In the strange floating existence of those days and nights, I went one evening to the Kabuki Theater by invitation of the star actor. The troupe had returned from a successful engagement in New York, but I had not gone to see them there. Somehow Kabuki seemed incongruous to me in that most modern of cities, and one time or another, perhaps, I would be in Tokyo again. The play that evening was the same one they had presented in New York, The White Snake. I knew the story well, for it is an ancient Chinese tale. The White Snake is a woman who assumes the form of a serpent for purposes of her own.
The night was clear and the streets of Tokyo were unusually crowded. I took a cab, and we arrived at the theater entrance, a vast place hung with paintings and filled with exhibits and crowded with people. Someone was waiting to meet me. The star had declared that he would not begin the show until he had met me and we had been photographed. I was led backstage and there he stood, made-up as a woman, the White Snake. It was a perfect make-up, sinister and graceful. He wore a close-fitting white kimono, without a trace of color. The headdress was white and his face, neck and hands were painted snow white. Even his lips were white, though lined at the inner edge with scarlet. The eyes were a snake’s eyes, black and glittering, their glance darting here and there. When he saw me he put out his hand, and I took it and it felt cold and smooth in my hand. I wanted to put it down because it was cold and smooth as a snake’s skin but it clung to mine, and thus, hand in hand, we were photographed. He talked for a few minutes, his stiff white lips scarcely moving, and then the gong struck and it was time for him to go on stage.
I went to my seat in the theater and there spent a few hours of pure pleasure. The stage was enormous, larger than any stage I had ever seen, and the spectacle superb. Amid masses of color and splendor, the White Snake moved with a sinuous composure, at once terrifying and symbolic, and I had never seen the play performed more powerfully and beautifully. There is no art in the world, in my opinion, which surpasses Kabuki in imaginative power. But perhaps this is partly because the stories of these plays have been a part of my childhood and I live through them again. At any rate the Japanese audience was absorbed as they can be only in this theater. When the play was over we walked out in a dream of silence.
The immense stage, the enormous cast, the splendor of the costumes and the extraordinary lighting made me realize again in contrast the cramped and narrow stage of Broadway. Year by year theater there has been compressed and diminished simply because of the cost of putting on a play. A great art is being strangled by craftsmen and mechanics in unions. Playwrights, directors and actors have offered a cut in their earnings but there is no such willingness on the part of the union workmen. I lingered after the play in the Kabuki Theater that evening and talked about it with Japanese friends over a bowl of tea. They had visited New York and they maintained that Japanese theater could never suffer such disaster. “We love art too well,” they said. “We realize the spiritual and emotional benefits of art. Even our workmen realize this, and they would never destroy such an important part of our life merely for the sake of personal greed.”
I hope they are right.
It was long past midnight when I reached my hotel rooms. When I was ready for bed, I went to the window as is my habit wherever I am in the world before I sleep, and looked out over the quiet city. An old moon hung crookedly in the sky, and its pale light shone down upon the roofs. At this moment, I felt again the deep inner quiver of an earthquake. It began as a tremor and then rose into a rolling motion. A picture fell, books slipped from the desk, a bowl of flowers crashed to the floor. I clung to the window sill and felt my heart pound against my ribs. Was this to be dangerous …? No. … The earth grew still again. Only the moon hung there, unchanged and fixed. I waited a few minutes more, then put the books into place and filled the bowl with water for the flowers.
It was long before I could sleep. The earth tremor had somehow shaken the roots of my temporary world. I recognize the need in myself for roots. I suppose it is the result of my childhood in China. Well as I loved that country and must always so love it, nevertheless I was at the same time always aware of the turmoil over which we lived, the possibility that at any moment the angers and discontents existing for centuries against the western peoples might flame into crises in which we, innocent as we were individually, might lose our lives, as indeed we very nearly did and more than once. Perhaps this childhood remembrance of ever present uncertainty, over which I had no more control than a leaf in a storm, has always haunted me — or did until he came. Now that he was gone, the old subterranean awareness of danger returned again.
He had no such dark shadows. Resolutely cheerful, naturally gay, he never expected or suspected catastrophe. When compelled by the fact, he had an odd habit of deciding when he would face it. The method was simple but absolute. He marshaled all the blackest possibilities and wrote them down in his clear firm handwriting. Then he took from his desk his father’s large gold watch and decided upon the day and the hour when he would attack the total problem. It was always at the last possible moment. Until it came, he was his usual charming self. He always found solution, or at least escape, and if the latter, it was not by any of the Chinese thirty-six ways. He never ran away.
I had come to depend very much on his genius for dealing with the improbable, for solving the insoluble and achieving the impossible and this always without the help of friends. He had friends beyond number, high and low, some of them among the wealthiest men in the world, others poor. The wealthy did not help him in the two financial crises of his life. He weathered his crises alone and triumphantly. The poor borrowed money from him without shame. To my indignation, distributed on rich and poor alike, he maintained a smiling indifference.
“They mean no harm,” he would say.
I hated the earthquake. It roused old fears and old fears reminded me again that his unshakable good humor, his cheerful pessimism, his flashes of impatience, his affectionate cynicism toward mankind, above all his gay acceptance of life as he found it were now no more. The old uncertainty was with me again, and forever.
The most modern theater, by way of contrast to Kabuki, was more of a shock than even I could take. It came about in this manner. We went one day to the production manager with a list of our tentative characters. We entered his office, preceded by a pretty girl, and found him that morning businesslike and dignified. The jovial man about town had totally disappeared. He delayed a proper time to show how busy he was and perhaps how important, and we knew he was both busy and important and we sat waiting. Tea appeared but the production manager was still busy. Finally he joined us and we gave him our list of actors. He pointed immediately to two doubtful names. He could not speak English at all that morning, it seemed. The pretty girl interpreting, he said that he merely suggested, he was not directing — this with a bitter look at the American — but we should make better choices for the two leading men than we had done. We agreed promptly but reminded him that the man we wanted most had not been released to us by his firm. Hearing this, he got up, walked around, rubbed his head, groaned loudly several times and talked through three telephones at once. Nothing happened except no — no — no — from three directions. He attached a pretty girl to a fourth telephone, sat behind his desk, and twisted his hair in both hands and groaned again. Then he knocked himself on the head with clenched fists and turned to us, beaming. He had an idea. The final performance of Japanese rock-and-roll singers and musicians was taking place at that very instant in his own rock-and-roll theater. He would accompany us there, we could see all the best rock-and-roll young men and we could then take our choice. He would command any whom we chose to be our actors. They would listen to him. “I am big producer,” he said loudly and now in English.