by Shan Sa
As I reach the crossroads my heart beats so hard I can’t catch my breath and I scour the streets anxiously for Min’s bicycle. At last I see him toiling up a hill and, as he reaches the top, he stops and waves to me. At that moment, he is sharply silhouetted against the sky. The wind trips lightly through the branches, which are full of birds singing their joyful little score. Some young Taoist monks walk past in their gray tunics, eyes lowered. A street peddler stokes his fire, and his fried rolls steam, a delicious smell.
In class, instead of listening to the teacher, I review the image of Min on his bicycle a thousand times inside my head. I remember his eyes shining out from under his hat, the way he raises his arm in greeting with his books in his hand. My cheeks are burning, and I can’t help smiling stupidly at the blackboard, where I think I can see him showing off as he weaves between the words and numbers.
28
After the earthquake I began to feel repulsed, but also fascinated, by death. These thoughts pursued me night and day: I would suddenly be overwhelmed with fear, I would have palpitations and I would cry for no reason.
The first time I touched a gun, I felt its strength in the chill of the steel. My first shooting lesson was outside, on an empty range. I was profoundly fearful, like a pilgrim preparing to touch the feet of a deity. With the first shot, my ears started to hum and, as the weapon kicked back, it struck me violently. That evening I went to bed with a sore shoulder, and a feeling of appeasement.
Every man has to die. Choosing oblivion is the only way of triumphing over this.
When I was sixteen I began to live again. At last I had stopped dreaming about tidal waves and ravaged forests. For me, the army was a giant arch capable of withstanding every kind of tempest. I was initiated into the delights of physical love in my very first year of cadet training, and I discovered the pleasure of abandoning myself inside a woman. Then I learned to sacrifice pleasure to duty. The Hagakure9 was like a beacon guiding me through adolescence towards maturity.
I prepared myself for death. Why should I marry? A samurai’s wife kills herself when her husband dies. Why send another life hurtling into the abyss? I am fond of children, they are the continuation of a people, the hope of a nation, but I could never have my own. Children need to grow up with a father’s guidance and protection, and to be spared from grief.
The appeal of a prostitute has the transient, furtive freshness of the morning dew. Prostitutes have no illusions and this makes them a soldier’s natural soulmates. They respond with a blandness that is reassuring; as the daughters of poverty and misery, they have an abiding mistrust of happiness. Already damned, they dare not dream of eternity, and they cling to us like shipwrecked mariners clinging to flotsam. There is a religious purity in our embraces.
After our training we no longer had to hide our recreational activities. High-ranking officers openly kept geishas, and second lieutenants made do with more fleeting encounters.
I met Miss Sunlight in June 1931. We were in a teahouse celebrating our captain’s promotion, and the screens slid silently backwards and forwards, revealing a steady stream of geishas. As one group arrived, the previous group was swallowed up in the shadows. Night had fallen along the Sumida, and boats with lanterns glided slowly downstream. I had been drinking and my head was spinning. We were getting one of the officers drunk as he lost his hand at cards, and I kept roaring with laughter. I was just about to run outside to be sick when I caught sight of an apprentice geisha10 in a blue kimono with wide, flowing sleeves with an iris design on them. She bowed deeply in greeting, moving slowly and with great nobility. Despite the white powder on her cheeks, the beauty mark that stood out against her chin made her look somehow melancholy.
She took a samisen from its case, picked up her ivory plectrum and tuned the instrument. She struck the strings abruptly and they reverberated loudly; it was like a clap of thunder in a summer sky. The wind blew, bending the trees and tearing open the inky clouds. The quiet clipping of the plectrum produced flashes of lightning that hurtled down the mountains. Waterfalls became torrents, rivers swelled and the sea, whipped up by the wind, hurled itself on the foaming shore. A husky voice began to sing of disappointed love, of abandonment and the underworld. I was seized by the misery that sometimes overwhelms a happy drunkard, and I was moved to tears by the desolate passion she described. Suddenly the music stopped, as abruptly as a vase breaking, and the voice fell silent.
