Please Enjoy Your Happiness (34 page)

There had been one more letter from you the day before we arrived. The mail plane flew out from California and touched down on the ship. The aircrew kicked out a dozen canvas mailbags. A few hours later the words ‘Mail call! Mail call!’
came over the intercom and, surprise, there was the letter. It took me a while to summon up the courage to open it. I was still bruised, I suppose, by the abrupt farewell and by my inability to say what I had wanted to say, but which I did not remember now that I was opening your letter.

I wrote back, bleating like a lamb, but there was no reply.

Epilogue

I had been in love with you and I had not fallen out of love. You had stopped writing to me but you lingered, at first a presence, and then a fragrance I sensed in shadows, and then a faint voice carried on winds that crossed the sea. I also was in love with your country in a giddy way, almost as if I was in love with a woman. You had urged me to study Japanese. But how would that be possible? I had been promoted and soon word came through the grapevine that I would probably be transferred to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Michigan to write press releases sent to the hometown newspapers of recruits training at boot camp there. This was supposed to be a choice posting. But as soon as I stepped ashore in San Diego I immediately went to the Pacific Fleet personnel office to plead for a transfer to any navy facility in Japan that might have a job opening for a petty officer with a journalism speciality like me. I spoke to a veteran clerk who had clearly once been bitten by a spider because he never asked me why I wanted that transfer. Instead, a hint of a grin came over his face as if he had just reverted to his youth. ‘Japan,’ he said. ‘Yes, Japan,’ and he said it with such longing that he might as well have been talking about sending me to Shangri-La itself.

During the week of Christmas, 1959, Yuki, I learned that I would be reassigned to the navy base in Yokosuka. I had beaten
the odds, Red Downs said. He invited me to go with him to San Diego’s old College Avenue Baptist Church the following Sunday when the African-American congregation raised its voice in song to give thanks. I did not know the words to the spirituals, but Red did, and he looked at me and said, ‘Let yourself be lifted up!’ We sang ‘Oh Freedom’. ‘Eyes on the Prize’. Black America was rising up and Red would soon be part of it. He was taking a train to Jackson to ask his hero girlfriend to marry him. My trajectory was different. I was joyful. I was dazzled by the prospect of returning to Japan, and who knows what else. In truth, I knew that my time with you was over and I was positive you would wish me to lead a life as a man – to work, to get more promotions, to study, to have adventures, to write poetry, to meet women, to get knocked down and get back up again.

I went with the
Shangri-La
when it left San Diego to dock at Bremerton, Washington, a few weeks later for a refit. Before I said my goodbyes, I read several poems I had written for you in coffee shops in Seattle, appearing a couple of times with the late Allen Ginsberg and with Gary Snyder. I read with a new sense of maturity. There was applause. Jazz records were spinning. Several people were reading paperback copies of Kerouac’s
On the Road
. This was my brief incarnation as a beat and I enjoyed it.

The ship would be Atlantic- and Mediterranean-based for a few years, but it would never cruise the western Pacific again except as a hulk. She was towed to Taiwan to be cut apart after she was sold for scrap in 1988.

Early in 1960, a navy plane flew me and forty or so other young fortunates to Japan. I remember that almost everyone was talking about a woman they had met there. But not me,
Yukiko. My summer with you was yours and mine alone and how could I possibly describe what had happened when I did not know the answer to that myself. I had taken a few days of leave but I did not tell my mother any more about you and she did not ask, which was good because we would have argued and she would have made me feel as if I had done something wrong. I began resisting the urge – the need – to think about you. But I was keenly aware that I had changed because of the gift of yourself that you gave me. I had your letters too.

I could have become melancholy, I suppose. I did miss you. But I focused all my energy on my new job writing news releases at the admiral’s headquarters in Yokosuka. Kip Cooper, a navy chief petty officer fond of cigars, kept a grip on me as if he was my father and if I stepped out of line I would hear about it. He could be gruff and caring at the same time. Kip liked it that when I began venturing out of the base I took a notebook with me that I was filling with newly learned Japanese words and phrases. I bought a small, primitive, portable reel-to-reel tape recorder which I used to record conversations with Japanese men in sake bars.

