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New by Abraham Rothberg:
The Torii Gate: A Novel Of
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ISBN: 1-4116-5610-5
The house came as a shock each time, jarring, as if he
had missed the last step in walking down a staircase and been shaken from
heel to head. From the outside, it looked like any other house in that
part of Shinjuku, its face anonymous and secretive, its real life turned
away from the street and passersby. The heavy wood doors could have
withstood a battering ram but opened smoothly when he rang. In the
anteroom, instead of Junyo or Aoyagi to greet him a muscular young man in
the uniform of Junyo’s Samurai society was bowing stiffly, his
white uniform with high collar, epaulets and tiny brass buttons in the
shape of the sun goddess almost operatic or musical comedy. Not at all
what Junyo intended, Jeffrey Middleton was sure, suppressing his smile.
The young man’s stern face and military bearing did not relax when
Middleton thanked him in Japanese and gave his name. The flickering eyes
remained alert, suspicious, and for a moment, Middleton was certain the
man would want to search him. Then the Samurai bowed and waved him
past, saying in stilted English that Ohki-san awaited him in the office
upstairs.
Inside, the house reflected Junyo’s divided spirit,
the more public part Western and filled with Queen Anne and Georgian
antiques, richly ornamented and upholstered Chippendale and Hepplewhite
pieces set on thick Oriental rugs, which contrasted with modern
marble-topped Italian tables. The white walls bore old-fashioned
silk-shaded sconces and gilt-framed paintings of barks, brigantines and
frigates in full sail. The Japanese part of the house, into which, in the
past, Middleton had been invited less frequently, was altogether
uncluttered, wooden walls and tatami floors, moving screens, walls and
windows.
The office might have been a successful writer’s
workroom anywhere but had the same East-West duality. On the shelves,
windowsills, the two large refectory tables, everywhere, there were books,
magazines, newspapers, piled helter-skelter around an electric typewriter
here, a tape recorder there, reams of typing and carbon papers, Japanese
writing brushes and bal1-point pens, four-plug telephones. But the
enormous plank mahogany desk was coap1etely bare and behind it, under a
modern glass light fixture shaped like a Japanese lantern, Junyo Ohki sat,
elbows braced on the desk, his face in his hands. The only decoration in
the functional room was a framed scroll on the wall above Ohki’s head on
which were inscribed the five ideograms of “the way”: giri — duty; chugi —
loyalty; chi — wisdom; jiu — benevolence; yu — valor, the code of the
samurai.
Middleton rapped softly on the open door, and Junyo’s
face emerged from his hands. He rose, the expression on his features
unchanged, moving from behind the desk as though he expected someone to
stop him. He wore a T-shirt that revealed the muscular torso he had worked
so long and hard to develop, his khaki pants sharply pressed, his feet in
Japanese socks and sandals. And he stood tall. Junyo had long ago told him
that once he thought white men a race of giants until he learned to know
them; but Junyo remained self-conscious about his height, uneasy about
Japanese being shorter than Americans, and it had always been one of the
unexpressed tensions between Junyo and Ed Nicholas that Nick stood six
feet three inches in his stocking feet and Junyo almost a foot shorter.
Junyo bowed and Middleton bowed back, slightly lower as became his place,
but Junyo’s words thrust him back on his heels as if he had been shoved.
“Why did I have to learn from old Kuruhara of Miko’s death and not from
you? More than a year has passed and still you have written me nothing of
your grief, though I have a dozen letters about literary trifles. Is that
the Western idea of friendship?” His eyes were slits, his Japanese hoarse
and brusque.
“I know that you were working to finish your book,”
Middleton stammered in English. “1 didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Disturb.” Junyo switched to English. “Is that the
word?” He stalked to the large windows that took half of one wall of
study.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to sit?”
“Sit if you wish.”
Deliberately, although he was wearing Western shoes
and trousers, Middleton sat, kneeling Japanese style on his haunches on a
floor without tatami, his head bent, his eyes pressed shut. “I have been
like a stone, falling, unable to utter a word,” he murmured in Japanese.
“Even stones speak.”
“Though my leg is missing, I still feel it. It cries
out, it pains me, it wishes to be caressed.”
Junyo turned from the window. “Old Kuruhara wrote that
Miko’s was truly a seppuku. Why?”
“Perhaps because her womb was barren, because she
could neither conceive nor bear.”
