by Nina Revoyr
The Warrens spent their first few days in Karuizawa the way most tourists did—going to hot springs, visiting the temples, shopping in the stores by the railroad station. Then one morning, Mr. Warren wished to go golfing, and so I drove him, along with Harmon and Kagane, to the new golf course just outside the town limits. Mr. Warren and Harmon were golfing, I was caddying, and Kagane carried everyone’s lunch. They had just finished playing the first three holes when Mr. Warren started sneezing uncontrollably.
“Damn allergies,” he said, eyes watering. Then: “Bill, I forgot my medication. Could you ask one of these boys to go back and get it?”
The interpreter turned to face us and said, “Mr. Warren is having trouble with his nostrils.”
Kagane stared at Harmon in bewilderment.
“His nostrils, his nose!” said Harmon, waving his arms. “They are causing tribulation!”
Kagane looked at me now, and I shrugged. Finally, Harmon turned to Mr. Warren. “I’m sorry, sir, they don’t seem to understand me.”
I stepped forward and said in my most careful English, “I understand, sir. You have allergies and you need your medication.”
Even in the midst of his sneezing fit, Mr. Warren stared at me in surprise. “You speak English!”
“Yes, sir,” I said self-consciously. “But only a little.”
“Well … .” And then he sneezed again. “Why didn’t you let on before?”
“You had Mr. Harmon, sir. But since I am aware of your condition, please excuse me while I return to town. Will Mrs. Warren know where you keep your medication?”
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Warren, and with that I left for the inn, where I startled Mrs. Warren by asking in English for her husband’s medication. I then sped back out to the golf course, and within a few minutes of Mr. Warren swallowing his pills, the sneezing fit subsided. For the rest of the morning, as they completed their round, he spoke to me in English—much to the consternation of Harmon, who kept giving me looks of displeasure.
When we returned to the inn that evening, news of my intervention had spread among the staff. I had always been held in a certain esteem because of my English, and this small incident suddenly made me a hero. The Warrens saw me differently as well.
The next evening, after my shift, I was sitting outside with Kagane near the employee quarters, which were about a hundred feet behind the inn. Mr. Warren came ambling back there about 10 o’clock, under a moon so bright I’d seen him from the moment he’d stepped outside. “Junichiro!” he called out as he approached, and Kagane departed without a word, leaving me to my encounter with the American.
I yelled back, “Over here!” and he came and sat on the tree stump that Kagane had just vacated.
After a comment on the night and the freshness of the air, Mr. Warren lit a cigarette and asked, “How’d you learn to speak such good English?”
“I went to an American Catholic school. I learned English from native speakers.”
“Have you ever thought of coming to America? There’s a lot of opportunity for a young man like you. You could certainly do better than washing dishes at a country inn.”
I hesitated. “That is kind, sir. But America is very far away.”
Warren shifted around to face me. “Look here, Junichiro. You’re a high school graduate who speaks wonderful English. We’ve got a big university in my state of Wisconsin, and it happens to be right in my city. How would you feel about coming to study there?”
I laughed. “I am only the son of a farmer, sir. Such things could never happen for me.”
“I’d take care of it, don’t you see? I could easily arrange for the payment of your college fees. It’s a bit late to register, but we should be able to swing it—the university owes me, considering how much money I give them. And I could send you a ticket for your passage over.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “Mr. Warren, I could never accept …”
“Of course you could,” he said, waving away my protest. “And call me Paul. Is this something you would like to do?”
“Sir, in my fondest dreams, I never—”
“Well then it’s done,” he cut me off, standing up again. He held out his hand, and I had already met enough Westerners by then to know I should shake it strongly. “I’ll see you in Wisconsin,” he said.
Although I was intrigued by Mr. Warren’s generous offer, I did not mention it to anyone else. I was afraid that his proposal was the result of sake and the mountains, an idea that would quickly dissolve once he returned to the States. While Mr. Warren did tell me, on the morning he left, to “remember what we talked about,” it did not surprise me when weeks passed, and then two months, without any word from America. It had all been a fantasy, one brief fiash of possibility, as when a beautiful girl smiles at you from across the room and then returns to the arm of her escort. By early August I had resigned myself to returning home and helping my family with the harvest before seeking work at the ski resorts for the winter. But then one afternoon, a week before the end of the summer season, Ishimoto summoned me up to the front desk.
“For you,” he said, handing me a package. It was wrapped in brown paper and covered with colorful stamps. “From USA,” he added in stumbling English.
I took the package from him—it was lighter than it appeared—and saw that it had come from Wisconsin.
“The Warrens?” asked Ishimoto, and I nodded, unable to speak. His wife emerged from the back room and they both watched me like excited parents. At that moment something occurred to me. “Did Mr. Warren speak to you about this?”
“Oh, yes,” said Ishimoto, and he could hardly contain his grin. “He asked if I thought you should go to America, and I said that we couldn’t wait to get rid of you.”
