The China Lover

Ian Buruma

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781843548027
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782395614
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

When Sidney Vanoven is sent to occupied Japan, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it is his dream posting. By day, he works in the censor's office watching Japanese films; at night he immerses himself in the sensual pleasures of Tokyo. His job leads him into the circle of the beautiful film star Shirley Yamaguchi, a passionate and indomitable woman, whose wartime secrets hint at deception and betrayal. As he learns more of her story it seems to echo Japan's own dark secret. In The China Lover, Ian Buruma has created an exhilarating saga of war-torn Japan that is epic in scale, richly imagined and vividly populated. It is quite simply unforgettable.

Contents

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part Two

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Part Three

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Acknowledgments

PART ONE

1

THERE WAS A time, hard to imagine now, when the Japanese fell in love with China. Well, not all Japanese, of course, but enough to be able to speak of a China Boom. Like all such crazes in my country, the China Boom was only a fleeting thing; here today and gone tomorrow. But it was spectacular while it lasted. The boom hit the country in the autumn of 1940, just as our foolish army was getting trapped in a quagmire of its own making. Nanking had fallen a few years before. Our bombers were roughing up Chungking. But all to no purpose. Frankly, we were like a tuna fish trying to eat a whale.

Back in Tokyo, the humid summer heat lingered unpleasantly. Asakusa, usually so full of life, looked exhausted, as though people no longer had the energy to enjoy themselves. Most of the action had moved west anyway, to the Ginza area, but even there a gloomy atmosphere hung heavily in the sultry air: the coffeehouses were half empty; bars had fallen on hard times; the food in the restaurants didn’t taste as good as before. Joy was in any case, if not yet strictly forbidden, officially discouraged, as “unpatriotic.”

Then came that crazy China Boom, like a rainbow in a dark gray sky. Films set in China were suddenly the rage. And all the girls wanted to look like Ri Koran, the Manchurian movie star. You would see them strolling down the Ginza, their short legs, like plump white daikon radishes, squeezed into tight silk dresses. Cosmetics were used to make their eyes look more slanting, more exotic, more Chinese. “China Nights,” Ri Koran’s hit song, evoking the louche glamour of nocturnal Shanghai, was played on the wireless all day long. The girls would hum its lilting tune, closing their eyes in rapture, gently swaying, like tropical flowers. A coffee bar in Sukiyabashi, named China Nights, employed Ri Koran look-alikes. Not that they really looked like her. Their crooked teeth and stocky build betrayed them immediately as Japanese country girls. But there they were, wrapped in a bit of garish silk, with a flower in their hair. That was enough. The men went crazy over them.

Perhaps the drabness of the home front made the Asian continent seem alluring by contrast. And it is not as if this boom was the first of its kind. As I said, we Japanese often catch collective bugs, which cause temporary fevers for this or that. You might say it’s in our blood. But perhaps the real reason was more mundane. Listening to Ri Koran’s song allowed people to forget, if only for a short while, about wars, economic slumps, and soldiers slogging through the mud of a blood-soaked land. Instead of being a place of a thousand sorrows, sucking us into worse and worse horrors, China became a place of glamor, promising untold pleasures.

It all seems so long ago now, as I contemplate the wreckage of our foolish dreams. China Nights is long gone. The Ginza a ruin. Japan a country of ruins. I’m a ruin. Anyway, just a year after it erupted, the China Boom was all over. After Pearl Harbor, victory over the Anglo-American barbarians was all people thought about. It proved to be just another one of our dreams, a mirage in the desert toward which we, a thirsty people, crawled in the vain hope that we would quench our thirst for a little justice and respect.

But before getting ahead of my story, I should like to explain my own love for China, which was not at all like that superficial China Boom of 1940. To understand my feelings, I have to take you back to the 1920s, to my native village near Aomori, a small place in a narrow-minded province of a small country, whose people held the narrow views of frogs stuck in a dark well. To me, China, with its vast spaces, its teeming cities, and its five thousand years of civilization, always represented an escape from the well. I was one little frog that got away.

Where I grew up, loving China was not exactly viewed with approval. There was old Matsumoto-sensei, of course, a thin man in a faded blue kimono and tortoiseshell glasses, whose long white hair floated around his shriveled neck like a tangle of cobwebs. But the China he loved stopped somewhere in the twelfth century. He lived in a world of musty Confucian classics, whose wisdom he attempted to impart to us with scant success. I can still picture him, his head almost touching the pages of the Analects, a half-smile playing on his cracked lips, as he traced the Chinese characters with the long brown fingernail of his right index finger, oblivious to the sniggers of his pupils. Even now, when I hear the names of Kōshi (Confucius) or Mōshi (Mencius), the image of Matsumoto-sensei comes back to me, with the burnt-milk smell of an old man’s breath.

