Well, he could go now, even to Yokohama…. He was so excited he could never sleep. He would lie awake and think of her…. Instantly he was asleep.
He was in the airplane with Akio. They left Nagasaki in a big tri-motored plane. As soon as the inland sea was crossed, Akio said, they would change to a small plane. The big one was only for safety over the water. From it he now looked down on the island of Kyushu.
“Tama is there,” he thought, gazing down into its greenness.
The mists were all gone this morning. He had waked from deep and pleasant sleep to find sunlight streaming into his room. Last night he had stolen through the mists to Tama, the heaven-sent mists. This morning they needed no mists. Everything was clear between them.
Akio was peering down through glasses.
“See that line of gray buildings and forts,” he remarked, handing I-wan the glasses. Looking down, I-wan saw a dotted line of forts facing east and south and west. He laughed.
“You seem to expect enemies from everywhere,” he exclaimed.
“When a nation is the smaller among larger ones,” Akio said, “it must be ready on all sides.”
“Surely you don’t expect war!” I-wan exclaimed.
“I suppose,” Akio said, hesitating, “we Japanese always expect war.” His face grew serious. “At least we have been so taught.”
I-wan was scarcely listening. He was searching the island with the glasses to see if he could find the house. People could still be seen — suppose he saw her in the garden! But no, the plane was mounting swiftly across the sea. Tama was there, hidden on the green island, like a jewel, the jewel of his heart. He gave the glasses back to Akio.
Akio was pleasant this morning. Neither of them spoke of the evening before, and yet because of it they knew each other as they had not. Akio was really talkative. I-wan, not wanting to talk, sat back in his seat by the small window, listening and gazing down at the brilliant blue sea. They were so high now that a great ship seemed to crawl like a snail on the surface of the sea, its wake like a tail behind it. Akio looked through the glasses eagerly.
“That is a warship,” he announced, “a Japanese ship going westward — probably to China,” he added.
“To my country?” I-wan asked idly. It seemed now a thing of no importance that once En-lan had exclaimed bitterly, “Why should foreign gunboats come into our waters? We send no such ships abroad.”
“We have no such ships,” I-wan had felt compelled to say honestly to En-lan.
“That’s not the point,” En-lan had argued. “We wouldn’t if we had them.”
I-wan, remembering, half-dreaming, thought, “I wonder if we would. I wonder if having them would make us want to use them.”
“Why do you send ships of war to China?” he asked Akio aloud.
“To protect our nationals,” Akio said, and added, “At least, so we are told.”
“I am not protected here,” I-wan said, smiling.
“Ah, but you are quite safe here,” Akio said. “We treat you well — we treat everyone well—” he hesitated and went on, “that is, I sometimes think we treat everyone better than we treat ourselves. We are very harsh with ourselves, we Japanese. We are devoured by our sense of duty.”
But the words scarcely fastened themselves in I-wan’s ears. He was thinking, “How pretty she looked last night in the candlelight, holding back her hair!” It seemed to him he could think forever of the way Tama had looked.
He fell into a dreaming reverie. He did not mind going away — very much — if he could have letters from her and could pour himself out in letters to her. They would tell each other more in letters, not having the bodily nearness to distract them. In letters they could draw mind closer to mind and spirit to spirit…. The time went quickly while he dreamed like this. Almost before he knew it the plane was dropping swiftly upon a crust of shore that appeared suddenly beneath them. Then in a few minutes they were on the ground, and being hurried by sturdy blue-coated men into a much smaller plane. Almost instantly they were mounting again, but this time flying so low they could see the farmers harvesting the yellow rice in the small fields which fitted as neatly together as the pieces of a puzzle.
“This,” Akio said suddenly, “is a convertible scouting plane.”
“Why so much preparation for war?” I-wan asked.
“It is our philosophy,” Akio said.
“Do you want war?” I-wan asked curiously.
“No,” Akio answered. He hesitated, in his frequent fashion, and took off his spectacles and wiped them very clean and put them on again. “I myself am a Buddhist,” he said. “I do not believe in taking life.”
“But if you were ordered to war?” I-wan asked.
“I have not yet decided,” Akio answered. He looked so troubled that I-wan made haste to say, “There is no need to decide — it was a silly question.”
But Akio said nothing to this. And I-wan did not notice his silence. He was only making talk. Inside himself he was already planning his first letter to Tama.
If he wrote in Chinese Tama could read it, because classical Japanese and Chinese were the same, and Tama wrote beautifully — he had once seen a poem that she wrote on a fan with delicate clear strokes of a camel’s hair brush. Well, but he would not use the old stilted Chinese forms of letter writing. He would simply begin straight off, “When I was there so high, soaring up in the blue, that was only my body — my heart like a wounded bird had never left the threshold of your room.” They must write like that, straight out of themselves….
Then again the plane was drifting like a leaf to the ground, and they were over Yokohama. He was shaken out of his dreams….
Yokohama was a busy, noisy city. There was no quiet garden here, no screen-shadowed house. He had found himself hustled into a crowded bus and hurried into the city along barren ugly streets, to a mushroom-like house of gray cement blocks.
Their bags were thrown on the sidewalk and he and Akio stepped down beside them. A uniformed doorman came and picked them up.
“These are our offices,” Akio said. “Shio will be waiting for us.”
He followed Akio through the door.
“I have never seen a building like this,” he said.
“Earthquake-proof,” Akio explained. “All Yokohama is earthquake-proof now, since the great earthquake.”
They went into a bare new office. A young woman met them.
“Mr. Shio Muraki begs you to be seated,” she said, hissing a little through her prominent front teeth. She was very ugly, I-wan thought, in a plain black skirt and a white blouse like a uniform. The skirt was too short and showed her thick, curving legs in black cotton stockings and heavy wide black leather shoes. But her ugly spectacled face was earnest with her effort to please them. She said, still hissing through her teeth, “Please — he is just now talking to an American gentleman from New York.”
They sat down as though they were guests. But Akio seemed quite accustomed to this. He went on: “That year I went to America on some business, I forget — ah yes, it was on the matter of a gold lacquered screen from the palace in Peking, and the American collector in New York wanted it, among other things. So I took it over myself. My father was afraid to send so valuable a thing. And also there were reasons why he wanted me to leave Japan for a while. When I left I stood by the steamer’s rail, looking back at Yokohama.” He stopped a moment and went on. “Sumie had come to see me off. And I watched the skyline as long as I could — long after I could not see Sumie, I could see the buildings lifting themselves against the sky. There were many fine tall buildings.” He lit a cigarette and smoked a moment. “Then we had the earthquake. I hurried back. And there was no skyline at all.”