I arrived too late at SCAP headquarters in the Dai-Ichi Insurance building to be assigned barracks, so Sam took me in the jeep to a ryokan. A tiny windowless room, blistered tatami mats, lumpy futon, but the bedlinen was spotless. I went out to find something to eat, couldn’t find a hotel with a restaurant still open, and ended up among the ramshackle black market stalls that had sprouted out of the debris. With the farmers and fishermen selling direct to these places, what was available to the ordinary citizen was negligible or way out of their price range. But the Yankee dollar could buy anything. In my case, a bowl of noodles flavoured with some dried fish and a small bottle of rice wine. I probably could have had a side of Kobe beef with chips if I had wanted.
My mood was upbeat with my hunger gone and my head swimming with the rough sake. I decided to take a walk down by the river and it was there that I first saw her, standing half-in and half-out of the shadow of the bridge. I couldn’t see her face, just the trail of smoke from her cigarette, the dark slacks and a blouse covered by a loose cardigan over her shoulders. The style of dress confused me and I wrongly assumed she must be a Western girl.
‘Hey, soldier,’ she called, her voice at first weak and throaty. Her face emerged slowly from the shadow, like a pale moon from behind clouds, a red scar of lipstick, hair loose past her shoulders, not pinned up in the Japanese style. A panpan girl. ‘Hey, soldier.’ Her voice stronger this time.
I looked around. The street was empty. I would just saunter over, exchange a few words, it had been so long since I had spoken to a young woman. Yet such a strong current of excitement ran through me as I approached her. Not just a sexual thrill. But the thrill of power. So seductive of my pathetic male sexuality. I could have her just like that. For less than a dollar. For the price of a bowl of rice, some dried fish and a half bottle of rice wine. These young women sacrificed for my comfort by this defeated nation, thrown up by the Japanese authorities like barricades against the invading foreign hordes. To protect the nation’s virgins by feeding them prostitutes instead. There were official brothels full of them. Sponsored by the government’s Recreation and Amusement Association. But who was this freelance woman of the street? A war orphan? An eldest sister forced to feed her family? Or did she just give pleasure in order to find her own pleasure in what a few dollars could buy?
‘You not GI?’ Her face was heavy with make-up. Unnecessarily, I thought, since she was quite beautiful.
‘British.’
‘Eikoku-jin. Why you here?’
I didn’t know if she meant here in Japan or standing here in front of her. I decided on the former although I wasn’t going to tell her I was a translator. Better she tried to communicate on my terms.
‘Americans want me for work,’ I said.
‘Americans want me too.’ A half-smile. Sad eyes lowering. She continued to suck on her cigarette, no inhalation, just light puffs kissed into the air.
I dismissed the stupid questions rushing into my head, stood there dumb, wondering what to say. I didn’t want to pay to have sex with her but I didn’t want to leave her either. I suddenly realised how lonely I was. How alone we both were. A large crow swung down in a black flap from the parapet and we watched as the bird struggled to unearth a scrap of food from among the reeds on the river bank.
‘Can I buy you something to eat?’
She dropped the cigarette, scrunched it out with the heel of her shoe.
‘One dollar,’ she said.
‘I don’t want… I don’t want sex.’
‘Not sex. My time.’
‘You want me to pay you so I can buy you something to eat?’
She smiled again. This time her eyes lit up. ‘Take it or…’ And then she screwed up her mouth in a search for the words. ‘Take it. Or leave it.’
I fell in love with Sumiko at that moment. I didn’t know anything about her – who she was, what had driven her to the streets, how many men she had slept with, whether she was a good person or a bad person. But even within her despair, she had exhibited a brightness, a playfulness, a hopefulness that in my own loneliness, my heart found irresistible.
‘I’ll take it.’
‘Good,’ Sumiko said, linking her arm in mine. ‘I am hungry. So very hungry.’
THE WATERWHEEL, CHAPTER 5
I watched as Sumiko hurriedly scooped up a few more strands of noodles with her chopsticks. I was not used to seeing a woman eat in this way. It both shocked and amused me to see the tails of soba flick against her chin before being slurped noisily into her mouth. Like rats disappearing down a drain. I passed her a napkin and she reluctantly dabbed the stock from her lips.
