Soldiers in Hiding

by Richard Wiley

  While reading Soldiers in Hiding, please forget this preface, or better yet don’t read it until you’re done. Or don’t read it at all, just let the book wash over you, and shut it again. Books on shelves closed and waiting. During these hard days of tumult and fragmentation, what could be better, what could be more optimistic?

  Each unopened book is a preemptive strike of its own.

  RICHARD WILEY

  April 2006

  Part One

  One

  IT GIVES ME PLEASURE TO HINDER AMERICAN TOURISTS occasionally. It is a small pleasure, to be sure, but a real one, and it is so very un-Japanese.

  There was a woman recently who stood at the edge of the street next to the mouth of an open subway, waiting for an obliging stranger, for someone to stop and ask if he might be of help. Her husband stood with her wearing slacks of many colors, the kind that stretch a little and hug the knees.

  When I came into the dim morning they were facing me, so I smiled and heard the woman say, “Ask this man, dear. Older men are often the most accommodating.”

  She put five sausage fingers between his shoulder blades and gave him a little nudge, a small push in my direction. Salary men in grays and browns hurried by all around us, for as is my custom I had been the first off the train and now my co-riders were catching up, coming out into a grim daylight of their own.

  “Excuse me,” said the man, even then standing a little aside so that I could see his big wife nodding a few feet behind him. “Do you speak English?”

  I smiled, leading him out of the pedestrian flow, over against a wall where we could talk more privately.

  “We’re looking for Tokyo Tower,” he told me. “We want to go there.”

  He spaced his words slowly and evenly so I cocked my head a little and looked at him, at the smiling face of his wife over his shoulder.

  “To-ki-yo Tow-er,” he said again, lips narrowing.

  “I understand,” I told him.

  The wife was pulled to us by streams of people heading, now, into the station. “He speaks English, Harold,” she told her husband. “We’ve found one with good English.” She turned to me and said, “We’re from Des Moines. He’s been here before.”

  “Sure has changed,” he said.

  I looked at them both a second and behind them, through the low smog, I could actually see Tokyo Tower a little, coming like a dunce cap off the small broadcast station that was my own destination.

  “You’ve got to take the train,” I told them. “You must go deep down into this station and take the Ginza line. Take it as far as it will go. The last stop is right at the foot of Tokyo Tower.”

  “My,” said the wife. “I didn’t realize we were so far.”

  This little anecdote, this little meanness, is exemplary of my state of mind these days. The man was my junior by less than a decade. Fewer than ten years separated his plump face from my drawn one, from my thin Japanese face with its lines and folds, yet they saw me as old. And his wife with the color of her hair actually entering the realm of blue. With people such as these it is easy to be deceitful. It is easy to be mean to men whose pants stretch about the knees, whose pants are multicolored, who waggle for their wives so. Indeed, my false finger took pleasure in pointing and it was beyond me to simply say, “I’m going that way myself,” and to take them to the tower, to the sale of all its cheap replicas with which they might decorate Des Moines.

  THE NAME OF MY TELEVISION PROGRAM IS THE “ORIGINAL Amateur Hour”; does that ring a bell? You may have heard of another one by the same name. I start the show and end it with a rendition of “Mood Indigo,” for in the early fifties that was the tune that propelled me to fame. In the beginning I limited my “Amateur Hour” strictly to serious acts, to the playing of musical instruments, to singing and dancing, and to impersonators. Now, however, it is novelty that wins the day. A woman can win, as one did last month, because of an ability to lift her lower lip up over the bridge of her nose without the use of her hands.

  The “Amateur Hour” was very successful after the war. The thoroughness of our defeat was manifested in our new idea of entertainment, in the flavor of our music, and in our dress as well. I had extreme popularity for I was one of the few Japanese who spoke perfect English, and I knew the ways of America perfectly. In the early days of my “Amateur Hour” it was the impersonators of Americans who were the great successes. The country could be moved to laughter so easily then.

