Please Enjoy Your Happiness (14 page)

‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’ you said suddenly. You reached out to hold my hand. Your fingernails dug into my palm, and I winced.

‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’ you said again. ‘That aria. That beautiful song. She sings in Italian, but I can understand just from the sound of her voice how lonely she was and how she never gave up hope. How sad! That poor Japanese girl. How sad! So much sadness. But she was no
cho-cho
,’ you said, explaining that
chocho
is a Japanese word also used to describe someone who is unfaithful or a flirt, a butterfly flitting from one lover to another.

‘She had a true heart,’ you said, ‘like me. We Japanese call it
magokoro
! Puccini should have named her Yuki.’

‘OK,’ I thought. ‘Now I know
urusai
. And I know
magokoro
.’ I pulled out the small green notebook I was rapidly filling up with pencilled Japanese words because you told me, Yuki, that I was
erai
– smart – and I needed to show you the notebook, every day, to show you what I had learned. I still have that notebook, and to this day it reminds me of my diligence when I was nineteen and I was enthralled about everything without exception.

You gave me a cup of tea. It was hot enough to burn my hand. ‘That is something else you need to learn,’ you said. ‘How to drink Japanese tea correctly.’ Sooner or later, you said, I would probably have to get into an
o-furo
, the Japanese bath where you do not use soap but you soak and turn bright red like a boiled lobster. ‘The
o-furo
is hot! This tea is not hot!’ you exclaimed, like a schoolteacher.

‘Now,’ you said, as if you were announcing an event. ‘I am going to tell you one other thing about Harbin.’

I sat firmly and squarely on the top step to your house, and steadied myself.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ you said. ‘The tea is burning your hand. But now I have to tell you that although my father had a good relationship with the Jews, part of his work as a
kempei
was to torture and kill many people – but not Jews.’

I put the cup of tea beside me on the step. I got a good grip on the surface of the stone. You sat down beside me. I could feel the heat of your hip, a heat more intense, it seemed, than the scalding tea.

‘Do you mean the work he did at that unit?’ My voice was hoarse. Hot green tea does that to my throat sometimes, even today.

‘Yes. The unit,’ you said.

You explained quickly. It operated in the suburbs of southern Harbin. Surgeons and doctors were assigned there, together with
kempei
. Your father, you said, told his family he was working at some kind of clinic where the Japanese government was studying diseases and the effect of severe cold on the body. Your father made it sound as if this was humanitarian work of some kind. But you said that the man you met recently told you that actually Unit 731 performed hideous experiments on unwilling human guinea pigs – most of them Chinese guerrillas or political enemies rounded up in suppression raids by the Imperial Japanese Army – to determine the effects of germ or chemical warfare. The unit also did experiments on some American and other Allied prisoners transported to distant Harbin from far-flung theatres of war. In addition, you said, these prisoners were subjected to exposure to the astonishingly severe winter temperatures that immobilize much of Manchuria, so that the effects of endurance
and frostbite could be monitored.
⁴

‘This is one reason why I have been saying that I am a guilty person,’ you said, suddenly tearful. ‘This is a reason why I said I am a wicked woman. It is because I am my father’s daughter . . .’ Your voice fell away into a strange silence. You put your arm round me with a tenderness I had never felt before.

At that moment a heavy rain began to come down. ‘I guess I owe you that poem,’ I said.

‘Please,’ you said quietly.

‘All right,’ I said. We were still sitting there in the rain.

This poem came out of nowhere. Maybe out of the sky. Maybe out of that moment. Maybe out of my inability to accept what I had been told. You still had your arm round me tightly. Your heat was still intense, even in that cold rain.

10

Five Simple Rules

The next day, late in the afternoon, I went to the White Rose, took a quiet corner booth, and waited for you to arrive. It was raining again. I had ducked into a ‘locker club’ where I kept some civilian clothes, including a plaid long-sleeved shirt with button-down collar, two pairs of corduroy trousers, and a brown suede jacket. Navy regulations did not permit swapping one’s uniform for civvies, but if I didn’t, how would I ever be able to visit you at your home? In my uniform in off-limits Yokosuka neighbourhoods I would be a moving target for the military police; Commander Crockett would be alerted and he might not be so forgiving next time. Maybe I would even be locked up in the brig, deprived of sunlight, raindrops, books, and the company of an extraordinary woman whose life was
better than a book. I was artful and conniving and determined. I was standing my ground. I was taking a calculated risk. I was a youngster, so I could be cleverly foolish. At twenty, I might be mature and boring. At twenty-one, I might be dead, or married. Also, I had a British passport, and my fall-back plan was always to whip that out if I was ever challenged for wearing civilian clothes and committing the crime of loitering at the Mozart coffee shop.

The White Rose was crowded with sailors in their white uniforms, sitting together in groups, noisy but sheepish, not knowing what to do except hope that pretty hostesses would pour their beer and tease them mercilessly for an hour or two.

Reiko came to me with a pout, slid across the vinyl with a squeak, and nestled against me as if I were her big brother. ‘Excuse me, please. Do you know any gentlemen?’ she asked in her excellent high-school English. She had just had her hair permed into a series of waves, one of which hung over her right eye, in an imitation, maybe, of the style made popular by American film actress Veronica Lake.

‘What kind of gentleman, Rei-chan?’ I asked. I addressed her with the affectionate diminutive version of her name.

‘Well . . . a handsome gentleman,’ she began, ‘suitable for a Japanese girl.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Let me see . . .’

I was curious to know what was appropriate, and what was not. I was curious, but not because I intended to have a Japanese ‘girlfriend’. Yuki and I had never used the term
koibito
– which means both boyfriend and girlfriend – to refer to each other. She always introduced me to people as either ‘my dear friend’ or as ‘the English boy’, to distinguish me, I suppose, from
American sailors who, lumped together, were ‘barbarians’, according to Kaji Yukiko.

