Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  During the quarrels, enmity, hyperbole and earnest discussion between the various colonial governments and the indigenes of the islands and, in the case of Australia, with the United Nations over the future of Papua New Guinea, Anna, like ourselves, had been getting on with her own increasingly successful business.

  Madam Butterfly was becoming the improbable headquarters for business gossip, know-how, information and advice among some of the biggest movers and shakers in the city, to all of whom Anna listened with a growing sophistication, charm, attention, mock incredulity, and genuine admiration. Add the allure of a beautiful woman, and the combination was irresistible.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘I try not to cheat and not to lie, which I find is almost impossible in the world of business. But I’ve also discovered it’s futile to feel guilty. He technically steals from me and I claw back what I can.’

  Anna Til

  ANNA IGNORED MY ADVICE and prospered by listening to her wealthy clients in the privacy of her rope and whip boudoirs; more than prospered. She owned real estate at the Paris end of Collins Street, and although it wasn’t the most salubrious area in the fifties and sixties, it was one that seemed to be ripe for redevelopment. The centre of the city was just a sniff away from a makeover – a new metropolis of ugly skyscrapers replacing the old Victorian-style buildings that made Melbourne so attractive. Whelan the Wrecker was going day and night with his great steel wrecking ball, and if it all went to plan, Anna the speculator looked like being amongst the city’s new elite – the developers.

  Our relationship did not change; she continued to cherish me in every way but one. During this period she didn’t expect to be, nor was she, the only woman in my life. The islands were awash with attractive young women. In Port Vila they might be French or British, and on the other islands there were Australian, New Zealand and United Nations personnel. With the peripatetic lifestyle of a shipping executive, and as the owner of a magnificent home at Beautiful Bay, I was initially the fortunate recipient of many an amorous overture, and in the years that followed I settled for long-term casual relationships with several lovely women.

  Though it is easy to say in retrospect, I never gave up on Anna and the hope that she would one day decide to seek help. Besides, she was one of only two women I had truly loved, and Marg, married with two kids, was unavailable. Being a male I could have found a hundred reasons why Anna wasn’t suitable, why I should settle down with a more compliant woman, have three or four kids and get on with my life. But whereas lust and desire make easy accommodations, love doesn’t. I learned to live with the cards I’d been dealt and hung on to the only single woman who truly mattered to me.

  Over the years I gradually pieced together the story of Anna’s life under the Japanese and in particular under the influence of Konoe Akira. Although it seemed incredible to me, eventually I was forced to accept that Anna believed her virginity was the source of all her other powers. Her inner strength – what she referred to as the core of the persimmon tree – would fail if she were to lose her virginity, and she would become, as she herself put it, a nothing and a nobody.

  On one of my frequent trips to Rabaul I brought up the subject of virginity and the notion of its invested power with my father the bishop. As I had expected, he proved a fount of knowledge on the subject.

  ‘Ah, well, of course there are the brides of Christ, the nuns, as the most obvious example of the role of virginity in the Christian faith,’ he began.

  ‘But isn’t their virginity predicated on devotion and service rather than personal power?’

  ‘Well yes, it may manifest itself in that way, but it emanates from the Virgin Mary, who is among the most powerful symbols in Christendom. No greater power can exist than the immaculate conception, the ability to spontaneously give birth to the Son of God.’

  ‘I hadn’t really thought of the Virgin Mary in terms of personal power; she’s blessed, tranquil, motherly, but hardly dynamic, is she? She doesn’t seem to have made much use of her power.’

  He laughed. ‘See how you unthinkingly speak of her in the present tense? That is how millions of people see her, as a living presence. Wouldn’t you see that as evidence of a dynamic character? Her personal power can help people to change or bring about change, her presence can be taken into battle or used around the hearth.’

  ‘Immaculate conception – isn’t it . . . I mean, a bit of an excuse to create a symbol of power rather than actual power exerted through personality, will, determination, intellect, whatever?’