“Did she not speak of it to you?”
“She was a daughter of Nippon. To have spoken of it
would have been demeaning.”
“Was there no way?”
“The physicians told me that the fault was hers, yet
there might be a way, but she would not listen.”
Junyo averted his eyes. “We too have had such
troubles, as you know, but Aoyagi is also a daughter of samurai yet she
has not slit her throat.”
“Miko’s was not a true seppuku,” Middleton
forced himself to explain. “She slit her wrists.”
Junyo’s biceps twitched, his fists clenched. “Was it
because she was Japanese?” he asked in English.
Middleton knew that Junyo was thinking of
anti-Japanese sentiments in the States, so he shook his head, although, in
another sense, it was precisely because Miko was Japanese. “Only in the
sense that we never truly understood one another. However much we tried,
even when we were most happy, our spirits remained strangers.”
“All spirits are strangers to one another, like all
people.” Abruptly, Junyo lifted him to his feet and led him to a chair.
“Perhaps,” he ventured, “it was ensé?”
Ensé, that mysterious Japanese weariness with
life. Was that what had afflicted Miko? He remembered how, after his
grandfather died, San-me ku’s eyes went lusterless, her features slack,
her sprightly walk turned to a shuffle. Was that ensé?
When Junyo spoke again, it was in an altogether
different voice. “You should have written me, spoken your heart, as to a
friend. Instead, you sent those niggling letters about con- tracts, about
foreign rights, about how to translate this Japanese expression or that.”
Middleton sailed. “One must live, and to live like
this,” his waving arm took in the entire house, “one must be able to pay.”
“Today there is a price tag for everything,” Junyo
ranted. “Everything is business, overhead, sales, profits.”
“What profiteth a man if —“
“ — he loses his own soul. That’s just what we
Japanese have done under your able American know-how.”
“Mitsui, Sumitomo and Mitsubishi needed lessons from
no one.”
“Once even zaibatsu knew their place, accepted
that there were more important matters than coal and steel, sales and
profits.”
“The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere again?”
“Even that had its grandeur.”
“A lot of us disagreed with enough to fight a war
against it,” Middleton said.
“Then make war! More manly and honorable than jostling
for markets to sell transistor radios and tweed cloth, this pushing like a
bunch of clerks — ” he pronounced that word British-style “ — trying to
elbow one another into the Underground.” He began to pace. “The nation I
knew is disappearing before my eyes. Sons of Amaterasu, warriors filled
with the spirit of bushi, are now a nation of merchants and
shopkeepers.”
That other nation of shopkeepers, Middleton reflected,
that other great island nation, along them some of his ancestors, had
fought that same battle to resolve it in a different way — and perhaps
they too had lost.
Whirling, Junyo dragged a second chair to the desk,
sat and cocked his arm on the bare desktop. Middleton stood, slowly
removed his jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. He rolled up
the sleeve that bared his right arm and leaned his elbow on the desk. When
Junyo’s sweating fingers fastened on his, they pressed the assault
immediately; hands clasped, forearms locked, they strove against one
another, arms swaying an inch this way, an inch that. “Remember when you
taught me this?” Junyo gasped.
Middleton nodded. The beginning. Junyo was only a
scrawny student, really still a boy then. Surprised by his avidity to
learn all things American and stunned by his fierce competitiveness,
Middleton had taught him to arm wrestle. From the very first, Junyo had
struggled to win and each time they had met since, Junyo had challenged
him to a contest but never been able to triumph. Times had changed though,
by a great deal. Since those first encounters, mentor had become student,
student mentor. Junyo Ohki was now a world-famous novelist, playwright and
scenarist, while he remained an obscure translator and professor of
Japanese and Chinese, proud of what Junyo had accomplished as only a
teacher can be proud of a magnificently gifted student who far outstrips
him.
The contest was not fair because he was so much taller
and heavier than Junyo, and although Junyo was younger and in superb
physical trim, weightlifting and swimming had kept Middleton fit. He would
have liked to preserve at least that modest superiority in arm wrestling
which over the years he had demonstrated, yet something told him that the
necessary occasion had arrived to allow Junyo to win. They sat straining
against one another, the sweat beaded on Junyo’s forehead, running into
his eyes, the muscles in his neck corded, and Middleton, arm quivering, at
last let his arm be forced flat. With a cry of triumph that echoed in the
room, Junyo leaped up and did a little dance to the window. A spearhead of
sweat tapered to a point at his spine, darkening his shirt. “I never
thought I would win,” he exulted, “Never, never!”
