Please Enjoy Your Happiness (3 page)

Do you remember the day you invited me to climb the hill to your apartment? You lit a stick of incense and said a Buddhist prayer. You were upset when I asked you why you were praying. I looked out your window, through the rain, at my ship far off in the bay, and for no apparent reason the tears welled up in both our eyes, and I held you tight, and you told me, ‘Paul. Never let me go!’ I still shiver when I remember that moment. I was just a boy. I held you for a while and then I let you go, and what did I say? Do you remember? I said, ‘I’ll never forget you. Never!’ You looked embarrassed. Or was that look something else?

That was much later in the summer, just two days before the
Shangri-La
left Yokosuka forever on 22 September. I had to return to the ship. You gave me your umbrella. You didn’t want me to get wet. I wanted to kiss you, but I couldn’t because I knew, and you knew, that it was all going to end. My youngster’s heart could not cope with the parting, so I was impatient and I offered up only an abrupt goodbye. As I was going down the steps I turned to look. You were staring at me. I could not see the expression on your face through the glass. I saw just your outline, which is all that I can see now, after all these years.

If you could have been at the opera with me last year, you would have understood why in my seventies I am filled with longing – for what, I do not know. You would have understood why when Butterfly sang ‘Un Bel Dì’ [‘One Fine Day’] I immediately thought of you on the mountain watching my
ship leave, waiting for its return. Maybe you are buried on the mountain. Maybe not. But here are Puccini’s lyrics to the most wonderful aria about lost love ever written. Men and women – even hardened and bitter men and women – sob when the abandoned Butterfly, who has never given up hope, begins singing:

2

The Torment

There was that moment at that small, shabby hotel, on a dirt side road leading nowhere, when I found you lying on the floor, your wrists slashed, dark red blood everywhere. They told me at the White Rose that you had gone there because you were ‘unhappy’. I thought I would go there to cheer you up. When I saw you with your eyes closed and with dried blood caked on your arms, I thought you were dead. The room reeked with the dangerous smell of blood. The young hotel clerk was shaking. She was horrified. She rushed out after saying she was going to call the police. I knelt down, not knowing what to do. So I touched your cheek. It was cold, but you stirred. Your eyes opened and you looked up at me with a strange sweet smile on your face. ‘I don’t want to die,’ you whispered. ‘I don’t want to cause you big trouble.’

And then you fainted, and I tore the bed sheet and tied your wrists to try to stop the bleeding and the next thing I knew the police were ordering me roughly in Japanese to back away. I had never known such fear. I was going to collapse myself, but then a police lieutenant wearing a tan raincoat and black beret, with one of those extraordinarily potent Peace cigarettes in his mouth, came through the door and told me in excellent English, ‘Let me take care of this. You probably should go. You don’t want to get mixed up in this. Go back to your ship. I promise you we will take care of her.’

I looked at you. You were limp, lying with your legs apart, your arms straight out, as if you had been crucified. I could not see whether you were breathing. You were so unearthly pale that you looked as if you had been dug out of a snowdrift. You were wearing a simple white dress, a string of red plastic beads round your neck, and bright red lipstick. It was as if I had interrupted you in the middle of an elaborate ritual.

I had that image of you in my mind as I wandered through the alleys where lives were being lived as they were in those days: The women splashing water on the sidewalks to keep down dust. The delicious onion and shrimp vapours coming from fried rice cooking in big steel pans that always made me instantly hungry. Happy children in their navy blue and white uniforms coming home from classes with black leather school bags on their backs. I could hear the melancholy sounds of an
enka
coming from one house and I guessed at that moment it was a woman singing about a lost love or a life not worth living and I wondered whether that was why you had tried to kill yourself. There was still blood on my hands. There was a tap running, and a woman watched curiously as she saw me washing the blood away. She came up to me, and I could see that she
was worried I had been injured. I did not know enough Japanese then to explain what had happened, so I thanked her and sat on the kerb while she patted me on the back as if I were a baby. It took a while for me to put everything in perspective and calm down enough so that I could continue walking to the main gate of the navy base. I did not want to talk to anyone about what had happened. I lay down on my bunk, shut my eyes, and saw that image of you that I could not erase from my mind. One of many thoughts filled me with terror: was I the reason you had cut your wrists?

In the morning, I went back to the White Rose, not knowing whether I would be welcome. The
mamasan
(woman manager) was sitting inside by the door, which was decorated with little mementos of love tacked up by the girls (we always called them ‘girls’ and they in return called us ‘boys’) who worked there as hostesses. She wore a kind of white apron over a simple blouse and the baggy
mompe
pants farm workers wear. She also wore
geta
, the wooden sandals that make a reassuring
clip-clop
,
clip-clop
in the alleys on dark nights when hardly anything is visible. The girls working in the bar always called her, respectfully, Mama. That was her role, and she was good at it. I never knew her name. I asked once. She shook her head. That’s why I always called her Mama. Her authority was absolute in the White Rose; she treated all of us – hostesses and sailors – with firm and resolute affection, as if we were all toddlers.

