Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  Fuchida-san hesitated momentarily. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s how you know he changed his name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did you see him again?’

  ‘No. I was in the yakuza, it was not appropriate to know a traitor.’

  ‘But all the Japanese prisoners of war were exonerated and the Senjinkun military code abolished by a dictate from your emperor.’

  ‘Ah yes, but that is the new Japan. The shame is not abolished in the mind. The shame is old Japan, and it will not go away so easily. It will only die when the soul of the last captured soldier who returned to Japan is enshrined at Yakusuni.’ Fuchida-san suddenly paused and frowned as if a perplexing thought had occurred to him. ‘You don’t still wish to find him, do you, Duncan-san?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you know his name?’

  ‘No. I advised him to change it but not to tell me. What you don’t know cannot harm you . . . or him.’

  ‘So, it would be impossible to trace him?’

  The yakuza boss seemed to think for a moment. I sensed he felt he was being challenged. ‘Not impossible; we can try. If he is alive there are fifteen thousand yakuza in western Japan who can make enquiries. But it will be very difficult. I will have to think if there was anything about him that would identify him.’

  ‘He was a brilliant artist, a painter of butterflies and jungle insects,’ I volunteered.

  ‘It is a start. There are probably ten thousand such unofficial artists in Japan.’

  ‘You mean unofficial because he has changed his name?’

  ‘No, like myself he was a poor boy and could not afford to be formally trained as an artist. He received a scholarship to the College of Engineering to study radio and we were very proud of him, the whole village received prestige from this. But he will not now be accepted into any artists’ colony. He cannot become recognised without the correct qualifications. It would not matter how skilled he is, he cannot make a living as a teacher or an official artist without the proper qualifications.’ Fuchida-san’s recitation of these strictures revealed more of the complex layers of Japanese society. Even artists formed a collective, a power group that required formal qualifications rather than naked talent to enter its portals.

  Poor little Gojo Mura, the non-soldier, dreamer, painter of nature, original innocent, harmless participant in a savage and brutal encounter, had copped the lot. He was trapped in an old Japan which, despite the new Japan, would never forgive him for being a man of peace who would rather paint a fly than kill it. I realised that despite the efforts of my host, the likelihood of finding him was practically zero.

  Mama-san had prepared a small banquet obviously on my host’s instructions and in my honour. Anna was a superb Japanese cook so I had learned to appreciate a great many foods. Fuchida-san seemed impressed that I could recognise the various dishes and was able to comment on them with some small authority.

  ‘You are not what we Japanese expect from a gaijin,’ he laughed. ‘If you stayed here for long you would soon become civilised!’

  It was a joke he would never have made if he hadn’t decided that I was to be a close friend. I confess I wondered to myself if, in the long term, this friendship was a good idea. Being known as a personal friend of one of Japan’s most powerful gangsters might not go down too well in Canberra. I imagined myself trying to explain to ASIO that we were simply fellow butterfly collectors!

  But I had no reason not to like him and friendship doesn’t require social equality or the opinions of others. Even so, I decided never to talk about him in the context of yakuza, even to Anna. I would tell her only that our meeting had been pleasant, that he was a cultivated and considerate host and his butterfly collection was impressive.

  There were two reasons for this. Anna would see him as an irresistible opportunity for business in Japan and perhaps Fuchida-san would want a reciprocal arrangement in Australia. I hated myself for thinking like this, but knew my girl too well not to take precautions. Anna saw business as the ultimate solution to most of the world’s problems and would often quote an axiom from a Presbyterian clergyman, William Boetcker, wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln: ‘You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.’

  The second reason was more practical. If Anna’s efforts to get heroin led to trouble, I would need the yakuza boss to help. Blackmail was always a possibility, so was arrest; a stranger looking for a fix in a strange city was easy prey. I was, as the saying goes, covering her arse in the event of an emergency.

