by Gavin Black
“Washo, washo, washo, washo!”
Everyone within reasonable radius of me was just as drunk as I could have wished, with the cheerful Japanese drunkenness which hangs on for a time before total collapse. I didn’t see any rice spirit bottles about but they must have been available.
It was a kind of bedlam designed for the fugitive. I had black hair and I hunched down a little, keeping my height levelled off with the mob. Once I looked back and saw a policeman, but only on the fringe of the crowd, as though he thought it impossible that I should be in there. I saw a piece of pole vacant and I grabbed it just as a surge of movement lifted the shrine above me and sent it lurching towards its rival. I held on to that pole and shouted:
“Washo, washo, washo, washo!”
We began to move towards the kill, both prancing parties of shrine carriers, and my crowd more aggressive. Up went the little god-house and then down again. This was a devil dance with destruction as its end and in a weird way, frightened though I was, I came near to catching the feeling. Here was a staged relief from the anger and terrors of ordinary life.
“Washo, washo, washo, washo!”
There was a scream of an order, high-pitched. Our shrine careened over towards the other, catching one corner of its projecting roof overhang. I heard a rending sound of torn wood. The crowd, packed along the street and hanging from upstairs balconies, screamed approval. Again another surge before the opposing team had a chance to recover and this time a portion of their god’s roof came ripping off.
Fifty policemen could have howled themselves hoarse then and never been heard or noticed. But I looked back. A white uniform had penetrated the outer fringe of nakedness.
I looked up at the shrine. It was dangerous to hang on up there now, but two men were still doing it. One of them looked down, and I saw it was Ohashi. The sweat was streaming off his face and his brown body. He looked odd without his glasses, and seemed to peer at me without seeing anything. I caught his foot and tugged. I wasn’t sure that he had recognised me, but he pushed himself off the shrine and slithered through the net of supporting poles, disappearing, and then surfacing right by me. He came in close and we were shoved about as we faced each other. He’d had a lot to drink but didn’t look fuddled.
“What?” he said, in a kind of astonishment and in Japanese.
“Police. Back there. After me. I’ve got to get away.”
It was a test all right, the dreaded word, police. Ohashi brought the back of his hand across his forehead.
“Trouble? For you?”
“Yes. Don’t stare that way. There’s two of them, maybe more now. Washo, washo, washo!”
His tongue came out and he seemed to suck the sweat from his upper lip with it.
“Follow,” he said.
I followed, edging my way after him. We weren’t the only ones to do that. The shrine carriers changed all the time, new ones taking over while the weary went for refreshment. Ohashi and I stood under a pitch of roof for a moment, looking both ways. One of the policemen, blowing a whistle, was too close for comfort, but that uniform and official sword wasn’t serving him well today. These naked boys were back in a time before policemen were thought of. And a policeman in Japan, unnoticed and unheeded in a pack of dancing dervishes was an odd sight.
Ohashi was looking at me. His eyes, bloodshot from rice wine, were appraising. He was quite sober and thinking about getting involved in this business. He had a perfect right to shake me off now if he wanted to and I didn’t make any appeals.
“Come,” he said.
We used the overhanging eaves of the shops, walking mostly on the board coverings of roadside drains, pushing our way in and out, assailed all the time by a great deal of bare human flesh. Then there was a lane and Ohashi nipped into it.
When I turned in he was already running, and he made a gesture to me with one hand. I wasn’t really in any state to run again, but I forced it, a kind of jog trot, with all the time the feeling that I was pushing my strength a bit far. The roaring behind us began to diminish as we swung about in a labyrinth of wooden housing, little places all with their fences to keep them private and no windows as eyes on to the lanes at all. We didn’t meet anyone either. It was as though all the life in that town had been sucked to the centre, and back here would have offered a field day for burglars.
Ohashi had stopped under what looked like a gate with a tile roof over it, watching me come up, his eyes speculative, as though he hadn’t really made up his mind yet, following an impulse that mightn’t be strong enough to carry him much farther.
“Temple,” he said, in explanation, and slid back a door.
It was a side door into a courtyard, huge and paved, with pigeons as the only occupants. The emptiness was eerie, for the main temple was big with a great sweep of grey-tiled roof ornamented at the ridge by what looked like gilded peacocks. There were side shrines, too, all with their little gods waiting for supplications to be said after the bell was rung to wake them. But no bell rang. The pigeons made their monotonous sexy sound beneath the throbbing of those distant drums.
“Safe here, I think,” Ohashi said. “Come.”
He kept looking over his shoulder towards the main gate, but no one came through it and there didn’t seem to be any traffic in the road beyond. We went behind the temple into a narrow back area only a few feet wide. Here Ohashi stopped and turned to me, quick breathing shoving the cage of his ribs in and out.
“What happen, Mr. Harris?”
I had been too speedy about telling the whole truth in this business and it hadn’t served me. I decided not to do it now. But I had to use anything that came to hand. And looking at the boy, I was conscious of the great seas of separate experience which divided us. I needed his sympathy to get his help and I groped around in my mind for something we would have in common, something the male animal anywhere would understand.
