I went inside, showered, dressed in the best clothes I could dig from the pile in the center of the tatami, took my book, and left again. This time there was no one in the laundry room nor on the street in front of Sunny Hive. A high wooden fence with a fig tree nodding over it fronted the Sugiyama’s house next door. Still, I could just make out the mournful light of a television coming through the shoji beyond the tree. I imagined Mr. Sugiyama, still in his T-shirt and shorts and socks, drinking from a glass of beer.
It did occur to me that Bill and Melinda might be at Mountain Cabin, but I didn’t see them when I walked in, so busy was I looking for Ichikawa Yuki, who, anyone could have guessed, wasn’t there. Junichiro stood at the far end of the bar pouring drinks, and tonight someone worked with him in the kitchen. All the tables were taken, so I sat on the first available barstool. The light wasn’t good but I opened my novel anyway, not only because I was enjoying it, but because I didn’t want to look like what I was - a man awaiting a woman who would never arrive.
In the novel, Yukiko agreed to meet the man the matchmaker arranged for her. The meeting was supposed to take place informally, at an upscale Osaka restaurant. It was not an official miai - the Japanese word for a marriage arrangement - but the suitor was overly anxious and things were awkward from the start. The second sister, Sachiko, and her husband, accompanied Yukiko, who, never mind the agreed-upon informality, wore a stunning white kimono with cherry blossoms falling over its shoulders at the front and back. The dinner conversation was awful, since Yukiko refused to say anything other than “um” and “eh”, right from the start. Even so, she told Sachiko later that night that she would accept the man’s proposal if the rest of the family thought it appropriate. That outraged me - I didn’t want her marrying that obsequious jerk - but word came after a few days that the jerk’s mother had dementia, whereupon Sachiko’s husband terminated the negotiations.
“Whew,” I said, aloud in the bar. “God bless dementia when it’s in someone else’s family.”
“Hi, Cornelius” said Junichiro. “What can I get you? All I have left is spaghetti Bolognese.”
He’d been standing in front of me for the last little while.
“That and a Sapporo,” I said.
He nodded and hurried off. The album he’d put on, whose jacket sat facing me, was Bud Powell plays Thelonious Monk, and the tune was Monk’s Mood. I didn’t know much about Bud Powell, but I’d been a Monk fan since I took a jazz appreciation class in college, believing that his jarring rhythms and thrilling mistakes mirrored the sort of life that I was meant to lead, though so far I had only experienced the mistakes, which hadn’t been all that thrilling.
Junichiro brought my beer, said the spaghetti was on its way, then gestured toward the other end of the bar where the same young woman from the night before sat nodding to Monk’s Mood, her fingers settled on a whiskey glass again. She wore a black turtleneck, had a dark plaid cape draped over the back of her chair, and her hair was swept off to one side.
“Her name is Kaori. She was a student at your school a year ago, and Bill’s girlfriend before Melinda got hired,” Junichiro said. “She is asking if she can buy you a drink.”
I stared at the woman. She wasn’t looking my way, but I did see Bill and Melinda sitting in the corner with another couple. “I think I better buy my own drink,” I said.
Junichiro didn’t register surprise, and when he told the woman what I’d said, she didn’t register anything at all. Only that morning I had lingered over the idea that she might have expressed an interest in me, yet now, with this seeming evidence of it, all I could think to do was turn down a drink.
I tried to go back to my reading, but was so filled with regret over my cold reply that I could no longer concentrate. I looked at Bill again. This time he saw me, raised a finger, pointed at an empty chair, and mouthed the words “Come join us.” Melinda looked up, too, and smiled. I smiled back, but I couldn’t help wondering if Bill’s old girlfriend had come to Mountain Cabin on the chance that he might be here, then offered to buy me that drink to make Bill jealous. I held up my book, as if saying I wanted to get back to it. And after that I had to read it again, until my spaghetti came.
Taeko, the youngest of the sisters in the novel, who also wore her hair swept to one side, was involved in a terrible scandal before the story began. She had run away with her boyfriend for a week of out-of-wedlock sex by the seaside. Her family found her and brought her home in an unfortunately public way, but worse than that, a description of the escapade was published in a local newspaper, with the horrifying mistake that Yukiko’s name was used instead of Taeko’s, making people think that she had run away with a man. The family demanded a retraction, but the whole thing made it all the more difficult to find Yukiko a husband. And that Yukiko didn’t care whether they found one for her or not infuriated everyone but me.
