Mr. Moto Omnibus

by John P. Marquand

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep making that remark,” she said. “Maybe that and that will add up to something else someday.”

  Her face looked drawn, which was not surprising, because pursuing the sun across the Pacific was always a tiring process.

  “We may as well get a taxi to the hotel,” he said, “and not wait for the limousine. Nobody around here seems interested in us.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said. “I don’t want to go into an act right now. My God, I’m tired.”

  He wished that he was feeling more alert himself because it was hard to trust decisions made under the strain of fatigue. He noticed that the main concourse at the airport was not crowded, except for the smallish group that had come to meet the plane, hotel and travel agents, and friends of the passengers. The faces, as he examined them swiftly, were Japanese, but there was none of the Gilbert and Sullivan quality that a stranger might have expected. The women were dressed in the same style that one might see in New York. The men, bareheaded, wore neat dark business suits, proving once again that the Japanese were, superficially at least, the most adaptable people in the world. Only a few generations, he was thinking, lay between the grotesque shadows of the double-sworded Samurai, who had once roamed the streets of Tokyo as symbols of total feudalism, and this entirely Western scene. The changes in that brief span were impossible for even a vivid imagination to encompass and they had ended in an adequate acquisition of all the skills of Western culture. Perhaps Japan’s main ineffectiveness lay in the too rapid merging of past with present, but then there had been no time for a gradual change. It was no wonder that there was something bizarre even in the self-conscious drabness of that group waiting at the airport. No Western observer that Jack Rhyce had ever heard of, and no Japanese either as far as his reading went, had been able to rationalize all the conflicts of the Japanese spirit.

  These thoughts all came to him hurriedly and added up to a sort of bafflement, as he faced the crowd.

  “Taxicab?” he said to the porter.

  The porter, dressed in coveralls with the airline’s name stitched across it, smiled, shook his head.

  “Limousine,” he said. “All people go in big limousine. Will stop at all hotels.”

  “No, no,” Jack Rhyce answered slowly. “The lady and me—taxicab.”

  He was just as tired as Ruth Bogart. He did not want to be in a crowded car, and he was so anxious to make his point that he was not aware that anyone had been watching until a small, middle-aged Japanese, dressed in a business suit of an unpleasant purplish blue color and wearing very yellow tan shoes, stepped toward him.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said. His hair was grayish and close-clipped, and he bowed in the manner of an older generation. “Do I speak to Mr. Rhyce?”

  Jack Rhyce had honestly thought until that moment that they were in the clear. He wished that his mind were moving faster, and that everything did not have the blurred quality that was so frequently the outgrowth of fatigue. The main thing, he told himself, was not to appear too careful.

  “Why, yes,” he said, “I’m Mr. Rhyce.”

  The Japanese smiled again, and Jack Rhyce saw that both his upper incisor teeth were gold-covered.

  “I am so very glad, sir. May I introduce myself?” His voice was high, and slightly monotonous. He gave a nervous deprecating laugh, and his hands moved with astonishing rapidity as he snatched a wallet from inside his purplish blue coat and whipped a name card out of it.

  “Please,” he said, holding out the card.

  “Why, thanks,” Jack Rhyce said as he took the card, “thanks a lot.”

  The thing to do was to take it slowly and clumsily. It was of great importance to exhibit no alertness or suspicion.

  “I. A. MOTO,” he said, reading aloud from the card. “Well, well, let’s see—that name rings a bell somewhere.” He did not want to overdo the slowness, but at the same time he did not wish to appear too bright; finally he allowed himself to break into a relieved smile. “Yes, I’ve got it now.” He pulled out his own wallet and thumbed eagerly through papers and memoranda until he produced the card he had been given at Fisherman’s Wharf.

  “Yes, it’s the same name,” he said. “Moto. Yes, I’ve got it now. Your nephew gave me your name in San Francisco. Well, this is a real surprise.” He turned to Ruth Bogart, smiling with fatuous enthusiasm. “You remember that nice Japanese boy on Fisherman’s Wharf, don’t you, Ruth dear, who told us about his uncle who might show us around the city?”

