The Japanese Corpse ac-5

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  The commissaris was sitting on the floor, struggling with his right slipper. "Easy," he said. "Don't you remember? In the year sixteen hundred and something the Japanese government granted us the right to live on a very small island just off the coast of Nagasaki, a port in the South."

  "Us?" de Gier asked.

  "Us. The Dutch. Merchants. We were allowed to buy things from them and they learned things from us. Medicine and how to make guns."

  "Yes," de Gier said sleepily, "so the one favor equals the other, but I seem to remember that we ought to be grateful for something and that we are repaying a favor, us, I mean, you and I, running about like dumb rabbits so that the yakusa can shoot at us."

  "Yes, that part was never clear to me either. The ambassador seemed very clear however. We are repaying a favor. The Japanese government is upset about their art being stolen and exported to the West and we are here to pose as buyers, to draw out the yakusa so that they can be arrested and tried in court. Maybe the ambassador was impressed by the point that only we, the Dutch, were allowed to trade with the Japanese."

  "In the year sixteen hundred something," de Gier said.

  "And during the three hundred and something years following that year. And apparently they kept us in food and wine and women when the French conquered Holland. Maybe that was the favor."

  "You aren't really going for that sort of stuff, are you, sir?" de Gier asked, and sat up. The commissaris had finally managed to get his slippers on and was standing in the open door.

  "It's a free trip to a foreign country, isn't it?" the commissaris asked, and smiled pleasantly.

  "Maybe a free trip to death."

  "To die is to travel," the commissaris said. "It should be the most interesting journey of all the journeys a man can make."

  The sliding door closed and de Gier could hear the old man's slippers rustling down the stairs. He grinned and lay back, trying to stay awake. He was still awake when the commissaris came back half an hour later.

  "That was a long telephone call, sir."

  "The ambassador was a little slow tonight," the commissaris said, and rubbed his hands, "but he did manage to understand me in the end."

  \\ 27 /////

  "Banzai" the five musicians shouted, and jumped from their seats. The commissaris, Dorin and de Gier stopped and bowed, three small and somewhat lost looking figures in the castle's hall, a hall four stories high and a hundred feet square. The commissaris seemed shy, Dorin was angry, but the sergeant felt as if he might take off for the sky. He looked at the two long rows of yakusa, each lining an entire wall, and at the small reception committee at the end of the hall, the daimyo and Kono, and kept on walking toward the two men. He was no longer aware that the commissaris and Dorin were walking with him; he felt supremely alone. I am a gaijin, he thought. I am a foreigner, all on my own. The conclusion was pleasurable and he grinned and the grin became part of the BANZAI shout from the stage. De Gier waved at the musicians, and the trumpeter gave a short blast in reply while the pianist struck a chord, making it change into the opening theme of "St. Louis Blues." De Gier went on walking and the daimyo and Kono moved forward. The sergeant's awareness of utter freedom was still growing. He hunched his shoulders and spread his arms and began to bounce with the bubbling rhythm, now strengthened by the saxophone supporting the trumpet's blasts, wheezing an octave lower, and the throb of the suddenly released double bass. The drums had burst free at the same time and a wild cacophony of trembling bangs mixed with the clashing cymbals.

  The yakusa had been watching the sergeant jump, and a roar of approval filled the hall, finding its center in the daimyo, who, grinning widely and with arms outspread in an all-embracing gesture of welcome, was skipping along, trailing Kono with him and beginning to form a circle around his guests. The yakusa had left their walls and joined the circle, moving slowly at first, but increasing their speed as the volume of the blues grew. The commissaris, dumfounded, looked about him, but felt engulfed in the glow of energy which had so suddenly erupted and which also seemed to come from himself, for he felt a distinct trembling at the lowest point of his spine. A surge of energy rose along his back and flowed into his head and beyond and made him dance too, an old man's dance, involving a minimum of action but moving his feet and his shoulders. All around him he saw the brownish orange faces of the yakusa, each split by a white smile, and he grinned back. Very nice, he thought, and touched Dorin, smiling invitingly.