My father, Sato Yukichi, had actually been to China as a soldier in 1895. But there was no love lost between him and the country of his former enemies. He didn’t mention the Sino-Japanese War often. I even wonder whether he ever had more than the haziest idea of what it was all about. Just once in a while, when he had drunk too much saké, he would throw back his head and burst into a marching song, cupping his hand to his mouth imitating the sound of a trumpet. He would then bore us with stories about Commander Koga rescuing the imperial flag, or some such act of derring-do. Or he went on about the weather in Manchuria, which, as he never tired of telling us, was colder even than our snow country in winter, so cold that your piss froze solid, like an icicle, from the tip of your penis to the frozen ground. Mother would always withdraw at this point and make clattering noises as she busied herself in the kitchen.

One day, when I was still a boy, I discovered a lacquer box among my father’s books, which contained some woodcuts of famous battle scenes set in landscapes covered in thick snow. Since the pictures had hardly ever been exposed to daylight, the colors were still as crisp and true as when they were first printed—fiery reds and yellows of gunfire; the dark blues of wintry nights. The horses, in pretty checkered padding from their necks to their ankles, were so vividly drawn that you could almost sense them shivering in the snow. I can still remember the titles: Hard Fight of Captain Asakawa, Banzai for Japan: Victory Song of Pyongyang. And the Chinese? They were depicted as cringing, yellow, ratlike creatures, with slitty eyes and pigtails, either writhing in terror or prostrated under the boots of our triumphant soldiers. The Japanese, looking splendid in their black Prussian-style uniforms, were much taller than these dead Chinese rodents. They looked almost like Europeans. This didn’t strike me as particularly odd at the time. Nor can I say that it filled me with pride. I couldn’t help wondering why beating such pathetic enemies should be presented as something so glorious.

These pictures were my first glimpse of a wider world, far away from our village near Aomori. But they were not what made me dream of leaving the old place. I think, now I look back, that such dreams were nurtured by something more artistic. I’ve always thought of myself as an artist at heart, a man of the theater. This began at a very early age. Not that we had the opportunity of visiting anything so grand as a Kabuki theater. You had to go to Aomori for that. Our village was too remote even for the travelling players, offering a bawdier and much inferior form of drama. And even if they had graced us with their temporary presence, my father would never have let me go anywhere near such entertainments anyway. As the village schoolmaster, he prided himself on his respectability. Men of substance, in his view, did not go to see performing riffraff.

Entertainment, where I grew up, consisted of one man only, the estimable Mr. Yamazaki Tetsuzo, candyman and “paper theater” performer. He would arrive, on festival days, on his old Fuji bicycle, carrying a wooden contraption rather like a portable set of drawers that contained a box of candies, a paper screen, and a stack of pictures, which he would pass in front of the screen one by one, while mimicking the voices of characters shown in the pictures. Since our village was buried in thick snow during the winter season, Yamazaki could only reach us in spring and summer. We always knew he was coming as soon as we heard the sound of wooden clappers, which he knocked together to announce his arrival. Before the show began, he would sell candy. Those lucky enough to have money to buy it were allowed to sit right in front of the screen. I was never that fortunate. My father, though rarely expressly forbidding my attendance at the candyman’s theater, certainly didn’t approve of spending any money. Aside from anything else, he declared that such candy was unhygienic. He may have been right, but it wasn’t the candy that provided the main attraction.

Mr. Yamazaki wasn’t much to look at, a skinny, bespectacled man with a few licks of well-greased hair swept across his shining pate. Though he told the same stories over and over, he allowed himself room for improvisation. When he spoke in the falsetto voice of a beautiful woman, you almost believed that the skinny old candyman, as if by magic, had been transformed into a great beauty. And when the beauty turned out to be a ghost, who slunk off at the end of the story as a malevolent fox, his impersonation of the animal trickster made us break out in a cold sweat. His sound effects were as important as the lurid illustrations of brave boy heroes and demon foxes. He was especially good at such dramatic touches as rolling thunderstorms, the clip-clop of wooden sandals, and the clashing of samurai swords. But his pièce de résistance, most popular with us, his most devoted fans, who would anticipate its coming like true connoisseurs of the theater, was the extraordinary honking fart, emitted by the pompous lord in a well-worn story called Snake Princess. On and on he went, like a human trombone, for what seemed like minutes without pause, his face getting redder and redder, veins bulging on his forehead, as though he were about to explode. We were in hysterics, no matter how many times we’d seen this remarkable performance. But then, suddenly, like a pricked balloon, his face quickly regained its normal shape, and he stopped the show, even though the story was still far from reaching its conclusion. He wrapped up his pictures, and folded the makeshift stage, neatly stacking it on his Fuji bike. “More, more!” we’d shout. But to no avail. We had to be patient until the next time we heard the noise of his wooden clappers announcing his arrival.

