An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful (30 page)

He stepped on to the beach, his feet heavy in the sand,
struggling
for balance on his cane. He could hardly believe this was the same place he had stopped by earlier where surfers had bobbed in the deep water. It was like walking towards a battlefield
littered
with corpses, a river gulch full of sun-bleached bones. Shapes rose out at him from the night. Beached boats. Bundles of fishing nets. An anchor. Seaweed drying racks. A loose umbrella, half-shut on broken spokes. An uprooted chair. Which he set upright, this rusted-metal frame lashed with broad strands of plastic. But still strong enough to take his weight, as he sat down, facing the sea.

This would have been Kawabata’s beach. An early morning venue for that frail, lonely, detached man. Why did that poor soul, who loved beauty so much, commit such an ugly death? Inhaling those filthy, toxic fumes escaping from the mouth of that brown rubber hose. At least Mishima had the courage to go the way of the elegant sword. At least that death was an act of beauty in itself. But to gas yourself? At the age of seventy-two. This writer who with great sensibility had expressed the essence of the Japanese mind. This writer who had not even penned a note of farewell.

He plucked the bag of chestnuts from his pocket. The little nuggets cold now but again that taste reminding of his childhood. His father and the knife with the ivory sheath. His mother stoic and uncomplaining, showering him with dust from a yellow rag. These thoughts interrupted by a police car driving along the empty highway blaring out its bulletins. He ducked from the glare of the headlights, the twin beams casting elongated shadows across the empty bay and then disappearing. He was alone again.

Again the ringing from his phone. Da, da, da, da, da. Da, da, da, da, da. He plucked it out of his pocket, switched it off, tossed the contraption as hard as he could, watched it skid across the wet sand. The night stretched wide before him. Pagan moon. Blue seabed. Distant stars. An icy gust hinting at the arrival of snow. He shivered. What was out there in the dark, raging ocean, gathering
tide-blood into its wake? A puny ripple that would do no more than lap at his toes? Or a mountain of water building its sheer walls higher and higher until it blocked out the eerie moonlight? He smiled in the face of his fate. He would wait. For death was the greatest denial of them all.

1928–2003

(Missing, Presumed Dead)

We were ten minutes out of Yokohama before anyone said a word. It was the soldier next to the driver who turned round. The one who had given the order for the jeep to stop and pick me up. I could see his rank. And the tag. Feldman. Captain Feldman.

‘Where you from, lieutenant?’ he asked.

That was the question the Yanks always put first. Never your name. They wanted to place you. A state, a city, a town, a zip code. Then the inevitable follow-up jibes about the Mets, the Redskins, the Cowboys, the Bulls, the Bears. Stuff like that. Friendly but never intimate. It was an illusion I knew all about.

‘England.’

‘I can see that from the outfit. Where ’bouts?’

‘London.’

Feldman had a pleasant face. Tanned. From lazing about sunny Okinawa, no doubt. A couple of days’ stubble. Skin slack, like an old hound-dog, giving him a weary but kindly look. He scratched his cheek, thoughtful, as if he were scraping up a memory.

‘I was stationed near Oxford couple of years back,’ he said. ‘Before this gig. London was a great place for R&R.’

‘Still is,’ the corporal beside me said. Large man, all crouched up in the small space, rifle between his knees. Black skin. Sleeves rolled up tight to reveal bulging biceps below the two stripes.
Red-eyes
. Faint moustache. Skin pocked like the road we were on. The name “Winston” on his tag. ‘I’m from Atlanta,’ he told me as if this somehow explained his presence in the jeep. ‘Atlanta, Georgia.’

‘Georgia’s always on his mind.’ Feldman half-sung the words.

‘Good jazz,’ Winston muttered softly so only I could hear. ‘Them clubs in Soho.’

‘You know where the fuck we’re going, Sam?’ Feldman shouted at the driver whose skinny head was bobbing in front of me.

‘I just keep going north, captain,’ Sam shouted back. ‘We’ll hit Tokyo soon enough.’

‘Just follow the smell,’ Winston said.

The smell was the rank odour from the shanty towns sprung up along the road. Corrugated iron structures propped up with
salvaged
pieces of wood. Futons airing in the sunshine. A few weedy patches of vegetables. It was where the first survivors would have reached before giving up and deciding to live where they stopped. Must be a river nearby. Others following until a makeshift village was born. Six months later and it would be a town I’d be looking at. Children poured out of these hovels to run after us.

‘Give chocolate,’ they shouted. ‘Give chocolate.’

‘Fuck off, you little brats,’ Sam shouted back, snaking the jeep over the road in a shake to get rid of them.