  ‘Close to a billion Catholics wouldn’t agree with you, son,’ he gently argued. ‘In the mind a symbolic reality and an actual one are often the same thing. The Mother of God lives just as surely as God Himself and is an omnipotent presence in the lives of around one in five of the world’s population.’

  ‘Clever idea,’ I remarked.

  ‘But not an original one.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Virgin birth as a symbol of power is not the preserve of Christians. Athena the Greek warrior goddess, believed historically to be the forerunner of our Virgin Mary, gave virgin birth to Erichthonius according to some of the sources,’ he told me.

  ‘Clever people, the Greeks.’

  ‘Ah, yes, they realised that virginity, as a symbol of purity, swaddles naked power with the notion that it has no motive other than good or what’s right. That’s a pretty powerful and compelling idea, don’t you think?’

  ‘Sure, the Greeks, Romans, Christians – classical antiquity; but what of the rest of the world, the Asians? Japan, for instance. Is virginity self-empowering within Japanese culture and beliefs?’ I asked him.

  As usual he had the answers. ‘Whosoever chooses celibacy is seen to have mastery over body and mind; moreover virgin power is also a concept found in the Buddhist and Hindu religions. The idea that women, when virgins, remain autonomous and independent seems to be a universal belief, and the association of virginity with power is widely accepted.’

  ‘But in the end it’s not a rational view, is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, there we have it, the cynic’s viewpoint. Religious beliefs are not sustained by logic. They are all the more powerful because they come from our emotions, because they are accepted as a matter of faith and with the promise of ultimate salvation. Humankind, it seems, must have faith. Finally, the virgin is a pure, unadulterated vessel in which God resides at His most powerful. Ergo the virgin nuns, the Brides of Christ, to bring us back to where this conversation started.’ My father sat back in his chair.

  If her virginity was what Anna believed to be the source of her power, I was to learn that the persimmon tree was the template for her character. The Japanese commander had given her a seed to plant every remaining year of her life so that she could constantly renew within herself the metaphor the tree represented. It was a classic case of reinforcement. While Anna explained the characteristics of the persimmon tree to me, she did not admit that Konoe Akira had inculcated the virtues of the tree into her inner being. She stated that he had once merely addressed her, next to a small specimen he’d planted in the tropical garden in Tjilatjap, where he had enumerated its virtues.

  ‘Nicholas, it is a tree that can accept great hardship. It will survive the coldest winter and the hottest summer, too much rain and no rain at all. In the summer its leaves are glossy and catch the sun. Its blossom feeds the bees. Its shade is so dense all may seek shelter from the heat under its verdant canopy or protection from the fiercest summer storm. In autumn its leaves turn the colour of flame then drop, a blanket that will turn to pulp and feed the earth in spring. In the winter its nourishing fruit hangs abundant, great golden orbs the size of a geisha’s fist attached to pliant, artfully twisted twigs dark against the snow. Thus, when times are hardest, it is at its most beautiful. The outer bark is springy, supple, resisting, it will accept great punishment from roaring gales, yet will not snap. But its greatest virtue lies deep within, a secret core of black ebony, the hardest of
all wood; nothing in nature can break it. When all the trees on earth have been destroyed by the furious elements, only the persimmon will still stand, proud and undefeated.’ She paused in what was obviously a soliloquy, each word placed carefully as if in a poem. Then she added in a quiet voice, ‘Only the biting blade of man can penetrate it, reduce it to nothing, wilted, broken, utterly destroyed.’

  The words she had recited were obviously too close to her heart for me to question at the time and I decided to wait for another occasion when I would attempt to make her see that the characteristics of the persimmon she had attempted to personify, her inner core of strength, would not disappear if she relinquished her virginity.

  Lust as a symbol of temptation and temporal life has long been contrasted with discipline, the inner self and divine inspiration. Sex is what we deny ourselves in order to become more resolute, stronger in mind and spirit – the mythical warrior.

