The China Lover (20 page)

   9   

T
HERE IS NOTHING
vulgar or in bad taste about Kamakura. Only an hour away by train, the old samurai capital is centuries removed from the neon-lit garishness of Tokyo. People often find Tokyo intolerably ugly. Well, let them think so. I adore its unashamed ugliness. There is no pretense about Tokyo; the artifice is openly, brazenly artificial. But ever since I was first introduced by my friend Carl to its thirteenth-century temples and shrines, the great Kamakura Buddha, the Zen gardens of Kencho-ji and Engaku-ji, Kamakura has been my refuge from twentieth-century madness. Kamakura was saved from the bombings by its insignificance. It has not played a part in the nation’s affairs since the fourteenth century, when the power shifted back to Kyoto, and Kamakura went into a state of aristocratic somnolence. That’s why it survived with all its treasures intact. Even General Curtis LeMay, usually so quick on the draw, saw no point in destroying a place that to him was of no consequence at all.

I liked to lose myself in the tart smells of temple incense and pine trees, which bore a curious resemblance to the scented salts my mother used when she bathed me as a child. And I always stopped by Mr. Ohki’s store behind Komachi Street, which smelled of camphor wood and old books. Although one might, with a little luck, find a beautifully carved seventeenth-century netsuke there, or a red lacquer bowl of the late Edo Period, Ohki-san specialized in traditional woodcuts. He spoke
old-fashioned British English. Before the war, many of his clients had been connoisseurs from Great Britain. “It’s hard to make ends meet these days,” he told me with a weary shrug. “The Japanese no longer care for these old things.” He served me a cup of green tea and patiently answered all my questions. I wanted to learn about everything, from the art of the early monochrome woodblock prints to the painted fans of the Muromachi Period. He would bring out box after box of prints: a perfect set of erotic prints by Koryusai, a first edition print of an early Eisho, as elegant as an Utamaro, but with more delicacy. We talked about art, about literature, about history. Once, to illustrate a point about the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, he showed me prints of battle scenes: handsome Japanese soldiers charging in their black Prussian-style uniforms, bloody Chinese corpses at their feet. “Frightfully vulgar, really,” he commented, before gingerly restoring them to their box. “You notice how they no longer used the old vegetable dyes.”

This time, however, I had no time to lose, even to see Ohki-san. I had been invited to have lunch with the divine Miss Y., who was staying at the home of a movie producer named Kawamura. The house was in the northern part of town, a plush square mile of traditional wooden houses nestled between the pine trees on a hill. The air was filled with the trilling sounds of early spring—the plum blossoms were just out. It was as if the war had never happened.

Yoshiko (she insisted that I call her by her first name) was dressed in a purple dress and furry pink slippers. We were joined by Kawamura in a freshly matted room decorated with a simple arrangement of camellias and a Chinese-style scroll painting of a bush warbler. I immediately recognized Kawamura as the older man at the film premiere. Something about him, the elegance of his tweed suit, the sheen on his silver hair, the way he discreetly sized me up through his large tortoiseshell glasses, made me feel a little shabby in his presence, as if I were wearing the wrong kind of shoes. Yoshiko called him “Papa,”
which invited the assumption that there was a “Mama” in the house. As indeed there was. Later, when luncheon was served in the Western-style dining room, a short, smiling lady in a sky blue kimono with cherry blossom patterns appeared. She did not say much, but what little she said was spoken in excellent Oxford English, a little like Ohki-san’s.

The dining room was decorated with a few paintings in the Impressionist style. I couldn’t make out who the painters were. Delicious Kamakura prawns, followed by tender veal cutlets, were impeccably served by a maid in white gloves. Kawamura was proud of his wines. We drank a German white followed by a French red. “You must excuse us, Mr. Vanoven, for this shamefully inadequate meal,” Madame Kawamura purred. “You see, we are living in rather straitened circumstances. Japan is such a poor country now.” Her husband, looking grave, added that it was all due to that dreadful war, a terrible error, which ought never to have occurred. “Let’s not talk about that,” said Yoshiko, “we now have peace. And we’re all here happy together, all because of you, Papa.” Kawamura murmured something in the way of a polite objection. Madame Kawamura examined the paintings on the wall, perhaps checking whether they were hanging straight.