  In my own mind I had given up any idea of finding Gojo Mura. It was patently an impossible task and I wasn’t going to hold Fuchida-san to it. Obligation is taken seriously in Japan and I didn’t wish to compromise him. Besides, with his identity changed, Gojo Mura would have created a new life for himself and probably had no wish to be reacquainted with his past. It was no different to Anna trying to find the two retired geisha who had trained her in kinbaku, rope bondage, and had later cared for her in the Nest of the Swallows. Of course, she hadn’t suggested that we attempt to do so, stressing that they would be in their early seventies now if they were still alive.

  Lunch was finally concluded with a dish of eel, one of the great Japanese delicacies, and quite clearly a compliment to me. In Japan eel is very near the top of the culinary list, whereas it is plentiful in Vanuatu, where the eels from the southern hemisphere come to breed. Anna, discovering this abundance, had often prepared the dish I was now being served. I had acquired a taste for it and was able to discuss the subtleties with my host. The dish served by the mama-san was of excellent quality.

  Japanese people take their food very seriously. Their diet is mostly fish, so the subtle variations of taste are often completely lost on European palates accustomed to stronger flavours. But in Japanese society the smallest differences in taste and texture are often the subject of lively discussion. Preparation is everything and a compliment is taken seriously; no comment indicates either a culinary disaster or simply bad manners.

  I recall explaining the natural miracle of eel migration to Anna, though not without some incredulity on her part, as the facts truly defy belief. Eels only breed in two or three places. In the southern hemisphere, they breed in the deep waters near Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and in the northern hemisphere in the deep waters of the Sargasso Sea in the West Indies, although Japanese eels spawn on the west Marianas Ridge in the Pacific.

  The eels in every dam, stream, rivulet, river and municipal drain head for one or other of these breeding grounds, often travelling miles overland to reach water. Once they have arrived at their destination they spawn and die, but the leptocephali – the tiny hatchlings no bigger than a gumleaf and still translucent – are carried on the ocean currents where they eventually turn into elvers and begin the migration back to dams, rivers, creeks, ponds or drains of fresh water, some travelling thousands of kilometres from where they were spawned. I recall telling Anna on the first occasion she served eel to me, ‘That poor sod worked very hard to get onto our plates. It has travelled further than Marco Polo, so let’s enjoy it!’

  I left Fuchida-san at the door of his penthouse lift, having told him that I had decided to, as we say, let sleeping dogs lie, and asked him not to try to trace the whereabouts of Gojo Mura.

  After a moment’s silence he said, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth, ‘We shall see, Duncan-san. I will think about it. It could be a good exercise for my younger wakagashira. Perhaps we could add a missing persons service to our special skills.’

  I returned to the Imperial Hotel alone in the Mercedes accompanied by only one of the black Toyotas containing the driver and three wakagashira. Upon arrival, thankfully without the mandatory squealing brakes and burning rubber, I quickly realised that things had changed for me. The doorman rushed to open the rear door of the Mercedes, but not before the three black suits in sunglasses had reached it, one standing on each side, while the third headed towards the main door of the hotel to ensure m
y way into the foyer was unimpeded. Again the two hotel pageboys stood motionless holding the plate-glass doors open and the five desk clerks had turned to stone.

  Climbing from the car I said to the doorman, ‘Please, this is not necessary, I am gaijin and have no authority here.’

  But he remained rigid, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on some spot beyond me. ‘Yessir!’ he barked in the manner of a sergeant major taking instructions from his company commander.

  Anna was still asleep, my note from the morning lying on the floor where it had been pushed under the door. She lay clutching her pillow, looking so beautiful I almost wanted to weep. I longed more than anything else to possess her. How could I love someone so much and not be permitted to make love to her?

  I have often wondered since if I would ever have taken up with Marg again had Anna been other than the way she was. I don’t know; I can never know. I loved them both, the yin and yang. I was aware that it wasn’t moral or in some eyes even decent, and it certainly wasn’t fair to either of them. But both acquiesced while remaining totally antagonistic towards the other. Some perverse competition was going on between them, though not only for the sole possession of the Nick Marg knew and loved or the Nicholas Anna knew and loved, but for the two entirely opposing points of view they represented. They were competing for two different future worlds, each strong and determined to win, both possessed of fine intellects, both playing out their emotional convictions and using each other as a yardstick to measure their success. It was a mind thing and I was, at best, the whetstone on which each sharpened the blade of her personal ambition.