‘Lay off, Sam,’ said Feldman. The words came out friendly but it was an order nevertheless.

‘Give chocolate.’ One little boy was right up racing beside me. He must have been about eight years old, yet he had the face of an old man. Wrinkled forehead. Ancient eyes. Two front teeth
missing
. A cigarette stub tucked behind his ear.

Corporal Winston reached into his breast pocket, pulled out some sticks of gum and tossed them. The chasing horde stopped for the pickings.

‘So what’s your business in Tokyo?’ Feldman again. ‘Or is it all top secret?’

‘Nothing so exciting,’ I said. ‘I’m a translator. Seconded to GHQ from the Foreign Office.’

Feldman laughed. ‘Did the General send for you then?’

‘Something like that.’

Winston poked me gently. ‘Well, say “hi” to ol’ Douglas
MacArthur
for me when you see him,’ he drawled. ‘Tell him old Billy Winston here would be mighty pleased to make the supreme
commander
’s noble acquaintance.’

‘Oh, stop jawing back there,’ Feldman said.

But there was no need for the captain to silence his man. We had fallen into speechlessness anyway, letting the road jostle and shake us into witnessing what was before us. The shanty towns had petered out and we were into some razed flat-lands. It wasn’t like any other bombed-out city I had seen. I knew London from the blitz. And so must Feldman and Winston. The Germans had left craters where whole streets might have been. Tenement
buildings
blasted open like dolls’ houses to reveal their innards. Gaps in what I could still see was a city. London with holes in it. But a city nevertheless. Here there were no gaps. Or at least just one big gap. For this was it. Miles and miles of rubble with the occasional scorched pillar or post still standing. Unobstructed. Occasionally a clue that human beings had once inhabited this place. A blackened safe. A burned-out oven. What were once the outskirts of Tokyo were now a petrified forest. Flies everywhere. My God, I thought. If this was Tokyo after the fire-bombings, what must Hiroshima and Nagasaki be like?

Feldman took off his cap. Military crop flecked with white. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What have we done?’

I was glad this hadn’t been my war. At least, that was how I saw it. The Brits might have been slugging it out with the Japs in Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Sumatra and Borneo but over here on mainland Nippon this was Uncle Sam’s backyard mess. I wasn’t losing any sleep over the pulling of any bomb-hatch trigger on the
Enola Gay
. And I wasn’t taking any responsibility for this either. This was heavy-handed stuff. Typical Yankee bullying. So let the poor bastards see the result of their handiwork. They deserved to.

As we moved closer to the centre of Tokyo, I noticed the men in the jeep begin to relax. Sam the driver started to whistle while Feldman, and Corporal Winston beside me, waved casually to a few of the people who had stopped to watch our passage. Some pedestrians waved or bowed back, expressionless, politely, their faces wan and drawn, their clothes hanging loose from
undernourished
bodies. The scene was still very much one of devastation but at least a few buildings had survived the fire-bombing. These were the concrete structures of ministries, banks and office blocks, walls blackened and charred, windows blown out and boarded up, metal signs twisted from the heat. Not the flimsy wood and paper houses of the poorer people that had served as mere kindling for the ferocious onslaught. Over one hundred thousand people had been burned alive that horrendous day in March, the smell of
barbecued
flesh even wafting up to filter through the bomb-hatches of the B-29s circling above.

Now, where building blocks had been reduced to ashes,
residents
had planted meagre rows of vegetables as they tried to eke out survival from the sooty soil. I saw beggars on the streets,
pavement
hawkers with a few precious possessions laid out in a barter for food, a lane of stalls where a thronging black market had sprung up. Skinny, hollow-chested urchins too weak even to chase us in the usual pester for gum and chocolate. A few leafless trees. Not a bird in the sky. Black clouds overhead. It was hard to believe the sun would ever shine on this city again. And if it did, people would probably retreat indoors from the heat.

Sam pulled up outside the Imperial Hotel. So Frank Lloyd Wright-famous, even I had heard of it. The building was an
amazing
feat of architecture, a bizarre combination of
faux
-Mayan and art-deco design, stretching back in layers of yellowish brick from the portico to a seven-storey tower at the centre. The bombing had roughed up the facade, but the hotel still boasted a faded grandeur. Feldman insisted we all got out and have our picture taken by the
pool in front of the entrance. No fountains flowed and the water was sooty black. Sam fumbled with the Brownie as Feldman and Winston took up position on either side of me. They held up their hands in a Churchillian victory-salute as I tried to manage a smile.

‘It’s a wonder it survived,’ I remarked to Feldman as we walked back to the jeep.

