Harry’s experience with women was mixed, because his mother was on the road so often as partner to his father’s ministry. Since Harry had been a sickly child, he had stayed in Tokyo with his nurse, who knew no better than to treat him like a Japanese. So he had grown up in a world of indulgent warmth and mixed baths, a Japanese boy who pretended to be an American son when his parents visited. But still a boy who had only speculated about the painted faces that stared from the windows of the brothels a few blocks from his home. There was something ancient and still and hooded about the whores in their kimonos. Now he was surrounded by an entirely different kind of woman, casually undressed and full of modern life, and in the space of a few minutes he had fallen in love first with Oharu and her half-moon brows and powdered shoulders, and then with the ballerina. If pain was the price of a sight like this, he could bear it. Sitting up, with the blood wiped off, he was small and skinny with a collection of welts and scratches, but his features were almost as uniform and his eyes nearly as dark as a Japanese boy’s.
The artist offered Gen and Harry cigarettes.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Oharu said. “They don’t smoke.”
“Don’t be silly, these are Tokyo boys, not farm boys from your rice paddy. Besides, cigarettes cut the pain.”
“All the same, when the gaijin feels better, they have to go. I have work to do,” the manager announced, although Harry hadn’t seen him budge. “Anyway, it’s too crowded in here. Hot, too.”
“Damn.” The artist felt his jacket pockets. “Now I’m out of fags.”
Harry thought for a second. “What kind of cigarettes? We can get them for you. If you’re thirsty, we can get beer, too.”
“You’ll just take the money and run,” the manager said.
“I’ll stay. Gen can go.”
Gen had been dignified and watchful. He gave Harry a narrow look that asked when he had started giving orders.
“Next time,” Harry said, “I’ll go and Gen can stay.”
It was a matter of adapting to the situation, and Harry’s point of view had altered in the last ten minutes. A new reality had revealed itself, with more possibilities in this second-floor music-hall changing room than he’d ever imagined. Much better than playing samurai.
“It would be nice for the girls if we had someone willing to run for drinks and cigarettes,” Oharu said. “Instead of men who just sit around and make comments about our legs.”
The manager was unconvinced. He picked his collar from the sweat on his neck and gave Harry a closer scrutiny. “Your father really is a missionary?”
“Yes.”
“Well, missionaries don’t smoke or drink. So how would you even know where to go?”
Harry could have told the manager about his uncle Orin, a missionary who had come from Louisville to Tokyo ’s pleasure quarter and fallen from grace like a high diver hitting the water. Instead, Harry lit his cigarette and released an O of smoke. It rose and unraveled in the fan.
“For free?” the manager asked.
“Yes.”
“Both of you?”
Harry looked over to Gen, who still held back, sensitive about the prerogatives of leadership. The door to the stage flew open for a change of acts, singers dressed in graduation gowns rushing out as ballet dancers poured in. The ballerina Harry had seen before didn’t even bother with the privacy of a screen to strip to her skin, towel herself off and pull on a majorette costume with a rising sun on the front. To Harry, her change of costumes suggested a wide range of talents and many facets of personality. Gen had been watching, too.
“Yes,” said Gen. “I’m with him.”
“You should be. Look at him, a minute ago he was about to lose his head, and now he’s in Oharu’s lap. That is a lucky boy.”
Was it only luck, Harry wondered? The way the fight had unfolded, the stumbling upstairs into the theater’s roost, encountering Oharu and the artist, the transition of him and Gen from would-be samurai to men of the world all had a dreamlike quality, as if he had stepped through a looking glass to see a subtly altered, more defined image from the other side.
Otherwise, nothing changed. The following day he and Gen were at school again. They marched onto the baseball field in the afternoon and had the usual bayonet drill with Sergeant Sato. Harry put on his padded vest and wicker helmet so that, one after the other, Jiro and Taro, Tetsu and Hajime could take turns pummeling the gaijin. Gen beat Harry into the ground more viciously than ever.
At the end of the drill, the sergeant asked what their ambition in life was and, to a boy, they shouted. “To die for the emperor!”
No one shouted more fervently than Harry.
1941
2
HARRY AND MICHIKO were dancing barefoot to the Artie Shaw version of “Begin the Beguine,” the Latin sap taken out of the music and replaced by jungle drums.
There was room to dance because Harry didn’t own much, he wasn’t a collector of Oriental knickknacks-netsuke or swords-like a lot of expatriates in Tokyo. Only a low table, oil heater, gramophone and records, armoire for Western clothes and a wall hanging of Fuji. An oval mirror reflected the red of a neon sign outside.
An erotic zone for the Japanese was the nape of the neck. Harry slipped behind Michiko and put his lips to the bump at the top of her spine, between her shoulder blades, and ran a finger up to the dark V where her hair began, black and sleek, cut short to show off the delicate ivory whorl of her ears. She was skinny and her breasts were small, but her very smoothness was sensual. At the base of her neck where it pulsed were three pinpoint moles, like drops of ink on rice paper. Michiko took his hand and slid it down her stomach while he shifted behind her. When a Japanese said yes and meant it, the word “Hai!” came directly from the chest. It was the way she said “Harry” over and over. In Japanese prints, the courtesan bit a sash to keep from crying out in passion. Not Michiko. Sex with Michiko was like mating with a cat; Harry was surprised sometimes afterward that his ear wasn’t notched. But she did possess him, she claimed all of him with a backward glance.
How old was she, twenty? He was thirty, old enough to know that her heart-shaped face was offered as innocently as the ace of spades. And if Saint Peter asked him at the Pearly Gates, “Why did you do it?” Harry admitted that the only honest answer would be “Because it fit.” Before lovers leaped into the red-hot mouth of a volcano, did they pause to reconsider? When two addicts decided to share the same ball of opium, did they ask, “Is this a good idea?” His sole defense was that no one fit him like Michiko, and each time was different.
“Harry,” she said, “did I tell you that you were the first man I kissed? I saw kissing in Western movies. I never did it.”
“Do you like it?”
“Not really,” she said and bit his lip, and he let go.
“Jesus, what is this about?”
“You’re leaving me, aren’t you, Harry. I can tell.”
“Christ.” It was amazing how women could turn it off, Harry thought. Like a golden faucet. He felt his lip. “Damn it, Michiko. You could leave scars.”
“I wish.”
Michiko plumped herself down on a tatami and pulled on white socks with split toes. As if those were enough wardrobe in themselves, she sat cross-legged, not knees forward like a woman should, and took a cigarette and her own matches. She was the only Japanese woman he knew who made love naked. Polite Japanese women pitched their voices high when talking to men. Michiko talked to men, women, dogs all the same.