  "What?" Dorin asked.

  "Party!" the commissaris said. "Nice! Let's join them!"

  Dorin seemed to wake from his stupor and lifted a leg, like a ballet dancer who intends to cross the entire stage in one leap, and the yakusa roared again.

  The three men had become the center of a flowing moving circle and looked like three delicate animated toys. De Gier in his light blue denim suit and white silk scarf and Dorin in a beautifully tailored linen suit formed suitable ornaments for the commissaris in his shantung jacket and narrow trousers and a gray necktie fastened with a pearl. The yakusa, all in dark neat suits, white shirts and black ties, were the frame that contained the moving picture.

  The blues tumbled on, repeating the theme in straight simple piano notes, but continuously improvising in trumpet and bass solos. The daimyo had unbuttoned his jacket and was flapping its tails so that he looked like a powerful bat, followed by a swarm of its blood-thirsty fellows. De Gier no longer moved about, but stood, trembling almost imperceptibly, his shoulders stretched, caressing the air with slow sensual gestures. The commissaris, lost in a vision from his early youth, saw himself as a toddler, playing in his grandfather's garden. Dorin, temporarily released from his anger, seemed to be playing basketball, making the ball veer against his flat hands. The daimyo shouted, a single word, "Jin-Gi," that hung in the hall for a moment. The musicians broke off, then started to play again after a short silence, changing the feeling of the hall but without interfering with the all-pervading togetherness. The guests, shaken suddenly, saw a second circle form around them. Slender Japanese girls clad in kimonos were tripping around their now loutish-looking menfolk and waving their decorated paper fans. It was the sergeant's turn to roar. He had seen the apparition leading the butterflies: a tall black woman, towering with her Afro-style hair, but also slender and graceful, striding through the hall with catlike skidding movements on impossibly long legs ending in thin ankles and high-arched feet. Each step of her stretched legs was a carefully slowed leap so that the mini-beings could keep up with her. The woman was dressed in a white ski suit; the tight-fitting jacket reached down to her buttocks which bulged and flexed every time she leaped.

  The drummer, touched by de Gier's roar, had bent down over his drums, tapping and ruffling so that he could control the sliding and shaking procession, and the trumpet shared his elation and blew round full notes at the hall's roof and the blackened hand-hewn beams that supported it.

  The yakusa had stopped their bat imitations and were following Dorm's basketball technique, hitting their air-balls to and fro. The daimyo hummed, a short song consisting of three notes with a pause for the fourth beat, and the yakusa sang with him, but softly so that his voice carried their happy grunts.

  The drummer could no longer hold the feeling of the hall and his sticks hung above the drums. The daimyo lifted a hand and the music broke.

  "Welcome," the daimyo roared. "Drink for guests and drink for us!" The commissaris, stopped halfway in a graceful turn, blinked and his brain began to function again. He was wondering how far the daimyo had foreseen this happening. How could he have known that the sergeant would react so spontaneously? And hadn't de Gier, for the time being anyway, reached a state of mind that could no longer be manipulated?

  The daimyo faced the commissaris and smiled and bowed.

  "You like?" the daimyo asked.

  "Oh yes," the commissaris said. "Very."

  "Indeed," the daimyo said, and gestured at a waiter, one of the three Chinese bartenders from the Golden Drag
on in Kyoto. The waiter, his skull gleaming in the soft light of the many paper lanterns hung all through the hall, shook his head so that his queue bobbed and flashed, and then made it turn, and stood under a silver disk a yard in diameter. He offered the commissaris a drink from his tray.

  "A whisky, sir?"

  "Surely," the commissaris said, and was conscious, while he drank, of the fact that he had danced and shouted and sung without even the excuse that the alcohol in his blood had reached a certain percentage. He had simply done as the daimyo had expected him to do, just like the time he had run and panted in the temple garden. But did it matter now? He didn't think it did. The whisky glowed in his throat while he looked into the kindly peering, bulging eyes of the daimyo.

  "You like?" the daimyo asked again.

  "Yes," the commissaris said. "I like."

