Please Enjoy Your Happiness (35 page)

After my four years in the navy were up in 1962, I studied Japanese history and language at the University of Illinois, and I received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study ancient Japanese history and culture at Harvard. Between 1968 and 1970, my poetry was appearing in prestigious literary journals alongside work by the likes of W. H. Auden, Thomas Kinsella,
Anthony Kerrigan, Stanley Cooperman, Joyce Carol Oates, and Dilys Laing. I turned down Harvard’s offer of an additional grant and selected instead a summer internship with
Newsweek
in Chicago. That internship resulted in ten years of writing for the magazine, including two more years based in Tokyo and several years in and out of Cambodia and Vietnam doing war coverage. That is where my poetry writing ceased, Yukiko. My sister Mary blames the magazine, arguing that, ‘it should never have sent a poet to cover a war’. In the early 1970s, when I was based in Tokyo for
Newsweek
, I made one personal visit to Yokosuka. But I went there only because I was curious to see how the city had changed. I did not have an expectation that I would find you and so I made no attempt to look for you.

I have related how in these later years of my life, in the midst of conversation about lost loves with friends in Costa Rica, I remembered that somewhere I had your letters. I found them, I had an epiphany, and I began writing. There were immediate questions asked by people interested in the story. Where are you, Yukiko? Are you still living? Who were you? Am I going to try to find you?

Because I do not know what happened to you after we last saw each other, I do not know if you moved to Tokyo or some other city or if you went back to the Hiroshima area: the city from which you had escaped. You had no reason to return, I believe. The yakuza gang in Hiroshima had washed its hands of you. I suppose that it is possible that a relative, maybe from your ancestral town, may have emerged. I will never know, probably, whether you and Shinoda Yusuke really were lovers and if you might have chosen to be with him again.

According to Detective Nazaka, you were a courtesan to the Japanese elite in Hiroshima. You were a woman of culture
because you were brought up in Manchuria. You were not a prostitute in Yokosuka. You were not a geisha. You poured drinks, listened to sobbing sailors, danced with them too, and earned money from tips and your cut of the drinks they ordered. Geishas are not prostitutes. They sometimes become the lovers of wealthy patrons but they are artistes and highly trained in all of the arts. They were a national treasure really, and are still regarded as such in Japan, where to have the pleasure and prestige of an important geisha’s company for one evening can cost a man as much as round-trip airfare between Los Angeles and Tokyo.

Many people ask why I kept your letters. They sometimes say that was unusual. After they read the letters they ask if it was really possible that a woman like you, working in a grim occupation for the Japanese mafia in Hiroshima, would read Kafka and Rilke, be familiar with the ancient Japanese women poets, appreciate Maria Callas, Debussy, and Beethoven, and speak Mandarin Chinese and Russian? Why didn’t you teach school, or work in a library, or marry a college professor, they want to know.

A few young people ask why I did not use email to keep in touch with you after I left Japan in 1959. A woman in her thirties said to me, ‘Come on, Paul. You mean you didn’t put the moves on her?’ I am not going to bother to talk about the email notion. The answer to the other question is a simple, ‘That’s right!’

Is it possible that you are living? If you are alive, you are not living as Kaji Yukiko, the name I gave you in this story. You are under your real name. Last year, Ogawa Wakako, my friend in Tokyo, who is in her late sixties, said when we were exploring the possibility of tracing you, ‘Paul, eighty-five is pretty old.
But Japanese women are young and strong!’ That wonderful statement came about after Ogawa-san became so intrigued that she took a train from Tokyo to Yokosuka in the hope of finding you. I had not asked Ogawa-san to make that trip. She talked to the police. But there were apparently no records that would give clues. Ogawa-san then made a second trip to Yokosuka to see a nostalgic photography exhibit at the city’s Museum of Art titled
Memories of a City
. Many of the photos showed Yokosuka as I remember it, and the catalogue from the show enabled me to identify the White Rose.

Later, Ogawa-san suggested that I look for you in the United States. Your English was excellent. You did not have family ties in Japan. You may have met an American serviceman and emigrated to the US, Ogawa-san suggested.

