Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  Cycling through the undulating countryside on the first day proved fairly monotonous, and pedalling caused not a little pain to my patched-up bum. A day later I took the advice of an old man selling almonds at the roadside and abandoned my bicycle for a backpack and two bamboo poles, a stout one to use for walking and a long slender one for a butterfly net. I purchased a length of strong but pliable wire, a couple of yards of fine muslin and a packet of nylon fishing line and, as I had done so often before, fashioned a tolerably commendable butterfly net in half an hour. My final purchase was several dozen sheets of paper to fashion my butterfly envelopes, whereupon I headed for the foothills of the higher mountains, some of which still carried more than a dusting of early-spring or late-winter snow.

  Japan has 238 species of butterfly and the Osaka area is conspicuous for its fifty-two varieties, none of them particularly rare, but it gave my ramble in the foothills a sense of purpose. Besides, it would be lots of fun. This late in spring, most of the pupae would have hatched.

  It was here in the dark shade of beech forests and winding, moss-covered mountain paths that I came across the second Japan of quiet ryokan [traditional inns] and tiny Buddhist monasteries, where at either place I might stop to eat an entirely vegetarian meal consisting of dozens of kinds of mushrooms, tofu, rice and many unidentifiable dried foods, some pushed aside after a tentative taste to be attempted at some future time.

  During the sunlit days I hunted butterflies, and during those eight memorable nights I stopped at small ryokan, soaking myself in the onsen [hot springs] that dot the hillsides. I laughed with the people of the foothills and joked about the absurdly small towels one was given to dry oneself. The fastidious Japanese required that you wash yourself thoroughly before entering a spring to have the aches and pains poached out of you in the mineral-rich waters. Beech trees, hot springs and mossy paths are not unique to Japan, nevertheless there was something quintessentially Japanese about lying alone in these silent mountain pools with the steam rising into the dark skies.

  After long days chasing around the countryside with a butterfly net, I soaked and relaxed, then spent the early evenings categorising and storing the day’s catch in envelopes. Then I rewarded myself with a feast – plates of steaming gyoza [steamed or fried dumplings], bowls of udon [noodles] and, as a special treat, sukiyaki [paper-thin slivers of meat cooked at the table in a rich broth with vegetables and noodles], all of this washed down with copious amounts of sake. Finally, dizzy with fatigue, good food and too much sake, I crawled into my bed, a futon laid out on a tatami mat, where I slept soundly, untroubled by thoughts of the Jade House.

  After my experiences in Tokyo, and the melee of foreign tourists and Japanese holiday crowds at World Expo in Osaka, the tranquillity of the mountain forests and the ancient traditions of the Japanese people brought a welcome respite. I hadn’t realised just how overwrought I’d been.

  On my last day in the higher foothills I caught a splendid specimen of Vanessa indica, known as the Indian Red Admiral, an entirely new butterfly to add to my collection, despite Fuchida-san’s generosity over the years. For a layperson, it was hardly a triumph after ten days’ work, but for a serious collector it was well worth every scrape, bruise and scratch.

  Then, on the same evening, a fellow hiker, a greying Japanese doctor who appeared to be in his sixties, turned up at the ryokan and, noticing the stitches in my forearm, asked to examine them. ‘These need to come out,’ he declared.

  I grinned. ‘They’re not alone, doctor.’

  ‘You have more? Let me see, please.’

  Hoping to spare him a busman’s holiday, I said, ‘There is no need. I can wait another few days until I get back to Australia.’

  ‘Hai! If they are all like these ones, no, I must take them out now.’

  After he’d seen the extent of the damage he laughed. ‘How did this happen, Duncan-san? Were you running away from a bomb?’

  ‘I sat on a vase,’ I replied.

  He looked serious for a moment. ‘You must be more careful where you sit in future,’ he advised, then began to giggle for a full minute.

  He refused my offer of payment, but accepted numerous cups of sake accompanied by mutual toasts and the inevitable cries of ‘Kampai!’.

