The motorcycle helmet Junichiro gave me was too small, but I put it on anyway and roared away with him on his Kawasaki 500. We got to Pontocho in no time, parked on a side street, and walked the rest of the way in, just as I had on my first visit. The restaurants and bars were closed again, and late-night detritus waited to be taken away. It was easy to imagine that such had been the case all the way back to my grandmother’s day. That it shouldn’t have been easy to imagine made me chase the image away.
I was sure I could once more find the “Oh!” woman’s place, but it didn’t take long before I’d said “There!” and “No there!” so often that Junichiro stopped at a vending machine to buy a can of coffee, and lean against a wall to drink it.
“I like this name you have given her, ‘the Oh! Woman,’” he said. “Maybe you should listen instead of look, for someone saying ‘Oh!’ from inside one of these buildings.”
He cast his head toward the nearest bar, from which, as if he’d conjured it, we began to hear the tinkling of a piano. When I told him it was on the wrong side of the street, he said, “In Las Vegas if you went to a bar on a Sunday morning you’d find people looking sick and waiting for the night to come again, but here things are calm. I think I prefer it this way. It’s less depressing.”
He finished his coffee and headed farther down the street, with me following along like his sidekick in a movie. Pontocho was less depressing, maybe, but I was depressed by not being able to find the “Oh!” woman. I said, “Yesterday a beautiful woman asked for my help and now I can’t find her.”
“It wasn’t yesterday, it was Friday,” said Junichiro. “Maybe your memory for beautiful women has a twenty-four hour shelf life.”
He stopped again, took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one free and lit it, and looked at me through the smoke. Today he wore dark blue jeans and a light blue work shirt with slits along the flaps of its pockets. His father had died during the war yet he had gone to college in Las Vegas, and now he wore the American hippie uniform. Fritz might have said his ignorance of history showed in everything he wore and said, but I thought he and Fritz were alike, in that each had a clear idea of how things should be, while I stood in the middle, looking in both directions.
“I met old Mr. Sugiyama this morning,” I said. “He told me he knew your father.”
Though it was only half smoked, Junichiro threw down his cigarette. “Sugiyama knew him, I did not,” he said. “He died before I could remember him.”
“Mine died before I was born. I mean my uncle. And both of them died in the war.”
I knew well enough that my uncle wasn’t my father, and apologized to my actual father inside my head. But now that Junichiro’s coffee and cigarette were gone, if I said that his father might have killed my uncle, what would he find to throw down?
“It was all a waste. Every soldier died for nothing, and every Japanese soldier died for less than nothing, for a bespectacled man hiding in his castle up in Tokyo,” he said. “And what have we learned since then? I don’t know why I came back here. Look what Mishima did two years ago for the same stupid reason. I should have stayed in Vegas with the drunks.”
I happened to know he was talking about the novelist, Yukio Mishima, who invaded the offices of Japan’s self-defense force, made a speech, sliced his belly open, then had a companion cut off his head. I knew it because I’d arrived in Japan not long before and watched it on TV.
We came to a building that I was sure housed the “Oh!” woman, for it had the same ‘karaoke’ sign and was on the right side of the street. I was also sure that we were finished talking about the war, until Junichiro took out his wallet to show me the photo of a young man standing in front of an airplane, in a flak jacket and a headband depicting the Japanese battle flag - a rising sun with extra rays. His head was shaved above the headband, his eyes dispassionate below it, like they'd already seen what was coming for him. I could tell that he was calm, like Mishima had been just before he lost his head.
“He also wrote me a poem,” Junichiro said.
Now I was sure he would recite the poem, but we heard shutters rattle above us, and when we looked, me expecting the “Oh!” woman, we got an expanding view of an empty room, its ceiling beams dark and its walls textured beautifully in the kyokabe style. What was more, the shutters weren’t simply open, but removed from their grooves and lowered to the street on ropes by a couple of workmen. Another worker came out to catch them and lean them against the building.
“Cleaning time. Let me leave your name and number. That way she can call you if the urge to do so comes,” said Junichiro.
