Please Enjoy Your Happiness (2 page)

More than fifty years have passed since Yuki and I first met in 1959. I have had to invent most of the dialogue. I have tried to remain true to Yuki’s manner of speaking, a task actually not that difficult, because she was unique and because she was my teacher, and we listened carefully and we talked and talked until
there was moonlight and midnight. I do remember key expressions and phrases Yuki used. While not fluent in English, she delighted in using a level of speech that had a striking intelligence and uniqueness. She loved to quote lines from Japanese, English, and Chinese poetry. She kept in her purse a large notebook with a black cover full of translated poetry and song lyrics. When she was not pouring drinks at the White Rose, she spent hours studying at the city library or listening to educational programmes and jazz and classical music on Tokyo radio stations. The reader can hear Yuki’s voice in her letters, many of which are presented here verbatim. Other letters include the editing changes she asked me to make. I have had to use the same inventiveness with other characters in the book, again trying to stay as true to the events as I remember them.

1

One Fine Day

Kaji Yukiko! I have your letters. I found them again after all these years. One is written, so neatly, so carefully, in blue ink. You typed the others on your Smith Corona portable. The paper is still creamy white and soft, as if it were made of silk. When I read your letters this afternoon, it was as if you were still speaking to me. I could hear your voice – strong, determined, wilful, elegant. You can tell from the tenor of my voice, I think, how emotional that moment was for me. You once said, when I was nineteen, that you read each of your letters out loud before you put it in the mail, so that when I opened the envelope I would hear the sound of your voice. ‘I will be a bird, sitting in a tree,’ you said. ‘If you keep my letters and read them again, you will hear me singing.’ That was in April 1959 in the seaport of Yokosuka, Japan. The long rainy season was beginning. It is now 2014 and the year is coming to an end. It is Christmas and, as usual, I am alone. Your letters are spread out on my bed.
I have read them all again, closely. They demand to be read closely. Talk to me, Yuki! Talk to me, because there is not much time left. I am seventy-five now. You – if you still live – are at least eighty-six. I can hear your voice clearly but have been struggling to recall exactly how you looked when we knew each other more than half a century ago. It has been at least twenty-five years since the last black-and-white photograph I had of you was destroyed when my damned roof in Bisbee, Arizona, started leaking. All I can visualize now are the outlines of your face. Your Manchurian face. The hard lines of your face, as if it had been chiselled out of stone and never loved. The jet-black hair down to your shoulders, with your fringe cut straight over your fierce eyes. How serious you were.

I remember that you were born in the depths of winter in Harbin, China. Your name, Yukiko, means Snow Child. When World War II was ending and the Soviets stormed into the Japanese colony in cold northern China, your family fled south to try to find a ship that would take you to safety in Japan. Your eyes were full of tears when you told me in the White Rose that your father had been killed and your brothers died, and then it was just you and your mother trying to escape.

It was dark in that bar where we often met when my ship, the USS
Shangri-La
, was in port. In the gloom, you were a tall, thin shadow, like you are now when I imagine you. You thought it was so funny that I was a sailor on an attack aircraft carrier loaded with nuclear weapons but named after a mythical paradise. I remember you pulled out a dictionary and you found the word
irony
and you said, ‘When I am old, I am going to remember this very funny thing.’

Maybe you are with your grandchildren now, your back bent, on your knees, the children demanding. Have you told
them that for a few months you knew a young sailor who helped you with your English, who captured your heart and to whom you read poetry? I think probably not. You may still be the shy though assertive one. Are you an orderly, obedient Japanese? Now I am the one who is laughing! There is simply no way you could ever be submissive or just a face in the crowd. You were the woman who discussed the poet Bash
ō
Matsu
ō
with me soon after we met on 15 April, 1959. You waved dismissively in my face when I talked naively about Jack Kerouac. You were the woman who insisted that haiku was preferable, very much so, to
On the Road
’s stream of consciousness.

‘Haiku are shorter than short,’ you said in your careful English, ‘but the content is profound. A good haiku is like a single snowdrop peeping through the ice.
On the Road
goes on forever. It is like an airplane crash.’

You didn’t like Johnny Cash and his ‘Hillbilly Heaven’ either, and I don’t blame you, because that is what they played so loudly at the White Rose when the sailors came to drag you out to the dance floor. You would stagger back to the booth where I sat, muttering, ‘Gershwin . . . Miles . . . Are they just a dream?’