  The following morning, back on my bicycle and noticeably fitter despite my hangover, I spent the final day pedalling over unending hillocks and through ubiquitous villages. Towards evening I reached the outskirts of Osaka and followed a flutter of yellow flags to a tiny minshuku [bed and breakfast place] where the owner served me a delicious home-cooked meal while her husband sat glued to the TV watching hours of sumo wrestling.

  Having eaten and refused the offer of a cup of sake I retired early to my by now accustomed futon set on a tatami mat for the night. The following day I handed in my bike and caught the shinkansen [bullet train] for the 200 kilometres per hour, three-hour journey to Tokyo. As if by magic, the elusive perfect cone of Mt Fuji chose to reveal itself as we passed, a familiar image from Japanese art.

  Nick Duncan, the intrepid boy sailor, teenage jungle explorer and butterfly collector, now cyclist and hill climber, felt brand-new when eventually he arrived back at the Imperial Hotel. As I stepped out of the taxi I was met by the familiar row of hotel flunkies standing to rigid attention, bowing as I passed with the quick mechanical jerk of a string puppet. Shortly afterwards I took a loving Anna, who seemed more than pleased to see me, into my arms. I had not been sufficiently naïve to believe that her renewed acquaintance with Konoe Akira would lead to a miraculous cure, and I would be welcomed home with the gateway to heaven wide open and welcoming. Psychological scars disappear slowly, if at all.

  I guess there’s nothing better than a reconciled quarrel or a reunion after a separation to heighten the pleasure of sex, and I had both going for me. We made love in our own accustomed non-penetrative fashion, in which we’d long since perfected the art of simultaneous orgasms. Conventional wisdom would have it that this couldn’t be entirely satisfactory, but this wasn’t true. Anna was such a skilled lover that I had come to see myself as beneficiary rather than victim of her vaginismus.

  Lying back in bed afterwards Anna told me the story of the days I had been away.

  Anna was to learn that Konoe Akira was still a man of rigid habits and his monthly appointment at the Jade House and the ritual that followed never varied. He traditionally arrived at the house of bondage at exactly ten o’clock in the evening in a powder-blue 1953 Cadillac with whitewall tyres, finned and over-chromed. This monstrous American automobile was driven by Staff Sergeant Goto, who could barely see over the dashboard and who was attired in chauffeur’s livery that might have been taken from a Norman Rockwell cover illustration for the Saturday Evening Post. Konoe Akira was a great admirer of General Eisenhower, and the car had been purchased to celebrate the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president. When Truman had fired the hated autocrat General MacArthur – surrogate emperor of Japan – the whole nation had rejoiced. But when eighteen months later Eisenhower followed Truman as American president, Konoe Akira believed that order had returned to the world once again with a military man at the helm of the world’s most powerful nation. The monstrously flamboyant automobile, a vulgar symbol of American prosperity, signalled to him that peace and opportunity had finally arrived in Japan under the watchful eye of a benign and competent general.

  The honourable General Konoe-san, as he was known at the Jade House, would be met by the Jade Mistress and his regular dominatrix of some years, Lee-Li, a woman in her early forties, who wore a black shantung silk kimono for the occasion. After the usual bowing and compliments, which Konoe Akira accepted with a cursory nod and a ‘Humph!’, he would be led by Lee-Li to a small room decorated completely in black where he would spend the entire night, leaving as dawn began to melt the darker shadows in the neighbourhood.

  This room had originally been created at his instigation many years previously and he had paid for it personally, alt
hough it had subsequently become a feature of the Jade House and was now, unbeknownst to him, often used by some of its other patrons. It was at the very back of the building where a doorway at the end of a passage led out into a narrow lane. Konoe Akira desired absolute darkness but wanted to know he wasn’t trapped, a curious contradiction to say the least, since for the most part he was bound, tied and utterly helpless should he ever need to vacate the small room quickly. But the Jade House had long since learned not to question his desires. While he was a stern and uncompromising patron he paid generously and, providing they met his comparatively simple demands, never caused any problems.

