Etsuko offered to drive me to Osaka since, according to Mr. Nomura, Ichikawa Yuki was still in her dormitory, packing and awaiting her departure for Tokyo. Miss Arai told him that she wouldn’t board the Shinkansen until nine p.m., and would spend the time until then saying her farewells. It seemed that Miss Arai was also miffed with Ichikawa Yuki for leaving Mr. Nomura hanging on the phone, and told him that if he ever called her she would come immediately, assuming, of course, that she hadn’t answered in the first place.
When Fritz and old Mr. Sugiyama heard that we were going to Osaka, they asked if they could catch a ride, in order to visit the Zero in that park. Before their plans had been vague, with “someday” the operative word, but it now appeared that “someday” would be now.
After exercising, Etsuko helped Emi get ready for school, then had to take her husband to a doctor’s appointment, so we didn’t get on the expressway until midmorning. Though Etsuko knew where the dormitory was her father had forgotten the Zero park’s location, and to make matters worse, or slower anyway, he called Junichiro before we left, asking him to join us. Junichiro agreed to open Mountain Cabin late that day, and now he roared around us on his motorcycle. So five of us headed into a vaguely shared past, while Ichikawa Yuki packed for a future unknown to her.
“It says that they let children climb on the Zero, that they use it like any other playground toy, but that can’t be true,” said Fritz. “It should be left untouched. If we ruin our relics we’ll be more likely to destroy ourselves all over again.”
Fritz, himself a relic of something I hadn’t been able to grasp, read from a pamphlet. He said we would visit a late model Zero, built near the end of the war and saved from destruction by Hirohito’s surrender on August 15, 1945. He said that the pilot assigned to the Zero had been ready to die that morning, and had committed ritual suicide in the very park we were headed for twenty-five years later, a week after Mishima’s harakiri.
While Fritz read, Etsuko made several wrong turns until we found the park in the Osaka suburb of Ashiya, not far from where she and Fritz grew up. Though the neighborhood was unrecognizable to them, the park was unchanged. Fritz had been the pusher, he said when they saw it, Etsuko the girl on the swing.
A chainlink fence surrounded the Zero. It didn’t seem that children were allowed to climb on it. As soon as we got to it, however, Mr. Sugiyama ducked under the chain. Since Junichiro and I soon followed him, that left Fritz and Etsuko on the safer side of things, just as they had been when they were kids.
It was smaller than I expected, the Zero, stripped of everything but its fuselage and tail and wings, its basic engine and cockpit. Maybe it was built that way - its only duty to fly up once then crash down on an American ship - or maybe it had been stripped before arriving at this park. I thought of Junichiro’s father’s desire to die for the Emperor, and of my uncle’s desire to come home alive. I imagined how he must have felt the moment a Zero much like this one came in low above the waves, bullets tearing up the water and the sand.
Fritz ducked under the chain link, too. “It was a fanatical idea during a fanatical time, but what I fear now is that soon a war will break out where killing oneself for nothing will seem ordinary,” he said. “If we don’t learn from our mistakes then our mistakes will leave our planet to orbit in empty sadness, around a slowly dying sun.”
Cheerful, as always, that Fritz, but the power of his words lay heavy on me.
Mr. Sugiyama touched the Zero’s fuselage with two fingers, walking all the way around it without lifting his hand away. I could see the two empty highways that his fingers made, as if they were all that was left after the people of our planet died away.
I thought he might say something about the Zero, but after he circled it he slipped back under the chain and went to the nearby playground to sit on a swing, like Takashi Shimura at the end of Ikiru. I wanted to follow him, but Fritz was staring fast and hard, first at Junichiro then at me. When Junichiro stared back, Fritz told him to get into the Zero’s cockpit with such vehemence in his voice that, without pausing but with weariness to his movements, Junichiro took his wallet from his pocket, his father’s photo from his wallet, then hoisted himself up into the Zero, quite like his father must have done in 1945. He found a groove in the airplane’s battered windshield frame, tucked the photo into it, settled into the pilot seat and stared straight ahead.
“Now, Cornelius,” Fritz said. “Do you want to run from our reenactment like you always run from things, join it like the man you want to be, or pull Junichiro from that cockpit and beat him before he has a chance to kill your uncle all over again? I guess I’m asking, how much play is involved in our play, and how much influence do you think those who went before us truly have in what we call our lives?”
They were extraordinary, wild, questions, though Junichiro, who heard them, too, still stared straight ahead, his hands wrapped around the Zero’s cold controls.
To the right of the swing where Mr. Sugiyama sat I could see a baseball field stretching away from us. So without answering Fritz I left the Zero and headed for the field, which was hard-packed, made for sure-footed running and the easy rolling of a ball. My idea was to show disdain for Fritz, to show my determination not to be involved - yes, to run away from things, never mind how clearly he had described that pattern in me a moment before.