  The interval didn't last long. The bartenders brought a large red lacquered screen on which an orange dragon blazed, its fiery tongue and cruel head on the first panel, the twisting scaly body on the second and the swishing armored tail on the third. The bar disappeared behind the screen and hosts and guests looked for a place to lose their empty glasses, but the bartenders ran about, picking up the glasses and balancing their large round trays. The trumpet blew a long straight note, a resounding blast that stopped and started again on the same level, but broke with a sob and lowered away in a lamenting groan. Bass and percussion caught the almost dying note and revived it in a Thelonious Monk composition, gurgling and beeping and finishing each line in breaking glasslike sounds of the utmost right of the piano's keyboard. The commissaris grinned at the weirdly comical music but felt himself again swept up in the current that had, just now, taken him to higher regions. He thought, for a very short moment, of the possibility of restraining himself, for the sake of Dutch sense and good behavior, but resisted the temptation. The daimyo was going well and should be encouraged. And why shouldn't he, the commissaris, float on the thought power of another? He ambled to the stage and sat down next to the daimyo, and Yuiko came trotting along obediently, ready to translate.

  "My court musicians," the daimyo said, "have made our nightclubs famous. I like jazz, I discovered the music in America, I often go to America. I discovered Miss Ahboombah too, one of the best dancers of New York and too expensive, I suppose, to be signed up here but I did it all the same, for a year. It turned out to be a good idea. Our clubs in Kobe and Osaka haven't had an empty chair since she began dancing there, and the clients often book weeks in advance."

  "A very beautiful woman," the commissaris said, and dangled his legs contentedly. "I hope we will see her again tonight."

  "But of course," the daimyo said, and tapped the commissaris' hand softly. "And there are other events on the program. I myself will try to be worthy of your attention"-he laughed and his hand touched the commissaris' sleeve-"but that may be boring for you, so afterward we'll have Miss Ahboombah again. And there'll be something to eat of course. Perhaps we should have started with the meal, but I thought that if we were all plonked down at long tables and if Yuiko had to run up and down to translate and if we had to stare at each other all the time… No."

  "No," the commissaris said.

  "No, no, so first we watch Miss Ahboombah. I will have to balance the feeling that exists between you and me. I frightened you not so long ago. I am sorry about that now, I saw your fear and afterward I felt guilty, although I thought, while it happened, that I had won."

  "In the temple garden," the commissaris said, and went on dangling his legs. Behind him the gurgling and beeping had softened and a sweetness had crept into the music and he allowed himself to be cradled in the song of the bass and the flowing lines of the trumpet.

  "But you mustn't mind that adventure," the daimyo said. "I would have been frightened too, and the trick wasn't original. I read the recipe in a book about the silver foxes of the Rokko Mountains, seven witches who lived here once, long ago now, in seven huts built in a circle. The witches thought of the torture-to show a man his own dead face. Evil women and very powerful, well-trained necromancers. They meditated, for weeks on end, like the monks in Kyoto-the good monks, not the bad ones who steal from their own temples and deliver the goods to us, nicely wrapped in cotton cloth. And the witches only wanted power, not the insight of the Buddha. Yes."

  "Are you a Buddhist?" the commissaris asked. He thought he had heard a note of reverence in the daimyo's voice.

  "Would I be a Buddhist?" the daimyo said, and held his broad hands upside down in front of his chest. "What would I be? A good question. I have no answer. My mind is clouded by the countless thoughts with which I have identified myself and which have all left their traces, and it is said that the Buddha mind is empty, empty and pure, for emptiness is always pure."

  He thought. Yuiko's eyes seemed glued to his thick fleshy lips. "But we have cleared our minds, you and I. Jin-gi, do you remember?"

  "I remember," the commissaris said, "and I asked the hotel director if he knew the word. He wrote it down for me. Two characters. 'Jin' means 'two men' and 'gf 'justice.'"

