The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel (20 page)

During the performance I saw an old lover from my Kawashima days. He was sitting with a cafe girl half his age, his thick hand resting in her lap. He was a member of the Wakatsuki Reijiro cabinet, a brutal lover and, as it turned out, a friend of Sesyu's, who he greeted enthusiastically. I thought that he hadn't recognised me, but as he took his leave he whispered, 'Your secret is safe with me, Yoshiko.'

The day after our visit to the Kabuki theatre, I told Sorry that I intended to go to Shanghai and that she could come with me if she wished. I wasn't surprised when, giving the excuse of age and habit, she declined. She said that Natsuko had told her of the civil war in China, and that she had no wish to be a communist. I didn't bother to explain that Shanghai was untouched by the struggle; it wouldn't have changed her decision. Through tears of regret she prepared me an opium pipe, saying she would share it and we could go to the place of opium dreams where we would always be able to find each other.

No one prepared the pipe quite like Sorry. She trimmed the wick to perfection, using the best lamp oil and heating the spindle just so. I loved the way her body leant in an arc over the bowl at just the right angle as she warmed the pellet over the flame, crooning to herself as though pacifying a baby. Like me, Sorry had never had mother's milk to give, but I felt like a child being offered the breast whenever I smoked opium prepared by her.

In the month before I was ready to leave Tokyo, Tamura came to take her leave of me. She said that one night very soon she would collect Sachiko and they would depart for New York and never return to Japan. If I ever wanted to find her there I should look her up in the telephone directory under the name of 'Mrs Jasmine'. She assured me that I would always find a home with her and that she would never stop hoping to see me at her door. She had sold my house to a mama-san who she said had a fine business brain and a good enough heart. It had been agreed that I could stay until the end of the summer. I kissed her on her unpainted lips, staining them with the red of mine. I wished her good luck and told her to be careful.

I was relieved when news reached me that her plan had been successful and that she and Sachiko had made their escape before her mother-in-law could foil it. It was odd to think that only a couple of days later she would be making her way in what she called the land of opportunity.

With Tamura's leaving, the life went out of Tokyo. I felt the same sadness I had experienced on leaving Mai in Mongolia, but without the sense of guilt that had accompanied that parting. Despite understanding her reasons for going, I felt abandoned by Tamura, and shocked at myself once again at how deeply I had misjudged the strength of my attachment to a female friend.

I had dreams in which I would find babies in the city and hide them in the cellar of a house that was familiar but not mine. I always forgot where I had put them and would search in a panic lest they starved to death. Miura said that I often cried out the name Yoshiko in my sleep, as though I was searching for a girl of that name. I told her that it was the name of an old school friend who I sometimes missed.

Suddenly everything around me was changing and although much of the change was of my choosing, my black days returned to plague me once again. Japan was going back to its old ways and was becoming increasingly anti-western. It reacted to the trouble in China with a prudishness that was making it a difficult place for a woman such as myself to live in. A ban against permed hair was introduced, and one against the teaching of English in schools. Geishas, representing the more traditional way of life, came back into favour, while the little progress that women had made was wiped out in an orgy of nationalism and a return to those ancient values that Japanese men felt at home with.

It was time for me to go, but before I did I found time amongst the planning and packing to speak to Atarki about Miura. I wanted him to repair my little Miura's face. With surgery she would be a beauty who might find herself with better choices in life than those she had at present. When I told her what I intended she said that she was happy enough as she was. She didn't trust Atarki, whom she had once seen dancing as though his limbs didn't belong to his body. The thought of such a man wielding a scalpel terrified her. After a few days, though, I managed to convince her of her beauty. Her vanity got the better of her and she agreed to him being asked.

Atarki said that it was not his field but he knew of someone who would do it and he was glad to be of help to me. He said that he would pay for the operation and make all the arrangements. He was as good as his word and Miura's eyelid was operated on by one of Tokyo's top plastic surgeons. When the time came for her bandages to be removed we were both surprised and delighted at how well the procedure had worked. She couldn't stop looking at herself in my mirror, and hoped that with her newfound beauty she might aspire to the more lucrative life of a prostitute. I thought that she would do well in that profession. Her delicate body, narrow hands and tiny feet would attract a great many clients.

In gratitude for a job so superbly done, I gave Atarki an hour or two of the peculiar type of pleasure that he enjoyed so much. I ordered him around and made him bring me vodka, which I threw in his face, telling him that I had requested sake. I beat him with a cane while I sat on top of him and insisted that he lie still as I did what I wanted to him. I bit his lip as I had done Kawashima's, and drew from him blood and a deep moan of satisfaction. I think that he enjoyed that evening more than any other in my company, and was, I thought, well repaid for his favour to Miura.

I did not tell Sesyu that I was leaving him and Tokyo. I could not be bothered with the battle or the pleadings that I was bound to reject. I had no doubt that he would easily survive my going and it would not be long before he found a girl to live in the pleasure dome he had bought for me. Sesyu was a man who needed to think himself in love, to have someone other than his wife to lavish presents on. For someone as generous as him, a new passion would not be hard to find. I knew that I would not break his heart, as surely as I knew that leaving him would not break mine. If I stayed with him, I knew with certainty that I would live to regret it.

Before I left, I gave Miura money and secured her a place with Tamura's 'good-hearted' mama-san. Sorry said that if she couldn't have me, she would give what affection she had left to little Miura, whom she had come to love. It pleased me that I had brought two such unlikely friends together.

I cut my hair short, returned to wearing jodhpurs and boots, and packed only a few clothes and those things that were precious to me. Not wishing to repeat the mistake I had made by taking Xue's jade pendant, I left Sesyu the deeds to the house on the pillow of my bed.

