At the age of sixteen Miya ran away from her home in Kyoto to marry a painter, an act of abandon that gave her the only moments of happiness she was ever to know in life. Romantically she thought she might become a painter like him in the Western style, using oils rather than charcoal, but as it turned out her young husband never had time to teach her. He was dying and her escape ended within the year. She returned home with the two gifts love had given her, a child and tuberculosis.
Her father wouldn't forgive her act of disobedience but he embraced his grandson, who he assumed would someday be the fourteenth actor in the family to bear the traditional name. Her father stopped speaking to her and never entered her room. A servant brought her meals. From her bed she could hear the old man and her son playing together.
When the boy was a little older her father got him admitted to the Peers' School in Tokyo. At the same time he was enrolled in a
No
theater in Tokyo to receive his initial training.
Miya objected to him being sent so far away, but her objections meant nothing. As she expected, his busy schedule kept him away from Kyoto for all but a few days out of every year. And even when he did come home he spent most of his time away from the house with his grandfather.
As he grew older he was increasingly ill at ease in her presence. He was silent and even sullen, as if embarrassed to be with her. She knew this was because she had always been sick and had never been able to be a mother to him. She also knew this couldn't be helped, but that didn't lessen the bitterness she felt toward the course life had taken.
Her father died suddenly one winter, and to her surprise Miya found herself relieved, perhaps even secretly pleased. Despite her sickness her son would now have to turn to her because she was all he had.
She wrote him a long letter praising his talents and talking about the future. With the letter she sent a small childish self-portrait done by her dead husband, the only memento she had from that short period in her life when both sickness and her son had come to her. The painting had hung by her bed since her husband's death, so she was quite sure her son would understand what she meant by sending it to him.
A few days later she received a telegram from her son's school saying he had disappeared upon learning of his grandfather's death. He had not received her letter. She sent a telegram to his theater and learned that he had not been seen there either.
Miya left her bed and took a train to Tokyo. Her son's classmates could tell her nothing, but at the theater she was given the name of a foreigner, a
No
scholar who had apparently befriended her son. Several hints or suggestions accompanied the information, but Miya was too agitated to hear them.
She went to the address she had been given and found a large Victorian house. The sun had already set. In her confusion she forgot to knock on the door.
Although ice covered the windows the house was insufferably hot, so hot she almost fainted when she stepped into the scene being enacted in the oppressive heat of that Victorian parlor, in near darkness, the outside world invisible beyond the frosted windowpanes.
A tall thin man floated between the pieces of stiff furniture, drifted across the floor in the wavering light of a single candle. He was toying with the folds of his formal kimono, a costume worn by virgins in
No
plays, and toying with the plaits of a black lacquered wig that only partially covered the wisps of graying hair flying in front of his face.
The shadowy figure held a whiskey bottle in one hand, a fan in the other. As he danced around the room he used the fan to reveal his genitals, which were fully exposed through the open kimono.
Near him on a horsehair couch, his middle raised by silk pillows, the candle resting on his belly, lay her son, naked and giggling.
Miya reached the door, the cold air, the icy wind. Somehow she made her way out of the neighborhood before she collapsed. She was found that night in a snowdrift and taken to a hospital. Weeks later she learned from one of her son's classmates that he had gone to work briefly in a factory that manufactured military overcoats. When he was fired for incompetence he had lied about his age and gone into the army under a false name.
That was in 1935. In 1937, while serving as a corporal in a film unit near Mukden, he was arrested as a spy and beaten to death by the Kempeitai.
Miya had to sell her father's house and her father's valuable collection of
No
masks to pay for her long convalescence. When her disease at last subsided she managed to find a job with the army. She was trained as a film projectionist at a base near Tokyo. The general at the base was a follower of
No
who made her his private projectionist as soon as he discovered the identity of her father. The general was transferred to China and killed, Miya went to work for another general who was transferred to China and killed, then for a third general who was transferred to China and killed. At the end of the war she was working for General Tojo, the Prime Minister who was soon to be hanged as a war criminal.
The winter evening the wind drove her away from the Victorian parlor Miya thought she was entering a Buddhist hell, an infernal, suffocating vision where angry demons forever tortured their victims. She had been a victim before, she was a victim again.
Yet the demons of legend always wore fierce masks. They grimaced and scowled, while the face in the candlelight of the Victorian parlor had been gently smiling, smiling so gently she was curiously reminded in time not of the hate she had felt that night, before she collapsed in the snowdrift, but of the love she had lost in life, all the love she had never known.
During the war as she moved from one tiny cubicle to another the memory of the face in the candlelight was always with her, an expression beyond her comprehension, the mystery of a
No
mask that was not a mask.
And it was still with her in the winter of 1945 when she retraced her steps one night through the ruined city, hungry and cold and alone, making her way back through the snow to the Victorian house eight years after the death of her son, returning to the man who had destroyed him, the only person who had existed for her in the world.
She didn't knock at the door, perhaps because that was the way it had been the other time. But if she had knocked no one would have heard her, for Father Lamereaux was not only alone but unconscious.
She found him on the floor of a back room where he had fallen, delirious and starving. The windows had been open since the previous autumn. Snow blew across the room and piled up in the corners. The thin cotton kimono the priest wore was stiff with frozen vomit and excrement.
Miya covered him with blankets and covered the windows. She heated the room and made a bed for him on the floor, for even though he was a skeleton she was still too small to move him. She sold a piece of furniture and bought medicine. She washed him and dressed him and called in a doctor to give him injections. The doctor told her what to feed him and she prepared it.
Twenty years went by.
