The Hemingway Files

by H. K. Bush

  “Goto-sensei is desiring your presence at his house, this coming Sunday, again at 4:00 p.m. Is that convenient?”

  “Why, yes, sensei. Thank you for bringing me that news.” I was feeling chipper that day, and felt like rubbing it in. “Isn’t it wonderful, to be invited again?” I noticed casually that Miyamoto’s hands were clenched. “And his beautiful niece, Mika-san?”

  From the look on his face, this last little piece de resistance almost gave him a stroke. Without a word he turned and lumbered off into the sunset, searching for a wall to bang his head against. In private, of course. For myself, merely speaking the magical name Mika produced a narcotic effect.

  So on a balmy September weekend, I made my second visit to the home of Professor Goto. This time, I arrived a bit early, and Mika again responded first to the call from the front gate. When I knocked on the front door, she opened it to greet me, with Professor Goto standing just behind her, elevated a little on the raised floor just beyond the genkan. Together they resembled the moon and the sun, smiling down upon me, a partial eclipse.

  “Welcome once again, Springs-sensei,” he said to me.

  I bowed as I presented to him more omiyage, this time, a fairly expensive bottle of very fine sake that I had gotten at a famous distillery outside of Nara on a day trip. I was a quick study, and Kilcoyne had mentioned this as a more appropriate gift. Again he handed it to Mika, unopened. He then mentioned his thanks for the box of red bean cakes that I had given him at our first visit, which I had purchased on my way back from one of my earliest day trips. “I noticed that you visited Takayama. Did you see the famous thatched-roof houses?”

  I had no idea what he meant by that, and said so. “Actually, I was just switching trains there briefly. I had been up in the mountains, hiking around.” As we stood there, I told him briefly of my other recent travels up north during the O-Bon holidays, and he began asking me many questions. He was especially interested in my stay at Ryoan-ji.

  “And you did all of this traveling on your own? I am very impressed with your ingenuity, sensei.”

  We walked back to the same room in which we had had our first meeting. Again, the window was partly open, and again Mika came and went noiselessly, filling and refilling our large, ceramic tea cups. She also brought some bean cakes similar to the ones I had purchased in Takayama, along with other little snacks, on a dark red lacquered tray: edamame (steamed soybeans), served in their thick green husks, and some small local candies. He summoned two of his servants, an elderly cook/housekeeper named Natsuko, overweight and mildy curious in her odd mannerisms, one of which was a habit of staring blankly at various angles (Later, he told me, “She is quite slow in most ways, but makes the most delicious foods in Kansai!”); and a man he called Omori, whom he introduced as his gardener and chauffeur of some twenty-five years. He was old but stout, and looked to be physically powerful. Omori bowed without smiling, said nothing, then quietly backed away.

  “He is as loyal as a police dog, and trained in the martial arts.” Sensei assured me. “But like a dog, he rarely speaks. Though sometimes he does bark!” I laughed at this odd comment; later I learned that Omori was essentially a mute.

  There were a few other pleasantries, but somehow this get-together immediately seemed quite different from the first one—it seemed like this was more of a business meeting of some sort. Professor Goto wasted little time with the rather bland conversations of our first attempt. For one thing, he asked me what I preferred to be called. I told him that my friends called me Jack. But back in my school days, some people called me Gene, which is also what my mother often called me.

  “Gene?” He actually smiled and almost beamed directly at me. This seemed to intrigue him.

  “Yes. Gene, as in Eugene. My given name: Eugene Jackson. Eugene was the name of my mother’s dead older brother, whom she adored. I sign my professional writing ‘E. J. Springs.’”

  He nodded. “Ah yes, so you do!” He thought this over. “Eugene. It’s funny to say, but that is also a homonym, for a phrase in Japanese—Yu-jin. It means friend, and sounds precisely the same as your name, Eugene. Although it is a rather strange word in Japanese. Not very common nowadays.”