As soon as my feet hit the edge of the field I decided to jog to the end of it, shake all this out of my head, and then go tell Etsuko we should leave this surreal chaos in favor of whatever ordinary chaos awaited us at the dormitory. But when I got halfway across it I heard an airplane approach me from behind, its engine engaged in a geriatric sputter. I turned to look toward the tree line. Maybe there was a ready explanation, a nearby airfield or a kid and his father flying model planes… I soon understood, however, that the sound wasn’t coming from the sky but from Junichiro’s motorcycle, which Fritz had started and was revving, in order to augment with a terrible screech his earlier insistence that this was an important moment for us, and that he would direct our revelations.
I looked at Junichiro, hoping he might join me in my disdain, but he and the Zero seemed to rise off its concrete platform in the sound waves, his intention unmistakeable. He would kill me where I stood, then wobble off to crash into the churning sea beyond. He would collapse the past into the present, he would be his father, with no ruined childhood, no marriage and divorce, no magenta cocktail glass to represent the decadence of his current life.
Before that moment, I hadn’t understood that a person could love what he hated or hate what he loved, but if that was the case with Junichiro, it wasn’t the case with me. It was true that my uncle had died, and that I was tied to him through my name and my grandmother’s stories, but I wanted all of that gone now, not chasing me in a park or singing ghostly songs to me from a wobbly Pontocho balcony. Despite my determination, however, Junichiro’s stare, combined with his motorcycle’s deafening screech, made me run again, this time zigzagging to the far end of the field just like I imagined my uncle had on that beach. When I got there I turned to stare back with as much determination as I could muster, until Fritz eased off the throttle and the Kawasaki stopped shaking on its stand.
When Junichiro didn’t move, my mind went to Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune in Hell in the Pacific, a movie that had two different endings. It was the story of an American airman and a Japanese soldier trapped on an otherwise deserted island. Their hostility turned into a guarded friendship, but later to hostility again. In the first ending a bomb killed them both. In the second they walk away from each other with the same sort of disgust that I now felt for Junichiro.
He may have felt it, too, for he got out of the Zero, hopped onto his motorcycle, and drove away, this time his engine humming beneath the surface of whatever had just happened, perhaps a bit like history hums beneath us all.
*****
While most of my fellow Marines were off fighting in Vietnam, I didn’t experience any kind of violence during my tours of duty as an embassy guard. I simply lived my life by reading and making love in England, and by walking and forming lists in Japan. But I felt like a veteran of my uncle’s war when I settled back into Etsuko’s car, and I wanted to let her know. When I turned to her, however, her eyes were burning and her jaw was set. A few minutes earlier Fritz had put an arm on her shoulder, no doubt apologizing for his behavior, but she’d flung it off, telling him that he and her father could make their own way home while she took me to the dormitory. And now she wouldn’t look at it when I tried to show her the dormitory address.
“Addresses aren’t any good around here,” she said. “You have to know where you’re going, which is never the case with any of us!”
I glanced at the paper, saying simply, “She’s in building 1400, room 509,” but Etsuko kept her eyes on the road until we got to a series of high-rise buildings and she leaned out her window so she could see the numbers written on their sides.
“1300 is there, so 1400 must be just beyond it,” she said.
“How about coming in with me, helping me understand what’s going on?”
Part of me hoped she would refuse, but she killed the engine, stepped from her car, and marched toward building 1400 with me hurrying along behind her. She led me to an elevator, up five floors and down an outside walkway, not letting me catch up until we got to room 509 where she knocked and then stepped back. A minute later, when no one answered, I knocked myself, and was just about to call Ichikawa Yuki’s name, when we heard music, like someone were carrying a radio when they came to the door. I stood straight when the music fell silent. Etsuko stood beside me where, despite herself, I could feel her warming to the moment.
“Ichikawa Yuki, it’s Cornelius from school. I got worried when you didn’t come to class last night. Mrs. Sugiyama is with me. She is worried, too.”
“Etsuko is worried, too,” Etsuko said.
A deadbolt turned and when the door creaked open, Ichikawa Yuki stood before us in a white yukata and holding a small wooden bucket. Her hair was piled up high with a chopstick running through it. A boombox sat at her feet.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” she said, but she left the door open when she walked back inside.
The room held three beds, each shoved into a corner. Photos of Miss Arai hung on the wall over one of them, photos of the pop singer Ozaki Kiyohiko were pinned above another, and atop the third stood an open, half packed, bag. She sat down beside the bag, pointing at the other beds for us. Her feet were bare but her yukata was circumspect, with no gap in it from her ankles to her neck. Etsuko sat under Miss Arai’s photos, me under those of the pop singer, whose song, I just then realized, had been coming from the boom box.
