The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  “Are you a Jew?” asked Yoshiko. It was perhaps not the happiest opening gambit at dinner with a perfect stranger who was producing her next film. I froze. Up shot his right eyebrow again. He pursed his lips and ran his right hand down his silk tie, as though to smooth away any creases. “Madam, may I enquire why you ask?” I was beginning to have second thoughts about my role as the cultural mediator.

  “Oh,” said Yoshiko, childlike in her undisguised joy at dining with such an eminent man, “I thought all producers in Hollywood were Jews. You know, I used to know many Jews in China. They were such cultured people, and so clever. I love Jewish culture: Mozart, Einstein, President Roosevelt, George Cukor . . .”

  “That’s quite a formidable group,” Adler said, “but I rather think some of them would be surprised to be included in that company. As for myself, since you kindly asked, my father became a Lutheran in Vienna around the turn of the century.”

  “Vienna!” cried Yoshiko. “I knew it. Jewish culture, in music, in theater, wonderful.”

  “Madam,” said Adler, who seemed quite ready to move on to another topic, “I have been fortunate enough to meet many cultured people, some from Vienna, some Jewish. But Jewish culture is not something I recognize, except of course in the synagogue.”

  “There used to be a beautiful synagogue in Harbin,” said Yoshiko. And that, to my intense relief, rather exhausted the subject.

  Adler in a display of his perfect manners took Yoshiko’s innocent remarks with good humor. I was thankful that much of the rest of the dinner conversation revolved around her role in the movie. She had to feel free, Adler told her, to make comments if the lines didn’t sound correct. It was most important to get the cultural details absolutely right. Her role was a pivotal one, since she had the only major Japanese part in the film. There was one other Japanese, the good Tokyo cop, to be played by Sessue Hayakawa. But Mariko was the more important role, for she was at the very center of the story.

  The tale of betrayals and double betrayals had a typical B-movie plot. It opens with a botched heist in Tokyo by a gang of discharged GIs. A fellow named Webber is shot by one of his own gang. Just before he dies, he tells the Japanese cop (Hayakawa) that he has a Japanese wife, Mariko. He also discloses that his best pal, a convict named Eddie Spanier, will come to Japan as soon as they let him out of jail in the States. Instead of the real Spanier, however, a military cop (Robert Stack), pretending to be Spanier, joins the gang, and takes Mariko on as his “kimono girl” for cover. Sandy, the gang boss (Robert Ryan), likes the new guy. Unfortunately, this makes Sandy’s “number one boy,” a young punk named Griff, jealous. Mariko falls in love with Eddie. Eddie tells her he isn’t who she thinks he is, and that he’s after the gang that killed her husband. Sandy hears of the double-cross. He tries to kill Eddie. Eddie kills Sandy instead, in an amusement park. Eddie and Mariko walk off, arm-in-arm, down the Ginza.

  Simple enough. But there was trouble even before the shooting began. Hayakawa, arriving at Haneda from Hollywood dressed in an absurdly lavish kimono, like a Kabuki actor a hundred years ago, was furious because the Japanese press wasn’t there to meet him, whereas Robert Ryan merited a full press conference. Off he went to his hotel in high dudgeon. The star’s mood didn’t improve when he found out that he had to share a studio dressing room with three other actors, instead of having one to himself. “I’m a Hollywood star,” he protested, “and I deserve respect!” Sam Fuller told him to talk to the studio people, and they told him to talk to me. Since there was nothing I could do, he went back to the studio people, who went back to Sam Fuller, who told Hayakawa that he was indeed a major star, and he would talk to the studio people, et cetera. Hayakawa finally got a room to himself.

  The set on the first day of shooting was supposed to be Mariko’s house in Tokyo. Stuart Weiss, the set designer, had come up with something that bore very little resemblance to a Japanese room. It looked more like a lavish restaurant in Chinatown, with odd red lanterns and other bits of Oriental frippery. The Japanese set builders were too polite to say anything. If this is what the foreigners wanted, this is what they would get. Yoshiko told Fuller that the set looked very strange. Fuller replied that it looked just fine to him. “Shirley,” he said, “don’t you worry your pretty little head over these details. This picture has to play in Peoria, not Yokohama.”

