youngest of those children is now nearly half a century old. There are few boats left, fewer nets as well now that fish are to be caught only in the deep sea beyond, with heavy metal nets hauled in by motors. The fishermen wear jogging shorts or cut-off jeans; and there are no longer nests of small boys asleep in the sand as the sky slowly lightens and the silent surf brings in the barges of the dead.

But back then the now grown men were the new generation, each escorting an ancestor home for three days of dancing and music, food and company. And I was not that far distant in time from these children—only ten years older than the eldest, still young enough to feel the wonder of the daily rising sun, of the ceaseless ocean, of the notion that the dead return.

The boy, a plain country child, bowed and smiled—this country boy I never saw again, whose name I never knew (and for whom I have made one up), this child who remains for me, not a person since I never knew him, but a messenger.

Then he turned to the others and, like a flock of plovers, all instant accord, they flew off down the beach, weaving through the dunes, along the shouting sea, back to family, back to home.

And I, my shadow black behind me in the morning sun, turned to look at their sandy nests. Already the approaching tide was filling them in, one by one.

The Sumida River, silver in the winter sun, glistened beneath us. We were on the roof of the Asakusa subway terminal tower, looking out over downtown Tokyo, still in ruins, still showing the conflagration of two years earlier, scorched concrete black against the lemon yellow of new wood.

This had been the amusement quarter of Tokyo. Around the great temple of Kannon, now a blackened, empty square, had once been a warren of bars, theaters, archery stalls, circus tents, peep shows, places I had read about where the all-girl opera sang and kicked, where the tattooed gamblers met and bet, where trained dogs walked on hind legs and Japan's fattest lady sat in state.

Now, two years after all of this had gone up in flames, after so many of those who worked and played here had burned in the streets or boiled in the canals as the incendiary bombs fell and the B-29s thundered over—now the empty squares were again turning into lanes as tents, reed lean-tos, and a few frame buildings began appearing. Girls in wedgies sat in front of new tea-rooms, but I could see no sign of the Fat Lady. Perhaps she had bubbled away in the fire.

What was he thinking, I wondered, looking at the avian profile of the middle-aged man standing beside me, outlined against the pale sky. I had no way of knowing. He spoke no English and I spoke no Japanese. I did not know that Yasunari Kawabata was already famous and would become more famous still. But I did know he was a writer who had written about Asakusa, and it was the place itself that interested me.

- Yumiko, I said. This was the name of the heroine of the novel
Asakusa Kurenaidan,
which Kawabata had written when—twenty years before, at about the same age as I was now, and just as enraptured with the place—he had walked the labyrinth and seen the jazz reviews, the kiss-dances, the White Russian girls parading, and the passing Japanese flappers with their rolled stockings. It was here on this roof where we were standing that Yumiko had confronted the gangster, crushed an arsenic pill between her teeth, then kissed him full on the lips.

Perhaps he was thinking of his lost heroine—tough, muscled, beautiful. Or, as he gazed at that blackened landscape under this huge white winter sky, perhaps he was feeling a great sorrow. All those lives lost.

I looked at that birdlike profile. It did not seem sad. In fact, he smiled, peering over the parapet and pointing at the river.

This was where Yumiko, having given the man the kiss of death, slipped through the porthole of a waiting boat and sped away just as the river police arrived. I knew this without knowing any Japanese because as a member of the Allied Occupation forces I had translators at my command and had asked for an English précis of the novel. Now, looking at the author leaning over the railing, as Left-Handed Hiko had done when he saw Yumiko making her escape, I thought about Kawabata's love for Asakusa.

He had begun his book with the intention of writing "a long and curious story set in Asakusa ... in which vulgar women predominate." It had perhaps been for him, as it was for me, a place that allowed anonymity, freedom, where life flowed on no matter what, where pleasure could casually be found, and where small rooms with paper flowers were rented by the hour.

Did he, I wondered, find freedom in flesh, as I had learned to? It was here, on the roof of the terminal, that Oharu had permitted herself to be kissed—and more—by members of the gang and had thus earned the title of the Bride of the Eiffel Tower. It was here that the Akaobikan, that group of red-sashed girls who in the daytime worked in respectable department stores, boasted about the bad things they did at night. Here that Umekichi disclosed that he had been raped at the age of six by a forty-year-old woman.