All around me the officers were looking at each other, stunned and at a loss for words. After bidding us farewell, the apprentice geisha put away her samisen, gave a little bow and slipped away with a rustling of her kimono.
29
Moon Pearl keeps begging my parents to let me go with her to the new mayor’s birthday celebrations. She is convinced that her husband will be going with his mistress, and is determined to catch him in the act.
Mother couldn’t resist her tears. I find my sister’s jealousy despicable, but I do want to get out and see people . . . and Min may be at the party.
“Ladies, good evening . . .”
The footmen at the bottom of the stairs greet us with effusive little bows. One of them goes ahead of us, inviting us to enter through a red lacquered gateway, and we walk across three successive courtyards. As Moon Pearl doesn’t want her husband to see her, we have arrived after dark.
We are shown into a huge garden where about a hundred tables are dotted around under the trees and lit with good-luck lanterns to wish the mayor a long life. An orchestra in evening dress is battling desperately with its waltz tune against an opera troupe singing at the top of their lungs.
We wend our way discreetly towards a table sheltering under an umbrella pine and settle there like two huntsmen waiting for their prey. To dispel the chill of early spring, our host has lit braziers and torches, and as soon as she sits down my sister complains that the flames are blinding her and she won’t be able to recognize her unfaithful husband. I scour the area around us, looking for my brother-in-law, and I suddenly catch sight of Jing wearing a European suit and sitting alone at a table, away from the crowds. He is watching me.
I go and join him.
“Would you like some rice wine?” he asks.
“No, thank you, I can’t stand it.”
On a sign from Jing, a waiter appears and dots a dozen dishes around the table. With a pair of chopsticks, Jing serves a few slices of translucent meat into a bowl for me.
“Taste it,” he says. “It’s the pad of a bear’s paw.”
This meat, which is highly prized by the Manchurian aristocracy, slithers over my tongue. It doesn’t taste of anything.
“Here,” he says, “this is camel’s foot marinated in wine for five years. And this is the fish they call black dragon, taken from the depths of the River Love.”
Instead of tasting the food, I ask him whether Min is here.
“No,” he says.
To hide my disappointment, I admit that I was dragged here by my sister and that I don’t even know what our host, the new mayor, looks like. He points out a short, fat man of about fifty wearing a brocade tunic.
“How do you know him?”
“He’s my father.”
“Your father!”
“You’re surprised, aren’t you?” says Jing with a cold little laugh. “Before the rebels attacked, he was a council member to the former mayor. One man’s death is another man’s making. My father would manage to get himself promoted even in hell!”
Embarrassed by his admission, I can’t think how to move away.
“Look, that’s one of my stepmothers,” says Jing, pointing rather obviously at a woman who is greeting the guests like a butterfly alighting on flowers to gather nectar. She is wearing too much makeup and a richly embroidered tunic lined with fur, and a fan-shaped headdress sprinkled with pearls, coral and muslin flowers—clearly a priceless antique.
“She was a whore before she became my father’s concubine,” says Jing derisively. “She sleeps with a Ja
panese colonel now. Do you know why she dresses herself up as an imperial lady-in-waiting? She has always claimed to be descended from a deposed family of the pure yellow banner11 . . . Now, this is my mother coming over. How can she accept that harlot under her roof?”
Following Jing’s gaze, I can make out the silhouette of a middle-aged woman. Behind her I suddenly catch sight of my brother-in-law with his hair slicked back and wearing an ostentatiously elegant suit. I ask Jing whether he knows him.
A smile appears at the corners of his mouth.
“Is that your brother-in-law? The informer?”
“Why informer? My brother-in-law is a respected journalist.”
Jing doesn’t answer. He pours himself a large glass of wine and drinks it down in one. He is a friend of Min’s, but he inspires a disturbing mixture of disgust and admiration in me. When I leave him, I am so confused that I can no longer find my sister’s table.