‘It outfoxed the Great Kanto earthquake as well,’ he said,
pushing
back his cap, smiling at me. ‘Designed by a Yank, of course.’

We all settled back into the jeep and Sam drove us towards Supreme Allied Command HQ somewhere in the heart of the city’s financial district.

‘One of the few areas left standing,’ Sam said. ‘I guess we need the money machine to get things rolling again.’ He had been there a few times as part of his duties, ferrying personnel arriving to and from the ships at Yokohoma.

Winston plucked out a cigarette from a packet wedged tight in the pocket of his uniform shirt, flicked open the lighter cap, thumb-sparked a flame into existence. Took a deep inhale, offered me one as an afterthought. I refused, even though I was dying for a smoke.

‘So what are you men here for?’ I asked Feldman.

‘Winston and me are assigned to ferret out the war criminals.’

‘You mean government ministers, generals, people like that?’

‘Naw. We’ve already got these slimeballs locked up. We’re after the ones who captured the bombing crews. The B-29 guys, shot down on their missions, but managing to bail out in their chutes. Some are POWs but God knows how they’ve been treated. We’ve got intelligence saying others were executed. Heads cut off with ceremonial swords.’

‘Livers gouged out, fried and eaten for dinner,’ Winston added on a slow exhale of smoke.

‘Bastards,’ Sam hissed.

T
HE
W
ATERWHEEL
, C
HAPTER
4

I arrived too late at SCAP headquarters in the Dai-Ichi Insurance building to be assigned barracks, so Sam took me in the jeep to a
ryokan
. A tiny windowless room, blistered
tatami
mats, lumpy futon, but the bedlinen was spotless. I went out to find something to eat, couldn’t find a hotel with a restaurant still open, and ended up among the ramshackle black market stalls that had sprouted out of the debris. With the farmers and fishermen selling direct to these places, what was available to the ordinary citizen was negligible or way out of their price range. But the Yankee dollar could buy
anything
. In my case, a bowl of noodles flavoured with some dried fish and a small bottle of rice wine. I probably could have had a side of Kobe beef with chips if I had wanted.

My mood was upbeat with my hunger gone and my head
swimming
with the rough sake. I decided to take a walk down by the river and it was there that I first saw her, standing half-in and
half-out
of the shadow of the bridge. I couldn’t see her face, just the trail of smoke from her cigarette, the dark slacks and a blouse covered by a loose cardigan over her shoulders. The style of dress confused me and I wrongly assumed she must be a Western girl.

‘Hey, soldier,’ she called, her voice at first weak and throaty. Her face emerged slowly from the shadow, like a pale moon from behind clouds, a red scar of lipstick, hair loose past her shoulders, not pinned up in the Japanese style. A
panpan
girl. ‘Hey, soldier.’ Her voice stronger this time.

I looked around. The street was empty. I would just saunter over, exchange a few words, it had been so long since I had
spoken
to a young woman. Yet such a strong current of excitement ran through me as I approached her. Not just a sexual thrill. But the thrill of power. So seductive of my pathetic male sexuality. I could have her just like that. For less than a dollar. For the price of a bowl of rice, some dried fish and a half bottle of rice wine. These young women sacrificed for my comfort by this defeated nation, thrown up by the Japanese authorities like barricades against the invading foreign hordes. To protect the nation’s virgins by
feeding
them prostitutes instead. There were official brothels full of them. Sponsored by the government’s Recreation and Amusement
Association. But who was this freelance woman of the street? A war orphan? An eldest sister forced to feed her family? Or did she just give pleasure in order to find her own pleasure in what a few dollars could buy?

‘You not GI?’ Her face was heavy with make-up. Unnecessarily, I thought, since she was quite beautiful.

‘British.’

‘
Eikoku-jin
. Why you here?’

I didn’t know if she meant here in Japan or standing here in front of her. I decided on the former although I wasn’t going to tell her I was a translator. Better she tried to communicate on my terms.

‘Americans want me for work,’ I said.

‘Americans want me too.’ A half-smile. Sad eyes lowering. She continued to suck on her cigarette, no inhalation, just light puffs kissed into the air.

I dismissed the stupid questions rushing into my head, stood there dumb, wondering what to say. I didn’t want to pay to have sex with her but I didn’t want to leave her either. I suddenly
realised
how lonely I was. How alone we both were. A large crow swung down in a black flap from the parapet and we watched as the bird struggled to unearth a scrap of food from among the reeds on the river bank.

‘Can I buy you something to eat?’

She dropped the cigarette, scrunched it out with the heel of her shoe.