The next day was Saturday so I didn’t have to work. I’d thought it odd that Mr. Sugiyama scheduled my first classes for a Friday night - maybe the German guy left him high and dry - but I was glad to have the weekend to settle in. Also, after that dinner with Bill and Melinda, I was happy to be free of them. It turned out Melinda had an extra job teaching English to a group of maiko - apprentice geisha - down in Pontocho. She had been there yesterday at around the time of my walk, and Bill got the idea that she’d asked me to say something strange had happened in order to make him jealous. I thought that was outright nuts, but managed to get through our meal together without saying so.
On Saturday morning, however, when I heard voices in the Sunny Hive hallway, I knew right away that one of them belonged to Bill and I didn’t want to deal with him again.
“It’s almost nine,” he was saying, “and I want to get these stains out of my shirt.”
“No ‘almost’!” the other voice said. “No washing until nine actually comes.”
On weekdays we could use the washer and dryer in the Sunny Hive laundry room from six a.m., but on weekends we couldn’t start until nine. I knew this from a handbook I found on the windowsill of my room, the window of which looked down into the narrow backyard of the neighboring house, where I saw a man and a girl doing calisthenics as soon as I got up. The handbook also said that we should not wear shoes in our rooms and that we should keep our music down. There were ten rules in all, but I stopped reading after three. I’d had enough with rules in the Marine Corps, and enough of other people’s sense of how I ought to do things during my stay in England.
The laundry room was on my floor. The second person who’d spoken, her accent told me, was probably Mrs. Sugiyama, whom I had to remember to call “Etsuko.” I thought I could tell that they were in the laundry room, so I opened my door and peeked out. Everything was dark in the hallway.
“Hand wash your shirt,” the woman said. “Better for stains and it won’t break my rule.”
I got my wallet and hurried downstairs to the street. I’d forgotten to buy coffee during my shopping trip the day before and needed some right away. There were no coffeeshops near Sunny Hive so I hurried one street over. I’d noticed the night before that Mountain Cabin opened at ten and decided I would stand in front of it until then if I had to, while also keeping my eye out for a store or a coffeeshop along the way. When a cat crossed my path a motorcycle slowed for it, then sped up again. I hadn’t expected that Junichiro would be working this morning after closing up last night, but when the motorcycle stopped in front of Mountain Cabin and a man dismounted and took off his helmet, I saw that it was him, dressed as he had been the night before and fumbling to put his glasses back on.
“Junichiro, hi,” I called.
“Hello Cornelius,” he said.
He unlocked the door and reached around to flip a couple of switches, lighting the inside of the bar and the magenta cocktail glass as well.
“Where’d you get the cocktail glass?” I asked.
“From a closing bar in Vegas. Went to college there,” he said.
Las Vegas seemed an unlikely a place for him to go. I wouldn’t have been any more surprised if he’d said Mississippi State. “You work nights and mornings, too?” I asked. “Makes for a long day. Why not hire someone else?”
I’d learned the art of vapid questions in the Marine Corps, until now they were my strong suit.
“Bad divorce means I can barely afford to hire myself,” he said.
He looked like the Edvard Munch’s Scream painting guy might have looked after the scream was finished. He’d had that look the night before, too. He invited me inside, started some coffee, then put on Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, played as fast as lightning. I imagined Bach and Goldberg - the first man who played them - sitting up and taking notice in their graves. Junichiro placed the record’s jacket where people could see it, though no one else was in the place. His bar had abstract drawings on its walls, plus double-exposed photographs of balloons rising into a cloudy sky.
We didn’t speak until the coffee was ready, but then, as if spewing it out to the music’s hellbent syncopation, I found myself telling him my story, starting with what happened in Pontocho and Bill’s reaction to it, flipping back to my grandmother and uncle, and moving forward to the Marine Corps. It was something I hadn’t done, a story I hadn’t told, since I lost the love of my life in England. I supposed I did it now because I thought Junichiro’s taciturn nature would make him listen without interruption, but he asked questions along the way, some connected to my story and some out of left field. “What Pontocho place did you visit, do you know its name?” “Did the Germans kill your uncle or was it us, the Japanese?” and “Did you notice that woman sitting at the bar in here last night?” were some of them.
“I don’t know its name, but I could find it again. He was killed by you, the Japanese,” and “Of course I noticed her, is she your girlfriend?” were some of my answers.
