Sayonara: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  LT. COL. CALHOUN CRAFORD: “You goddamned nigger-lover.”

  On this night I could not sleep. I was agitated by Hana-ogi’s problem although as events turned out, I should have been concerned about my own. I was aware that I had found that one woman whose mere presence beside me in the dark night made me both complete and courageous. Toward four in the morning I hammered my pillow in confusion and Hana-ogi wakened and felt my forehead and said, “Rroyd-san, you sick!” And she leaped up from our bed and tended me as if I were a child and I hadn’t the fortitude to tell her that I was in a trembling fever because her picture of an old woman huddling beside a Buddhist temple had made me nightmarish.

  She cooled my head and wrapped dry sheets about us and I went to sleep assured that somehow we would escape from the inevitable consequences of our acts. But when I woke I was shivering again, not from fever but from outrage. For Lt.Col. Calhoun Craford, a paunchy red-faced man who hated every human being in the world except certain Methodists from his corner of a hill county in Georgia, stood over our bed. His round florid face looked like a decaying pumpkin as he stared down at us.

  “Well,” he drawled infuriatingly. “You doin’ mighty fine down there, Major.” He kicked at the bed roll and Hana-ogi drew a sheet about her neck. Then Lt.Col. Craford got purple in the face and shouted, “You get to hell up here, Major Gruver. The Giniral’s gonna hear about this.” He muscled his way about our tiny room, knocking things over, and I leaped from bed, but before I could do anything he threw my pants in my face and grunted, “Fine spectacle you are. A giniral’s son, shackin’ up with a nigger.”

  With an almost premonitory sense I recalled Joe Kelly’s violent threat one night when he had come home beat: “Some day I’ll kill that fat bastard.” I felt that if Lt.Col. Craford said one more thing in that room I’d beat Kelly to the job. I think the colonel sensed this, for he looked contemptuously at Hana-ogi huddled beneath the sheet and stalked through the paper doors. They trembled as he passed.

  When Lt.Col. Craford showed me in to General Webster’s office in Kobe the old man minced no words. “What in hell does this mean, Lloyd!” He was much more profane than I can repeat and he had all the details. “A fine, clean, upstanding man like you! The son of a general in the United States Army. Shacking up with some cheap …”

  I stood there and took it. He never mentioned Eileen, but it was obvious that he was bawling me out on her behalf. She had been held up to public ridicule. His wife had been made to look silly. And I had outraged the military decencies.

  He shouted, “Did you sign that paper we sent you acknowledging my order about public displays of affection with indigenous personnel?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you know what’s in the order?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But you defied the order?”

  “No, sir.”

  He exploded. “What in hell do you mean, no sir?”

  “I’ve never been guilty of public affection with a Japanese girl.”

  Lt.Col. Craford stepped forward and said, “One of my men saw them in the movies the other night. He followed them along the back streets. They were holding hands,” he added contemptuously.

  “You’re a liar!” I shouted.

  General Webster rapped on the desk. “You be still, Gruver. This is serious business. Now Craford, what actually happened?”

  The repugnant colonel coughed, pointed at me with disgust and said, “He flagrantly broke the order, Geniral. Made love on the streets with a Jap girl. Set up house-keepin’ with her. We’ve checked her record. A cheap whore.”

  “You …” I sprang from my position at attention and rushed at Craford. General Webster astonished me by reaching out and shoving me back.

  “So you say you weren’t seen with her?”

  “That’s what I do say, General Webster,” I cried.

  He became quite angry and asked in a low voice, “What do you call living together? Don’t you call flagrant cohabitation a public display of affection?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “Not in terms of your order. We were never seen on the streets.”

  The general lost his composure and said harshly, “I’m going to court-martial you, young man. You’ve broken every law of decency. You’re under house arrest. Understand what that means?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Watch him, Craford. If he does anything, throw him in the stockade.”

  “I will, sir,” Craford wheezed.

