Please Enjoy Your Happiness (30 page)

I was watching you from the shadows of your room as if I were your captive. On some occasions over the years I have watched closely as women apply make-up and attempt to define their beauty with various degrees of success, or no success at all if they have the fatal flaw of being modest. You were speaking as if you had been born in another age, as if you had been the mistress of a court noble – but then, that was just my interpretation. I was learning to write poetry. You can’t blame me for being a dreamer, seduced, without even a kiss, by your charm. You can’t reprove me for mentioning that you were the only woman I knew who was so conscious of her beauty that she called herself ‘ugly’.

You looked closely at the apparition I was to make sure I was paying attention. ‘I use a combination of ancient Chinese and Japanese techniques when I feel it is possible for me to feel beautiful,’ you said carefully. ‘I feel beautiful today because you are here and I thank you for that. I smooth on very lightly this
bintsuke
wax as a foundation and then gently dust my face and my shoulders and the back of my neck with rice powder,’ you said. ‘I use a pomade rouge on my cheeks to bring them to life,
like this. I use a vermilion balm for my lips and a mix of dried flower petals and beeswax to make my eyebrows curve, like that. Not all of my lips should be coloured with the balm because I wish to stress the fullness and pout of my lips, like this. Then, after I am satisfied with that, I emphasize my nose and the corner sockets of my eyes with gentle touches of rouge, like this.

‘On my nails, I have a red tint made of gum arabic, egg whites, beeswax, and gelatin. Last month, my nails were tinted in the purple colour of a beating heart, but I decided to change to the most brilliant red today, just for you. I use a perfume I make myself that only releases its fragrance whenever I make love, or whenever I walk after making love, so that there is a trace of me that briefly lingers even after I disappear. I pretend that these jade earrings are a gift from the emperor and why not? Why shouldn’t I pretend?

‘All this is what men find beautiful, I was told when I was a young girl and still a virgin. But you know, when I became older, and my body became rounder, men were not interested in white jade skin or secret perfumes. For them, I was like a piece of ripening persimmon. They were eager to bite into me, but like the fruit I kept them waiting, waiting, waiting until that moment when I was sweet. If I had allowed them to taste me earlier, the taste would have been so bitter. It is like that with persimmons. It is like that with certain women who are no longer girls. That was my technique. These men could hover around me and offer money and gold. But I made them wait until they became acceptable to me. They found it irresistible. They found it incredible that they could not have me. They were not like you, Paul-san. But you are not yet a man.’

All of this was on my mind on that breezy, cheerful day as I made my way to your house.

Almost everyone I passed appeared to be busy. They were not just acting busy. It was as if the whole population of Yokosuka was pulling together to restore something lost: a moment from youth, maybe, or a vision of the village they abandoned. Millions of country folk had moved to the cities to look for work after the death and destruction caused by American bombs. This was not a day for thinking, it occurred to me. This was a day for doing. Schoolchildren were scampering home with their leather satchels bouncing up and down on their backs to study algebra and trigonometry and to one day start companies like Sony or Honda. Housewives were hanging out newly washed clothes to dry in the sun, and some were using bamboo paddles to whack dander out of the cotton-packed futon mattresses they used for sleeping. One woman with a big smile on her face called out
konnichiwa
[good day] to me and then walloped her futon in rhythm with a jaunty song on the radio that made her happy.

I picked up the pace of my walking. I was worried about how you were going to react when I sailed away. At times in your letters you had sounded almost frantic, asking – demanding – that I remember you forever. When I said goodbye, would you cry and cry and cry even though you told me you would not? Would you? I felt apprehensive about those final days and yet I felt good about this day on which you suggested that we meet.

We had walked out of the Mozart with Debussy filling every emotional void in our senses, and you had pulled on my sleeve and stopped me in the alley. Under the street light you had said, almost in a whisper, as if you were sharing one of your secrets: ‘Paul, I want to dulcify these days.’

‘Dulcify?’

‘Yes, Paul. If you are going away, I want to celebrate our brief life together. I want to dulcify every moment we have together. Do you understand?’

But I did not understand ‘dulcify’. When I told you that, you looked so disappointed. It was as if my inability to understand that word had reduced me in a flash from being an almost-man to a helpless child again.

You pulled hard on my sleeve and looked up at me with those
ron-pari
eyes and you asked, ‘Do you ever read the dictionary? Do you ever look for words that can make your ugly English language sound beautiful? If you don’t do that, you will have a miserable life, sailor boy, and you will forget me. But you will remember me if you remember that this one word, dulcify, means sweetness and gentle and agreeable. That is the memory I want you to have when I say goodbye.’

A huge flood of emotions surged up inside me. I could not speak. My voice was locked, paralyzed. You used a finger to wipe a tear from my cheek. It had never occurred to me that despite the longing in your letters, you would be the one planning the last of our goodbyes, and I, who had spent the summer desperately trying to grow up, would be the one struck down with grief.

But that was yesterday.

Today I had my own list of things to do, the first of which was to do my best to help you dulcify. I had decided during the night that I was not going to be in mourning. Yes, that was it. I was going to be kind and generous and considerate and make these last days bearable for you because I was almost certain that your determined approach to the end of our affair was a charade and that you, a woman who had shuddered with joy
when I gave you that ‘embrace of a lifetime’, would be on your knees begging me not to go. That thought frightened me. But it was a sunny day. Everyone was whistling and sweeping and dusting. At one household, a young woman had placed an easel in her tiny garden and was using oils on canvas to paint a likeness of your hill. She had already daubed the blue flowers of the paulownia and she had painted the steps, twisting and curving like a writhing snake upward into nothingness. I stopped to look and I smiled at her. ‘Hello,’ she said in really pretty English. ‘I have seen you before. You are such a gentle boy.’