I wondered about all of this but had no way of asking. And soon, chilled by that great sky, we went down the steep stairs, companionable but inarticulate. I had given him an outing, he had given me his bird's eye view of Asakusa.

I did not see Kawabata again for over ten years, and then, at a P.E.N. conference, with the sun reflecting off the Sukiyabashi Canal just outside the big French windows, I was introduced to the white-haired man who had been presiding.

- Oh, but we know each other, he said: We spent a very cold afternoon together ten years or so ago. I caught a cold. Was in bed for a week.

He looked at me, kindly, inquisitively, and released my hand: I imagine he doesn't even remember me.

- But I do, I said.

- He speaks, said the writer in surprise. Then, to the others: There we were, stuck up there, the old subway tower in Asakusa, and I didn't know what to do about him. He was so enthusiastic and kept pointing things out. And we couldn't talk.

- Tell me, I said, a decade-old curiosity surfacing: What were you thinking of that day up on the roof ?

- I don't remember.

- But how did you feel about Asakusa's being burned to the ground? You were seeing it for the first time since the end of the war.

- I'm not sure. Surprise maybe. Sadness probably."

He had gotten over it. I wasn't over it, even yet, and doubted I ever would be. For me Asakusa had spread over the entire city, the country, maybe even the whole world.

- And you, did you ever try translating
Asakusa Kurenaidan?
he asked.

- I never learned to read.

- Well, at least you learned to speak. We can talk, finally.

And he smiled, his white head birdlike against the light of the slow canal and the distant clamor of Tokyo traffic.

But we did not continue the conversation. People were now pushing, wanting to have a word with the famous novelist. We had already had our talk. And whenever we met thereafter, Kawabata would cock his head on one side and look at me quizzically, humorously, as though we had something in common.

Ten years later, the translation of
House of the Sleeping Beauties
appeared and I saw that Kawabata had been as true to his vision of Asakusa as I had been to mine. Yumiko, or her daughter, was now in this strange house in Kamakura where old men found their youth again in sleeping girls, in firm, dormant flesh.

And, later still, one day in 1972, a quarter of a century after we had stood on the tower and thought of Yumiko, I saw his face flash onto the television screen. Noted author dead, a suicide.

I could not believe it. Dead, yes, but not a suicide. How could anyone who so loved life, and sex, and Asakusa, kill himself? No, it was an accident. The body had been found in the bathroom, the water running. He had been going to take a bath. He had used the gas hose as a support, pulled it loose, was overcome. This I wanted to believe. I could hear the water running, and I remembered the silver of the Sumida, the muddy bronze of the Sukiyabashi Canal.

But in time I too came to believe that his was a suicide. The kiss of death—not arsenic but gas—had been chosen. Naked, Kawabata had stepped into the water just as Yumiko had slipped into the boat and got away.

Old Mr. Kuroda—Shozo his nicely old-fashioned given name, a neighbor—blinks. Old men blink like babies, as though not yet used to their eyes. His eyes widen, contract, then blink, each sight as though astonishing. He stares at me, stunned.

I stare back. Old people are faintly disreputable. We may feel sorry for them but at the same time we condemn, as if being this old, lasting this long, were somehow a social fault, a breach of etiquette.

His daughter sighs and wipes his chin, as she would that of a small child. And what is it now? she asks, turning, hearing his yammering: Oh, I see. That's nice. Then she looks away. She is speaking to him as he must have spoken to her when she was very young.

Later, while he is lying down, taking his childlike afternoon nap, she says that he has no
darashi.
Strong words:
darashi ga nai.
I know perfectly well what it means, but am not sure what it specifies.

Let me look it up in the dictionary. There. Slovenly, untidy, sloppy, disheveled, unkempt, slipshod, etc.—a list of attributes ending with, oddly: a loose fish. What could that be? One always learns something about one's own language from the Japanese-English dictionary.

And we have no comparable phrase in the West, where sloppiness is considered less of a sin and can even be seen as attractive, a sign, in young people, of naturalness, spontaneity, freedom from conservative restraint.