“High-class Johnnie Walker bottle. Cheap blue bottle.”
“Yes.”
“Wake up, what’s the difference?”
“Smooth and clear. Blue and crude.”
Blue glass recycled from old sake bottles, Harry thought. Glass removed too fast from the blowpipe, a fact that could save Gen’s skin, to say nothing of his commission and fancy dress whites. “What makes it crude?”
“Bubbles.”
“Say it again, Lieutenant.”
Gen sat back. His chin and shoulders rose. “Bubbles.”
• • •
BUBBLES WERE the answer.
While there were no experiments, Gen had draftsmen secretly draw all four sides of each blue bottle in the water tank and in the examining room, taking care to pinpoint every bubble in the glass, a pattern that was each bottle’s “fingerprint.” At the next Magic Show, Dr. Ito transformed not one but two bottles of water into oil. However, when the sketches were compared, it was plain that, while the specially marked stoppers might be the same, the bottles containing oil were not —by the evidence of their own “prints”— the bottles of water originally placed in the tank. At which point, the guards confessed to being bribed for turning a blind eye and tried to shoot themselves with their own handguns. Gen got the credit for exposing the subterfuge, and Ito went off with the police.
The main thing was that Harry had learned how paranoid and crazy the navy was on the subject of oil. By December, eight months later, when he altered shipping ledgers in Yokohama and created a tank farm in Hawaii out of thin air, he figured the navy had only itself to blame.
13
OHARU WAS A perfect model, because her expression was as blank as paper. Kato would turn out a woodblock print of her posed by a teapot and brazier, an elegant kimono with a snow-circle pattern wrapped tight around her middle and loose at the neck, her hair piled in three tiers and pierced by a gilded comb and tortoiseshell pin. The first impression the print gave was of a woman lost in thought. The viewer noticed the striped shadows cast by the bars of a prostitute’s window. Steam spilling from the pot, suggestive of opportunities missed. In her sleeve, Oharu’s hand crushing an empty pack of Golden Bats. Only then would the viewer see by the context —not as in a single picture but almost as in the repeated images of a film— a woman whose pride had chased away her clients and now, at day’s end, the sun sinking into a red haze over the licensed quarter, had no prospects or cigarettes left when regrets were all too late.
Or not. The evening offered other patrons. The next print was of Oharu in a boat, surrounded by a constellation of fireflies that lit the water’s surface. She wore a fishnet-pattern kimono, and her hair was slightly disheveled, her mouth slack and tipsy. All that could be seen of the man she was with was a sleeve of army green. The sleeve of her kimono trailed as she stared at a reflection of the moon. In the faintly glimmering lights, she seemed to melt into the water, and the moon that floated in it could have been her own pale face. It was, the young Harry thought, the face of a woman who had surrendered everything.
But no, that was the next print. The model was not Oharu but Chizuko, the small dancer Harry had seen changing into a ballerina’s tutu on his first visit to backstage. Her hair, cut short as a schoolgirl’s, cupped her broad face. Kato had depicted her standing in the snow, dressed in a red, slightly soiled kimono, barefoot in stilted clogs, a paper peony in her hair and a rolled tatami mat slung across her back. The mat was the trademark of a “sparrow,” a prostitute with the coarsest sort of clientele. Although she was younger than Oharu, Chizuko’s eyes returned the viewer’s gaze with blunt directness. Her cheeks and her feet were flushed from the cold, and despite the snowflakes that swirled around her, Harry could feel her heat.
“You take them too seriously,” Kato said. He and Harry were wrapping up the prints amid the drop cloths, paints and easels of his studio.
“They’re only pictures. Oharu attracts one sort of customer and Chizuko another, they have different appeals. The customer tells me what he wants to see, and that’s what I give him. A good lesson for you, Harry, give the customer what he wants.”
“But the print of Chizuko isn’t like the others. There’s only one copy. You ordered the printer to smash the blocks.”
“That’s my agreement with the customer. It’s a very private issue. That’s why it’s important that you exercise discretion when you deliver it. You understand discretion, don’t you, Harry?”
On this particular run, Gen went along. At his insistence, they stopped at a teahouse so he could see the prints. He had been as infatuated with Chizuko as Harry was with Oharu, and the image of her as the lowest form of prostitute had the same impact it had for Harry.