  The daimyo beamed. "You remembered the word, and you have even thought about it! But that's very good, much more than I might have hoped for. You are in a foreign country and you receive many impressions, words, ideas. All day they fall on you, like raindrops, and like raindrops they roll away down the protection of your mind and are sucked up by the ground. That's what happens to me in America and I thought the same would happen to you here. But you remembered the word, the word that I gave to you on Lake Biwa. An important word that only we, the yakusa, have penetrated and truly understood. The idea, like so many ideas in our country, originates in China, but we don't always know what we are supposed to do with the Chinese wisdom, so very often we just store it somewhere, in temples mostly."

  The daimyo grinned and pushed his fist softly into the commissaris' chest.

  "Yes," the commissaris said. "This Jin-gi, a rule of behavior, I thought, some sort of code."

  "Yes. Two men-justice. Two ideas that together form a third, and the third idea says something about human relations. The old daimyo, the man who I replaced after I had gotten myself through the war and had been appointed to a series of functions in our organization, said that two men will only be able to really meet after they have learned to destroy their own desires. Every time I saw him he would discuss that particular subject. Rather step back than jump ahead at the cost of another person."

  The commissaris raised a thin hand. "At the cost of another yakusa?"

  "Yes," the daimyo said "another yakusa. And when, in the end, he decided that I understood, he didn't want me to bow to him anymore. He claimed that the Japanese custom of bowing has degenerated from a greeting to an acceptance of status." He turned toward the commissaris. "Do you follow me?"

  "No," the commissaris said. "To bow is to greet, I thought."

  "Yes, but who bows first? That's what matters. In Japan we always try to determine one's level of life. When two men meet, someone has to bow first. Not in Jin-gi, however." He folded his hands into a praying gesture. "You see, two separate hands become one new form. You can use us, you and me as an example too. If we had met at some official event we might have had trouble bowing. You are a powerful man in Holland, but Holland is a long way off and I have my strength here, so perhaps I am of more importance, should we meet here. If that should be true, you might be expected to bow first. But we could look at the problem from another angle. You are older than I am, and you are far more experienced; you are an exotic foreigner from the West, and I am Mr. Tanaka or Mr. Tamaki, one of a hundred million creatures pushing for space on these little islands. So now what do we do? Who bows first?"

  "I will," the commissaris said, "if I can do you a favor that way."

  "No bows," the daimyo said. "We forget bows. You had the opportunity to kill my old friend Kono, and your assistant could have left Yuiko in her bathroom, in her own vomit. But you forgot your own desires and stepped back and
proved, in the eyes of every yakusa who is worthy of the name, that you had learned the lessons of your own organization in Holland and that you can practice your insight."

  "Well…" the commissaris said.

  "Jin-gi," the daimyo said, and stared into space. The trumpet had returned to the first note of the Monk song and the sustaining rhythm ended. Silence had returned to the hall. "Please excuse me," the daimyo said. "I have to go to the kitchen to see that the liquor you brought has been cooled properly. A rich royal liquor, but your assistant said that the taste gets lost when it isn't served very cold, so I asked the cook to place the bottles in his freezers, then we can drink the spirit later tonight. You brought a great quantity and you must have troubled yourselves considerably. It wasn't necessary; your presence is an important gift in itself."

  Dorin took the daimyo's place on the edge of the stage and smiled nervously. "Miss Ahboombah is next on the program," he said softly. "What a spectacle, a black stripper in a Japanese castle. Our civilization is going ahead with leaps and bounds."

  "You don't like black women?" the commissaris asked politely.

  "Oh yes," Dorin said, and gestured vaguely. "I do. As a boy in San Francisco I was absolutely thrilled by them and my mother claims that I became quite impossible, even as a baby, whenever black ladies paid the slightest attention to me. I think that my first real excitement was caused by a girl from the Congo. I don't remember what she was doing in San Francisco, maybe she had come to some congress. She was dressed in a wide flowing African garment, very colorful, and she had her hair dyed gray and put it up into a sort of knot. I followed her about all day and I am always dreaming about her, even now, and it happened more than ten years ago."

  "Sexual dreams?" the commissaris asked.

  "Yes, of course, but maybe more than that. Sex, certainly, but without any pornography, elevated sex, something like that."