Since I’m an American, I have never learned to disguise my curiosity in the way the Japanese do, so I asked Yoshiko about the end of the war. Wasn’t she in China? How had Ri Koran, the star of
China Nights
, become Yamaguchi Yoshiko again? “I’m sure you’ll have some more wine, Mr. Vanoven,” said Kawamura, as he picked up the bottle. Yoshiko pulled a tragic face. “It was the worst time of my life,” she said, her eyes trained on Kawamura.

“War is just awful,” Kawamura interjected, “the way it turns men into beasts.”

“That’s so right,” said Yoshiko. “Let me tell you what happened to me, Sid-san. Me, who was born in China, and loved China as my own
country, I was arrested as a traitor. Can you imagine how hurtful that was for me? A traitor, me. Of course, I was a Japanese, but China was my home. And they were going to execute me for being a traitor, for making propaganda for the enemy. I never meant to do China any harm, Sid-san. You must understand that. The date had already been set. In a stadium, they were going to shoot me in front of a crowd. It was a nightmare, Sid-san, an absolute nightmare.” She dabbed her eyes with her napkin.

“But how could you be a traitor if you were Japanese?” I said, sounding rather silly, even to myself.

“Of course—” she started, her voice choking with emotion. Kawamura softly patted her knee to ease her distress. I sensed some impatience on the part of Mrs. Kawamura and I felt suddenly embarrassed. It was unforgivably gauche to have brought up these misfortunes. I felt myself breaking into a sweat.

“Of course I am Japanese, but the Chinese wouldn’t believe me. They thought I was one of them. After all, I
was
Ri Koran, Li Xianglan.” She gazed at Kawamura with her adoring wide eyes. “But thanks to you, Papa, I pulled through.”

“I did nothing,” he demurred.

“Yes, yes, you stood by me at the worst time of my life. You arranged everything.”

I waited for more. Not for long. “Mama had evacuated as soon as the awful war was over, with little Chieko,” Yoshiko explained. “Papa, bless his heart, kindly consented to stay with me, to make sure I was all right. Oh, it was a terrible ordeal, confined in that ghastly little house in Shanghai, and later in a prison camp, being insulted by ruffians. I thought I would never survive it.”

At this point Madame Kawamura excused herself and said there was something she had to attend to.

With all this talk of Papa and Mama, I couldn’t help wondering
about Yoshiko’s own family circumstances. Again, with typical American brazenness, I asked her. Were her parents also in China at the end of the war? Yoshiko looked down at her feet and said nothing.

“Your father was, was—” offered Kawamura, before giving up on his train of thought. Yoshiko sighed. “Well, thank goodness for the Jewish girl,” said Kawamura. As always when that word came up, I felt a slight jolt, forcing me to pay special attention.

“The Jewish girl?”

“Yes. Masha,” whispered Yoshiko.

Masha, it turned out, had grown up with Yoshiko in Manchuria. Close to the end of the war, she suddenly turned up in Shanghai, just as Yoshiko was giving a concert. Without her, Yoshiko probably would have been tried by a war crimes tribunal and executed. To prove that she was Japanese, and not a Chinese traitor, Yoshiko needed her birth certificate, but her parents, who kept that all-important document, were stuck in Peking. Yoshiko was imprisoned, and Kawamura wasn’t allowed to leave Shanghai. So Masha offered to go to Peking and find the documents that would save Yoshiko from a traitor’s death. Somehow Masha tracked down Yoshiko’s parents, got hold of the relevant papers, and smuggled then back to Shanghai inside a Japanese doll. A few days later, Yoshiko and Kawamura were on a boat back home. She never heard from Masha again. Kawamura reassured her. “She’ll be all right,” he said. “The Jews always take care of their own.” I paid due attention, but said nothing.

“I felt so lonely,” said Yoshiko, her face a picture of suffering, “standing on deck watching the lights of Shanghai slowly disappear. Do you remember, Papa? Nothing but darkness and the sound of the waves. I thought I might never see the country of my birth again. That is when I knew that Ri Koran had died.”

