By the time I picked up what I needed at the art supply store, loaded it into the trunk, drove to Masahiko Amada’s office in Aoyama, and found a parking spot, I was exhausted. I felt like the country mouse visiting his city cousin. When I reached his office it was past one by my watch, which meant I was more than a half hour late.
I asked the receptionist to call Masahiko. He came right down. I apologized for being so tardy.
“Don’t worry about it,” he laughed. “My office can adjust, and so can the restaurant.”
Masahiko took me to an Italian place in the neighborhood, located in the basement of a small building. Masahiko was obviously well known there, for no sooner had they seen his face than we were guided to a private room in the back. It was very quiet: the sound of voices did not reach us and no music was playing. A quite passable landscape painting hung on the wall. It showed a white lighthouse on a green peninsula under a blue sky. Super-ordinary scene, sure, but done well enough to let the viewer think, “Hey, that place might be nice to check out.”
Masahiko ordered a glass of white wine, while I asked for Perrier.
“I’ve got to drive back after this,” I explained. “It’s quite a trek.”
“No kidding,” said Masahiko. “Still, it’s a heck of a lot better than Hayama or Zushi. I lived in Hayama once, and driving back and forth to Tokyo in the summer was awful. The whole route was jammed with people heading to the ocean from the city. A round trip was a half day’s work. Compared to that, driving in from Odawara is nothing.”
The menus arrived and we ordered the prix fixe lunch: prosciutto as appetizer followed by asparagus salad and spaghetti with Japanese lobster.
“So you finally decided to do some serious painting,” Masahiko said.
“Well, I’m living alone now, and I don’t need commissions to get by. Maybe that’s why the urge to paint my own stuff hit me.”
Masahiko nodded. “Everything has a bright side,” he said. “The top of even the blackest, thickest cloud shines like silver.”
“Yeah, but getting up there to see it is no picnic.”
“I was speaking more theoretically,” Masahiko said.
“I think living on top of a mountain may be affecting me too. It’s the perfect spot to focus on my art.”
“Yeah, when no one’s there to distract you and it’s that quiet, you can really concentrate. A more normal person might get a bit lonely, but I figured you’re the kind of guy who can handle it.”
The door opened and the appetizer was brought in. We fell quiet as the plates were laid out.
“I think the studio has a lot to do with it as well,” I said once the waiter had gone. “There’s something about being in that room that makes me want to paint. At times it feels like the center of the whole house.”
“If the house were human, it’d be the heart, perhaps.”
“Yeah, or the consciousness.”
“Body and Mind,” Masahiko said in English. “To tell the truth, though, it’s hard for me to spend time in his studio. His smell has sunk in too deep. I can still feel him in the air. When I was a boy, he’d isolate himself in that room almost all day, painting away without a word to anyone. It was his sanctum, off-limits to a kid like me. I tend to steer clear of the studio when I’m there, even now. You should be careful too.”
“Be careful? Why?”
“So you don’t become possessed by his spirit. It’s a strong one.”
“Spirit?”
“Maybe ‘psychic energy’ is a better term. Or ‘flow of being.’ His is intense enough to sweep you away. At any rate, when someone like him spends a long time in a particular place, it soaks in his aura. Like particles of smell.”
“And that’s what could possess me?”
“Maybe ‘possessed’ isn’t the best way to put it. ‘Absorb his influence,’ perhaps? It’s like he invested that room with some special power.”
“I wonder. I’m only looking after his home, and I never met him. So maybe it won’t weigh on me as much.”
“You’re probably right,” Masahiko said. He took a sip of white wine. “Being related to him may make me more sensitive to those things. And if it turns out that his ‘aura’ inspires you in your work, so much the better.”
“So how’s he doing these days?”
“Nothing in particular is wrong with him. He’s past ninety, so I can’t say he’s the picture of health, and his mind is confused, but he can still manage to get around with a cane, his appetite’s fine, and his eyes and teeth are in good shape. You know, his teeth are better than mine—never had a cavity!”
“How bad is his memory? Can he recall anything?”
“Not a whole lot. He doesn’t recognize me. He’s lost the concept of family, of father and son. Even the distinction between himself and other people may have blurred. Still, maybe it’s easier when those things are swept away, and you don’t have to think about them anymore.”
I sipped my slender glass of Perrier and nodded. So Tomohiko Amada had forgotten even his son’s face. Memories of student days in Vienna must have set sail for the far shore of forgetfulness some time ago.
“All the same, what I called his ‘flow of being’ is still strong,” Masahiko said, as if in wonder. “It’s strange: he remembers almost nothing, but his will is the same as always. It’s obvious when you look at him. That psychic power is what makes him who he is. I feel a bit guilty sometimes that I didn’t inherit that temperament, but there’s nothing I can do about it. We’re all born with different abilities. Being linked to someone by blood doesn’t mean you have similar gifts.”
I looked in his face. It was rare to see Masahiko bare his true feelings.
“It must be awfully hard to have such a famous father,” I said. “I can’t even imagine what it’s like. My dad was nothing special, just a small businessman.”