Harry explained, “It’s just a picture, Kato says. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Gen wanted to tear the print in half but settled for watching Harry deliver it to a ground-floor apartment with pots of bamboo at the entryway. The door was opened by a tall, handsome man wearing a boater, white shirt and slacks as if about to go rowing in spite of the cold weather. He took delivery without a word, but Harry recognized him as the army officer who had been with Chizuko to the movie house.
“Did he invite you in?” Kato asked when Harry returned.
“No.”
“Good. If he ever does ask you in, think up some excuse.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think you’d do, Harry.” Kato stepped back from his painting, a view of the Seine, to glance at Harry. “You’re not beautiful enough.”
Harry’s interest was piqued. From the occasional word dropped by Kato or Chizuko, Harry learned the customer was a rich idler, an army officer, a noble, a self-made man. Kato tended to denigrate while Chizuko embellished. Whichever, the customer ordered an unusual number of prints. A tank rolling through shell bursts. Fabled swordsmen dicing up bandits, tigers, whales. Others more macabre: a treetop swarm of winged monkeys. A woman crucifying her lover in the dark of a cave. A demon suspending a pregnant woman upside down the better to remove her liver.
Kato put more and more trust in Harry. He could send Harry to the printer to bring back a fan print, mirror print or indigo, secure in the knowledge that Harry would select the right one. Besides, on rainy winter days or during Tokyo’s humid summer, it was much easier to have the boy run errands while Kato devoted his time to copies of Degas, Renoir, Monet. Kato produced his imitations for himself, not for sale. Harry would return to see Kato squeezing tubes of oil paints, glossy worms of cadmium yellow, ocher and carnelian that he daubed onto the canvas. Harry was a boy off the street, how could he tell the artist that his Japanese prints had grace and life and definition and that his French art was mud and that French flowers looked like frosting? In the meanest Japanese portrait was the dignity of a straw hat, umbrella, kimono. In comparison, French nudes looked stripped and awkward, with thick hams of pink and green. Also, French artists always seemed to be slumming. In Japanese prints, prostitutes were appreciated like royalty and heroes were made from actors, wastrels and gamblers.
Kato paused in midstroke. He was painting a blue cathedral. Blue speckled his hands, shoes, beret.
“Do you plan to be a missionary, Harry?”
“No.”
“If you stay in Japan, you should think about becoming a professional gambler. It suits your personality, and the Japanese are almost as fond of gamblers as they are of samurai. I’ll get you some dice.”
“I have dice.”
“See, you’re halfway there. Tell me about your parents. Why the American compulsion to make everyone else like them? And their Japanese? They don’t understand that Japanese is spoken best when it’s not spoken at all. You understand, Harry, because you are a thief, and thieves are good observers. You’ll never be Japanese, but I would bet that in a dark room you could fool anyone.”
It was true. On sultry August evenings, Harry would go walking with Oharu between shows and entertain her by imitating vendors, beating
an empty sake tub like a drum and calling in a high-pitched, nasal voice, “Clogs mended, clogs mended!” or blowing a toy bugle and singing, “Tofu! Soft-as-a-baby’s-bottom tofu!” Up and down the street, housewives appeared at their doors with money in their hands. Oharu covered her laugh with her hand until she and Harry turned the corner to the theaters of the Rokku, their dominion, their part of Asakusa. Posters of the latest Hollywood epics lined the way, but what Harry liked most was the reflection in the poster case of him and Oharu strolling by, her sinuous skirt against a background of mincing kimonos, her half-moon eyebrows blandly taking in the world, her hand on Harry’s arm as if they were the Rokku’s crème de la crème. Fantasies of how he might become Oharu’s paramour and protector flitted through Harry’s mind all the time. If he could make her laugh, he could make her love him. If he rescued her from some sort of danger, then she would look at him in a whole new light. But she was fearless and needed rescuing from no one, and he understood that part of his attraction for Oharu was that she couldn’t take him seriously.
