The China Lover (37 page)

“Let me tell you, then. In the middle of the sixteenth century, several Portuguese ships landed on the island of Tanegashima. They brought many things, Bibles, spices, sponge cakes, silk, wine, atlases, telescopes, and matchlock guns, two of which were presented to the Lord of Tanegashima, who was deeply impressed by these priceless weapons and promptly used them to go duck hunting. We Japanese
were always good at copying and then improving foreign inventions. So it was with guns. Soon the smiths of Tanegashima were making better guns than the Portuguese. Europeans didn’t know how to make matchlocks work in the rain. We Japanese figured out a way to do it. The feudal lords started supplying huge armies of conscripted peasants with muskets and went to war against one another. Great land battles took place in the central Japanese plains. Soldiers from both sides marched into storms of gunfire, and died by the thousands.

“Swordsmanship didn’t count for anything anymore. For the first time in history, a peasant soldier had the means to kill the highest-ranking samurai. Even a general in full armor was helpless against a musket-wielding peasant. When the most powerful Shogun, Hideyoshi, unified our country, he decided to put a stop to this. All weapons not belonging to samurai were confiscated. Samurai went back to their swords. Guns became obsolete. In a few years, Japanese no longer even knew they had ever existed. We achieved a state of absolute peace in Japan, which only came to an end when the Americans arrived in the port of Shimoda two hundred years later on their notorious black ships, loaded with firearms and cannon. So innocent were the Japanese of such destructive force that they believed the American guns were a kind of white man’s magic.”

Yamaguchi-san clapped her hands in delight. “But that’s a wonderful story!” she cried. “It shows that it’s possible to get rid of murderous weapons. That’s why we must support our peace constitution. We must show the world that there is a better way to solve our problems than going to war.”

Hanako shook her beautiful head. “Just a moment, Yamaguchisan,” she said, with a quick glance at Bassam, who was slipping a nugget of treacly baklava between his lips, “there is more to this story. Yes, the Japanese managed to get rid of firearms, it is quite true. But at the price of living for over two hundred years in a police state ruled by a
military clique. We had peace at the cost of our freedom, of being at the mercy of any man of samurai rank who felt the urge to cut down a commoner, simply to practice his swordsmanship. Abolishing guns made us into a nation of slaves, and an easy prey for foreign imperialists.”

I was overwhelmed by the sharpness of her mind, the logic of her thinking, the purity of her conviction, the sound of her voice, so compassionate, and the sweetness of her manners. I loved this woman in a way I had never loved any woman before. I had always thought that the expression “love at first sight” was ridiculous, something in cheap novels for teenage girls. But I can’t think of another way to describe my feelings. That’s what it was. A spark had flown, a dart had penetrated my heart. I wanted to kiss her, hug her, hold her, there and then. I wanted to be with her forever.

Of course I didn’t kiss her. We were Japanese, after all. When she suggested, after the interview was over, that we should visit one of the refugee camps the following day, I was like jelly, stammering my thanks. I must have been perspiring. She asked me if I was all right and handed me her handkerchief. I thought I would melt from embarrassment, but also from the sheer delight at having encountered an angel.

The camp was really a slum of low brick houses with roofs made of plastic bags or, in the more fortunate cases, sheets of corrugated iron. There was uncollected garbage everywhere. A pack of filthy dogs was feeding on the refuse from an open bin. The camp had been targeted many times by the Israelis. Children dressed in rags were splashing around in filthy waterlogged craters where the Zionist shells had exploded. It looked, in fact, like hell on earth. And yet the people were smiling. Everyone we interviewed was convinced that victory would one day be theirs. The spirit of these people was so extraordinary that it put us to shame. Here, every man, woman, and child was a soldier. Women did their laundry with Kalashnikovs stacked up against the wall behind the washtubs. Children from the age of five were trained
to be freedom fighters. We saw these brave little souls practicing drills with wooden rifles.

