The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel (38 page)

The atmosphere at that time in Peking had become tenser than ever, mostly due to dissident Chinese challenging Japan's occupation in countless underhand ways. The citizens of Peking never knew from one day to the next who would end up in charge of their city, so they tried to please all sides. Those with money used it to gain favour and to protect themselves as much as they could. They paid their servants generously, hoping that, should China ever win back the capital, they would be loyal and keep their secrets. I would have been considered just another business expense, a sort of life insurance policy.

I gave generously to Pearl's charities, which were mostly for the support of artists and poets. I was always buying Kim expensive presents, and I ran up huge bills in Peking's nightclubs. My account at the Hotel de Pekin was enormous, as I often entertained there, giving banquets for visiting Japanese royalty and parties in private rooms for my less salubrious acquaintances. As I hurtled through those last years in Peking I spent on clothes and jewellery, gambling and opium, fortune-tellers and beauticians who promised to make me look younger than my years.

Without Jack to give me ballast or Tanaka to reassure me, it was hard to know what to plan for the future. I lived my life as though nothing would ever change, while closing my mind to the knowledge that all things do eventually. I felt protected by the elite circle I moved in and did my part to sustain those connections. I saw Kim through two abortions, both of them more easily achieved than my own had been. I arranged for a lover of Li's, a handsome but mendacious young man, to disappear when he took to blackmailing Li with the threat of exposure of his sexual preferences. Most of Li's friends and family already knew where his desire lay, but in China it is not so much what you know but what you speak that counts. I helped Pearl through a difficult time when she fell in love with a young artist who courted her to his bed, before moving on and breaking her heart. So bereaved by her loss was she that she contemplated suicide. She had given up her lover Baron Matsuyama, and Li, although sympathetic, had no real idea of the pain she was in. She told me that without my support she would have had no one to turn to as her blood family lived in Nanking, and Li's mother would have taken pleasure in condemning her. I had made good and true friends of Li and Pearl, but it was Kim whom I loved and admired most. Her constancy and honesty were as sustaining to me as she said mine were to her.

It was only when Sumida's son died in a kamikaze attack on the American naval force in the Philippines that all of our lives suddenly seemed less secure. In the year that followed his death, Japan was pushed by the Chinese to discontinue operations in the interior of China. To my disgust, our troops were being withdrawn from Kwangsi province and sent home to reinforce defences there. To us Japanese who occupied Peking, ideas of failure were unthinkable and we put them from our minds. Not believing that we, the greatest warriors in the world, had suffered more than just a temporary setback, we danced the nights away in Peking, pretending that the rhythm of our lives was as constant as ever. But as though it knew better the city seemed to be holding its breath, waiting perhaps for the inevitable, while in subtle ways everyone around me seemed to be preparing for flight. The Chinese, secondclass citizens in their own capital, sensed change and became less subservient, less willing to work for Japanese families.

Pearl and Li stopped giving parties on the excuse that, like the Japanese royals, they had other more pressing matters to deal with. Sumida did his best to bear the loss of his son in true Japanese style, but the ambition in his nature had deserted him. He was no longer exciting to be around and because I did not seek his company, I did not notice that he was avoiding mine. Kim, listening to the chatter of the Chinese, worried that Chiang would soon enter Peking. Through a neutral consulate she tried to reclaim her American citizenship, but they would not have her. She said that she was going to suggest to Sumida that she accompanied him when he was recalled to Japan. But for some reason she never broached the subject with him. I think she knew that he would have refused her. She told me that she thought that a Chinese mistress was a fine thing in China when you occupied her country, quite another in Japan when you have been seen off. I told her not to worry, that Japan would always succeed, but she wasn't comforted. A few months after Kim's failed attempt to regain her American citizenship, Sumida found out about it and dropped her. I think that she was pleased to be rid of him, but she said the damage to her reputation with the Chinese had already been done.

