Please Enjoy Your Happiness (9 page)

One thing I discovered, by the way, was that certain women were strongly attracted to men skilled at artful and deceptive behaviour. I was suddenly popular. The Suzie Wong bar, like the fictional version in the film, was a nest of Eurasian vamps who moved deliberately with the restraint of snakes and who were especially good at slow-smoking black Russian Sobranie
cigarettes with gold filters. A pretty girl sitting in your lap, kissing the wound on your cheek and blowing smoke into your eyes when you are nineteen . . . Ahhhhhh. Sublime. You may recall that I used that word when I told you about the incident and you laughed with a strange kind of regret.

I almost forgot. I believe I showed you that history book when we met on that July day in Yokosuka. You saw a couple of blood spatters on the cover. You seized the book, looked sternly at me, and said: ‘Oh. Oh. Oh! What is this? I told a certain poet to be a good boy.’ I explained at great length what had happened. You looked proud of me. ‘Fighting in defence of literature,’ you said loudly, as if you were making an announcement. ‘A noble sport!’

I still have my copy of the Chinese history book. The final paragraph in the book reads,

I remember reading that passage and thinking a forbidden thought: ‘I suppose that includes me.’

I’ve just remembered another book acquired on that same Hong Kong visit. I still have that, too. It is
The True Story of Ah-Q
(
Q
). You know my habit, which you started, of wandering into used bookshops not in search of any particular book but in search of the great unknown. ‘I always have a book
with me,’ you said mischievously in the White Rose. ‘When the world becomes too much, I open the book and slip inside. Would you like to know how to do that? Watch! See! Look, here is the book. I open the book. I start reading. I am in a trance. Now look at me. See? I am invisible.’

When I die I want to be buried with
The True Story of Ah-Q
, the
Outline History of China
with the blood spots from the battle over literature, the
Senryu
with your fingerprint inside, and the antique bronze vase with the green patina you bought me because I said that if I ever was a writer I would use it to store pens and pencils and rulers and ink brushes and a long thin paper knife I would use to slit open the envelopes containing your letters. You can still write to me, you know. I am here, waiting, waiting.

‘You want to talk to interesting people as much as you can,’ you told me. ‘The best way to do that is to walk into a bookstore, pick up a book – any book – and ask the person next to you if he has read it. A stupid person will just shake his head. An intelligent person will say, “No, but I would like to read it.”’

I did not buy the
Ah-Q
book, which was written by Lu Xun and had been published as a magazine series in 1921 and 1922. It is considered a masterpiece in China. The story traces the ‘adventures’ of Ah-Q, a peasant with little education and no definite occupation. He is a bully to the less fortunate but fearful of those above him in rank, or power. He persuades himself that he is spiritually ‘superior’ to his oppressors, even as he is hauled off to be executed for a minor crime. Inside the book I wrote, ‘Paul Rogers, Victoria, Hong Kong, 6/17/59. Bought for me by Paul Feng.’

Paul Feng happened to be standing alongside me in that Hong Kong bookstore. He looked surprised, and pleased, when
I not only asked him if he had read the book but I asked questions about it after he said
Ah-Q
was a classic. ‘This is wonderful,’ Paul Feng said. ‘A young American wants to read the most famous book in China. Please let me buy that book for you.’ We talked for a while. We sipped bitter tea from small cups. It was good to feel like the equal of an educated man, I recall telling you. It was good not to be the stereotypical young American but to be the object of friendly curiosity. Nonetheless, because I had tasted the fruit of seduction-by-book with the volume of Chinese history, I raced back to the Suzie Wong bar, sat down at the same table, pulled out
Ah-Q
, and attracted yet another swarm of Sobranie smokers. In the midst of these adventures, I received an extraordinary letter from you, dated 5 June, 1959.

You were laughing very hard on the train platform at Yokosuka station as I told you stories from the cruise. You clutched my
arm and squeezed it tight. ‘My plan is working,’ you said. ‘You met me when you are a boy. Now you are becoming a man. I am responsible for that. I am so happy.’ If there is one image of your face that has persisted over the years it is the way you looked at that moment. The way you looked at me remains – the look a woman of the world gives a man in his youth that can never be repeated again.

We were waiting for the train to Hayama, a small resort town with a beach south-east of Kamakura. You had reserved rooms there.

‘Yes, I am a wicked woman,’ you said, with a sly smile, when I looked embarrassed. ‘But don’t worry. We will read books and write poetry all night because we cannot be lovers.’

You were chuckling. I was even more embarrassed.

‘Do you know that many hundreds of years ago at the court, there were always beautiful women reading books and keeping diaries and writing poetry? Love affairs often began when a gentleman saw beauty in a woman’s calligraphy before he even saw her face. In the diary of the aristocratic woman Shikibu Izumi, there is a poem. I can remember this poem. Yes, here it is in my notebook. Please listen carefully.

I remember many stories you linked to your recitation of verse, Yuki. Sometimes I wondered if you had been a schoolteacher at some point in your life. I would listen closely, very closely, because these tales often were magical and you delighted in my
delight as I listened. You created a hush of silence by putting your fingertip on my lips. And then you told me that many of these women were locked away with nothing else to do but think and imagine a world outside those great court walls and castles. Lady Murasaki, for example, wrote the world’s first novel, the first psychological novel, the first modern novel:
Genji monogatari
[
The Tale of Genji
], an esteemed classic about love and intrigue familiar to Westerners doing Japanese studies. Also, you said that a noblewoman, Sh
ō
nagon Sei, wrote
Makura no s
ō
shi hyoshaku
[
The Pillow Book of Sei Sh
ō
nagon
], a journal packed with poetry, gossip, observations about court life, and lists of things to do. Both books were first published almost exactly one thousand years ago. Here is the brief passage from the
Pillow Book
that has always made me laugh, even as it did the first time we discussed it, Yukiko, when you behaved, in a fit of giggles and tickles, as if you had written it yourself:

‘I take books like those when I travel by train so I can also be transported back to those lovely times as well as to my destination,’ you said, slipping that big fat notebook full of pillow-style notations into your purse. ‘Those great women were strong. Sei Sh
ō
nagon was a court official. Many of these women writers carried swords. They knew how to use them . . . like me. That is one new secret about me, Paul-san. I have a sharp sword. I can fight. I have fought. I am a fighter . . . Do you like my use of tenses?’

I was listening to you like a tall, thin fool. I think you sensed that I felt deeply inadequate. I felt as if I were a tightrope walker trying to get from one side of a cultural chasm to the other. So to help steady me – maybe even to make me laugh – you said, ‘But what else do you think these women from ancient times were doing? They were WAITING. They were waiting for their lord to call them to his chamber. So patient are Japanese women. Always WAITING! Waiting women wrote so many great poems and books because they were thinking and thinking while they were waiting and the men were fighting. Silly men!’ Yes, it was the women who were the writers, you said, but they were also the concubines and mistresses and playthings of the highest calibre for those men.