  “But Mr. Adler said . . .”

  “I don’t give a damn what Mr. Adler said. He isn’t making the movie. I am. And I say it’s fine.”

  To say that Yoshiko and Bob Stack didn’t warm to one another would be putting it mildly. She couldn’t stand him. I never quite figured out why. He was a bit on the dull side, to be sure, talking endlessly about his mother back in L.A. Although he had made a splash earlier in his career as the first man to kiss Deanna Durbin on screen, he was not the romantic type. Yoshiko liked men to make a fuss over her. Bob Ryan certainly did. She complained to me that Bob had quite fallen in love with her, which didn’t seem to overly bother her. Quite the contrary, I should say. In fact, Bob, a strict Catholic, and a married man, was not known as a Lothario. But he followed Yoshiko about like a dog in heat. I once caught him banging on her dressing room door, shouting: “But Shirley, I love you!” It was all most unseemly.

  But Yoshiko was a pro. I watched her shoot the famous scene with Stack in the Chinese restaurant that was supposed to be her apartment. He was on his stomach, dressed in a kind of funereal black kimono, his shoulders bared, as she, in a bright red kimono, more appropriate for a bar hostess than a demure young woman, kneaded his spine. “Where did you learn how to do that?” he purrs.

  Yoshiko: “In Japan, every girl learn from early age how to please the man.”

  Stack: “So what is it in a man that attracts a Japanese woman? Broad shoulders? Muscles?”

  Yoshiko: “Nooo . . .”

  Stack: “So what makes a Japanese woman want to . . . ?” (Yoshiko whispers something in his ear) “What?”

  Yoshiko: “His eyebrows. In Japan, woman finds eyebrows so romantic.”

  Stack: “That’s traditional, too, eh?”

  No wonder Yoshiko found her Hollywood debut rather a disappointment.

  23

  IT WAS DURING a rare break in the shooting, between locations, on a Saturday morning, that the phone rang in my apartment in Azabu. “Hellooo,” said a reedy voice, clearly American, probably Southern, almost certainly female. “How are you, Sid? It’s meee.” Who? “Meee, Truman.” Funny name for a girl, I thought. I had no idea who I was talking to. Who? “Ooh, Sid,” came the reply. “Truman, Truman Capote. Parker gave me your number. I thought you might be my Cicerone in this garden of vice, or should I say my Mephistopheles?”

  Of course I had heard of Truman Capote. I had actually read his Other Voices, Other Rooms. I admired his writing, but I had never made his acquaintance, and certainly hadn’t expected a phone call. I must admit that the voice threw me. Still, I would soon get used to it, since for the next eight days, he called me at all hours; where to buy drugs for his migraine, where to have lunch, where to drink cocktails, or buy American magazines or a pair of socks. But mostly he called to tell me he was bored: “Bored, bored, bored, darling. Is there really nowhere in this ugly town where a boy can have some fun?” I told him about the attractions of Asakusa and Ueno. But he showed no interest.

  Truman had come to Tokyo on an assignment from The New Yorker, to write a profile of Marlon Brando, who was shooting a movie with Josh Logan in Kyoto. Unfortunately, Logan had banned journalists from the set, and told Brando to reject all requests for interviews. He knew just what a literary bitch like Truman might make of his Japanese venture. So Truman chose to be cooped up like a fuming prisoner in his room at the Imperial (“A retirement home in Akron, Ohio, my dear”). If he couldn’t have his interview with Brando, he would sulk: “Hell isn’t hot enough for that old Jewish queen Logan.”

  I decided that the only way to snap him out of this mood, which wasn’t doing anyone any g
ood, was to make sure he found some romance. So I took him on a little tour. He was mildly amused by the drag queens at Hanazono Shrine, but dismissed the boys in the blue line bars, even though some of the boys certainly showed an interest in him. They couldn’t get enough of his light blond hair, which they stroked as though he were a Siamese cat. On and on we went, from bar to bar, ending up in a place called Bokushin no Gogo, Japanese for L’Après-midi d’un faune. A photograph of Clark Gable gazed at us from the wall. The furniture was a kind of fake French Empire style, made of cheap wood painted gold. Truman held forth amusingly on grisly murders in the American South. Whenever I pointed out some promising Japanese youth, he turned away after a perfunctory glance and said: “Too small.” What did he mean, too small? “Too small down there.” How did he know? He held up his thumb, as if to hitch a ride: “Just look at their thumbs, honey. It never fails.”