Actually, I read that part of the story at the temple near Ryoanji, or on the bus, or at the coffee shop, and remembered it now because I still couldn’t concentrate. After the scandal, Taeko and her boyfriend promised never to see each other again, but, of course, they secretly met. Though the picture I’d formed of Taeko before entering Mountain Cabin that night had been of the “Oh!” woman’s sultry singing companion, now I saw her as Taeko, all the way.
“Let’s meet tomorrow at ten,” said Junichiro, back with my spaghetti. “That way we can sleep in a little and still get to Pontocho before it wakes up.”
When I said that ten was fine he was off again, and when I looked back down the bar at Kaori she stood, pulled her cape from her chair, and left Mountain Cabin without a glance at anyone.
The kitchen had a swinging door, through which I could see Junichiro’s helper whenever he pushed it open. He was older and resembled the Japanese actor, Takashi Shimura, who’d appeared in many Kurosawa films. I knew him because I’d taken a class on Japanese cinema during my time in Tokyo. Takashi Shimura was a wonderful actor. Whether singing a mournful song about how short life was in Ikiru, or leading a pack of ronin in Seven Samurai, he was always able to show the entire range of human emotions. A bit like Thelonious Monk.
As I ate my spaghetti I tried to go back to the book, where human emotions were reined in tightly, but I still couldn’t do it. The couple with Bill and Melinda left just after Kaori did. A table near theirs had also been vacated, so the older man came out of the kitchen to clear it off. He still looked like Takashi Shimura, but he also resembled the man I’d seen doing calisthenics from the window of my room that morning. When he took the dirty dishes into the kitchen, I finished my beer, caught Junichiro’s eye to let him know I wanted to pay, then went to stand by his cash register. Someone came to stand behind me whom I thought would be Bill, but when I turned I found Melinda. “Bill’s hanging around a bit,” she said, “I’m going home.”
When the older man came out of the kitchen again and I asked her if he was Etsuko’s father, she said he was. After Junichiro took our money, Melinda and I left Mountain Cabin, neither of us glancing back at anyone.
*****
Tsuruko, the eldest sister in the novel, had a banker husband who had just been transferred to Tokyo. Tsuruko didn’t want to go, but she told Sachiko that one advantage of the move was that she could take Yukiko with her, so that Yukiko might start afresh, where the newspaper article identifying her as the sister who had run away with a man would not be widely known. I thought that was a stupid idea - all a good marriage investigator had to do was dig a little - and Yukiko was desperate to stay in Osaka, but what could she do?
This time I read until well after midnight. Because of her strength of character, this sister who ‘um’ed and ‘ah’ed her way through each marriage arrangement, held sway over everyone, while Taeko, the frivolous youngster, made everyone worry that she’d throw caution to the wind again, and ruin Yukiko’s chances once and for all.
It was strange to realize that though, on the surface of things these women’s lives were nothing like my own, I felt a deep affinity with them, as if I, too, were not at all modern, as if they were members of a club to which I belonged. I understood them whether they were staid and conservative, like the eldest sister; on edge all the time and in need of vitamin B-12 injections, like Sachiko; ephemeral and beautiful, like Yukiko; or careless and easy, like Taeko. I understood them because they lived within me like the disparate characters played by Takashi Shimura, and also because their author revealed them to me like the earth reveals its seasons, each arriving just as I grew weary of the previous one.
I fell asleep with the book beside me on my new tatami. Before pulling out my futon I had folded my clothes, put them in a small chest that stood at the edge of my room next to an even smaller desk, and arranged my toiletries on a shelf in the bathroom. My room had two front doors; a shoji that I could close while leaving the main door open, and the main iron door that I could lock. Out in the hallway sat a wooden box where I’d lined up my three pairs of shoes.
When I awoke in the morning I opened my window and leaned out to breathe deeply of the early fresh air. Below me, on the far side of the Sugiyama’s backyard, another family’s territory encroached on theirs, its fence bulging convexly, as if there’d been a battle over space and the other family had won. Otherwise, their tiny yard had a cheerful aspect to it, the spot where Etsuko’s father did his calisthenics surrounded by potted plants - the smiling mask of Obake no Q-taro, a popular ghost in Japanese cartoons, stuck on a stick in one of them. I was about to duck back inside, to shower before going to meet Junichiro, when a face as round and smiling as Obake no Q-taro’s, popped out from beneath a clothesline.