  Then again, perhaps that was crap. It was quite possible that Anna, ever the pragmatist, saw Marg providing intimacy she couldn’t provide herself and realised that it was better coming from someone with whom she had nothing in common, an enemy she knew, than from someone who might ultimately replace her.

  Marg, on the other hand, was the true enigma. If it wasn’t for the yin and yang reasons, then, I asked myself, why did she tolerate this time share? Still an extraordinarily attractive woman, she had been pursued by men far more politically and socially powerful than I was who came with the promise of marriage, security and respectability. Her explanation, unsolicited, was simply, ‘Nick, I love, want and need you. But tomorrow I may not!’ Marg was always scrupulously honest. She was warning me that she had accepted Anna but that was it. There would be no infidelity, no other women.

  It had been a strange and unexpected day and I rather badly needed a Kirin, the excellent Japanese lager, and a few moments alone to think things out. I left a note to tell Anna I was downstairs at the bar and to call me when she wakened. When she had returned from her successful journey into the Tokyo night, I had been too overwrought and angry, and also too relieved at her safe return to get a blow-by-blow description of her search for dope.

  Her cool, calculated and confident persona had been falling apart even before she’d left the hotel and, although it had been years since I’d witnessed her in such a state, I told myself it was the one time she was completely vulnerable and couldn’t disguise her feelings. In the world she had entered the previous night this would be commonly recognised; heroin withdrawal is a universal experience amongst addicts, and can easily be exploited.

  Now I was worried that she might not have obtained sufficient heroin to last the duration of our stay in Japan, which could be potentially disastrous. For several years after the coffee-scalding incident on the island I had begged her to seek help and she had certainly tried. Her regular ‘business’ trips overseas to try to kick her habit always ended in failure, as did her efforts to overcome her vaginismus, and my insistence – demand might be a more precise word – that she continue to seek professional help had produced a growing tension between us until Anna had finally broken down completely.

  We had been out sailing on Madam Butterfly on our way for a picnic lunch on Hat Island, the actual name for the island we had laughingly come to call ‘Coffee Scald’.

  Anna had arrived the previous day for a week’s visit after one of her ‘business’ trips, this time to a Swiss clinic. I had met her at the harbour airport after a prolonged liquid lunch with a customer.

  I wasn’t big on the proverbial business lunch, alas all too common in the islands, but he was a regular client and he believed I’d done him a favour, so he was being insistent. The favour consisted of my agreeing to load machinery between the hours of twelve and two to ship to New Guinea. This was when the country, including my loading crew, normally stopped for lunch. It was a small concession and didn’t require an invitation to lunch.

  I’d finally agreed, thinking I’d get away before two-thirty to meet the Sandringham flying boat, which was due to land on the harbour at three o’clock. But when I phoned the port terminal to check the time of arrival they told me takeoff had been delayed in Brisbane and the seaplane was expected in around five o’clock. My business associate was a bit of a booze artist, but I’m big enough to take a fair amount of grog. However, by the time the plane landed I’d had a skinful, though nothing I believed I couldn’t handle. The delight at seeing Anna and the hope that this time she might be clean after her trip overseas should have been reason enough to stay happily sober.

  As had become her custom, she’d brought two bottles of Cristal, her favourite champagne. One we called our ‘joyous bottle’, traditionally intended for her arrival, and the other our ‘melancholy bottle’, consumed the evening before her departure. After dinner on her first night home we would sit on the verandah looking over Beautiful Bay and quietly drink our joyous bottle, delighted to be together again.