Sometimes she was still frightened by the strange love she felt for this aging foreigner who had locked himself behind the darkness and doors of his years. But despite the corridors and eras that separated him from her, he needed her all the same, she knew that. She had saved him once and now she went on saving him, telling him what to do and when to do it, not letting him drink whiskey or eat the foods that upset his stomach, keeping him away from the garden when it was raining.
Long ago her orders had become a habit to him. In twenty years he had not once ventured beyond the grounds of the house.
To Miya this was proof above all else that she had at last succeeded in finding someone to love and serve. For in the end that was the only meaning she had been able to discover in the mysteriously gentle smile from the candlelight, that love was so fleeting a hope it had to be trapped like the expression on a mask and imprisoned.
So she kept watch. She guarded the house and the garden.
A footfall. The door. In the kitchen Miya abruptly raised her head, a movement so commanding it might have been perfected by her fathers, those tiny determined men who for thirteen generations had pursued the role of the princess.
Father Lameraux stood in the middle of the parlor with his back to the windows. His gaze fell on the long table where the Legion had met, on the formal chairs, on the horsehair couch. Miya watched him.
Master?
He turned, looking over her head.
Has he left?
Who?
The visitor.
Yes, he's left.
Did he disturb you?
Father Lamereaux didn't answer.
Would you like to rest?
No. As a matter of fact I want you to go shopping. I've decided I'll have raw tuna for dinner. And rice and the best pickles and whiskey. Irish whiskey.
Why, master?
Father Lamereaux drew himself up. He clasped his hands behind his back and glared over the head of the little woman who was not half his height.
Why? What do you mean why? Those are my instructions. I used to enjoy life and now I want to enjoy it again. Do as I say.
Tuna fish is bad for you, master.
What do I care about that? I'll do what I want. Now go and buy the whiskey and bring it to me in the garden. You'll find me sitting in the rain beside the patch of moss, but don't interrupt me. Just bring the bottle and a glass and leave me alone.
There are turnips for dinner, master. I'll bring tea to your study.
He watched her leave. Stiffly, slowly, he crossed the room and went into his study. Books were piled up all over his desk. Books and the thick sheaf of papers he called the index to his memoirs. A thick sheaf of blank papers.
Did anyone know that he wasn't really writing his memoirs? That he'd never written a word of them?
No. She knew but of course no one else did. No one else knew anything about his life since the war.
Once, not long after his release from internment in the mountains, he had thought of leaving Japan, Tokyo, this house, leaving everything behind and returning to Canada. He had thought of it for an hour or a day or a year but then he had decided it was already too late. Time moved in epochs and there were no hours or days or years in the life he had lived. He had loved his cats and the flowers of Tokyo, he had loved his legionaries, and now there was nothing left for him but the solitary empire where they roamed as ghosts.
He looked at the windows. The rain was still coming down. He opened the volume that lay in front of him and saw that a page was torn. That wouldn't do.
He turned more pages. They were all torn. That wouldn't do at all.
After dinner he sat in his study repairing books, patiently holding each page in place until the glue cemented itself. He seldom slept anymore. Often he sat up until dawn. So it was late that night, even later than usual, before his memories finally collapsed and led him into despair.
As always he was silent and rigid at that moment. So silent and rigid that even the woman who thought she loved him, who did love him cruelly as best she could, would never have suspected that the cry within him then was rising to a scream.
Life is brief and we must listen to every sound.
H
IGH ABOVE TOKYO, MAMA
sat in her apartment painting her fingernails. Twenty-four floors below lay the Imperial palace, the swans in the Imperial moat little white dots, the pines on the Imperial slopes no bigger than bonsai. As with the aristocrats of old, she kept her nails long to show that manual labor was beneath her. Mama had last cut her nails in 1938 prior to the labor that brought forth her second son.
It was late morning and Mama had just taken her fifth bath of the day. No matter how late she stayed at her nightclub, Mama always rose at six o'clock in the morning to take her first bath. Then she breakfasted on tea and three raw oysters and arranged herself in front of the window, on a raised dais in the shape of a lotus that sat on the back of an ivory elephant.
Her posture was one of contemplation. Her legs were crossed, with the ankles tucked over the knees. Her hands assumed the attitude of the fist of knowledge.
This
mudra
was Mama's favorite when facing the rising sun. The right hand was curled, with thumb touching forefinger, as if ready to grasp a cylindrical object. The left hand was held directly below, the thumb clasped by the three lower fingers, the forefinger pointing rigidly in the air. When all was in order the forefinger of the left hand slid up into the slot of the right hand.
The cosmic soul enclosed the individual soul, the sun rose in the sky. Thus did she come to terms with the dawning day.
The fist of knowledge also had erotic connotations. The left forefinger that rose with the new sun could be interpreted as a
lingam,
the receptive palm or sky of the right hand as a
yoni.
But Mama was not one to question an ancient Tantric stylization. If the sexual act occurred during meditation, so much the better.
There was another reason why the fist of knowledge appealed to her. In that
mudra
the five senses of the left hand rose and found themselves completed by the sixth sense of the right hand. Physical nature entered into gnosis.
Or in everyday language, the woman took the position above, the man below. Over a period of years Mama had found that men grow heavy. The woman above, the man below, was a pleasing concept to her as well as a comfortable position.
Or as Lao-tzu had said,
seize the way that was so you may ride the things that are now.
Or in everyday terms, choose the position of childbirth. The woman straddles the man so the manchild can be born, which is what the saga meant when he advised seizing the way that was. When the woman rides on top there will be a spurt of new life, for the couple at that moment is following the way of wisdom.
Complex metaphysical subjects. Mama would not have bothered with them had she considered herself an ordinary woman. As she looked down on the Imperial palace she recalled the words of the ancient Chinese chroniclers, the graybeards of the Han dynasty.