There are many online search engines in the United States. You sign up. You pay a small fee. Then there are often multiple choices of identical names. I was shocked when I found a woman, in the right age group, using your real complete first and last name attached to an American surname: in other words something like
Yukiko Kaji Williams
. I telephoned her. She said she was hard of hearing and asked me to ‘type’ a letter, which I did, enclosing with it an original carbon copy of one of your 1959 letters. There was silence. Ogawa-san was absolutely convinced that this was you and even I, usually sceptical, began to believe. The woman had used the word ‘type’, which is what you and I did when we used typewriters to write letters. And that voice on the phone – telling me, in measured, beautifully phrased English, ‘I am so sorry that I have this hearing problem. I can’t quite understand what you are telling me about yourself. But if you believe that this is important, please type me a letter. And, thank you very much . . .’ – that voice rang true. But
eventually a niece of the woman called me to say that her aunt was already in the United States in 1959 and that she could not, therefore, be you, Yukiko. She added that her aunt already had an American Social Security card in 1959. I asked a friend of mine who is a private investigator to check whether this was true. His assistant confirmed that fact. I am still not 100 per cent convinced that she is not you. I was ready to drive cross-country to meet you. I was crushed. I lost you once. If you are she, I don’t want to lose you again.

American-style online searches for people are not really possible in Japan, Ogawa-san explained. Privacy laws are restrictive. And besides, she said, there are several different ways of writing the kanji characters for your name. I have the kanji for your first name because on one occasion you chose to sign your letter in kanji. But I did not keep the envelopes that your letters came in. I did not have any idea then that having your address might be important one day.

I should mention, also, that Ogawa-san had a conversation with an official of the Japanese government’s social services agency to ask whether there was an association of repatriates from Manchuria, which might have membership lists useful in locating you. She was told that such an association had existed, but because of the passage of time, and the aging of that generation of 1.5 million people who were able to return to Japan from Manchuria between 1945 and 1948, there did not seem to be any reason to keep the organization going.

What became of the others I met in 1959? Paul Feng? I don’t know. Nurse Lydia Wong? I don’t know. Irene Chen? I don’t know. Cloudlet? I am sure she is a good Catholic. Mr Ito? I don’t know although I suspect he is still living, a man in his early eighties cheerfully saying, ‘Please enjoy your happiness.’
Detective Nazaka? I am sure he is smoking cigarettes and drinking cognac and chatting up barmaids in a Japanese version of Heaven, which is where he belongs. Shinoda Yusuke? Long gone, for sure. Chaplain Peeples? He passed away in 1997 and his grave can be found in the Lawtonville Cemetery of Estill, South Carolina. He is probably preaching in a Baptist version of Heaven. Red Downs died in 2012 and is buried in the Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Newton, Mississippi. Jim Fowler, Oscar and Gunther? I have made attempts to track them down, but no luck. Commander Crockett? He rose to the rank of captain and died peacefully in 2005 in Dallas, Texas, where he is ‘entombed’ (according to an obituary) at Hillcrest Mausoleum. I am sure he is ballroom dancing or piloting jet fighters in a Texan version of Heaven.

The names of
Shangri-La
crew members are real, as is the name of the ship itself. Fortunately, I have the amazingly detailed ‘cruisebook’ from the ship’s voyage to the Pacific in 1959, which lists the ship’s crew and has photos of many individuals. These names may sound contrived, but Davy Crockett, Charlie Peeples, and Bobby Drybread all are authentic, as are the names of my shipmates. The names of the Hong Kong characters appear in books they gave me or are listed in one of my notebooks. I wrote the names of Mr Ito, Detective Nazaka, Reiko, and other Yokosuka personalities in the Japanese phrase-book in which I made entries as you began teaching me fragments of your language. Many other Japanese names are in the notebook, written there by men and women who befriended me.

