Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  He climbed until the path levelled out and spread through the trees. A stone fireplace had been built among the cypress and sugi, and rope decorated with white pennants linked the trees. A Shinto shrine. He looked to the low mountains in the distance, the neat brown and blue arrangement of forest. The Kami, the spirits of this place, were silent. Mist drifted in to obscure the pine trees, winding itself around the branches of the pines. Emmett had walked this mountain before, with his father, years ago. Now he felt that his father remained hidden in the mist, in the silence of the Kami. The pines were visible, then invisible, while the mist shifted, leaving its wet trace. His father is dead. His father’s lover, Sachiko, is dead. His mother is dead and gone. Nothing remains of the dead, but the damage they’ve done.

  There was nothing to do but walk back down. Snowy, morning light reminded him of Ontario. The path returned him to the garden at the back of the house, under a layer of snow patterned by birds’ feet, covering the stones right to the edge of the black water of the fishpond. Green grass thrust raggedly through the snow. He’d gotten cold, his boots were wet, he’d snagged brittle twigs from the persimmon tree in his hair. He approached the house and tapped on the glass of the French door.

  Aoi stood inches away, separated from him by a pane of glass. She was huge, wearing a cloak, a weave of black and ochre, and her face was coated in heavy white makeup with an aureole of rouge beneath her eyes. Her thick black hair had been lacquered so it rose high from her forehead, adding several inches to her considerable height. Her shining hair was again shaped strangely into jet-black triangles at her cheekbones.

  She didn’t blink. He swayed his body far to the left then far to the right, and her red-rimmed eyes followed him, the whites of her eyes, her nearly black irises tracking his movement, but she was unsmiling. Like a bat unfolding its wings, Aoi spread the wide sleeves of the cloak, revealing her muscular forearms, and opened the door. Heat pulled him to itself and he fell inside. His feet began to needle and thaw.

  He shook the twigs from his hair onto the mat and tried to remove his boots, but the laces were frozen. Finally he pried them off and peeled off his wet socks. When he looked up to address Aoi, she put her finger to her painted lips, “Shhh.” She waved, Follow.

  Aoi returned him to the tatami room. The curtains were drawn against the morning light. He fell onto the futon with a childish moan of contentment and then stood up quickly: his clothes were damp and not very clean. Aoi shuffled in her white socks to stand before him and take his musty tweed jacket, folding it and placing it near the stove. She returned and put her cold hands under his sweater and lifted it over his head. He laughed but she shushed him.

  Her cloak had silk buttons, one looping over the other. He reached curiously to touch her hair, but she gripped his right wrist while she undid the silk clasps. Then she let him go and stepped toward him. As she did so the cloak fell away, revealing the naked body below her painted face, the creamy whitewash that ended at her collarbone.

  He travelled his fingers over her breasts and rounded her stomach, then ran along the strong shoulders, pushing her backward till she was lying down. The rouge around her eyes made them look huge and animal. He moved so his body covered hers and pinned her arms back. He felt the delirious surge of freedom, an existence without restraint; his life lifted from him, a fleeting sliver of childhood, pure greed, destructive and pleasing to himself. This time he cried out.

  Aoi put her hand over his mouth and forced him back until he kneeled between her legs while she sat up. The careful arrangement of her hair had become a tangle of rich black braid. There was the dense scent of her rice powder smeared on his chest.

  She walked to the window and pulled aside the curtain. Emmett followed, gathering up the cloak to drape it over her shoulders. With a tone of defiance, Aoi told him that the cloak had belonged to her grandmother. “It is from Manchuria,” she said.

  He began to get dressed. Even the sparse furnishings seemed disappointed. He wondered why he felt as if they’d just had an argument. He asked her if she was all right.

  Aoi, cloaked and pallid, shook her mane and arranged the garment around her feet. She might have been preparing to greet His Imperial Majesty. In a low voice she asked him, “Why do you never ask me about my father?”

  Emmett was struggling with his pants. He wondered, indeed, why he’d never asked her about her father. She’d said he’d died. And the Americans had let her stay in the house. He apologized; he was sorry that he’d spoken to her so little; he was always distracted by her unusual looks, her uncommon beauty. “Tell me,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  Emmett put on his shirt.

  “He was a hero,” she said.

  Her voice had a shrill register he’d never heard before from her. He continued to get dressed. He wanted to be prepared for what came next.

  “He was a hero,” she repeated. “A Japanese hero.” Then she laughed in the way that he liked, in her estranged, solitary victory over the meaningless defeat of her country. She abruptly saddened. “Ah,” she said, “poor Father.”

  Aoi looked from the window down onto the snowy lawn and the road beyond. She spoke softly in singsong English. “When the dead are listening, what do we tell them?” In the eggy light, her broad face was a moon, even in its irregular shape. She lifted her face to him, tears flowing over the white surface of her face. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. The moon was crying. She lay down on the floor with her face buried in her arms and raised her head to look at him. Her tears had washed the rouge into two V’s under her eyes. The remains of lipstick were smeared to the corners of her mouth.

  She rolled over onto her back, wrapping the Manchurian cloak around her body, but for her right breast — and it did look like a lotus blossom — and the dissimilitude of her large form, its continent of Manchurian ochre and shades of black, and its floating breast in misalliance with her gorgeous clown-face, all made him keenly glad he’d come here after all.

  She stared up at the ceiling, coiling her hair round her finger. “My father died to redeem his purity.”

  This was a Japanese expression. Emmett guessed that she meant that her father had died by suicide. A redemptive, purifying suicide. There must have been shame. It would be indelicate of him to question her on this. So he said nothing.

  A half-hour later, she walked down with him to where he could catch his bus. It was cold and she covered her ears with mittened hands. Once, he turned to find her kneeling several feet back, rocking herself, inwardly, intensely focused. She held up her hands filled with fresh new snow and showed him this.

  He looked hard to see what she wanted him to see. Snow. And all around, trees, which were very good trees, in the way Japan was good, and which were good in ways quite unlike the good trees of Canada.

  Aoi stood up in the freezing wind, regarding him from behind her ruined makeup, her hair wildly dishevelled, like a giant and sexually knowledgeable child.

  “I can’t leave my country,” she said.

  “I’ll see you in two weeks,” he promised. She didn’t respond; she didn’t believe him. Women have a way of doing that, he thought; they make you feel bad and then refuse to tell you what you did.

  He succumbed to the temptation to be at a loss for words and left her on the road below the plum trees. He was some distance away when he heard her calling out. “Emmett Jones!” He stopped and listened. I have taken something from you! Aoi’s voice winging overhead, her tone of victory with a desperate edge.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Emmett walked to a low row of artisans’ shops in Kobe, to a warm wooden room where a handsome, middle-aged woman sat at a drafting table drawing maps. The walls were covered with similar hand-drawn maps and below them twenty or thirty cubbyholes were filled with scrolls. There were hangers draped in sea charts. Land surveys hung from the rafters, swaying in the heat coiling up from the hibachi. The place smelled of sandalwood. The woman looked at him from under the papery
folds of her eyelids, laid her pen in a dish, opened a drawer, and removed the train schedule to Tokyo. The cartographer’s office served as an information centre. She said in English, “So much coming and leaving.”

  With her smooth, greying head, she looked like a piece of soapstone. While she prepared his ticket, she asked, “Where is your home in the United States?”

  He told her he’d been born in Japan but that he was actually Canadian. She uttered a cry of delight and called out in Japanese. A Japanese man wearing a hakama, a fellow in his mid-twenties with a shining, merry face, unmistakeably of the same family, appeared from behind a screen. She introduced him. “My brother,” she said. “Dr. Kimura.” She said the name as if it were a light joke.

  “Canadian,” said the woman, pointing at Emmett. “Canadian,” she repeated, pointing at her brother.

  Dr. Kimura bowed. In neat consonants, he said it was wonderful to meet a fellow Canadian.

  “I was born here,” said Emmett.

  Dr. Kimura burst out laughing. He had a boy’s voice. “I was born in Ottawa.”

  His sister smiled wanly, with a tremor of disapproval.

  Dr. Kimura said, “I’m going to Tokyo tonight, to board a ship and go home.” He put stubborn emphasis on the word home.

  Dr. Kimura’s sister remarked that she had found him a companion for his journey to Tokyo, for she happened to know that Mr. Jones was catching the same train, and they both must hurry or they’ll miss it. “Ah!” said Dr. Kimura. “I’ll be glad to have a chat with you!”

  The night journey to Tokyo was intensely pleasurable. Kimura loved to talk, but he was also a curious listener, and Emmett trusted him with harmless, almost gossipy details of his life.

  Several times Emmett brought the conversation round to Aoi, to the difficulties of her relations with a gaijin. He tried to imply that she confused him, intending to portray himself as a man willing respectfully to submit to women’s irrationalities. Kimura listened with a look of subdued merriment on his face.

  They arrived in Tokyo at nine that night and found a bar doing brisk business in the rooms upstairs, catering to Japanese sailors and the new Japanese police wearing shabby, hand-me-down American uniforms. Emmett ordered sake from the very pretty, very young girl.

  Kimura wasn’t yet a doctor; he was still a student. The war and an internment camp in Guelph, Ontario, Kimura pointed out, had slowed his progress. Kimura called himself “a relativist” — a Nisei, he insisted, being a man of two existences. His father had remarried as soon as his first wife died, and he’d left his daughter, Kimura’s elder sister, sixteen years old at that time, behind in Japan while he journeyed to Canada in search of — what?

  “Freedom!” said Kimura, laughing. “Crazy, eh?”

  Kimura was born within a year of their immigrating. They couldn’t go back. Japan had closed herself off again, to purge all enemies of the kokutai. It was hard for Kimura’s sister, left behind, but things got much worse for her in the war years when the thought police, the Kempeitai, watched those with even the slightest connection to the United States. Anyone who gave her employment was suspected of harbouring a spy, a decadent infesting Japan with the foreign ideology of individualism. She’d nearly starved.

  “But you aren’t American.”

  Kimura laughed and put his arm around Emmett’s neck, kissing his cheek.

  Kimura was tough on his race, but if Emmett gave way to any criticism of the Japanese, Kimura would flip to the other side in passionate defence. “The manner of a man’s death will determine the value of his life,” he said and added, lugubrious with drink, “We can’t expect someone like you, Emmett Jones, Christian, to understand our noble tradition of seppuku. An act of honour, a demonstration of free will.” Here, he shrugged and winced. “But to suicide for the emperor?” He made a light sound with his mouth: “Pfft.”

  Kimura was we as a Japanese and I as a Canadian. “I am not convinced,” he went on, “that every one of the tens of thousands of suicides in the last ten years adds up to nobility. Maybe it’s impossible to do anything nobly anymore. Nobility has been diluted among too much population on the planet.” Kimura smiled like one of the Gods of Good Fortune and called out for the pretty little girl to bring them Scotch whisky.

  The sailors and police in their shabby uniforms put down their beers and turned to look at them. Kimura cheerfully raised his cup and said in English, “Goodbye, Buddha-Heads! Goodbye, everlasting shame! Goodbye, kokutai! Tomorrow I go home to Canada!”

  Without a word, four sailors pushed back their chairs and approached like men called to perform manual labour, casually fitting brass knuckles onto their hands. The man who reached Emmett first took a swing, but he was so drunk Emmett dodged the first blow, and he heard the brass knuckles clatter to the floor. The sailor staggered back and hit him barehanded, this time punching his face hard enough to break his glasses. Emmett’s mouth filled with blood. He hit the man under the jaw, snapping his head back till his body leered toward the floor and he fell.

  Two sailors were holding Kimura so another could hit him square in the gut. Emmett caught one of the sailors by the arm, turned him around, and hit him with his left fist, knocking him to the floor. He knew immediately he’d broken his hand. The policemen abandoned their beer to join the fight. Emmett grabbed the brass knuckles from the floor, then wrapped his arms around Kimura, twisted him out of their reach, and hurled him toward the door. With the brass knuckles in his right hand, he swung his arm full length and caught a Japanese policeman in the throat, axing across his larynx with his whole swing. Blood spurted from the man’s mouth and nose and he buckled suddenly, bleeding so much Emmett could smell it.

  Emmett dragged Kimura, limping, out to the street, where they flagged down an American SCAP vehicle.

  The car was driven by a fellow from SCAP whom Emmett recognized from meetings at Dai-Ichi. The fellow turned around and looked at Emmett’s bleeding face. Emmett said, “Bar fight.”

  Kimura said, “Damn! I think I’ve torn my meniscus cartilage!” Kimura and Emmett began to laugh too hard. Kimura’s merriment had been changed, as if his cheerful transparency had become opaque. His laughter was harsh, despairing.

  The American took them to the dockyards, dropped them off on an oily dock, and drove away without comment.

  Kimura and Emmett hid behind a stack of wooden crates. It was a cold night and they huddled together for warmth. Soon Kimura limped off and returned with a wet cloth to wash the blood from Emmett’s face. “You’ve broken your nose,” he said, and then gripped Emmett’s nose with the heels of his hands and gave a firm push sideways. Emmett heard a crunch.

  At six o’clock the following morning, Kimura boarded the ship that would take him away from Japan. Emmett couldn’t see well without his glasses. He stood on the dock and waved goodbye to Kimura, a vague figure standing at the ship’s railing. During the night, they had agreed neither of them could afford to be caught in the brawl. Kimura would never escape Japan; Emmett would face criminal charges and lose his job.

  “That man I hit might be dead,” Emmett had said to Kimura.

  Kimura calmly responded, “We would have been beaten to death.”

  Emmett was dimly surprised to discover such a steel edge in the young doctor, but he thought about what Kimura’s sister had endured. And Emmett knew how brutal the Japanese police could be — it was Japanese police who had killed his father.

  Emmett had black eyes and a swollen left hand; he’d have to explain to the people at the Liaison offices how this had happened. He and Kimura agreed: Emmett would report an incident that had taken place that night. He would report that he’d been accompanying a Japanese man from the Tokyo train station when they were jumped. He would even give the name, Kimura. Kimura is a very common Japanese name. Emmett had been struck in the face and had broken his hand with a clumsy punch, but there were no other injuries. This man Kimura had gone his own way once they’d assured each other that they were all right. Emmett
hadn’t called the police because the muggers had vanished; assaults were common on the streets of Tokyo, and the police would have nothing to go on, tracking down homeless men.

  Emmett would always wonder what the SCAP official who’d picked them up off the street thought had happened. He never learned the man’s name, and he never heard from him, even when the dailies reported that a policeman had been killed by “a thug” in the Minato district in the early hours of Monday morning.

  The Japanese police didn’t report publically that one of their own had lost his life in a bar fight with a white man, no doubt an American. They did not antagonize their occupiers. They bent, supple. Emmett was relieved of any consequence of the fight.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The receptionist tapped her nails at his office door while Emmett was on the phone with an optometrist. His new glasses would be ready to pick up that afternoon. He’d bandaged his hand, and he fumbled as he put the receiver down. She poked her head inside and said, “It’s his nibs. He wants to see you.”

  “I have an appointment.”

  She looked at him while she waited for him to understand that he had no choice, and then she retreated, leaving his door open, her high heels tapping, calling out in a singsong, “Better run, sweetie pie. The general said ‘now.’”

  At Dai-Ichi, making his way into MacArthur’s office, Emmett had to step aside to permit a flurry of reporters who were on their way out. Somebody said, “Hey, Jones. Who won? Her husband?” Their faces were blurry, but he didn’t think that his friend Wilson was among them; Wilson had said he was going to Pusan, to observe the chaotic retreat of MacArthur’s Eighth Army.

  It was a few days after Christmas and the UN forces were getting shot in the back. MacArthur had just fed the press the news that his forces had managed to wipe out thirty or forty thousand Chinese and North Koreans during the “withdrawal.” Nobody talked about the hundreds of thousands of Korean civilians being killed. The reporters chatted happily as they filed past. They’d been under a UN-imposed censorship, so it was gratifying to get the lowdown from the general.