Butterfly's Shadow

by Lee Langley

  But there were old people left behind in Nagasaki whose children had already built new lives in America, whose grandchildren were now Americans, and in that fast-moving, faraway world there was little time for letters – some were no longer able to read or write Japanese. If letters could be written in English, how much more strongly they would link the old and new worlds. The people left behind, Cho-Cho mused, would feel less excluded: their bright young American families would be able to get news from home – in English!

  She would offer herself as a scribe; a traditional occupation.

  Perhaps she might occasionally write letters of her own, to a lost child, her Joy: ‘My Dear Sachio,’ they would begin, but those letters would remain unposted.

  Mrs Sinclair at the Methodist mission house was an old friend of Henry Sharpless; she knew the whole story. When Cho-Cho arrived at the mission house and asked to see Mrs Sinclair, she hurried out of her office and impulsively took the girl’s hand in both her own.

  ‘My dear!’

  She looked at the small, pale young woman and wondered what to say next. To enquire after Cho-Cho’s health hardly seemed appropriate. She was saved embarrassment: the visitor, though she spoke in a whisper, took charge with a confidence that surprised the older woman.

  ‘Mrs Sinc-u-lair, I have for some time studied Engrish. I can read and write, and have some acquaintance of life in the West. Some Nagasaki families have been making use of my letter-writing s-u-kills, but I have time to spare. Perhaps it is possible for me to give lessons to the mission girls?’

  She felt it was unnecessary to mention that she had earlier given lessons to enterprising tea-house girls; the vocabulary and tone of those classes would hardly be appropriate for the God-fearing pupils at the mission house. When the tea-house workers picked their way slowly through their lessons, between the building blocks of nouns and verbs and adjectives, something unspoken also emerged: a search for ways to express secret wishes, to be heard, to have a voice.

  To Mrs Sinclair she offered a different, tempting bait: she explained that because of Pinkerton she had set herself to learn about Methodism, and the Methodist idea: let your good deeds shine for all the world . . . Would they accept her lessons as a good deed? And, in return, paying her a little to help her stay alive might also perhaps be considered a good deed?

  And so the next step forward was taken.

  For a while, Cho-Cho’s days were filled with English lessons – basic conversation, reading, writing, geography. She had found a suitably indirect way to insist that Suzuki should leave the silk factory:

  ‘The machinery has already scarred your hands. I fear the skin will grow so rough that you may damage the fabric when you wash clothes; as a favour to me, Suzuki, please allow your fingers to regain their former smoothness.’

  Suzuki knew what she was really saying, and Cho-Cho knew that Suzuki knew. The maid’s hands slowly healed. Meanwhile Cho-Cho’s mission house classes grew increasingly tedious, the girls less keen than the tea-house workers, less eager to improve themselves. She fretted, grew bored.

  26

  Each day, a cycle rickshaw carried Cho-Cho to the mission house and home at the end of lesson time. One morning, as she stepped into the rickshaw, she gave the man directions that surprised him. He turned in the saddle:

  ‘The waterfront?’

  It was not an area frequented by respectable young women. He shrugged and moved off, pedalling comfortably.

  As they neared the port she asked him to slow down as she peered left and right, studying the sleazy shopfronts and rundown dwellings, the stalls busy with people bargaining, buying, selling. And, threading their way through the crowd, American sailors from a ship newly docked, coming ashore on leave. Young men, looking curiously alike in their white uniforms, pink faces expressing astonishment at this unknown, alien world. Cho-Cho noted one or two of the sailors pausing at shop doorways, hesitant. Lost.

  She tapped the rickshaw man on the shoulder.

  ‘Mission house.’

  Mrs Sinclair was at her desk going through papers. She looked up and saw the girl waiting outside the door. She beckoned her in.

  ‘Cho-Cho?’

  ‘Mrs Sin-cu-lair, I want to learn to cook American food.’

  ‘Why would you want to do that, my dear?’

  ‘Ah, perhaps I could get a job, with an American family. Perhaps you have a book of recipes that I could borrow?’

