Orbit 9 Read online

  Iwahashi said nothing. His provincial-minded colleagues thought of him as a tainted expatriate simply because he had been out of the country for more than six months. But he had won favor with the Ministry of Education for that. And it was they who had sent him to check up on Mochizuki’s work.

  Another student assistant extended a black hood that opened out and masked Ito’s face. For the while he saw darkness and rested.

  Dr. Mochizuki pointed a finger and yet another student trotted over with the folio of drawings the tsukisoi had put down. She was now slowly massaging her patient’s back.

  “Ito-san is very good at keeping track of all this technical detail,” said Mochizuki, flipping through pages of architectural, landscape, and military drawings. “The main actors are all here,” he waved a hand at the mannequins, “dressed in all their changes of costume. Or at least he used to keep everything straight. That’s the whole trouble.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Iwahashi. He meant he would see if the. project were worth saving or not. Probably not.

  Buddhalike, Ito-san sat on the matting with his face cupped in the hood. He saw a rectangle come out of the darkness in the ratio of 1:2.55. The tsukisoi stopped rubbing his back and nodded to the cameraman.

  The slave screen before Iwahashi’s eyes lighted up.

  He could see, from the torn edges of the uneven picture, that horses, chariots, rice bags, arms, and other military supplies were being loaded on river barges, ready for dispatch against the enemy down the Yangtze.

  But the picture went to pieces almost as soon as it had started.

  Dr. Mochizuki stood up and shouted. “Failure! A great failure!”

  The cameraman crept out with little hunched-over motions. The tsukisoi came up and asked leave to go to the movies. Mochizuki nodded and sadly watched her go. And Ito-san got up on his knees and made noises sounding like, “So sorry.”

  “That’s new,” said Mochizuki.

  “Will he be all right?” asked Iwahashi.

  “He lives here,” replied Mochizuki. “Let us please quit for the day.”

  * * * *

  Ito-san had the run of the whole twelfth floor of the new engineering building. He would trouble no one. Dr. Iwahashi knew that. He was famous for his comparative study of American and Japanese mental hospitals. He viewed the hospital ward as a small society, a kind of natural human community as suitable to anthropological fieldwork as any tribal home. In reporting his findings in the Japanese Journal of Psychiatry, before popularizing them in the newspapers, he could not resist delivering the following acid remarks:

  We note with some irony that mental patients in America, that self-advertised homeland of democracy, are segregated into different classes as measured by the ruling ethic of social adjustment, which classes are meted out their custodial rewards in terms of placement in violent wards, general wards, or open wards. In Japan, still undemocratic in its feudal infrastructure—a condition our American critics never tire of exposing—mental patients enjoy unmitigated commonality. This equality under one class of confinement is enabled by the fact that we Japanese are so disciplined a race that even when we go mad, we go mad politely, with no disobedience to authority, no unguarded lapse of consideration for others, no unexpected breech of decorum, and no interruption of politesse.

  Ito-san was simply installed in the laboratory where the experiment in bionic moviemaking was being conducted. The room contained a gas heater, a hot plate for cooking rice, and a four-mat platform: high-class quarters for a tsukisoi and her patient.

  The times the tsukisoi had gone to the movies, which had become increasingly frequent, Ito paged idly through the script or strolled up and down the hallway in his clogs, whose sound of wooden kalumping gave Dr. Mochizuki an easy means of tracking him by ear.

  * * * *

  After the laboratory failure, the two professors, leading a double procession of loyal students, retired to a small coffee shop across the street from the university grounds. A plaster cast of a Picasso bronze, an owl, sat in the front window as an emblem of the democratic comforts of informal lounging to which the coffee shop invited its seekers, faculty and students alike. Numerous other works of Western art, paintings of English landscapes and statues of naked Greeks, crowded the walls and corners of the tiny room.

  The place was filled with male art students, their long hair internationally styled, one to a table, paying for their majestic, foreign-style privacy with demitasse Columbian coffee at the steep price of seventy-five yen a cup. The manager waved away the student at the window table to make room for the herr doktor professors, while the anthropology and engineering majors descended on the rest of the tables and ordered soft drinks. Drs. Iwahashi and Mochizuki drank beer. They looked out on a miniature courtyard, a sentimental rural scene of moss, paddle wheels, and recycled dripping water, glassed-in like a museum diorama and artificially illuminated. From time to time, in orderly succession, according to their class standing, one or two students would migrate over and sit at the professorial table to listen and ask questions.

  At one point a person unknown to either one of them sat down and asked Dr. Iwahashi about his newspaper articles on American and Japanese mental hospitals. Did teacher believe, then, that Westernism was a kind of disease that had to be kept out of the motherland in order to preserve Japanese sanity?

  “Oh?” asked Dr. Iwahashi coolly, not even turning his head to the speaker. “Are you one of our students?”

  The person quickly removed himself and his misplaced communication and returned to a remote table where he nursed with melancholy intensity a German translation of Mao Tse-tung’s poetry.