Kato had given Harry a print to deliver when Oharu asked him to see a matinee of a Chaplin film with her. Gen knew the address and took the print in Harry’s stead. The film was hilarious, Charlie in a department store, running down the up escalator and up the down escalator while the Movie Man sat before the screen and delivered a thoroughly superfluous “Up, up, up! Down, down, down!” Oharu rested her hand lightly on Harry’s, and throughout the film, he stole glances at it and debated whether to turn his hand and hold hers or put his lips to the pale column of her throat. He did neither. Decorum was strictly maintained in movie houses. Where aisles were lit, ushers were required to wear underpants, and houselights were never dim enough to encourage physical intimacies in the audience. What stopped Harry, however, wasn’t rules but fear. He was contemptuous of cowards and didn’t understand the paralysis that came over him around Oharu. He could tease and joke with her, but anything serious caught in his throat.
It wasn’t until Oharu left to change for her own show at the Folies that Harry realized Gen had not returned to the movie as they’d agreed. Hours had passed. By virtue of his height and looks, Gen usually stood out, but Harry didn’t find him on the Rokku, in AsakusaPark or on the temple grounds. He visited Gen’s house, the card game at the aquarium, their favorite café. Gen wasn’t anywhere. Kato had expected Harry to deliver the print, and Harry had never let him down before.
Finally Harry took a tram across town to the customer’s address, the same place he had delivered the print of Chizuko, a wooden row house that had been taken over and consolidated by someone with money. The customer answered Harry’s knock wearing an airy summer kimono. He was in his mid-twenties, broad-shouldered with muscular calves, built all of a piece like a bear. Handsome was too pretty a word. Domineering with black-rimmed gray eyes under heavy brows, a man with the gravitational pull of a larger planet.
His attention wandered down to Harry. “You’re Gen’s friend. You’ve been here before.”
“Yes. I am so sorry to bother you, excuse me, but would you do me the favor of telling me when Gen left?”
The customer scanned the street once more before he gestured for Harry to remove his shoes and enter. Harry followed to what were very much man’s quarters, a room dominated by a sea captain’s desk and Persian rug. Any middle-class house had a European room, but this seemed to be the real thing. A boar’s head was mounted by a selection of Kato’s demon prints, a satin bed of medals and an officer’s tunic with a shoulder torn off and stained a rust color. The dial of a radio glowed in the corner, although the music, a lied, was turned to a whisper. On the opposite wall were Kato’s battlefield prints and a ladder of European sabers and Japanese swords. A Westminster clock ticked on the mantel. Oriental pillows were strewn around a low Moorish table set with cognac and dates. Gen lay on a pillow on his side, his eyes swimming but with a curious pride that played around his lips.
The customer sank into an armchair. He said, “Gen is interested in the military life. I was telling him all about it.”
In Japanese, the brushstrokes of a single character could define a writer’s class and education. The casually rich room, the few words from the customer, their intonation at once formal and negligent, suggested the royal Peers’ School, university, travel abroad. In an army officer’s case, that would have been Berlin.
“We’re wasting your time,” Harry said and hoped Gen would get to his feet.
“Not a bit. Gen has a great deal of promise.”
“He delivered the print?”
The customer gave thought to his answer. “Yes, he delivered the print, and we fell into conversation. You’re not Japanese at all, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“Ah.” He bestowed a smile on Gen, who lit as if a lamp had been turned his way. The customer stretched out his bare feet and considered Harry. The smell of fresh sweat hung in the air, along with a leathery scent of cigars. In one corner, a dummy in a kendo mask and armor held a wooden stave. Harry noticed murky photographs of equestrian events, an engraved trophy for something, a gilded citation in German and a side table holding a vase with a single white chrysanthemum. The customer seemed to have accomplished a great deal for his young age. There was a restlessness about him that suggested a coil under pressure. What Harry could see of the rest of the apartment was a thoroughly Japanese arrangement of screens and mats, but this European parlor had the personal shadows of a lair. The customer suddenly heaved himself out of his chair and asked Harry, “What do you know about swords?”
“The sword is the soul of the samurai.”
“Quite right. And the samurai is the sword of the emperor. Try this. One hand.” The customer lifted from its mount not a Japanese sword but a Western saber with blood channels and a rounded guard. With only one hand, Harry could barely hold its weight. “Meant for horseback, really. The rider impales a man on foot, and the force of the horse’s charge throws the victim over the rider’s shoulder. Very mechanical. It even feels like a piece of machinery, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” In Harry’s hands, the saber felt like a giant wrench.