“But Ri Koran is still alive in the movies,” I ventured. I had meant to flatter, but with sincerity.

Instead of expressing pleasure, Yoshiko bowed her head and burst out: “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” She said this with the sudden passion of a young girl, pummeling her chest. “Why did I allow myself to be deceived by the militarists? Unlike you, Papa. I was a tool in their hands. The militarists, and their terrible war, they made me into an accomplice, forcing me to be in those hateful propaganda films. Do you know how humiliating that was for me, Sid-san? To be an accomplice in that cruel war. Do you understand how awful that was?”

“Now, now,” said Kawamura. And turning to me: “Another glass of wine?”

“Perhaps,” Yoshiko continued, “I should never be in the movies again.” She said this with a look of resolve. Then, smiling: “From now on I am just Yamaguchi Yoshiko, and I will dedicate my life to peace. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.”

“Now, now,” repeated Kawamura. “I hear that you have worked in Hollywood, Mr. Vanoven. It’s been a long time since I’ve been there. Tell me, whom do you know in Hollywood?”

I mentioned the only famous name I knew. Kawamura looked at me with interest: “Ah, yes, Frank Capra, a very fine director.”

Yoshiko smiled, pleased perhaps that I had made an impression on Kawamura, and said: “Is he knowable?” I wasn’t sure if she was addressing her question to me or to her patron. In the event, neither of us gave her an immediate answer.

   10   

L
IFE AS A
censor had its small compensations. I had the invaluable opportunity to see many films in their original state, before politics or morality forced us to wield the dreaded scissors. Not that all the movies we saw were really worth seeing, but sometimes we were lucky enough to be the first to witness the birth of a masterpiece. One of them was the picture being made when Major Murphy and I visited the Oriental Peace Studios. Kurosawa’s
Drunken Angel
was a revelation: the pathos of the young hoodlum, humanized by his fear of dying, and of the alcoholic doctor, redeemed by his compassion. Above all, the atmosphere I had come to know so well: the dance halls; the black markets; the poor, squalid, violent life in a ruined city that reeked of humanity. What had looked like a chaotic jumble of lights and sound booms and plywood facades on the studio set had miraculously come to life on the screen. I could only marvel at the magic of film, in the way a religious person marvels at stained-glass windows and candlelit saints in a place of worship. That is what the cinema was to me, a kind of chapel, where I worshipped my saints in the dark, except that my saints were not really saints; they were as human as could be. The transubstantiation of light projected through celluloid to reveal life itself, that was the miracle of cinema.

Mifune, as the gangster, is all brutish swagger on the surface, but oh so vulnerable, almost childlike, underneath. It is this quality in
Japanese men that I adore, in the movies and in life. Surrendering myself to them, worshipping their soft, hairless, adolescent skin, running my hand along their supple thighs, burying my nose in the delicate black tuft above their genitals—this, for me, is a way of sloughing off my adult self and finding my way back to a state of innocence, the natural state of the Japanese, but one that must be regained by us Westerners, corrupted by the knowledge of sin.

Drunken Angel
was not the film that caught Murphy’s imagination, however. He didn’t really see the point of it. Mifune Toshiro, to me, is the perfect Japanese male. But all Murphy could say was: “Who cares about just another dumb gangster.” Worst of all, from his point of view, the movie didn’t have a message, or not one that he could easily discern. Nor did it have the kind of uplifting conclusion that Murphy liked, the happy ending that warmed cold hearts. What stirred his enthusiasm was a different kind of movie altogether. One in particular became a cause célèbre and subsequently left its faded fingerprint on history. The movie was called
Time of Darkness
, produced by a well-known figure at the time, Nobuo Hotta. I came to admire this brave intellectual, with his gaunt, saintly face. He didn’t much care for appearances; his suits were disheveled, his hair unkempt. But Hotta was one of those rare individuals who never compromised with power. He stood up for his beliefs, not all of which I shared, but no matter, he was a man of principle. Before the war, he had been a well-known Marxist, and everyone knew how much he had suffered for it once the militarists took over Japan.