  It sounded a reasonable reply, and Cho-Cho’s expression was guileless, but Mrs Sinclair had a feeling she was being fooled. Still, what harm could come of lending the girl a book of recipes?

  The red and white cookbook was dauntingly thick: too many pages, too many recipes.

  Chapters were arranged alphabetically by main ingredients (Beans, Rice & Grains; Meat) or by course (Appetisers & Snacks; Desserts). Cho-Cho studied the headings doubtfully until she came to ‘Cooking Basics’: this might be the place to start. There were ingredients, methods and something called ‘menu plans’ which she could ignore. She was looking for some familiar words, and finally she found them: meat loaf, hash brown potato, apple pie. But would it be like Momma makes?

  She looked down the page: two pounds of ground beef, two eggs, one yellow onion, one cup breadcrumbs (or three slices stale bread), brown sugar, ketchup, mustard . . .

  She handed Suzuki a list of ingredients with a grimace. ‘See what you can find in the market; it won’t be easy, but the cooking looks simple enough. It just says mix and bake.’

  Her first attempts were disastrous: the meat loaf crumbled, the potatoes burned and even the birds rejected the apple pie. She persevered, and soon produced results at least recognisably similar to the distressing examples Pinkerton had brought back from the ship. Now she sent for the marriage broker.

  He had grown sleeker and less eager to please since their last meeting. Business was good and he had little need for a scrawny woman of twenty with a scar on her neck.

  Cho-Cho greeted him briskly and did her best to conceal her dislike of the man. She had a proposition:

  ‘I plan to open an eating house. Small, simple, in the harbour district. I need a loan.’

  ‘Against what security?’

  She gestured to the table: wrapped in scarlet silk, her father’s sword.

  The broker was a realist. He was aware that the sword, however precious, would not cover the expense of opening even a modest establishment.

  ‘What makes you think you can succeed? We have plenty of such places.’

  ‘Not like mine.’ She called to Suzuki, and the maid appeared with a tray spread with small dishes.

  Cho-Cho handed her visitor a plate containing a selection of unfamiliar items. Intrigued, he picked up a morsel with chopsticks, and tasted it. His eyes bulged; he rubbed his head, went through an elaborate pantomime of shock, dismay and disgust. He disposed of the mouthful.

  ‘This is filth.’

  ‘Yes!’

  She had a memory flash of Pinkerton one morning trying a mouthful of fermented bean paste, spitting it out and asking, incredulously, ‘What is this filth?’

  ‘It is natto,’ she told him. ‘Traditional breakfast food.’

  ‘It stinks,’ Pinkerton had replied, ‘and I never want to taste it again.’

  ‘This is meat loaf. Traditional American food,’ she told the marriage broker. ‘My customers will be Americans. Homesick sailors.’

  The marriage broker considered her words, put a question. Listened. He looked at the dish of food, then at her, with new respect.

  ‘This place you want to open . . .’

  It began as a slot between two buildings, barely larger than a shed; a counter and some stools. Cho-Cho was at the stove, Suzuki serving. Outside, a large board, boldly lettered in English.

  Nagasaki American Kitchen

  MEAT LOAF HOME STYLE

  APPLE PIE LIKE MOMMA MAKES

  The first sailors treated it as a joke; they ventured in, expecting some crazy Jap version o
f real food. Soon they were lining up at the door. The crowd became an embarrassment; Cho-Cho hired a waitress. They moved to bigger premises, brought in tables, expanded the menu. Beer was served.

  Cho-Cho was up before dawn, off to buy vegetables at the riverside market, fish on the quayside. She had business cards printed for the Nagasaki American kitchen. Tucked into the obi of every tea-house worker, they earned the girls a small commission from Cho-Cho for each customer they sent her, customers that now included officers.

  She was dishing up a New England chowder when she saw him pause in the entrance; the white uniform, the golden hair, cap tucked under his arm. She made a small, involuntary sound, then he came out of the shadowy doorway into the light, a fresh-faced stranger asking if he could make a reservation for later.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘To avoid disappointment.’

  After she had engaged, and trained, a cook and a second waitress, Cho-Cho sent a message to Sharpless requesting a meeting.