  Konoe Akira was playing a very old tune on a young, ingenuous and intellectually vibrant instrument when it was placed under abnormal stress. I would have been a fool to think I could counter his effect on Anna by simply using logic. Anyway, I have long since realised that when it comes to humans, few things in this world are wrought by logic alone. So, I decided to attempt a different strategy and to take Anna to Japan to confront Konoe Akira, assuming he was still alive. He was the key to solving Anna’s delusional fear of losing her virginity.

  Anna and I shared a knowledge of Japanese culture and an intense interest in Japan that kept us together despite what I thought of as ‘our problem’. Apart from what I had gleaned during childhood and later war experience, my knowledge of Japan had benefited from my father’s deep understanding of Japanese life and culture.

  We were also both fluent in Japanese and often spoke it together, Anna refining or correcting my grammar or usage. In a language that depends on nuance and exquisite politeness, every word must be placed with infinite care; just as in a game of checkers, the wrong one in the wrong place can lead to disaster. Anna, with three years’ tutelage from a language instructor appointed by Konoe Akira as well as the pressure of his exacting standards, spoke a fluent and more refined Japanese than did I. My knowledge of the language had begun in early childhood and then continued in a scholarly manner with my father, but it had been coarsened by my exposure to the argot spoken by the Japanese field-radio operators I’d listened to and interpreted during my stint with Intelligence at Guadalcanal and later as a coastwatcher.

  Once I’d made up my mind about visiting Japan it seemed completely logical. Our business needed another ship, and now we could afford a brand-new one. The Japanese shipbuilding industry was back in business, their prices more than competitive and their technology up to the minute. I’d take Anna along and we’d seek out her Japanese mentor and confront him. I’d use the ship as an excuse for a bit of a jaunt.

  In addition to buying a ship and attempting to track down Konoe Akira, there were two other people of interest I hoped to find. The first was Gojo Mura, a Japanese radio operator who had lived alone on a cliff face high on the mountain overlooking Henderson Field, the American airport at Guadalcanal. He had been relaying American aircraft movements to the Japanese headquarters in Rabaul and proved difficult to dislodge. As someone trained in jungle warfare, I volunteered to get him out of his mountain eyrie.

  I’d finally found him half-starved in the jungle at the base of the high cliff where he had lived. He’d climbed down from his cave and was seated in a sunny glade painting butterflies using a battered tray of watercolours. The paintings were both accurate and beautiful, and instead of killing him as I had been ordered to do, I struck up a conversation with him and he showed me his sketchbook filled with drawings and paintings of jungle insects, moths and butterflies.

  A less likely soldier than Gojo Mura never existed. In fact, he explained that he had been seconded to the navy after training at the Telegraph Department of the College of Engineering in Tokyo and had never received a single day’s military training. When he led me to his cave I discovered that the bolt on his rifle had rusted up and the barrel had deteriorated so much that it would never fire another shot. He had subsisted alone for months on a bag of rice and the few jungle plants and roots he’d discovered, through trial and error, that he could eat.

  After he’d been interrogated as a prisoner of war I managed, through the inestimable Marg, then in Melbourne, to have him assigned to a civilian Japanese internment camp near Hay for the duration of the war. I had always intended to keep up our friendship but he had unexpectedly been repatriated to Japan, leaving me the address of a friend of his who, like me, collected butterflies. I had duly contacted Iko Fuchida, but he had written briefly to say that he too had lost contact with Gojo Mura, who had never in fact turned up.

  Over the years that followed I had sent butterfly specimens from the jungles of New Guinea to Gojo’s butterfly-collecting friend and he had reciprocated with specimens from Japan and the surrounding islands. Apart from these carefully named and mounted specimens and his notes on habitat and species, I knew nothing about Iko Fuchida. This is often the way with passionate collectors whose shared interest is only one aspect of their lives. Now I hoped to make contact and had brought him as a gift twenty-four splendid specimens mounted in a rosewood and glass tray to ensure my welcome.

  Apart from Konoe Akira, Anna knew nobody in Japan except the two retired geishas who had instructed her in the ways of bondage and later cared for her at the Nest of the Swallows. The likelihood of tracing them seemed pretty remote. As two of the four madams supervising the officers’ brothel, they could have been prosecuted for war crimes and gaoled.

