Please Enjoy Your Happiness Read online

  This story is dedicated to those Japanese women from all walks of life who with grace, warmth, and kindness helped Japan rise to new greatness after the disaster of World War II.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 One Fine Day

  2 The Torment

  3 Blue Woman

  4 A Certain Girl

  5 Time of the Typewriter

  6 Man Like a Bear

  7 Spider Woman

  8 Nice Simple Boy

  9 There Is No Forgiveness

  10 Five Simple Rules

  11 The Police Know Everything

  12 Yukiko’s List

  13 The Most Beautiful

  14 The Tower of Lilies

  15 What Is My Joy?

  16 Hall of Flowers

  17 Inappropriate Thinking

  18 Friends and Enemies

  19 Waiting Woman

  20 Am I OK?

  21 Nocturnes

  22 What Men Find Beautiful

  23 The Garden of Grand Vision

  24 We Are Very Sorry

  25 Can You Find It in Your Heart?

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Music and Film References

  Selected Readings, Films, and Music

  Prologue

  In the private world of a sweetheart I once had there was a secret valley, much like Shangri-La. She told me that in that valley her family lived happily and all her lost friends waited for her, their faces happy. Her youthful secrets were there, locked in the ice and snow that ringed her paradise. This imaginary valley was not in Tibet. It was not in Japan. It was somewhere in vast landlocked Manchuria in northern China. It was there that Kaji Yukiko was born. She knew she would never see it again.

  Yukiko was almost a woman when she fled from Harbin, a sophisticated city of Manchuria. Japan surrendered in September 1945, its puppet state in Manchuria was abandoned, and massive Soviet forces moved in, together with vengeful Chinese guerrillas, forcing the 1.7 million Japanese colonists there to flee for their lives. Repatriated, after many hardships, back to Japan, Yukiko became the ultimate outsider in a homeland she did not know. Tall, beautiful, poised, ferociously curious, gifted in languages including Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, and English, she became a plaything of Hiroshima criminals and wealthy businessmen. But, finally, one terrible day, she ran away. In her chest of drawers, on top of her favourite books of poetry, she kept a short sword – a tanto shira – wrapped in deep violet silk, for the inevitable day the gangsters came for her.

  Her past was catching up with her when I met her. She had created a new private world around her interests in literature and music. But she desperately needed someone to confide in, someone to love. She had lost everyone and everything she loved. For her, love had no future.

  I was an outsider too: a young English kid who had enlisted in the US Navy. I was nineteen. The year was 1959. Yukiko was thirty-one when she picked me out of the crowd of sailors in the White Rose, the bar in the seaport of Yokosuka where she worked. She walked up to me with a tired smile and said, ‘Hello.’ I was so inexperienced and tongue-tied I did not know what to say. I was focused completely on how near she was to me, and how her eyes were focused only on me. I still remember the mix of fragrance and heat, and it still has the same effect on my aging body as it did then when I was young.

  ‘What is that book in your hand?’ she asked, in the sort of delicately phrased English that foreigners sometimes speak, unaware that they are putting native speakers to shame.

  ‘It is poetry,’ I said, my face red.

  ‘And who is that poet?’

  ‘I don’t know if you know him. It is Dylan Thomas, the favourite of many young men.’

  She looked at me quickly and in disbelief, not as if I were a fool, or clever, but as if I were a blank sheet of paper on which she could write. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said brightly. ‘Mr Dylan Thomas. The wild man. The free man. I envy him. He once wrote to a woman, “Poetry may not appeal to the intelligent mind more than to the unintelligent.” Isn’t that wonderful! Yes. Let’s go! Let’s talk about that.’

  I looked around the bar. There were about thirty sailors like me, dressed in their white summer uniforms, some drunk, some loud, some sitting cheek to cheek with girls in bright glittery gowns. I could not imagine a discussion like this one was really happening. It was like some kind of dream. And yet, here was this intimidating woman, dressed entirely in black, asking me, ‘How old are you?’ and saying, when I answered, ‘Come with me, sailor boy. Come on!’

  She told me I was without a doubt the first man in the history of the US Navy who dared to enter a Japanese country-and-western bar with a book of poetry in his hands.

  ‘You may need a friend,’ she said. ‘Sailors do not read verse. Someone might pick a fight with you because you carry that book. You are not normal,’ she added, in a kindly manner.

  Thus began an unfinished romance that was also a friendship. It started right there, in a darkened corner booth upholstered in black vinyl as if it were the back seat in a teenager’s Chevy. As I have grown into my seventies, I have come to accept that this romance is still going on. Even now it haunts me. It survives, bobbing up and down on the surface of my life, which has had its share of disappointments. At times it becomes spectral, and now it is compelling me to write about what happened in the middle months of 1959. I heard that voice again, full of excitement and anticipation: ‘Come on! Come on!’