A Japanese bar hostess is not a prostitute, Mama told me when we first met. A hostess pours drinks, cracks jokes, makes conversation, rubs sore backs, and expresses sympathy for things that ail men’s minds. Some guys had also pinned photos of themselves on the door with messages such as, ‘See you next time, Michiko. I love you!’ or ‘Sonny loves Reiko,’ showing a
sailor with a big lipstick kiss on his face put there by the woman of his dreams. The girls had left small objects around the doorway, like the votive offerings deposited by the Catholic faithful praying for sick relatives and children. There were ribbons and tortoiseshell hair clips. There were handkerchiefs with messages on them in Japanese, which of course I could not read then, but I knew the meaning of the red hearts alongside the kanji characters written in ballpoint pen.

Mama looked up at me sadly. I thought she was going to tell me that you were dead. She gripped my arm so I could not move and she said, loudly, ‘I’m sorry!’ You once told me in jest, I think, that the Japanese could be ‘distressingly polite’. A half-dozen of the hostesses ran up to us. They wore cocktail dresses as if they were waiting to be taken to the Ritz. Several of them had been crying, and their mascara was running. They clasped handkerchiefs to their faces. They put their arms round me. ‘Thank you so much,’ one of them finally blurted. I guess I knew then that you were alive.

Reiko, a sturdy, red-cheeked farm girl from Aomori in northern Japan, spoke some English. She was able to tell me that you were in the hospital and had been given blood transfusions and that you had been able to send them a message saying, ‘Anthony Perkins found me.’

‘How do you say that?’ Reiko asked earnestly. ‘Should I call that “rescue”? Did you rescue her? You are a good boy! Very good boy! We love you!’ The girls started laughing, and a couple of them ruffled my hair. And then Reiko said, ‘Go to the hospital, please. Quickly! Urgently! You need talk to Yuki-chan.’

I was beginning to discover that all these women had secrets. Some of these secrets I learned over time. Every time the
Shangri-La
steamed out of port I knew more of them.

In those days the enemy was ‘Red China’. The
Shangri-La
was, according to US Navy nomenclature, an ‘attack aircraft carrier’; navy publicity about the ship called it a ‘Man o’ War with Men of Peace’. But it was home base to several squadrons of jet and propeller attack aircraft, and in its bowels were nuclear weapons in a locked-down area guarded by the ship’s Marine Corps detachment. We would go charging up and down the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea like a bull chasing
machos
in the narrow streets of Pamplona. Once, somewhere down towards the Philippines, the
Shangri-La
shuddered and blew its whistle furiously as it tried to put on the brakes. I rushed up on deck. A gloriously antique white four-masted schooner straight out of a Joseph Conrad novel was crossing our path. Its decks were loaded with green bananas, breadfruit, and wooden crates. I could read the ship’s name through the patina of rust on its bow:
The Torment
. The crew was straining to get more speed out of the sails.
The Torment
leaned over into the arc of pure white spray it made in the emerald sea. Its safety, its destiny, depended on its skipper, a white-haired man at the wheel wearing a white shirt unbuttoned to the waist. He was laughing – or maybe cursing – as the vast bulk of the
Shangri-La
cast a shadow over him. He did not look back as he steered
The Torment
to safety.

We seamen, by the way, called our vessel the ‘Shitty Shang’. Every day we were fed ‘shit on a shingle’, shredded chipped beef in a milky sauce on black toast, the whole thing loaded with saltpetre or other chemicals to smother our libido, or so the story went. I envied the skipper of
The Torment
at that moment and every man aboard her being tossed about in our wake.

Another time we came across a single palm tree fastened to a
tiny white coral speck of an island no bigger, it seemed to me, than a soccer field. The sea was like glass, and the island seemed to be floating on it, while the palm tree with its coconuts swayed as if it were an island girl delighting in our presence. The next time we came that way, the palm tree and its island were gone. I asked about that. Someone told me our aircraft had bombed it into oblivion.

The girls at the White Rose and the dozens of other saloons in Yokosuka had their secrets. We sailors had secrets too, but ours were bright and funny and full of bravado. We would never admit we were lonely. Never. We were certain we were not lonely. But the truth was that every time we arrived in Yokosuka we went looking for the girls we knew. On the fringes of the streets with bars were a few whorehouses for sailors who wanted sex but did not want company, those who could not handle tears of joy, or holding hands, or slow dancing. Hostesses at bars like the White Rose often had secrets that were nightmares of desperation. This was less than fifteen years after the end of World War II. Many women had lost husbands, sweethearts, brothers, sisters, parents, and friends. Millions of homes had been destroyed in US firebombing runs directed not at military or industrial targets but at the civilian population. You told me once that people with connections to Hiroshima and Nagasaki often had extreme personalities, even if they were not in those cities when the atom bombs tumbled out of the sky. And families like yours that had settled as colonists in northern China when Imperial Japan seized territory there also were shattered, almost as if they had been A-bomb survivors, by the violence they experienced trying to escape from Manchuria when the Soviets attacked. Whole settler villages were exterminated. You told me an especially horrifying story about a
heavily built Russian woman soldier in leather boots who killed a huddled group of Japanese mothers and their children with her machine gun which you called ‘a mandolin’. Parents abandoned their children or pleaded with Chinese families to take them. Women whose men were killed often were raped or offered themselves as wives to Chinese farmers. Japanese records suggest that more than thirty thousand civilians perished and another thirty thousand were never accounted for in the month of August 1945 alone. The bulk of the exodus continued until late 1946, dwindling to a trickle of people in 1948. Those who made it back to Japan, you said, were often treated as if they were foreigners because they had been born in a foreign land.