“Are you going back home?” I asked. “We only have two more weeks of school. Stay and attend firefly weekend with us.”
“I thought about that,” she said.
She looked at her boom box, which I’d picked up and brought back into the room with me.
“We’ve got a good subject for next time, ‘Is it better to lie or tell the truth in awkward situations?’” I said. “You don’t want to miss that. Mr. Sato is already staking out his territory.”
“I know,” she said, “Miss Arai told me. We even practiced a little. I happen to think that, though lying is everywhere around us, in the end the truth will serve us best.”
“Was it before Mr. Nomura’s call? I mean when you and Miss Arai practiced?”
That was too direct, and when she didn’t respond, Etsuko took over. “It doesn’t matter. Practice is good whenever you do it. But don’t you understand that leaving Mitsubishi will damage Mr. Nomura’s reputation more than it will yours? Why not allow the man to pretend this never happened?”
When I asked, no doubt too directly again, “I don’t understand. What did Mr. Nomura do that was so bad?” she picked up one of her notebooks, opened it and looked at it for a moment, then handed it to me. There were drawings on opposing pages, one a good likeness of the singer from the poster on the wall, and the other, no question about it, a good likeness of me. Under my drawing were the lyrics, in English, to the song she’d been listening to when she answered the door. “Until we meet again I do not want to talk about who is at fault. For some reason I am lonely. For some reason I am empty. Little by little I will lose everything…”
“Mr. Nomura took my notebook when I foolishly left it on a chair, copied that page, and distributed it around the dining room,” she said.
I let an index finger stab the drawing of me. “What page, this page? He didn’t tell me that!”
“Let my try to understand,” said Etsuko, but for once I understood something before she did. On one hand, the drawing meant that in the hierarchy of Ichikawa Yuki’s affections I was on the level of the pop singer, which thrilled me, while on the other it meant she had to quit her job because Mr. Nomura humiliated her, and that made me furious.
“Did you translate the lyrics yourself?” I asked. “I’ve always liked that song but I never knew what it meant.”
I spoke lightly but my blood was boiling… How could Mr. Nomura have done that to her?
“It means what such things always mean, that love is hopeless,” Etsuko said.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Ichikawa Yuki. “Or let us just say it means that this stage of my life is over.”
“But doesn’t how I feel count?” I asked. “Don’t I have a say, since it’s me in your drawing?”
When Ichikawa Yuki said, nearly inaudibly, “Well, I guess you could say it’s you, since I drew it in your class,” Etsuko turned at me, the slightest smile at the edges of her lips.
God in heaven, it wasn’t me! Who could I have thought it was me when it didn’t even look like me, except around the chin and eyes, and a little around the haircut.
“How do you feel about it, Cornelius?” Etsuko asked.
I thought about saying something insipid, like, “Oh, look at the time!” but I was tired of such things to the bone.
“I feel empty and lonely and I don’t want to talk about whose fault it is,” I said.
That brought tears into Etsuko’s eyes, though her smile stayed where it was.
And it made Ichikawa Yuki say that though returning to work at Mitsubishi was impossible, she would not leave for Tokyo until firefly weekend was over.
Endnotes…
The surreal aspects of the scene in the Zero park represent an impulse I have to include a bit of ‘unreality’ in every story. Most of my novels are realistically rendered, but each one cracks that reality once or twice or thrice. Here, it happened first with the “Oh!” woman’s singing partner, now in the Osaka children’s park. These things come about because of a somewhat ineffable desire, on my part, to fiddle with the hold that our sensual realities have on us. And, since I am a believer in the rule of three, it is likely to happen again.
Mr. Nomura’s mortification over what happened when he tried to call Ichikawa Yuki on the phone represents my attempt to demonstrate the erstwhile Japanese, Olympiad-level efforts, at saving face. Or maybe not even “erstwhile,” I don’t know if they’re still around, but when I lived there they were in full force. The drawing in Ichikawa Yuki’s notebook, whether of Cornelius or not of Cornelius, was my attempt at placing ‘blame’ on Mr. Nomura rather than letting the incident remain as enigmatic as it otherwise would have been.
The song on Ichikawa Yuki’s boombox,“Mata Au Hi Made” (また逢う日まで) was all the rage on Japanese radio and television in 1971. At the time, when I lived in Tokyo, I even knew the lyrics well enough to sing along, so I added it here as a bit of a homage to Ozaki Kiyohiko, a now mostly forgotten pop star who died over a decade ago.
The Olympic-level attempts at saving face still exist in full force. There is no other way to be.