There was another reason why the fist of knowledge appealed to her. In that mudra the five senses of the left hand rose and found themselves completed by the sixth sense of the right hand. Physical nature entered into gnosis.
Or in everyday language, the woman took the position above, the man below. Over a period of years Mama had found that men grow heavy. The woman above, the man below, was a pleasing concept to her as well as a comfortable position.
Or as Lao-tzu had said, seize the way that was so you may ride the things that are now.
Or in everyday terms, choose the position of childbirth. The woman straddles the man so the manchild can be born, which is what the saga meant when he advised seizing the way that was. When the woman rides on top there will be a spurt of new life, for the couple at that moment is following the way of wisdom.
Complex metaphysical subjects. Mama would not have bothered with them had she considered herself an ordinary woman. As she looked down on the Imperial palace she recalled the words of the ancient Chinese chroniclers, the graybeards of the Han dynasty.
East and south of Korea there lies a kingdom known as Wa. The people are much given to strong drink, respect is shown by squatting. The men tattoo their faces and adorn their bodies with designs, the size and pattern indicating their rank in society.
And as the later graybeards of the Wei dynasty had remarked, the curious kingdom of Wa is a queen country, curiously ruled by a queen.
Now Mama was tattooed from neck to ankle and had been since she was a child, so who was to say? It might be that the curious kingdom of Wa had been ruled by one hundred and twenty-four successive generations of male emperors, but the curious question remained, who had ruled curiously in the beginning?
In any case temporal history interested Mama less than spiritual, and the religious situation was much clearer. After years of meditation she could not deny that she and the Kannon Buddha had certain characteristics in common.
First, the Kannon was the only woman in the crowded pantheon of male Buddhism, just as Mama was the only woman who had ever worked in a brothel in Kobe without subsequently getting married. Second, like that goddess, she always followed the path of compassion and mercy.
Among the many males there were chanting and silent Buddhas, laughing and crying Buddhas, Buddhas for every purpose and occasion. But among all the confusing statues to be found in the temples of Japan there was only one woman, and she alone seemed to have a distinct personality.
Of course Mama had never actually seen a statue of the Kannon using the fist of knowledge. But as everyone knew, the statues had all been carved by men. What would have happened if women had been allowed to join the carvers’ guild? Would the Kannon always be shown with open hands, passive and accepting?
In addition to the fist of knowledge Mama used twelve other mudras.
Sincerity.
The empty heart.
The unopened lotus.
The newly opened lotus.
Intentions clearly made known.
Holding one’s water.
Seeking refuge.
The backhand or hindside.
The difficult back to back.
The equally difficult position of middles touching
while the rest is held apart and erect.
The variation where middles touch with both hands
on their backs.
The final position where both rest in the clasp of
covering hands.
One mudra, in short, for each stage of the sexual act.
Mama sat on her ivory elephant contemplating the sky until eight o’clock. By then the sun had risen high enough to establish the pattern of the day. She then took a bath every hour on the hour until noon, when she lunched on tea and six raw oysters. Prior to her afternoon meditation she took another bath. At six in the evening she took her eighth and final bath before changing into an evening kimono and going to her nightclub.
One measure of her influence in Japan was her apartment, the only one in the skyscraper where she lived. The Imperial chamberlains had objected strenuously to a skyscraper beside the Imperial moat, and the only way it got built was through a promise that the building would be used strictly for offices, that it would always be empty at night.
The chamberlains felt that the Emperor, although not a god since the end of the war, still deserved some privacy at night. At the beginning of the century, after all, there had been one hundred and thirty-four living gods registered with the relevant ministry in Peking, and of these only the Japanese Emperor still survived as an institution.
Mama had used her business connections to make an exception of herself. Because there could be no lights in the skyscraper after dark, her apartment was furnished with infrared lighting invisible to the naked eye. From below, the immense tower looked deserted but high on the twenty-fourth floor, unknown to the twelve million inhabitants of Tokyo, a small elderly woman in infrared goggles watched over them. Every night she smiled benignly down on the world’s largest city as she ate her last meal of the day, tea and twelve raw oysters.
Although she was today the most powerful woman in Japan, life had not begun easily for her. She had been born to a peasant couple in the Tohoku, the poor northern district of Japan. Each year thereafter her parents had another child whom they suffocated at birth, the regular practice among farmers living in poverty. Mama was eight years old when the silk market in America collapsed for a season, leaving her parents no choice but to sell her to a brothel.
A house in the licensed quarter of Kobe offered the highest sum, and that was where she went. Her father blamed her mother for the silk disaster in America, since her mother was an Ainu and therefore of Caucasian origin. Before he went off to drink at night he beat her as hard as he could.
The year Mama left home a son was born to the couple. They kept him because their daughter was gone. After the war this man, who had the body hair of his mother, confessed a long list of crimes to Geraty, a heinous record of torture and arson, killing and sexual perversion that stretched from Siberia to Mukden to Shanghai and up the valley of the Yangtze, that included among many atrocities the murder of Miya’s son and the murder of the Japanese General responsible for the rape of Nanking. It was from him that Geraty stole the military greatcoat he was wearing the night he first met Quin, not by accident, in the bar in the Bronx once owned by Geraty’s father.
As for Mama, she never knew she had a brother, neither then nor years later when the night came for him to murder both her surviving son and Hato, the freighter passenger on the Pacific crossing who had worn a false moustache and false sideburns and so angrily kept the secret of his shoeboxes from Quin and Big Gobi.
Although she was only eight years old when she went to the house in Kobe, Mama soon came to know the customs of the world from the sailors who passed through that busy port. Throughout her childhood she was tattooed a part at a time, as was customary at the beginning of the century for Japanese children entering a serious life of prostitution or crime.
When puberty came her body was entirely covered with tattoos with the exception of her face and her hands and feet. The tattoos recounted the epic story of a dragon. The dragon’s tail curled around her waist, its fiery breath licked her stomach, its tongue forked into her crotch, its eyes peered from her nipples.
On her backside, in even more terrifying guises, the theme was repeated with variations.
Thus when a visiting knight sagged in bed, thinking he had met the challenge and triumphed, slain the dragon and earned a night’s sleep, Mama had but to whisper to him in the candlelight to prove that facts were always illusionary when compared to myths.
Turn me over, she suggested.