  “Furthermore,” the general said, “I’ve cabled your father.”

  I gulped and he saw that that one had hurt, so I recovered by saying, “All right, sir, but I wish you hadn’t.”

  “I wish you hadn’t made an ass of yourself. Craford, take him under guard to his quarters.”

  Lt.Col. Craford enjoyed humiliating me, especially since I was the son of a four-star general, and he made quite a flourish of depositing me in my informal prison. He marched me into the lobby of the Marine Barracks, up the short flight of steps leading to the elevators, and down the hall past all the open doors. “This is it, nigger-lover,” he growled.

  As soon as he was gone I called the motor pool to see if I could get hold of Joe Kelly. After the fifth call I made contact and he whispered, “Can’t talk, Ace, I’ll be over.” He arrived around noon that morning and slumped into a chair, “Jeez, Ace, the fat’s in the fire.”

  “What happened?”

  “Old Blubber-gut sent a bunch of strong-arm boys to search your house. They photographed everything. I hope you didn’t have any Air Force papers you shouldn’t have. Anyway, they wrecked the joint and boarded it up for good.”

  “What happened to Hana-ogi?”

  “The neighbors say she slipped out right after you were arrested. Katsumi watched Blubber-gut’s men tear up the house. Then she hurried out to Takarazuka with the news but Hana-ogi never batted an eye.”

  “How can people take things so calmly?” I cried.

  “You learn,” Joe explained. “When you’re a Japanese woman or an enlisted man, you learn.”

  It was that evening that my real torment began, for when the performance of Swing Butterfly ended I looked down from my prison and saw graceful Hana-ogi, moving like a goddess down the flower walk and across the Bitchi-bashi and through the vegetable stalls and onto the path that led to the dormitory and long after she had disappeared I could see the image of that slim and graceful girl disappearing into the shadows—and I became more determined than ever that I must not lose her.

  On the third evening after my house arrest began, I was sitting before the dismal meal of Marine food brought to my room by the waiter, when Mike Bailey opened my door softly, cased the joint like a detective, then motioned down the hall. In men’s clothes, looking like a would-be janitor, Hana-ogi slipped in to see me. Mike made a hasty sign of benediction and tiptoed out.

  I cannot describe how joyous it was to see Hana-ogi in my room. Not only had I been tortured by my longing to have her beside me in the bed roll but—as I realized now—I was even more hungry to hear her soft voice chattering of the day’s events and I believe my heart actually grew bigger as she told me of the little things: “Fumiko-san say I crazy. When Colonel Craford smash house two kimonos rost.”

  “What do you mean, rost?”

  “Men take. I no find.”

  I became so incensed over the lost kimonos that I realized that I had reached a new meaning of the word love. I was engaged in a heavenly contest with Hana-ogi to see which of us could give most to the other and this experience of surrendering my desires to another human being was new to me and frightening in its implications. I was already thinking vaguely about the future and a perplexing problem popped out as a blunt question: “Hana-ogi, how old are you?”

  She counted thirty on her fingers and I felt as if a basket of icicles had been dumped over me, for a woman of thirty and a man twenty-eight seemed abnormal. I had known several officers married to women older than they and it always
turned out badly. I was suddenly glum till I remembered that a Japanese girl is considered to be one year old at birth so we figured out that Hana-ogi was really only twenty-nine and that furthermore during eight months of each year we would be the same age. It was extraordinary how much more beautiful she seemed at twenty-nine than she had been at thirty.

  Toward morning she dressed and left my room, asking, “You have dinner tonight—Makino’s?”

  I explained what house arrest meant and said that I had pledged my honor as an officer. She said simply, “I have pledge my honor too. I have pledge the honor of my mother and the food of my two sisters.” Then she kissed me and left.

