On hot days, Kato, Harry and Oharu stayed in Asakusa and went to the movies. Asakusa boasted more theaters per square foot than anywhere else on earth. The three friends sat in the dark, eating dried fish with beer and watching Buster Keaton take pratfalls on the screen while, in the back of the theater, a fan blew cool air from a block of ice.
At all foreign films a Movie Man sat onstage to translate the dialogue titles and what the audience was seeing. “Now Buster is running after the train. Now the train has turned around, oh, now the train is after him. Puff, puff, puff! Puff, puff, puff! He calls out to Mary, ‘Save me! Save me!’ Mary calls, ‘Run, Buster, run!’”
“Have you noticed,” Kato would inquire loudly of all the nearby viewers, “that, according to the Movie Man, the heroine in American movies is always called Mary. Is this likely? Don’t they have any other names in America? Why is the villain always named Robert?”
“Kato is an expert on villainy,” Oharu said to Harry. “He says an artist has to try every vice.”
“In Paris we drank green absinthe and smoked hashish,” Kato said. “It was the happiest time of my life.”
Three rows ahead was the dancer Harry had seen his first day backstage at the music hall, the girl who changed with such naked cool from ballerina to majorette. Despite the dark he saw every detail, the wavy perm of her hair, a hat that was not much more than a feather, the shadow of her neck, her ear like a curled finger beckoning him, although she had never spoken to him other than to send him for cigarettes.
Kato followed Harry’s attention. “You like little Chizuko? Too bad, it looks like she already has an admirer.”
The admirer was an army officer. Harry immediately cast for explanations: father, uncle, family friend.
“Chizuko’s not for you,” Oharu whispered.
“Chizuko could be perfect for him,” Kato said. “A playmate his own age, inventive, full of energy.”
“Leave him alone,” Oharu said.
“I’m sure something can be arranged,” said Kato. Oharu pinched his arm.
Afterward they took in the theater of the streets. Kato taught Harry to appreciate the storyteller with his slide show and never-changing tales, the candy maker who turned and tugged rice dough into cats and mice, the publicity bands who banged through the alleys with saxophones, drums and spinning umbrellas to sell soap, seltzer, cigarettes. The twenties were a loud, bright time of modern girls-mogas-who worked at new telephone exchanges, sold French perfumes in department stores, punched tickets on buses. Fashion was war. On one corner, a corps of Salvation Army uniformed like majorettes would shake tambourines and sing “Rock of Ages” while, from the next corner, the Buddhist Salvation Army in saffron robes tried to drown them out with bells and chants. No one knew how the next social advance would take place. In a Ginza department-store fire, salesgirls burned to death rather than leap down to nets and embarrass themselves. Immediately a law passed requiring salesgirls to wear panties, and two thousand years of fashion changed. There was, as Kato pointed out, nothing more beautiful than a kimono. A woman in a hand-painted kimono and obi was wrapped in a work of art. Western fashion was drab by comparison, but as color leached out of modern clothes, it spread into billboards and movie posters, matchboxes and postcards, race cars and airplane banners. And, of course, each word, each character in every sign or delivery boy’s jacket was a picture. Every street was a flood of images.
Kato lived in the Ginza above a bookstore in rooms that he said were very French, very art nouveau. Harry didn’t know what France or nouveau was like, but he didn’t doubt it was exactly like this. Armchairs seemed wrapped in vines. Sconces were glass flowers on stems of brass. Even the teapot looked alive enough to hop from the brazier. French posters of ballet and cancan dancers had places of honor on the walls. Japanese prints of a young woman teasing a cat, and a geisha offering her shoulder to a tattoo needle, were strewn on a table.
Kato said, “Hokusai and Yoshitoshi, all the great Japanese artists, were inspirations for Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Modern art is Japanese art through French eyes.”
The lecture was wasted on Harry. He much preferred the simple lines and secret messages of the Japanese prints. How the girl innocently batting with the cat revealed the provocative nape of her neck cowled in red. How the geisha bit into a cloth to stifle pain the same way lovers stifled cries of ecstasy.
“Do you paint here, too?” Harry asked. He saw no easel, paints or canvas.
“Open your eyes.”
Harry noticed how Kato had positioned himself by the poster of a French cabaret, a line of cancan dancers with blue faces and red hair. In a corner, however, was the Japanese calligraphy of Kato’s name. The poster was an imitation.
“You did that?”
“Good, you aren’t totally blind. There’s hope for you yet, Harry. You help me deliver the prints on the table and we’ll meet Oharu and go to a Chinese restaurant. She loves Chinese food.”
Harry didn’t meet Kato’s customers. It was a warm day in May, and he was happy to go along and wait outside while the artist took prints, boxed and loosely wrapped in silk cloth, around town. The last delivery was to the museum in Ueno Park. Ueno Park was famous for its hills of cherry trees, although the flowers had passed and the branches, dark as patent leather, were going to green. What Harry liked about the park were its drunken rickshaw men, street magicians, beggars and “sparrows,” prostitutes who carried a ready rolled-up mat. Kato seemed to know each fire-eater, mendicant and whore.
This day, however, the usual transients had disappeared, the park was empty, sparrows flown. In a city of crowds, Ueno Park was mysteriously quiet until Harry saw red flags march over the hill, so many that the cherry trees seemed to toss in waves of red. These were followed by ranks of men wearing red bandanas tied around their heads and carrying signs that read RICE IS THE PEOPLE’S PROPERTY, a surprise to Harry, who had been taught at school that all the rice in Japan was the emperor’s. Some marchers were university students, but most were life-hardened workers holding their strong fists high. As they marched, their song spread across the landscape of the park: “Arise ye workers from your slumbers / Arise ye prisoners of want…”
” ‘The Internationale,’” Kato said. “It’s May Day. They’re Communists.”
It was thrilling, the unity of voices, the forward motion of history that swept up Kato and Harry. Flags seemed to set the park on fire as the phalanx swung down a wide flight of steps to the street, where a row of police waited. Like the bank of a river, the blue line of uniforms redirected the course of the march, containing it along a high stone wall. Demonstrators ran ahead to outflank the police, but they were checked by the arrival of flatbed trucks bearing men in black headbands, with shirtsleeves rolled back from tattooed arms. Newspapers always identified groups like this as patriotic citizens; their tattoos revealed them as yakuza, initiated members of the underworld, but criminals could be patriotic, too. All Harry knew was that it was like watching a painting of a battle come to life, in place of warring samurai the modern armies of the streets. Demonstrators raced, waving and snapping their flags. Men in black headbands jumped off the trucks, shouted, swung ax handles. As the two forces collided, individuals turned to indistinct forms grappling with each other. A red vanguard plunged through the black ranks, and Harry felt the flags surge, bearing away all opposition. Red paint splattered the trucks.