For several weeks I avoided going anywhere near the Mozart café. I bypassed the bars in Honcho. There was something, just something, holding me back. You had slipped through my fingers and that final night at the White Rose had been so special and so perfect that I did not want to do anything to spoil that moment by revisiting it. And then one day I heard that ‘Un Bel Dì’ aria again from
Madama Butterfly.
It was as if the voice of Maria Callas was the voice of one of Claude Debussy’s Sirens. The aria wafted down an alley where store workers and apartment tenants were putting out their rubbish in small cans and children were noisily playing
ken-ken-pa
–
Japanese hopscotch. I suddenly heard a woman shout, ‘
Urusai!
’ It was not your voice, Yukiko. But that shout caused me to wheel about and, in an instant, become determined to find you.

Honcho was different, somehow. This was midday on a Saturday. Not much was happening. The light was harsh. The facades of the nightclubs and bars looked shabby, forsaken, forlorn, garish. The White Rose had closed, although I discovered some months later that it had re-opened in a different location. The door was locked. There was no notice there explaining what had happened. I asked at neighbouring bars for you, for Reiko, for Mama – but nothing. I climbed the 101 steps, but you were not living there. There were no crows in the trees. The paulownia looked forlorn. Your prayers written on neatly folded pure white paper were gone. I spent some frustrating hours with my limited Japanese trying to ask questions. This was the nightmare I experienced in the aftermath of you. That summer of innocence and rain we shared now seemed so remote, almost not real. I searched for Nazaka Goro and discovered that he had been reassigned because of poor health. Mr Ito was still running the Mozart café but he said, regret clouding the usual cordial smile on his face, that he had not seen you for weeks. The sign outside was still there: ‘Please enjoy your happiness.’

And so you became the woman who occasionally, and then less occasionally, haunted me. We were sharing that beautiful memory you spoke of in your letter and you were happy, happy, happy with that memory. Is that true? You were somewhere, maybe almost within reach. I sometimes had the thought that if I turned such and such a street corner, you would be there, clad in your yukata, clip-clopping along in your wooden
geta
,
with a bag of books slung over your shoulder, and that you would look at me with a strange nod and pass on by without a word. But the premonition was false. Maybe it was wishful thinking. As the weeks went by and the rainy season of midsummer, 1960, came and went, you became less of a presence and maybe even less of a memory.

I only spent a few months in Yokosuka, Yuki. There was a second promotion and it meant that I would be living as a virtual civilian in Tokyo.
Pacific Stars & Stripes
, the daily newspaper written and produced by a mixed gang of young military guys and their mentors – a hard-drinking, scrappy, cigarette and liquor-drinking gang of characters who had mostly been in Japan since the start of the US Occupation in 1945 – snapped me up and made me a reporter. I am sure my escapades would have amused you. They were evidence of manhood. There were two bar fights that resulted in reprimands. I was yanked back from Taiwan after being sent there to cover the official visit of Robert F. Kennedy: I wrote that his aggressively driven limousine knocked several Chinese off their bicycles instead of writing about diplomacy. I also was pulled back from the Philippines because the
Pacific Stars & Stripes
Ford sedan I had parked outside the home of an American missionary couple who put me up overnight was stolen.

The man you helped create had his share of early loves. Do you remember the sultry singer Matsuo Kazuko? I met her at Club Rikki in Tokyo. I have been playing her records, hearing her voice again and remembering her tobacco kisses flavoured with cognac and how she slapped an astonished gangster’s face in the club when he tried to buy her.

Koga Yasuko, a shop girl who looked so good in pink angora sweaters, read
Romeo and Juliet
out loud in English on the
subway as a way of flirting with me without embarrassment.

And then there was Asaoka Michiko, who was really not Japanese but Korean. I called her ‘Michi’. She sang blues in cheap nightclubs reeking of spilt beer and foul cigarettes. One day – after I spent the night with her while a typhoon rattled the shutters in her tiny apartment – she led me proudly to a pro-North Korea rally where everyone was denouncing the United States. She won my admiration that day, and I bought a bottle of sake that we drank later. I told her she was brave and pretty and bold and wonderful, which made her cry because no one had told her that before. I could have so easily fallen in love with her.

But one day Michi simply disappeared, with no hint and no note and no trace except for a comb on the floor thick with a tangle of her long black hair. That image has remained with me for all these years. It is only recently, after I mentioned the scene to Japanese friends, that I learned that among the many thousands of Japanese superstitions is a truly ancient one involving combs. A comb falls – for some women that is a bad omen. They will not pick up the comb. If you break the complex kanji used for the word
kushi
[comb] into its associated parts, one part (
ku
) means bitter and the other part (
shi
) means death. Also,
kushi
sounds a lot like
kushin
, which means trouble or pain.