We headed toward the heart of the city, then out along the bus route I took to go to Ryoanji Temple. Kaori walked ahead of me in silence, occasionally lingering at an intersection, as if unsure of which way to turn. We left the river at one p.m. In the window of a shop I saw that it was now nearly two, the weight of each minute deepening our silence. We weren’t walking fast, but when she stopped at a boxy two-story building some thirty minutes later, I figured we had covered about four miles. She unlocked its door, led me upstairs and opened a door there, too.
If I expected anything from the interior of her studio, it was something reflective of the building’s dull exterior, but the room was large and airy, its far wall replete with floor-to-ceiling windows, its left wall yellow, its right one orange, and with the wall that housed the door we came through a robin’s egg blue. Against the orange and yellow walls wooden shelves were lined with dolls, while in front of that bank of windows, three life-sized dolls sat in office chairs with their backs to us. On the floor in a corner lay a messy futon, no doubt the artist’s sleeping quarters. Kaori lived where she worked, was showing me not only her studio but her home.
We’d left our shoes outside, so when she pointed at a stack of slippers near her bedding I found the largest pair, slipped into them, then stepped over to the dolls along the orange wall. They were uniform in size, and all were female with hair that boxed their faces in with bangs. Their obi were thick and tight across their abdomens and the fronts of their kimonos rode high against their throats, while the backs of them plunged a few inches down their necks - the kimono erogenous zone. The wall behind them set them off in ways that belied their sameness, as if each were engaging me in some private way.
I made my way over to the yellow wall, whose dolls were far more varied in pose and dress and hairstyle. Some carried umbrellas, their complexions as white as a single cloud in an otherwise cloudless sky; some carried fans and had a toe pointed out; while others held musical instruments, their expressions turned inward. These dolls had an intensity unavailable to the orange-wall dolls, yet seemed to pay homage to a larger doll at their center, a spectacular female ninja with a sword over her head, her legs spread wide, her eyes alert and hawkish. Each doll along either wall seemed made according to sets of precepts developed over centuries, thus allowing Kaori’s late sensei to look back at her, not in anger, but with pride.
In the middle of the room stood a workbench with doll parts and woodworking tools strewn across it, plus stacks of folded cloth and a sewing machine. A head so large that it could only be intended for a doll like those sitting by the windows was in Kaori’s hands when I turned to tell her how exquisite I thought her work was. The head had no expression for it had no face, but its forehead was narrow, its cheekbones high, its dome like that of a cancer patient. When she held it out I stepped over and took it. Anyone can tell you that a head is heavy, and I can tell you that this one felt like Natasha’s did, when she rested it in my lap during rainy London evenings… that is to say, it had the weight of someone loved.
With the head in my hands and my heart beating high up in my chest, I walked past those life-sized dolls to stare out the window. I could feel them waiting for me to turn and look at them, so that was what I did. Now I could see that they were smaller than I thought, maybe three quarters life-sized - and that they were all Kaori in various poses. The doll in the center was Kaori with her feet crossed at the ankles, her hands in her lap with the tips of her fingers touching, quite like they had her drink glass in Mountain Cabin. Her dress was buttoned to her neck, her breasts large enough to seem to want to escape their bondage, and her expression was heedless, precisely as lustful as the “Oh!” woman’s singing companion’s.
I leaned against a window, then stood away from it quickly, lest it break and send me to the street below. The dress on the doll to my left rode halfway up her thighs which were spread, while the one to my right sprawled in her chair, one hand to her brow with a pair of glasses held askew, like she’d just come home from a hard day at the office. It was clear that these weren’t sex dolls, as I’d feared, but representations of female sexuality both accented and demystified. By that I mean there was a lesson in them for those of us who could learn it, yet a shoring up of stereotypes for those who could not.
“I had only myself as a model,” Kaori said. “It isn’t narcissism, you know, but a failed imagination. The one with glasses is my attempt at humor, but I don’t think it works, do you?”
I told her I thought all three were extraordinary, then pointed at the side wall dolls again, in order to try to talk about them, since I was otherwise speechless regarding these larger ones.
“The reason there are so many is that I will have an exhibition soon,” she said.
She saw how unsettled I was, came to take the head back, then nodded at the dolls in the chairs. “Since I can’t abide small talk I shall use these three as stand-ins for me at my exhibition. I’ll station one by each wall and one at the door, to greet whoever might come. Do you think that’s a good idea? Artificial greeters instead of artificial greetings.”
“May I come to your show?” I asked. “Is it open to the public?”
“It is not, but you are invited. You won’t be welcome, though, if you don’t take one doll now, in apology for me having made you walk so far today. The condition is that you bring her back for my show.”
When I said it was an easy condition to meet, she pointed at the ninja girl.
“Take her,” she said. “She won’t bother you nearly so much as the ones in the chairs.”
