Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (23 page)

The reason is that to have done it on purpose would not at all have been the right way of doing things. And to have acknowledged that this was occurring, had she noticed, would also not have been the right way. And as for using colloquial Japanese, a choice that would have rendered my problem much less acute, well, that too would not have been correct.

Did she detect my muted struggles, did she note that flush of distress which, I am told by those who witnessed it, rendered my performance the more exquisitely amusing? Did she?

Well, that is not a proper question. For, even if she had, she could not have abandoned her mode of expression. She owed it to her public, to her art, to the great new instrument of culture and education on which she was for the first time appearing, to accord it, herself, and me the due amount of formality.

But there was more to it than that. What Isuzu Yamada was doing, something I could actually have watched had I managed to collect myself, was inventing
kata
for television.

Here was this new medium and she was in a way just as lost as I was. Her spectators were no more visible than they were in the movie studio. But there one had time and space and the possibility of correction. Here there was nothing like that. We were "live on the air."

She was thus just as unprepared as I was, but her approach to the problem was much more creative. She started running through available
kata,
as it were. Those who watched told me it was an education just to see the way that the look, the turn of the head, the display of the hands changed as she became increasingly familiar with the medium, as she visibly decided which would be appropriate to the small screen. By the time our fifteen-minute "conversation" was over, the viewers had had a demonstration of a great artist creating before their very eyes. Nothing was allowed to obstruct that creative urge, and in the end she got it all just right.

That quarter of an hour was perhaps historically significant. It may well be that the current
kata
for TV appearances (and they certainly now exist, because people on the tube all act the same way) were born that very night.

I only wish I had paid more attention.

Bright lights, red carpet, stars, smiling Toho executives—it is a special premiere, Kon Ichikawa's
Happiness.
Director right there at the end of the receiving line. Smiling, greeting, talking—famous cigarette stuck between lips.

- Ed McBain original, he says: Only really this much of a story (holding up a hand, forefinger and thumb almost touching, to indicate how little it was. Fingers then stretch apart). The rest was all us.

Lips expertly juggle cigarette among the syllables. We have been expecting lip cancer for years. No sign of it, however.

- Rest was all us, he says, eyes crinkling in the way they always do. Pantomimes stepping into a pair of overalls, perhaps. That's him getting into the Ed McBain original.

- Great fun to make, this film, he says, beaming.

I have never heard him say otherwise. All films were great fun to make. Great fun to make the cannibal sequences in
Fires on the Plain
too, I imagine. Such fun really that it isn't to be taken all that seriously—filmmaking.

During the obligatory pre-screening speeches the leading actor is unable to say a single word. Part of this is perhaps pose, it being thought smart to be inarticulate in public. But most I think is real, that seeming stupidity which afflicts some actors. In the film itself, however, the same actor is very good, seems to know precisely what he is doing, does it skillfully. Again I see Ichikawa pretending to climb into the overalls.

Since everything is great fun to make, one infers that it isn't all that difficult and that the results aren't all that important. This must reassure actors considerably, I would think, but, just as important, it suggests that this is the way Ichikawa keeps his distance from his work, and himself.

Certainly it explains why he can keep working in a period when other more earnest directors can't. Ichikawa, since he does not have to be serious about it, can take any script he is offered. Then, no matter how bad, he can amuse himself by making it as good as he can. Fun to make that film, he will say of his very worst.

He told me once that the director he most admired, the one he would most like to resemble, was Walt Disney. I thought this was mordant Ichikawa humor until it occurred to me that he meant, literally, what he said. Disney too had great fun making films, he too could climb inside and do everything himself.

Yet there was a period when Ichikawa's films became serious—
Erijo, Kagi, Bonchi.
This was when his wife was doing his scripts. The experience of seeing an Ichikawa film suddenly deepened. One was moved by its beauty, its truth, its sadness. I was very enthusiastic about these films back then. Ichikawa just stared at me, cigarette in mouth, as though he did not know what I was talking about.

Perhaps he didn't. His wife is now gone and others (including a number of film-studio hacks) write his scripts. He takes what is given him, puffing his cigarette, his eyes crinkling.

The film begins. Lots of Ichikawa-type humor involving a cop papa and his motherless kids. Actor very competent—plaintive, amusing, believable. Filled with the that's-too-bad-but-it-can't-be-helped feeling which, even now, is so attractive to Japanese audiences. Let's just get on with life, says the film, and the audience smiles. Applause at the end. Beaming Toho executives, a grinning Ichikawa.

I noticed that the film is, like all Ichikawa's, of a certain temperature. It is cool, not really chilly, not actually cold, but quite cool. People getting into it and moving around in it have not raised its temperature. They all seem to be working in the film from a distance.

I remember Ichikawa getting into his invisible overalls. Moving the film around, moving the actors around, making a cool and pleasant experience of it. Then I remember his earlier films and I wonder who once climbed into Ichikawa and made
him
move around.

What to do about the old Yamato; a problem, that. Madame Sumiré gazed around, sucked a tooth. Well over a century and a half, and looking every year of it. Still, the beams were strong. During all those generations the termites had never really settled in. Perhaps something more might be made of this—of sheer tradition. What with all the other older buildings gone from Ginza, what with concrete, steel, glass, and bathroom tile, the novelty of good, expensive wood was growing. Capitalize, perhaps, on that—age, probity, worth.