  “Some of these modern students have no manners,” Iwahashi said to his colleague Mochizuki. “Just because I write for the mass media, I get mass man on my tail.”

  Mochizuki reached for a peanut and munched it, cupping a hand before his mouth by way of concealing the unlovely sight of teeth and jaws at work.

  “But you technical people,” Iwahashi went on, “are paid enough so you don’t have to chase after the mass media for your children’s tuition money.”

  A bona fide student took his place as soon as the conversation drifted away from personal matters.

  “I wanted to say,” offered Iwahashi in all friendliness, “that you really sounded like one of the old-timebenshi back there awhile ago.”

  “It couldn’t be helped,” said Mochizuki with a trace of overloudness. He checked this show of feeling, revealed in his defensive tone of voice. “I mean, we didn’t have a sound track.”

  The current supplicant put forth his question:

  “Benshi? What is a benshi?”

  Both professors laughed at that, Iwahashi with easy, body moving mirth, Mochizuki with a stiff sniggle.

  “Why, then, I’ll tell you,” boomed Dr. Iwahashi. He was a veritable Sam Johnson at explaining things during these typical extracurricular afternoons, unlike his formal classroom self.

  “When movies came to Japan, they had a benshi standing out in the wings to explain the action. Talkies, which came in long before your time, naturally put the benshi out of business.”

  “That is so,” said Dr. Mochizuki.

  “Not only that,” added Dr. Iwahashi, “there was another man waiting at the top of a stepladder with a bucket of water, ready to dump it on the screen after each reel. Ha! What do you think of that? All that bright light beaming down out of the arc lamp, poured through a hot focus onto the paper screen down there—it might catch fire, you know. Hence, the little man with a bucket of water to cool it off, just in case.”

  Mochizuki reached for another peanut and chewed it aggressively, without covering his mouth. He could abide no insult to technology, ancient or modern.

  “Do you remember,” asked Dr. Iwahashi of the student, “when they first showed Rashomon in town? Kurosawa won first prize for that at Cannes in 1951, the first film Japan ever sent out to an international festival. Nobody back home understood it. So Daiei s
tudios sent out benshi talkers to explain things.

  “The trouble is,” Dr. Iwahashi went on, “that Hollywood products are too very much popular.”

  “Hai!” said Mochizuki with an explosive sound of positive agreement.

  “That’s why the Board of Scientific and Technological Development is interested in Dr. Mochizuki.”

  “Hai!”

  “The commercial development of his device will make Japanese movies more popular at home and help keep out so many foreign films. This will help our balance of payments, too.”

  * * * *

  The day the experiment in bionic moviemaking ended, Ito-san walked into Dr. Mochizuki’s office, stood there until noticed, then, straightening his winter wool kimono with courtly dignity, he kneeled to the floor, kowtowing, and distinctly said: “I cannot do it, teacher, I cannot do it.” And leaning forward, forehead on the floor, he cried great quaking, relieving sobs of tears.

  * * * *

  Displeased to learn that his marvel of bionic engineering must shut down for want of a stable telepath, Mochizuki sent for Iwahashi.

  When the message arrived, Professor Iwahashi was in the midst of his Thursday afternoon class. He took the folded note from his tiptoeing office secretary, read it, and dismissed her. He decided matters could wait until he finished the lecture.

  “This classroom, its furnishing, your clothing, personal belongings, all are of Western origin. Even the subject of my lectures is a branch of Western learning. Brought up and educated in these surroundings, few of you must find it easy to retain any culture which you can call your own.”

  Dr. Iwahashi surveyed the high-collared Admiral Perry uniforms of his students.

  “What, after all, can be claimed as absolutely native to this country?”

  The students of comparative social behavior fingered their class pins, another foreign culture trait, in a state of high anxiety.

  Dr. Iwahashi bore down on them.

  “It is in the social conduct of your human relations that you are Japanese, if in nothing else. Be that! Remember the art of ki-ga-tsuku.”

  Dr. Iwahashi tugged at the wings of his vest and tipped forward on the thin soles of his French patent leather shoes.

  “Questions.” He asked for them with a statement and departed the classroom.

  The academic secretary, who had been sitting there all the time, hung his head respectfully until the sound of hard heels turned from the hallway and into the professor’s office.

  A student in the second row stood up and asked: “Pardon me, but I do not yet understand this business aboutki-ga-tsuku. How is this so different from the behavior of foreigners? I do not understand what teacher is trying to tell us.”

  Noises of agreement were made by the rest of the class.

  Set off to one side of the lectern at a little rickety table, the teacher’s minion sat: a ruined, tubercular little pinch of a man dressed in a soiled suit. He put down his cigarette in slow motion, as if returning from a paradise of intellectual preoccupation to serve dolts, and blew out the last sick lungful of smoke.

  It was he, the disciple, now that the master had left the room, who had to come right out in the open with this obscene talk about the private parts of social behavior.