“I will give the Germans this. When they fence, they hack at each other until they’re bloody, they don’t back down. The scars are most impressive.”
“But they don’t perform seppuku, do they?” Gen said.
“No, it is strictly Japanese to take one’s life by cutting the stomach open. It’s an honor that has unfortunately become degraded. Today someone barely pricks his stomach before a friend cuts off his head.”
“Have you ever seen it?” Gen asked.
The customer didn’t answer directly. “Even the beheading is sloppy. You have to cut through the neck, not at it. It helps to shout.”
I’ll bet, thought Harry.
“You take kendo at school?” the customer asked.
“Yes,” said Harry.
“Who is the best swordsman?”
“Gen.”
“I’m not surprised. He is a model of youth.”
“Harry is usually a target,” Gen said.
“A target, if he’s brave, can learn more than anyone else,” the customer said. His breath was sweet from cognac. He ran his hand from Harry’s shoulder blades to the base of his spine. “Stronger than you look. Now try this.” He took the saber from Harry and replaced it with a samurai sword. The blade was narrow and tapered, its length marked by a wavy temper line between the steel of the edge and a darker, softer iron core. Although it was longer than the saber, and its grip was stripped to show the maker’s signature stamped into the bare tang, the sword was a two-handed weapon that Harry held comfortably. Even still, it seemed in motion. “A blade of the Bizen school, the edge as sharp as a razor. The first so-called reform of Japan after the West forced its way in was to forbid samurai from carrying their swords. Thousands of swords were melted down to make bookends, souls turned into knickknacks and souvenirs. Hold it lightly, as lightly as you should hold y
our life.” The customer squared Harry’s shoulders and hips, hands like a sculptor’s molding clay. When Harry twitched the man’s hand off, he took Harry by the head and aimed his attention to the sword. “Do you know how a blade is made so fine and so hard? The metal is beaten and folded and beaten a hundred times, and then a hundred times more, and then another hundred, the same way a man is made into a soldier. That is why a Japanese soldier can march in his sleep, can stand at attention while the ice forms on his face. The sword is worn with its blade up so that the act of drawing becomes the act of attack. The curve of the blade puts the sword as it’s drawn at the most efficient angle to strike an enemy. Every parry carries within it a thrust. That is the Yamato spirit. Hold the sword straight out. You take bayonet, too?”
“We drill at school,” Gen said. “We train on Harry.”
The customer asked Harry, “They train on you, yet you’re still here? You have the quality of durability, if nothing else. Perhaps you have the makings of a soldier after all. But I saw you once in a movie house. You seemed more interested in women.”
“He’s in love with Oharu,” Gen said.
“Is that true?” the customer asked Harry. “Are you in love with a woman?”
Harry felt the color in his cheeks betray him. Held straight out, the sword trembled.
“It’s one thing to have a woman,” the customer said. “It’s another to be in love with a woman. To love a weaker person, what does that do for you? To mix inferior steel in a sword, does that make the sword weaker or stronger? Weaker…or…stronger?” He pulled back his sleeve and placed the inside of his wrist under the sword. Harry tried to hold the sword up, if not still, but his shoulders ached; the blade grew heavier and began to dip. Gen got to his knees to see. The blade’s edge just touched the customer’s skin, and a drop of blood circled his wrist. He didn’t flinch. He said, “True love can only exist between equals.”
As Harry let the blade fall, the customer neatly slipped his hand out of the way, took the sword and stepped back for more room. Sword at the perpendicular, he took a position of balance, knees slightly bent, looking right, left, making a complete turn, the blade slicing down, then on a horizontal arc, his kimono swirling around marble-smooth, muscular legs in the sort of dancelike move Harry had seen on the Kabuki stage and in samurai films, but never before with such a sense of ease and genuine menace, of an animal casually indulging in the briefest display of its claws. Harry knew in that instant the difference between being inside and outside the cage of a bear. The customer finished with a snap of the sword called “the flipping off of blood,” slipped the blade under his arm as if sheathing it and bowed to Harry.
December 6 (V5.0) Page 17
