The Tokyo Giants were taking advantage of the warm weather to hold an off-season workout. Not just for rookies; Harry spotted the home-run slugger Kawakami and the pitcher Sawamura, who once struck out Ruth, Foxx and Gehrig in a row. Japanese were fanatical about practice. Pitchers threw hundreds of pitches a day, which was probably why their arms wore out so soon. Especially with breaking pitches, a Japanese specialty. Every few minutes a fighter plane would pass overhead, towing its shadow across the diamond and up over the slope to the airfield across the road. Otherwise the scene was immaculately normal. One coach hit grounders to the infield, another lofted fly balls toward players stationed in front of the beer sign, pitchers lobbed the ball back and forth on the sidelines. Sawamura had lost two seasons to active duty in China and was resurrecting what had been the league’s best fastball. With each pitch, the catcher’s mitt produced a satisfying pop.
Harry was a Giants fan, and no one on the team ever had to pay for a drink at the Happy Paris. He liked practice almost as much as games. He found a meditative calm in the repetition of the infielders as they broke for the ball, fielded the good hop, set their feet and fired to first. They refused to backhand grounders or dive for liners, but otherwise they were as good as Americans. Also, they played honorable basebalclass="underline" they would never slide with their spikes high to break up a double play or throw a knockdown pitch. During the season every game had an epic dimension; when the Giants lost, there was mourning throughout Tokyo, and an error on the field demanded an apology from a shamefaced player to his entire team. After games, writers raced back to the office on motorcycles to file their stories. Even at a winter workout like this, when Kawakami, “The King of Batting,” walked to the plate with his famous red bat-fashioned from a sacred tree in a secret forest-the writers studied every swing as if he were a great actor onstage. When he knocked a ball over the scoreboard, they oohed and aahed like children. The Japanese were crazy for home runs.
One of the Giants ran off the field, leaving Sawamura no one to throw to, so he motioned Harry to pick up a loose glove. The pitcher had such a smooth motion and the ball came with such easy velocity that Harry’s hand stung with every catch, but he was damned if he was going to let it get by him or be distracted by a line of bombers coming out of the sun, practicing an approach in close formation. As the planes passed overhead, the gunners in their bubbles seemed near enough to shout to.
When Harry’s arm warmed, the ball went back and forth with more energy. A game of catch was a conversation in which nothing in particular need be said. Motion was all, motion and the elongation of time. Activity around the field-grounders, fly balls, the pitchers’ easygoing throws-took on the steady nature of a metronome. At the batting cage, Kawakami took a cut. The ball rose and hung, spotlit by the sun, as a fighter that had just taken off from Haneda came over the clubhouse. For a moment the ball and plane merged. Then the fighter passed, trailing a shadow that leaped the outfield fence. And the ball came down into a glove and the fielder threw it cleanly, on one hop, to home.
8
A FTER THE BATTLE at Ueno Park, Kato took Harry into his confidence more and more, allowing him into his studio and paying him to deliver finished work. Harry liked the studio for its sophisticated jumble of Greek statues, samurai armor, urns stuffed with props like umbrellas, swords and peacock feathers. Artfully out-of-focus photographs of French haystacks and cathedrals covered the walls, plaster casts of feet and hands weighted the cloths that covered works in progress. Whether his models posed in kimonos or without, Kato always wore a studio coat and beret because, as he said, “Professional decorum is never so essential as with a naked woman.”
Western art was for himself. For money, Kato produced purely Japanese woodblock prints. It was a transformation to Harry. Kato was no longer an imitation Frenchman fussing over a palette, he was a master who could capture the contours of a model with a seemingly continuous line of ink. The model herself was no longer a sallow, short-limbed version of a Parisian prostitute but a delicate courtesan wrapped in a silk kimono. Better yet for a boy like Harry, the process was a puzzle to be disassembled and put back together. Kato’s sketch went to a carver who sent back a close-grained cherry-wood keyblock and as many as ten other blocks carved for separate colors. Sometimes Kato sent the blocks to a printer, sometimes he did the printing himself. He printed one color a day, from light to dark-clamshell for white, red lead for tan, turmeric for yellow, redbud for pink, safflower for red, cochineal for crimson, dayflower for blue, lampblack for ebony-on soft mulberry paper. Kimonos were always a challenge, with their patterns of peacock eyes, russet leaves, cherry blossoms, peonies. The subtlest color of all, however, was skin, painted with the lightest pink to flatten the fibers of the paper. Layer by layer the colors coalesced into an image, the slattern into an innocent beauty, a swirl of lampblack for a teapot’s steam, a dusting of mica to suggest the night. Harry enjoyed the misdirection. Great artists like Hokusai or Kuniyoshi could each print a series called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which were not pictures of Fuji but of life in Tokyo, of courtesans or fishermen or peddlers stumbling up a hill with a small, hazy Fuji floating serenely in the background.
Harry arrived once when Kato had gone for medicine and left the door unlocked. Harry was inside alone, stealing a smoke, when an ember fell from the cigarette and burned a drop cloth. He had to move a plaster cast to refold the cloth and hide the incriminating hole and, in doing so, uncovered a work in progress that he had not seen before: a courtesan in an elegant black-and-blue-striped kimono, her hair knotted and embellished with a tall white comb. What was different about this print was that she was in the pleated leather back of a large car, leaning to one side with a cigarette to accept a light from a male hand holding a lit match. The more Harry looked, the more he saw the artistry in the two sources of light, the match’s small ball of fire and the moon through the rear window of the car. How her twisted position revealed the line of her neck. How loose strands of hair and the kimono’s rumpled surface indicated a recent intimacy. What surprised him most was that the woman was Oharu.
Oharu was Harry’s best friend at the theater, his older sister and secret love. Harry had seen her only in chic skirts and French hats. He moved another cast to pull more of the drop cloth off. A second, almost finished print was of Oharu at a cherry-blossom party, wrapped in a maiden’s pink kimono and seated on a quilt covered with fallen pink and white blossoms. It would have been a portrait of innocence itself, except for the fact that the quilt was planted with bottles of sake and beer. Oharu slumped to the side, her eyes slitted with drink, a ukulele forgotten in her hands. Golden bees crawled over the blossoms, bottles, Oharu’s hair. A third print was so dark it took Harry a moment to understand it was a ballroom flecked by the reflections from a mirror ball on dancing couples, black figures on a blue floor, the only one identifiable, Oharu, in a red kimono waiting by the slanted light of a half-open door.
By now Harry couldn’t stop. He uncovered a stack of prints, a catalog of copulation, on every page a samurai or monk inserting his monstrously swollen erection into a woman experiencing such transport that her eyelids were closed and her teeth bit into cloth as if to stifle any outcry, while, under a kimono’s disarray, her legs splayed, the gaping bush lay exposed and her toes curled in ecstasy. The main thing so far as Harry was concerned was that the prints were antiques, not of Oharu.