  Now I am alone in my projection room, watching and editing a tape of the program as it will be broadcast soon. The logo, TEDDY MAKI’S ORIGINAL AMATEUR HOUR, lifts and floats from view and I come onstage. I have my guitar with me and sit on a high stool all alone on the stainless-steel stage floor. I say everything first in English, then in Japanese, and when I make a joke the laughs of old dead audiences come out of their cans and echo across the room. I play my introductory tune, then stop abruptly to read from the English language cue card that bobs by the camera. I can’t read Japanese well, so when the joke is in that language it must be printed in Roman characters eight inches high. My old face bends to the work of the guitar, then looks deep into the camera’s eye. My phrasing is impeccable, the tune is my trademark. “Mood Indigo”—so perfectly mannered, so properly manicured for a man of such soft delivery as mine.

  There is a shift after a commercial to another camera angle and there I am again, this time ready to introduce the first guest. I stop the reel with the buttons on the arm of my chair and for a moment sit in the dark. I see only the red glow of the cigarette that I am holding, burning in front of my face. I wonder, do the people from Des Moines still ride the long subway under the city? When the next good citizen directs them correctly, will they try to find me? Will they wish for a confrontation? Or perhaps, exhausted and saddened in their hot hotel, they will turn on the television and there I’ll be, the enemy before them….

  The projector is on again, shifting from my old face and settling softly on a seven-year-old girl, her eyes wide and waiting for the first strains of her music. As she does her folk dance the camera lights on me and then back to the little girl in time to catch her stumbling on the edges of her new gown. I introduce some others, a woman who can contort, a man who can drink water through his nose, but the last guest turns out to be the winner for he is a farter and farters are in vogue this year. The man, gray like the subway riders, wears a Rotary pin in his lapel and stands erect. He claims to be able to play tunes with his gas and says he will demonstrate by letting the television audience hear the first two bars of my theme song. We laugh together and I stand up to the man who bends over neatly, his well-tailored ass round and polite toward the camera…. “Mood Indigo” is barely discernible in the mournful sound that he makes.

  When I turn the lights off again and listen, I can hear the rest of the show turning onto the pickup reel, slapping lightly at the back of the room. I edit every show as haphazardly as I’ve done this one, choosing the acts according to how distasteful they are. The farter rolls around behind me on the end of the celluloid, smiling out at the audience with each turn, and the little folk dancer must go back to the countryside and try to explain why she didn’t make it and the farter did. She would not understand, but I must push toward the collapse of culture in the remaining years that I have. It is not for me to let such little girls carry Japan any farther forward on her old wheels. Here in the dark with the white glow of the dying screen in my eyes, I can imagine as I will an “Amateur Hour” that once again takes the hearts of my adopted countrymen by storm. I have even thought that perhaps, if I could find my man from Des Moines again, I would recruit him, ask him to come on the air and sing the songs that I remember from my youth. Maybe he would sing of World War II, as if his Japanese audience, sitting softly on their zabuton, had somehow shared the same wartime music, held the same memories, carried the same victories in their aging hearts.

  But enough. I am a figure of waning prominence, it is true, but my name is permanently lodged
in the memories of nearly all my countrymen. Teddy Maki. Teddy Maki. The name has a certain ring to it, don’t you agree? The way those final vowels lift it so nicely into Japaneseness.

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD LIFE WAS WONDERFUL. IN THE CITY there was a small grocery store full of vegetables, fruit, and soft fresh fish. In the valley there was a farm, Maki’s farm. My uncle and father served each other well, for all of the children of both men worked the farm in late spring and summer and then spent the other seasons living above the grocery and going to school. For a while we had tried attending school in the valley near our home, but the long stares of the other children quickly sent my brothers and me toward the city and the tolerance of numbers. In the part of Los Angeles where my uncle kept his store it was possible to see kimonoed men and women and to hear only Japanese for days.

