“You take them too seriously,” Kato said. He and Harry were wrapping up the prints amid the drop cloths, paints and easels of his studio.
“They’re only pictures. Oharu attracts one sort of customer and Chizuko another, they have different appeals. The customer tells me what he wants to see, and that’s what I give him. A good lesson for you, Harry, give the customer what he wants.”
“But the print of Chizuko isn’t like the others. There’s only one copy. You ordered the printer to smash the blocks.”
“That’s my agreement with the customer. It’s a very private issue. That’s why it’s important that you exercise discretion when you deliver it. You understand discretion, don’t you, Harry?”
On this particular run, Gen went along. At his insistence, they stopped at a teahouse so he could see the prints. He had been as infatuated with Chizuko as Harry was with Oharu, and the image of her as the lowest form of prostitute had the same impact it had for Harry.
Harry explained, “It’s just a picture, Kato says. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Gen wanted to tear the print in half but settled for watching Harry deliver it to a ground-floor apartment with pots of bamboo at the entryway. The door was opened by a tall, handsome man wearing a boater, white shirt and slacks as if about to go rowing in spite of the cold weather. He took delivery without a word, but Harry recognized him as the army officer who had been with Chizuko to the movie house.
“Did he invite you in?” Kato asked when Harry returned.
“No.”
“Good. If he ever does ask you in, think up some excuse.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think you’d do, Harry.” Kato stepped back from his painting, a view of the Seine, to glance at Harry. “You’re not beautiful enough.”
Harry’s interest was piqued. From the occasional word dropped by Kato or Chizuko, Harry learned the customer was a rich idler, an army officer, a noble, a self-made man. Kato tended to denigrate while Chizuko embellished. Whichever, the customer ordered an unusual number of prints. A tank rolling through shell bursts. Fabled swordsmen dicing up bandits, tigers, whales. Others more macabre: a treetop swarm of winged monkeys. A woman crucifying her lover in the dark of a cave. A demon suspending a pregnant woman upside down the better to remove her liver.
Kato put more and more trust in Harry. He could send Harry to the printer to bring back a fan print, mirror print or indigo, secure in the knowledge that Harry would select the right one. Besides, on rainy winter days or during Tokyo’s humid summer, it was much easier to have the boy run errands while Kato devoted his time to copies of Degas, Renoir, Monet. Kato produced his imitations for himself, not for sale. Harry would return to see Kato squeezing tubes of oil paints, glossy worms of cadmium yellow, ocher and carnelian that he daubed onto the canvas. Harry was a boy off the street, how could he tell the artist that his Japanese prints had grace and life and definition and that his French art was mud and that French flowers looked like frosting? In the meanest Japanese portrait was the dignity of a straw hat, umbrella, kimono. In comparison, French nudes looked stripped and awkward, with thick hams of pink and green. Also, French artists always seemed to be slumming. In Japanese prints, prostitutes were appreciated like royalty and heroes were made from actors, wastrels and gamblers.
Kato paused in midstroke. He was painting a blue cathedral. Blue speckled his hands, shoes, beret.
“Do you plan to be a missionary, Harry?”
“No.”
“If you stay in Japan, you should think about becoming a professional gambler. It suits your personality, and the Japanese are almost as fond of gamblers as they are of samurai. I’ll get you some dice.”
“I have dice.”
“See, you’re halfway there. Tell me about your parents. Why the American compulsion to make everyone else like them? And their Japanese? They don’t understand that Japanese is spoken best when it’s not spoken at all. You understand, Harry, because you are a thief, and thieves are good observers. You’ll never be Japanese, but I would bet that in a dark room you could fool anyone.”
It was true. On sultry August evenings, Harry would go walking with Oharu between shows and entertain her by imitating vendors, beating an empty sake tub like a drum and calling in a high-pitched, nasal voice, “Clogs mended, clogs mended!” or blowing a toy bugle and singing, “Tofu! Soft-as-a-baby’s-bottom tofu!” Up and down the street, housewives appeared at their doors with money in their hands. Oharu covered her laugh with her hand until she and Harry turned the corner to the theaters of the Rokku, their dominion, their part of Asakusa. Posters of the latest Hollywood epics lined the way, but what Harry liked most was the reflection in the poster case of him and Oharu strolling by, her sinuous skirt against a background of mincing kimonos, her half-moon eyebrows blandly taking in the world, her hand on Harry’s arm as if they were the Rokku’s crème de la crème. Fantasies of how he might become Oharu’s paramour and protector flitted through Harry’s mind all the time. If he could make her laugh, he could make her love him. If he rescued her from some sort of danger, then she would look at him in a whole new light. But she was fearless and needed rescuing from no one, and he understood that part of his attraction for Oharu was that she couldn’t take him seriously.
Kato had given Harry a print to deliver when Oharu asked him to see a matinee of a Chaplin film with her. Gen knew the address and took the print in Harry’s stead. The film was hilarious, Charlie in a department store, running down the up escalator and up the down escalator while the Movie Man sat before the screen and delivered a thoroughly superfluous “Up, up, up! Down, down, down!” Oharu rested her hand lightly on Harry’s, and throughout the film, he stole glances at it and debated whether to turn his hand and hold hers or put his lips to the pale column of her throat. He did neither. Decorum was strictly maintained in movie houses. Where aisles were lit, ushers were required to wear underpants, and houselights were never dim enough to encourage physical intimacies in the audience. What stopped Harry, however, wasn’t rules but fear. He was contemptuous of cowards and didn’t understand the paralysis that came over him around Oharu. He could tease and joke with her, but anything serious caught in his throat.
It wasn’t until Oharu left to change for her own show at the Folies that Harry realized Gen had not returned to the movie as they’d agreed. Hours had passed. By virtue of his height and looks, Gen usually stood out, but Harry didn’t find him on the Rokku, in Asakusa Park or on the temple grounds. He visited Gen’s house, the card game at the aquarium, their favorite café. Gen wasn’t anywhere. Kato had expected Harry to deliver the print, and Harry had never let him down before.
Finally Harry took a tram across town to the customer’s address, the same place he had delivered the print of Chizuko, a wooden row house that had been taken over and consolidated by someone with money. The customer answered Harry’s knock wearing an airy summer kimono. He was in his mid-twenties, broad-shouldered with muscular calves, built all of a piece like a bear. Handsome was too pretty a word. Domineering with black-rimmed gray eyes under heavy brows, a man with the gravitational pull of a larger planet.
His attention wandered down to Harry. “You’re Gen’s friend. You’ve been here before.”
“Yes. I am so sorry to bother you, excuse me, but would you do me the favor of telling me when Gen left?”
The customer scanned the street once more before he gestured for Harry to remove his shoes and enter. Harry followed to what were very much man’s quarters, a room dominated by a sea captain’s desk and Persian rug. Any middle-class house had a European room, but this seemed to be the real thing. A boar’s head was mounted by a selection of Kato’s demon prints, a satin bed of medals and an officer’s tunic with a shoulder torn off and stained a rust color. The dial of a radio glowed in the corner, although the music, a lied, was turned to a whisper. On the opposite wall were Kato’s battlefield prints and a ladder of European sabers and Japanese swords. A Westminster clock ticked on the mantel. Oriental pillows were strewn around a low Moorish table set with cognac and dates. Gen lay on a pillow on his side, his eyes swimming but with a curious pride that played around his lips.