The China Lover (28 page)

   24   

E
VERYTHING SEEMED
TO be going so well with Isamu’s project in Hiroshima. While Yoshiko was out filming, Isamu worked on his designs from morning till night, alone in his cave, like a hermit monk possessed by a vision that had to be realized at all costs. When he emerged from his cave in the evenings, all he wanted to do was talk to Nambetsu about atonement, historical memory, the aesthetics of war, and other lofty subjects. Yoshiko, exhausted from long days in the studio, was a silent witness to these intellectual exchanges. Once she actually fell asleep at Nambetsu’s table, her head falling into one of his exquisite bowls filled with a particularly choice selection of raw sea urchins. Nambetsu was beside himself. Isamu, to placate his mentor, immediately shook his wife awake and told her to apologize for her appalling manners. She broke down in sobs, rushed into the night, lost her footing in the dark, and fell into a rice paddy, yelping with pain as she twisted her ankle. (If you look very carefully in the scene of
House of Bamboo
where she meets Bob Stack for the first time, you can see a flesh-colored supporting bandage on her right leg.) The men continued to drink saké and discuss art until well past midnight.

Isamu’s design for the Peace Memorial, to be called the Arch of Peace, consisted of a squat dome, like a huge Haniwa funeral ornament, with an underground vault. This somber space, Isamu explained to me, was meant to be a kind of traditional tea ceremony room, where
people could reflect on matters of life and death. Inside would be a black granite slab engraved with the names of all the Japanese victims of the atom bomb. There were victims who were not Japanese, of course, but it was decided by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Committee that for the sake of “public coherence” (I think I have the translation right) they would not be included. This was no fault of Isamu’s. Thousands of Koreans, many of them slave workers, had died from the bomb, instantly if they were lucky, or slowly, in terrible pain, if they were not. When representatives of the Japanese-Korean community protested some years later about the exclusion of Korean victims, there was a typical municipal row, with demonstrations, and harsh words in the press. In the end Koreans were permitted to build their own memorial just outside the borders of Peace Park.

But this was not yet an issue when Isamu, after many months’ work, for which he wasn’t receiving a dime, submitted his plans to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Committee, consisting of various notables from the government and the architectural profession. Tange had praised Isamu’s plans for their boldness and clarity. Both men were itching for the construction to start. Surely nothing could go wrong now. But something did, of course, go wrong. A formal letter from the committee was passed on to Tange, who had to break the news to Isamu. His design had been turned down, because the proposal, in the words of the gentlemen of the committee, “although no doubt admirably suited to foreign countries, such as the United States, was not appropriate for Japan.” As the letter explained, such a delicate project could only be entrusted to an artist “who understands Japanese feelings.”

Isamu was devastated, but much too proud to say anything in public. Privately, I could see his earlier zeal to change Japan slowly turning sour. This might explain the notorious plastic shoe incident, notorious that is among those of us who found ourselves entangled in the life of
Yoshiko. I happened to be there, in the Land of Dreams, when the actual incident occurred. It was one of those sultry summer evenings, when you work up a sweat just sitting still. Isamu and I were drinking cold saké from wooden cups. Yoshiko was still out filming somewhere. She had left around five-thirty in the morning, in the studio Packard. She rarely returned before nine or ten at night.

Isamu was in one of his intense moods, brooding over the lack of understanding in Japan of his art. First he was hailed as a savior, the famous American artist who had come all the way from New York to teach the Japanese how to be modern. Now they resented it when he tried to convince them that their own tradition was actually closer to the modern spirit than all their third-rate imitations of Western trends. “I’m not in the slightest bit interested in exoticism,” he said, his dark eyes burning with the passion of his conviction. “I’m just telling them to look into their own souls. You know, the problem with the Japanese is that they’re the only ones who won’t learn from Japan.”

The last rays of the sun were painting the landscape pink, as though the rice paddies were covered in cherry blossoms. A small speck of white in the distance was moving slowly in our direction. The speck turned out to be Yoshiko’s Packard. She sighed with relief as she stepped onto the veranda after taking off a pair of light blue plastic sandals: “Home at last. It’s been such a long day. I’m exhausted. My feet have been killing me. Is there any cold barley tea?” Isamu stared at her feet and didn’t reply. He didn’t even respond to her greeting. I assumed he was still sunk in his thoughts about Japanese art.