Around the same time, Jack's friend Misha Salmonov arrived in Peking. Sumida told me to contact him and rekindle our friendship. He thought the
Pravda
correspondent was spying for Russia and wanted me to feed him misinformation. Although he had never mentioned it to me, Kim had told me that Sumida knew of my affair with Jack. Like most Japanese men I suspect that he would have thought less of me for it, especially now that we were at war with Jack's country. But he was pleased enough to use my contacts from that time when it suited him.

I asked Misha to dine with me at my hotel and he accepted with enthusiasm. He told me that he would soon be on his way to Chungking, where he expected to see Jack who was on his way there to interview Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

'Jack's in China?' I asked quietly.

'Yes, but of course he can't come to you in Peking, Yoshiko. He would be arrested as an enemy agent, just as you would be if you went to Chungking.'

'Would he come if he could?' I asked.

'I honestly don't know, Yoshiko. He says that you love Japan and he hates it. He is still angry with you for choosing Peking over him.'

It wasn't so much that Misha stirred memories of those intense days in Shanghai, or that his quiet style reminded me of Jack that made me drink too much and end up in his bed. It was more to obliterate the pain I felt knowing that Jack had returned to China about his own business, which did not include me. When I said to Misha that we had both betrayed Jack, he bruised me by replying that he didn't think so. In his company I had sought unsuccessfully to find the girl in the blue dress, the one who smelled of musk and had slept with Jack on boats named after her for the voyage. But she was Jack's girl, not Misha's, so we did not lie together again. I saw Misha a couple of times after that night. We had a drink or two and spoke of old times, but being in his company only made me sad. He said he thought Chiang would succeed over the communists and would also rid China of the Japanese. I did not agree with him, but I liked Misha and didn't feed him the misinformation that Sumida had asked me to.

A few weeks after Misha left Peking, America dropped its cowardly atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within days of those events my world, like those tragic islands, disintegrated.

I woke one morning to find Kim banging at my door. She told me through sobs that the Japanese Emperor had capitulated to America. She had heard him on the radio surrendering in a stilted voice. She said that Sumida had already returned to Japan and that she and I had been left to face the revenge of our countrymen. I thought that she had got it wrong and tried to console her, but she would have none of it.

'Don't be a fool, Yoshiko,' she sobbed. 'This is not a tactical withdrawal - Japan is crushed. You don't have Japan and you don't have China. If you are found by Chiang's men you will be executed as a traitor.'

I gave her a shot of the Russian plum brandy that Misha had left in my room and she calmed down a bit. She told me that she hoped to bring together a plan she had been working on for months, and that she would do her best to help me if she could but that for the time being she was going into hiding and that I should do the same. I left her in my bathroom at the Pekin repairing her ravaged face with cold water.

I caught something of her panic when, with a pounding heart, I visited the officers' mess and found it deserted. All Japanese soldiers were confined to barracks and were pulling out as fast as they could. They had been ordered not to show their faces on the streets of Peking. I didn't fully panic until I called on Li and Pearl and discovered that they had left for Japan at the same time as Sumida. Their newly emboldened maid attempted to shut the door on me but I put my foot in her way and insisted that she look to see if Li had left a note in my name. She took pleasure in telling me that he had not. A chill began to creep through me. I knew without doubt that I was in serious trouble. After all I had done for them Li and Pearl had left without the slightest thought for me. For all their noble blood, they had turned out to be worms in the end.

I drove out to the airfield with Faithful and Chou to discover that, apart from a couple of pilots who were loading their plane with what looked like boxes of official papers, the place was deserted. They said that everyone who had been on the official list had already been flown to Japan. I asked the younger of the two to fly me back with them but he said it was against their orders to carry civilians. I told him that I was a commissioned officer in the Japanese Army and he laughed. Japan, it seemed, had forgotten my existence, and my heart ached with the betrayal of it. Just as my father had given me to Japan, so Japan had cruelly returned me to China. Overnight I had become a refugee in fear for my life, with no country or family of my own.