I laughed and opened the package, and there it was—a train ticket to Tokyo from Karuizawa, a ticket for passage by ship from Tokyo to San Francisco, and a bus ticket from San Francisco to Madison. Dear Junichiro, said the hand-written letter. Please accept my apology for waiting so long to write you. It took a few weeks to arrange your travel and your paperwork for entrance to the university, but everything is finalized now. Please make the trip to Wisconsin as soon as you can, and we will get you settled here before school starts in September. You will be staying in the house of one of my good friends. You’ll have a private room, and you should be very comfortable. The letter went on to describe how exactly to obtain my visa, and what paperwork to bring with me when I came. I had to sit down to absorb the implications of it all, and I shakily translated to the Ishimotos, who were as thrilled as if they were making the trip themselves.
It is hard to explain, now, exactly why I was so captured by the idea of going to America. I loved Japan, its mountains and rice fields and serene, still temples—but there was also something in me that felt contained there; that needed a different setting in which to grow. It was perhaps a mark of my arrogance and immaturity that I believed I had to leave in order to do so. But the picture of America that had been painted by my teachers at St. Francis, and the expansive, entrepreneurial American spirit embodied by the Warrens, had enticed me to believe that America was the place of bounty and hope, or, as some said in Japan, the Land of Rice. And so I traveled home to my village four days after my tickets arrived, prepared to break the news to my family.
The first person I had to tell was my father. Although he was only forty-five at the time, I thought of him as old. He was as steady and silent as the mountains we lived in, not gregarious or hard-drinking like the other men I knew, and I was always proud to have such a respectable man as my father. The whole family was aflutter because everyone was home. The house was alive with the sounds of my mother cooking and laughing, and of the four of us children loudly recounting the events of the last few months. It pained me to know that I would deflate this happy scene with the news that I was bearing, and for the first two days there was no opportunity for private conversation with my father. I finally found him alone one morning, standing ou
tside, looking out at the maturing crop of rice. It was a glorious day. The sky was clear and blue, and a gentle wind was blowing through the trees. The stream that meandered past the house was full from a recent rain; our three old mules stepped gingerly down the banks to drink from the running water.
“It is nearly time to harvest,” my father said as I approached. I glanced out at the fields and saw that he was right—the rice plants were as high as our waists. After we harvested, we would dry the stalks on bamboo frames and then sell them to the makers of tatami.
“There is a good crop this year,” I commented. “It should yield a high price.”
“Your brother has become an able farmer,” he said. “I am giving him more and more responsibility with every passing season, and you see he is very successful.”
“My brother is becoming a man. I believe I detected a gray hair this morning when he leaned over his bowl of rice.”
My father smiled at this and then kicked the ground. His knee-high boots were splattered with mud. “Your mother thinks we might be losing you, Junichiro. She says that even when you are here, you are not really here.”
“It is just the opposite, Father,” I said, feeling a tightness in my throat. “Even when I am not here, I will always be here.”
He pulled himself up to his full height, which did not quite equal my own. “So it is true that you are leaving us.” He looked straight ahead as he said this, and I followed his example.
Even though I was taller than my father, I felt like a little boy. “I have been offered a chance to study at a university in America. An American family I met in Karuizawa is willing to pay my passage and university fees.”
My father absorbed this news silently for a moment. “And why do you need to go to America for schooling? What is available to you there that you cannot find here?”
I could think of no way to answer that would make him understand, so I continued staring out at the fields. A crow dipped down among the rows of rice; the scarecrow my brother had devised, wearing our old clothes, did not seem to bother it at all.
My father kicked the ground again and spoke. “I will not stand in your way, Junichiro. But this opportunity is both more and less than you think. It will change you in ways you can’t anticipate now. And if you go, you will never again see your father.”
I glanced at him, and then turned my head away. “Of course I will see you, Father. It is only four years.”
“Four years can be a lifetime. And the world you are about to enter will open up into many others.” He paused and looked out at the hills. “It does not surprise me that you’re going. You, of all my children, are always looking forward, always seeing what’s around the next bend. But you must remember to feel the ground that is right beneath your feet. Live where you are, not only where you think you should be. Otherwise, you will end up living nowhere.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but he raised his hand and bid my silence.
“I wish you luck. You have been a good son.”
I looked at him again, surprised by the emotion in his voice, and saw that there were tears in his eyes. But before I could say anything, he turned away and walked wearily back to the house.
I will never understand how he knew what would happen once I made the trip to America. But he was right about everything. My father was always right. And one week later, when my tearful family accompanied me to the train station in Karuizawa, my father embraced me long and hard, which he hadn’t done since I was a child. We disengaged and I bowed to him deeply, hoping my respect and love were clear. And as I sat and lay and wandered on the ship for two weeks, I kept wondering whether I had made the right choice. Eventually, I would gain success and fame of a level I could not have imagined. But the man I sought to please—as he seemed to know already—was lost to me forever.
