Our more modest civilization is the only one that has grappled with this essential truth: to act is to die; to die is to act.
15
One custom that we have imported from the West is that the New Year marks the beginning of the season for parties.
My sister dresses me in one of her European dresses, then she parts my hair on one side and waxes it thoroughly before opening her makeup box. In just one hour I have become unrecognizable even to myself. My face is as white as over-soaped linen, my eyelids are darker than a moth’s wings, and the fluttering false eyelashes make me look winsomely tearful.
On the square in front of the town hall the garlands are vying for attention with the stars. Carriages and cars glide over the snow and spew out “gentlemen” fingering gold-handled canes, and women in furs, their hair curled and cigarettes at the end of ivory filters held nonchalantly between their lips.
A wood of fir trees sparkling in the snow lies between the Imperial Hotel and the rest of the world. A path swept clear at the beginning of the evening zigzags between the shadows and the wavering torchlight. The hotel porters in their red capes are sharply silhouetted against the glassy clarity of the windows.
A revolving door projects me into a huge room, where red lacquered columns reach up towards a domed ceiling hung with crystal chandeliers like bouquets of fireworks. Mountains, forests and seas undulate around the walls, and the sun contemplates the moon as storks fly off towards the clouds.
My sister drags me over to a table and orders me a café au lait, a fashionable sort of drink to have in a place like this. The band accompanies a singer in a sequined dress that gleams as her body moves like a charmed snake, while her milky-white throat produces a moody, plaintive voice.
Soon my brother-in-law asks my sister to dance. Looking into each other’s eyes and holding hands, they look beautiful and elegant as they move rhythmically backwards and forwards, round and round. The music speeds up and my sister smiles and flushes as she lets herself be carried away. When the waltz ends amid general applause, my brother-in-law kisses her gently on the shoulder and I feel a constriction grip my heart: who could guess how much he makes her suffer?
I look round the tables and see Huong, who must have been watching me for a while. My classmate greets me with a little nod, and I would like to be swallowed up by the ground to hide my horrible makeup. What will she tell them tomorrow? I’m going to be a laughingstock.
As I struggle with my embarrassment, she waves to invite me over to her table. I get up slowly and, as I reach her, I can see the thick powder on her own cheeks. She is wearing a completely backless dress, and I find this extravagance reassuring. I am not the only one who looks like a caricature.
A man offers me his place and goes to find a chair. Huong introduces me to her friends, who seem a lot older. She is very friendly towards me and for the first time I can see how gracious her carefully chosen words are. Now that any animosity between us has evaporated, I can admit to her how hostile I feel towards this stuffy, hypocritical society.
She looks at me for a long time and then raises her glass towards me.
“You must drink. Otherwise you’ll always be an outsider.”
The champagne fizzes in my throat and makes me cough. I am won over by the gaiety of the evening and, encouraged by Huong, I dare to look up and meet male eyes. A man asks me to dance and I feel like a bear walking beside him. When I come back to Huong, her hysterical laughter is contagious: this girl I have never liked is suddenly my accomplice, my friend.
As we leave the hotel, still drunk, I insist that we go back to the car on foot. My sister scolds me, but it isn’t long before the idea appeals to her: I need to sober up before we get home.
One shadow stands out against the dark mass of the woods: a naked body with its arms across its belly, staring up at the sky.
Last summer the Resistance Movement attacked enemy convoys, so the Japanese burned all the fields along the railway line. Ever since, hordes of ruined peasants wander up and down our streets, begging for a few grains of rice. A corpse can no longer defend itself: the other beggars have taken all this man’s clothes.
16
What a pleasure it is to receive my first letters! Venerable Mother gives me a detailed account of the New Year festivities, and I learn from Little Sister one detail that she preferred to keep to herself: since I left, Mother goes to the temple every day and prays for hours on end. On the other hand, Little Sister has had a dream that Buddha has taken me into his protection.
Little Brother’s letter is elliptical—as usual, this doctor of classical letters is economical with his words and his emotions. He concedes that, at the moment, the homeland needs soldiers more than it needs writers. I read his words with tears in my eyes—his message is clear, he is asking forgiveness for misunderstanding me for so long.
As an adolescent, after Father’s death, I felt such an anguished love for my brother that I embarked on a peculiarly intense relationship with him, like that between a father and son, a trainer and an athlete or an officer and a soldier. So that he would live up to my fierce expectations, I forced him to learn the games at which I excelled. Little Brother pretended to obey me and patiently waited for his opportunity to rebel.
The day came. It’s nature’s way: there comes a time when the eldest loses his power over his siblings. When he was sixteen Little Brother was as tall as me, he had become a young man, he had a solid bone structure and impressive muscles. One day he solemnly challenged me in the kendo club. The next moment I was hit right across the face by a wooden saber, such a powerful blow that I staggered. When I regained my balance, the victor bowed and thanked me for accepting the challenge. He took off his mask: his face was gleaming with sweat and glowing with secret delight. He bowed a respectful good-bye and left the dojo still wearing his kendo clothes.