  “Why, yes,” Ruth Bogart said, and her face also grew radiant with delight. “Why, he must have sent over a cable. What a lovely thing of him to do.”

  It was quite a little scene, and Mr. Moto was laughing in courteous sympathy.

  “Yes,” he said, “my nephew. He sent a cable. Yes.”

  “Well,” Jack Rhyce said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Moto, and it’s a mighty nice surprise to find you here, just when I was trying to tell the porter that I wanted a private taxicab to take us to the Imperial Hotel.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mr. Moto said, “Teikoku Hotel.”

  “What’s that one again?” Jack Rhyce asked.

  “Teikoku,” Mr. Moto said, “Japanese word for Imperial. We can get a taxicab downstairs. This way, please.” And he spoke swiftly and eloquently to the porter.

  “This is all mighty kind of you, Mr.—er—Moto,” Jack Rhyce said. “This young lady and I are pretty tired. If you could just get us a taxi and tell the driver Imperial Hotel—then suppose you come around later and call my room at, say, six o’clock, and maybe we can talk over what you can show us in Tokyo. I’ll be a little bit more on the ball by then.”

  “On the what?” Mr. Moto asked.

  “On the ball,” Jack Rhyce said, laughing at the small joke. “It’s the American way of saying more wide-awake.”

  Mr. Moto looked delighted.

  “On the ball,” he said. “Oh, yes. Thank you so very much, and Good-by until then. I will call at six o’clock, and we will both be more on the ball.”

  He laughed; Jack Rhyce and Ruth Bogart joined him.

  They were silent in the taxi for the first few moments. There was no way of being sure about the driver’s English. She put her hand over his and her fingers pressed quickly.

  “Picked us up again.”

  “Yes,” he signaled back, and at the same time he spoke aloud.

  “Ruth, dear,” he said, “it seems to me your face is on just a tiny bit crooked.”

  “Oh, Jack,” she said, “why didn’t you tell me sooner?” and she snatched her compact out of her handbag, and a moment later gave the signal of negative. No one was following, but then, why should there have been? They were going to the Imperial Hotel and the driver had been selected.

  “Wasn’t it nice of him to meet us, Jack?” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered, “it was very polite, wasn’t it? I think it will be interesting to see more of him, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “maybe. Well, I can’t believe we’re here, can you, Jack? So this is Tokyo. I must say it isn’t so romantic as I thought it was going to be.”

  She was right. Tokyo was not a romantic city. It lay sprawling over a large area, divided by a muddy river and canals—a dusty, smoky city that sweltered in the summer and shivered in the winter. Except for the areas contiguous to the Imperial Palace, all the districts of that immense city were jumbled together planlessly like a deck of cards thrown on a table, so that dwellings, shops, temples and factories were shuffled into an indiscriminate confusion. There were districts, but there were no street names except for those that had been set up by the American Army of Occupation. He remembered a bright paragraph that had been written about Tokyo in a prewar guidebook. It was fortunate, the book had said, that most of the dwellings in Tokyo were of fragile frame construction, with paper windows, because they caught fire so easily in the winter, thus making better city planning possible when they were rebuilt. There had been ample
opportunity to rebuild Tokyo. The great earthquake of 1923 almost razed the city, and during the war incendiary bombing had achieved virtually the same result—in fact, the modern business district in the vicinity of the Palace was about all that had withstood the bombing. Yet now there was hardly a sign of war. Tokyo was rebuilt again, in the same disorder as before, and with the same flimsiness and impermanence. The shops were back again, wide open to the street, displaying dried fish, vegetables, bolts of cloth, earthen and enamelware and banners in Japanese characters waved above them. You could buy anything in Tokyo, from raw tuna fish to a whole gamut of Western-style goods in the great department stores along the Ginza. Tokyo was itself again, but, as the Chief had said, there was a new veneer. There were signs advertising American toothpaste and American cosmetics, and the streets were as full of motor traffic as any American city, with driving that was even more aggressive. The variety of the vehicles on those teeming streets was a living and rather disturbing illustration of the efforts of the East to adjust itself to competition with the West.

