I stepped up to the stocking counter and a pert Japanese girl said briskly, “You are not allowed to buy nylons, Major, unless you have your wife’s card.” There were a half dozen officers’ wives at the counter and they smiled indulgently. I said quietly, “I didn’t want nylons. I wondered if you could tell me where the weekies are.”
The American women started to laugh outright and I was grateful when the Japanese cleric said, with exaggerated politeness, “Over there, Major.” She pointed to the frame containing silk underwear while the women behind me laughed again.
It would have been simpler, I suppose, if I had cut my throat right then. Certainly the stares couldn’t have been any tougher or my confusion greater. But I walked as inconspicuously as I could to the lacy counter where, as if by prearrangement, the clerks waited on everybody else first. So as I stood there, trying to look at some indefinite spot on the wall but always hitting brassieres or girdles, I became aware of the conversation around me. It was intended for me to hear.
The first officer’s wife said, “I suppose many of our men get trapped by these girls.”
The second said, “I never see them fighting very hard to stay free.”
The first replied, “I can understand enlisted men and Japanese girls. Probably never knew any decent girls in America.” You could tell from the emphasis that unquestionably the speaker was decent.
The second agreed, “But what is impossible to understand is how an officer can degrade his uniform.”
Fortunately a clerk appeared and I said, “I’d like some weekies.”
The American wives broke into laughter and the clerk said, in the sing-song professional voice used by Japanese girls, “Small, medium or large?”
I gulped and asked, “What are weekies?” This caused a real flurry of laughter in which the Japanese girl joined.
She reached under the counter and produced an open carton containing a bunch of pink nylon panties. Grabbing one she dangled it in the air and asked, “Small, medium or large?”
Now more women gathered about the counter and there was an outburst of uncontrolled hilarity. I figured that nothing else could happen so I said, “I’ll take that one.”
At this there was hysterical laughter and the Japanese girl popped her hand over her mouth for a moment, then showed me the band of the panty she was holding. “Major, weekies are one for every day of the week.” And she showed me the embroidered word Thursday.
Frantically I indicated the entire pile and said, “I’ll take them all.”
But the clerk said, “These sample only. Small, medium or large?”
In despair I tried to think of how Katsumi looked. My mind was an aching blank and I pointed blindly at another Japanese clerk and said, “Her size, I guess.”
Behind me one of the women whispered sweetly, “He doesn’t remember how big she is!”
I looked around me at the faces of my countrywomen. They were hard and angular. They were the faces of women driven by outside forces. They looked like my successful and unhappy mother, or like powerful Mrs. Webster, or like the hurried, bereft faces you see on a city street anywhere in America at four-thirty any afternoon. They were efficient faces, faces well made up, faces showing determination, faces filled with a great unhappiness. They were the faces of women whose men had disappointed them. Possibly these harsh faces in the Osaka P.X. bore an unusual burden, for they were surrounded each day with cruel evidence that many American men preferred the softer, more human face of some Japanese girl like Katsumi Kelly.
As I paid the clerk I overheard the first officer’s wife say, “All little Jap girls who live with G.I.’s are crazy for anything that will make them seem more American.” The second turned to watch me go and added, “Including American men.” But as I left these tough, bitter women and walked through their circle of bleak and unforgiving faces I saw near the elevator an American girl who could have been Eileen Webster. She was beautiful and fresh and perfect and I almost cried aloud with pain to think that something had happened in American life to drive men like Mike Bailey and me away from such delectable girls.
BUDDHIST MONK, 1794: “This bell we received as a gift from the girls of Yoshiwara.”