I have seen many great performances since, from far more famous entertainers than this humble candyman, but first impressions are precious as gold. Nothing would ever compare with the magic of Mr. Yamazaki’s paper theater productions. I quite lost myself in his stories, which painted a world that was so much more attractive than the dreary everyday life of our village; not just more attractive, but in a way more real. In the same way that one can feel resentful at having woken up from a particularly vivid dream, I hated it when Mr. Yamazaki’s stories ended in mid-flow. I was hungry for the next episode, even though I already knew exactly what was in store.

There was no reason for Mr. Yamazaki to pay any special attention to me, a fawning, stagestruck little boy, who never bought any candy. But after many days of following him around like a homeless puppy, offering to polish his bicycle, asking him to take me on as his apprentice (as though my father would have let me), he finally deigned to speak to me. It was a hot afternoon. He squatted down by the dusty roadside, mopping his brow with a cotton handkerchief and sipping cold barley tea from his flask. Squinting through the smoke of his cigarette, he asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I said I wanted to be like him, travel around and put on theater performances. I begged him to be my teacher. He didn’t laugh or mock me, but slowly shook his head, and said that it was a hard life, being a performer. He did it because he had no other choice. But I looked like a clever little boy. I could do much better than him. And he had no need for an apprentice, anyway. I must have shown my disappointment, for as a kind of consolation, he reached into his candy bag, fished out a picture book, and handed it to me as a gift.

It was a more precious gift than the candyman could possibly have imagined. I would go so far as to say that it changed my life. For this was my introduction to Suikoden or All Men Are Brothers, my favorite book of all time, my Bible, as it were, whose stories about Chinese swordfighters released into the world during the fourteenth century as demons I learned to recite word for word. I could tell you the stories of all of them, all one hundred and eight heroes: Shishin, the warrior with the nine dragons tattooed on his back; Roshi Ensei; Saijinki Kakusei; and on and on. These immortal warriors, battling in the marshes of central China, were so far removed from the twisted yellow creatures in my father’s woodblock prints that they seemed to be from a different species altogether. They were giants, not cowering dwarfs. They had style, these fighters for justice and honor, and they were free. Perhaps that was the main thing, their sense of unlimited possibility. The Suikoden heroes could only have existed in a vast place like China. Compared to them, Japanese warriors were bumpkins with small dreams, constrained by the narrow boundaries of our small island country.

I read the book over and over until the cheap paper wore so thin that it began to fall apart. Alone, in the yard of our house, I wielded my bamboo sword in imaginary battles against wicked rulers, striking poses I knew from the pictures, putting myself in the roles of Nine-Dragon Shishin or Welcome Rain, the dusky outlaw with his phoenix eyes. We Japanese prize loyalty and honor, but we copied these virtues from the ancient Chinese. Reading All Men Are Brothers made me wonder, even as a child, about the fate of that great nation. How could it have allowed its people to fall so low? I knew better than to ask my father, who had nothing but contempt for “the Chinks.” So I posed the question to Mr. Yamazaki, who tilted his head and sucked in his breath. “I don’t know about such difficult matters,” he said, and told me to study hard, so that one day I would know the answers to all my questions. But even though he was unable to enlighten me on the sad fate of China, he did make room for me in the front row, right under the screen perched on his bicycle, in spite of the fact that I was never able to buy any candy.

2

I FIRST SAW Yamaguchi Yoshiko perform in the great city of Mukden in October 1933. Mukden, which we called Hoten, was the busiest, most cosmopolitan city in Manchuria, more modern even than Tokyo in its best days, before our capital city was turned into a smoldering ruin by the American B-29s.

It was her eyes that left the deepest impression. They were unusually large for an Oriental woman. She didn’t look typically Japanese, nor typically Chinese. There was something of the Silk Road in her, of the caravans and spice markets of Samarkand. No one would have guessed tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Ian Buruma
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents