“Thanks. Remember the days when we used to run around Asakusa? We ruled the roost, Harry. You and me and Gen, we ruled the roost.”
Hajime had done well by the army, however. Here he was in a crisply ironed uniform with a sergeant major’s tabs, a waxed and bristling mustache and thick spectacles that magnified his self-importance, no sign of the falling down drunk who had pissed on the street outside the Happy Paris the night before. He was still loathsome, but he had no family or friends, and Harry supposed that, after all, someone ought to see the son of a bitch off. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone on the platform that Harry wasn’t Japanese. In this crowd, with its blur of emotion, he seemed to blend in well enough.
“These kids think they’ve been through boot camp,” Hajime said. “Wait until I get my hands on them. Do you know why a soldier will charge a machine gun across an open field?”
“Why?”
“Because he’s more afraid of me.”
Which was true enough. Harry had heard plenty of stories about recruits considered too short or tall or slow or quick who had been beaten until their noses were split, teeth lost, eardrums burst. Supposedly it was a psychological approach, to create a rage that could be turned on the enemy. Rage and fear plus devotion to the emperor. Harry was always amazed how the army could take so many young scholars, gentle poets, honest farm boys and fishermen’s sons and turn them into killers. It took the hard work of men like Hajime.
“Well, I can see why you’re so eager to get back to China. Ever afraid of a bullet from your own men?”
“I never turn my back on them.”
The train was late. The crowd shifted to fill the platform without falling onto the tracks. Fathers sucked in their chins with pride while women seemed more ambivalent about sending off sons who looked young enough to be trading baseball cards. A man in a bowler asked Harry, “Would you be so kind?” and handed him a camera, a little spring-bellows Pearlette. Harry took a picture of the man with a young recruit who had a bright red face from ceremonial farewell cups of sake and a thousand-stitch belt tied like a scarf around his neck, a son who was obviously the measure of his father’s love.
“Remember ‘Forty-seven Ronin’?” Hajime said. “Remember how we let you in even though you weren’t Japanese?”
“I think you needed someone to chase.”
“We had a great gang. Then you and Gen started hanging around the theater and dumped the rest of us.”
“We grew up.”
“What was the name of that dancer you were so crazy about? Oharu? That was terrible about her.”
“What’s the point, Hajime?”
“The point is, I know how much you wanted to be Japanese, and now you see you’re not.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This. This army is only for real Japanese, that is why it is unstoppable. This is a pure army. No pretend Japanese here. You think you know everything, you always thought you were so clever. Soon enough there won’t be a white man left in Asia, and that includes you.”
Hajime’s voice rose with the approach of a locomotive drawing a train decked in red and white bunting. Flags flew on the engine’s steam domes and boiler front. Recruits who had already been gathered from other stations leaned out coach windows to shout over the explosion of air brakes, squeal of rails and renewed fervor of the band, which welcomed them with a popular song.
Bullets, tanks and bayonets
Bivouac with grass for a pillow.
My father, appearing in a dream,
Encourages me to die and come home.
“Hold this.” Hajime handed back the gun while he cleaned the lenses of his glasses. There was a rush to board because the train was running late. This was a city where people were physically packed into subways and onto buses. Harry let families shoulder by to the steps for leave-taking, mothers and fathers bowing to their soldier-sons with much trembling but no crying. Hajime set the glasses on his face and took a step backward up to the railroad car.
“Don’t forget this.” Harry stretched out an arm with the package.
“From me to you,” Hajime said. A smirk crept across his face as if this was a moment he had waited years for, a payback for ancient debts. The locomotive let off a snort of steam, aching to roll; Japanese engines were thoroughbreds, black and slim. At once, the press of bodies, enthusiasm and noise carried Hajime all the way up the steps of a coach that was rocking from the motion of soldiers finding seats.
“It’s yours,” Harry shouted.
The tide of embarkation, boys aching to leave good-byes behind, pushed Hajime into the car. “Too late,” he said, or something like that, his words overwhelmed by the noise of the band. The press grew greater, and the next time Harry saw Hajime was at an open window where families passed up last-second remembrances and boxes of food. Hajime pulled aside his cape to open his holster flap and show Harry another pistol, a full-size Nambu, already nestled there.
“Good luck, Harry,” Hajime mouthed through the window.
The train shuddered and began to slide along the platform. Harry tried to push forward to Hajime, but the wall of bodies and banners and flags was too dense to breach. The fervent waving of hands prevented Harry from even following Hajime’s coach by sight. The boys were going, hurtling toward destiny with lives that weighed less than a feather, with the bulletproof prayers of their loved ones, to open a whole new dawn for Asia. With such purity of spirit, how could they fail?
10
GAIJIN WERE FREAKS, and Harry’s parents were the biggest freaks of all. The pair of them preaching the gospel on a street corner was almost mortally embarrassing to Harry. First was the presumption of preaching at all before being asked. Second was his father’s total inability to speak Japanese. Third was his mother’s partial Japanese. Fourth was the fact that she spoke not women’s but men’s Japanese, full of bluster no decent woman would use. Fifth was the way she stood beside her husband instead of behind him. Sixth was their mysterious ignorance about how much and to whom to bow. Seventh was their loudness. Eighth was their clumsiness. Ninth was their color. Tenth was their size. Those were the Ten Sins of Gaijin, and every day Roger and Harriet Niles were guilty of each one. And if there was any contradiction between Harry’s condemnation of them and his own black reputation, it escaped him. Sundays were the worst. A Baptist church had no stained glass or popish carvings, only pews leading up to the choir organ and pastor’s pulpit and, in between, the satin curtain that veiled the baptismal well. The order of service was call to worship, Scripture, prayer and sermon leading to the testimonials of believers. Thus was the hand of Jesus made visible, His intervention and the redemption of a sinner followed by hymns translated and sung in Japanese in triumphant dissonant satisfaction. Or the service would include baptism, when the veil of purple satin was drawn aside for an immersion into water that cleansed the soul, a drama that, when he was in town, Roger Niles conducted with the theatrical vigor of the original John the Baptist. The entire congregation would lean forward and hold its breath, all transfixed except for two figures in the front row, Harry and his uncle Orin, who both smelled of mint, his uncle to cover the reek of whiskey, Harry to hide a taste for cigarettes. He would rather have been strolling with Kato and Oharu, taking in fresh air on the Rokku or, better yet, sharing a smoke in a movie house.
Oddly enough, Harry actually liked the painting of the river Jordan above the well. The artist had depicted Jesus in white robes and John in a lion skin, wading into azure water with the spirit descending from heaven in the form of a dove. Cedars and date palms fringed the riverbanks, and around the entire scene was a string of pearls. Harry found the scene calming, not the baptism itself but the slowly flowing river.
Kyoto had a river like that. The summer after Harry had met Kato, he and his parents had gone down to the old capital, which had a Baptist hospital and church. While the congregation attacked the hymns, Harry slipped out and wandered behind the church. There the river lay, brown-green water with torpid folds and ripples under a yellow haze. A branch trailed like an idle hand in the water. On a twig, two dragonflies touched tails of gold. Harry sat at the base of the tree to dig cigarettes from his shirt.