“You always win, Junyo.”
“The martial spirit — bushi!” Junyo rejoiced.
A buzzer sounded and Junyo picked up one of the
phones, said he would be down in ten minutes, to have the car ready.
“We’re going to Haneda,” he explained when he hung up, “to greet the
returning Corporal Muta.”
“That soldier they found on Saipan?”
“Imagine, Jeffrey, living in the wilderness since
1944, refusing to surrender even when he knew the war was over! That is
true Japanese spirit!”
Middleton remembered throwing satchel charges into the
mouths of Saipan caves to seal them off because the Japanese wouldn’t com.
out of them to surrender, though he pleaded with them through a bullhorn
in their own language. Months later, when the caves were opened by others
who went to search for souvenirs, he saw not only dead soldiers, but women
and children, their bodies decomposed, their hair still black and richly
growing. And American soldiers and Marines knocking the corpses’ teeth out
for the gold. “Muta,” he said, “sounds like an idiot.”
“You’ll never understand, will you?” Junyo said,
stripping off his shirt and wiping his chest dry with it. He motioned
Middleton to follow him into the bedroom where he flung off the rest of
his clothes in a heap at his feet. Self-consciously displaying himself, he
stood proud and naked, toweling himself vigorously. It was a body of which
Junyo could well be proud; on the verge of middle age, it was all muscle,
defined pectorals and deltoids, biceps and triceps, without fat or
flaccidity, a body Junyo had created for himself. The scrawny boy he’d
been and the man he was now were like the before and after advertisements
of Charles Atlas which had transfixed Middleton in the pulp magazines of
his youth.
One of the white Samurai uniforms was laid out
on the enormous four-poster bed, a truly Victorian bed with side curtains,
as far from Japanese tatami and futon as one could get. Junyo splashed
himself with cologne, then, in minutes, he was dressed, grim and military.
Outside, a uniformed young man was waiting at the
wheel of a tan Toyota which he gunned down the street as if he were taking
off from a carrier deck. “Twenty-six years,” Junyo said, “a lifetime.
Kimmochi Muta was a youth when your troops took Saipan and drove him into
hiding. Now he’s a middle-aged man.”
“He simply gave up his life for nothing.”
“Can Japan have lost if only one soldier of the
Imperial Japanese Army preferred death to surrender, for twenty-six years
lived alone and hunted, hiding in caves, eating rats?”
“Muta did finally surrender.”
“No! Two American sailors surprised him while he was
trapping fish.”
“You’re splitting hairs.”
Junyo looked despairing. “Did you read what Muta said
to the reporters? The Asahi printed his exact words: I would only
like to tell the Emperor that I continued to live for His sake and
believing in Him and Yamato-damashii.”
Yamato-damashii, the traditional martial spirit
of Nippon. Like Junyo and the arm wrestling, they never gave up. The
American newspapers had also reported that Kimmochi Muta had confessed
that he was afraid to surrender for fear that he might be damned as a
traitor by his own people.
“Now,” Junyo said “Muta’s coming home to Nippon, like
a true soldier of the Emperor. Millions will be watching on television,
and they will share his Yamato-damashii, those who once were part
of it and those who do not even remember how it was.”
“Is that why we’re going to Haneda?”
“To greet the returning warrior and to remind all the
sons of Amaterasu that there are still some of us who revere the Emperor.”
At the airport the sky was overcast with low clouds
that made the air a burden to breathe. The plane had set down half an hour
earlier and already more than five thousand people were gathered.
