“What is a whore doing in our house?” Harriet asked.
“That’s rather self-evident, dear,” Roger said. He pulled Oharu up by her hair and thrust her toward the door. “Get out.”
Oharu bowed. “So sorry.”
“If she says that one more time, I’m going to scream,” Harriet said.
“It’s raining,” Harry said.
“So it is, Harry,” his father said. “So your whore might have to run down the street naked and get her bottom wet.”
“The neighbors,” Harriet said.
“Get dressed.” Roger threw Oharu’s clothes at her. She looked small and humiliated to Harry, her eyes darting this way and that as she dressed in disarray. Roger turned on Harry. “As for you, do you know why the surprise visit? Because we have been informed by the mission board that you have been sending your uncle Orin to China to make money off the currency exchange. We come here to spread the word of God, and you have found every conceivable way to spread corruption. It’s like having a viper for a son.”
“I’m sorry,” Harry told Oharu in Japanese. “It’s not your fault. Thank you for everything. Thank Kato, too.”
Roger Niles put his whole weight into a roundhouse slap. Harry took half a step back. He’d received as bad from the school drillmaster.
“I’m talking to you,” Roger said. “My mission here is over. You have destroyed it. You have broken your mother’s heart, you have abused our trust, and I see not one sign of repentance.”
“Good-bye,” Harry told Oharu.
“God damn it.” Roger undid his belt. “Turn around.”
“Go to hell,” said Harry.
Roger Niles gathered both ends of the belt in his hand as a whip and laid into Harry. A white welt edged in red curled from his ribs to his neck. Harry gasped but otherwise said nothing. Oharu ran as soon as she was in her shoes. Staggering from fury and frustration, Roger raised the cry, “All the way to Japan around the world for this. Like whipping a stone.” He whipped until Harry was crisscrossed with welts, until Harriet and even the derelict Orin hung on to Roger’s arm and consoled him as family must have once consoled the father of the prodigal son.
THE NILES FAMILY left two days later on a Colombian freighter bound from Yokohama to Panama and a connection to the States. To keep Harry’s condition secret, they stayed almost entirely in their cabin, and as no one in the family spoke Spanish, it wasn’t until they saw American newspapers in the Canal Zone that they read about the earthquake in Japan. While the Nileses had been at sea, 120,000 Japanese had died in Tokyo in three days of shaking and fire. Except for the Imperial Hotel and Tokyo Station, hardly a building was left standing. The updraft of the fire was so intense it lifted people high into the air, where they burst into flame. American observers said it was the end of Tokyo as a modern city and that it would take the Japanese fifty years to recover.
Over the next few years, Harry wrote everyone in Tokyo he could think of. Finally Gen answered as a project for high school, where he was studying English. All the old gang, the five samurai, had miraculously survived, most by crowding into the Asakusa temple grounds as the fire swirled around them. Kato, however, had died while retrieving paintings; his building collapsed on his last trip in. The little dancer Chizuko was killed by rioters who took her for Korean; mobs who blamed Koreans for everything blamed them for the fires and killed a thousand for revenge. She had looked vaguely Korean, Gen added. Oharu had simply disappeared. A lot of people disappeared.
16
AS HARRY DROVE, he learned on the radio that the evening English lesson had been replaced by German.
Ist Hans in seinem Wanderjahr?
Ja, Hans ist in seinem Wanderjahr. Er ist in Paris.
Harry wondered where that madcap Hans would turn up next. Moscow? London? Where would Harry be? At ten thousand feet on the Hong Kong Clipper, a flying boat en route to Manila, Midway, Honolulu and America, Home of the Free, the Chrysler Airflow, the platinum blonde. He’d give Alice Beechum an inside tour of the movie studio, introduce her to her favorite stars, take in Tijuana and Santa Anita.
The radio said, “And now that popular tune ‘Neighborhood Association.’” After a space of a few seconds, a lively voice began, “A knock on the door from friendly neighbors saying, ‘Watch out for foreign spies!’”
Well, that was catchy, too, Harry thought.
When Harry was a kid, he found it odd that his parents and other missionary adults had trouble speaking Japanese. Some missionaries were sent home with what was called “Japan head,” an overloading of the brain. The problem, Harry came to understand, was that Japanese did not translate into English or vice versa. Basic words had no equivalents or meant different things. What was warm and expansive in English was presumptuous in Japanese. What was respectful in Japanese was craven in English. To Americans, a whore was a whore unless she was willing to be rescued; to the Japanese, a girl sold by her family to a brothel was a model daughter. Japanese said yes when they meant no because other Japanese knew when yes meant no. Americans cursed and vilified an endless number of fuckers, assholes, bastards, bootlickers, et cetera, et cetera. With shading and intonation, Japanese made one word, “Fool!” express them all. Harry learned this naturally. Now he was about to unlearn, simplify, drop his Japanese side and be 100 percent red-white-and-blue American. He had wired $85,000 to New York the day before Japan froze American assets. If that didn’t make him American, what the hell did?
Not yet, though. On the banks of the Tama River, south of the palace, stood the villas of patriots who had done well by the war. There Harry arrived with his donation for the shrine of National Purity, ten thousand yen in a furoshiki cloth bag. Tetsu and Taro were already waiting at the gate. What more fitting entourage for modern Japan, Harry thought, than a sumo in a formal black Japanese jacket and a yakuza sweaty with tattoo fever? Actually, both looked uneasy as Harry approached.
Taro’s shoulders filled the gateway. Inside, a pathway climbed through a garden of evergreens to a large house ablaze with lights. A second path lit by stone lanterns ran even farther to a torii gate, a barracks and dojo and, finally, enveloped in a gauzy light, a ring of ancient pines that was the shrine itself.
“Ready?” Harry asked. “I’m here to pay my respects to Saburo-san.”
Taro didn’t move. “Sorry, Saburo’s not here.”
Harry could see Saburo with a circle of devotees, enjoying a cigarette in the living room of the house. There were groups of men inside and outside the house, which wasn’t unusual for a man with Saburo’s following. He’d started off as a moneyless Japanese patriot in Manchuria seven years before but had had the prescience to hook up with an energetic army officer named Tojo. By the time Tojo and Saburo were done, the army and National Purity comanaged railroads, cotton mills, coal and iron mines throughout Manchuria in the name of imperial harmony. Tojo became a general and prime minister. Saburo returned to Tokyo and established academies, charities and shrines dedicated to his Society of National Purity.
“What are you talking about?” Harry said.
“He’s not here, Harry,” Tetsu said. He looked sick and miserable.
“I just need Saburo’s ear for a second.”
“I’m sorry, Harry,” Taro said.
It would have been discourteous for Harry to point out the visible Saburo. Anyway, Harry was at a rare loss for words. He had invited his own friends along, and now they were blocking his way.
“Tetsu, did you talk to Saburo about the donation?”