From the very start, Murphy had taken a personal interest in the picture, to the point of going in to see the rushes and suggesting improvements. I’m not sure these suggestions were always welcomed, but the Japanese at least pretended to be grateful for his interventions. Hotta was a thinker, Murphy not at all. But somehow the two managed to get along. They were both idealists. Although their ultimate
notions of the ideal society may not have been the same, a shared commitment to democracy was enough to paper over their differences. Seeing Murphy thump his frail Japanese friend on the back always made me wince, but Hotta didn’t seem to mind this at all. He liked the Americans for their “frankness,” a word that I always suspected could also be taken to mean a lack of subtlety, or good manners. To be frank was to be unsophisticated.

Murphy was certainly frank. One small matter of dispute still sticks in my mind. Murphy thought the title of the movie was too gloomy. “Sure,” he said, “there were dark pages in all our history books, but shouldn’t we include something about the present, offer some hope for the future?” His face took on the beatific glow of a visionary. “What about
Light After Darkness
, or
After Darkness, Liberation
, or”—he had to think hard here—“
A Hard Lesson Learnt
?” But Hotta resisted these suggestions, very politely, always making sure to thank Murphy for his excellent advice. He had not resisted the Japanese militarists only to become a toady to the Americans. “Do you know how I got this scar?” he asked us one afternoon, as he pushed out the left side of his face for our inspection. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I saw it clearly, a pinkish stripe running from the corner of his left eye to his jawline. “A little present from our Special Higher Police, just because I wouldn’t trample on my deepest convictions.” So
Time of Darkness
it was.

Time of Darkness
was in fact a documentary picture constructed very much like Capra’s
Know Your Enemy
, except that this was even harder-hitting. Using some of the same footage that we selected for our movie—the Nanking Massacre, the bombing of Shanghai, the kamikaze attacks—
Time of Darkness
went much further than we did in blaming the Japanese Emperor himself for the war. In one extraordinary sequence, a photograph of the Emperor in military uniform slowly dissolves into a postwar portrait of him in a suit and tie, looking
into the camera a bit sheepishly, like a timid bureaucrat, even as the narrator informs us that the Japanese people want to put their war criminals on trial.

I mentioned Hotta to Yoshiko one night in Tokyo. It was after her concert for Allied troops at the Hibiya Theater. The place was packed, of course. In the first half of her show, Yoshiko was dressed in a red, white, and blue kimono, and sang Japanese numbers like “The Apple Song,” then a popular hit, and “Tokyo Boogie-Woogie.” But she brought the house down when she appeared after the intermission in a clinging silk dress imprinted with pink cherry blossoms, and sang “I Get a Kick Out of You.” The guys just adored her and shouted back: “We get a kick out of you too, baby!” I wasn’t too sure about her choice of music, nor did I feel comfortable in a hall full of hollering GIs; mob emotion always makes me feel ill at ease. But the evening was clearly a triumph for Yoshiko, and I was proud to be her friend.

I was invited, as the only foreigner, to join her for dinner at the Imperial Hotel after the show. Kawamura was there, as usual, but there was no sign of Madame Kawamura. Several others, all Japanese, sat around the table, including a well-known and very handsome movie star named Ryo Ikebe. Before we sat down for dinner—Ikebe and myself, that is—we found ourselves standing side-by-side in the men’s room, and I couldn’t resist a peek. I cannot be entirely sure of this, but I do believe that he was aware of my interest, for he spent an inordinate amount of time shaking his rather formidable member with a trace of a smile on his lips. I found it a little hard after this revelation to concentrate on the dinner conversation. But this is by the by.

“Ah, yes, Hotta-san,” exclaimed Yoshiko, when I mentioned his name. “You know we made a film in Russian during the war, a musical. It was never shown. Our military censors wouldn’t allow it.”

“Frightful vulgarians,” muttered Kawamura.

“We had such a lovely time shooting that picture,” Yoshiko recalled
with a chuckle. “All the men working on the film were in love with me, you know, Sid-san, the Russians as well as the Japanese, the stars, the director. Ooh, it was a new drama every day. But I call it our phantom picture. Do you know, I’ve never seen it myself. Poor Hotta-san was devastated. He had put so much time and effort into it. Did you know he was beaten by the Special Police?” A frown appeared on her forehead. “The militarists treated him abominably, abominably!”