  The consul found himself in the unusual position of being inarticulate, for once incapable of reaching for the emollient bridging phrase, the convenient comment – the usual stuff of diplomatic social intercourse. He knew she was no longer giving lessons to the mission girls – the restaurant kept her too busy – but he hesitated to offer the normal congratulatory noises. Had she forgiven him?

  For a while the two remained in silence, Cho-Cho looking down at the matting by her feet; Sharpless allowing himself an occasional glance at her face, remembering the hours he had spent by her side, watching over her, waiting for signs of returning life. She looked well, but there was an intentness in her face that was new.

  He coughed nervously. Cho-Cho touched the pale scar at her throat, a gesture that had become a habit. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible.

  ‘Have you news from America?’

  ‘A letter from my sister. She says . . . everyone is well.’

  She had said considerably more; Mary had written an intemperate screed, furious with Henry, who had clearly been aware of the disgraceful affair going on in Nagasaki. Was this, she asked, what the government paid him for, to supervise illicit unions between decent American boys, lost and confused in foreign lands, and local women of ill repute? Nancy, she added, had borne up bravely, but her life was ruined.

  He had attempted to respond, filled page after page with calmly reasoned explanation, and then with equal calm had torn up the pages. Finally, he decided too much time had passed, and he placed her letter in a drawer and turned the key.

  ‘And have you replied?’

  A shake of the head.

  ‘I think you should.’

  The words surprised him, and she noticed.

  ‘Sharpless-san, I have lost my child. What will help me to live is to know something of his life; to know that he is growing, is in good health. Is happy. It would help.’ A pause. She touched her throat. ‘It would help me if you were to write to your sister. Ask for news of.’ Another pause. ‘The child. Will you do that?’

  And so it began, Henry becoming, to his sister’s surprise, more of a family man, requesting news of Mary herself, and Louis; enquiring after the well-being of his niece and her child. At appropriate times of the year he requested a snapshot of Joey: ‘they grow so fast. I still think of Nancy as a toddler.’ To Nancy herself he was incapable of writing: the mystery of the day of her departure; her failure to tell him Cho-Cho was bleeding to death on the floor, though she must have known, all this created a barrier as solid as stone.

  But for Cho-Cho’s sake he wrote regularly to his sister and she wrote back, and in Nagasaki an album was slowly created, formed of tiny black and white snapshots with dates – Joey’s first bike . . . Joey playing the flute in a school concert . . . winning a geography prize . . .

  Cho-Cho’s relationship with a lost boy, regained, at one remove, on paper.

  Mary and Louis discussed the change in Henry, and agreed that it was probably due to his status as an ageing bachelor far from home and family. His sister softened: poor Henry, of course he missed them. In her next letter she told him she prayed to God to bring him some measure of joy in that strange, unchristian land where he must be lonely.

  So when Henry asked Suzuki to be his wife and she agreed, he made no mention of the fact in letters home.

  27

  Suzuki was hesitant about accepting Henry’s proposal. She had adored him for years, in the way she would revere a distant god. For a servant girl to be noticed at all by such a figure seemed beyond expectation. But from the beginning Henry had talked to her as an equal; they understood one another. He had known Cho-Cho’s father and he had feared for the future of the orphaned girl. He told Suzuki once that if he could have adopted Cho-Cho when her father died, he would have been a second father to her. With time, Suzuki saw, his feelings had changed. Perhaps before he knew it himself she was aware that Henry was besotted with her mistress.

  From the day when he arrived with Pinkerton at the little house overlooking the harbour, through the years that followed, Suzuki watched that devotion grow. But Cho-Cho was always tantalisingly beyond Henry’s reach, and Suzuki saw the three of them moving in a sad, circular dance like figures on an Imari vase, linked but held apart: Suzuki loved Henry, who loved Cho-Cho, who loved Pinkerton, and so it would continue.

  Suzuki accepted him because she was Japanese and, like Henry himself, a realist: she accepted the possible. And she felt guilt because incomplete though it was, her life would be richer by far than Cho-Cho’s.

