The Nicholas Linnear Novels (23 page)

There was a stand of intervening cherry trees and the foliage was so lush that they could not make out what was happening behind it.

A crowd had formed by the time they arrived, having cut through the grass so as to bypass the crowded stairs. Taking Nicholas by the arm, the Colonel shouldered his way through the throng. Already, at the edges, there was some pushing and shoving. The scuffling was brief, however, as more of the metropolitan police arrived on the scene.

The front line of people parted and they saw an expanse of grass like a glade in a forest. There were cherry blossoms scattered upon the grass as if in a hero’s welcome home. Nicholas caught a glimpse of a patterned kimono. At first it appeared gray but then, as he was shoved forward by the thrust of the uneasy crowd, he saw that it was composed of thin waved lines of black and white which, at a distance, blended together. It was trimmed in white.

As more policemen pushed themselves through the onlookers, those already in the glade shifted position. As they did so, Nicholas saw a man kneeling on the grass. His forehead touched the ground littered with blossoms. His right arm was close to his body, the hand invisible within the kimono’s folds across his belly. In front of him was a small lacquered rosewood and brass box and a long white strip of silk, partly in shadow.

Behind him, the Colonel gripped Nicholas’ shoulders as he said, “That’s Hanshichiro!” He was referring to the great Japanese poet.

Nicholas squirmed to get a better look. He now saw the kneeling man’s face between the forest of shifting legs. His hair was iron-gray, his face wide and flat, the features thick. Lines pulled down the corners of his mouth. His eyes were closed. Then Nicholas saw that the silk strip before him was not shadowed but stained. Being porous, it let all the blood through so that it seeped into the earth at Hanshichiro’s feet.

“
Seppuku
,” the Colonel said, “is how it ends for the honorable.”

Nicholas was still thinking of how incredibly ordered it was. He was used to stories of the war; there, death was messy. But here, how serene, how precise, how much like the tide of time it was, while all around its calmness stirred the agitated waters.

“Are you all right, Nicholas?” The Colonel put his hand lightly on his shoulders, looked down at him concernedly.

Nicholas nodded. “I think so.” He looked up. “Yes. I guess I am. I feel—a little strange, as if there’s been too much to take in suddenly. I—Why did he do it in the park? He wanted everyone to see.”

“To see and take note,” the Colonel said. They had quit the lake, climbing into the heights of the park where the trees blotted out even the surrounding paths. Above, Nicholas could still see the wavering dragon, spitting his fire into the air, as if in defiance of the currents that blew him hither and thither.

“He was a bitter man, firmly embedded in the past. He could never reconcile himself to Japan’s new path.” A dark blue carriage filled with pink twins and pushed by a matronly Japanese woman went past them. “Hanshichiro was a brilliant artist, obsessed. A man of great honor. This was his way of protesting Japan’s march toward the future, a future which, he felt, would ultimately destroy it.” A young American sailor and his Japanese girl friend approached them from the heights, laughing and clutching each other’s hands. The sailor put his arm around the girl, gave her a kiss on the cheek. She giggled and turned her head away. Her hair tossed in the wind, rippling like the dragon’s body if he were but articulated.

“There are many others like Hanshichiro,” Nicholas said. “Wasn’t Satsugai born in Fukuoka?”

The Colonel looked reflectively at his son. He stopped and dug in his jacket pocket. He withdrew his tobacco pouch, went about filling his pipe, his thumb tamping at the bowl.

Nicholas, watching the dragon float high above him, over the treetops, said, “I’ve read the Constitution, Father. I know that you had a hand in it. It’s not Japanese but it’s very democratic. Much more so than the policies of the government today. Politically, Japan’s gone far to the right, the
zaibatsu
were never dismantled. Most of the prewar personnel is intact. I don’t understand that.”

The Colonel drew out a gunmetal-gray Ronson lighter and, turning his back to the wind, thumbed the long flame to life. He sucked three or four times, deeply, almost with a sigh of contentment, before he flipped the top of the lighter closed. “I want to know how you feel before I answer that. Do you care that Hanshichiro is dead? Or that you’ve seen a man take his own life?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.” He put his hand along the black iron railing bordering the path, feeling the cool metal against his skin. “I don’t know whether it has taken effect yet. It’s like a movie, not real life. I didn’t know him or his work. I guess I’m sad but I don’t know why. He did what he wanted to do.”