Since I now knew that the secret of love is communication, I wish I could tell you exactly how Hana-ogi and I learned to talk in those exquisite days of early love, but I cannot recall how it was done. I do remember the evening when I tried to ask Hana-ogi what her name meant. I was barefooted and wearing the cheap blue-and-white kimono so common in Japan. I sat with my back against the fragile wall, my feet awkwardly out upon the tatami. I tried to convey the idea: “What does Hana-ogi mean?” but I did not succeed for the only two words she understood were what and her own name and she naturally suspected that I wanted to know what she wanted. So with tiny gestures and much pointing she indicated our small house of great love and said that all she wanted was to be here with me, that she wanted to hear me splashing in the tub, that she wanted to cook our meals over the glowing fire and that when she slid the paper doors shut in the evening she wanted to lock us in and the world out.
Quietly I sat against the wall and tucked my kimono tighter about me, relishing the delicate thoughts she had expressed for both of us. But then I tried again and this time she cried, “Ah, so desu-ka! The other Hana-ogi! Yes, Rroyd-san. I tell.”
It is here that I wish I could explain, but I can’t. Knowing almost nothing of my language this extraordinary girl nevertheless told me the following story, while I scrunched against the wall, my knees against my chin. Some of the passages she danced, some of them she pantomimed, and some she spoke in such expressive Japanese that I could fairly guess their meaning. And this is the story she told me:
Once upon a time in a small village near Tokyo there was a girl of great beauty. No one knows her name, but she was to become Hana-ogi, the most renowned prostitute in the entire history of Japan. As a child she lived with her widowed mother but it soon became apparent that her only possible future lay in the green houses of Yoshiwara, the ancient walled quarter by the marshes of Tokyo, where the unwanted young girls of farmer families were trained to become glowing and cultivated courtesans.
The old mother sold Hana-ogi when the rare child was seven, and for eight years this girl, always more beautiful, waited on the established courtesans of Ogi-ya, the green house which she would later make the most famous in all Japan. While she still wore her obi tied behind with its long ends signifying that she was virgin, the older girls taught her the skills of their trade and on her fifteenth birthday Hana-ogi discarded forever her real name, tied her obi in front, and took her first customer.
He was a young man from Odawara and he fell so desperately in love with Hana-ogi that he used to haunt the steps of Ogi-ya even when he had not the money to come inside. In perplexity he watched Hana-ogi become the most prized woman in Yoshiwara, and there were more than four thousand there at the time. She became famous for her poems, exquisite sighings of the heart and delicate memories of farm life when the early dew was on the rice fields. Priests in the temples sometimes told the worshippers of this saintly girl who took no thought of buying her own freedom from the green houses but who sent all her money home to her old mother. On holy days Hana-ogi went to a Buddhist temple that was known as the silent temple because it had no bell to record the great days and one evening Hana-ogi led a procession of thousands from the Yoshiwara bearing a bronze bell for this silent temple. It was her gift to the priests who were poorer than she.
Her fame became so great that visitors from China came to see this glory of Nihon. (My Hana-ogi rarely called her country Japan, never Nippon.) Poets wrote famous songs about her. Men close to the Shogun came to talk with her, and above all the painters of the passing world, the wood-block artists who lived along the edge of the Yoshiwara, made many portraits of her. Today, in the museum at Kyoto, you can see maybe three dozen famous paintings of Hana-ogi. When I see them, said my Hana-ogi, I think that this immortal woman is
speaking to me across the years and I take courage.
Now all the time that the great men of the Shogun’s palace and the world-famous painters were with Hana-ogi, the young lover from Odawara was watching, too, and one spring as the cherry blossoms were about to bloom he abducted Hana-ogi from the green houses. Where they hid themselves, these two happy people, no one knows. Whether they had children of their love no one can say. The years passed and bad luck fell on the house of Ogi-ya. No more did the rich men and the painters come there and no more did the priests of the nearby temples receive gifts from Hana-ogi. The portraits of this unforgettable girl were sold in great quantity, for everyone wished some memento of the loveliest woman Japan had ever produced.