  He made cupping movements with his hands, scooping for that elusive balance between charitable clarity and selfish obfuscation required of a scholar as yet not sufficiently established to talk all in riddles.

  “Unlike foreigners, Japanese do not like to say what they mean. If we say what we mean we are as naked persons, undressed in the world.”

  The secretary sensed that he had gone too far with his conceit and lit a fresh cigarette. He did so nervously, however, and exposed the package to reveal the brand, Golden Bat, the inexpensive favorite of old-time farmer folk, at once dating his taste and discrediting his claim to win a faculty position in the department.

  Another student rose up to ask what, after all, was so bad about the behavior of the foreigners?

  “Take the Americans for example. They are direct and informal with each other. None of this body ritual we go through, such as bowing and hissing; none of this verbal ritual, such as saying yes when you mean no. Why shouldn’t we Japanese also adopt rational and efficient customs for ourselves?”

  The secretary ignored the question. He held out with dogged silence until somebody else stood up. It was the first student.

  “Yes, that is my question. What is it, as teacher tells us, that makes us truly Japanese inside?” With a twist of his class pin the student sat down.

  The secretary talked to this point with professional ease.

  “I refer you to chapter eight of teacher’s most famous work, Patterns of Japanese Interpersonal Behavior.”

  The secretary thumbed through his copy of the textbook.

  “That is the chapter entitled,‘The Art of Ki-Ga-Tsuku What does teacher mean by ki-ga-tsuku! He has talked about this many times. I will repeat it for you.”

  Dr. Iwahashi’s secretary flattened out the pages he would talk from. He ducked his cigarette pack under the table and drew out a fresh Golden Bat. It was loosely rolled and he had to twist the ends before lighting it. He spoke from memory, of course, because he had written the book, and many others like it, from his master’s lectures. Theoretically, the long years of feudal servitude on the part of the secretary would pay off with a professorship for himself. Then he, too, would be able to designate a promising young scholar to care for his own later years.

  “Ki-ga-tsuku has this meaning: to find out what the other person intends to do. It is a game of perception. But it is different from the one played by Westerners. Foreigners want always to understand each other. Just as they come to Japan and try to understand the Japanese people.”

  Appreciative laughter issued from the class at this, and the secretary reached out and touched the pages of the book possessively.

  “We Japanese do not try to understand. We don’t want to know why, we want to know what. We don’t care about reasons, about motivations. Those are unclean matters. Concern for them is bad for the character.

  “Our Japanese society is much more wholesome. Everybody’s role in our society is fixed and identified like a piece on the chessboard. When we encounter another Japanese we have only to guess what his next move will be. Who cares why he makes it? To guess why is to get involved in the sticky threads of another’s inner life. We in our formal society are free individuals undefiled by contact with the motivations of others.”

  The classroom was quiet. The secretary, now that he had the class with him, smoked his Golden Bat with pride

  “It is still the mission of the Japanese people to improve the character of the inferior races of the world. Allow me to quote the words of our late departed General Sadao Araki: ‘The spirit of the Japanese nation is, by its nature, a thing that must be propagated over the seven seas and extended over the five continents.’ “

  * * * *

  Dr. Iwahashi scuffed his way through the fallen leaves of the great ginkgo trees that dominated the Hongo campus. Neighborhood people were moving about, bent over, picking up the last of the ginkgo nuts for roasting.

  Only one structure rose above the trees, the new engineering building, the first of the new constructions over eight stories put up by the university after the new earthquake regulations were put into effect.

  The building was faced with glazed tiles; inside, it sported a pair of automatic stainless steel elevators. Iwahashi rode up to the twelfth floor and walked down halls of modern beauty and lighting. How unlike the halls of anthropology, with its cramped quarters, crammed with loose stacks of wooden drawers at the top of a walkup of unimproved cinderblock construction.

  Inside the engineer’s office a dented aluminum pot boiled on a gas heater. Mochizuki extended the hospitality. He tipped the spout into a strainer packed with damp leaves of green tea and the bubbling hot water went steaming into the porcelain cup.

  Iwahashi step
ped across the snaky red gas tubing and received the cup in both hands in an act at once of polite formality and of self-seeking warmth.

  After a long moment there in the grey twilight of a late afternoon in winter, Iwahashi said:

  “I’ve arranged for Ito-san to be taken home. Come with me and I’ll treat you at your favorite seafood restaurant.”

  The two of them jostled comfortably, not speaking, in the rush-hour crowds of the Marunouchi line and got off at Shinjuku station. They waited in line to enter Kikumasa, where tired businessmen took it easy on the way home with a little beer and raw fish. Finally, when their turn came, they sat facing each other at long stone benches, surrounded on high by great ornate platters that once had served the feasting tables of the Tokugawa barons. Surrounded by the clatter and delighted sounds of eating and enthusiastic talk on all sides of them, the two professors wiped faces and hands with the warm, wet towels set before them and prepared to order.