The Colonel drew on his pipe, thinking of what his son had just said. What had he expected? Tears? Hysterics? He dreaded returning home and having to tell Cheong. She loved the old man’s poetry. It was terribly unfair for him to think Hanshichiro’s death could touch Nicholas in the same deep way it did him. Their experiences were not the same and neither were the generations; anyway, Nicholas did not yet possess the sense of history that the Colonel and Cheong did. And, of course, he had quite a different perspective on it. For a moment he thought of Satsugai. There wasn’t much Nicholas missed. He would have to watch that from now on.

“Although the American party line was to make the military totally culpable for the war,” the Colonel said, “it’s only fair to say that there was a purge of the
zaibatsu
directly after the war. However, there was so much burning of original documents and deliberate falsification of others that a great many upper-echelon executives slipped through. Others, of course, did not and were tried and convicted of war crimes.” They began to walk toward the eastern gate beyond which their car was parked.

“Now the Americans came in here with the best of intentions.” The Colonel drew on his pipe, exhaled the blue smoke. “I remember the day we finished drafting the new Constitution and dropped it on the Premier and the Foreign Minister like another A-bomb. They were flabbergasted. It wasn’t a Japanese Constitution; its spirit was totally Western, that’s certainly true. But it was MacArthur’s firm intention to keep the country weaned from its feudal past, which he saw as highly dangerous. Its essence was that all power should be stripped from the Emperor and given into the hands of the Japanese people while maintaining him as the symbol of state.”

“Then what happened?” Nicholas asked.

“In 1947, Washington, through MacArthur, did a complete about-face. Rights were withdrawn, certain war-crime convictions were overturned and the leaders of the
zaibatsu
were restored to their prewar eminence.”

“It all sounds so contradictory.”

“Only if you look at it from a purely Japanese point of view,” the Colonel said. “You see, America is deathly afraid of global communism; the Americans will go to any lengths to prevent its spread. Just look at how they’ve aided Franco in Spain and Chiang Kai-shek out here. Fascism, the Americans feel, is their best weapon against communism.”

“Then the Americans deliberately disregarded their own Constitution for Japan, restoring the reactionary
zaibatsu
, guiding us in a right-wing direction.”

The Colonel nodded but said nothing. He felt now as if he might never make it to the park gate, as if it were the end of a treacherous overland journey that he no longer had sufficient strength to make. “Let’s sit here a minute,” he said softly. They went carefully over the low railing, sat on a patch of grass filled with sunlight. Still, it seemed chill to the Colonel and he hunched his shoulders against the wind. Sheets of thinly layered cloud passed, now and again, across the face of the sun, causing brief shadows to dance like ghosts across the wide lawn. The cherry blossoms rustled; a brace of dogs barked like brass being beaten; a brown and white butterfly darted erratically along the top of the grass, a blithe dancer without a partner. The day seemed like a haiku to the Colonel, perfect and sad, bringing tears to the eyes. Why were so many haiku sorrowful? he wondered.

The Colonel had witnessed many deaths in his day: the deaths of men he knew and those he did not. One develops over time a kind of shell against which these personal disasters must bounce away; either that or one goes mad. Until death takes on the unreality of a mime show and one no longer contemplates it.

This death in the park, on this sunny spring day, among the children, the inheritors of Japan, was different. The Colonel felt deflated, like Caesar returning home to Rome from the arms of Cleopatra, from eternal summer to the chill of March. He thought of the eagle circling Caesar’s statue in the square; the augury. And it seemed to him that this important death, which he had witnessed, was also an augury of sorts. But what it portended he could not say.

“Are you all right?” Nicholas asked. He put a hand on his father’s arm.

“What?” For a moment, the Colonel’s eyes were far away. “Oh, yes. Quite all right, Nicholas. Not to worry. I was just thinking of how to break the news of Hanshichiro’s death to your mother. She will be most upset.”

He was silent for a time, contemplating the pink-white blossoms all around. After a time he felt calmer.

“Father, I want to ask you something.”

It might have been a moment that the Colonel had dreaded, but Nicholas’ tone of voice was such that his father knew that he had spent much time thinking about the question. “What is it?”