“Hi,” said Emi, the ten-year old.
“Hey,” I said, “It’s Emi, right?”
She said something like “hold on a second,” and ran back into her house.
I expected her to return with her mother or father and readied an apology. Who wanted a foreigner, or anyone, actually, leering into their backyard on a Sunday morning? When she didn’t come back right away I looked up at the windows of the other rooms of Sunny Hive, where I found Fritz Stolz, leaning out, too. He looked as forlorn as a scarecrow standing in a fallow field.
“Good morning, Fritz,” I said.
“The trick to observing people in their natural habitat is not to get caught,” he said.
“What are you, Fritz, a cultural anthropologist?”
“I am an historian, writing about what Germany and Japan once had in common… I am the memory that others have lost.”
He disappeared just as Emi came back with her grandfather, who looked at me with a hand to his brow. “I am sorry for Emi’s intrusion on your thoughts,” he said. “You visited Yamagoya last evening, sat at the bar for a while, did you not?”
“I did,” I said. “I saw you there. My name is Cornelius MacLeish.”
I wanted to say that I had loved him in The Seven Samurai, but held my tongue.
“And mine is Sugiyama. The man who runs your school was adopted into our family.”
The husbands of the two elder daughters in my novel were adopted into that family, too. Such adoptions would be impossible in America - men would never give up their surnames to satisfy the families of their wives… It seemed to work well in Japan, though.
“Pleasure to meet you,” I said. “Have you worked at Yamagoya long?”
Emi had been pestering him, asking repeatedly, “What did he say? What did he say?” but now she said “Pressure to meet you!” in English, causing me to laugh and her grandfather to swing her up into his arms. He did a couple of deep knee bends with her, then put her down.
“I don’t work there. I knew Junichiro’s father during the war, so I help him when I can.”
That marked the first time since my arrival in Japan that any Japanese had mentioned the war to me, and it made me oddly thankful, as if some dusty old trunk had finally been opened.
“Fritz Stolz told me he’s writing about the war,” I said. “He seems to want to tie a lot of things together, take a different tact.”
I feared the ‘tact’ Fritz might take would be as an apologist for Germany’s heinous acts.
“Yes, he and I have spoken. Soon we will go see a Zero in an Osaka children’s park. It’s ironic, because I used to take Fritz and Etsuko to that same park when they were children.”
Ah, so Fritz and Etsuko were children together… Now things were falling into place.
“I had an uncle who was killed by a Zero in 1944,” I said. “Maybe I could go with you.”
When Mr. Sugiyama said, “If he was killed in 1944, it was probably by a Mitsubishi A6M, built in Osaka until the factory was destroyed by one of your bombers,” I asked without forethought, “Did you ever fly one?”
“Me? No. Even then I was too old. But I worked on them. It was there that I met Junichiro’s father.”
When Etsuko stepped outside to join her father and daughter, I apologized for interrupting their Sunday morning.
Just as I was about to step back into my room, Emi said, “Pressure to meet you,” again.
Endnotes…
1. The invention of Mr. Sugiyama (the elder), suddenly working in Mountain Cabin, came to me so that I could spend time praising the great Takashi Shimura ((志村 喬, March 12, 1905 – February 11, 1982). He’s not a well-known actor in the west, so I wanted to mention him. Now, of course, the elder Mr. Sugiyama, has got to stick around in my story much like Takashi Shimura did in innumerable Kurosawa movies. I only hope that I can do him justice.
2. Those who have read my novel, “The Grievers’ Group” will recognize Cornelius’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Phoebe, as the prototype for the ten-year-old Emi in this episode. Or, contrarily, Emi may somehow be the prototype for Phoebe. I often ask myself ‘who stands in for whom?’ as time does its tricky dance. Either way, the girls share an exuberant manner of speech and an incapacity for fundamental dishonesty. I like to think that all children have those traits, though, of course, they do not.
Here is Takashi Shimura singing “Gondola no Uta” from “Ikiru.”
He was looking at a Zero fighter on display in the National Air and Space Museum, so I came up beside him and said, "Natsukashi, desu shou." He replied, in Japanese, "I was on the design team at Mistubishi." The chief engineer of the project was Jiro Horikoshi (1905-1982) who was dismayed that Japan had gone to war with the United States.
I met one of the designers of the Zero in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1988.