In a panic, I attempted to radio Japan from Sumida's office but the airwaves were deserted, silent as snow. While I was there I took the opportunity to destroy any papers that had my name on them and I burnt the meticulously kept invoices of payments to me. In a futile act of revenge I shredded the photograph of Sumida's dead son, which, in his hurry to be gone, he had forgotten.

That night in the Pekin I slept badly and dreamt that there was an earthquake that crumbled the hotel to dust. At dawn next day I visited my one-time friend and informant Jin. He offered me money, but said it was dangerous now for him to have his name linked with mine.

'If I am asked I will claim never to have known you, Yoshiko,' he said.

I took the money and his advice that I should attempt to change my appearance and get out of the city as quickly as I could.

When I looked for Kim she was nowhere to be found. Both her shops were open but her staff hadn't seen her for days. I couldn't hang around, hoping that she would turn up. Wherever she was I guessed that she would be experiencing the same panic as me. Time was running out and so I began my own hastily put-together plan. I oiled my short hair back from my face and added a twist of false hair to the back to give me the traditional look of a conventional Chinese woman of the middle classes. I threw away my jodhpurs and evening dresses and wore only plain cheongsams and lowheeled embroidered shoes. I tried to find lodgings with those Chinese families that I had helped in their hour of need, but none of them wanted to know or to help me. A man I had saved from ruin hissed at me to go away and die. They may have had troubles of their own, but it was hard to excuse their treachery.

Within a few days of my airport visit there were Chinese troops in Peking. I saw them swaggering in the streets and thundering down the narrow lanes in their jeeps, looking triumphant. The peasant Chinese welcomed them with open arms and the wealthy, fearing an uprising of the common man, managed false smiles of welcome.

The twins offered me lodgings in their shack and, much as I hated the idea of it, I knew that I had to accept. The Hotel de Pekin was already filling with Chinese officers and I didn't trust its staff to keep my identity from them for long. I moved out quickly, taking only what I could carry with me. I took my precious writing case with its sentimental contents, my jewellery and a bottle of good sake and settled myself in the twins' hideous hovel. I had a fair sum of money with me, but not as much as I could have hoped for. The safe in Sumida's office where I had always kept enough for a year's good living had been looted. At first, out of habit, I suppose, I found it hard to believe that Sumida had taken my money. I searched around in the drawers and cabinets hoping that he had hidden it for me in some other place. It was true that he had left me in the lurch, but to cut off my means of survival seemed too Iowan act for a Japanese officer. But as only the two of us had known the combination of the safe it was hard to retain my faith in his honour, or to believe that he had ever thought of me as Japanese. Perhaps he had known that I would never be sent for by Japan, that whatever I believed myself to be, I was nothing more than a colourful but expendable Chinese spy to them.

Depressed and panicked, I could only think of getting back to Japan. I still loved it and I played a game with myself of sometimes being angry at my abandonment and at others believing that there had been a terrible mistake, that Japan had not knowingly relinquished me. Even though it might only be to share Japan's defeat, I longed for home.

The thought of being captured by the Chinese was hateful but I was confident of avoiding that fate. I needed time to plan my escape and, although I loathed the mean little hovel, it was a place of safety that would do well enough for the time being. But as I settled into the damp shack it was with the worst possible timing that I discovered the unmistakable signs of the French Pox on my body. Brown sores appeared on the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet, I developed a throat so raw that I could not swallow. I had been feeling below par for some weeks and had suffered a rash on my chest and back, but it had disappeared and I had forgotten about it. Syphilis is a terrifying illness. I knew that it could make you blind and cause a slow death and I was very frightened. I went from feeling sorry for myself to believing in my strong survival instincts. I hoped that the signs of the illness would disappear without effect as they often did. At one and the same time I both cursed and felt sorry for Misha Salmonov, who must have passed it on to me without knowing.