  It is interesting to remember, to try to recall, the first realization one has of being different. During my early years the color of people, the curve of an eye, the texture of hair, the height and prominence of a cheekbone were all invisible to me. But as I grew older they came into focus. We stayed together in our small and studious way while they fanned out across the world. I remember a time, before my father had saved enough money to buy his farm, when he made his living as a gardener, trimming and pruning the bushes of our neighbors. He would often take me with him on his jobs, letting me ride high atop the clippings in the back of his truck, and he would laugh at the half-understood insults that sometimes came his way. On Saturdays, during those years, our family practice was to go to town together and to shop and walk along the boarded streets as if they were our own. My mother’s dress, the way it hung so oddly long, made her legs look like cucumbers, and my father’s hat was always tight across his eyes. Why, I remember thinking, did they need to be so strange? The parents of other children were all belt buckles and boots, all muscular and tall, yet my father, even from the low vantage point of his son’s eyes, was clearly the smallest of men. What boy, under such circumstances, wouldn’t long for Los Angeles? To have an uncle such as mine seemed like a gift from the gods, and the longer I stayed with him, the farther I grew from my father, the more impossible it became to go back.

  Once, when I was in the tenth grade and had been staying with my uncle for three or four years, a girl, her very existence couched in blonds and blues, fell in love with me and chose several paths by which I might walk her home from school. The girl’s name was Trudy, Germanic and pure, and her hair had ringlets which would bounce when she walked so tall beside me. I can remember waiting in the alley behind her house, knee-deep in the grass and hidden by the dusk. When she could sneak away Trudy would run to me. In the alley behind her house she would remove her jacket and pull my willing head in between her giant breasts, in among the white walls of flesh that moved past my ears. She talked to me in a low voice, asking me if I liked it and what I wanted to do, but when she pulled my head back all I could do was gasp, panting for air, until she laughed and plugged my mouth with one of her huge nipples, making me dizzy and helpless once again.

  After the war came and when I wondered at the ironies in my life I often thought of Trudy. She would have given herself to the war effort, I knew, but would she have considered the Japanese dangerous? Remembering my thin body in her arms she would probably have thought us weak and said that it was the Germans who were the real worry, for the blood in their veins was in hers. Still, whenever I search my memory for signs of Los Angeles I find Trudy first, for she is that part of which, at the time, I was most proud. As I grew older I wanted less and less to spend my summers picking fruit and vegetables on my father’s farm. My uncle, with the city behind him, grew toward America so much faster than Father. His English was better and his humor was ruled, like my own, by what he heard on the radio, by what was new. Progressively each year, when school was out, the features of the farm became less appealing, my father’s form more foreign. When he, in his tired old truck, would stop at the store, and when we heard him talking to my uncle below, my cousins and I would look at each other or out the window at Los Angeles and yearn for the summer we’d miss, for the time when the parks and nearby beaches would be full, when young Japanese girls, as well as many others, would be waiting. Nevertheless, it took me until the summer after graduation to insist that I would no longer go, that I was educated now and would find my future in music, that I’d stay in Los Angeles and live above my uncle’s store like a real American boy.

  My cousins and brothers, all younger than myself, were packed into the pickup and gone, and suddenly the upper floor of my uncle’s store, with its outside staircase leading to the open city, was mine alone. Where was Trudy, I remember wondering, when I needed her most? Now that I was a graduate she was two years gone and had moved across the city to Hollywood. She’d called a time or two, late at night, but she couldn’t get past my uncle’s English, and the telephone was forever in his domain. So with the place to myself I really did turn my attention to my talent. A guitar sat across my lap hours each day and, true to the Japanese stereotype, I could copy anything. I listened to recordings of the Ellington band and in a while could play rhythm or do wild solos, note for note, with whoever was on the record. My uncle used to come quietly up and sit on the edge of one of the six beds in the room and listen…. “Teddy, Teddy,” he would sometimes say, smiling.