I do not have copies of the letters I sent to you. But I do have the poetry I wrote at your urging, which I included with every letter I mailed to you. It is probably better that I do not have my letters. What did I know about love and longing when I was nineteen? Japanese women often said with a giggle that I looked like Anthony Perkins. ‘Oh no, Paul-san,’ you said. ‘You look like me: a refugee.’ And there was some accuracy in that, because I was an immigrant kid on a four-year US Navy enlistment who was not yet an American citizen. I was only two years off the boat from Europe. I was a stranger in a strange land
made even stranger by the shock of sudden immersion in things Japanese. The more that interest grew, the less I liked certain things about the United States. Ice-cold Coca-Cola – that was fine. Segregation. Guns. Ignorance. Intolerance. It didn’t take much for a kid like me, who carried a thirty-five-cent paperback copy of James A. Michener’s
Sayonara
in his kitbag, to realize that I would be a rebel and a
ronin
(masterless samurai) all my life, no matter where I was. You told me that. You also predicted in your letters that I would become a writer, all of which happened, although I suppose you do not know that.

I still have that copy of
Sayonara
. It was printed on cheap paper, so its pages are yellowing. Maybe you remember the book? We talked about the story for hours, and I told you how Lieutenant Commander Charlie L. Peeples, the Protestant chaplain on my ship, did his best to warn the entire crew of 3,448 men that getting involved with a Japanese woman, and especially attempting to marry one, was against ‘command policy’, pretty much the way it was in
Sayonara
. You and I had to sneak into those sections of Yokosuka that were off-limits to navy personnel just to have an undisturbed conversation and sip coffee. Do you remember how angry I was, and how much I hated everything I thought was unjust and unfair? You were so worried. You didn’t want us to end up like the American officer and the Japanese actress, unhappy and torn apart by the rules. Here is that copy of
Sayonara
with the naked geisha on it which we passed from hand to hand many times when we talked about that love story. The cover is coming loose. I treated that book as a talisman. It went with me to Vietnam and Cambodia in the war years. For me, the story still rings true. I read the book in Saigon and Phnom Penh. During my long career as a journalist, it went with me to Manila, to Cuba, to
China, to Argentina. I know how to lose myself in impossible love. You taught me that.

I have started to dream in Japanese again since rediscovering your letters. Why am I dreaming that way? Sometimes I do not exactly know. But I did begin thinking about Japan again with emotion for the first time in many years in 2011, during the disaster of the Tohoku earthquake, when I spent long hours on my couch watching live video feeds from NHK (Nippon H
ō
s
ō
Ky
ō
kai, Japan’s equivalent of the BBC) on my laptop computer. I was an emotional shipwreck. And then again I was overwhelmed by nostalgia after I bought opera tickets in 2012 for
Madama Butterfly.
And there was that April evening in 1996 here in Arizona when I encountered the gentle Oe Kenzaburo, the 1994 Nobel laureate, drinking tea in a hotel bar and staring out the picture window at a big pile of rocks through his antique spectacles with perfectly round lenses. He told me, at the end of a long conversation about love and longing in which your name came up, ‘Don’t fail to write about this lovely woman before you die or you will regret it when you are in Heaven.’ It is only now, after reading your letters, that I realize how much you cared about me. Maybe age has made me wiser, more appreciative, and wistful. I grew up, finally, I suppose, and now I am an old man looking back, far back, to that brief time in my life when we were more than friends. Sometimes you are talking to me in my dreams. I am lost in Tokyo or some other city. I am looking for a train to take me to Kyoto, but I can’t find the train station. You are speaking Japanese, and I am struggling to understand you. How strange that in my brain there is a reservoir of fluent Japanese! You might be interested to know that when I went to university I majored in Japanese language and history, and that I lived and worked in Tokyo in
the 1970s. I was an idiot in my youth. I made no real effort to look for you. It is only now, after my marriages, that I appreciate who you were and what you did for me. You told me over and over again, ‘Go to university.’ You demanded it! You told me to write poetry. You demanded it! Write for newspapers. Write for magazines. Write books. ‘Write! Write! Write!’ you said. I was reeling, not comprehending, astonished at what you were telling me. You imagined reading what I had published. You saw something in me that I could not begin to see in myself.

Here is the first of your letters, written soon after the
Shangri-La
left Yokosuka, as it often did after ten or fifteen days in port, to patrol the South China Sea. It was delivered to the ship by mail plane. The
Shangri-La
would sail away for two or three weeks, and then it would be back again. We were together, and I would go. We were together, and I would go. From April until the last day of summer in September, I was always arriving and leaving. You were always there, waiting on your hilltop, hiding from crows and other malevolent creatures until you could jump down the 101 steps and dash through the wet streets lit by the neon lights of nightclubs so you could greet me.

Do you recall, Yuki, those long nights at the White Rose when we talked politics? I said some of the crew thought I was a Communist and that my commanding officer told me – when I did not buy the official doctrine that ‘Red China’ was America’s enemy – ‘Rogers! The US Navy doesn’t pay you to think!’ Or those afternoons we sat talking in the Mozart coffee shop, and
the delicate sound of the piano in the wet heat of the summer impelled you to touch my hand, as if I were a child or maybe as if we were both children, across the white tablecloth? ‘This makes me think of my father,’ you said. ‘He played piano for me when I was a little girl. Sad. So sad were those years.’