Only Mama was unsure. The clown’s trick had made her think of oysters.
To her the oyster had always been a theological symbol because it was encapsuled and complete, because it resembled the gray jelly of the brain, because Lao-tzu had once spoken of a substanceless image existing before the Yellow Ancestor. To Mama it seemed likely the oyster might be that image. More than once in her despair she had dreamed of becoming an oyster.
But that was before the clown had smiled at her. There was magic in the illusions he worked with his films, a magic so simple it had made her smile for the first time since the death of the General, made her smile and realize she was not yet ready to join these other voyeurs in a circus of death. Instead she decided to visit the circus master alone, before he gave his performance.
She stopped taking laudanum to clear her mind. She meditated, something she hadn’t done in a year. The night before the circus she came to the filming room as usual.
The couches were arranged in rows, the windows shuttered, the door bolted. She waited until after midnight before she sneaked out of the room. By then the companions were dazed with opium smoke and the clown was snoring fitfully, his bulk spread over three or four large chairs beside the stalled projector. After years of use the ancient documentary had finally snapped. The machine still purred, a reel flapped around and around, but the frame on the wall remained the same, a peasant hovel with a large indistinct animal pressing at the door. Perhaps two frames had been trapped in the lens when the machine stalled.
No one saw her leave. She slipped into a rickshaw, closed the curtains around her, and began the long ride down Bubbling Well Road.
Her destination was an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city. The building was square, window-less, with tall skylights. A muffled shriek, a squeal drifted to her on the wind.
She passed down a canvas corridor, the draped cages of the sleeping animals. Strange costumes, spangled and hairy, hung from the packing boxes. The warehouse itself turned out to be a vast open space lit by moonlight. The ceiling vaulted toward the sky, the corners were left in darkness. Here echoes could have no end, for the great empty area was no less than a cavern of the mind.
He was standing in the sawdust ring. He wore a black bowler hat, a lavender frock coat. In one hand he held a megaphone, in the other a whip. He was standing with his head back and his arms spread, staring at the sky.
She went up to him and bowed. She told him who she was and why she had come. She said that she was one of the group that had commissioned the circus but that she had decided not to come, despite her misery. So she was here alone to learn from the master the meaning of his final performance.
He broke into a gloomy laugh and began striding around the ring cracking his whip, hissing orders through his megaphone. He talked about faith, deception, disguises. He swept his arms through history gathering up emperors and peasants, barbarians, poets. He sank into a confused monologue on love, love that was and love that might have been.
The words cracked, the whip flew, the megaphone defied an imaginary audience. This man, she realized, had lost his way in a land of strange beasts and savage costumes.
She couldn’t understand the nature of his despair, but as she watched him stalk himself in the ring a curious image stirred within her. She saw a naked giant slumped beside a lamp that dimly projected meaningless figures on the wall.
The image was so vivid it startled her. Why had it come to her then? What connected these two anonymous men, a nameless projectionist and a nameless circus master?
She gazed at the skylight, at the invisible corners of the warehouse, at the tiny sawdust ring. She listened to the raving voice of the circus master and heard within it her own voice whispering, whispering night after night to a silent fat man who sat naked and immobile, impassive, oblivious to every horror she recounted, untouched by the terrors she wished upon herself.
Quickly then she slipped off her clothes and went up to the circus master, stopped his pacing, and took from him the megaphone, the whip, emptied his hands, and held him in her arms until the sobbing quieted, until the spasms subsided and he felt in her a blessing that he had lost long ago, a blessing that she had lost as well, forever she thought, not having known until that moment that the gift had been returned to her by the naked giant who nodded forgiveness.
Their act of love lasted until dawn. When she left him she walked for miles, making her plans to return to Japan.
That night she sat by an open window looking at the stars. Midnight passed, the hours wore on. She considered her past grief, she reflected on the torment of the circus master who at that very moment was introducing the ghosts of his years in their terrible costumes, opening the cages of the savage beasts, celebrating his circus of death. But at that very moment, as well, new life was moving within her.
In the course of knowing ten thousand men she had conceived only once. Now she knew it had happened again. Through the intercession of the naked giant she had learned once more to love, she had loved well, and now she would bear the circus master’s son.
The boy was born in the General’s old villa in Tokyo. Because he was half-Caucasian she could not keep him. War was coming with the West and it would be unfair to have him grow up in Japan. Despite herself, she had to get him out of the country while there was still time.
She went to the one man she felt could help her, the missionary who was a friend of the General’s brother. Father Lamereaux listened to her story and agreed to send the baby to America. Sadly she gave him up.
War with the West came, then defeat. Before the war doors were never locked in Japan, but now desperate men stole everything they could find. Her house was broken into nightly, a new gang of starving thieves entering as soon as one had left.
The General’s chauffeur, who had come to work for her at the end of the war, suggested hiring one of these gangs of combat veterans to guard the house and keep the others away. But Mama had a different idea, one consonant as always with the Tao. She quoted Lao-tzu.
When there is Tao in the empire, the galloping steeds are turned back to fertilize the ground by their droppings.
But what does it mean? asked the corporal.
It means, she said, that these men who were heroes yesterday, who are thieves today, will one day be heroes again. They are galloping steeds, and if we treat them with the wisdom of the Tao their droppings will fertilize the future.
Droppings? said the corporal.
A man has several, answered Mama. There are still three or four women servants in this house, and I am sure there are other women near here who are lonely after so many years when the men were away fighting. So instead of posting guards we will invite every passing steed into the house. You will see.
The corporal feared what might happen, but the Tao was in Mama and she knew it. Before many years went by a new Japan began to emerge, an ingenious and industrious Japan, energetic, prosperous.
Many of the old ways had changed, but none more noticeably than the tradition Mama had become skilled in as a child, perfected in girlhood, and left as a young woman, the delicate and profound knowledge of men that for centuries had made the entrance to a Japanese brothel, no matter how humble it might appear to the passing stranger, one of the few truly exquisite gateways in the world, a portal unparalleled save by the path of mystics seeking comfort not in this world but another.
The elaborate brothels of the prewar years gave way to the garish bars of the early postwar years, but then the American soldiers left and Japanese men settled down to learning the lessons of the war and the Occupation. Having been defeated in their venture at Asian conquest, the Japanese combat veterans embraced peace and built industries to supply the Americans, who in turn, having been victorious, were now fighting wars all over the continent, bringing a devastation everywhere that required ever more Japanese goods and industries to replenish what was destroyed, bringing a prosperity to Japan that no warlord or ultranationalist could have conceived possible two decades earlier.