  Once every year the black room was refurbished at his personal expense. The decor was simple and strictly functional, and every part of the room, from the paper and bamboo walls and ceilings to the tatami matting, was black. The futon, slightly raised to accommodate his stiff leg, and the single cushion on one side of a low ebony table in the centre of the room were of black shantung silk. Where the second cushion should have been was a small ebony stool, a concession to Konoe Akira’s stiff leg. Neatly folded on the table was a black tourniquet and a single chopstick carved from the black heartwood of a persimmon tree.

  The only concession to colour in the monochromatic room was a crystal ashtray on the table with a slightly raised and sandblasted butterfly motif at its centre, beside which, in the summer, rested a yellow and cream frangipani blossom and in the winter a single persimmon.

  Konoe Akira had never explained the significance of the butterfly ashtray, or the flower or the fruit, but one summer night he’d entered the room to find the single blossom missing and the ensuing conniption had practically removed the roof. This incident had become part of the folklore of the establishment and numerous stories evolved about the meaning of the tropical blossom and the celestial winter fruit, though none of them were ever authenticated. After twenty-five years, Anna explained their significance.

  Miss Sparkle, her friendship with Anna renewed after they’d caught up on events of the last twenty-five years, became Anna’s co-conspirator and quickly used her yakuza influence to persuade the Jade Mistress to cooperate and to instruct Lee-Li to comply with Anna’s instructions. Not that Anna was in the least assertive or pushy. She took the time to win the confidence of Konoe-san’s dominatrix and to learn all she could about his proclivities and sexual desires. It had been twenty-five years since she’d last attended to him – a long time to remember his precise requirements – and she needed to be carefully briefed. In that time she had also greatly increased her anatomical knowledge and skill at kinbaku and in many of the other aspects of bondage.

  ‘He is difficult to please, Anna-san,’ Lee-Li had warned.

  Anna smiled. ‘Nothing has changed I see. Does he have any health problems, for instance, his heart? Varicose veins?’

  ‘Yes. Three months ago he had a chest pain – it’s not the first time – also pains in the neck and upper arms. He has special pills. I put one under his tongue and he recovered quickly, but there has been nothing since.’

  ‘Nitroglycerin tablets. Does he have them with him?’

  ‘Always; they are in the little aluminium case he brings with him. But he will stop you if he is not feeling well. With him it must be perfect. And because he is such a perfectionist, he is sensitive to the slightest difference in pressure, so . . .’

  ‘Are you saying he will know the difference between your touch and mine?’

  ‘It could be a problem,’ Lee-Li admitted. ‘We have a servant girl, a cleaner who enjoys the rope. We use her sometimes to teach the maiko and to practise ourselves. If you wish I will demonstrate my technique and the rope sequences with the exact pressures the honourable General Konoe-san requires,’ she offered.

  Miss Sparkle, whose phone duties kept her in the penthouse, was unable to attend any but one of these practice sessions, but she’d marvelled at the blindfolded Anna’s dexterous and fluid way with the rope. ‘You know more, much more than ever I taught you, Anna-san. You are the empress of kinbaku. You can make the rope do anything,’ she cackled gleefully.

  Anna, with the help of the other dominatrix, quickly relearned the sequences and the peculiar technique Konoe Akira required because of his stiff leg, as well as the different posture needed to work on the elevated platform rather than the traditional futon on the floor. They practised the precise timing of the preliminary knot sequence and the number of steps to the platform so that Anna could silently enter the darkened room and take over from the other dominatrix. ‘Does he talk?’ Anna asked, remembering that in the past Konoe-san had occasionally made a specific demand or required a response from her.

  ‘Only very rarely. Just the usual expletives, moans, groans, sighs and cries of pain, then, of course, the climax, after which you must remain still and silent for a count of two hundred before releasing the ropes and handing him his yukata. Then you wait until he grunts permission to turn on the light and begin to prepare the morphine,’ Lee-Li replied.

  Thus Anna discovered that Konoe Akira still required that Lee-Li personally prepare and administer the morphine needle at the conclusion of the bondage session, as he had all those years before when she had been a frightened teenager in Java. She wondered if it was the same small aluminium box containing the syringe and morphine phial, now also the nitroglycerin tablet, that he’d used when she’d administered the drug to him.