  So that night I put my honor way down in the bottom drawer among my socks and crept through the alleys to Makino’s and as I climbed the stairs to the little room where I had first seen Hana-ogi my heart beat like the throbbing of an airplane engine and I thought, “God, that I should have become so involved,” but when I got there Hana-ogi in green skirt and brown blouse was waiting for me. Old Makino made us tempura and to my surprise I found I was getting to enjoy Japanese food. We talked of many things and Hana-ogi said that soon Swing Butterfly (she always called it Butterfry) would close in Takarazuka. Maybe it would go to Tokyo. The news was terrifying and I hadn’t the courage to discuss what it might mean to us but she said, “I no go Tokyo. I stay here and wait for you.”

  It was incredible to me that she would give up Takarazuka and I said, “Hana-ogi, you can’t.”

  Before she could reply Makino came running in and cried, “M.P.’s!” Ashamed of myself I crowded into a cupboard and heard the heavy tread of Lt.Col. Craford’s polished boots and in that moment I understood what an ugly thing fear was and why we had fought the last war against the Germans: we were fighting the tread of heavy boots. And then like the wind on a stormy day I completely changed and felt disgusted with myself, an Air Force officer breaking my word, hiding in a closet with a Japanese girl who should have hated me. It was the low spot of my life and when Lt.Col. Craford stamped down the stairs I stepped out of the closet and said, “Hana-ogi, I’ve got to go back.”

  She looked at me closely and asked, “When M.P. come …” She pointed at the closet and asked, “You sorry?” She could not find the right word for ashamed but she did bring a blush to her cheeks and she did act out my shame.

  “Yes,” I said. “I gave my word.” But as I turned to go a flood of terrible longing overtook me and I grasped her face in my hands and cried, “Don’t go to Tokyo, Hana-ogi. Wait here. I cannot let you go.”

  Her slim, straight body grew limp and she whispered to me in Japanese, something which meant, “Not Takarazuka or my mother could take me away.”

  I kissed her hands as I had done that first night. There were a hundred things I wanted to say, but I was choked with confusion. I walked boldly down the stairs, marched openly along the street to the Marine Barracks. Hana-ogi, aware of the deep shame I had felt in the closet and sharing it with me, marched just as brazenly beside me in her distinctive Takarazuka costume and kissed me good-bye at the barracks. “Rroyd-san,” she said softly, “I love you takusan much.”

  GENERAL GRUVER: “Say, do you think the Japanese can be trusted after we go home?”

  When I entered the barracks, my father and General Webster were waiting. My father looked down the street at Hana-ogi walking bravely back to the dormitory and said, “Pretty girl. Almost pretty enough to justify an officer’s breaking his word.”

  General Webster started to bluster but Father cut him short. He took us into the manager’s office and let me have it.

  My father is no puling one-star general ordered about by his wife. He said, “You idiot. You poor, bewildered idiot.”

  I have never heard my father swear. He chews gum when he’s mad and makes the muscles in his jaw stand out and right now he looked as if he could beat me up. I stood at attention and looked straight ahead.

  “What are you gonna do?” he asked contemptuously. “Dishonor your uniform, humiliate your friends?” He walked around me then snorted. “Some officer!”

  General Webster said, “You’ve broken your word of honor and you’re going to be court-martialed.”

  Father cut in and asked, “Well, what are you gonna do?”

  I said firmly, “As soon as I get out of here I’m finding another house.”

  General Webster gasped and Father stormed. “That you won’t do! There’s a night plane to Korea. Get on it. I had some orders cut. Take them and get out.”

  I said, “All right, and when I come back it’ll be to Hana-ogi.”

  The effect of this strange name on my father was startling. Apparently he was unable to accept the fact that Japanese girls actually had names and that American officers might love those alien names and the curious creatures to whom they belonged. He shouted, “Ruin yourself over some common whore!”

  I had taken a lot these last few days and I’d had enough. I hauled back my right fist and let my father have one below the left ear. He staggered back, got his footing and came at me, but General Webster separated us. We were all trembling and furious but Webster spoke first: “By God, you’ve struck a …”

  “Get out of here, Webster,” my father snapped. “I’ll handle this.”

