Soldiers in Hiding (2 page)

As much as I was poor, at the beginning, in Korean, I was good, at the beginning, in Japanese. I seemed to find the hidden zipper that held that language in, and pulled it down and stepped inside, and began to look out from there, at times at least, through Japanese eyes. Though, as is my wont with everything, I never learned the language completely enough, I had facility, and for most of the time I lived there I was a fierce guardian of my own language acquisition, even going so far as to pretend to be Czech or Lithuanian, on occasion, with those who tried to practice English with me on the streets.

In a way, this is more a reminiscence than a preface to this book, which I hadn't read, I have to say now, in nearly twenty years. I did read it recently, but with trepidation. What if I no longer liked it? What if I found the sentence formations that I'd loved two decades previous annoying to me now, too full of simile or overwritten? Japan was by no means out of my system after I'd written this book, for
Soldiers in Hiding
isn't the only book I've set there. For another decade, from 1994 until a year or so ago now, I wended my way even further backward, past the agony of World War II to the mid-nineteenth century, as I worked on a kind of “prequel” to the novel you are holding now, one called
Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show
. So once for six years, and once for ten, for three times longer than I actually lived in the place, Japan was the malaria that heated my undernourished brain, the flame beneath the kindling of my creativity. I returned to the country three times, remembered parts of the language I had forgotten, remembered the humidity of summer and the cold of December on the Tokyo streets, and not only walked the roads that Teddy Maki walked, up around the now quite whorish
Roppongi, but traveled the paths of this second book's making, to Shimoda and the one-thousand-man bath, to Mito and Kyoto again, where a new cast of characters strolled along, as if the past were no longer sleeping under the mikan trees, but awake again and in my hands. In the interim, during the 1980s, my family and I had ventured to Africa, to Nigeria and Kenya, to a drama and culture of another ilk entirely, and where two distinctly different sorts of novels found their way out of my festering, but even then the foothold that Japan had chiseled in the walls of my psyche never grew faint enough that I couldn't find purchase there, and start that old climb again. How to know a place that isn't your own? Or how to rid yourself of it?

In the end, after putting my trepidation aside, rereading
Soldiers in Hiding
was pleasurable for me. It goes without saying that no one on earth could be closer to the book after six years of riding the range of its paragraphs, of reining in its excesses and branding it with my own particular eccentricities. Yet there were parts of the novel that I'd forgotten, or sublimated so completely as to be surprised, at least, like a new reader might, by their sudden occurrences. I did not remember, for example, that certain (minor) characters in the latter part of the book had even been invented by me. So when they flew into Tokyo one day, out of a clear blue winter sky, and stepped off the airplane, for me it was as if I were there to greet them at the bottom of the gangway, like the mayor of Tokyo himself, with flowers in my hands and a smile on my face. Yes, I had created them—for if not the writer, then who is the god of a story?—but I had paid so little attention to their lives since, had thought so rarely about what they might be doing during those twenty years that the book remained closed, that I was like someone's bachelor uncle saying, “Look how much you've grown!”

In other ways, also, this experience of reentering the world of
Soldiers in Hiding
was instructive. I am not a critic, have been short-fused with critics (and reviewers most especially) in the past, but the chance to rejoin one's early self, to “listen in,” as it
were, on those currents that often run so far below the surface of one's consciousness as normally to be unreachable, was enlightening. Who but a writer, after all, or a very serious diarist, has that chance at all? I do suspect that most writers have the same reluctance I had concerning opening the covers of closed books, but it helped me remember that there is a thematic element to my work which dives more deeply than what I briefly outlined above; it helped me to remember that writing is like mining, in that both must first strike a vein, and then open that vein up.

So what I can say now that my work deals with, from
Soldiers in Hiding
, through that first novel published second,
Fools' Gold
, from my Peace Corps book,
Festival for Three Thousand Maidens
, to the two set in Africa, and on to
Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show
, is twofold: first, it is concerned with the predatory nature of our ethnocentrism, and with exposing that ethnocentrism as our hubristic mistake, second, with my belief that the beauty of difference, in language and habit and constancy, in art and music and national dress, in wine and in the definitions of love, in what makes us proud or ashamed, should be honored and praised, looked at and laughed at, noted for what it is, but never judged. Especially in days such as we are going through now, with cultural and capitalistic aggrandizement zooming like a rollercoaster car about to fly off its tracks, what storytelling can do is help to derail it early, before it kills every one of us.