At the stroke of ten, announced by a bright blue cuckoo that popped from a clock on the wall, Junichiro flipped his “closed” sign around to “open.” He said that since it was Saturday he would work until midnight, but that tomorrow Mountain Cabin would be closed and he would take me to Pontocho on his bike, if I wanted him to, so that I could show him the bar.
*****
Believe it or not, though I thought of her often, I couldn’t remember my grandmother ever making the connection between her life as a concubine in Kyoto and her son’s death at the hands of a Japanese soldier, maybe because she didn’t want to think about it or maybe because I was so young. What was worse, since I wasn’t so young anymore, I hadn’t made the connection either, until I got my embassy posting to Tokyo. It did occur to me then that some old man I passed in the street or stood next to on a subway platform might have killed my uncle, yet the best I could think to call it was ironic, before simply getting on with my day.
After I left Mountain Cabin, however, my answer to one of Junichiro’s questions - “He was killed by you, the Japanese,” - nagged me, probably because of that “you” stuck in there, which made it seem intimate, like “point me the way.” Quite apart from the folly of following my grandmother’s past-life roadmap, could the reason I came to Japan have been to search for a particular “you” among the legions of the ever-present “them?” Did I have that sort of curiosity, or even retribution, in me? What if the man who killed my uncle was still alive? If so, did he think of my uncle? Had he told his family about him, calling his death the price, or even, god forbid, the spoils of war? Or had he killed so many American soldiers that he didn’t remember my uncle at all?
I stopped to stare at a vegetable seller on a corner. He was of the age - late sixties, early seventies - as was the man standing beside him with a cucumber in his hands. Could he have killed my uncle, the cucumber once bolt-action rifle?
Another of Junichiro’s questions struck me in an opposite way - had I noticed the woman in his bar last night? I said I had and asked if she was his girlfriend, but was he about to say that she’d wanted to know who the short-haired foreigner was, sitting with Melinda and Bill?
Perhaps you will notice a pattern here. In something like twenty-four hours, interspersed with haunting my grandmother’s old haunts and teaching my first classes, I had been beguiled four times: by the “Oh!” woman and the disheveled Aphrodite beside her; by the pretty kimonoed student who had wanted to support me; and now, simply because Junichiro mentioned her, by a woman who sat alone in his bar caressing her drink.
Is it callow of me to have such thoughts paired so closely with those of my uncle’s death? I hope not, for though most men my age chased after half the women they met in the hope of sexual conquest, it wasn’t lust that drove me, despite my easy beguiling. It was that, since the moment my grandmother prayed to outlive my grandfather, I had wanted that kind of love and had been on the lookout for it wherever I went.
I still needed coffee for my room so I walked toward the school where I saw Mr. Sugiyama standing in front of it passing out fliers. After our argument ended last evening, Bill told me that though Mr. Sugiyama could say whatever he wanted to in nearly flawless English, he rarely understood a word that anyone said back to him. So when I approached him I had testing that notion in mind, in order to discover whether Bill was an outright liar or simply a mercurial guy.
“Mr. Sugiyama,” I said, “I think I heard your wife scolding Bill for trying to wash his shirt before nine o’clock this morning.”
“Hello Cornelius,” said Mr. Sugiyama.
“Those laundry room rules seem important to your wife and though I have a hard time sleeping in myself, I think the nine o’clock rule is a good one. I appreciate having a bit of quiet on a Saturday morning, don’t you?”
I gave him an expected look.
“Cornelius, would you help me with these advertisements? Our enrollment is down this month and we’ve just hired a new instructor.”
He smiled to let me know that I was the new instructor.
“I’d be glad to help, but I can’t read Japanese,” I said. “Can you tell me what the advertisements say?”
I pointed at the flyers and looked expectant again.
“If you work the other side of the street we can catch passersby in both directions,” he said. “You may think it’s a foolish idea, but the last time I used this scheme enrollment went up by eighteen percent.”
“I can see numbers on the flyers. Do they represent the school’s tuition?” I asked. “And aren’t we in the middle of a semester right now? This seems like an odd time to advertise. Don’t students have to wait until the beginning of another one to enroll?”
Actually, we were near the end of a semester, making it doubly odd that he had hired me.
“When Bill helped last year, his side of the street did better than mine. Young women enrolled solely to be taught by Bill. Now they will enroll to be taught by you, Cornelius. Please now, no more dilly-dallying.”
Oh, he was slick.
“I’ll give it half an hour,” I said. “But I’m in search of coffee and maybe something to eat.”