I could not think of anyone at that moment, except for a couple of navy pilots who sometimes dropped by the office on the
Shangri-La
where the ship’s newspaper was published. These pilots liked to bombard me with politely voiced questions such as, ‘Have you met any girls you like a lot?’ and, ‘Where can we meet college girls?’ as if I, who was still a virgin at the time, had a secret life when I went ashore in Yokosuka. Little did they know! You would think that virile navy pilots would already know the answers to those questions, but the truth was that command policy, constantly enunciated by Chaplain Peeples as if it were an addendum to the Ten Commandments, dictated that virtually everything ashore was off-limits to commissioned officers. I knew I could not recommend to Reiko that she meet these pilots because if they were seen escorting a Japanese woman around Yokosuka they would be severely reprimanded by their superiors, and that reprimand would be entered in their service record and possibly result in a denied promotion. Navy fliers could get falling-down drunk in bars in Honolulu, for example, and they could chase American girls there without any chaplain’s disapproval. But Japanese girls were
verboten
. Lowly seaman apprentices such as myself were not restricted, as long as they remained in the Honcho district’s three narrow streets jammed with neon-lit nightclubs and bars, immediately opposite the main entrance to the navy base. Also, of course, fliers were discouraged by their chaplains and also by American embassy or consular personnel if they had the temerity to get married in Japan and then attempted to bring their brides to the United States.

So, I asked Reiko, what kind of male qualities were acceptable
to a Japanese woman? She giggled. ‘I am really too young to tell you that,’ she said coyly. ‘I am only twenty-two. I am a girl from the countryside. My father is just a farmer. What do I know?’

I looked at her closely. Why did some of the girls at the bar call her ‘Pumpkin’, I wondered? She was no beauty, but she had already shown me that week you slashed your wrists that she was loyal, affectionate, and sturdy both in frame and in temperament. Reiko was a ‘sweet apple’, you said. ‘It hurts me when I see sailors touching her because she is such a good girl. Do you know that almost all the money she earns here at the bar goes back to her family in Aomori?’

‘Please, Reiko,’ I said. ‘Tell me. What kind of man do you like?’

‘Well . . .’ she began, followed by a big tumble of carefully phrased words. ‘I long for the special man appear in my life. I hope we could accompany with each other to walk together for the rest of the life, no matter if it is storm or wind. We will always join together to experience the sour, sweet, bitter, and hot in the life.

‘I am saving my love in four parts. One part I will give to my family, because they give life to me. One part I will give to my future husband, because he will be the one who will accompany with me for the rest of the life. The third part I will give to my husband’s family, because if it was not for his mother and father I would not have him. The fourth part I give to myself, because if a woman does not love herself, how she could love another?

‘Also, I believe that you can’t make someone love you. All you can do is be someone who can be loved. The rest is up to the man who recognizes your worth. That is what my grandmother told my mother, and that is what my mother told all her daughters including me. All my aunts agree too. Every
woman in the village agrees. Every woman in Japan agrees too, probably.’

‘How many sisters and brothers do you have?’ I asked.

‘I am the youngest,’ she said. ‘I have five sisters and four brothers. At one time we all lived in my parents’ very big farmhouse. Maybe you have not seen a traditional Japanese farmhouse? In the far north where I was born and it is very cold in winter, we are all sharing warmth under the thick thatched roof. My brothers and sisters. My parents. My grandparents. Three cousins who lost their parents. Two aunts who lost their husbands in the war – killed by Americans. The family altar where we honour our dead ancestors because those ancestors are living with us . . . Oh, yes, also a horse. Many chickens. Several big lazy dogs. Several fierce small dogs. Cats with no tails that get fat in the winter. Big bags of rice and seeds and sweet potatoes. Big boxes of tea. Onions too. Many barrels of sake . . . Let’s see. Have I forgotten something?’

I laughed politely. I was trying to imagine living that way. In my family it was myself, my mother and father, two sisters, a highly devious Siamese cat named Chang, and that was it. ‘Is there anything else?’ I asked her. She looked up at me. I think she sensed at that moment the vast differences in culture and habit. Also, maybe she was thinking that living on a housing estate in the suburbs with 2.5 kids and a Buick station wagon might not be a wise choice for someone raised in the Japanese countryside who suckled her mother’s breast – as was the custom in her family – until she was eight years old. (Reiko always enjoyed telling sailors that.)

‘Yes, there is more,’ she said. ‘I am very definite. This is the way I want to live my life. All the women in my family say that
the measure of love is when you love without measure. Do you understand?’

I nodded in the affirmative. In the back of my mind was the friendship I had with you, Yukiko.

‘In life there are very rare chances that you’ll meet the person you love and that he will love you in return,’ Reiko said. ‘So, once you have it, don’t ever let go because the chance might never come your way again.

‘It’s better to lose your pride to the one you love than to lose the one you love because of pride. All the women in my family believe that too. We spend too much time looking for the right person to love, or finding fault with those we already love. Instead we should be perfecting the love we give. That is a woman’s duty in Japan. That is what we Japanese believe with all our heart.

‘So can I tell you the five simple rules in my family? You are not Japanese, but maybe you can remember these rules that will make you happy. I tell your friend Yuki-chan this, many, many times. But sometimes she forgets because she has so much on her mind.

‘One: Free your heart from hate. Two: Free your mind from worries. Three: Live simply. Four: Give more. Five: Expect less.

‘I follow these rules,’ she said, ‘because even though I am from the countryside, I know that the world is so big. I know there must be the
one
man who would love me and care for me. I would like to be his sweet wife only. I seriously want a simple love that a man could share with his woman.