“Does Satsugai belong to the Genyōsha?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It seems a logical question. Satsugai is the head of one of the
zaibatsu
, he is virulently reactionary in his philosophy and he was born in Fukuoka.” Nicholas turned to his father. “Frankly, I’d be surprised if he wasn’t a member. Wasn’t it that which allowed him to be restored to power after the 1947 purge?”

“Ah,” the Colonel said judiciously. “Ah. Very logical assumption, Nicholas. You’re quite observant.” The Colonel thought for a moment. To their left several gray plovers broke from the treetops in a flurry and, circling once, headed west into the sun. Farther away, the dragon box kite was being slowly lowered by invisible hands; the day was almost done. “The Genyōsha,” the Colonel said carefully, “was founded by Hiraoka Kotarō. His most trusted lieutenant was Munisai Shokan. Satsugai is his son.”

Nicholas waited for a time before saying, “Is that a yes?”

The Colonel nodded, thinking of something else. “Do you know why Satsugai named his only son Saigō?”

“No.”

“Remember I told you that, in the beginning, the Genyōsha decided to work within the political framework of the country?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they came to that conclusion the hard way. The Military Conscription Act split the Meiji oligarchy into three factions. One of these was led by a man named Saigō. He was the leader of the ultra-conservative samurai. In 1877 Saigō led thirty thousand of his samurai into the field of battle against a modern conscription army put together by the Meiji government. Armed with rifles and guns, they easily defeated the samurai.”

“Of course!” Nicholas exclaimed. “The Satsuma Rebellion. I never connected the names before.” He broke off a blade of grass. “That was the last samurai uprising, wasn’t it?”

“The last, yes.” The Colonel got up, feeling at last as if he were ready to face the outside world, Cheong’s saddened face. He could not bear it when she was sad.

They crossed the remainder of the park, passed beneath the high gate. Behind them the sky was clear of dragons, the sun lost within the thickening haze that reddened the sky like a drop of blood on a blotter.

That night they both dreamed of the death of Hanshichiro, each in his own separate way.

T
HE GRAY CONCRETE BLOCKS
of Manhattan shimmered under the late July sun. It was sticky. Nicholas could feel the heat penetrating the thin soles of his summer loafers, making even walking uncomfortable.

He stood near the curb at Seventh Avenue just outside the modernistic marquee of the new Madison Square Garden and Penn Station complex. He glanced up at it, thinking how quickly it had gone out of style. Across from him was the Statler Hilton Hotel and, a block up, the hideous plastic and glass frontage of a McDonald’s.

Distractedly, he watched the traffic shooting the lights, weaving lanes; waves of steel. He was thinking of the call that had come in late last night. Vincent’s voice had been a terrific blow. Terry and Eileen, murdered. It seemed impossible to imagine. No prowler could possibly have gained entrance to Terry’s apartment without his knowing it; he could not have been surprised in that way. How then? Vincent had been peculiarly unforthcoming; his voice had sounded lifeless and, when Nicholas began to press him, he had merely repeated the instructions to be at the Seventh Avenue entrance to Penn Station after taking the first morning train into the city.

The sun burned the streets out of a cloudless sky. Nicholas’ shirt stuck to his skin. He ran his fingers through his hair, wishing now that he had had it cut shorter in deference to the heat. The lights were red along the avenue and the heavy air hung like brocaded curtains, stagnant, feeling almost solid with the heat.

It was not Vincent who would be meeting him but, he had been told, a Detective Lieutenant Croaker. Lew Croaker. Nicholas thought he remembered the name. Free time had made
The New York Times
that much more important. A case earlier in the year. Didion. The papers, even the normally staid
Times
, had turned it into a spectacular event, perhaps because it had occurred in the Actium House, the most exclusive new residence building on Fifth Avenue. Croaker had been brought in. He was someone’s fair-haired boy; he got a ton of press, especially on the six o’clock news on TV.

The lights on Seventh changed to green and the traffic resumed its herky-jerky flow, dominated by yellow taxis. Out of this mass of dodging confusion a sleek black limo abruptly appeared. Its tinted glass made it difficult to see inside. It slid to a quiet stop in front of him. The back door on the curb side opened and Nicholas saw movement on the far side of the seat. A figure leaned forward, beckoned to him. “Please get in, Mr. Linnear,” a vibrant voice said from out of the depths.