“A woman has made a complaint about me,” I said.
“Eh?” His mouth fell open.
“A European woman. It was a surprise. I was on the beach when the police came. Naturally, I wasn’t expecting anything. I’m not sure that the thug last night hasn’t something to do with this business. You could say I was being blackmailed for money.”
“Blackmail?” The word was meaningless to him. I couldn’t think of a Japanese equivalent.
“The woman wants money from me,” I said.
“Ah, so.” He looked solemn. “Much better to go to brothel, I think.”
It was the Oriental viewpoint. But I knew then I had hit on something. He wouldn’t expect to understand. The Westerner’s relations with women was bound to remain an utter mystery, something it was a total waste of time to try and comprehend. All over Asia millions of Orientals stare at Western films, astounded at the complications which surround the occidental male in his relations with the other sex. To them it is a kind of lunacy which must just be accepted, though the basis of so much of our tragedy seems to them vastly comic. They are too polite, however, to laugh when we are around.
Ohashi may have felt suddenly like laughing then, but that didn’t show. He was quite solemn.
“The police put you in jail for this?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t stay to ask. Look, Ohashi, if I can just get some clothes I’ll be all right. Could you find me something? And bring it here? Is this where I’m to hide?”
He nodded.
“Most safe, I think. Clothes difficult.”
He was looking at my length. I remembered about the jacket I had left for repair in a Kamakura shop. If I had a jacket which fitted it wouldn’t matter about my pants. I just wanted to be clothed. The contemporary man, even in a warm climate, is at a moral and mental disadvantage without his trousers. I told Ohashi about the jacket, and he was quite certain he could get it. He was even willing to go to the hotel and try to get my things out of the room there, but I dissuaded him from this, thinking it quite likely that my belongings had all been removed by the police to be
tested for bloodstains.
Clearly the boy was committed now, almost enthusiastic. Since my crime was totally incomprehensible to him he had no qualms about being associated with me as an accessory to it. Possibly he felt that my flight was some kind of idiot whimsy which offered a Japanese student a unique opportunity to study aspects of Western behaviour. Observing my antics might even lead him in the end to some understanding of Mr. Graham Greene.
I had a twinge or two of conscience about cheating him then. I couldn’t just use him.
“Look, Ohashi, there’s something I want to say. I have quite a lot of money. I mean, I’m what I suppose you might call a rich man. When I get out of this mess I would like to make things a little easier for you.”
“I do not understand?” His face had stiffened.
“It’s just that I know Japanese students in most cases are not very well off. Isn’t that so?”
“My mother is widow. My father die in war at Iwo Jima. We are poor now, yes.”
“I see.” I had put my two big feet into this, and it wasn’t going to be easy to get them out. “What was in my mind was that I’d like to help you on with your career in some way. To make it a little easier perhaps, so that you can go to your examinations without … well … worry.”
“You pay me money?” he asked flatly.
“If you would like me to help you that way.”
“I would not like. My father was captain in the navy. Before him my family is samurai. You understand?”
I did understand, and I had put my feet in it.
“Forgive me for blundering, Ohashi.”
“A samurai does not help friend for money.”
“No, of course not. It’s just that I’m … well, honoured that you should call me a friend. But you don’t really know me very well, do you? You may be taking something on that you could regret later.”
“In Japan friend is of the heart.”
“So quickly, Ohashi?”
“So quickly, yes.”
I’m not often made to feel humble, but I was then. The mood between us had become almost emotional, in the way it can do so quickly in Japan. I had stabbed at his pride, and now he was committed to me, and not from curiosity any longer. He was a samurai who had taken something on which, in his code, he was obliged to see through to the end.
I won’t deny that this gave me a feeling of relief, too, that I had got him, by whatever route. This boy was all that stood between me and a world in which I was practically naked, had no money, no one else to turn to, and in which there was a hue and cry out for me.
“Show me where to hide,” I said finally.
It was an odd place. He had found it as a child, playing about the temple. Some boards at the back of the crumbling building were loose and they let us directly into a roughly finished area right behind a ten foot high Buddha. All the decoration was to the front, and back here the huge seated figure had an air of mouldering dereliction, a great mass left to dry rot and pigeon droppings.
The pigeons were above us, nesting probably from the sound they were making, and the fluttering of their wings was almost continuous as they came back and forth from some opening under the tiles. Above, too, was a Chinese puzzle of rafters, as though at various times the roof had been reinforced, and in a somewhat slap-happy manner. About level with the Buddha’s head was a kind of platform, a niche wide enough for me to lie along and on which I could be quite invisible from below even if someone did come around behind the god, which Ohashi said was unlikely. He said he would come back with clothes, and some food, and any money he could get.
I protested about the money, but he looked at me, solemn, and I shut up.
“You can sleep, I think. You need rest, Mr. Harris.”
“I do, yes.”
“Don’t roll off.”
It was an odd hide-out. The back of Buddha’s head, level with my shelf, was white with pigeon droppings and if the birds were conscious at all of an alien presence it didn’t interrupt their murmuring domesticity. After a little one sat on a beam above and dropped on me.