Yoshiko neatly arranged her plastic sandals at the entrance to the house, and was about to fetch the tea from the kitchen herself. I offered to help her. No need, she said. Then something snapped in Isamu’s mind, like a spring that had been coiled too tightly: “Oi!” he shouted at Yoshiko. “Come back here!” First I’m getting some tea, she said. “Come back here right now!” he screamed. I had never seen
Isamu in such a rage. It was as if he were mimicking, in exaggerated fashion, Nambetsu’s tantrums.

Yoshiko, looking pale and flustered, stepped back onto the veranda: “What?”

He answered in English: “What the fuck do you think you’re wearing?”

“What do you mean? My usual summer kimono. The one you like. What’s wrong with it?” Despite her visible exhaustion, she smiled, still eager to please.

“I mean this junk!” Isamu stooped to pick up the plastic sandals and tossed them in a high arc far away into the rice paddy, where they slowly sank into the mud. “How dare you come into this house wearing this vulgar plastic rubbish! Have you no taste at all? It’s an abomination, a desecration! An attack on everything I’m trying to accomplish in this wretched country of yours.”

First she looked bewildered, then she was speechless, and finally it was Yoshiko’s turn to be furious. “Oh, so now it’s just my country, is it? What about your boasts of being so Japanese? If you’re just a foreigner, what do you care about my sandals? Plastic is American, no? Well, let me show you something . . .” She took a pair of traditional Japanese straw sandals out of her bag; they were covered in splotches of red. “I’ve worn these to please you, Mr. Japanese Tradition. Well, look what they did to my feet!” She peeled off a Band-Aid from the side of her left foot and showed us a nasty gash with pus oozing at the edges. “Unlike you, I
am
Japanese. Why should I have to ruin my feet to prove it? I’ll tell you one thing, you’re just a typical American, you’ll never understand our feelings.”

I wish I could have disappeared, but there was no chance of that. “Stay,” said Yoshiko, quite firmly, when I mumbled something about it being time to get back to Tokyo. I didn’t wish to hurt her feelings, so I stayed, a mute and uncomfortable witness to their marital distress.

“You think you lost your precious commission in Hiroshima because of discrimination,” said Yoshiko, whose anger was far from dying down. “It wasn’t discrimination. It was your bad manners. I told you to take gifts when you went to see the committee members. They were very hurt. I know. I was there, remember?”

Isamu, still panting from his fit of hysteria, snorted with contempt: “What do you mean, gifts? This is a professional job. I’m not asking them for a favor. What do you expect me to do? Bribe them? That’s all nonsense.”

Calmer, but still speaking with a steeliness I had rarely seen in Yoshiko, she replied: “You’ll never understand, will you? We’re not talking about bribes. We’re talking about goodwill, about custom, about
tradition
. You’re always spinning theories about our traditions. But you don’t understand it in your heart. You only think with your head, like a typical foreigner.”

If all had been well in the Land of Dreams, I guess this storm would have blown itself out, so to speak, in the conjugal bed, followed the next morning by apologetic smiles. But that’s not the way it was. Yoshiko retired to the bedroom, Isamu went back to his studio to work, and I spent the night drifting in and out of dreams, one of which I can recall because it was so utterly peculiar: I walked into a bar stark naked. It resembled the
Après-midi d’un faune
in Kanda; or at least the fake antique French tables did. The place was full of men, wearing kimonos. One of them was Nambetsu, who was leading them in a tea ceremony. I wanted to take part. But nobody listened. They totally ignored me, as if I wasn’t even there.

   25   

T
HE PARTY FOR
House of Bamboo
in Tokyo was more like a wake.
Le tout Tokyo
was in attendance, of course, dressed in all their finery, even though everyone knew it was an absolute stinker. This being Japan, no one openly said so, but word had traveled at lightning speed. Remarks after the premiere screening were carefully chosen. “Most remarkable,” murmured Mr. Kawamura. “Quite so, quite so,” added Madame. “Very interesting,” was Hotta’s verdict, “Japan seen through blue eyes.” “The costumes were very nice” was the opinion of dear, loyal Mifune. And Kurosawa just looked amiable and said nothing at all.

Since none of the American actors had bothered to come to Tokyo for the premiere, poor Yoshiko was left to face the disastrous reception of her Hollywood picture alone. Well, not quite alone. There was always Twentieth Century–Fox’s man in Tokyo, a preposterous figure named “Mike” Yamashita, who sported large gold cufflinks engraved with his initials, wore striped suits in the style of a Chicago mobster, and thumped every foreigner on the back. Mike was of little help in a crisis.