  We both considered this coincidence, and he seemed pleased by it. “I spent many years in America, and I became familiar with your friendly customs. I would prefer to call you by some version of your given name, one that can be like a Japanese name for your stay here, as long as you feel comfortable with it.” This idea seemed to give him some pleasure, as it did me. “Why not Yu-san? It sounds like a shortened version of Eugene!”

  “Of course, Goto-sensei, that would be fine.” I actually hesitated a bit when he said “Yu-san,” because in my American mind there was something quaint if not a bit phony and melodramatic about it. But to tell the truth, Professor Goto’s new name began to grow on me, almost immediately. I liked the sound of it—a Japanese equivalent. So I asked, “Perhaps you can show me how to write the kanji?”

  This pleased him even more, so he found a card and pen, and before me inscribed my new Japanese moniker:

  He presented the card to me, saying “Please learn to do this, Yu-san.” And then he guided me, stroke by careful stroke, through the process of writing it properly.

  I accepted the card, then presumed to ask him what I should call him. Sensei, or Goto-sensei, would be just fine, he told me. But he seemed a trifle stiff in answering, as if it were a dumb question (which it was, and, once again, I recognized later that it was another of my ignorant breaches of protocol, strike three for the neophyte gaijin). I should have known, but somehow did not, that my position relative to him was not one that could allow anything in the vicinity of an endearment. In fact, however, it is from that encounter that I began thinking of him, and usually calling him, by a single name: Sensei.

  We resumed our interview. After another cup of tea (there is much lengthy tea drinking in Japan, and it makes one wonder how their bladders never seem to fill), silence pervaded the room for several long moments. Finally, Sensei looked up at me directly. “Yu-san,” he said, hesitating just slightly to be certain that it was a name that he might use to speak to me directly. “Last time you asked me about my family. Your story about the fishing trips with your father reminded me of when I would return with my own father to his homeland, in the far western extremity of Honshu Island, and how he taught me to fish with nets on the seacoast, just as he had done as a young man.

  “They lived in Yamaguchi Prefecture, the remotest southwestern tip of the main island. It was a tiny village on the northern side of the prefecture, called Senzaki, facing the Sea of Japan. Very remote. I recall the journey on the trains taking an entire day, or at least it seemed. Senzaki was the last stop of one of the train lines, alone out on a peninsula, surrounded by the sea. The train station’s grand opening when I was a boy was a great celebration for our people down there, a sign we were joining the modern world!” He paused to let the image soak in. “Those were magnificent times. The pine trees along the rocky coast, and the salty wind in my hair as I stood leaning into it … ” He paused again. “The wonderful poems of my youth.”

  Here I began to note the romantic yearning we both seemed to share about the past. I was noticing the initial crack in the blank walls surrounding the wealthy Japanese professor up on that trendy mountainside, and some light began to shine through.

  “As you might know, my family has had its share of good fortune. But it was not always so. My grandfather was a mere fisherman. They lived near a rugged stretch of the sea that was quite forbidding, and yet quite breathtaking. And the sunsets—ah, they were iridescent. The sky was empty, yet full. Do you understand that, Yu-san?”

  I nodded, though the statement seemed more like a zen koan than anything quite meaningful at the moment. He sipped again.

  “My father, Goto Kennichi, the oldest child of my grandfather, was quite energetic and a very fast learner, as you might say. His life growing up was difficult. He lear
ned to work hard all day long, every day. Cleaning nets, cleaning fish, hauling the fish to market, the harsh sun beating down, or the sleet in the cold winter days, the never-ending winds off of the sea. But there was always rice and fish on the table, with enough money left over for clothing and life’s other essentials. It was a large family and they cared deeply for each other.”