‘When did you last eat?’ I asked.
‘Yesterday morning. Batta. I don’t know how you say.’ She wiggled her fingers in insect-like fashion.
I knew but didn’t say. Grasshoppers. A breakfast of grasshoppers.
The owner of the stall put down two small cups and a flask of warm sake on the counter in front of us. Beneath his peaked worker’s cap, his tiny eyes stared out fiercely at us. He said something to Sumiko, which I couldn’t hear. Her reply told him I was English not American. He shrugged and left us.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘He said his pride hurt to see Japanese girl with American soldier.’
‘What do you think about that?’
‘I am not Recreation and Amusement girl.’ She picked up the noodle bowl, tipped it up high and drank down the last of the contents. In the bald light of the one bulb hanging from the rafters, I could see the darker flesh of her neck as it stretched uncovered by make-up from the collar of her blouse.
‘I didn’t think you were.’ I knew that the RAA prostitutes worked out of licensed brothels rather than try and pick up soldiers off the street. ‘So what are you then?’
‘I am an onrii lady?’
‘And what is that?’
‘Onrii. Onrii one.’
‘Only one?’
‘Yes. Only one man.’
‘So where is he? This one man.’
‘Go back to America.’
‘When?’
‘Before one month.’
‘And left you to eat batta?’
She picked up the flask of sake, filled my cup to the brim. ‘I have no father, sick mother, two young sisters.’ She put the flask down and counted out her responsibilities on three of her fingers. ‘Only food is black market food. Too expensive. GI good to me. Sugar, salt, chocolate, cigarettes from PX. Even soap. That is Japanese life now. He give, I give. Good deal. Do you have wife?’
I shook my head.
She took my hand, began to massage the palm. ‘Skin soft,’ she said. ‘O ffice soldier, yes?’
The simple act aroused me. In fact, everything about her aroused me. The smell of her cheap perfume. The touch of her rough fingers on my skin. The rocking closeness of her bare foot next to mine on the counter stool. But this was no subservient Japanese girl of the streets. There was a defiance about her. A pride. I might have had the commercial power, but she had the sexual power.
‘Yes. Office soldier.’
‘British office soldier can go to PX?’ She let go of my hand to refill my cup.
‘I don’t know. I think so. I need to report tomorrow. I’ll find out then.’
‘OK. Which hotel you stay? Nomura? Dai-Ichi? Imperial?’
I smiled. From what I had learned from Sam the jeep driver, she had just reeled off the three main accommodation facilities for GIs and Westerners. In ascending order of luxury.
‘I will find out tomorrow.’
‘So where you stay tonight?’
‘A ryokan. Near here.’
‘A ryokan,’ she sneered. ‘Show me.’
I paid and we went out into the street. The market was still busy despite the hour, with stalls lit up by paraffin lamps and lanterns floating off like fireflies into the darkness. I wanted Sumiko close by me, not to lose her in the crowd, but she kept stopping at displays of goods laid out on up
turned boxes or just spread out on handkerchiefs in the dirt. And it wasn’t the usual trinkets I would have expected to catch her eye but pots and ladles and spoons and tunics and badges and military blankets. The city was devastated yet here was the fresh bacteria of commerce clinging to the rotting corpse, ready for cultivation into a new economy.
‘You buy me this?’ she asked, holding up a pair of silver-plated teaspoons she had snatched up from a cloth on the ground.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re useless.’
‘They’re pretty.’
‘I’d rather buy you some rice.’
I pulled her away from the skinny boy who seemed to be responsible for these, his only, pieces of merchandise. She kept up apace beside me now, clinging roughly to my arm. We passed a group of men warming their hands around a fire burning high and greasy from an oil drum. One of them spat towards Sumiko as we passed. I made a half-hearted display of wanting to respond but she pushed me ahead.
‘Poor soldiers,’ was all she said.
Taking my bearings from the bombed-out remains of Shinjuku Station, I managed to find my way back to my ryokan. I waited with her outside as she smoked a cigarette.
‘I can’t go in,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Too Japanese.’