As I read over that last paragraph I see that literary art is political, that all art may be, however adamantly its makers might insist that it's not. Yet at the same time art is art because of its ineffable quality, not because of what it “says” to us. Stories are stories are stories, they are celebrations of the mythical and the mysterious, and are made poignant anew, through the generations, because those who people them come alive for us. You open a book, whether for the first time or after twenty years or after two hundred, and you step into it. This, not something from
Star Trek
, is the true “beaming up.”

I don't know what makes a writer. Perhaps, as may have been
the case with me, it is nothing more than a protracted childhood, a tendency to slip away from the worries of the inside of the house and linger outside of it, an Indian stalking cowboys. Or perhaps it is more inexpressible, as we are the gods of our stories, coming from gods of our own. There are nine Muses, after all, hanging around the foot of Mt. Olympus, so surely they must venture out, fly over and look down on us once in a while. The first three Muses, by the way, are named Melete, Mneme, and Aoide—Meditation, Memory, and Song. We empty our heads, we think of nothing, then we follow the memories that come to us. And if we're lucky, the singing, whether in praise or in lament, will last us the rest of our lives.

While reading
Soldiers in Hiding
, please forget this preface, or better yet don't read it until you're done. Or don't read it at all, just let the book wash over you, and shut it again. Books on shelves closed and waiting. During these hard days of tumult and fragmentation, what could be better, what could be more optimistic?

Each unopened book is a preemptive strike of its own.

 

RICHARD WILEY

Part One

One

IT GIVES ME PLEASURE TO HINDER AMERICAN TOURISTS occasionally. It is a small pleasure, to be sure, but a real one, and it is so very un-Japanese.

There was a woman recently who stood at the edge of the street next to the mouth of an open subway, waiting for an obliging stranger, for someone to stop and ask if he might be of help. Her husband stood with her wearing slacks of many colors, the kind that stretch a little and hug the knees.

When I came into the dim morning they were facing me, so I smiled and heard the woman say, “Ask this man, dear. Older men are often the most accommodating.”

She put five sausage fingers between his shoulder blades and gave him a little nudge, a small push in my direction. Salary men in grays and browns hurried by all around us, for as is my custom I had been the first off the train and now my co-riders were catching up, coming out into a grim daylight of their own.

“Excuse me,” said the man, even then standing a little aside so that I could see his big wife nodding a few feet behind him. “Do you speak English?”

I smiled, leading him out of the pedestrian flow, over against a wall where we could talk more privately.

“We're looking for Tokyo Tower,” he told me. “We want to go there.”

He spaced his words slowly and evenly so I cocked my head
a little and looked at him, at the smiling face of his wife over his shoulder.

“To-ki-yo Tow-er,” he said again, lips narrowing.

“I understand,” I told him.

The wife was pulled to us by streams of people heading, now, into the station. “He speaks English, Harold,” she told her husband. “We've found one with good English.” She turned to me and said, “We're from Des Moines. He's been here before.”

“Sure has changed,” he said.

I looked at them both a second and behind them, through the low smog, I could actually see Tokyo Tower a little, coming like a dunce cap off the small broadcast station that was my own destination.

“You've got to take the train,” I told them. “You must go deep down into this station and take the Ginza line. Take it as far as it will go. The last stop is right at the foot of Tokyo Tower.”

“My,” said the wife. “I didn't realize we were so far.”

This little anecdote, this little meanness, is exemplary of my state of mind these days. The man was my junior by less than a decade. Fewer than ten years separated his plump face from my drawn one, from my thin Japanese face with its lines and folds, yet they saw me as old. And his wife with the color of her hair actually entering the realm of blue. With people such as these it is easy to be deceitful. It is easy to be mean to men whose pants stretch about the knees, whose pants are multicolored, who waggle for their wives so. Indeed, my false finger took pleasure in pointing and it was beyond me to simply say, “I'm going that way myself,” and to take them to the tower, to the sale of all its cheap replicas with which they might decorate Des Moines.