30
My friends persuaded themselves that I had fallen for the apprentice geisha and they invited her to our banquets as often as possible. I flushed every time she appeared. The winks and stifled laughs that my brother officers exchanged irritated me, though they also inspired an obscure feeling of pride and happiness.
Sunlight was shy and always left quickly after she had sung, but as time went by she agreed to serve us food and to have a drink. She had tiny hands, and her fingernails were like antique pearls. When she brought her glass up to her lips, the sleeve of her kimono slipped down her arm, revealing a dazzlingly white wrist. Would it be like gazing on a snowfield to see her naked?
My pay at the time only just allowed for me to arrange the occasional dinner and I was in no position to keep a geisha. Time went by and my ardor cooled; I needed more accessible women to brighten the austerity of military life.
Politically that year was like a leaden sky: we dreamed that the storm would break, letting the sun shine through once more. As soldiers, we could neither take a step back nor shy away from the situation, and a number of lieutenants12 chose martyrdom. There were more and more assassinations, and the young assassins would then hand themselves over to the authorities to prove their loyalty. But neither their own terror nor these voluntary deaths could do anything to jolt our ministers out of their inertia. They were so afraid of a return to the Kamakura era13 that their only thought was to keep the military as far from power as possible.
We were coming close to the moment of ultimate sacrifice: in order to conquer the world we had to cross a bridge made of our own flesh and blood. Seppuku14 became fashionable again, a noble form of suicide that requires a long period of mental preparation, and this turned my thoughts away from the apprentice geisha.
One spring day I received a mysterious letter written in a beautiful calligraphy that betrayed its writer’s rigorous education. A woman I did not know asked me to meet her in a teahouse by the Bridge of Willows. Intrigued, I went to the rendezvous. With night falling, I could hear music and laughter in the distance, but the rustling of silk just the other side of the door suggested geishas were passing behind it. Then the screens drew apart and a woman of about forty greeted me with a bow. She wore a kimono in grayish-pink silk with glimpses at the neck of a second, olive-green kimono. A hand-painted cherry tree in blossom scattered its petals over her kimono right to the very ends of her sleeves.
She introduced herself as Sunlight’s mother and welcomed me. I had heard that she herself was a former geisha and that she owned a large teahouse. She told me that she had known my father; I knew that he had been very much in love with a geisha, and asked whether it was she.
She stared at me intently for a moment, then lowered her eyes.
“You have met my daughter,” she said. “Have you enjoyed the evenings you have spent in her company?”
I told her that I very much admired her talents as a musician.
“My daughter is seventeen. She should have moved on and been confirmed as a geisha last year. As you probably know, in this profession an apprentice geisha cannot be given an artist’s status until she has undergone the mizuage ceremony. My own experience was worse than a nightmare and I have decided to spare my daughter from a similar calamity. I have asked her to choose her man, and she has chosen you. I have taken the liberty of finding out about you, and you have been spoken of most highly. You are on the threshold of a great military career, but you are young and you would never be able to pay the sum required for this ceremony. That does not matter; I have chosen for my daughter to be happy and I offer her body to you. If you accept this humble request, I shall be eternally grateful to you.”
I was completely astonished by what she had said, and I did not say a word. She came towards me on her knees and bowed low.
“I beg you to consider it,” she said. “Do not trouble yourself with the financial details, I shall take care of that. Consider it, please . . .”
She stood up and disappeared behind the screens. I found the room oppressively dark. According to tradition, an apprentice geisha should be deflowered by a rich stranger. This initiation is expensive, but it is the crowning status symbol for a man of the world. No apprentice geisha has ever chosen the man who should ravish her, and I had just been asked to transgress this custom scandalously.
I was tormented with doubt and could not give my answer straightaway.
31
I didn’t see Min yesterday on my way to school and I keep asking myself whether he is ill or whether he doesn’t want to see me anymore. Is he already engaged, like many students of his age? Why should he show any interest in a schoolgirl?