  On this particular visit I recall it was a beautiful evening with just the sliver of a new moon showing, the stars so numerous and the air so clear that they seemed to suffuse the sky with a constant glorious glitter. It was close to midnight when the joyous bottle stood empty and we foolishly decided to follow it with the melancholy one, which proved to be a salutary lesson that one should not interfere with tradition. Anna lifted her melancholy-filled champagne glass to indicate the stars, and began to recite in Japanese.

  ‘Look up, up . . . up there, at the midnight sky

  At the game of chance within the firmament

  Saturn’s rings, mooned Jupiter, planet Mars

  All yours if you hoist ambition’s sails and set

  A galactic course, then cast a wide-flung net

  To fish for the brightest stars in all creation.’

  ‘Anna, that is beautiful!’ I exclaimed.

  She laughed. ‘Too much champagne. I have never recited it aloud to anyone before, although I do so in my head every morning the moment I wake and every night before I go to sleep.’

  ‘Does it have a name, the poem, and what does it mean to you?’ Like a lot of poetry, you don’t always get the meaning first off, but I was curious about it because it was obviously very important to her.

  ‘It is called “Fishing for Stars”. It urges me to dare to seek my fortune everywhere and not to be afraid to take the risks involved in the truly big ventures,’ she replied.

  ‘It’s lovely. Where did you learn it? Is it Japanese?’

  Anna hesitated. Had I been sober I would have stopped as soon as I noticed her hesitation, knowing she could only have learned it in one place at one time. I daresay, had she too been less inebriated she would have reminded me of her request and in turn my promise never to ask questions about her experience under the Japanese unless she volunteered the information herself. ‘Just something I learned long ago, Nicholas,’ she replied.

  ‘Him?’ I asked stupidly, knowing.

  ‘Yes.’

  A voice in my head yelled, ‘Stop! You’ve had too much to drink.’ But I couldn’t. The champagne, added to what I’d drunk earlier, had tipped me over the edge and a blinding resentment fuelled my tongue. ‘And you repeat it twice daily? Must be pretty important to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna replied, not backing off.

  ‘Why is
that?’

  ‘Nick, stop it! I don’t want you to know. It has something to do with the silver cigarette case you found here in my bedroom.’

  It was the wrong thing to say, another unspoken resentment that gnawed at my pathetic heart. A year or so back I had gone to fetch Anna’s suitcase and had seen a silver cigarette case on the table beside her bed which she had obviously forgotten to pack. As Anna didn’t smoke I thought it curious and before returning it to her I had briefly glanced at it, then inexcusably opened it to discover it contained just a dusting of a dirty white powder that I realised must be heroin. She had chased the dragon and no doubt intended to clean the cigarette case before she went through customs in Brisbane. On the lid of the case was inscribed in Japanese script a line that made no sense in that language. It read: Nyuwun pamit ratu. I returned the case to her without commenting on the contents, but asked casually what the inscription meant, as it was clearly not Japanese.

  ‘It is Javanese,’ Anna replied, accepting the case and putting it into her handbag, ‘a small joke.’

  ‘A joke in Javanese written in Japanese? That’s funny in itself,’ I remarked at the time. ‘Does it translate?’

  ‘No’ she replied. ‘Some other time I will tell you, Nicholas,’ she said, smiling and attempting to sound casual.

  I have a half decent memory and it was only three words. To satisfy my curiosity I’d had it translated and found it meant Goodbye, Princess. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to realise it had been presented to her by Konoe Akira. Anna had never mentioned the cigarette case again, nor had I, nor that I knew the meaning of the inscription on the lid; that is, until this starlit night when I had too much French booze in my belly.

  ‘Ah, the famous silver cigarette case Konoe-san presented to you. The one in which you keep your smack; inscribed, no less, with the words,’ I laughed, ‘Goodbye, Princess’.

  ‘Nick!’ Anna said, her voice sharp yet tinged with dismay.

  But it was too late. Five years of sexual frustration, childish resentment and jealousy of her Japanese mentor turned into verbal vomit, which I was unable to prevent spewing out of me. ‘And it came with a lovely little poem about the stars?’ I chuckled. ‘Go on, darling, recite it for me again, will you?’