As Miura slept I took my leave of the yellow house and left the city before the morning mist had evaporated. I passed the copper roof of the Imperial Palace, coloured with verdigris, just as the sun rose above the dark pinewood that surrounded it. I pictured Hirohito, the Emperor of Radiant Peace, asleep in his gilded bed and wished him and Japan good fortune. I was leaving too early for the maples to colour, but the abundant white anemones waved me goodbye.

It had been interesting, an interlude in my life that had allowed me to spend time with Sorry, and to see Tamura fulfil her ambition. I was satisfied that Miura would have a better life than she could have hoped for before she knew me. As for Doctor Atarki, he would miss me and enjoy his misery.

I felt that I would never see Sorry again and, as it happened, I was right. In the spring of the following year, she died from the vicious influenza virus that carried off many infants and aged in Tokyo. The news of her death reached me on an overcast day in Shanghai when I was already feeling gloomy. I had lost my sweet, sweet Sorry.

I rarely prepare opium without thinking of her, or eat dried lychees without the scent reminding me of the times I spent with Sorry as a girl, gossiping and nibbling them as we sat on the bed, she and I against the world. I never found another Sorry to look after me, for she was irreplaceable.

Longhua Peaches and Sake

There is a saying that, regardless of any other factor in our lives, it is the one of timing that seals our fate. Nothing proved the saying more for me than the time I spent in Shanghai. In those teeming streets where fabulous wealth and extreme poverty collided, where there was a price for every cruel pleasure and murdered children were the debris of the rivers, I became greedy for experience and lost what there was of goodness in my nature. It seemed to me then that I had been fashioned for that particular city at that exact time and no warning that I would be seduced by its grasping decadence would have affected me then.

The day I arrived in Shanghai I booked into the Central Hotel on Nanking Road and took a walk along the foreshore known as the Bund. By the time I returned to the hotel for tea served in the British fashion my head was buzzing with the myriad images of Shanghai that have stayed with me to this day. I came to know the city so well that if you asked me now, I believe I could draw a map of it from memory. I fell in love with it completely. I think what overtook me was its unique combination of virtue and vice that hung like the scent of opium in the air, imbuing it with the promise of bliss.

In the crush of Shanghai's streets, I rubbed shoulders with rich old men who strolled with their beautiful Russian mistresses. I smiled at the sailors hurrying to 'Blood Alley' where the Cantonese girls who serviced them were called saltwater sisters. I admired the speed of the running rickshaw boys, and the shiny new black automobiles that ostentatiously cruised the narrow roads. I flirted with the red-turbaned Sikh police who shouted at the cars and hit the rickshaw boys with their truncheons. And after that first day I learnt to turn my head from the 'honey carts' filled with human excrement from the international settlements as they made their way to the reeking night-soil jetty. The stinking cargo was loaded on boats and taken up the rural creeks to the farms. So rich was the living for those with money in Shanghai that Chinese farmers prized the waste from their bodies as being especially fertile.

Every kind of human being was to be found in Shanghai, not just different nationalities, but the good, the bad, the rich, the destitute, those with religion and those without, the whole and the crippled and of course the dead, who had to be constantly cleared from the dirty Huangpu River. Beggars ended their days in the sewers, or had to be stepped over as they expired on the streets. So poor were the peasant Chinese of Shanghai that infanticide was a common crime that never came to court. The sale of children was so prevalent that I have heard foreigners say that the Chinese ask more for a pig than a child.

You could buy anything you desired in Shanghai, exotic foods, imported spirits, the latest French fashion, powder to kill bedbugs, strawberry jam to stir into your tea, delicious Longhua peaches and wonderful furs from the Siberian Fur Store. There were bookshops and beauty parlours, teahouses and theatres where you could see the latest American and Chinese films. As well as a hundred dance halls, there were seven hundred brothels. Opium dens were never more than a few yards away and there were clubs and whorehouses run by Korean gangsters.

On my first walk I bought myself a box of black Russian cigarettes; they had gold bands around their filter and looked darkly glamorous. I must have been approached a dozen times by beggars and people trying to sell me everything from tickets for the Peking opera to crickets in little wooden cages.

The only other thing I bought on that first day was a guide to the 'flowers' of Shanghai. It listed the hundred most popular girls, the more refined courtesans, the Japanese geishas and the boy actors who often doubled as prostitutes. The most expensive of the 'flowers' were the virgin courtesans whom only the richest men could afford to deflower. When summoned, these girls were taken to their assignations on the shoulders of their pimps, so that the dust of the street would not defile them before their customers did. They were very young girls, some no more than ten years old, but painted like dolls, their tiny mouths as red as blood. They seemed already to have lost their innocence.

The thrill of Shanghai entered my bloodstream like nicotine and kept me addicted to its peculiar but easily acquired taste. Only the most confident, the most brazen, survived well in Shanghai. I was determined to be amongst their number.

Within a month or two, I had found myself a small circle of acquaintances made up from fellow guests met in the busy international bar of the Central Hotel. Following their lead, I dressed up for dinner and drank gin and tonic before and brandy after. Most of my new companions were transient foreigners, American and British journalists, French salesmen and Chinese and Korean entrepreneurs. But a few others, attracted like myself by the city's air of excitement, took up more long-term residence.

One of these companions, a plump but elegant woman who claimed to be the daughter of an Indian maharajah, took a fancy to me and drew me into her circle. She gave her name as Rajkumari, which I later discovered means princess in Hindi. She told me that like her other friends I could call her Mari. She had a huge circle of acquaintances and could often be found drinking with European aristocrats or Japanese playboys, as well as with the White Russians who always claimed to be princes or counts no matter what their true origins. Although she had a superior manner and modelled her accent on the English ladies who took tea at the Astor Hotel, she wasn't above being seen in the company of the most brutish of gangsters.