  While I had fond memories of the effete but certainly delightful Gojo Mura, Anna’s associations with Japan were less pleasant. She may have benefited from her intensive education in Japanese culture and willingly embraced the values, aesthetics and philosophy of a distinct and rarefied version of the Japanese way of life, but she had paid a tremendous price in psychological damage.

  Colonel Konoe had shaped her to his own ideal of womanly perfection, which included an aristocratic appreciation of Japanese art, the exacting disciplines of ikebana and formal manners. In fact, Anna was a throwback to the pre-Meiji ideal of courtly behaviour, almost certainly unique outside the small remaining Japanese aristocratic elite of which Konoe Akira had been and perhaps still was a part.

  In so many ways she was intrinsically more Samurai than anything else, despite the fact that she functioned as a contemporary woman with a sharp mind, ready wit and formidable will. I was to learn that she continued to live by many of the intellectual tenets of Samurai philosophy, for example, their formal politeness in addressing an enemy and the exquisite manners involved in the creation of an insult.

  In doing business, Anna was said never to lose her politeness or gentle and courteous manner, even when faced by daunting male opposition, or by taunts or improper remarks designed to upset her. Even when she had her opponent thoroughly beaten, she would allow him to leave the contest with his head held high. If she was herself defeated, she would bow and smile politely without any outward sign of anger, frustration or remorse. If someone lied to her or cheated she would wait. ‘Nicholas, as long as you remain in the game, those who play it will return and you will not have forgotten.’ It all added up to a redoubtable opponent who many an arrogant male had cause to remember after assuming she was just a pretty face and could be taken for a ride.

  When I put to Anna the notion that we should visit Japan together she was so quick to respond that I knew the suggestion did not come as a surprise. I also knew that we had both thought about Konoe Akira, but perhaps she imagined a different outcome from the hopes I entertained.

  ‘Nicholas, that would be wonderful!’ she enthused. ‘I know so much and yet so little about Japan and the Japanese. Now you can show me where you were born and share your experience of the people with me,’ she added gracefully.

  ‘Anna, the pre-
war Japan of my childhood is long gone, as is the autocratic and esoteric world of your Japanese colonel,’ I added somewhat slyly, watching her carefully.

  But if Anna had plans to meet Konoe Akira she gave no indication of this. ‘It will be fun to be with you when you buy your ship, Nicholas. I too would like to do business with Japan – it would be a pity to waste my knowledge of the language – but what form that business might take I’ll have to wait and see.’

  She was in so many ways smarter than me. Besides, I’d long since discovered that second-guessing Anna Til was an exercise in futility. I am ashamed to say that I thought she might well use the trip to enlarge her knowledge of sadomasochistic techniques by visiting places whose reputations she had learned about from her clients.

  On the jet to Japan, one of those new 707 Boeings that made flying long distances a damn sight more comfortable than the lumbering Super Constellations, Anna and I had a conversation that I recall to this day with total clarity.

  Her establishment, Madam Butterfly, a source of constant disagreement between us, was now being used by many of the Japanese businessmen who were once again allowed to trade with Australia. Public hatred of the Japanese was slowly fading, no doubt due to passing time and, more importantly, the desire to make a big quid. Our inestimable leaders plainly saw that exports of raw materials, coal and iron ore in particular, to a rapidly growing Japanese economy could balance the books, and our new-found prosperity would soon assuage the national conscience.

  Like many of us involved at the sharp end of the war, I had come to accept that the average Japanese soldier was almost as much a victim as we had been – mere cannon fodder. Our wartime propaganda had turned them into bestial torturers, whereas this description more often fitted the kempeitai, selected for and trained in brutality. As well, it described many in the officer ranks, such as the beasts who had ordered the murder and torture of our prisoners of war at Changi, Sandakan and the Burma–Thailand Railway. These were the vile creatures who deserved to be exterminated and I would have been the first to volunteer to give each and every one of them a double tap from an Owen submachine-gun.