  At two o’-clock in the morning, groggy from too many watered-down whiskeys, no longer amused by the murder stories, tired of trying to pimp for the great young American novelist, I said to him: “Is there really nobody you like?”

  “Yes, there is,” he mewed.

  “Thank God for that. Who?”

  He glanced at me slyly from the corner of his eye: “You.”

  Time to go home, I thought, though I managed to extricate myself a little more politely.

  I thought I would never hear from Truman again, after my attempt to find him some romance ended in disappointment, and more sulking on his part. But two days later, the phone rang just as I was trying to write my weekly movie review. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon. The crows were making a terrible noise outside my window. Not only was there no trace of his earlier funk, he sounded positively delirious: “Honey, I’m in heaven!” I asked him where he was. “In heaven. Why didn’t you tell me about this place, Asakusa! All the pretty things you can buy around the temple . . .” But I had mentioned Asakusa to him. “No, you did not. I had to find it all on my own.”

  As with much of what Truman said, this turned out to be a falsehood. Sam Fuller had invited him to come and watch the last scene, of Bob Stack shooting Bob Ryan in an amusement park on the roof of an Asakusa department store—gunshots and merry-go-rounds, carnival music and murder, the kind of thing Orson Welles did so well in The Lady from Shanghai. Bored with waiting for the action to start, Truman had gone wandering around the Kannon Temple market, with its rows of little stalls filled with touristy gewgaws. “Oh, those lovely artificial flowers, those gorgeous gold Buddhas, those adorable dwarf trees . . . And I bought myself a beautiful silk kimono, jade green, with the most marvelous chrysanthemums in gold thread. It was just as I remember it from Aunt Marie’s parlor in Alabama. You know, as a boy, I would spend hours with her Oriental menagerie, imagining I was in Japan. Now I know it’s all true. Oh, Sid, I wish you could have been there.”

  24

  EVERYTHING SEEMED TO be going so well with Isamu’s project in Hiroshima. While Yoshiko was out filming, Isamu worked on his designs from morning till night, alone in his cave, like a hermit monk possessed by a vision that had to be realized at all costs. When he emerged from his cave in the evenings, all he wanted to do was talk to Nambetsu about atonement, historical memory, the aesthetics of war, and other lofty subjects. Yoshiko, exhausted from long days in the studio, was a silent witness to these intellectual exchanges. Once she actually fell asleep at Nambetsu’s table, her head falling into one of his exquisite bowls filled with a particularly choice selection of raw sea urchins. Nambetsu was beside himself. Isamu, to placate his mentor, immediately shook his wife awake and told her to apologize for her appalling manners. She broke down in sobs, rushed into the night, lost her footing in the dark, and fell into a rice paddy, yelping with pain as she twisted her ankle. (If you look very carefully in the scene of House of Bamboo where she meets Bob Stack for the first time, you can see a flesh-colored supporting bandage on her right leg.) The men continued to drink saké and discuss art until well past midnight.

  Isamu’s design for the Peace Memorial, to be called the Arch of Peace, consisted of a squat dome, like a huge Haniwa funeral ornament, with an underground vault. This somber space, Isamu explained to me, was meant to be a kind of traditional tea ceremony room, where people could reflect on matters of life and death. Inside would be a black granite slab engraved with the names of all the Japanese victims of the atom bomb. There were victims who were not Japanese, of course, but it was decided by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Committee that for the sake of “public coherence” (I think I have the translation right) they would not be included. This was no fault of Isamu’s. Thousands of Koreans, many of them slave workers, had died from the bomb, instantly if they were lucky, or slowly, in terrible pain, if they were not. When representatives of the Japanese-Korean community protested some years later about the exclusion of Korean victims, there was a typical municipal row, with demonstrations, and harsh words in the press. In the end Koreans were permitted to build their own memorial just outside the borders of Peace Park.