  He paused to sip more tea. Chimes sounded from somewhere beyond the gardens. “My mother was from a hard-working family in the east, a village in the north of Shimane Prefecture, near the town of Oda. Her father was a farmer; Oda means “small rice field.” They were somewhat more fortunate than my grandfather’s family, growing much rice, which was a valuable commodity. So much so, that when my grandmother was … what shall I say? —being offered to my grandfather’s family as a possible arrangement, it seemed to them to represent a coming up in the world. Ah, Yu-san, my English is so poor. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I think so. It was an arranged marriage, yes?” “So! That’s right. All marriages were in those days. My great-grandmother was a nakodo—an arranger of marriages, a matchmaker in the south, and she knew the brother of my great-grandfather, from way up north. In this way, my grandparents were brought together. This must sound strange to an American, but it was the way of life back then. This is how my family emerged, through this arrangement. And so in the year 1889, my grandmother met my grandfather, and they were married, after which they lived all their lives on that rocky seacoast in Yamaguchi. My father was born there, in 1890, even before the turning of the new century.

  “At first, in the very early days that he barely remembered, there was just enough to get by. He would tell me stories about how long the winters were, and those times when the fish were not running, and there was very little food to go around. It is a triumph of the human spirit when people come together in a family and make things work. But as he grew into manhood, somehow they began to prosper. My father was a remarkable mechanic and a person of rare abilities with regard to machinery, things of that sort. He could fix things, and he would build contraptions for various purposes. He rigged machines that helped clean the fish, for instance. He did all of this while still a teenager. These stories are all among the lore of my family—part of the Goto legend, as they say.”

  He looked up at me with a bit of a sly grin. “Americans do like to believe that they invented dreaming! ‘The American Dream,’ yes, Yu-san?” We laughed together. “But it was a great moment in the history of my family when my father, having succeeded rather brilliantly in his schoolwork, was allowed to enter a technical school in Hiroshima, to study engineering and manufacturing methods. At that time, Hiroshima was emerging as one of the industrial centers in the south of our country. It was just before World War I, and Japan was becoming a modern nation. The times were ripe for industrialists and entrepreneurs, men with vision and stamina, dreamers who saw what Japan might become in the world.

  “My father was one of those men, Yu-san. He understood that Japan would make its mark in the world through the production of the basic materials of the modern nation. Machinery, steel, chemicals, wire, electrical parts, hardware, and so on. The building blocks of industry. He liked to call these things “kome,” which means rice grain. His first businesses, he would say, provided kome to the world industries: the basic ingredients. No meal is complete without rice, he would say. In many ways, the story of my family is the story of my homeland—providing uncooked rice grains to the world. But soon enough, we progressed from simply providing kome to making the entire, fancy meal. And we started getting our own rice grain from other nations. By the time of World War II, we Japanese were building airplanes, ships, locomotives, machine tools, armaments, electronics, appliances, and heavy machinery. And so was my father. In only twenty years, he had risen to become one of the chief engineers of our remarkable industrial emergence as a nation. There were many others involved, of course. But men like my father who helped inspire and guide the miraculous transformation, were rewarded with great affluence.”

  Professor Goto continued telling me about the rise of his family. That rise had many good implications, but of course, it also had many very bad ones. He hinted at some of these—the ways that his father contributed to the emergence of Japan’s military dictatorship, and its alliance with Nazi Germany in World War II. His father’s insistent participation in the cult of the emperor, even after the war. These historical realities received only the slightest acknowledgements in his story, but they hung in the air like a dark cloud. Evidently, Goto Kennichi had been an admirer of the regime and a devotee of the imperial family, including Hirohito, until the end of his life.

  After an awkward moment, I asked, “And what did you do during the war years? Where were you living?” I remembered the small comment in the book chapter covering his family empire, the comment about his supposed “efforts.”

  He thought about my query. “I was in Kyoto, studying. And thankfully, the city was never bombed, nor seriously damaged. They were terrible times, and we all learned to … make some contribution to the war efforts, in whatever ways we might be useful. My worst memories were about the attacks. We still had family living in Hiroshima, and when the city was vaporized, two of my favorite cousins, along with their entire families, were killed there in August of 1945, at the war’s end.”