So there was Yoshiko, at the official press conference in the Hilltop Hotel in Kanda, dressed in her kimono, fielding questions from a largely hostile press about flaws in the film for which she could hardly be held responsible. The many errors—only the
Yomiuri Shimbun
was
kind enough to call them “misunderstandings”—were not just regarded as regrettable mistakes by the Japanese reviewers but as deliberate insults to Japanese honor. The fact that minor Japanese roles were played by Japanese-American immigrants with only a rudimentary knowledge of their ancestral language; the fact that Japanese rooms looked like Chinese restaurants; the fact that a man running in the Ginza turned a corner to find himself almost climbing the slopes of Mount Fuji. These were all taken as American slaps delivered firmly, and quite deliberately, on the national face.

Mr. Shinoda of
Kinema Jumpo:
“What do you feel about being in a movie that will make the whole world laugh at us?”

Mr. Horikiri of the
Asahi Shimbun:
“Do you agree that
House of Bamboo
is a typical example of U.S. imperialist arrogance?”

Mr. Shindo of
Tokyo Shimbun:
“Do you still think of yourself as a Japanese?”

Forget national face; every question landed like a stinging blow on Yoshiko’s own face. Although nobody actually used the word, the implication was quite clear: Yamaguchi Yoshiko was a traitor.

She managed to keep her composure during the press conference, but broke down as soon as we were alone. Tears flooded down her cheeks, making a terrible mess of her makeup. Black lines streamed like little rivers down the craggy pink valleys of her face. How could they do this to her? Why did they say these terrible things? Didn’t they know how hard she had tried to improve the image of Japan in the outside world? She had done her very best to tell Sam Fuller about the errors in the film. Why didn’t people appreciate her more? I tried to console her as best I could, as we sat in the back of the Twentieth Century car, an absurdly large, lemon yellow Cadillac Eldorado, rolling past the moat of the Imperial Palace, where only a few years before a GI had been lynched by a Japanese mob after it became known that the United States would be keeping its military bases in Japan. There
was no mob there now, just people rushing to and from work in the gray drizzle, and provincials lining up in front of the palace gate to have their souvenir photographs taken.

My own review in the
Japan Evening Post
did not come easily. I found a way, though, of maneuvering around the danger areas while remaining essentially honest. I decided to treat the movie as a fairy tale, an American fairy tale set in Japan. To take it as an attempt to show the real Japan would be a grave misunderstanding. Shirley Yamaguchi, I wrote, “brilliantly acts out the Occidental fantasy of the Oriental woman. Not since Madame Butterfly has the loving innocence and gentle submissiveness of this iconic figure been conveyed with such consummate skill.”

The next time I saw Yoshiko, for lunch at a tempura restaurant in the Nishino Building, she didn’t mention my review, which I took as a silent acknowledgment of my friendly intentions. She was wearing a mauve kimono, and a pair of large sunglasses, presumably as a shield against prying eyes. When she took them off, I noticed that her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. I thought it was the torrid reception of her movie, and was about to commiserate, telling her what unthinking idiots journalists were, but her anxiety turned out to have a different source. Yoshiko had been asked to be in a musical on Broadway,
Shangri-La
, a musical version of James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon
. It is a variation of the Rip van Winkle story. A plane carrying Westerners from the war in China crashes in the Himalayas. The survivors wake up in a mysterious place where time doesn’t exist and peace lasts forever. One of them, a British novelist, falls in love with a beautiful Oriental woman (Yoshiko). They decide to elope. But the moment they leave the timeless zone of eternal peace, the beautiful young woman becomes a wrinkled old crone.

I had seen Mr. Capra’s
Lost Horizon
before the war, with Ronald Colman as the novelist and Sam Jaffe as the High Lama. For months
I dreamed of Tibetan temples, Oriental wise men, and snowcapped mountains. It fed my loathing of the world I lived in, its addiction to material wealth and violence. I’d have accepted a one-way ticket to Shangri-la anytime.

“My dear,” I said, “the part sounds perfect for you. You must do it, of course.” She nodded vigorously. Starring in a Broadway musical had always been her dream. She couldn’t have asked for anything better, she assured me. But she didn’t look happy at all. She kept readjusting her collar, as the truth emerged in bits and pieces. Apparently Isamu didn’t want her to go. He wanted her to stay in Kamakura, and anyway, he said, the musical was just “mediocre American rubbish.” But that hurdle had been negotiated, though not without a few paper doors being torn and crockery smashed on the way. Isamu gave in. He had to. As Yoshiko said: “My career was on the line. We’re both artists, but he doesn’t understand that I work for the public. I need an audience. It’s different for Isamu-san. He just works for himself.”

