Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (29 page)

Listening to this extraordinary abuse, I thought how very like Oshima it was to say "this country"
(kono kuni
), where anyone else would have said "our country"
(waga kuni).
Even dead drunk and in a fight he remembered the importance of such distinctions.

The architect had perhaps looked forward to an exchange with the drunken film director, one that would reflect favorably upon himself. He had no opportunity. The invective flowed like lava. There was no mistaking it. He stood, ashen-faced, and was buried.

Then Oshima belched loudly and giggled before covering his mouth in a tardy gesture of apology. Taking Obayashi's hand, he proceeded to waltz across the stage. I was invited to join them, and as the three of us glided off the curtain fell.

- More drinks, more drinks, cried Oshima: More teapots. What a good idea of yours that teapot was. (He put his arm around me.) Now, off into the night. Just think. We might even discover the meaning of life.

He pinched my cheek and off we went.

Famous—a face known to millions of television viewers, seen nearly nightly throughout the land. A peculiar face, made of small, strong bones, light skin rendered even lighter so that under harsh studio lights it seems almost an abstraction of itself; a small red mouth, always busy with what has been called the fastest delivery in show business; the copper-colored carrottop wig, a trademark; and—in between—the eyes, lustrous, like black grapes on that small, white, triangular plate of a face. A face purposely simplified, a mask.

Memorable—a face lending itself to caricature: made of so little, it takes little to capture it on paper. Whether advertising instant noodles or refrigerators; whether refereeing contests of young popular singers or giving advice to housewives; whether interviewing or appearing in one-woman shows—this face says everything before it even opens its mouth.

It says: Tetsuko, the most popular and admired woman in Japan. Not that the face is in itself admired. What is admired is the real Tetsuko, the person behind the mask, or that part of it she allows to appear on the stage, the screen, the tube.

The television audience knows this person from her talk shows. During these the mouth suddenly shuts, the babble ceases. For as long as the other person, the interviewed, wants to talk, Tetsuko listens. She listens with that rapt attention of the truly interested. It does not matter who the interviewed is. So long as he speaks Tetsuko is silent, regarding him with the gaze of a child, or of certain animals.

Sometimes she talks to help. When the hopelessly inarticulate, profoundly unsure actor Ken Takakura was a guest, she patiently asked questions. Though each was answered with a monosyllable she persevered and the effect was, oddly, as though he were talking. She interpreted each grunt as if it had actually meant something, as well it might have, and out of nothing at all created an eloquent encounter.

This is admirable, and her vast Japanese audience admires it. They also like it when she is emotionally carried away. She often cries when she does Emily's return from the grave in
Our Town;
she is touched and moved by the afflicted, to whose organizations she privately gives sizable amounts of money. Once she had as guest a foreigner, a German, expert in such matters, who showed photos from the extermination camps. While he was smiling—for on television in all countries one is supposed to smile—she became more and more affected and finally broke down.

The audience knows that despite the instant noodles and the pop singers and the fastest delivery in show business, here is a fellow human who can be very funny (her famous imitation of Florence Foster Jenkins singing the Queen of the Night aria, for example) but who also feels deeply—visibly.

You feel that Tetsuko knows about life's miseries, about its tragic side. Part of this feeling is due to thé mask itself—it is the face of a tragedienne, lustrous eyes, no nose, proud mouth: a very young Berma in
Phèdre
, the ghost of the princess in the No. But even her gaiety and occasional inconsequentiality seem tinged with sadness. She also allows herself to appear vulnerable, the price she seems to pay for her spontaneity, as fresh, as innocent as that of a child, knowing as we do that the vulnerable get stepped on, that children become adults.

Her fame extracts a price as well. On the street, when out with her, one notices a small crowd gathering around. People stop, stand, stare. The looks are all admiring, but the group grows and Tetsuko, peering through her mascara, says that perhaps we might cross the street or take a taxi.

Fame is dangerous too. Fans are suffocating, in all countries. Few people know where she lives and fewer yet have her home telephone number. If she wants to give it she will do so in the most secretive manner. She hopes you will not think her silly, but actually this number is—lapsing into the Las Vegasese that has now become part of her language—for your eyes only.

She lives alone, in a large apartment near Roppongi, that modern section of town which values what she advertises. It is there that one sees her as herself—and finds that that self is really no different from the one she publicly presents.

The apartment is all white—white on white. The white bed has white sheets and a white coverlet. There is a white piano and an off-white harpsichord. On the bed is a large doll and on the shelves collections of glass animals, paperweights, little things from abroad. There is a large portrait of herself, all in white, in a too large chair. There is also a Marie Laurencin. The eyes are large
prunelles
—this is where Tetsuko's eyes come from.

It is the apartment of a little girl, and that is what she, a mature woman, also is. She makes things in the kitchen like a little girl making cookies. She gleefully tries things out—pickled plums mixed up with
shiso
leaf-then sits back to judge the effect. She is forever running off to go through drawers until she finds whatever it is she wants to show you.

Like a little girl she loves clothes—has never appeared once on her talk shows in the same dress. Her closets are full of them but she seems to have no favorites. Like a child, she likes quantity.

When her best-selling book about Totto-chan appeared, her millions of readers were not surprised at this portrait of Tetsuko in childhood. This is because they saw right through the persona and recognized the child in her, and the child in themselves.

Though nearly fifty she seems nearer fifteen. Her gaiety, her concern are those of an adolescent. If her TV image radiates youth it is because she has remained so young—or, rather, because she has never been anything else.