  A strong breeze raised the curtains slightly, a truck rumbled over the road somewhere outside the wall of the compound, and we paused to let the heartbreaking memory of Hiroshima sink in. He had not said it with any anger, it seemed, but with a heavy sadness. I wanted to interrogate him further about what he called his own wartime “contribution,” but that was not the right opportunity. Then Sensei continued. “My brother Tsukasa was a much more prominent part of the war effort. He was cut very much in the same mold as my father. If anything, he is even more gifted than my father. He learned to fly, and eventually flew the Zeros during the war. He always claims to be ashamed of Japan’s evil doings during those years, and yet there is still a hint of pride in his voice when he reminds me that he shot down Allied planes over the Pacific, many of them American fighters and bombers.”

  He paused, straightened the sleeve of his robe. “I recall when some older men killed themselves when Emperor Hirohito passed away, in a pathetic attempt to inspire young men to return to the old samurai ways of dying for the emperor. Such a grand waste! It was one of the most traumatic moments in post-war Japan: old, conservative men, killing themselves to honor the past! We call this specific act junshi: an expression of loyalty, repugnant as it may seem to Americans. And there was the gruesome act by Mishima, our great writer that many of us compared to your Hemingway. Yet my brother sympathized deeply with such visions of pride, as he would consider them. He assured me that these lonely deaths were gallant and honorable efforts. It is possible that he might have even considered it for himself, though my brother has grown rather … comfortable in his wealthy ways. But still, Tsukasa might not mind dying in such a manner. He would think it to be for … a noble cause.”

  More silence ensued. Then, “I am afraid my elder brother is quite old-fashioned.” He reconsidered his choice of words. “In fact, he is quite mistaken. I think we Japanese owe the Americans many more apologies for the things we did in those days. Most of us older Japanese are, in fact, deeply ashamed of our nation, and of what happened during those times. And yet, there is still that strong pull of national destiny, and honor, and the memory of the dead. It is why Japanese leaders still often visit Yasukuni Shrine, in Tokyo, our official memorial for all the war dead, much like your Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, which I once visited. I recall standing before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, and feeling a great calm, and yet also a great sadness there.” I noted silently that this was the second time in our two meetings that he had mentioned Yasukuni Shrine. I resolved to find out more about it.

  He stopped to consider the curious fact of history that had mysteriously brought us face to face ac
ross that table. Here he was, sitting and drinking tea with an American, talking about his brother’s pride in killing Americans. “It is ironic, is it not, Yu-san? We are sitting here now, at this time and on this day, citizens of two nations that wanted very much to destroy each other less than fifty years ago. And yet we can be here now as friends, sipping tea, yes?”

  I looked up at him again. “Yes, sensei.” And I don’t know why, but I felt the urge to bow forward slightly toward him. He recognized my gesture, and his eyes opened a bit wider, his eyebrows arching slightly. And then he bowed toward me, gently.

  Another burst of breeze suddenly stirred some papers nearby. The thin curtains blew inward. A fragrance from outside, a blend of moisture and nectar, filled the room. We both looked up, and whatever that elusive magic was that had briefly warmed me just as suddenly disappeared. But the moment we bowed toward one another signified something, I was certain.

  There was further talk about my family and my days at Yale, but the brief magic was gone. Soon it was time to leave that afternoon, so I gathered my bag and stepped out of the room toward the front entrance. Sensei followed closely behind, and Mika appeared again from an adjoining room. I turned to face them both, having put on my shoes, ready to depart. “Again, Sensei, this has been a most splendid time together. I thank you with all my heart.” (This sort of language sounds a bit stilted to American ears, but that is how I had learned to speak to elders in Japan.)

  “Goodbye, Yu-san. It has been most enjoyable.” He paused. “Yu-san, I’d like to pursue some of our—common interests. I would love some good conversation about … well, for example, the secrets of young Hemingway and 1920s Paris, among other things. I also have some … items to show you. Does that sound at all interesting to you? That is, if you are not too busy? Perhaps we can arrange a regular time for our meetings?”