Please Enjoy Your Happiness (5 page)

‘If I P.S.,’ you said, ‘it is going to be something special. It is not what you call an “afterthought”. I can’t send you presents when you are at sea, but I can send you a P.S.’

‘But how do you say P.S. in Japanese?’ I asked.

‘We say it this way,’ you said, writing into my notebook the kanji
.

‘No. No. No!’ you insisted, refusing to tell me how those kanji are pronounced. ‘First, you have to tell me is it P.P.S., post-post-scriptum, or is it P.S.S., post-scriptum scriptum?’

I was too young to know the definitive answer. To this day I still do not know how to pronounce
. Here are the ‘gifts’ you sent me in that letter. You preferred to call your P.S. ‘gifts’.

Your letter reached me on the
Shangri-La
. When it arrived, we were somewhere on the ocean, somewhere near the island of Guam. At sea you are always somewhere. Where I was exactly, I never knew. I would stare out at the sea all the way to the horizon. If my gaze went all the way to where the sky met the sea and then beyond . . . that is where reality began and I knew where I was, like I did when I was with you. There was a typhoon that tossed the ship around as if it were a toy. They made an announcement from the bridge telling everyone to stay below. But I knew a secret passageway and ladder up to the crow’s nest at the very top of the vessel, and I took your letter up there to read it again and again. The envelope blew away. But I held on to the two pages of paper. And after I read and read your poems I realized there was nothing I could do to make the ship come back to you. It would all happen in its own sweet time, as they say. I would come back and look for you and I would find you and I would ask you to tell me more.

I am the sort of person who needs to know. I was reading yesterday that Japanese is the most imprecise language in the world because it is so poetic. There are so many ways of interpreting each kanji – those Chinese characters you use – and nothing is said with direct intent. Things are suggested. You told me once that there are a basic 1,246 kanji in daily use, but
the actual number of kanji known to exist may be as many as five thousand, although some of them were used only once or twice in obscure and ancient imperial court poetry written mostly by noblewomen and concubines coping with the long absences of lovers who may or may not have been killed or wounded on distant battlegrounds. Important things are only hinted at. Your country is a floating world, a place of dreams and mists and mirrors, not to mention the frequent tears. Somehow you came out of Manchuria wearing death as a shroud and with no purpose to live – or at least no purpose after your daughter died. Do you see how horribly direct and analytical my way of thinking is because I am from the West?

You would never frame your thoughts this way. The big heart-shaped leaves would be falling from the beautiful paulownia with its masses of blue trumpets in front of your house, and you would watch them silently, thoughtfully, as if they were a highly appropriate part of your loneliness.
How am I ever going to be able to communicate with you? How am I going to be able to know you?
Those were my questions. Those were my thoughts when we came back to Yokosuka and I found you at the Mozart coffee shop. I saw your instant of ecstasy. I saw you raised up. I saw you yearning to be joyful, to be happy, to be free.

Do you understand this? Do you know that in 2011, when the sea invaded northern Japan and those images of certain death swirled around the world, the first thought that leaped in my mind was:
Are you safe? Where are you? Are you alive?
I thought that, even though I had not thought of you for years.

Do
you
remember
me
? Where is the Japan that I knew fifty years ago? Where are the tiny bars, with stools for no more than
six people, where I spent so many hours writing down words and phrases spoken to me with such care by so many good people: working men with bruised hands, lawyers in white shirts with their briefcases, the single gorgeous woman behind the bar pouring sake and flirting with me entirely in Japanese. Do those places still exist, or is everything now befouled by Kentucky Fried Chicken and Starbucks? Do you know that by the time I finally left Tokyo in late 1962 my command of street Japanese was so good that I was able to date Japanese girls my own age who did not speak English? And that is all really because of you and the effort you put into making sure I was learning your language every day. You called
me
‘Teacher’ because I sent back corrected copies of your letters. Hah!