Yamaguchi-san was taking notes in her reporter’s notebook when a young couple was brought over to talk to her. They were dressed very simply, and welcomed us in the formal Arab manner, asking where we were from. Hanako said we were all from Japan, which seemed to please them. Both had been born in a village near Tel Aviv, they told us. Although they were still children when they were brutally expelled, they had never forgotten their homes, and would pass on the memory to their baby boy, named Khalid. The father, Abu Mohammad, glowed with pride as he fingered his boy’s short dark hair. “He will fight for our freedom,” he said. When Yamaguchi-san asked the parents whether they weren’t worried that he might get hurt, they looked at their child with deep tenderness. The boy’s mother, Aisha, then handed him to Yamaguchi-san, who placed the infant on her lap. “Please accept our little boy as yours,” said Aisha. “You come from an ancient culture of warriors. Your blessing will ensure that he will grow up to be a kamikaze and bring honor to all of us.”

Yamaguchi-san, moved by their gesture, hugged the child before handing him back to his mother. “I will always be there when he needs me,” she said. They scribbled down their address in her notebook. Ten years later, the little boy and both his parents would be dead, murdered by the Christian Fascists doing the Zionists’ bidding. And by the time we got back to Tokyo, Abu Bassam, that smiling Buddha of a man, addicted to coffee and sticky baklava, would be blown to pieces by a car bomb in a quiet backstreet of West Beirut.

When we made our tearful farewells from him, and Hanako, he kissed me and said that I was welcome to come back anytime. Even more precious to me were Hanako’s words in parting. She looked at me intently and said: “I know you’ll be back here soon.” I knew that I would, too. I knew I had found a home at last.

   8   

A
FTER BEIRUT
, I was utterly disgusted with the country of my birth. Sure, the streets were cleaner, and the trains ran on time; they always do in Fascist states. The millions of salarymen, teeming through the stations like gray-suited rabbits, returned every night to their little suburban hutches, where their wives tucked them into bed, safe and snug. This was a society addicted to security, where the salaried rabbits had learned to stop thinking; a society that prized mediocrity, without a sense of honor or higher purpose; a society grown soft and selfish; a place from which the only escape was the false consciousness of pornographic fantasy. And the rabbits looked content. That was the worst of it. They had exchanged their brains, and their souls, for— what?
Comfort
. Since political resistance was now useless in Japan, the few remaining revolutionaries who still retained some vestige of their souls had turned on one another, like rats trapped in a sack.

Again, nothing in life occurs without purpose. Of that I remain firmly convinced. It all happened only a few weeks after our return to Tokyo: Twelve soldiers of the United Red Army murdered by their own comrades. Cops in a shoot-out with five survivors of the purge in a Karuizawa mountain lodge. Manager of the lodge taken hostage. Round-the-clock television coverage, watched by eighty-five percent of the Japanese population. Two cops killed. Hostage released. Five arrests. The “United Red Army Incident”!

It was clear to me from the very beginning that Japanese TV had become the voice of the oppressors, making a sentimental melodrama out of the woman taken hostage, presenting the police as national heroes, and the Red Army as criminals. The people had been thoroughly brainwashed by the ruling class. But the way Japanese minds had been colonized by the authorities was interesting: it was done by turning news into spectacle. The Karuizawa shoot-out was just another cop show, with good guys triumphing over the bad guys. Politics had turned into soap opera, and armed struggle into a samurai drama. The Red Army warriors had played their parts to perfection, looking like stage villains, poking their guns through the windows of their mountain lodge.

And I felt complicit. Wasn’t I working for the same TV station that licked its chops over the siege in Karuizawa? What was our program about the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people if not another kind of entertainment for the rabbits glued to their flickering shrines? To them, it was a travelogue, political porn, pictures for the armchair reveries of the petty bourgeois. Even so, after the United Red Army Incident, David Niven had got cold feet about broadcasting the show. He was afraid that the Red Army fighters for Palestinian justice were portrayed too sympathetically. He was right. They were. But he needn’t have worried, because the showbiz-hungry, brainwashed Japanese rabbits showed no interest in the Palestinians. All they cared about was the glamorous presence of Yamaguchi Yoshiko, in her miniskirts, her shiny white boots, and her keffiyeh, which she wore on the show. Her face was everywhere: on the covers of fashion magazines, on subway posters, in department stores, and on TV chat shows. She won a prize as Journalist of the Year. Yamaguchi Yoshiko’s star was reborn in Beirut. And I was disgusted.