Then one day there was a burst of glory. (Here the real Hana-ogi, my living grace, assumed a kind of cathedral beauty as she simulated an incredible procession.) Hana-ogi had come back to the green houses. She was thirty-four years old, more beautiful than she had ever been, more stately. Young girls walked before her, bearing flowers. A minister of state walked proudly behind her. Two men held umbrellas over her head, and she was dressed in an exquisite blue kimono with rich flowing robes of purple and the geta upon her feet were eleven inches high. Within five days the greatest artists of Japan had issued magnificent pictures of her joyous return, and we can see them still, the stately processions, the rare, wonderful woman coming back to her strange world.
It was the golden age! In those days there was singing and long talks and beautiful pictures and fine women and Nihon was never so joyous. And queen of the golden age was this country girl, Hana-ogi. She never explained her absence, she never told what had happened to her lover, but people guessed that like all Japanese men he had grown tired of her and had abused her. She lived at the Ogi-ya for many years and when she was too old to serve the visitors any longer she disappeared one day and no one ever again heard of Hana-ogi.
My living Hana-ogi folded her hands and sank upon the floor.
I was aghast at such an ending to so powerful a story and I cried, jumping to my feet, “No! No! What happened to Hana-ogi?”
It took some time for me to explain myself and then my beautiful Japanese narrator stared up at me in surprise and said, “In Nihon many girls. Every time new girls in Ogi-ya.”
I shouted that I knew that, but what had become of Hana-ogi? My adorable oval-face on the floor looked up in confusion and said, “Hana-ogi become old girl.” (She pulled down the lines of her face and indicated that a tooth was missing.) “She old, she go.”
“But where? Where did she go?”
My living Hana-ogi shrugged her shoulders. Then, sensing my disappointment, she formed the sign of a Buddhist temple and made believe to ring the bell which the ancient Hana-ogi had bought with her few coins and she indicated that no doubt this most glorious woman of Japanese history had been thrown out of the Ogi-ya when her teeth were broken and that she had possibly taken a position near the steps of the temple to beg alms.
There was an overwhelming ache upon my heart and I knelt upon the floor beside my Hana-ogi, who had fled her prison for her lover and whose future was as uncertain as her predecessor’s. There was an enormous bond of tenderness between us and that was the definable beginning of my determination never to surrender this rare woman, this tender and gracious miracle.
The consequences of such a determination I did not then foresee, but they were explained to me in part by an event which occurred three nights later. Like any husband and wife we ultimately felt even our perfect home confining and we wanted to go to a movie, but this was no easy trick. Hana-ogi knew that I might be arrested if I appeared on the streets with her and I knew that she would get into serious trouble if she were seen with me, so she left our paper doors first and in five minutes I followed and we met inside the darkened theater and held hands like any beginning lovers, congratulating ourselves on having evaded the chaperones. But our luck didn’t hold because this movie concerned the French Foreign Legion attacking a desert outpost and across the screen lumbered a long convoy of camels and Hana-ogi whispered, “Ships of the desert!” and I fell to laughing so hard that finally she clapped her hand over my mouth and cried, “Rroyd-san. Somebody see us.”
She was right. People did stare and two women recognized Hana-ogi as the great star at Takarazuka, so that when the lights went up these women choked the aisle and begged an autograph and soon Hana-ogi was surrounded by young girls.
We hurried out a side door and she fled alone down a back street and I ambled up the main street and when I got home I found her sitting dumb on the floor, her head bowed. She told me that she had always known that some time we would be found out and that she was not frightened. She would have to leave Takarazuka but she might find a job in pictures. Or there were certain theaters in Tokyo which might offer her work. She said, “I not scare. But Takarazuka I like very very much.” (She said, “I rike berry berry much.”)
I suggested at once that perhaps she should leave me and return to Takarazuka dormitory and endanger no longer a brilliant career but she kept staring at the floor and said quietly words which meant this: “I always planned to act till I was past forty, for I shall grow old slowly, and when my days as an actress were over I intended to take the place of Teruko-san, who was the greatest dancer Takarazuka ever had and who now teaches us the classical steps. But when I came here, Rroyd-san, I knew the danger I ran and if tomorrow were yesterday I would come here again.”