  Suzuki’s family, at first mistrustful, met the consul and discovered that he spoke their language fluently, that he was at ease with their culture and – for a foreigner – had a reasonably pleasing appearance: small, pale, black-haired, with sharp cheekbones and narrow eyes. He was considerably older than Suzuki, therefore experienced in the ways of the world; a good thing. He was also, being American, wealthy, while their own poverty was showing ever-sharper teeth. He was made welcome.

  ‘Your daughter will have a traditional wedding,’ Cho-Cho reassured Suzuki’s parents. ‘Sharpless-san would want that.’ Faced with this unexpectedly forceful young woman, the parents, to their own surprise, allowed her to take charge of arrangements.

  Cho-Cho ticked off items on her list: comb, sandals, sash . . . she recalled that once before, long ago, she had rehearsed these details, but this time the paraphernalia would be real, not the furnishings of a hopeless dream. The bridegroom would provide.

  She concentrated on each item: Suzuki’s wedding kimono would be of heavy silk, shiromuku, the whiteness denoting purity. The white headdress would be placed over a gleaming ceremonial wig. She assembled the little purse, the mirror, the fan and the kaiken – there was a momentary faltering when she came to the traditional bridal knife in its silken sheath. She touched her throat, paused. She sensed Suzuki watching her with an anguish that was not wholly concealed.

  She wanted to reassure her old servant and friend but troublesome emotions were better left unexpressed. And besides – a fingertip to her throat – she suspected she would be unable to speak the words.

  The Shinto ceremony moved at the traditional, stately pace with an exchange of rings and nuptial cups. The priest led the service, the bridal couple recited oaths of obedience and faith and at the sanctuary they offered twigs of the sacred Sakaki tree. Henry wore the appropriate kimono, the haori-hakama and – unusually for him – looked cheerful. Cho-Cho saw with surprise that his features had acquired a nobility, even if only temporarily.

  And she saw, too, that happiness really did lend beauty to the plainest face. Suzuki’s eyes shone and her skin glowed in the reflected light of the pearls she wore – her husband’s wedding gift.

  When Suzuki had her first child, a difficult birth that left her weak and exhausted, Henry was apprehensive not only for his wife’s welfare, but for Cho-Cho’s state of mind: how would she respond to the new arrival? As always, she surprised him, briskly offering help.

  ‘
The restaurant is running itself; I don’t always have to be there.’

  This time it was her turn to care for a fragile woman, coax her to eat, to return to life. Once, her servant had helped her to live; now their roles were reversed.

  She knelt beside Suzuki, bowl and spoon in hand. ‘Remember the bird? How hungrily he gobbled up your rice?’ She rested the spoon gently against Suzuki’s lips, ‘The way he peck-peck-pecked at the seeds?’ A little natto in miso soup found its way into Suzuki’s mouth. ‘And then – shitting all over the doorstep!’ Surprised by the bold language, Suzuki opened her mouth, involuntarily took in more soup, joined Cho-Cho in nostalgic laughter. The corner was turned.

  The second birth was easier. The third, routine. Cho-Cho became as skilled as Suzuki herself in caring for the infants. As the two women together fed and cleaned the young ones, working with the familiar harmony of a team, Cho-Cho remarked that she was enjoying the advantages of motherhood without the pain of responsibility. ‘I shall watch them grow, worry over them as you do, but without the fear that I should have done things differently.’ She added, with a note of determination, ‘I shall love them.’ Silently, she vowed that she would also teach the girls about life and how to deal with it.

  Nagasaki was burgeoning: silk was in demand and the Mitsubishi steelworks had expanded, was modernising. Western visitors multiplied: businessmen, buyers, importers, exporters, arrived and found their way from dock to town, factory floor to boardroom.

  The wives had different needs. With a diplomatic nudge or two from Henry, Cho-Cho was invited to give professional guidance. A successful restaurant owner, she could be accepted socially, her past conveniently forgotten; the world was changing, modern ways were superseding tradition, at least on the surface.

  Here was someone these men of the world could trust to escort the ladies from the safety of their hotel, to show them where to acquire the most delicate fabric, the finest lacquer bowl. Someone to show them the local tourist sights – the Glover Garden, for example.