“Why such work?” I had inquired.
“At night the children are asleep and safe.”
“It is better than leaving them all day,” and so forth, the same in Paris as in Tokyo—
Our talk was now interrupted by the production manager. “My best friend,” he announced, and presented a very small girl.
Her face was a cameo of sadness. I had already noticed her. She had been sitting beside a fatuous business man and serving him with liquor and condiments. Once, with my accursed, noticing, novelist’s eye, I saw him put his arm around her too closely and she shrank away with a look in her eyes that for pity’s sake I will not describe. She sat beside me now, saying nothing, just looking at me with such deep quiet that I felt communication. Of this I do not speak.
The night wore on. I rose to leave. The madame, whom the girls call “mama,” assembled a line to bow farewell. She herself came with me to the car and leaned in the window to talk, speaking English rather well. She had had an education and was not a shallow or silly woman. She kept looking at me with warmth and affection, pressed my hands, gave me a great bouquet, and let me go reluctantly.
Alone in the car I pondered upon this phenomenon of Japanese life, the night life of men apart from their families. It is a force destructive to family life, a relic of feudalism. The modern Japanese woman hates the bars and geisha houses which take their men away from home. Old-fashioned Japanese women accepted them as they accepted anything men did, but modern Japanese women long for real companionship with the men they love. Yet men still continue to stay away from home, “and I have learned,” as my little Japanese secretary said one day with a cold calm, “to nag him no more. I have even learned how to greet him with a happy smile at two o’clock in the morning.”
Yes, she could do it. The Japanese woman has always been stronger than the Japanese man, for, like the Chinese woman, she has been given no favors. She has never heard of chivalry or knights in golden armor. She was born a female — that is to say, an inferior person, a bearer of burdens, an obedient slave. In centuries of such existence, while she compelled herself to devotion and duty, she accumulated an inner strength which cannot be surpassed. She gave birth to man, tended him and cared for him, shielded and defended him without question. Why should she question when there was none to answer? She was betrayed by only one person, another kind of woman, the woman who did not marry, the woman who was not bowed down with household cares and children, the woman taught and trained and groomed to amuse men. She was betrayed by geisha. All that a man could not find in his uneducated houseworn wife, whom he needed, nevertheless, for comfort and household ease, he sought and found in the geisha, whose only duty was to please him, to attract his eye, to entice him with music, to win his mind by her education. The best geisha is a brilliant and intelligent woman. She has her counterpart in the Greek hetaira, against whom Greek wives also wailed their accusations.
I inquired one day of a beautiful geisha, “Do you feel no concern for the wife of this man whom you have captured?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “It is the men who create the demand. We are merely merchandise.”
A cynical reply, and her modern counterpart, the bar girl, is in every way her inferior. A well-trained geisha could be, in her own fashion, a woman of distinction and grace. Any woman, it seems, can be a bar girl. If her face is half pretty, she is lucky, but if it is not very pretty, she has other wares to sell. Her influence on men is even less fortunate than that of the geisha. She is less graceful, less distinguished in every way. She is sometimes no more than a dead-end kid and is nearly always a prostitute. Geisha can be prostitutes but are not compelled to be. They may keep their hold on men in other ways, if they so desire. The bar girl has few resources beyond her sex, and at this moment sex is more crude than ever before in Japan. Naturalism there has always been, but sex, per se, is used by women now as a lure and a weapon, and by men as an escape, comparable to alcoholism. Escape from what? Desperation and a sense of personal inferiority, I suppose. What else does the human male seek to escape?
Geisha and bar girls aside, however, something has happened to young Japanese women, and I rather imagine that the something is American men. Many Japanese women have been courted by American men, and the two, man and woman, have been surprised to find what each had been seeking for a long time — the woman, a man who appreciates gentleness and deference and a naturalistic attitude toward sex; the man, a woman who has been taught to defer to him, and to serve him, to believe that his sexual interest in her is all the love she should expect from any man. Although I do remember a certain young American man who complained that a Japanese woman made a wonderful wife when she first came to America, but after two years she was no better than an American, having learned American female ways!
Be that as it may, young women in Japan have not learned American ways. They are liberated, that is all. They move everywhere with delightful freedom and composure, at once daring and feminine, bold and shy, an enchanting combination of apparent innocence and actual sophistication which, if not permanent, is very attractive while it lasts. And perhaps if she lives in America, she may discover that the young American man is often a charming but perpetual boy, and what pleased and surprised her at first palls when the boy does not grow up. I know a certain American who brought a beautiful young Japanese wife home with him and introduced her with enthusiasm to his welcoming parents. A year later this same young woman announced that she wished to have a divorce because she had fallen in love with another man. The man, it appeared, was his own father, who had also fallen in love with her. The older man wanted an adoring wife, and the Japanese wife had been trained to adore, and the young woman wanted, as she said, “a more wise man.”
Perhaps there are no rules for this eternal game between man and woman. The Japanese man, so far as I could see, has not changed very much. I wonder if he will like his woman when he discovers what she really is. As yet he does not know.
That night when I went to my hotel room, full of such thoughts, it was raining, the streets were deluged with flood waters and the rain thundering down enclosed me in a box of sound. I am claustrophobic and I escaped through the silent corridors of the vast new part of the hotel, where my rooms were, to the old building put up by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was one of his early manifestations, and certainly it does not in the least resemble his later work, the Guggenheim Museum in New York or the Dallas Little Theater. Nor does it resemble anything in Japan. It is a curious heap of tessellated edges and corners and over-decoration. Its glory is that it has stood through all earthquakes and this because the architect discovered that Tokyo itself was built on a quivering sea of mud. Into this sea he sank thousands of Oregon pine logs and on that foundation built his monstrosity. It actually floats and can therefore adjust to anything.
Does floating lead to adjustment? I pondered upon the question as I sought one of the many corners in the dark old lobby. If so, then I must be adjusting. It seemed to me that I was not living, not even existing, only floating upon the surface of time. To rise in the morning and work, to walk alone at night, to sleep briefly and get up at dawn, not thinking of past or of future, but only of this one day, this one night, and pondering on men and women, I was reminded how rare an experience of marriage mine had been. I am not an easy-to-marry woman, or so I imagine. I am divided to the bottom of my being, part of me being woman, the other part artist and having nothing to do with woman. As an artist I am capable of cruelty, for artists are ruthless and must be.