Then a second, far more formidable barrier arose: her visa application was denied. No reason given. Strings were pulled. Kawamura wrote to a friend at the embassy. Letters went back and forth between Tokyo and Washington. It took several months before an answer emerged from the American consul in Tokyo: Yoshiko was “a threat to U.S. national security.” This sounded quite mad. But still no stated reason. More letters were sent, and contacts asked to intervene. It turned out that Yoshiko was suspected of Communist activities. But why? More time, more letters, more interviews. The name of Colonel Wesley F. Gunn came up in the files. He had marked Yoshiko as a suspected Communist agent in wartime Manchuria. Her childhood friend, “the Jewess Masha,” was known to be working for the Soviet government. And besides, hadn’t Yoshiko been conspicuously friendly with Charlie Chaplin, even as his “un-American” activities became known?

Just as life’s misfortunes ambush a person without warning, help
too can come from the least expected quarters. There is a certain rough justice in this, I guess. A year or so before Yoshiko’s visa problem, she had played the part of a mistress of a British merchant in Yokohama in an utterly forgettable Japanese picture called, for some reason,
Autumn Wind
. Ikebe was in this movie as well, playing the merchant’s handsome Japanese servant. The foreigner is cruel. The mistress falls for the servant. They try to elope. The foreigner is about to kill the servant. She threatens to kill herself. The foreigner hesitates. The lovers get away in the fog.

A forgettable picture, as I said, but a fateful one. For the British merchant was played by a fellow by the name of Stan Lutz. I knew him slightly. He had held a position in Willoughby’s intelligence section. A shady character, with straw blond hair and thin lips, Lutz had stayed on in Japan after the occupation ended. I spotted him once or twice at Tony Lucca’s place, eating pizzas with Japanese men with big necks and flashy neckties, the kind one doesn’t pick a quarrel with. I didn’t much care for Lutz. But Yoshiko appears to have got along with him all right. He played in a few other Japanese movies, many of them a trifle louche, the kind of thing we would call “soft porn” today, all pretty bad. There were other ventures, too, in businesses of one kind or another.

Lutz was not unusual. I knew the type. Japan offered rich pickings for men who weren’t too fussy about the way they made their money. As Lucca would say, it was all a matter of connections, and Lutz had more powerful ones than most. One of them was a man named Yoshio Taneguchi, an indicted war criminal who had written a well-known memoir while awaiting his trial. The Allies arrested him for crimes committed in China during the war: torture, assassinations, looting, that kind of thing. Rumor had it that he was very rich. During the war, the Imperial Japanese government had been grateful enough for his
services to give him the honorary title of “Rear Admiral.” The translator and publisher of Taneguchi’s memoir was Stan Lutz.

Anyway, Taneguchi never had to stand trial. Willoughby had him released, because of his wartime reputation as an avid hunter of Japanese Communists, just the kind of man the Americans thought they needed when China fell in the late 1940s and Japanese trade unions were beginning to get troublesome. It turned out that Taneguchi had a soft spot for Yoshiko, whom he remembered from her Ri Koran days in China. When Lutz told him about Yoshiko’s visa problem, he said something about having been a member of Ri Koran’s “fan club” in Manchuria. He promised he would have a word with friends in the U.S. government. The visa came through in a week. What Lutz got out of the transaction, I don’t know. Perhaps he had acted purely out of friendship. But neither “purely” nor “friendship” are words I would normally apply to an operator like Lutz.

To thank him for his kind help in this personal matter, Yoshiko hosted a small dinner for Taneguchi at a discreet Japanese restaurant near the Hattori Building in the Ginza. We had a private tatami room. Lutz came. Kawamura had been invited, but when he heard the name Taneguchi, he suddenly remembered a previous engagement. Isamu was there, reluctantly, one felt. The party was never going to be convivial. It was one of those ceremonial occasions without which Japanese society could not function. Yoshiko made sure only the most expensive dishes were served. The service was impeccable and the food tasted, well, expensive. Yoshiko, as a token of her gratitude, handed a beautifully wrapped gift to Taneguchi, a short porcine man with a crooked mouth and little, shrewd eyes. I noticed that he was missing a finger on his left hand. “This is from my husband and I,” said Yoshiko. “No, it’s not,” said Isamu, pulling a face like a stubborn child, “it’s just from Yoshiko.” Yoshiko laughed, flashed him a look of anger that pretended
to be mock, and said something to the effect of “Pay no attention to him.” Taneguchi grunted and put the parcel aside without opening it. Grunting was in fact his main contribution to the conversation. Lutz would sometimes translate a grunt, which put Isamu in an even worse mood. “I know,” he said, “I speak Japanese.”