It was warm in there, heat radiating down from the roof, producing the kind of temperature the Americans like in their buildings in January. I lay wondering where the priests were, probably at the festival, though the whole place had a curious air of being unused to human presence, as though this was some sect in which old ritual was in decline, the observance only sporadic.
A bell woke me. It was meant to wake the god, and I nearly fell off my shelf. The pigeons, equally startled, set up a great fluttering. And then I heard a voice, a woman’s, coming from directly beyond the Buddha. A worshipper, and I was bound to eavesdrop, but the uneasiness which came from that didn’t last long. The woman’s voice was loud and practical, as though she had learned that it didn’t do to whisper to heaven.
“My husband’s stomach,” she said, and went on with it, over and over, an incantation. “My husband’s stomach, my husband’s stomach.”
The bell clanged again. This particular Buddha must have a reputation for curative powers, if he could be wakened. The wife out there was determined to do this and never mind the pigeons. It was like being in a belfry, right up there, imprisoned while the local bell ringers’ association carried out their weekly practice down below. The pigeons started a stampede out through their exits, but I had to stay put. After a time it was all I could do to keep from being violently sick.
Maybe it’s one way of getting rid of an ulcer, to send your wife along to ring the bell, I don’t know. But by the time she was finished I was nearly biting the unplaned boards beneath me, and when she had gone I lay for a long time sweating, coming back slowly to life, wanting aspirin I couldn’t get.
When I could think I thought about Ohashi, and the remarkable coincidence of the boy just turning up last night after my fight with the thug. There was a certain innocence about his explanation that he often went for walks at night, an excuse of his presence which by not being too plausible was somehow more convincing. But I could still be a fool just lying here waiting, banking on that business of the boy’s father being a samurai. I looked at the alternative to trusting him and it wasn’t attractive, involving setting out on my own in a pair of bathing trunks, and with no help of any kind. It seemed to me almost certain that I would be nabbed quickly even if I did manage somehow to get clothes. The police would be waiting out there for the mouse to appear from whatever hole he had found.
There was, too, another possibility I had to face, that Ohashi, borne up by lofty sentiments while with me, might have felt them dribbling away when he got home. There was nothing to stop him just not returning, leaving me to the pigeons, the bell, and slow starvation.
I’d eaten a fair breakfast but my stomach told me it was well into the afternoon. There were sounds of activity now in the street beyond the abandoned calm of the temple courtyard, the hooting of cars, and distant voices. Once I heard a shouting which alerted me, but there was never any search of the compound and, though the festival was over, the sound of it gone, no priest came back to the temple. Another worshipper came, but this time to discreet prayer; all I heard was the clink of a coin into the money box and the bell pulled only once. There wasn’t even an audible murmuring above pigeon noise.
I managed to sleep again for a while, but by the time dusk was filling the temple with shadow my stomach was sending out sporadic grumbling protests. I lay on it, in that state of alert irritability which real hunger brings, knowing that soon I was going to have to give Ohashi up and prod myself into some scheme of action. The trouble was I couldn’t begin to see what this might be. A minimum optimism demanded something to eat.
Pity it wasn’t the kind of temple where they offered the gods food. It was just possible, though, that something like that went on in one of the side shrines and the idea made me lift my head.
I saw eyes watching me. Those eyes were a little lower than I was, but not much, and in the half light they glowed red. It was the biggest rat I ha
d ever seen, obviously about some business not unconnected with pigeons’ eggs above me, and I was an obstacle to its plans. It glared at me, baleful, angry and probably as hungry as I was. It had a plump tail hanging straight down.
I had a vision then of the temple teeming with rats after dark, this one a kind of advance scout, more daring than the others, but later a horrible pattering going on all around me. Time to make my move.
I sat up, my muscles stiff from that earlier exertion, swinging my legs out from the shelf towards a beam I had used to get up. The rat didn’t scuttle away from my movement at all, it just went on sitting quietly on its crosspiece, watching me with a kind of bold arrogance which sent shivers up my naked spine. The rats owned this temple and this one was letting me see it. I dropped down to the floor.
It was getting dark fast, and I peered round the Buddha, which gave me a view of the courtyard beyond, illumined now by a single powerful electric bulb suspended near the main gate to the street. The street itself was glowing and crowded, as though this was a peak hour out there.
Somehow the temple and I were remote from all that human activity, as though the calm of this place was sealed off in a vacuum that was a sort of death. I had safety of a kind here but it was static, useless to me. I had to move out.
And then something turned into the courtyard, a coolie pulling a two-wheeled handcart like the one which had been thrust across the road this morning to stop my flight. On the cart was a hump of something covered by a tarpaulin. It wasn’t until the man was nearly in front of the temple that I saw it was Ohashi.
I found those loose boards and got out just as he was pushing the cart backwards into the area just wide enough to take it.
“What’s all this?” I asked softly, knowing he had seen me.
“Police everywhere. Not safe to walk with you in streets. I take you on cart.”