‘Can I see you tomorrow?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘By the bridge?’
‘Perhaps.’ She passed her cigarette over to me and I squashed it out under the heel of my shoe. ‘Now I must go home.’
As I watched her disappear into the black hole of the night in this bombed-out city, I tried to imagine where her home might be.
THE WATERWHEEL, CHAPTER 6.
I was billeted at the Nomura. My room was tiny, cramped, but I was just grateful it wasn’t one of those cordoned off into cells by blankets – which is how most of the GIs slept. I was also given access to the PX, where I bought some essentials for myself, a bag of rice and a few bars of chocolate for Sumiko. That night I waited three hours for her by the bridge but she never came. I repeated the vigil the following night and the next with the same fruitless outcome.
By coincidence I had been assigned to work with Feldman, the captain who had given me a run into Yokohama when I first arrived, together with Winston, the corporal from Georgia who liked jazz. Feldman was the chief interrogator in an investigation into the deaths of a bailed-out American bomber crew allegedly murdered in captivity. Six of the poor Yankee bastards survived being shot down over Southern Japan only to be captured and then eventually driven out into the woods by a group of fishermen and shot. A blood-lust revenge just one night after news of the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki had reached the village. The murderers of all these thousands of innocent civilians now seeking justice for the death of six airmen. My heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t think Feldman’s was either. He had just finished a law degree when he had enlisted. Four years later and these interrogations were his apprenticeship. It was hard to eke out justice from a bunch of simple fishermen who never really believed they had done anything wrong. War was war was war. Their victims surely understood that. The issue was not whether the crew had been shot but that they had taken their punishment honourably. With stoic dignity and acceptance. Stories had circulated that the dead men’s livers had been ripped out and served as a delicacy to officers at a local army base but I was sure these tales were just meant to throw fire on to the frenzy. The autopsies proved me right. We were just one of several war crime cases on the go, right up the scale to the highest ranking officers and military commanders. This was America’s Nuremberg in Japan. There would be a few showcase trials to demonstrate whose law and morality now ruled the roost and to satisfy the press back home. Then they would peter out.
But for now I spent day after endless day in a windowless interrogation room that reeked of sweat, cigarette smoke and hopelessness watching a skinny, scared peasant realise that bushido was irrelevant to his captors. My mouth and throat parched dry from the hours of translation and interpretation in the summer humidity as a heavily perspiring Feldman, thorough and patient, went over events again and again with his prisoners. At night, I was desperate for human company that didn’t involve a bewildered and unrepentant fisherman, Feldman or Winston, a cabaret or a crate of beer or a quick fuck with a panpan up an alleyway by the hotel. I had been told half the Occupation Force had already contracted syphilis or gonorrhoea. Penicillin was the biggest selling drug on the market. Tokyo was just a big black hole for me, both literally and emotionally, and it was swallowing me up.
It must have been nearly two months after our first meeting when I finally saw her again. The girl who ate grasshoppers. I was crossing the road outside the Imperial when she emerged with her co-workers on the arms of a bunch of American officers in their dress uniforms. The whole lot of them were like a gaggle of geese, pouring out into the street, all het up and excited, cackling and flapping, necks wriggling in all directions. She saw me too, a flash of a smile, before she drifted on up the road with her giggling flock.
I took heart from that brief acknowledgement and went back to the bridge the following night. I only had to wait ten minutes and then she turned up. The proud spark in her I remembered from our first meeting had gone, and her whole body sagged with a certain weariness. We exchanged pleasantries.
‘You are a kind man,’ she said, running her finger lightly along my forearm.
I wasn’t sure if she was making a statement or asking a question. I shrugged. ‘All I did was buy you a meal.’
‘Can you drive?’
I nodded.
‘Can you get jeep?’
‘I don’t know. Yes, perhaps I can. Why do you need a jeep?’
‘I want you to take me out of here. Out of Tokyo. To the mountains. To Hakone. Just one day. Can you do that?’