  In my high school class there were others who played, and on the Fourth of July we did a dance, our first job. It was a block party held at a hall near my uncle’s store, and we were beside ourselves with the success of it. My uncle marveled at the way we sounded so professional, and my cousins, home from the farm for the holiday, stood in stupid silence at the side of the room. They all said, “Is that Teddy up there? Is that our Teddy?”

  The leader of the band was a boy my age whose name was Jimmy Yamamoto. Jimmy was dark of mood and walked around the neighborhood with his hands deep in his pockets, a soulful look on his face. He was from a broken home, something nearly unheard-of among Japanese immigrants of that day, and it had been rumored throughout the high school that for a time Jimmy was in trouble with the law. He was a thin man, unmuscular and smooth, yet there was an aura about him which made the rest of us feel something akin to fear. He spoke so little, had no need of friends, seemed to know so much.

  Nevertheless, it was Jimmy Yamamoto’s ability at booking that meant everything to the band. When he spoke to people he kept his voice low, but there was something about his manner that made them listen. By the end of the summer, when my cousins came back, Jimmy had acquired the habit of standing around the store, silently peeling himself a peach, and staring at the steady customers. My uncle and I felt a little proud that he had adopted us, though we had no idea why.

  “He’s done more for the band than you have,” my uncle said one night, nodding toward Jimmy at the back of the store. “Why don’t you ask him to name it?”

  “It has a name already,” said Jimmy, not coming forward but somehow getting his voice all the way up front to us.

  “What do you think, Jimmy?” asked my uncle. “Some nice catchy name. Something that will bring pride to the neighborhood.”

  Jimmy stopped leaning on the long meat counter and walked slowly up to where my smiling uncle stood.

  “We’re going to call the band ‘Jimmy Yamamoto and the American Japs,’” he said.

  My uncle didn’t move. A smile lingered at the edges of his mouth. “What?” he said.

  “That’s what I want to call the band.”

  My uncle and I looked at each other. I knew Jimmy wasn’t joking though I’d never heard the name before, but my uncle wasn’t sure. “You want to call the band, ‘American Japs’?” he asked, his voice still uncommitted.

  Jimmy nodded, smiling slightly, but my uncle’s smile was gone. “You can’t do it,” he said.

  “It’s a good name,” said Jimmy. “I’ve given it a lot of thought and it is a name with distinction, one that will be difficult to forget.”

  “It is
a bad name,” said my uncle. “It calls attention to prejudice rather than pride. It will make the community ashamed rather than knit it together.”

  “It’s a good name,” said Jimmy.

  “A bad one,” said my uncle.

  The argument over the name of the band went on like this for days, my uncle furiously thinking up better names when Jimmy was gone, then hitting him with them when he came in sometime after dark.

  “Anything else,” he said, finally. “The community wants this band to work but not with that name. Anything else, Jimmy, and you can take the town by storm and with our blessing. What do you say? Choose another name?”

  Jimmy had his trumpet tucked under his arm. He carried in his hand a list of j obs stretching to Christmas. “Look at the bookings,” he told us. He left the list with my uncle and then walked away.

  “He’s a good boy,” my uncle told me. “What did I tell you? I knew it all the time.” He swung the booking list in my direction. “Trumpet players are always the leaders,” he said, remembering for a moment whose uncle he was. “He’s calling the band ‘Jimmy and the Ayjays’; what do you think? A reasonable compromise, don’t you agree?”

  The essence of Jimmy Yamamoto, so far as I could tell, was contained in the name that he first chose for our band. Jimmy Yamamoto and the American Japs. Irreverence. He was a man I was awed by and I could never understand why he wanted me for a friend. I was simple and standard for my age, while Jimmy was smart and cool. The only time I was his equal was when we played. His trumpet and my guitar were friends of the first order, and though the other members of the band came and went, it was always Jimmy and I who were steadfast.