I could no longer meet the legionaries here, it wasn’t safe for them. I had to meet them one at a time for a minute or two behind a tombstone. I had to sneak back and forth through the city, evaporate and materialize, die in doorways and resurrect myself in the moonlight of a cemetery. There seemed to be only one thing to do, so I did it. I became a ghost. And Quin became a ghost as well. The idealist became violent and unsure of himself, I could see it in his eyes. You don’t understand, you say? No matter now. There’s nothing to understand anymore.
Father Lamereaux rose. He gazed at the windows.
How did it end, Father?
End? How can there be an end when Our Lady’s reign is forever? As for Quin, he went to Shanghai and never came back.
When?
Just before total war began, but in retrospect who can say? Artillery pieces were placed around the Shinto shrines in 1905.
Is there someone who might know what happened to him?
There was a woman who once played a thousand-year-old koto with indescribable tenderness across the hours of a spring afternoon in Kamakura. She might have been in Shanghai then, I’m not sure. I’ll give you her name.
No one else?
Father Lamereaux moved into the hall. He opened the front door and held out his hand. He wrote on a piece of paper, then stared at the drops of rain in his palm. Deep scars formed around his eyes.
In Tsukiji, he whispered. A gangster. Good-bye.
The door closed. Quin moved up the street in the rain reading the piece of paper. On one side Mama, The Living Room, an address. On the other side no address, a name, Kikuchi-Lotmann.
Kikuchi-Lotmann must be the gangster in Tsukiji, the fish market district of Tokyo. Mama must be the woman who had been in Shanghai. Beside the names two arrows were drawn pointing in opposite directions.
The rain came down and Quin watched the Emperor’s autograph dissolve in his fingers.
Miya sat in the kitchen slicing turnips. The shopkeepers in the neighborhood, who knew nothing of her forebears, assumed that tuberculosis had stunted her growth as a child and made her into a dwarf. But that wasn’t true. The men in her family had been tiny for generations, and they had always been careful to choose tiny women to bear their sons. They were No actors who specialized in the difficult role of the princess.
In the tradition of a family devoted to No, these severely disciplined men passed their stage name down from one generation to the next. Miya’s father had been the thirteenth actor to use it. Thus when she was born in 1905 the stern old man barely noted the fact. He had dedicated his life to No and there were no roles on the stage for women.
At the age of sixteen Miya ran away from her home in Kyoto to marry a painter, an act of abandon that gave her the only moments of happiness she was ever to know in life. Romantically she thought she might become a painter like him in the Western style, using oils rather than charcoal, but as it turned out her young husband never had time to teach her. He was dying and her escape ended within the year. She returned home with the two gifts love had given her, a child and tuberculosis.
Her father wouldn’t forgive her act of disobedience but he embraced his grandson, who he assumed would someday be the fourteenth actor in the family to bear the traditional name. Her father stopped speaking to her and never entered her room. A servant brought her meals. From her bed she could hear the old man and her son playing together.
When the boy was a little older her father got him admitted to the Peers’ School in Tokyo. At the same time he was enrolled in a No theater in Tokyo to receive his initial training.
Miya objected to him being sent so far away, but her objections meant nothing. As she expected, his busy schedule kept him away from Kyoto for all but a few days out of every year. And even when he did come home he spent most of his time away from the house with his grandfather.
As he grew older he was increasingly ill at ease in her presence. He was silent and even sullen, as if embarrassed to be with her. She knew this was because she had always been sick and had never been able to be a mother to him. She also knew this couldn’t be helped, but that didn’t lessen the bitterness she felt toward the course life had taken.
Her father died suddenly one winter, and to her surprise Miya found herself relieved, perhaps even secretly pleased. Despite her sickness her son would now have to turn to her because she was all he had.
She wrote him a long letter praising his talents and talking about the future. With the letter she sent a small childish self-portrait done by her dead husband, the only memento she had from that short period in her life when both sickness and her son had come to her. The painting had hung by her bed since her husband’s death, so she was quite sure her son would understand what she meant by sending it to him.
A few days later she received a telegram from her son’s school saying he had disappeared upon learning of his grandfather’s death. He had not received her letter. She sent a telegram to his theater and learned that he had not been seen there either.
Miya left her bed and took a train to Tokyo. Her son’s classmates could tell her nothing, but at the theater she was given the name of a foreigner, a No scholar who had apparently befriended her son. Several hints or suggestions accompanied the information, but Miya was too agitated to hear them.
She went to the address she had been given and found a large Victorian house. The sun had already set. In her confusion she forgot to knock on the door.
Although ice covered the windows the house was insufferably hot, so hot she almost fainted when she stepped into the scene being enacted in the oppressive heat of that Victorian parlor, in near darkness, the outside world invisible beyond the frosted windowpanes.
A tall thin man floated between the pieces of stiff furniture, drifted across the floor in the wavering light of a single candle. He was toying with the folds of his formal kimono, a costume worn by virgins in No plays, and toying with the plaits of a black lacquered wig that only partially covered the wisps of graying hair flying in front of his face.
The shadowy figure held a whiskey bottle in one hand, a fan in the other. As he danced around the room he used the fan to reveal his genitals, which were fully exposed through the open kimono.
Near him on a horsehair couch, his middle raised by silk pillows, the candle resting on his belly, lay her son, naked and giggling.
Miya reached the door, the cold air, the icy wind. Somehow she made her way out of the neighborhood before she collapsed. She was found that night in a snowdrift and taken to a hospital. Weeks later she learned from one of her son’s classmates that he had gone to work briefly in a factory that manufactured military overcoats. When he was fired for incompetence he had lied about his age and gone into the army under a false name.
That was in 1935. In 1937, while serving as a corporal in a film unit near Mukden, he was arrested as a spy and beaten to death by the Kempeitai.
Miya had to sell her father’s house and her father’s valuable collection of No masks to pay for her long convalescence. When her disease at last subsided she managed to find a job with the army. She was trained as a film projectionist at a base near Tokyo. The general at the base was a follower of No who made her his private projectionist as soon as he discovered the identity of her father. The general was transferred to China and killed, Miya went to work for another general who was transferred to China and killed, then for a third general who was transferred to China and killed. At the end of the war she was working for General Tojo, the Prime Minister who was soon to be hanged as a war criminal.
The winter evening the wind drove her away from the Victorian parlor Miya thought she was entering a Buddhist hell, an infernal, suffocating vision where angry demons forever tortured their victims. She had been a victim before, she was a victim again.