THE WATERWHEEL, CHAPTER 7
It was easier to get the jeep than I had first thought. A few forms to be filled in at the motor pool and that was all. The reason for the requisition? To visit witnesses to take statements. I had the authority to do that. Finding the extra petrol was the problem. I had almost given up on the whole adventure when finally I found some yakuza chap from the Kanto Ozu gang with a hoard of the stuff behind a stall in the Shinjuku market. He was willing to part with a couple of jerrycans for a few dollars if I threw my sunglasses into the deal. I filled up, drove off to pick up Sumiko at the bridge. My driving was rusty and I struggled with the double-declutching but at least the Japanese drove on the left the way I was used to. I made it to the bridge ten minutes late, quite proud of myself for only stalling twice on the way. She was wearing a bright kimono, pink with the pattern of cherry blossoms. I noticed her musky green-tea scent as she slipped in beside me. She hardly wore any make-up. I took that as a compliment.
The first few miles were awkward, both of us hardly speaking as I drove through the city, or what was left of it. But the regeneration that was under way in the shanty towns sprung up around the charred remains gave us reason to talk. There was scaffolding everywhere, concrete mixers, bulldozers, giant lorries hauling in bricks and girders, building crews hammering and welding, bent-backed peasants growing vegetables in fields of soot around the sites. Human beings were bloody resilient, I had to give them that.
The roads were in remarkably good condition, re-surfaced no doubt for the military ferrying supplies between HQ in Tokyo and the naval base down in Yokosuka. There was little civilian traffic, and the few other military vehicles we came across honked us wildly on seeing a soldier out with a Japanese girl. You wouldn’t have known when Tokyo became Yokohama but once we had moved on south past Ofuna, the countryside began to spread out green and clean in front of us. The air was fresher, sweeping in off the sea, and I began to breathe easy. This was my first day of R&R since I had hit Japan. I had a jeep and this little Japanese sweetheart by my side. I was ready to enjoy myself.
‘I thought we might see Mount Fuji fr
om here,’ I said.
‘Only person who stay in Japan long time see Fuji-san,’ she said, turning to smile at me.
‘Well, that rules me out,’ I said, pumping the pedal a little harder. ‘Where shall we go?’
‘Ashinoko.’
I turned inland from the coast at Odawara and then up and over a mountain pass. The roadways became trickier, pretty rough with more potholes than macadam in patches, sharp bends and steep inclines, and I had to concentrate hard on just changing through the gears, with not much time for my passenger or the scenery. Over the summit and it was plain sailing after that, just cruising in neutral most of the time down to Hakone. Lake Ashi would have been pretty unremarkable compared to what I was used to back home had it not been for Mount Fuji sitting off in the distance. Unburdened by clouds, the sight of the volcano’s absolute symmetry was astonishing, hard to believe it had been carved out so perfectly by nature rather than by human endeavour. I could understand why the Japanese accorded this mountain divine status. And given my unfettered view, I guess I was scheduled to stay in Japan a long time. A fact Sumiko didn’t hesitate to tease me about.
We had lunch in a restaurant by the lake where she was more attentive than I could have ever wished. She filled and re-filled my sake cup, laughed at my stupid jokes in Japanese, hung on to my arm as we strolled, insisted on buying me a small box inlaid with the local marquetry as a souvenir. She then told me there was somewhere else she would like me to take her.
The hotel was one of the most impressive buildings I had ever seen. I had just pulled out of a bend entering a small village and there it was. So unexpected, just spilling out of the mountain side, easy as you like. That was its architectural strength. Its organic nature. Summing up in an instant all that was exquisitely beautiful about Japan. Grace, elegance, subtlety, attention to detail, respect for the natural form. I drove into the forecourt where a few other military vehicles were parked. Christ, there was even a staff car flying the Stars and Stripes. Perhaps the old Supreme Commander himself had stopped by for a cuppa. A couple of white-gloved flunkies took the jeep, leaving me and Sumiko standing in awe in front of the building. I thought of myself, Feldman and Winston stopping off on my first day in Tokyo to get our photographs taken outside the Imperial Hotel. That Frank Lloyd Wright edifice was magnificent but what I stood staring at now really moved me. I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was the romantic in me. I brushed down my uniform ready to escort my lady through the swing doors.
An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful Page 29