I think that’s what she intended to say and I was deeply troubled by the responsibility I had undertaken and by the resolve I had made never to desert her, but when she saw my silent fears she put her soft hand upon my face and said, “This time only time I be in love. I not stop our love one day before …” She made a great explosion with her hands as if the world had fallen in. She embraced me and we fell back upon the bed roll and I undressed her and her slim yellow body shone in the moonlight like a strand of gold that had fallen across my pillow, and she started to whimper and said, “I not speak true. Oh, Rroyd-san, I afraid. I not want to leave Takarazuka. I not want to sit by temple—begging—old woman—teeth broken away. But if I go you now, I never find courage to come back. I never love nobody no more. Never, never. (She pronounced it, “I nebber rub nobody, nebber, nebber.”) I not want to be alone, I want to sleep here, with you.” Beside my bead she placed her hard, tiny pillow stuffed with rice bran and we talked no more, for we were finding, as so many people must, that the ways of love are often terrifying when the day is done and one can no longer avoid studying the prospects of the future.
But next day she gave me proof of the courage she said she did not have. We were eating cold fish and rice when our doors slid back and disclosed beautiful Fumiko-san. A curious change came over Hana-ogi and it seemed that she was no longer in our little house but back on the stage at Takarazuka and I appreciated how desperately a part of her that theater was. Fumiko had come, she said, to warn us. An Osaka newspaperman had seen us at the movies and had informed the Supervisor, who had not reprimanded Hana-ogi that afternoon because he hoped she would come to her senses before he was forced to take official action. Fumiko-san implied that he had asked her to speak with the brilliant star who had so much to lose if she persisted in her indiscretion.
Hana-ogi was deeply disturbed by this news and I became aware that these two girls had long ago formed a team of mutual protection and that they bad always stood together as a team against the difficulties and defeats of their profession. Earlier Fumiko had found an American who bad imperiled her career by kissing her in public and Hana-ogi had protested. Now it was Fumiko’s turn to sound the warning. The two exquisite girls talked for a long time in Japanese and I judged they were assessing the various risks in the situation but Fumiko’s arguments did not prevail and she left with tears in her eyes. When she had closed the doors Hana-ogi said simply, “I stay.”
I discussed with her the possible results of this choice, even at times coming close to arguing on Fumiko’s
side, so that Hana-ogi stopped short, stood facing me, and demanded, “More better I go?” When I cried no and kissed her, she closed the discussion by saying, “I stay.”
There was a firmness about her mouth when she said this and I was surprised, for I had come to look upon her as the radiant symbol of all that was best in the Japanese woman: the patient accepter, the tender companion, the rich lover, but when Hana-ogi displayed her iron will I reflected that throughout the generations of Japanese women there had also been endlessly upon them this necessity to be firm, not to cry, not to show pain. They had to do a man’s work, they had to bear cruel privations, yet they remained the most feminine women in the world. Now that I knew them, these strange Japanese women, I saw the contradiction everywhere. Katsumi was having a baby when she hadn’t the slightest idea how it would be cared for or under what flag, yet it was she who bolstered up the spirits of her family. Hana-ogi had placed her career in jeopardy for a few months in a tiny house along a canal with a man who could never marry her. The young girls I saw with their American soldiers, the little women bent double carrying bricks and mortar to the ninth story of a new building, the old women in rags who pulled plows better than horses, and the young wives with three children, one at breast, one strapped on the back, one toddling at her heels. I concluded that no man could comprehend women until he had known the women of Japan with their unbelievable combination of unremitting work, endless suffering and boundless warmth—just as I could never have known even the outlines of love had I not lived in a little house where I sometimes drew back the covers of my bed upon the floor to see there the slim golden body of the perpetual woman. I now understood why ten thousand American soldiers had braved the fury of their commanders and their country to marry such women. I understood why there were supposed to be many thousands of American-Japanese babies in the islands. I understood why perhaps a half million American men had wandered down the narrow alleys to find the little houses and the great love.
Sayonara: A Novel Page 13