You said to me soon after we met, ‘We Japanese use three different written languages.’ There is kanji. Each character can be read with both a Japanese sound and a Chinese sound. For example, the Japanese word
atarashi
, which means ‘new’, can also be read as
shin
, which is the Chinese sound. There are many hundreds of words like that; scholars call them pictographs because each kanji originated as a tiny picture of something. But then there are also two written languages using characters that are entirely phonetic and are not a picture of anything. Those are hiragana, which sometimes appear alongside complicated kanji to indicate their sound and meaning, and also katakana, which is usually used to approximate the sounds of foreign words in everyday use in Japan, such as
basu
, which means ‘bus’, or
kissu
, which means ‘kiss’.

When I first started learning Japanese, I was not sitting in a classroom. Your life was my classroom. You were not my student. I was your student and your sweetheart. I am so lucky to still have your letters. ‘Fancy and actuality’ – it sounds so
Japanese. Dreams and reality: you understood that both happen in a love affair.

Yes, I can hear your voice. I can hear you singing your favourite song, done as a duet by the torch singer Matsuo Kazuko and the male singer Wada Hiroshi: ‘Dare yori mo, kimi wo aisu’ [‘More Than Anyone Else, I Love You’]. You are still a little bird singing in the tree. It is a slow song. It is moody and flirtatious, sung by a worldly man and a worldly woman slyly tempting each other.

Every time I hear that song I want to write to you again. More than anyone. More than anyone else, I still love you.

In conversations with close friends about those days I have often struggled to explain why a mature woman would become involved with a young man who was so shy and inexperienced. My experiences with girls who were not yet women had been so limited. But here was a woman who, with great tenderness, accepted that shyness as if it were a strength, not a weakness. It took a while to become a man. But I was being groomed. ‘Oh,’ you said one day, flashing me a sudden glance over your shoulder in a way that made you even more beautiful. ‘You will make many women happy. I will teach you. But first you must learn how to smile, like me.’

Of course, in later years, I was equipped with a smile but I was still too shy to dance. The girls I met were now women. If I trace relationships I have had back to 1959, often there is a common thread: a kind of quest for a Yukiko. This was especially true of Japanese women I knew later on. They were not my mentors in the arts. But those friendships were evidence, at least, that I had become a man. I had experiences, the details of which I could share with male friends as young men do. But I never was awed as I was when I was close to you.

4

A Certain Girl

Dear Yukiko,

How many ‘dears’ do I dare put in front of your name? If you are dead, am I addressing a grave, or maybe your ashes? You had no living relatives, as far as I know. Did you marry after I was gone? Did you find some happiness? Were you able to become a wife and have more children? Somehow, sadly, I don’t think that was the case.

I think you were one of those people who startled those around her – like a gorgeous short-lived rose – and then dropped her petals. We could not have had a life together anyway, don’t you agree? Sweetheart was a good role for me. It was what you needed. Despite my youth, I was capable of being that, at least. But I will tell you a new secret: in old age, I would be that way too.

You once told me that after you fled Manchuria no one had
ever loved you. You had not allowed it. You grew up loving books and art and music and the idea of romance without the drama of actually making love with someone. I may have been a child but now I think that I knew this about you. After you met me, you wanted a sweetheart, a kind of courtly lover.

Do you remember when we took the train south to Kamakura and we stood in front of the enormous Daibutsu, that thirty-foot-high bronze statue of the Buddha made in the year 1250? You were so merry on the train. I had the lyrics to ‘Who’s That Knocking’ by the Genies on my mind, and as the train rocked I was singing, ‘Who’s that knocking . . . On my door . . . doo doo doo-wah, bang bang bang . . . all night long.’ The other passengers watched, with solemn, confused faces, as I came down the aisle towards you, snapping my fingers. You were astonished. ‘No, no, no,’ you said, with some force. ‘You are the poet.’ I think that was the moment when you realized that I was really just a young man who insisted that ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ was poetry, ‘Stagger Lee’ was revolutionary, and Frankie Avalon’s ‘Venus’ should have been dedicated to you.