  But this was not yet an issue when Isamu, after many months’ work, for which he wasn’t receiving a dime, submitted his plans to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Committee, consisting of various notables from the government and the architectural profession. Tange had praised Isamu’s plans for their boldness and clarity. Both men were itching for the construction to start. Surely nothing could go wrong now. But something did, of course, go wrong. A formal letter from the committee was passed on to Tange, who had to break the news to Isamu. His design had been turned down, because the proposal, in the words of the gentlemen of the committee, “although no doubt admirably suited to foreign countries, such as the United States, was not appropriate for Japan.” As the letter explained, such a delicate project could only be entrusted to an artist “who understands Japanese feelings.”

  Isamu was devastated, but much too proud to say anything in public. Privately, I could see his earlier zeal to change Japan slowly turning sour. This might explain the notorious plastic shoe incident, notorious that is among those of us who found ourselves entangled in the life of Yoshiko. I happened to be there, in the Land of Dreams, when the actual incident occurred. It was one of those sultry summer evenings, when you work up a sweat just sitting still. Isamu and I were drinking cold saké from wooden cups. Yoshiko was still out filming somewhere. She had left around five-thirty in the morning, in the studio Packard. She rarely returned before nine or ten at night.

  Isamu was in one of his intense moods, brooding over the lack of understanding in Japan of his art. First he was hailed as a savior, the famous American artist who had come all the way from New York to teach the Japanese how to be modern. Now they resented it when he tried to convince them that their own tradition was actually closer to the modern spirit than all their third-rate imitations of Western trends. “I’m not in the slightest bit interested in exoticism,” he said, his dark eyes burning with the passion of his conviction. “I’m just telling them to look into their own souls. You know, the problem with the Japanese is that they’re the only ones who won’t learn from Japan.”

  The last rays of the sun were painting the landscape pink, as though the rice paddies were covered in cherry blossoms. A small speck of white in the distance was moving slowly in our direction. The speck turned out to be Yoshiko’s Packard. She sighed with relief as she stepped onto the veranda after taking off a pair of light blue plastic sandals: “Home at last. It’s been such a long day. I’m exhausted. My feet have been killing me. Is there any cold barley tea?” Isamu stared at her feet and didn’t reply. He didn’t even respond to her greeting. I assumed he was still sunk in his thoughts about Japanese art.

  Yoshiko neatly arranged her plastic sandals at the entrance to the house, and was about to fetch the tea from the kitchen herself. I offered to help her. No need, she said. Then something snapped in Isamu’s mind, like a spring that had been coiled too tightly: “Oi!” he shouted at Y
oshiko. “Come back here!” First I’m getting some tea, she said. “Come back here right now!” he screamed. I had never seen Isamu in such a rage. It was as if he were mimicking, in exaggerated fashion, Nambetsu’s tantrums.

  Yoshiko, looking pale and flustered, stepped back onto the veranda: “What?”

  He answered in English: “What the fuck do you think you’re wearing?”

  “What do you mean? My usual summer kimono. The one you like. What’s wrong with it?” Despite her visible exhaustion, she smiled, still eager to please.

  “I mean this junk!” Isamu stooped to pick up the plastic sandals and tossed them in a high arc far away into the rice paddy, where they slowly sank into the mud. “How dare you come into this house wearing this vulgar plastic rubbish! Have you no taste at all? It’s an abomination, a desecration! An attack on everything I’m trying to accomplish in this wretched country of yours.”

  First she looked bewildered, then she was speechless, and finally it was Yoshiko’s turn to be furious. “Oh, so now it’s just my country, is it? What about your boasts of being so Japanese? If you’re just a foreigner, what do you care about my sandals? Plastic is American, no? Well, let me show you something . . .” She took a pair of traditional Japanese straw sandals out of her bag; they were covered in splotches of red. “I’ve worn these to please you, Mr. Japanese Tradition. Well, look what they did to my feet!” She peeled off a Band-Aid from the side of her left foot and showed us a nasty gash with pus oozing at the edges. “Unlike you, I am Japanese. Why should I have to ruin my feet to prove it? I’ll tell you one thing, you’re just a typical American, you’ll never understand our feelings.”