How strange it was, I thought, to be able to tell such things just from a man’s quick smile, or the way he stands to look at her. What a gift. No wonder Japanese women were the poets in ancient times. No wonder I, as yet still a boy, could be called ‘gentle’ by a woman I did not know.

In the background I could hear the sound of Misora Hibari singing ‘Ringo oiwake’ coming from an open window. I have to tell you that when the woman painter told me the name of the song I wrote it into my notebook so that one day (and that day happened just last month) I could hear it again and know what the lyrics meant. Once the music begins like a soaring bird in a dark sky, it is impossible for me to move. When it starts, I have to sit down. If there is a cushion, I have to grip it. If I let myself go, that sweet summer unfolds again as if it were a record playing on the turntable. Listening to ‘Ringo oiwake’ causes the same reaction I have when I listen to Butterfly sing ‘Un Bel Dì’. Here are the words to the song, the translation courtesy of my Japanese friend Ogawa Wakako, who says she would have enjoyed knowing you, Yukiko.

You might like to know, by the way, because you so love to laugh at the little eccentricities of life, that the ‘Ringo oiwake’ melody somehow found its way to Jamaica, where it became the foundation for the classic ska hit ‘Ringo Rock’, sung by all kinds of Rastafarians. Until recently, after a Jamaican musician visited Tokyo and heard ‘Ringo oiwake’ on the radio, everyone in Jamaica had believed it to be a Jamaican tune. ‘Everything of consequence in this world is a fable, and if you live in that world you become a fable too,’ you once said. I did not reply then. But now I am going to tell you that you were correct.

I was dulcified by the song. I was saddened too. You told me that every Japanese knew that the mother ‘who died in Tokyo then’ had been killed by American bombs, and that ‘then’ referred to a war in which so many people had lost someone. You said this without any bitterness. You said it with kindness. I was thankful for that. Despite my worry about leaving you, and how to leave you, and the stark truth about war, I still felt good about that day on which we had agreed to meet.

But then, just as I was approaching the steps to your house, I came across Detective Nazaka sitting on a park bench with his shabby raincoat unbuttoned and his thin black tie loosened. He was looking deceptively relaxed and confident as he took a drag from a broken cigarette. He squinted at me. His mouth twisted as if he had bitten into the sourest of
umeboshi
. He coughed and spat something horrific onto the pavement before sticking his hand up to signal vigorously for me to stop as if I were a speeding taxi.

‘Excuse me,’ I said gingerly. ‘I am on my way to meet Miss Kaji.’ I was desperate to get past him and climb the hill.

‘Yes, I know,’ he said. His voice was the usual harsh croak. He did an imitation of a smile. ‘The police know everything!’

‘It’s nice to see you, sir. But I don’t want to be late,’ I told him.

‘Yes, I will make this quick,’ he said. ‘I understand that you met Kaji-san at the Mozart café yesterday. She is Japanese, you know. We Japanese do not necessarily have to discuss certain concepts or subjects, even though you might have wanted that to happen. We can remain silent in our conversations and use our senses to know what the other person is thinking. We can talk silently. Foreigners cannot do that, you know. It is the Japanese sixth sense. We Japanese are especially sensitive people.
The crimes I investigate excite the senses. Those are the type of crimes that cause poetry to be written.’

I had no idea what he was talking about. But I showed interest by nodding in agreement. It was a mistake. He continued.

‘For example, here is a crime I wish I had investigated but which I could not do because it happened in 1936 in Tokyo and I was living in Manchuria at the time. There was a woman, Abe Sada, who had been a prostitute. But then she started working as a maid in a cheap hotel. Kichi, the owner of the hotel, foolishly molested her and that caused the two of them to start a love affair in which they engaged in sexual experiments that were bizarre even for Japan. Miss Abe became more and more possessive and jealous. The hotel owner did everything he could to please her, but Miss Abe murdered him after he confessed to her that the sensation of strangling excited him. She cut off his penis and she used it to write in blood on his chest, “Sada and Kichi: together, forever”.’ Nazaka looked closely at me for some kind of reaction. But nothing in my experience allowed me to speak. I thought how little I knew about your life, Yukiko, and the relationship you had with the man who became a bear. He raped you: that I knew. You became his woman: that I knew. Would you kill him, I wondered?

‘Well,’ Nazaka said. ‘You can see that we Japanese are so very sensitive when it comes to matters of the heart. I think you know now we are a special people. Even without battleships we are a superior people. I believe Jewish people have this special sixth sense too.’

I told him I did not know that. Since I started writing poetry because you required it, I thought I had developed the skill of knowing and sharing thoughts without speaking. But that was
a skill, not a sense. If it was a sense, it would have been a
wu wei
thing – not planned, not considered, but done.

‘People who write poetry,’ you told me with a chuckle, ‘are not normal at all. We are like messengers from somewhere. We are angels. Remember that, please, and always make sure that your private thoughts when you are with a woman are poems that you do not have to recite to her.’

‘I am sure you had a good conversation with your friend,’ Detective Nazaka said. ‘You don’t have to answer me. I can sense that you did.’

No wonder that in Japan the police know everything, I thought.

‘Well, Mr Paul, there is some news that Miss Kaji did not announce to you because it is old news. It has gone. It is the past. She did not tell you about it because, being Japanese, she thought you would realize it already. But of course, you are a foreigner, so you don’t know . . . Do you?’

I shook my head. ‘Can you please give me the news,’ I asked before sitting down on the bench because I sensed there was going to be a shock to my nervous system.

‘
Saaaaa
,’ he said, as if he was struggling with something. ‘
Saaaaa
.’ There were a few seconds of silence.