 

THE NAME OF MY TELEVISION PROGRAM IS THE “ORIGINAL Amateur Hour”; does that ring a bell? You may have heard of another one by the same name. I start the show and end it with a rendition of “Mood Indigo,” for in the early fifties that was the tune that propelled me to fame. In the beginning I limited my
“Amateur Hour” strictly to serious acts, to the playing of musical instruments, to singing and dancing, and to impersonators. Now, however, it is novelty that wins the day. A woman can win, as one did last month, because of an ability to lift her lower lip up over the bridge of her nose without the use of her hands.

The “Amateur Hour” was very successful after the war. The thoroughness of our defeat was manifested in our new idea of entertainment, in the flavor of our music, and in our dress as well. I had extreme popularity for I was one of the few Japanese who spoke perfect English, and I knew the ways of America perfectly. In the early days of my “Amateur Hour” it was the impersonators of Americans who were the great successes. The country could be moved to laughter so easily then.

 

Now I am alone in my projection room, watching and editing a tape of the program as it will be broadcast soon. The logo, TEDDY MAKI'S ORIGINAL AMATEUR HOUR, lifts and floats from view and I come onstage. I have my guitar with me and sit on a high stool all alone on the stainless-steel stage floor. I say everything first in English, then in Japanese, and when I make a joke the laughs of old dead audiences come out of their cans and echo across the room. I play my introductory tune, then stop abruptly to read from the English language cue card that bobs by the camera. I can't read Japanese well, so when the joke is in that language it must be printed in Roman characters eight inches high. My old face bends to the work of the guitar, then looks deep into the camera's eye. My phrasing is impeccable, the tune is my trademark. “Mood Indigo”—so perfectly mannered, so properly manicured for a man of such soft delivery as mine.

There is a shift after a commercial to another camera angle and there I am again, this time ready to introduce the first guest. I stop the reel with the buttons on the arm of my chair and for a moment sit in the dark. I see only the red glow of the cigarette that I am holding, burning in front of my face. I wonder, do the people from Des Moines still ride the long subway under the
city? When the next good citizen directs them correctly, will they try to find me? Will they wish for a confrontation? Or perhaps, exhausted and saddened in their hot hotel, they will turn on the television and there I'll be, the enemy before them….

The projector is on again, shifting from my old face and settling softly on a seven-year-old girl, her eyes wide and waiting for the first strains of her music. As she does her folk dance the camera lights on me and then back to the little girl in time to catch her stumbling on the edges of her new gown. I introduce some others, a woman who can contort, a man who can drink water through his nose, but the last guest turns out to be the winner for he is a farter and farters are in vogue this year. The man, gray like the subway riders, wears a Rotary pin in his lapel and stands erect. He claims to be able to play tunes with his gas and says he will demonstrate by letting the television audience hear the first two bars of my theme song. We laugh together and I stand up to the man who bends over neatly, his well-tailored ass round and polite toward the camera…. “Mood Indigo” is barely discernible in the mournful sound that he makes.

When I turn the lights off again and listen, I can hear the rest of the show turning onto the pickup reel, slapping lightly at the back of the room. I edit every show as haphazardly as I've done this one, choosing the acts according to how distasteful they are. The farter rolls around behind me on the end of the celluloid, smiling out at the audience with each turn, and the little folk dancer must go back to the countryside and try to explain why she didn't make it and the farter did. She would not understand, but I must push toward the collapse of culture in the remaining years that I have. It is not for me to let such little girls carry Japan any farther forward on her old wheels. Here in the dark with the white glow of the dying screen in my eyes, I can imagine as I will an “Amateur Hour” that once again takes the hearts of my adopted countrymen by storm. I have even thought that perhaps, if I could find my man from Des Moines again, I would recruit him, ask him to come on the air and sing the songs that I remember
from my youth. Maybe he would sing of World War II, as if his Japanese audience, sitting softly on their zabuton, had somehow shared the same wartime music, held the same memories, carried the same victories in their aging hearts.