Looking through my notes of our conversations that I made in 1959, I see that you often reached into your journal so that you could express certain thoughts in English that had been
translated from the Japanese. One of your favourite statements was a line from Lady Murasaki’s long novel
The Tale of Genji
. Murasaki started writing the novel at the end of the tenth century and continued writing it into the beginning of the eleventh. You often told me that line inside the Mozart café, a smile rippling across your face. ‘There are as many sorts of women as there are women,’ you would say with a knowing chuckle, as I laughed, still the child.

Another of your favourites from
The Tale of Genji
, which you recited in the week before I returned to the United States, was: ‘Did we not vow that we would neither of us be either before or after the other even in travelling the last journey of life? And can you find it in your heart to leave me now?’

Last year, I made a working trip to Las Vegas with my younger son, Alexander, who is an attorney geographer, and I brought your letters with me. I read some of them to my son while we were driving – especially those in which you predicted that I would write – and I told him, ‘You know, when I am gone please make sure these letters are not thrown out, so that if you have children your kids can read them and learn something about their grandfather and what a woman who was pure of heart saw in him when he was a young man.’

Endnotes

1
 From
Oku no hosomichi
[
Narrow Road to the Interior
], 1689, published in
Anthology of Japanese Literature
. Bash
ō
believed that art could create an awareness that permitted seeing and communicating the elusive essence of experience.

2
 I always thought that the Romany connection was, in reality, a myth. However, late in 2005 I visited David Brinkley in Plympton, Devon, who confirmed the connection. David has done extensive research over the years into various branches of the Brinkley family (one branch is Gypsy) and he sometimes helps organize gatherings of Brinkleys in the village of Brinkley, Cambridgeshire.

3
 In the early 1970s, when I was working as a
Newsweek
correspondent in the magazine’s Tokyo bureau, I remember several conversations I had with my boss there, Bernard Krisher, who often said that many of his close friendships with the elite of Japan came about because he was Jewish. Bernie, who married a Japanese woman, was always bemused by comments made by people in Tokyo about his religion – it was almost as if they were in awe. But as for the supposed filial linkage between Judaism and Shinto, that topic never came up with Krisher. By the time I worked for
Newsweek
, I had already received an undergraduate degree in Japanese history and I would have rejected any notion that Shinto – a nativist religion centred on the belief that the members of the imperial family are direct descendants of a sun goddess – had anything in common with the Jewish religion.

4
 An article in
The Asia-Pacific Journal
explains how in August 2015, China opened a new museum documenting the crimes of Unit 731, located on the same site in Harbin where Japanese scientists and medical personnel conducted ‘experiments’ on Chinese prisoners during the Second World War. A handful of American and other Western prisoners also suffered the same fate. No one was brought to trial for these atrocities after Japan surrendered.

5
 There were no zippers back then in sailor pants, the reason being that the metal crocodile teeth in early zippers could severely injure private parts, a danger that persisted until the Japanese company YKK [Yoshida Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha] perfected mass production of toothless nylon zippers.

6
 After I wrote to my friend and classmate Ogawa Wakako, in Tokyo, about these films, she expressed a strong interest in your history. At the end of the war, she said, women could either stay in traditional marriages, if their husbands had survived, or for the first time in Japanese history they could chose ‘to go out’ into the workplace and make something of themselves, without marriage. The workplace in those years included the vast
mizushobai
(literally, the ‘water trade’) night-time entertainment scene, where jobs ranged from geisha, which is a true art form, to cabaret or bar hostess to massage-parlour girl. Today that industry, geared to pleasing men, is more complex and brutal than in any other country in the world. Yukiko believed she was one of the emancipated – emancipated, at least, in her own mind.

7
 Kenzan Ogata was a genius of Japanese ceramics and master of Zen, who died in 1743. This poem was found the next day by a lodger at the tenement house they shared on the Sumida River near Tokyo. The translation is from
Kenzan and His Tradition
, by the British potter Bernard Leach, on whom the Japanese bestowed the title of the Seventh Kenzan in 1913.

8
 Kawabata won the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature. He killed himself four years later in Kamakura.

9
 Translated for this book by Carmen Barnard Baca. ‘This is the opposite of waiting for the dawning light of love,’ Carmen notes. ‘It’s waiting for the glow of that light of love, after it has gone over the mountains.’