  Frightened and dismayed, General Webster retreated and while we watched him go, I had a moment to steel myself for the brawl I knew must follow. Four times in my father’s career he had dragged colleagues into a boxing ring where in the anonymity of shorts he had massacred them. Before our fight began I thought in a flash of how strange it was that I had belted my father for saying far less than what Lt.Col. Craford had said and I experienced a dizzy sensation that when he turned back to face me I would see my enemy and my friend.

  I shook the dizziness away and cocked my fists, but when he turned he was grinning and chomping his gum. “I take it she’s not a prostitute,” he laughed.

  I started to say, “Sir, this girl …” but he interrupted me and pulled me into a chair beside him and asked, “Son, what’s this all about?”

  Again I started to explain but he said, “I flew out here from the Presidio to knock some sense into you. But you’re not in the market for sense, are you?”

  I said, “I don’t want any lectures.”

  He laughed and chewed his gum and said, “Son, I wouldn’t respect you if you hadn’t swung on me. She seemed right pretty and you say she isn’t a tramp?”

  I told him who she was and he said, “By heavens, Mark Webster must have dropped his drawers when he heard about you having a house. He drove me in to see it. Say, they don’t build very big houses in Japan, do they? Say, tell me how you promoted a house?”

  I started to tell him about Katsumi and Joe but he said, “Lord knows, son, I hoped you would marry Eileen Webster. Good family, staunch military background. Mother’s a bit of a bore but in service you can always get away from her. Say, have you heard the news that really galls Webster? His daughter’s serious about a real-estate salesman from Seattle. Major, I think. Webster’s furious and is rotating the fellow back to the States.”

  He sized me up carefully, chewing his gum, and said, “Y’know, son, if you still wanted Eileen you could have her. Wait a minute! Don’t underestimate that kind of marriage. Right now you’re all boiled up about sex, but a man lives a long life after that fire goes down. Then you appreciate having a woman you can talk to, some one who knows military life. What do you and Madame Butterfly talk about?”

  He waited for me to speak but as soon as I started he said, “Let’s get back to Eileen. You ever know any officers married to women who disliked the military? Sad lot. Sad business. Your mother and I haven’t been what you might call romantic lovers …” He slapped his leg and burst into real laughter. “Could you imagine your mother in a shack along a canal! But anyway we’ve always been able to talk. We want the same things. We want the same things for you, Lloyd.”

  He paused and I thought I was back in St. Leonard’s on anothe
r occasion like this. My father was saying, “Your mother and I want the same things for you, Lloyd,” but even then I knew for a certainty that Mother had never wanted those things for me and I had the strange feeling that if she were in Japan right now—if she knew the whole story—she would be on my side and not Father’s.

  He said, “I suppose you’ve figured what your present course would mean to things like life plans.”

  “What do you mean, present course?”

  “Well, getting married to a Japanese girl.”

  “Married!”

  “Sure, married.” He chewed his gum real fast and then said, “You mean you haven’t thought about marriage? You mean you think you’re the smartest guy on earth. Can shack up with a girl, have children even, and never think of marriage.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of marriage,” I said weakly.

  “I know you weren’t,” he roared. From the other room General Webster stuck his head through the door and asked nervously, “Everything all right?”

  “Get out of here,” my father commanded, and I thought how rarely men like him could respect men like Webster or men like the one I seemed on the verge of becoming. “Squaw man,” the Army would have called me in the old days. He walked up and down the room flexing his head muscles and then turned sharply, speaking in machine-gunlike tones.

  “Don’t you see what’s gonna happen, son? You’re gonna work yourself into a box. You’ll be unable to find a solution. So suddenly you hit on marriage! You’ll marry the girl and that’ll make everything just dandy. Good God, son! You’re twenty-eight years old. Why didn’t you marry Eileen that summer in San Antonio?”