Middleton stood a distance back from the phalanx of three dozen
white-uniformed Samurai who, with Junyo at their head, waited for Corporal
Muta to alight. The JAL jetliner had been pulled right up on to the
concrete apron, the staircase rolled into position. When the plane door
opened, there was silence, then a spattering of applause like light rain,
but no sooner had a beat, emaciated Japanese carrying a World War II rifle
emerged when the acclaim grew into a stormy roar of “Muta! Muta!” The
crowd surged forward, trying to break through the police cordon, which
bent but held. Reporters and officials surrounded Muta as he walked
haltingly toward the airport building. TV cameras atop several trucks and
on the shoulders of photographers followed, then a microphone was held in
front of Muta’s mouth. As if someone had given orders, there was sudden
silence. Muta stood still, his eyes taking in the crowd, then he drew
himself erect and with one hand held the rifle high over his head. Thin
reedy words floated over them like cherry blossoms. “I have come home to
Nippon with the rifle the Emperor gave me. I regret that I did not serve
him better than I did.” The silence lasted until Junyo and his cohorts
began to chant in unison, “Aikokushin! Aikokushin!” and held up
placards inscribed with the three ideographs that meant heart, love and
country; together they made up the word the Samurai were chanting
which once had been a leading prewar Imperial slogan.
A doctor and nurse appeared and Muta was seated in the
wheelchair they brought. Rifle across his knees, his arms held high in
greeting, Muta was wheeled through the crowd which parted to let him pass.
As he disappeared through the doors of the airport lounge, a wave of
screaming black-uniformed students came charging down on Junyo’s
Samurai carrying signs that read, “We Are Unalterably Opposed to the
Imperial Way!” Rocks and bottles flew, lead pipes were brandished, blows
struck. A Samurai was beaten to the ground by two stave-wielding
students. Junyo was at the very center of the fighting, his face alight
with joy of combat, his teeth bared, using both his arms and legs. His
Samurai were outnumbered ten to one yet Middleton felt no urge to join
them in the defense of the Imperial Way, or for that matter Corporal
Muta’s quarter century of pointless sacrifice. What, he wondered,
possessed a Muta? Was it really Yamato-damashii or psychopathology,
the fear of shame and being shamed in a rigid culture. And were the two
mutually exclusive?
A siren wailed, a bullhorn roared, and the riot police
with their shields and helmets charged in to separate the black and white
uniforms. Junyo was laying about him energetically, fighting three
students when Middleton saw the fourth with a pole sharpened to a spear
point running at him from behind. “Junyo!” Middleton shouted, but Junyo
couldn’t hear him. Middleton ran to intercept the spear but he knew he
would be too late, then, just as the spear was thrust, Junyo shifted his
ground, and the spear sliced along his side leaving a bright scarlet smear
on the white uniform. Junyo went down on one knee, turned to see the
student bearing down on him a second time. Clumsily, Junyo tried to evade
him and, as the student tensed for the thrust, Middleton knocked him to
the ground. He tore the pole from his fingers and as the student, eyes
wide with fear, mouth agape, strove to get to his feet, Middleton slammed
him back to the ground. Another black uniform plunged out of the melee,
pipe raised to strike, and Middleton caught him with the pole, left across
the shoulder, which sent the pipe clanging on the concrete, right across
the chest to send the youth sprawling. Swinging the pole like a kendo
stick, Middleton cleared a space around them until Junyo, clutching his
side, blood seeping through his fingers, stood up next to him, then
Middleton cut a path in front of them until they were clear of the
fighting.
Behind them the police were clubbing the combatants
apart while two trucks with water cannon maneuvered into position. Some of
the students and Samurai had already taken to their heels, pursued
by the helmeted Kidotai and their riot sticks. Others were
hammer-locked and run into paddy wagons. A little apart from the rest,
standing next to one of the paddy wagons, a short, flat-faced man with a
powerful peasant physique was directing the police efforts.
At the Toyota, Junyo’s right side was dripping blood.
He asked Middleton to get the car keys in his trouser pocket. Middleton
found them, and embarrassed, realized that Junyo had an erection and had
wanted to announce the fact to him. He helped Junyo into the back seat of
the car, advised him to lie down, but Junyo refused. As Middleton was
about to get into the driver’s seat, the youthful Samurai who had
driven them there returned, one eye already blue and closing, his uniform
torn and filthy. Only then did Junyo introduce them. “Hushino, Fumio,” he
said brusquely. Fumio bowed hastily and looked nervously back to where the
riot police were bombarding Samurai and students alike with
torrents of white water. Fumio slipped into the driver’s seat and with his
own keys started the car. “We must hurry,” he said, looking at Junyo’s
bleeding, then back at the Kidotai water cannon. “It was Fukutake,”
he said to Junyo, and Junyo nodded acknowledgment.
When they were on the road, Middleton ripped Junyo’s
jacket up the back, then tore the right side off to expose the wood still
brimming with blood. “You’re lucky,” he said, “the boy gouged out some
flesh but nothing to worry about.”