And, as with most children, there comes a moment when one sees in Tetsuko, sitting there in her white dress on her white chair, a look, not of discontent, but of a kind of uncomplaining wonder. It seems to ask if this is all there is to it, if there is nothing more. It wonders if things could have been different.

Well, yes, is the answer. Things could always have been different, for all of us. Tetsuko, for example, would have made an excellent, serious actress. Earlier, on stage, in films, she made you remember every character she played. I will always remember the innocent, foolish, warm, frivolous wife in
Summer Soldiers.

Yet this excellence was not enough. Like any child she wanted her gratification right now. Hence, perhaps, TV: instant playback, instant feedback—the perfect medium for kids.

I mention her stage and film roles and she says: Oh, that! Then she drops this inner gaze, opens her eyes wide, and is suddenly the hoyden, the tomboy, or doing her impersonation of the mature woman, a
femme du monde
, all guile and drooping eyelids. We laugh and Tetsuko is reassured.

She finds her maturity in another fashion. Tetsuko wants to be responsible and this she shows in countless admirable ways. She gives much of her money to the afflicted, particularly the deaf. She finances a school and theater for those so disadvantaged. The proceeds of the best-selling
Totto-chan
went to the poor, the needy. She herself went to Africa, taking money to the starving, calling the attention of her country to their plight.

She also wants to be faithful. She never wants to forget anyone she has ever met. She wants to be a completely responsible friend—she keeps up, sends little notes, postcards, remembers birthdays, supports one's ventures; with old loves she has lunch and becomes a sister rather than a lover—doing whatever it takes to stay in there.

In this responsibility, this fidelity, she reminds me of someone. Who could it be? Of course ... how could one forget: Mother—yours, mine, everyone's.

This grown-up, paradoxical little girl has become everyone's mother. What she wanted most she has become. Though she has no child of her own, we are all of us her children. She gave up a career for us. And yet this look of doubt occasionally remains.

But not for long. Tetsuko adjusts her mask, says something funny, busies herself, then must dress and be off—off to that great, magnifying, loving, and satisfying mirror which has, in its way, created this admirable persona—off to those millions whom she will never see but who see her every night.

The two large silk-screen prints, each perhaps two by three feet, look like Sotatsu's famous panels of the thunder and wind gods. They are supposed to: colors the same, poses reminiscent. But these are goddesses—the wind goddess trails her linen coat, stepping firmly from one cloudlet to the next, long black hair streaming behind her; the thunder deity now wears her drum as a cache-sexe, and above it are her ample, pink-tipped breasts.

Mayumi looks at her two prints; a major reassessment has been made. These female deities are just as strong, just as dominating, as were their male counterparts.
That
is the reassessment.

When she was young Mayumi saw that, like all Japanese, she would have to conform. Like all Japanese girls she also shortly understood that she would be expected to conform more than Japanese boys did. Gone, they may have told her, were the days when a woman was allowed but three roles: obedient daughter, wife, and mother. Yet, as Mayumi grew up, she realized these roles were still all there was.

Men had more choice, a little more. But if a woman was not an obedient daughter, refused to marry, and consequently had no child, then she was a bad woman. It was because of this that most of her friends obediently married.

Mayumi decided not to. She would be an artist. Besides the fact that she was talented (which meant that she cared enough to be skillful), artists did not have to comply to quite the same extent.

She also had a place she could go to. Artists were expected to be international. And from an early age Mayumi had increasingly looked outside to other countries, particularly to America where it seemed, from this distance at any rate, that women had more scope.

She is now working on a new silk screen of Benten, a goddess from the start, the only one Japan has ever officially allowed in from abroad. She came, perhaps from China, possibly from India, in a
karafune
, a vessel otherwise filled with males. Having assumed Japanese residence, she was given a number of suspicious attributes. Sly, it was said she was, and unfriendly to courting couples, positively dangerous to the happily married—yet all the while lustful herself and something of a threat to young males.

Mayumi's Benten is quite different. She is benign. She sits in her boat and strums her lute. About her happily circle both crane and turtle, auspicious creatures. She is a figure of repose, looking inward on herself. As a goddess should be, she is full, rounded, content.

Mayumi married a man from abroad, John Nathan. As so often happens she saw in him the promise of freedom, life in his country, home of liberty and equality, America. At the same time he perhaps saw in her the promise of security, the warmth and care of Japan. In the event, two children later, it didn't work out—separation, then divorce.

Like the young Benten, she now found herself in a new country. And, since she was a divorced woman, America, not being much different in this regard from Japan, began to disapprove, to gossip. This, however, Mayumi no longer feared or resented. She lived by herself with her children and created her goddesses.

These are all of a single family. They resemble each other. There is a fullness about them, a satisfaction which is never complacent, a natural acceptance and not—its male counterpart—a natural exclusion. These goddesses are thoroughly themselves. Gods, ever fearful of opinion, conceal themselves behind their attributes. Goddesses, magnanimous, do not. They expose themselves freely to the public gaze.

Hers are Japanese. They come from the days long ago when little Mayumi peered into the dim light of the shrine and saw the small, round mirror on that cloud-shaped pedestal.

- I knew it was the sun goddess, she has said: I asked her to help me, though I did not know exactly for what. In return, I promised to be a good girl.

And then, some years later, when she was eleven, her mother took her to an exhibition of Munakata's woodblock prints, where she saw not only Buddha and his ten disciples but also the reclining nymphs, peris, and goddesses of his full-breasted world.

These remained with her, but it was only much later, during her first pregnancy when she had almost despaired of art and had taken to studying Japanese design instead, that they suddenly reappeared.