It is an unworthy sentiment, I know, but I sometimes wished the folks in Bowling Green could have seen me, at the Imperial Hotel, in the company of my Japanese friends. You might well ask why I should wish to impress people I was so eager to leave behind. Perhaps it was my small vengeance for being made to feel like a freak. I was with real friends now, on a much more glamorous stage.

Not that all my friends were so glamorous. Some of my most intimate moments were shared with people who didn’t even know my name. In the dark of a Tokyo movie theater I was just like everybody else. If I ate enough rice, I often mused, I might even start smelling like everybody else. It was the smell of the Japanese, that sweet combination of rice-sweat and pomade, that intoxicated me more than anything. It was so good I could almost taste it. Every time I fell to my knees in worship, no matter how squalid the shrine of the moment, a public toilet, the park, the dank room of a short-time hotel, I did so hoping I could possess something of the Japanese; the act of love as a route to transfiguration. But I digress again.

To celebrate the release of
Time of Darkness
, we organized a small party, Murphy and myself, for Hotta and the crew. It took place at Tony’s, the first pizza restaurant in Tokyo. The owner was a large New Yorker named Tony Lucca, who had quit his job for SCAP and made a killing on the black markets. Legend had it that he needed a forklift to transport his cash. Tony liked to be driven around Tokyo in the back of his cream-colored Cadillac convertible with his pal, Kohei Ando, boss
of the Ando gang, while being entertained by several young women at a time. Rumor also had it that Tony maintained warm relations with the Luchese family in New York, a rumor Tony himself did nothing to dispel. A somewhat dubious character, then, but his pizzas were delicious (and even if they hadn’t been, they were the only ones in Tokyo), and Tony, despite his booming voice and crude jokes, had a knack with the Japanese; he knew how to make them feel at ease. Movie stars ate pizzas at Tony’s, and so did politicians, businessmen, and, naturally, Tony’s gangster friends, the yakuza, who were given pizzas for free.

So there we were, with great slabs of melted cheese and pepperoni laid out in front of us: Hotta, Murphy, the movie’s director Shimada, the cameraman, the editor, various others whose names I’ve forgotten, and me. Murphy, who didn’t drink alcohol, raised his glass of orange juice and made a toast “to the success of this great democratic motion picture,” and to “my good friend, Nobu-san, if I may be permitted to call you that.” Hotta rose to thank him for the kind words. He found it impossible to call Murphy “Dick,” no matter how often Murphy invited him to do so, or even “Dick-san,” so he compromised, and left it at “Mr. Richard.” But he didn’t seem in a particularly festive mood that night. In fact, his face looked tight as a clenched fist. Hotta was a fastidious man, and at first I thought that Tony’s faintly louche ambiance didn’t agree with him. But there was another, more compelling reason for his unease. Although
Time of Darkness
had opened in a small artsy cinema in Shinjuku, the main Japanese film distributors had refused to touch the movie. “Too complicated” was the stated reason; or “Confusing to the general audience.” Worse, Hotta had been receiving threats to his life if he didn’t withdraw the film.

Murphy dismissed the whole thing as a silly joke: “Now, why would anybody want to kill you? It’s a great movie.” Hotta thanked Murphy for his support, and said: “Japan is hopeless, Mr. Richard, hopeless.”

“What do you mean, hopeless? We’re at the beginning of a new era,
Nobu. The Japanese want to be free like everybody else, be free to say what they think, free to vote the rascals out, free to go where they please. That’s why we fought this damned war, isn’t it? And you fought for it too, right? That’s why they roughed you up in prison. But those dark days are over now, my friend. We’re building a democracy, and it’ll work, Nobu, you’ll see, it’ll work out just fine.”

Hotta took a sip of his red wine and said that Japan was “too complicated.”

“Nothing we can’t fix,” said Murphy, at which point Tony, who fancied himself as an entertainer, gave us his rather Neapolitan rendering of “Slow Boat to China.” Murphy led the applause. Hotta’s mood did not visibly improve.