But I didn’t blame her. Her intentions were sincere. When we talked about her new fame, she told me, as she so often did, that I was
being “too intellectual.” Her star status, tedious as it was, could only help to promote the matters we believed in. She even asked me to help her write a book about the Palestinian struggle. And there were other things we could do. She was brimming with ideas. What about a program about Colonel Gaddafi, Libya’s wonderful revolutionary leader? Or an interview with Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader of North Korea? And who knows, we might even get permission to go to China and meet Chairman Mao.

I didn’t want to let her down. But the truth of the matter was that I was wasting my time in Japan. I felt so powerless there. I couldn’t wait to get back to Beirut, for that was where I was needed. There, everything felt real, important, vital. It was impossible to erase the images from my mind of the children’s faces in the refugee camp, the pride of Khalid’s parents, the resolve of the freedom fighters in the PFLP office, and Hanako, of course, Hanako with her sweet Madonna smile, her total dedication, her love of the poor and the oppressed. Hanako, who knew that I would soon be back.

After Beirut, even Tokyo, the city of my dreams, seemed flat. Banchan was away, making another pink film, something about sex and student politics in Kyoto. Talking to most of my old friends was impossible. Their eyes would wander when I told them about Beirut and the Palestinian struggle. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on them. They had their own lives to live and Beirut was far away. But wasn’t this just how the Japanese had behaved during the war? Pretending not to know, when innocent Chinese civilians were being massacred by our soldiers. Nanking must have seemed far away then, too. Why do people never learn the lessons of history? Do we never change? Is change impossible?

I didn’t think so. I didn’t want to think so. And this is why I will always be grateful to Yamaguchi-san. Her enthusiasm was the one thing
that kept my hopes alive. She was different from most Japanese, no doubt because she grew up outside Japan. Maybe Okuni was right, and the landscapes impressed on our minds in early childhood do shape our perspectives. Just think of the difference between growing up in the vast empty plains of Manchuria, and being trapped on a narrow little archipelago filled with rice paddies, volcanic mountains, and overcrowded cities. A child raised in Dairen or Harbin would have been exposed to people from all over the world, while we saw only other Japanese, just like us. Unless you happened to live near a base. Even then, the only foreigners I ever saw were Yankee soldiers, and they were country boys themselves, still reeking of cow dung.

I finally took Yamaguchi-san round to meet Okuni. We went to see his latest play in the great yellow tent, pitched on a vacant spot beside the lily pond in Ueno. It was on one of those humid summer nights when the cicadas rasp and the fireflies set the pond alight. The tent was full, with no standing room left. A solitary electric fan valiantly displaced some warm air, and even that stopped when a fuse blew halfway through the play. Sitting on the dirt floor, packed together with hundreds of sweating young people, was uncomfortable. But I didn’t mind. Good theater shouldn’t be comfortable. People must sacrifice comfort for art. I noticed Vanoven, the American homo. When he spotted me, he smiled and held up his thumb. I felt rather sorry for him, though I don’t really know why. There was something sad about the crazy foreigner in the Japanese crowd. When I asked him whether he was staying for a drink later, he shook his head. “Another time,” he shouted.

Yamaguchi-san, noticing my exchange with Vanoven, asked me how I knew that foreigner. I explained that I had met him in Okuni’s tent and asked her whether she had ever come across him. “I’ve not had the pleasure,” she said.

The play was a fantasy based on the movie
Lost Horizon
. In Okuni’s version, the survivors from the plane crash in the Himalayan mountains were not British, of course, but Japanese, one of them a famous character from a popular movie about a detective with seven faces. Shangri-la was not part of Tibet, but Asakusa after the bombing raids. The Grand Lama was a popular singer of Japanese ballads, who was also a serial killer. In the last scene, the back of the tent opened up to reveal the entire cast singing a wartime ballad about kamikaze pilots. Their faces were white and streaked with blood, the ghosts of those who died in the Asakusa bombings.