  Now Anna, who chased the dragon, a different method of allowing her bloodstream to accept opiates, was once again required to learn how to use a syringe. In all her years as an addict she had never injected heroin or given it to anyone else and she had to appeal to Miss Sparkle for help.

  The old lady quickly arranged for an older addict roughly the same height and weight as Konoe Akira on whom she could practise, with Anna using the same equipment – phial, syringe, tourniquet and chopstick – Lee-Li used. It took three days until she felt she had sufficiently mastered the technique, the drug addict on each occasion shaking his head and marvelling at the purity of the morphine the yakuza mama-san had supplied. At the end of his three-day tenure as guinea pig, Miss Sparkle had given him a further week’s supply and sent him off, happy as Larry.

  The next evening Konoe Akira arrived in his powder-blue Cadillac, and Anna, dressed in a formal black silk kimono, was concealed in the room next to the black room at the furthermost end of the establishment. Anna’s entry was timed precisely from the moment the light went out, when she was to go and stand in the complete dark in the open doorway of Konoe Akira’s black room. She would be required to count in a practised cadence to five hundred, by which time the first of the ropes would be in place and she could enter, Lee-Li giving a short staccato cough as a signal.

  From her position in the doorway Anna heard the familiar moans and sudden indrawn breaths as the ropes wound and tightened, and almost as she reached the end of her silent count she heard the slight cough, more a clearing of the throat, from Lee-Li. She entered the room, skirting the ebony table as she had practised blindfolded so often over the past week, proceeding silently on bare feet, counting the number of paces. She reached the raised platform and found Lee-Li’s hand to take up the rope. It was a near faultless exchange and in case Konoe Akira picked up any sudden disharmony in movement she pulled the rope a fraction tighter, causing him to wince and focus his attention back on himself.

  Anna applied herself steadily for half an hour, her pliant fingers massaging and coaxing, working the rope with such subtlety that Konoe Akira cried out in ecstasy or moaned in despair as she punished and rewarded him and after almost an hour built him up gradually to a shattering climax.

  When the last ecstatic moan had died to a whimper she began to count, but then realised that Konoe Akira was weeping. She began to undo the ropes, massaging his joints and working his slack penis intermittently until it stood erect once again. He had stopped crying and was now panting, irregularly gasping for breath. She had almost removed the last of the ropes when she h
eard the distant siren of the approaching ambulance, whereupon she twisted the rope in a configuration around his left hip and scrotum, twisted it, then jerked it so violently that the sudden stab of pain shot up through his thighs and into his chest, causing agony so intense that Konoe Akira screamed as he ejaculated the second time. Anna switched on the light just as he experienced a second excruciating pain, this one brought on by a severe angina attack. Anna had judged it to perfection. He would believe he was dying, whereas she had simply punished his heart sufficiently to bring on the attack. Outside the ambulance siren died and Anna listened for the sound of running footsteps approaching. The ambulance had been a safeguard in case she had misjudged his medical condition.

  The honourable General Konoe Akira stared up at her, his eyes filled with panic and disbelief. He pointed, his hand shaking violently, to the table at the centre of the room upon which rested the small aluminium box. ‘T . . . t . . . tablet,’ he stammered.

  Anna smiled down at him. ‘Ah, Konoe-san, such a great pity. You have overestimated the strength of the heartwood, the core within that, come what may, cannot be broken,’ she said softly. ‘Remember this night when you could so easily have been left to die.’

  Moments later three ambulance medics burst into the room. ‘He requires a nitroglycerin tablet,’ Anna said to one of the medics. Then turning on her heels, she left the room.

  ‘Jesus, a heart attack!’ I exclaimed when Anna came to the end of the scene at the Jade House. ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘Yes, it was only acute angina.’

  ‘You’ve talked to him in hospital?’

  ‘Yes, the day after, and every day since. This morning before you arrived I went again, and I will go again tomorrow.’

  I waited for her to explain further but she remained silent. ‘Is that all? A few days ago you saw the bloke for the first time in twenty-five years, you’ve seen him every day since the angina attack and that’s all you have to say – you’re going back tomorrow!’