Later, the boy said he wanted to be a writer, and he enrolled at the University of Tokyo. Since then our paths have gone their separate ways. At university he spent so much time with left-wing students that he became aggressive and contemptuous. Influenced by anarchist authors, he took a hostile stance towards the military, accusing them of interfering in government affairs, and calling them “assassins of liberty.”
I no longer had the time or the patience to set my brother straight. He had, anyway, taken to making himself scarce whenever I was at home. As far as I was concerned, Little Brother was lost, swept away on the great tide of red.
Why this change of heart now? Had he quarreled with his friends? Had someone revealed to him how vain Marxism was and how ridiculous their ideas of utopia?
I reply with a letter as brief as his: “My brother, after my first battle the only thing I now worship is the sun, a star that represents death’s constancy. Beware of the moon, which reflects our world of beauty. It waxes and wanes, it is treacherous and ephemeral. We will all die some day. Only our nation will live on. Thousands of generations of patriots will together create Japan’s eternal greatness.”
17
At my age one friendship wipes out another, flaring up like a fire then dying down; they’re never constant, but each new one glows just as fiercely as the last.
By inviting Huong to have supper with my family I am opening up my universe to her. In her quilted blue Chinese dress, and with her hair in two plaits the good little schoolgirl wins my parents over. After supper, I offer her some tea and invite her to my room. She crosses the threshold as carefully as someone stepping into a dream.
To show her how magical this old room really is—it is one of the few to have escaped the bombing—I turn out the lamps and light the candles. Scrolls of calligraphy and paintings loom out of the darkness and gradually blend with the tinted frescoes on the walls. There is a majestic set of shelves full of books at one end, and on my lacquered table little painted birds frolic among the leaves. Two pots of go-stones have pride of place atop an old carved wardrobe, to watch over me at night. Huong picks up a manual about go and
leafs through it. She takes one of the combs I collect, long and fine, made of polished silver and decorated with feathers. She fingers my pearls. A long silence falls between us.
Then she sits on the edge of the bed and opens her heart to me: she was born out in the country and she lost her mother when she was eight years old. Her father remarried and was completely crushed by his new wife’s bulk and drive: she would set off every morning with a pipe in her mouth to oversee work in the fields. The stepmother hated Huong, and it was not long before the arrival of her twin stepbrothers deflected her father’s affection. To them she was just a slut. As they grew up, the boys took pleasure in hurting her: they tormented her like two young cats toying with an injured sparrow. She was constantly insulted by her stepmother, who was peculiarly eloquent when it came to insults. Huong was exiled to a little maid’s room and, at night, she would count the raindrops falling on the roof. They were innumerable, like the sorrows she had to endure.
When she was twelve she was sent to school: the stepmother was rid of the thorn in her side and Huong discovered freedom.
She was a passionate and determined child, and she shook off her accent and transformed herself into one of the young town girls. It didn’t take her long to understand what made these city-dwellers tick, and she put these mechanisms to her own use. Thanks to a few coins slipped into the boarding housemistress’s pocket and a couple of bottles of wine at the end of the year, she was given permission to go out whenever she liked. She shared a room with girls older than herself, and was initiated into the pleasures of champagne and chocolate and the waltz. By imitating them she learned to put on makeup, to lie about her age and to get herself invited to balls. Men came to fetch her in their cars, whispering empty blandishments to her and telling her how beautiful she was.
Since then, the holidays have become pure torture. Back there, the house is dark and damp, and the smell of the draft animals is disgusting. Her father spits on the floor, her stepmother shrieks at everyone, and her brothers—instead of sitting properly at the table—squat on their chairs so that they can inhale their food all the more efficiently.
It is nearly nighttime and I offer Huong my bed. She snuggles into it, next to the wall, and carries on talking until her words become muddled and her voice dwindles to a whisper.
I stay awake for a long time. My friend is seventeen, and her father is looking for a husband for her—that will bring an end to a party that has gone on for three years. Will she ever meet a man who can change her fate?
18
There are days when I suddenly have new strength and will, and I can look death in the face with a sense of peace and joy. Guided by my country’s need, I fulfill the destiny of an imperial soldier with my eyes closed. But the path a hero must tread is not as straight as we might imagine: it twists and turns through the harsh mountains of sacrifice.
This morning I wake up lying on my stomach on ground that has been burned dry by the sun. I snooze on in the warmth rising up from deep in the earth. My eyes are still heavy with sleep and it is a long time before I open them and become aware of a tombstone just centimeters from my face. I have been sleeping on my mother’s tomb.
I stifle a cry of alarm and wake myself properly this time. The winter sun is not yet up, and this room commandeered from peasants is like a cave. My soldiers are snoring in the dark. Who can give me the key to my dream? How can I know whether it was a premonition? Could it be a message from my mother before she leaves this world? Who can I find to tell me—here and now, thousands of kilometers from Tokyo? Is Mother alive and well?
I have thought about my own death for so many years that it has become as light as a feather, but having never prepared myself for my mother’s death, I will be unable to bear its weight.