*****
Yukiko received another marriage proposal, this time from a man who looked far younger in his photo than he did in person. She came all the way home from Tokyo for dinner with the man, at which he spoke of nothing but ‘The China Incident,’ and Hitler’s annexation of Austria. He didn’t notice Yukiko’s lack of interest, nor everyone else’s irritation, was so boorish that no one could bear to see Yukiko marry him.
Oh, doomed relationships! No wonder I loved the book so much.
Something else I loved about it was that, previous this meeting, there’d been little talk of the impending war, never mind that the story began in 1938, or that much of what the sisters considered essential in their lives would soon disappear forever. Natasha would love this novel, too, and I thought about sending her a copy. “War and Peace with the war part missing,” I would write in my note.
The moment I got back to my room I realized that there was no place for the ninja except on the floor or on the windowsill. She needed a stand from which she could dominate my room as she had the room I’d taken her from. So I put her down and left again, to go ask the Sugiyamas if they had a stand I could borrow. It was a long shot, to be sure, but I wanted to treat the doll correctly from the start. Before I got to their house, however, I ran into Fritz, out on the street again, so I told him that I’d come to the place in the novel where Yukiko’s suitor spoke of nothing but Hitler and Germany’s annexation of Austria. “Blabbered on about it,” I said.
“Anschluss, Cornelius,” he said. “It means ‘union,’ not ‘annexation.’”
“That’s the word they used. What a jerk the guy was! Yukiko deserves better than him.”
Fritz’s smile tightened across his face, his pockmarks stretching out like little dried lakes. “Your ‘Anschluss’ mistake is a good example of how translation can go wrong,” he said. “Whether the man was a jerk or not isn’t the point. I say union, you say annexation, and that makes all the difference.”
“Like tomatoes and tomahtoes, eh?” I asked.
I thought that would lose him, but Fritz perked up. “But it is the opposite of tomatoes and tomahtoes! Precise wording is essential, not only for understanding history, but for understanding… dare I say it… love!”
He threw his hands out like he was about to break into an a cappella version of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” just as the Sugiyamas’ gate flew open and Emi popped out of it on a pogo stick, leaping in great kangaroo leaps toward us. She flew sky-high then stuck her dismount between Fritz and me like a gymnast coming off a pummel horse.
“Guten tag and pressure to meet you,” she said, before speaking to Fritz in speedy Japanese.
“She wants you to join them them for calisthenics,” he said. “She thinks you need to get in shape.”
“I beg your pardon, Emi, I just got out of the Marines. I’m in better shape than Takanohana,” I said.
“Did he just mention Takanohana?” she asked Fritz “He’s my favorite sumo wrestler. He’s the only one who isn’t fat and he’s also a great swimmer! If they made a sport with sumo and swimming, he would be the absolute champ. He didn’t say anything bad about him, I hope.”
Fritz translated, and once she was satisfied that I was praising Takanohana, not condemning him, she jumped back on her pogo stick and took off down the street, her hair lifting off the sides of her head like short thick wings.
Fritz and I watched her go, he with a wistful expression on his face. “After only one generation people forget what happened before they were born,” he said. “That goes for trivialities regarding athletes as well as for facts about the war.”
He brushed at his clothes, as if insects had landed on him. “Even so, Emi’s grandpa and I will visit a Zero soon, and you should join us, get to know more about what killed your uncle.”
I was sure I hadn’t mentioned my uncle’s death to Fritz. Maybe Junichiro told him, though I couldn’t imagine that they were friends.
“Do you ever go to Mountain Cabin?” I asked. “Do you know the guy who owns it?”
“No, I do not go there! The place represents Japan’s new decadence, its decision to copy everything American.”
Disliking Fritz was de rigueur for Bill, so I’d thought I’d try to counter it. But digging through the mounds of hot resentment that steamed around inside of him was difficult.
“All I meant was that the man you’re visiting that Zero with helps out there sometimes, so he must think the place is okay,” I said. “Anyway, you should see the doll I got today.”
I hoped mentioning the doll would change Fritz’s mood, and sure enough, it brought his demanding friendliness back. “Doll? What doll? Show it to me this instant!”
“It’s in my room. I came out to try to find a stand for it.”
When he took my arm and tried to turn me back toward the building I pulled away.
“I’m not showing you now,” I said. “I’m not settled yet. We’ll have to make it another day.”
“Have you not learned that there is no other day?” he asked. “But I will pay for the right to see this doll by lending you a stand. I have one in my room.”
He pulled me into the building and halfway up the stairs before running up two more flights by himself. As soon I heard his door open I hurried into my room, closed and locked my door, then went to the window and closed the shoji. Though there was no chance of Fritz looking in from outside, I felt like I’d been in the presence of a loon who might try to do it anyway. The doll was on the window sill, the action of closing the shoji nearly knocking her off.