When I told him I didn’t have a phone, he said I could use the one at Mountain Cabin. He then took a pen and paper from his shirt pocket and disappeared into the building.
*****
We ate lunch at a nearby tonkatsu restaurant, then Junichiro said he needed to visit his mother and offered to drop me at Sunny Hive. I said I’d walk, taking my time. When he was gone it occurred to me to go back to that bar, to knock and hope the “Oh!” woman answered, but what would I say if she did? Despite the underlying neediness that has crept into this narrative, I didn’t want anything from her, so I walked toward a promenade that stretched along the Duck River. I had my novel with me, tucked down the back of my pants. I’d only finished twenty percent of the novel, but knew already that I ought to start doling it out, that this was one of those stories that I wouldn’t want to end. So I sat on the first bench I came to.
Duck River is Kamogawa in Japanese. The week I arrived in Tokyo I began an intensive course in the language, but I wasn’t very good at it, the worst, perhaps, of all my classmates. What I was good at was listing and memorizing vocabulary words - five a day - reviewed each night before I fell asleep. I knew hundreds of words by the time I left Tokyo, yet had little idea of how to put them together in an understandable way. I knew “chicken” and “beef” and “pork,” but not “duck” until now. So I said it aloud five times - kamo, kamo, kamo, kamo, kamo, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck. Such were my predilections when I wasn’t thinking about love.
During the years I guarded the American Embassy in London my predilections were different, both because I still had worldly ambitions and because I already knew the language. Each Sunday morning I would sit on a bench along the Thames with the Sunday Times in my hands, my goal to read it front to back, thus becoming conversant in everything having to do with England. Maybe I would take a graduate degree in politics after I left the Marines, becoming a journalist or scholar.
One morning, after I’d been there for about a month, a young woman reading a book on the bench I chose to sit on, tried to scoot away from me, obviously irritated by the space invasion.
When I said, “I won’t bite,” she huffed, but when she stopped reading an hour later and discovered that I was still there, she said, as if answering a question I hadn’t asked, that it was her second time through the book, which was three inches thick and weighed two pounds. When I asked why she would want to read any book twice, especially such a thick one, she said it was because her parents named her after one of the characters in it and she wanted to get to know herself in the way her parents wished she’d turned out. I thought that was marvelous. Her name was Natasha - it still is, I guess - and the book was War and Peace. We were hardly apart again after that morning, and what we mostly did was read. Or I would read and she would reread. I read whatever she gave me: War and Peace, Middlemarch, Lolita, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and lots of Dickens and Trollope… I read War and Peace again after she left me. It wasn’t the first time I had understood that I might find myself by visiting other eras - I was, after all, my grandma’s grandson - but it was the first time I’d done so inside the mind of a great writer. And I was doing it again now, with the book I held in my hands.
Couples strolled along the Kamogawa, chatting and laughing. The benches near me filled up but, unlike in England, I stayed alone on mine. So I opened my novel to the spot where Yukiko arrived in Tokyo to live with her eldest sister and fell into a listless funk. Her sister tried to lift her mood by taking her shopping and to restaurants, to a performance by a famous Kabuki actor, even to tea at the Imperial Hotel. Finally, however, she called Sachiko in Osaka, asking her to come help rescue Yukiko from her depression. Yukiko hadn’t complained, mind you, she never spoke of wanting to go home, but that she was desperate to do so was obvious to everyone.
The desperation of those who do not speak about their desperation… Should the explication of that not be one of literature’s goals?
A woman sat down on the opposite end of my bench, as if in cosmic opposition to what I had done in London. She didn’t have a book but simply sat there breathing easily and gazing at the river. Her hair fell off her shoulder on the side nearest me, making it hard to see her face, but that didn’t make her any less familiar. Her name was Kaori, and the last time I saw her she had offered to buy me a drink.
“Jun-chan told me you were meeting today,” she said. “I hope you will forgive me for following you.”
“When did he tell you that?” I asked. “Before you left his bar last night?”
She pulled her hair back and turned toward me. “No,” she said. “He told me this morning.”