Yamaguchi-san said she didn’t understand the play at all, but loved it all the same. Okuni laughed and asked her why she hadn’t come to see
The Ri Koran Story
. She pulled a face and said: “I suffered too much in the past. I don’t want to remember. Ri Koran is dead.” Okuni’s eyes widened. I could tell he was fascinated. To him she was still Ri Koran, whatever she said. She would always be Ri Koran. Yamaguchi Yoshiko didn’t interest him.

“But we can’t just slough off the past,” Okuni said. “We are made of our memories. And besides, Ri was a great actress.”

“But I’m no longer Ri, and I never wanted to be an actress in the first place. I wanted to be a journalist. An actress does as she is told. I was fooled. It’s different being a reporter. A reporter is free. An actress can’t do anything to change the world.”

Okuni shook his head and said: “Journalism is just about facts. It’s the truth of accountants. We artists can show a higher truth.”

“Well, I prefer reality.” Yamaguchi-san then talked about our trip to Beirut and the Palestinian struggle. I could tell that this bored Okuni. I could see it in his face. It was how most of my friends reacted when I spoke about these things. One detail, however, caught his imagination: Khalid’s mother asking Yamaguchi-san to raise her boy as a
kamikaze. “Amazing,” he said, his little dark eyes shining. “Can you imagine such passion in Japan today? Here, when the students occupied the campus in protest against the Security Treaty, mothers threw candies over the wall, ha ha.”

Yamaguchi-san suggested that “maybe we don’t need heroes anymore.”

“But we do,” said Okuni, “we do. In the movies.” He was still laughing, and asked one of the actors to bring his guitar. We clapped along as he sang a song from his latest play: “On the far side of the Sumida River is the Land of No Return, Where lovers roam and home fires burn, On the far side . . .”

“Did you know,” said Yamaguchi-san, “that I was in the musical version of
Lost Horizon
? On Broadway, in New York.” Yo Kee Hee, who hadn’t said much all evening, asked her to sing a song from the musical. Yamaguchi-san swatted this idea away. No, she couldn’t possibly. It was all too long ago. She had lost her voice. But Yo wouldn’t be denied. After a bit more coaxing, Yamaguchi-san sang a song called “The Man I Never Met.” Her soprano voice was as beautiful as ever. Okuni wiped a tear from his eyes. “Ri Koran is still alive!” he shouted, giggling with excitement.

“She is dead,” said Yamaguchi-san quite firmly. “That was Shirley Yamaguchi, anyway. And she’s no longer with us, either.”

“What about singing ‘China Nights’?” suggested Yo, not without a note of malice.

I froze, hoping Yamaguchi-san wouldn’t be offended. “Never,” she said, with a firmness that closed the matter at once. “I will
never
sing that song again.” Changing the subject, she asked Okuni where he was going to pitch his tent next. He mentioned Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, and Kumamoto. Something extraordinary always happened in Osaka, he said. “We usually pitch our tent in Tennoji, near the Zoo. At night
you can hear the wild animals howling, and once an escaped sea eagle flew right into the tent, just as Yo was singing a song about a ghostly captain roaming forever in his submarine.”

“Perhaps,” said Yamaguchi-san, “you should think of going abroad, pitch your tent in other countries, become more international.”

Okuni’s eyes lit up. “But not America or Europe,” he said. “What about Asia? That would be good. In Seoul. Or Manila, or Bangkok—” He reached for the saké bottle. His high-pitched giggle sounded almost like the shriek of one of those wild animals in Osaka Zoo. “Sato,” he roared. “What about Beirut? Why don’t we put up the yellow tent in the middle of a Palestinian camp?”

“Too dangerous,” we all said in chorus. “Crazy.” “Never get permission.” “We don’t have the money” (Yo Kee Hee). “What about the food?” (Nagasaki). “And the language?”

“We’ll do it in Arabic,” shouted Okuni, with a beam of madness in his eyes. “Next stop Beirut. The Existential Theater for the Palestinian guerrillas. That’ll be some situation!”

Yes, I thought, and a tuna fish will one day climb Mount Fuji.