It is impossible to reconcile family and fatherland: a soldier is a man who destroys his loved ones’ happiness. If my life has been of any use, the nation owes that to one woman’s sacrifice.
Feeling my way in the dark, I find a piece of paper and a pencil stub. I cannot even see what I am doing, but I write a short letter to Mother, telling her of my regret. I have neglected her for so long!
I fold it in four and slip it under my pillow. How many days do we still have to endure before we renew contact with the world?
19
Huong makes a strange confession.
“My father is very rich, but I have to beg him for money. He gets angry, and he ends up giving me only half what I need, throwing it down onto the table at me.” Then she goes on, “I’ll marry an older man who’ll know how to pamper me.”
A few days later she leads me to understand that she has fallen for someone.
“You see,” she says, “a real man is different, not like the boys with mustaches who lurk outside our school. He can guess what you’re thinking, anticipate what will make you happy. When you’re with a man, you’re no longer a girl but a goddess, a sage, an ancient soul who has lived in every era, a wonder that he contemplates with all the intense curiosity of a newborn baby.”
Even though Huong has become my best friend, I never quite understand what she is saying. Her convoluted soul is divided between light and darkness, she is both blatant and discreet, and her life is full of mysteries despite everything she confesses to me. This Monday morning she has come to school exhausted and on edge. Although her hair is plaited, I can see evidence that it has been curled and then straightened. She is intoxicated with some joy that only she understands.
“The best demonstration of love a man can give,” she tells me, “is his patience as he watches a virgin maturing.”
I flush and find I can’t utter a word. She doesn’t seem at all embarrassed to be talking about something so intimate, and yet there is a grandeur, a heroism to her indiscreet confessions. There is a realm of life that I haven’t yet grasped. I feel like a blind person who has never seen the splendor of the sun.
“How can I get out of this darkness around us?” I ask Huong.
She pretends not to understand.
“How can I become a woman?”
She opens her eyes wide and cries, “You’re mad. Leave it as late as possible!”
20
Back to the civilized world.
The town of Ha Rebin is in the northern extremity of Manchuria, a strategic place in the Sino-Russian conflict. Our warships are challenging the Russian navy on the River Love, which is several kilometers wide.
When twilight falls on this noisy, bustling town, the domes of all the mosques, the crosses and virgins on the churches, and the sloping roofs of the Buddhist temples are all silhouetted against the bloodied brilliance of the sky. Russians, Jews, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, English, Germans and Americans live side by side in this cosmopolitan metropolis. Each of these peoples has found a way of recreating its own landscape and living according to its own culture.
Yesterday I slept among bales of straw, lulled by the howling wolves and the moaning wind. I drank melted snow. My uniform was burned, full of holes and ingrained with sweat and filth. Today I am in a clean uniform and back in a bed with a woolen blanket in a heated room. I am off to visit the prostitutes with a few of the other officers. I blow my savings by choosing a Japanese girl.
Masayo, a young prostitute originally from Toyama, pours me a drink. Her makeup is unremarkable, her perfume bland, her kimono garish and the way she handles the bottle is a bit clumsy, but still she manages to dazzle me. When I catch hold of her hand, the touch of a woman’s skin has the same effect as an electric shock. I pull her to me violently and she falls into my arms. I rip open her loosely tied kimono and tear her underwear. Two white breasts spring out.
The pink of her nipples is more than I can bear. After months of solitude, I want to expire in a woman’s body. I knead her breasts with my hand and straddle her, despite her protests. My sex finds hers and I have scarcely penetrated her before a luxuriant pain sweeps over me and gently turns me inside out.
Back in the street, I walk with a
spring in my step, both emptied and full of new energy. The prostitute has injected me with the human warmth that I had lost.
21
The square in front of the town hall is seething with people, and with my basket over my arm I drag Moon Pearl through the crowds. She complains about being jostled, about the price of grain, about how little game there is for sale. She is unusually talkative and strangely jumpy as she criticizes everything we buy. I am exasperated by her constant moaning, and I can’t wait to be rid of her.
In the last three years her life has changed into a great river of despair. I so miss my bright, cheerful sister with her dark plaited hair tied with fiery colored ribbons. She used to be constantly on the move, spinning round, sitting down only to get straight back up again. She persecuted us with that explosive laugh of hers.
Today a few wisps of wavy hair straggle from under her hood and float limply on her pale cheeks. Her hair has lost its shine, a metaphor for her entire being, dulled and subdued.
I shake her by the arm.
“Why don’t you divorce him then!”
She stares at me, opening her beautiful slanting eyes wide. Tears stream over her face.
“He loved me, Little Sister . . . ! He swore I would be the only woman in his life . . . ! I don’t think he’s forgotten his promise. It’s stronger than him . . . Yesterday evening I followed him . . . he went to the theater with some loose woman, a depraved creature who let him fondle her in his theater box . . .”
I don’t know what to say to her. Our new customs have condemned polygamy, but this hasn’t stopped men being fickle, or released women from their suffering. My parents are very enlightened, they encouraged my sister to marry the man of her choice—a marriage of love that has caused pain and unhappiness.