“The gaijin,” Hajime shouted. “The gaijin is getting away.”
This always happened. No one wanted to be the vile Lord Kira. Harry was Kira because he was a gaijin, a foreigner, not Japanese at all. As soon as the hunt began in earnest, the fact that he was a gaijin was reason enough for the chase. Harry’s hair was as closely cropped as the other boys’. He went to school with them, dressed and moved exactly like them. Didn’t matter.
Down the street, a storyteller in a dirty jacket had gathered smaller kids around his paper slide show of the Golden Bat, champion of justice, a grotesque hero who wore a skull mask, white tights and a scarlet cloak. Harry slipped between them and the cart of an orange-ice vendor.
“It’s going for the wagon,” Hajime said. A gaijin was always “it.”
Harry ducked around the ragpicker’s teetering wagon and between the legs of the wagon’s swaybacked horse, tipping a sack at the rice shop and pausing only long enough to whack Tetsu’s shin. The twins weren’t fast, but they understood commands, and Gen ordered them to block the doorway to a peep show called the Museum of Curiosities. Hajime threw his rod like a spear to catch Harry in the back. Harry stumbled and felt a hot, damp stab of blood.
“Submit, submit!” Tetsu hopped on one leg because the muslin had started unwrapping from his stomach from the effort of the chase.
“Got it!” Hajime tripped Harry, sending him rolling over the ground and through an open door into the dark yeasty interior of a bar. A workman drinking beer at the counter stood, measured his boot and kicked Harry back out.
The action had drawn the twins from the peep-show door, and Harry raced for it. The peep show itself was a gallery of muted lights, “mermaids” that were papier-mâché monsters stitched to fish and “exotic nudes” that were plaster statues. Harry backed up the stairs past the peep-show entrance, where constricted space meant he faced only one attacker at a time. The twins squeezed forward, falling over each other to reach Harry. Gen took their place, goggles over his eyes to show he meant business. Harry took a stiff jab in the stomach, another on his knee, gave a short chop on Gen’s shoulder in return but knew that, step by step, he was losing ground, and the stairway ended on the second floor at a door with a sign that said NO ENTRANCE. THIS DOOR IS LOCKED AT ALL TIMES.
Blood ran down Harry’s neck and inside his sweater. At school their one-armed military instructor, Sergeant Sato, gave all the boys bayonet practice with bamboo poles. He would march them onto the baseball diamond dressed in padded vests and wicker helmets to train them in thrust and parry. Gen excelled in attack. Since Harry, the only gaijin in school, was always chosen as a target, he had become adept at self-defense.
Hajime launched his spear again. Its tip raked the crown of Harry’s head and bounced off the door. Gen broke Harry’s pole with one stroke and, with another, hit Harry’s shoulder so hard his arm went numb. Pressed against the door, Harry tried to defend himself with the halves of the pole, but the blows came faster, while Gen demanded over and over, “Submit! Submit!”
Magically, the door opened. Harry rolled backward over a pile of shoes and sandals and found himself on a reed mat looking up at a gaunt man in a black suit and French beret and a circle of women in short satin skirts and cardboard crowns. Cigarettes dangled from expressions of surprise. The air was thick with smoke, talcum, the fumes of mosquito coils and the heavily perfumed sweat of chorus girls.
The man carried an ivory cigarette holder in fingers painted red, blue and black. He tipped his chair to count Gen, Hajime, Tetsu and the Kaga twins gathered at the top of the stairs. “Hey, what are you trying to do, kill him? And five against one? What kind of fair fight is that?”
“We were just playing,” Gen said.
“The poor boy is covered with blood.” One of the women knelt to lift Harry’s head and wiped his face with a wet cloth. He noticed that she had painted her eyebrows as perfect half-moons.
“He’s not even Japanese,” Hajime said over Gen’s shoulder.
The woman reacted with such shock that Harry was afraid she would drop him like a spider. “Look at that, he’s right.”
“It’s the missionary boy,” another woman said. “He’s always running through the street with this gang.”
A man in a straw boater heaved into view. “Well”-he laughed-“it looks like the gang has turned on him.”
“We were only playing,” Harry said.
“He defends them?” the man in the beret said. “That’s loyalty for you.”
“It speaks Japanese?” Someone pressed forward to observe Harry more carefully.
“It speaks a little,” Gen said.
The woman with the cloth said, “Well, your victim isn’t going anyplace until he stops bleeding.”
Harry’s head stung, but he didn’t find it unbearable to be in the gentle hands of a chorus girl with half-moon eyes, bare white shoulders and a paper crown, or to have his shoes removed by another chorus girl as if he were a soldier honorably wounded and carried from a field of battle. He took in the narrow room of vanity mirrors, screens, costumes glittering on racks, the photographs of movie stars pinned to the walls. The floor mats were covered with peanut shells and orange rinds, paper fortunes and cigarette butts.
“Achilles stays here.” The man in the beret smiled as if he had read Harry’s mind. “The rest of you can scram. This is a theater. Can’t you see you’re in a women’s changing room? This is a private area.”
“You’re here,” Gen said.
“That’s different,” the man with the boater said. “He’s an artist, and I’m a manager. Go ahead, get out of here.”
“We’ll be waiting outside,” Hajime threatened. From farther down the stairs, the twins rattled their poles with menace.
Harry looked up at the woman with the cloth. “What is your name?”
“Oharu.”
“Oharu, can my friend stay, too?” Harry pointed to Gen.
“That’s what you call a friend?” Oharu asked.
“See, that’s Japanese spirit, what we call Yamato spirit,” the artist said. “Loyal to the bitter, irrational end.”
“But he’s not Japanese,” the manager said.
“Japanese is as Japanese does.” The artist laughed through yellowed teeth.
“Can he stay?” Harry asked.
Oharu shrugged. “Okay. Your friend can wait to take you home. But only him, no one else.”
“Forget him,” Hajime said into Gen’s ear. “We’ll get him later.”
Gen wavered on the threshold. He pulled the goggles from his eyes as if seeing for the first time the women amid their cushions and mirrors, the packs of gold-tipped Westminster cigarettes, tissues and powder puffs, the sardonic men angled in their chairs under a blue cloud of cigarette smoke and mosquito coils stirred languidly by an overhead fan. Gen looked back at the stairway of boys, then handed his bamboo pole to Hajime, slipped off his clogs to step inside and closed the door behind him.
“How is it you speak Japanese?” the artist asked Harry.
“I go to school.”
“Japanese school?”
“Yes.”
“And bow every day to the emperor’s portrait?”
“Yes.”
“Extraordinary. Where are your parents?”
“They’re missionaries, they’re traveling.”
“Saving Japanese souls?”
“I guess so.”
“Remarkable. Well, fair is fair. We will try to do something for your soul while you are here.”
Harry’s position as the center of attention was short-lived. A music hall might offer thirty comic skits and musical numbers and as many dancers and singers. Performers shuttled in and out, admitting a brief gasp of orchestra music before the door to the stage slammed shut again. Costume changes from, say, Little Bo Peep to a sailor suit were done on the run, Bo Peep’s hoop skirts tossed in all directions for the wardrobe mistress to retrieve. Three or four women shared a single mirror. While Oharu removed Harry’s sweaters to wipe blood from his chest, he watched a dancer hardly older than himself slip behind a screen to strip and pull on a ballerina’s tutu. In the mirror he could see all of her.