Junyo glared. “I do not worry. This is not the way I
am fated to die.”
“I wish you’d told me that,” Middleton said in
English, “so I wouldn’t have bothered to get into the fight.” He ripped
the skivvy shirt into three strips and laid them along the gash to staunch
the blood. With his bloodstained hand, Junyo held it in place.
Fumio parked the car in the alley behind Junyo’s house
and threw his soiled Samurai jacket over Junyo’s shoulders,
glancing furtively up and down the alley to see if anyone noticed their
going into the garden entrance. Inside the fence they walked on the stone
path through the bonsai pine, Mongolian oak and cherry, passed a
full-grown clump of shuddering bamboo, then a pond of golden carp swimming
lazily around three jagged rocks which jutted up from the clear waters. A
kasuga lantern a few feet away stood guard over them like a lighthouse
over a shoal. On the platform, they took their shoes off, Fumio kneeling
to remove Junyo’s for him, then went into the eighteen-mat room of the
house.
Junyo sent Fumio for a first-aid kit, then lay back on
the tatami. In a few moments, looking like a scarecrow in the tattered
remnants of his uniform, Junyo rose to his knees. Pressing the bloodied
shirt to his side, he inclined his head and said gravely. “Once more you
have saved my life, Jeffrey. You performed like a true warrior, good
soldier.” You must have been a very good soldier.”
Middleton sank down on the tatami and stared out at
the garden, the waves of green flowing into the house like surf, the
square-eyed kasuga lantern warning him — but of what? A good
soldier? Had he really been a good soldier? He doubted it. He lacked
the blind hatred and the blind patriotism, the urge to violence and
vengeance. Then he noticed the tokonoma. In it, highlighted, was a scroll
with a single ideograph, chikara, the Japanese word for power drawn
from the shape of a sword. Beneath the scroll lay an old, magnificent
seppuku dagger.
“Once again, Jeffrey,” Junyo said in a weak voice,
“you save my life and shape it for new opportunity, just as you have
shaped my art.”
A compliment Junyo meant but at the same time mocked.
From the beginning, Junyo had set out to make him feel responsible for the
“new Junyo Ohki,” wanting him to serve as father and mentor. At first,
Middleton thought of the boy he befriended almost like a son or younger
brother, but that soon passed. What had, in time, truly bound them
together in steady, abiding affection, was their long, intimate
collaboration as writer and translator. And this, despite the fact that
Middleton had just as consistently admired Junyo’s work as he had
disapproved of Junyo’s ideas and life, as though — as Junyo never tired of
reminding him — the two could be separated. Junyo insisted that Middleton
must feel responsible for his whole life, because if Junyo was
“Middleton’s creation,” then wasn’t the “creator” responsible for his
creation? But at bottom Middleton understood that to be a subterfuge and
evasion, for Junyo no more considered himself anyone’s creation than
Middleton did: If anyone in the world thought of himself as
“self-created,” surely it was Junyo Ohki.
Fumio returned with a full-fledged combat first-aid
kit, and Middleton used it to cut the remains of the uniform away, swabbed
the gash with surgical cotton, but except for a quiver of facial muscle,
Junyo remained impassive. Middleton laid the sulfa-impregnated bandages
across the wound and taped the ends into place. “Looks clean, but you
ought to have a doctor examine it. Might need stitches.”
Junyo nodded absentmindedly and Middleton doubted that
he would see a physician. Cleaned up except for the discolored eye,
wearing only a loin cloth, Fumio returned with hot saké and three
beautiful red lacquer cups on a black lacquered tray. “You were sure it
was Fukutake?” Junyo asked” and Fumio nodded, then poured the saké. Junyo
raised his cup to the tokonoma, grating, “Chikara!” Fumio
echoed the toast, but Middleton refused to drink to power or toast that
niche. Silently, he waited until they were finished, then drank his saké.
When Fumio refilled their cups, Middleton declined. He
had to go. Junyo acquiesced, and Middleton thought Junyo might be in shock
until he saw Fumio’s loincloth. Then he understood, set his cup down and
left the room. On the platform, he put his shoes on and walked across the
flat stones to the gate. Just before going through it, he looked back and
saw the sliding windows of the eighteen-mat room shut and the blinds
drawn.
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