The place had certainly seen changes. Back in the old days, a famous Edo geisha house, screens by minor master, cakes from Kyoto. Then a suicide, lovesick and indentured maid, so the legend went. No recourse then but to become a restaurant—everything traditional and expensive: eel and turtle, blowfish, shrimps served live. There the Meiji emperor himself appeared, the palace being not that far away. Consequent governmental popularity—part of Pearl Harbor planned within these very walls.

And then decline. Though the place withstood the terrors of war, it could not the horrors of peace. Bombs and conflagrations gave way to higher taxes and the rising price of land.
Tatami, shoji, fusuma—
traditional materials all—now far too dear as demand diminished. No recourse then but to reopen as one of the better hostess bars.

And here was where the fortunes of the old Yamato had become Madame Sumiré's own. Acquired from a second husband praying for peace at any price, it proved a challenge she had overcome. She, after all, knew the business—had met Mr. Watanabé while he was postwar slumming at the ratty Ueno cabaret where she had once worked.

Minor master's screens were sold, partitions were knocked out,
fusuma
junked; holes were cut in ancient walls to hold the air-conditioning;
tatami
banished, giving way to purple wall-to-wall; modern sit-down toilets where the
tokonoma
was; then cocktail bar and floor-length mirrors, box seats and tabourets, cut-glass chandelier for proper mood and red plush drapes which always caught the dust.

And then the girls. More problems there. One trained them, treated them like daughters, then watched each and every one turn bad. How she had encouraged with her nightly talks: Girls, give your all for old Yamato, keep up the spirit, make ours the winning team. And how she had watched them give their all in other, unintended ways, ending up madames themselves at other, rival Ginza bars.

These youngsters, they knew nothing of tradition, of the deference owed an elder, being modest in their proper places, working hard, doing without—virtues all, now all but lost.

Oh, the years of listening to them whine; watching for the wily ones, the ones who cheated on the side; the widows, crying on the customers; the greedy ones who ate the raisin butter. Madame Sumiré sucked her gold tooth and looked about.

Seven o'clock—another night. Soon the old familiars, fewer now, and bringing fewer guests. Business was not going well. The ancient Yamato was sinking, the very beams groaning as in despair. Yet she had tried.

Oh, she had tried. The monkey, so soon dead, unfed, purchased to amuse the guests; all her girls dressed up as nuns, a fad soon past; computer games to attract, she'd hoped, the younger executives.

And then, her greatest folly. Keeping up with things as she invariably did, Madame Sumiré knew of Arab interests. This being so she put in plastic hassocks and glass-topped tables with gilded legs. Purple chiffon, hopefully harem-like, was bunched and candles placed nearby, romantically, despite the risk.

She changed the name to Senichiya, the Thousand and One Nights, spray-painted the front all purple, a favorite color and one she fancied Middle Eastern. She had a star and crescent painted in gold over the bar, imported quantities of arrack to make her new guests feel at home, and redid the facilities: on one door, Sultans; on the other, Women.

Originally she had wanted tiled floors and a purling fountain but, on being advised that the building would then collapse, she made do with plastic
tatami,
lilac-trimmed. This she had thought the Arabs might enjoy but it was her Japanese customers—she had no other—who delighted in the novelty of sliding shod across the mats.

Then, over the new sound system, Bernstein doing
Scheherazade
, night after night, month after month, until the record hissed and one of the girls went funny in the head—and still no Arabs in their quaint burnooses with those cunning water pipes. Why, she'd even gone to the trouble and expense of finding a needy body-builder, stripped and oiled him, twined his violet turban all herself and given him a stage scimitar to shiver with in the neon-flooded entrance.

All for naught. But no one could say that Madame Watanabé—Sumiré to her friends (Violet, a charming name)—lacked punch or fight. No sooner out of one disaster than bravely into yet another.

She'd studied the papers, the financial reports; she knew prosperity when she saw it. Her country on an upward curve and the Dow Jones averages, whatever they were, leaping as though in hot pursuit. The wealth was there for the taking, and despite what the envious said there was nothing better than a pile of cash.

She looked about her domain and her tongue found her tooth. Japan ... perhaps that, after all, was the answer. Revive the glory of the old Yamato! Yes, put all the
fusuma
back, get new
tatami
for the ones the guests had scuffed, and make them leave their filthy footwear at the door. Make them squat at toilet once again as well.

Ah, there was charm in all this. Practiced eye on public pulse, she could see it now. With foreign novelty so rife, what further titillation than tradition? With things gone this far, old Japan was like a foreign land. A trip to ancient Kyoto was now as exotic as any voyage to London, England, or to Paris, France.

What further novelty than this? And never mind the cost, an investment after all. Enthused, with shining eyes, petite and dumpy Sumiré clasped her hands at her velvet bodice, at the level of her lilac orchid, forgot her incisor, flashed a smile. Sumiré, enterprising yet, would make her money while she still had breath. People always said that things couldn't be helped. How wrong they were. How well she knew. There was always room for hope.

And, outside, the old nameboard hung, almost illegible in the purple glow, and on it—Yamato—the first name for Japan, carved in oak by an artisan long dead, gone for well over a century and a half. Softly the board creaked, slowly swaying in the first night breeze.

We were talking about the
furosha
, those bums increasingly littering parks and malls and subway passages, propped against the wall or lying on the pavement, sleeping, sometimes drunk, always carrying shopping bags filled with all they own.

They have chosen not to work, not to carry their weight in our society. There is plenty for them to do but, no, they want the easy life of lounging about and foraging in garbage cans. They are simply dropouts. This, at least, is the conventional view.

- Surely, there's plenty of work they could do? I said conventionally.