“There are some benefits to having a famous father, but there are times that it really sucks. I think the latter are a bit more frequent, actually. You’re lucky you don’t have to deal with that. You’re free to be who you want.”
“You look like the one with a free life.”
“In a sense,” Masahiko said. He turned his wineglass around in his hand. “But in another sense, no.”
Masahiko possessed a keen artistic sensibility of his own. He had taken a job with a medium-sized ad agency after finishing school. By now, his salary had increased, and he looked for all the world like a bachelor enjoying everything city life had to offer. I had no way of knowing if that was true, however.
“I was hoping to ask you a few things about your father,” I said, broaching the reason for my visit.
“What sort of things? You know, I really don’t know that much about him.”
“I heard that he had a younger brother named Tsuguhiko.”
“Yeah, that’s true. That would be my uncle, I guess. But he died a long time ago. Before Pearl Harbor.”
“I heard he committed suicide.”
A shadow passed across Masahiko’s face. “That’s supposed to be a family secret, but it happened so long ago, and part of it’s public knowledge now anyway. So I guess it’s okay to tell you. He cut his wrists with a razor. He was only twenty.”
“What made him do it?”
“Why do you want to know something like that?”
“I’ve been trying to learn more about your father. I stumbled across your uncle’s story when I was looking through some documents.”
“You want to learn more about my father?”
“I wanted to learn more about his paintings, but as I looked at his career I became more and more interested in his personal life. I’d like to know the kind of man he was.”
Masahiko studied my face from across the table. “All right,” he said. “You’ve taken an interest in my father’s life. There may be s
ome significance in that. Living in that house has created some sort of bond between the two of you.”
He took a swallow of white wine before launching into his story.
“My uncle, Tsuguhiko Amada, was a student at the Tokyo Music School back then. A talented pianist, they say. He loved Chopin and Debussy, and high hopes were held for his future. Forgive me for sounding arrogant, but artistic talent seems to run in our family. To varying degrees, of course. However, in the midst of his studies my uncle was drafted. He should have received a student deferment, but his papers had been mishandled when he enrolled in the conservatory. If those forms had been properly filed, he could have put off military service until graduation, and probably avoided it altogether. My grandfather was a big landowner in the area, and influential in political circles. But there was a slip-up in the paperwork. It came as a great shock to my uncle. But once the system grinds into motion there’s not a whole lot anyone can do to stop it. Protest was futile: the army grabbed him, gave him his basic training in Japan, and then loaded him onto a troop transport and shipped him off to Hangzhou. At the time, his elder brother Tomohiko—in other words, my father—was studying painting under a famous artist in Vienna.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Everyone knew that my uncle wasn’t cut out for the rugged life of a soldier or the carnage of the battlefield—he was a high-strung young man, and physically weak. To make matters worse, the young men of southern Kyushu who made up the 6th Division were a rough group, known for their violence. My father agonized over the news that his brother had been drafted and sent off to war. My father was egotistic and highly competitive, a typical second son, but his younger brother was shy and retiring, the somewhat pampered baby of the family. As a pianist, he had to be careful to protect his hands. Even as a child, my father learned to look out for his little brother, who was three years younger, and shield him from the outside world. It became second nature to him—he was his brother’s protector. But all he could do in faraway Vienna was sit and fret. The only information he got came in his brother’s letters from the front.
“Of course those letters were strictly censored, but the two brothers were so close that the elder could read the younger’s feelings between the lines. Moreover, the true meaning of those lines was skillfully camouflaged, so only he could figure it out. My uncle’s regiment had fought their way from Shanghai to Nanjing, engaging in fierce battles in the towns and cities en route, and leaving a trail of murder and plunder in their wake. Those bloody events left my high-strung uncle with deep emotional scars.
“One of my uncle’s letters described a beautiful pipe organ they had come across in a church in occupied Nanjing. It had survived the fighting in perfect shape. For some unfathomable reason, though, the long description of the organ that followed had been inked out. What military secrets could an organ in a Christian church possibly have compromised? The standards used by the censor attached to their regiment were impossible to fathom. As a matter of fact, it was common for him to black out the most innocuous and unthreatening passages of a letter while overlooking the parts that really might have put troops at risk. As a consequence, my father was left in the dark as to whether his brother had been able to play that organ or not.
“Uncle Tsuguhiko’s year in the army ended in June of 1938,” Masahiko continued. “Although he had arranged to reenter the conservatory right after his return, he went back to Kyushu instead and committed suicide in the attic of the family home. He sharpened a straight razor to a fine edge and slit his wrists. It must have taken tremendous resolve for a pianist to do that to his hands. I mean, if he had survived, he might never have been able to play again, right? They found him in a pool of blood. The fact that he had killed himself was kept a deep, dark secret. To the world, the official cause of death was heart failure or something like that.