He isn’t at the crossroads this morning, either. Feeling sad and indignant, I am just deciding I will have to forget him when a repeated ringing attracts my attention: I look up and see Min pedaling towards me.
“What are you doing this afternoon?” he cries.
“I’m playing go on the Square of a Thousand Winds,” I can’t help myself answering.
“You can do that another day. I’m inviting you out to lunch,” he says and, without giving me time to decline his invitation, he adds, “I’ll wait for you when you come out of school.”
Before riding past us he throws me a banknote.
“It’s for your rickshaw boy,” he says, “it’ll keep him quiet.”
At noon I come out of school after everyone else and, head lowered, I make my way along the wall. Min is not at the door. I heave a sigh of relief and get into a rickshaw, but then he looms in front of me like a ghost.
He abandons his bicycle and slips onto the seat beside me before I even have time to cry out in surprise. He puts one arm around my shoulders and with the other hand he lowers the blind on the rickshaw so that we are hidden down to our knees. Then he tells the boy to take us to the Hill of Seven Ruins.
The rickshaw trundles through the narrow streets. Inside, sheltered from the stares of passersby under the white tenting yellowed by the sun, Min’s breathing becomes heavier. He brushes my neck lightly with his fingers then buries them in my hair, massaging my nape. I hold my breath, rigid with terror and with an unfamiliar feeling of delight. Beneath the bottom of the blind I can see the rickshaw boy’s legs swinging regularly. Dogs, children and pedestrians skim by on the pavements to either side . . . I would like this monotonous landscape to go on forever.
On Min’s orders, the rickshaw boy stops outside a restaurant. Min sits himself down as if he were in his own home and orders some noodles. The tiny room is soon filled with the smell of cooking, which blends with the scent of the first spring flowers. The manager serves us and goes back to snooze behind his counter as the midday sun streams in through the open door. I concentrate silently on my food while Min holds forth on the class struggle. When he interrupts himself to say he has never seen a girl eat so voraciously, I don’t rise to his teasing—I find the whole situation exasperating! The young man is obviously accustomed to this sort of tête-à-tête, but I have no idea how a girl in my position should behave. Min saves me from my own
confusion by suggesting we go for a walk on the Hill of Seven Ruins.
We start our climb along a shady path where all around us yellow dandelions and purple campanula are in flower. The new grass has grown in dense clumps round the charred granite blocks, the vestiges of a palace that was consumed in flames. Min asks me to sit down on a lotus flower carved in marble, and he stands back to look at me. I find the silence uncomfortable, and sit with my head lowered, bending a buttercup stem with the tip of my shoe.
I don’t know what to do. In the novels at school—Mandarin Ducks and Wild Butterflies—a description of a young man and a young woman in a garden would constitute the most awkward scene in a love story: they have so much to say to each other, but a sense of propriety forbids them from betraying their emotions. By comparing the two of us to characters in the sort of books for sale at a train station, I eventually think we are both ridiculous. What does Min expect of me? And what do I expect of him?
I don’t feel anything to compare with the thrill of our first meeting, or with the palpitations I feel every morning as I travel to school and Min simply passes by me. Is our story already coming to an end, and does love exist only in the solitude of my imagination?
Min suddenly puts his hand on my shoulder, making me quiver. I am just about to break free from him when he starts to stroke my face with the tips of his fingers, my eyebrows, eyelids, forehead, chin. Each little move he makes sends shivers through me. My cheeks are burning and I feel ashamed, I am afraid we will be seen through the foliage . . . but I don’t have the strength to resist.
He draws my head to his; his face approaches inch by inch. I can make out the freckles on his cheeks, the beginnings of a mustache, the misgiving in his eyes. I am too proud to let my fears show and so, instead of fighting, I fall straight into his arms. His lips brush gently onto mine. They are dry but his tongue is moist, and I am amazed when I feel it probe into my mouth. A torrent flows over me.