  Once when he was in Chungking, during the war, Jack Rhyce recalled having had a long conversation with a well-informed Chinese. It had taken place during an air raid, from which they had not bothered to seek shelter, and the words of his Oxford-educated acquaintance had been punctuated by the thudding of Japanese bombs. Industrialization, the Chinese had said, was not the private property of the Western world, but only a trick which the East could learn as easily as not, and perhaps this was so. Perhaps all learning, in the final analysis, was only a trick. Certainly the Japanese had learned industrialization, and they were still learning how to adapt it to their peculiar needs. The vehicles there in Tokyo were like illustrations for the Darwinian origin of species, and all the manufacturing nations in the world were represented in the picture. Japanese and English cycles, motor bikes, scooter bikes, pedicabs, small, three-wheeled private cars, larger three-wheeled trucks, heavy-duty Japanese trucks, small shiny Japanese cars that competed with the German Volkswagen, American light cars, American heavy cars, French and English and Italian motors—everything was there to answer any need, including rickshaws and hand-pushed barrows. Somehow this variety against the facades of the shops with their indecipherable signs managed to assume a monotony which he associated with the outskirts of any large city. But the Chief had been right. Where had the kimonos gone? And where were the wooden clogs called getas? There had been an effort everywhere to lift the face of Tokyo. There were strange echoes of New York, Chicago, and Hollywood. The American moving pictures and the GI’s might have inspired the ball parks, beer halls and dance halls. But from the street, at any rate, there was no way of seeing behind the entrance doors, and the sliding windows, sanded or papered, of the wooden Japanese dwellings and inns along the main thoroughfare. There was only a suspicion, among all that modernity, of something older and more conventional, only an occasional, fleeting glimpse through a gateway of a dwarfed tree, or a pool or a rock garden. Nevertheless, as sure as fate, most of old Japan still lay behind those perishable facades, and it would remain at least for the foreseeable future.

  “It’s dreadfully noisy and crowded, isn’t it?” Ruth Bogart said.

  He remembered that she had never been there before, and that the noise and crowded feeling inspired by an Eastern city was different from the West. There was more patience and adroitness and discipline because populations were denser and living space was smaller. Tokyo gave a sense of teeming millions that one never experienced in London or New York, but Jack Rhyce knew that there was a peculiar peace behind those facades. Once they had reached home, all the Japanese women, in their New York cotton dresses and their high-heeled shoes, and all the Japanese schoolgirls, in their navy-blue skirts, and white middy blouses, and all the men in their business suits and all the Boy Scouts would move magically into another kind of life.

  The shoes would be left outside. There would be straw matting underfoot. European clothes would be hung away, and there would be kimonos—no chairs, no beds; and still, perhaps, wooden blocks for pillows. There would be cushions beside low tables, a charcoal brazier and tea, and sushi made of raw fish and rice, and a porcelain jar of hot sake surrounded by minute cups. There would be the family tub for the hot bath, and now that it was summer, an open window would afford a glimpse of a tiny garden court, with goldfish in a lily pool. This picture would vary with poverty or wealth, but everywhere in Tokyo the pattern would be the same. The old conventions still lay just behind the modern curtain and behind the barrier of language. Every stranger, in his own way, was conscious of that older life. It must have been hard to live two lives at once, as people always did in Tokyo.

  “Are you sure we’re going the right way?” she asked.

  Of course he was sure. It was true that he had scarcely been in Japan, but as soon as he had been briefed on his present assignment, he had spent so many hours on the Tokyo material that he could have found his way to any point in the city, without asking directions.

  “We’ll be there before long,” he said. “You’ll see the Imperial Palace grounds and the moat to your right in just a minute.”

  “You do know a lot of fascinating facts,” she said. “I would have boned up on this, too, but I didn’t know I was coming.”

  “It’s going to be a great experience for you,” he said. “We’re reaching the handsomest part of Tokyo now. It might almost be Cleveland or Toledo, except for the Palace.”