CHAPTER FIVE
October 9, 1964
The morning after my meeting with Bellinger, I took the cover off my automobile for the first time in months, coaxed the engine to life, and drove west toward the Fairfax district. I drove slowly, so as not to strain the large old car, passing the Chaplin studio on La Brea and the Pickford-Fairbanks studio on Santa Monica. I turned left at Fairfax and eased the car down into that lovely old neighborhood. All the buildings there—the Spanish-style apartments and English Tudor houses—look much the same as they did when they were built in the ’20s. Once one crosses Melrose, the businesses, markets, and bakeries become solidly Jewish, and the sounds of Hebrew and Yiddish fill the air. Here is the famous Canter’s Deli, filled with elderly Jews in the daytime, and with wildly dressed young people of every religion, I have heard, in the hours after midnight. On the east side of the street is Fairfax High School. And just across from the high school, a theater.
I remembered this theater; I’d even been here once or twice to see second-run films. It was a logical place to choose as a venue for old-time movies. Although much smaller than the lavish theaters where our pictures once played, the details were right, from the curved glass windows and cupped silver change hole of the ticket booth, to the ornate, gold-plated light fixtures, to the old piano that had once been used to accompany silent films. Suddenly I felt nervous about seeing it again, and after I found a space large enough to accommodate my vehicle, I took several deep breaths to gather myself.
As I approached along the sidewalk, I saw workmen carrying heavy tools and equipment and heard the inter-mittent sound of drilling. The old marquee had been removed, replaced by black art-deco lettering that said, Silent Movie Theater. A middle-aged man stood in front of the ticket booth and examined a piece of paper. He was wearing khaki pants and a white long-sleeved shirt that was smudged with dirt. His blond hair was uneven, as if it had been cut by a child, and he had the meaty countenance I associate with the Middle West. As I approached, he looked up and said hello.
“Hello,” I replied. Then I pointed through the open doors. “I have been in this theater before when it played second-run movies. What are you doing with it?”
The man, who I assumed was O’Brien, glanced over at the workers. “My wife and I just moved out here, and we’re opening a silent movie theater. We’re fixing it up—we have to replace the snack counter, renovate the bathrooms, that sort of thing. So the place will still have an old-time feel, but with all of the modern conveniences.” He looked back at me and fiashed the smile of a salesman; perhaps that was what he’d been in Ohio. “We’re having a big opening night in four weeks—spotlights, red carpet, live music, the whole shebang. I hope you’ll be able to come.” He reached behind him and then handed me a flyer.
Chaplin Double Feature! it announced in thick black letters. Come Celebrate the Grand Opening of the SILENT MOVIE THEATER!! Relive Hollywood’s Glory Days!
“Tell me,” I said, lowering the fiyer, “what other films will you be screening?”
O’Brien tapped his pen against the clipboard he held. “That’s what I’m working on right now. There’s the classics, of course—like Keaton and Mary Pickford and the Keystone Cops. And Intolerance and The Sheik and all those old things. But I don’t know what to show beyond the obvious choices. Do you have any suggestions?”
“Well,” I said, stepping closer to him, “thank you for asking. I do, in fact, have several suggestions. I believe you should consider showing some of John Gilbert’s films, as well as those of the Gish sisters and Harold Lloyd. Certainly Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson. And you might consider Jun Nakayama.”
A look of puzzlement crossed O’Brien’s big Midwestern face. “Who?”
“Jun Nakayama, the great Japanese star.”
“He was a star in America?”
“Yes,” I said, trying to mask my impatience. “From 1912 to 1922, he made more than sixty films. He was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, particularly in the years between 1915 and 1920. He starred opposite Fannie Ward, Lillian Gish, and Bessie Love, and did one picture with Gloria Swanson.”
“Really? Now what was his name again?
”
“Jun Nakayama. His most well-known work was the 1915 picture Sleight of Hand. Several others, including the World War I film The Noble Servant, may still exist in private collections. He worked with all the great directors of the day, including William Moran and Cecil B. DeMille.”
“You know, I think I do know who you’re talking about,” said O’Brien, brightening. “Somebody else mentioned him also.” He looked at me with a new respect. “You sure know a lot about silent films.”
“I suggest that you try to find Nakayama’s pictures. I believe that you will find them quite interesting.” And with that, I bade him farewell and continued down the sidewalk to Canter’s. I felt too unnerved to make the trip home right away, and ordered some tea and an apple turnover to calm myself down.
While I was thankful that someone had taken enough of an interest in silent films to open a special theater, I was troubled by the fact that the proprietor seemed to know so little about them. How could he do the period justice if he didn’t recognize the contributions of some of the silent era’s most accomplished artists? How could someone who was clearly not a student of film present even the pictures he did know in an appropriate context? For silent movies are a singular form, one that viewers cannot appreciate without a basis for understanding what they see. They have their own rules and symbols; they depend on inference and audience involvement much more than outright explication; and every element—from the use of light and shadow, to the choice of color stock, to the suggestion of off-camera space—is vital in creating the overall effect and expressing a larger vision. And it is not simply that silent films themselves have been forgotten; lost, too, has been the language to discuss them. I was not convinced that the man I had met that day would be able to convey that love and understanding.