“In fact, though, it was clear to everyone why Uncle Tsuguhiko had taken his own life—his war experience had ruined his nerves, and wrecked him psychologically. I mean, here was a delicate young man of twenty, whose entire world was playing the piano, thrown into the bloodbath of the Nanjing campaign, surrounded by heaps of corpses. Today we talk about post-traumatic stress disorder, but that phrase—even that concept—was unknown then. In that deeply militaristic society, people like my uncle were dismissed as lacking courage, or patriotism, or strength of character. In wartime Japan, such ‘weakness’ was neither understood nor accepted. So the family buried what had happened, as evidence of their shame.”
“Did he leave a suicide note?” I asked.
“Yes, they found a personal testament in his desk drawer. It was quite long, closer to a memoir, really. In it, Uncle Tsuguhiko recorded his war experiences in excruciating detail. The only people who saw it were his parents—my grandparents, in other words—his eldest brother, and my father. When my father returned from Vienna and read it, he burned it while the other three watched.”
I waited for him to go on.
“My father kept his lips sealed about what that testament contained,” Masahiko continued. “It was the family’s darkest secret: to use a metaphor, it was nailed shut, weighted with heavy stones, and sent to the bottom of the ocean. However, my father did tell me the gist of what was in it once, when he was drunk. I was in grade school, and it was the first time I learned that I had an uncle who committed suicide. To this day, I have no idea whether it was the alcohol that loosened my father’s lips, or if he figured that I had to hear the story at some point.”
Our salad plates were cleared, replaced by the spaghetti with Japanese lobster.
Masahiko took his fork and stared at it for a moment. As if inspecting an implement used for some special task.
“Hey man,” he said. “This isn’t really something I want to talk about when I’m eating.”
“No problem. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Like what, for example.”
“Something as far removed from your uncle’s testament as possible.”
So we talked golf as we ate our spaghetti. Of course, I had never played the game. No one around me had either. I didn’t even know the rules. Masahiko, however, had taken it up in order to play with the people he did business with. And to get back into some kind of shape after years of inactivity. He had purchased a set of clubs, and spent his weekends on the golf course.
“You may not know this,” he told me, “but golf is the oddest game you can imagine. As weird as it gets. You could say it’s a sport unto itself. Yet I’m not even sure if it can be called a true sport. The funny thing is, once you get used to its weirdness you can’t go back.”
Masahiko went on and on about the strangeness of golf, telling me one off-the-wall story after another. A great conversationalist, he made our lunch extremely entertaining. We laughed together as we hadn’t in ages.
Our plates were cleared away and coffee was brought in, although Masahiko opted for another glass of white wine.
“Anyway, back to my uncle’s suicide letter,” he said, his voice abruptly serious. “According to my father, Uncle Tsuguhiko wrote about being forced to behead a Chinese prisoner. He described it in painful detail. Of course, a common soldier like him didn’t carry a sword. In fact, he had never touched a sword up to that point. I mean, he was a pianist, right? He could read a complex musical score, but wielding an executioner’s sword was beyond him. But his commanding officer handed him one and ordered, ‘Chop off his head!’ The prisoner wasn’t in uniform and had no weapon when he was picked up. Nor was he a young man. He claimed he was a civilian, not a soldier. But the army was grabbing any likely men they could find and dragging them in to be killed. If your palms were callused, you were deemed a peasant and might be released. If they were soft, however, it was assumed that you were a soldier who’d tossed his uniform to pass as a civilian, and you were summarily executed. Arguing the sentence was a waste of breath. The method of
execution was either being gutted by a bayonet or decapitated by a sword. If a machine gun unit was in the area, prisoners might be lined up in a row and shot, but there was a general reluctance to ‘waste’ ammunition that way—bullets were always in short supply—so bayonets and swords were used. The bodies were collected and dumped in the Yangtze River, where they fed the many catfish who lived there. I don’t know if it’s fact or fiction, but it was said that some grew as big as ponies on that diet.
“My uncle took the sword from the officer, a young second lieutenant who had just completed officer training school, and prepared to cut off the prisoner’s head. Of course, he didn’t want to do it. But it was unthinkable to refuse an order. Not something corrected by a simple reprimand. An order from an officer in Japan’s Imperial Army was an order from the Emperor himself. My uncle’s hands were shaking. He wasn’t a strong man, and to make matters worse it was a crummy, mass-produced sword. The human neck isn’t that easy to sever. His attempt failed. Blood sprayed everywhere, the prisoner thrashed about—it was gruesome.”
Masahiko shook his head. I sipped my coffee.
“When it was finally over my uncle started puking. When there was nothing left he puked gastric juice, and when that was gone he puked air. His comrades ridiculed him. The officer called him a ‘pitiful excuse for a soldier’ and kicked him hard in the side with his army boots. No one sympathized. Instead, he was ordered to decapitate two more prisoners. This was for practice, to help him become accustomed to cutting off people’s heads. A soldier’s rite of passage, it was thought. Participating in such carnage made a man a ‘true warrior.’ But my uncle was never meant to be a warrior in the first place. He wasn’t put on this earth for that. He was born to make beautiful music, to perform Chopin and Debussy. Not to chop the heads off other human beings.”
Killing Commendatore Page 44