  The Palace and the moat and the modern office buildings that stood opposite, across the broad avenue, gave a vivid illustration of the colossal effort Japan had made to compete in a dangerous and changing world, and spoke very eloquently of the cultural cleavage that had torn Japan for a century. There was no place in Tokyo where the pictures of old and new Japan appeared in more accurate focus. The Palace grounds of Japan’s Emperor were guarded by a moat and behind it by a grim, sloping, dry masonry wall of black lava rock. At the wall’s summit, through the artificially contorted outlines of pine trees, were the curving tiled roofs of ancient guardhouses. The area had been the citadel of the old Tokugawa fortress, before the Emperor had moved there, after Perry’s visit to Japan. The walls and moat were at least a thousand years old, and the etiquette and spiritual qualities that they protected were vastly older. A part of the Palace had been destroyed by bombs, but the Emperor was still residing among the trees and gardens. Across the street the skyscraper buildings of banks and insurance companies, and the modern Nikatsu Hotel, made a dramatic contrast. Most of them were of a prewar vintage, and most of them had successfully survived the bombings. It was true, as he told Ruth Bogart, that when you saw them, you had the whole story of Japan, if you could manage to read it.

  “Out there in the park by the Palace gates,” he said, “is where the people gather in times of grief and mourning. They say that there were thousands of them on the day of the surrender.”

  He thought that he could still feel echoes of that time as they passed the Palace walls. The Emperor had addressed his people over the radio that day, the first time that his voice had ever been heard by the general public, and it was ironical that it had been difficult for many of his subjects to understand him because he spoke in the dialect of the old Court of Japan. It was a time, he said, when all must bear the unbearable; Japan had surrendered, and the subjects of Japan were asked to welcome their former enemies. And they had done so. They had put large signs on the airstrips reading WELCOME, U.S.A. It was still not difficult to imagine the park, filled with thousands of mourning Japanese, prostrate, beating their heads on the ground. Hundreds had disemboweled themselves before the walls that day, as a loyal gesture to the Emperor.

  “You see,” Jack Rhyce said, “they are very loyal. That’s the main thing to remember about the Japanese. Loyalty is the essence of their religion, although they might not put it that way.”

  “How do you know so much about them,” she asked, “if you’ve been here so little?”

  “By readin
g,” he said. “And in the war we took a prisoner now and then.” But this was no time to talk about himself; they were driving up to the Imperial Hotel.

  He heard her exclaim when she saw that low structure of yellowish volcanic stone, with its strange windows and angles. Although the hotel was designed by an American, it must have once represented the quintessence of Japanese aspirations. He had always thought it was one of the oddest buildings in the world, and he still thought so. While he went to register at the desk, he left Ruth Bogart standing by the baggage, staring bemused at the rough stone corridors and angles. The building had been completed in 1922, and, as a guidebook once put it, it was a maze of “terraces, loggias, porte-cocheres, turrets, inner gardens, glassed-in corridors and roof gardens . . . the salient architectural features of the exterior have been reproduced in the interior, where there are columns, ledges, winding tile stairs and temple-like effects.”

  He could not tell whether he was surprised or relieved when he found that their rooms on the third floor of the front wing had a connecting door. Gibson had made the arrangements, and the connecting door might possibly have been an attempt at humor, except that Jack Rhyce knew that Gibson seldom made jokes. Three Japanese boys walked ahead of them, carrying their luggage. He was almost sure that he had seen at least one of them when he had been at the Imperial during the Occupation. The hotel had seemed old and tired then. Now he knew that it would never be young again, because it represented a Japanese dream that was lost, a fantastic, disturbing dream of misplaced grandeur and conflicting taste. He wondered, as he often had before, whether its famous architect, Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, or some Japanese contractor had approved the final plans. He was inclined to settle for the contractor, because everything was too small and weirdly compact for Western taste. There was a Lilliputian quality about the rooms and everything inside them. The writing tables were too low, the wardrobes below normal height, and the walls of volcanic stone made everything look crowded.