A late-sleeper’s puffiness sat across the bridge of her nose and under her eyes, giving a hint of what she must have looked like as a child.
“I’m glad you followed us,” I said. “I feel that I owe you an apology.”
She nodded in agreement with that, before asking, quite out of nowhere, “Do you think we know what it’s like to be dead when we’re dead?”
At some point in this narrative - probably before now - I should say that not everyone I met during my time in Kyoto spoke perfect English. Many made mistakes and some were barely understandable. But in the translation of the novel I was reading, just as in War and Peace, people spoke beautifully, so I have made those who inhabit my story follow those standards. If I am accused of Americanizing them by doing so, or of coating them with a sheen of familiarity they didn’t naturally have, then credit me also with giving them depth, without first having to search for the tools I might need to cut through linguistic brambles.
“You came to ask me if I think we know we’re dead when we’re dead?” I asked. “Don’t you have an easier question? Like why I didn’t accept your drink last night?”
She shrugged and said, “I asked if you think we know what it’s like to be dead when we’re dead. It is something that gnaws at me. When I make my dolls, who never get to live, of course, I ask myself that question. You may think it strange, but it bothers me more than anything. I mean, we know what it’s like to be alive when we’re alive, so if everything has an opposite, why not that?”
I was on the edge of telling her that far from thinking it strange, I had had such thoughts since I was ten years old, but I said only, “I didn’t know you were a doll maker.”
“It’s a tradition in my family. My grandmother did it, and her mother before her. But my current dolls, or some of them, at least, would make both of them, as well as my sensei, furious were they alive. Maybe that is why I ask the question.”
“Because if your grandmother knows she’s dead, then she’ll look back at you in anger. And if she doesn’t know she’s dead then you are free to do as you like?”
I had no doubt that my grandmother, should she know she was dead, would look back on me with love, no matter how I chose to live my life.
“Yes, though I’m even more worried about my sensei. If he saw certain pieces of my current work right now he might hire a yakuza to kill me.”
As she spoke I imagined her singing, I often think they have only just gone out, and now they will be coming back home.
“Why not ask Junichiro your death question?” I asked. “I happen to know that he thinks a lot about such things, even if he doesn’t talk about them.”
“Because I can only ask it in English. It’s embarrassing to be so direct in Japanese. Our languages do have their constraints… and constraints are what I think about second most often.”
I wanted to ask about Bill, her boyfriend before Melinda came along, but once again I said something else. “I’m fine with talking about whatever you want to talk about, but could you help me with my Japanese while we’re at it? I just now added ‘duck,’ to my vocabulary.”
I pointed at the river, where no ducks sat.
“Doll is ningyō, but let us walk and talk,” she said. “I want to show you my studio.”
Endnotes…
Cornelius may have watched Mishima’s suicide on television, but I listened to it on the radio, in Hitachi, Japan, on November 25, 1970. I had been in Japan for only seven months, so I couldn’t be sure what I was hearing, since my Japanese was elementary. Still, I parsed it out, and was both stunned and appalled. For a closer understanding of Mishima I suggest you read his story, “Patriotism” (憂國), published in 1961 and often anthologized. His wife, Yōko Sugiyama, makes a cameo appearance (her name is on a mailbox) in my novel, “The Grievers’ Group.”
I made Cornelius sit on that bench along the Kamogawa in order to offset my own drunken visit to it, described in my Substack essay “Booze” on September 4, 2022. When I plopped down on that bench after having visited an “All You Can Eat, All You Can Drink” restaurant, I frightened a young couple away. I wanted Cornelius to have a better experience.
In an endnote to Episode One I stated that sooner or later I would have to come up with a reason for letting my Japanese characters speak nearly perfect English. Does the paragraph here, beginning with “At some point in this narrative - probably before now…” satisfy that requirement?
In that paragraph, I think you justify beautifully why your characters speak near-perfect English.
I was under the impression that you had seen the event on TV, since you wrote that "Mishima's head was big enough to hold many novels, yet small enough to roll right into your living room."