“Yodelayheehoo,” said Fritz, from the other side of my door.
I hadn’t heard him coming back downstairs.
“I told you, Fritz. I haven’t settled in yet.”
“Okay. I will leave the stand out here,” he said.
He didn’t have a stand! Who had an extra doll stand sitting around? I tiptoed over to put an ear against the door. When I asked, “Are you still there, Fritz?” he said “No.”
When I opened my door a black lacquer stand stood where I expected to find Fritz, who was over at the stairwell, ready to go back up.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m amazed that you actually had one.”
I took the stand and was about to close my door again, but who could be such a putz?
“Okay, come have a look at the doll,” I said.
“No,” Fritz said again.
“Come on, Fritz. She’s really an amazing gift.”
“If you want me to see her bring her out,” he said.
I didn’t want him to see her. He’d asked to see her, bribing me with the stand, which I took in and sat the doll on top of. She did look great up there, the absolute ruler of her world and my own.
“It’s like Kaori shrunk down and came home with you,” Fritz said. “Watch out for that woman, Cornelius. She casts spells.”
He had come to stare in my door.
“Did she ever cast a spell in your direction?” I asked.
Maybe that was why he had a stand. If a doll could be given, it could be taken away.
“She is the reason I dislike Mountain Cabin,” he admitted. “Do you call it a spell if a woman can remove one’s affection for a place?”
I certainly did. A spell had been cast on me concerning London. But it was only possible that Kaori had ever been Fritz’s girlfriend if she cast a spell on herself.
“You’re too old for her anyway,” I said. “Why not find someone your own age?”
I smiled in order to soften my words, but Fritz was not offended. “Someone my own age at every stage of my life takes no looking, Cornelius, for I have found her,” he said.
He bowed toward the ninja, stepped out into the hallway again, and closed my door himself.
*****
“Knock knock,” Emi said. It was a little after six the next morning.
“Go away!” I told her. “I’ll exercise tomorrow.”
“Come on, sleepyhead. Grandpa’s out there waiting! Knock! Knock! Knock!”
I stood out of my futon and opened my window. There was no sign of life in the Sugiyama’s yard. “He is not,” I said. “If we are going to be friends, you have to stop lying to me.”
I pulled on my pants and opened both my doors to find Emi in a white T-shirt and blue gym shorts. Her T-shirt had the image of three blind mice walking along a yellow brick road, above a slogan that read, “We’re Off to See the Lizard.” When she reached in to take my hand I snatched it back, went to find some Marine fatigues, and slipped into my bathroom to put them on. When I came back she was on my futon, the novel I’d been reading in her lap. “You can’t exercise in those!” she said. “You look like you’re hiding in a forest.”
“I’m making coffee before I do anything. Can you read some of the words in that book?”
I’d found only Nestle’s Gold Blend instant coffee in any of the nearby stores, but my room had a copper kettle and a couple of mugs, so I put some water on while Emi kept on talking, maybe about the words she couldn’t read, maybe about the benefits of exercise, maybe about my complete obliviousness. When the water was ready and I poured it over some coffee, Emi said that I should drink it fast.
“It’s too hot to drink fast,” I said. “Let’s start our workouts tomorrow.”
“Today, tomorrow!” she said in English.
“Everyone in your family speaks English huh, Emi?” I said.
“Today, tomorrow! Big, little! High, low! Early, late! Eat, drink! Good, bad, and ugly!” she said. She drew a pistol from the waist of her shorts, shot me with it, then blew the smoke from the end of her finger like that was all she needed to know of English.
I got my notebook and showed her my lists of words. While I drank my coffee she studied it, then asked quite seriously, “Can I have this?”
“I’ve been adding to it for years,” I said. “I can’t just give it away.”
She ran her finger down the sets of words until she found “want,” with “hoshii” beside it.
“I want this,” she said. “Hoshii desu.”
In truth, I hadn’t added a single word to my list since I left the Marines, not even “duck” yet.
“Hoshii, huh? Okay, take it,” I said. Maybe I’ll get a new notebook, start another list.”
Emi left then, my gift apparently more important to her than getting me in shape.
When she was gone I drank more coffee and got a lot more sleep.
Endnote…
Taeko, the youngest sister in the novel Cornelius is reading, was also a doll maker. I haven’t decided whether to make that explicit in the novel you are reading yet.
I think you should keep the doll maker connection between Taeko and Kaori unmentioned. It'll be a sweet discovery for anyone who has already mentioned the novel Cormelius is reading and an even sweeter one for the reader who picks up the novel after reading your work- especially if there is a character personality connection between the two. You can flesh out Kaori's character in other ways without making the connection, letting the work stand on its own and keep this particular connection as a sort of Easter egg. That's Mt vote anyway.