He shooed me across the street, where, almost as soon as I got there, three young women came walking along. I imagined that they were the “Oh!” woman, the student in the kimono from my Mitsubishi class, and the solitary drinker from Mountain Cabin - come to berate me for thinking about them. I had just begun berating myself, when one of them said, “Good morning, Cornelius. How are you today? Helping out already, I see.”
She was the pretty woman from my Mitsubishi class, with her hair combed out and dressed in western clothes. My berating stopped.
“Good morning!” I said. “You’re out early. Sorry I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Her name is Ichikawa Yuki,” said one of her companions, who was also in my class. “‘Ichikawa’ is also the town she comes from, up near Tokyo. There’s a sign in Tokyo Station that says ‘Ichikawa Yuki’ That’s how she remembers her name!”
She and the third friend covered their mouths and laughed. I felt like doing a pirouette.
“‘Ichikawa Yuki’ can mean ‘going to Ichikawa,’ or ‘this way to Ichikawa,’ the third friend said. “We think it’s funny that every time she went through Tokyo Station she saw a sign that told her to go to herself.”
“It’s a silly thing,” said Ichikawa Yuki, “the kanji for ‘Yuki’ in my name means ‘snow,’ not ‘go.’ But it sounds the same and it looks the same, too, when written in romaji.”
“Don’t give those women flyers!” called Mr. Sugiyama. “They attend our school already!”
“Yessir,” I said. “No flyers for them.”
“What?” Mr. Sugiyama asked.
When I told the three young woman what Bill had said last night - that Mr. Sugiyama could say whatever he wanted to in English, but he rarely understood what people said back to him - Ichikawa Yuki nodded. “He is that way,” she said, “but he’s also a kind and a convincing man. He talked our company into enrolling us in Kyoto when there are English schools all over Osaka where our offices actually are.”
Her eyes were the darkest of pools, and deeper than those of her friends.
“Cornelius, the flyers!” yelled Mr. Sugiyama.
Endnotes…
Glenn Gould made two recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, in 1955 and 1981. I much prefer the 1981 version, but, of course, could not use it for a novel set in 1972. Interestingly, in that later version Gould slowed down, making the recording less pyrotechnic but more sensuous. The 1955 recording is 38:34 seconds long, the one in 1981 is 51:18.
Quite in opposition to Cornelius, when I lived in Tokyo in the early 1970s, World War II was often on my mind, as was my uncle’s death in it. My first novel, Soldiers in Hiding, was all about that war, though a Japanese-American musician, not my uncle Jack, was its protagonist.
In 1972 the school where I worked in Tokyo devised a scheme in which its teachers would stand at the Akasaka Mitsuke subway exit, handing out flyers. I thought of it as humiliating, but the school’s enrollment went up.
After last week’s Episode Two of this novel I got the following note from a friend and a reader regarding Melinda’s waist-length blonde hair: “I can’t quite shake the image of Melinda’s blond curls nearly at her waist… In my limited experience, women with curly hair simply do not let it grow anywhere near that southerly neighborhood. If they did, there would be almost no time for anything but hair care. Melinda needs a hair straightener, or some editing of her genetic code.” Does anyone agree or disagree with that? Should I go back and give Melinda a haircut?
Another friend and reader asked the question, “What would Mississippi State have against George Washington?” He was talking about Cornelius’s thought (during his first English class), that he couldn’t quite believe Mississippi State University would name a hall after George Washington. Any comments on that?
The main bit of interest for me is Cornelius's voice. Someone said (maybe it was you), that if the narrator has an engaging voice, we will follow it anywhere, to the laundromat, to Borneo, or anywhere it wishes to take us. Cornelius has that kind of voice: amused and bemused, easygoing, curious, crisply observant, yet vulnerable to new experience. In other words, likeable. His grandmother is a reliable presence; though deceased, her occasional appearance is welcomed by the reader. And what a hoot Mr. Sugiyama, the school's director, is. He speaks articulately and knowledgeably but cannot respond likewise to things said to him. Many great cultural effects here, too, as well as pleasant turns of speech: on the fussy Bill and Melinda's attire: their "matching shirts seemed like a sartorial accident"... music's serendipitous intrusions into literature"... and in Notes, "Pontocho had the exhausted beauty of a woman resting after a night of casual debauchery." Can't wait to read more of "Cornelius on Love." I can already tell that this will eventually prompt a rereading of "The Grievers' Group." How can it not?
Regarding passing out leaflets advertising the school. Do I recall that you suggested hiring a chin don ya to Mr. Hayashi?