  But this is not a ghost story. This is a story about a real young man – myself – and a real woman. It was Yukiko who stripped illusions from the realities of life and showed me what it takes to be a man. It was her ‘duty’, she said, to educate me in poetry, writing, language, and opera, and to familiarize me with films from the golden age of Japanese cinema and those moody songs about broken hearts known as enka. Her actions allowed me to appreciate the importance of loyalty, honour, respect, and courage.

  She urged me to live life without regret: to live a life without love if need be.

  She predicted with a great deal of conviction in her long letters that I would become a writer and said she knew she would read about me some day. She spent hours typing those letters as if they were manuscripts, infusing them with poetry from forgotten ages and those tough enka lyrics – about hopeless love, two-timing men, abandoned women, drunken nights, lost innocence, futile longing – that might as well have been written about her own struggle to survive.

  She told me she would always remember what we had shared together after I sailed away forever. That inevitable day was coming. I could not stay. If I had jumped ship, I would have ended up in jail. She asked me many, many times to promise that I would never forget her. She asked for that in her letters. She asked me in person, staring at me with an intensity that I, a mere boy, did not understand but which I appreciate now. I have not forgotten her. Do you remember me, Yukiko?

  I began considering the idea of writing this book as a series of new letters to Yukiko some time in 2012. I started after a night in the Blue Marlin Bar in San José, Costa Rica, where men my age sometimes go into tailspins talking about their regrets, some about the women they once loved, which also means the women they will always love. Of course, I thought of Yukiko. But where were her letters? I needed them – I needed their magical qualities to help me write with the kind of passion my friendship with her deserved. It took me a while, but a few weeks later I found them in the poetry section of my personal library, tucked into a thick volume of notebooks written by Gerard Manley Hopkins. One letter was handwritten with a fountain pen in the cursive script of disciplined penmanship taught in classrooms long ago. The other letters were typed.

  As soon as
my fingers touched the paper the letters were written on I realized what they were. I stepped back from the shelves and propped up the pillows on my battleship grey couch, which is a wonderful place to read and nap. I read the letters one by one, slowly, in chronological order. I have ten of them. There were more, but somewhere in my long life the rest disappeared, although I do have the notes I made about them when I was correcting Yukiko’s use of English at her request. I read the letters again, and then to my surprise I started sobbing. It was almost like having a broken heart, except that I was thrilled and happy and, strangely, also a little chagrined. I realized that I had been so young when she wrote to me that I had not appreciated how much effort she had made, often with the use of her hefty Sanseido’s Japanese–English Dictionary, to lay bare her heart on the softness of this paper made from the leaves of mulberry trees.

  I read the letters yet again, this time out loud. I could hear the sound of her voice speaking to me through the static noise of half a century of life that included three broken marriages and all the anguish that went with them, but also the joys of fatherhood, living a full life, and professional success. I have had relationships with several remarkable women during those years. But in that moment it dawned on me that none of those relationships was as compelling and challenging as the one I had with Kaji Yukiko. Her letters are the soul of this story.

  These chapters are a tribute to Yukiko and my hope is that readers will find that the friendship she shared was a gift to a very young man who would like in sombre old age to say thank you. The chapters are, in effect, one long letter or a series of letters to this woman who so profoundly influenced my life. To help the reader understand the historical context, geography and the literary interests of Kaji Yukiko, I occasionally make digressions, many of which Yukiko used to help me understand her world. She might not agree with some of my interpretations and conclusions but I know full well she would enjoy debating and discussing them and, if she thought it was necessary, correcting them with her characteristic humour and care.

  A Note on the Text

  The reader should know that I have changed Yukiko’s real first and last name so that if she reads this some day she can chuckle privately and enjoy her cup of green tea. I have followed the Japanese convention that family names precede personal names, although in practice Yukiko always referred to herself as Yukiko Kaji in conversations with me. However, from this point forward she will be Kaji Yukiko. Japanese people are accustomed to various renditions of their personal names. ‘Yukiko’ is the formal version. ‘Yuki’ is informal and would be used among friends and family. ‘Yuki-chan’ is informal and is used among friends and family to show affection for someone who is endeared. It is also common to add -chan to a name when addressing a child. In a respectful setting, Kaji Yukiko would be addressed as Kaji-san – the -san being an honorific. None of this I knew in 1959.

  More than fifty years have passed since Yuki and I first met in 1959. I have had to invent most of the dialogue. I have tried to remain true to Yuki’s manner of speaking, a task actually not that difficult, because she was unique and because she was my teacher, and we listened carefully and we talked and talked until there was moonlight and midnight. I do remember key expressions and phrases Yuki used. While not fluent in English, she delighted in using a level of speech that had a striking intelligence and uniqueness. She loved to quote lines from Japanese, English, and Chinese poetry. She kept in her purse a large notebook with a black cover full of translated poetry and song lyrics. When she was not pouring drinks at the White Rose, she spent hours studying at the city library or listening to educational programmes and jazz and classical music on Tokyo radio stations. The reader can hear Yuki’s voice in her letters, many of which are presented here verbatim. Other letters include the editing changes she asked me to make. I have had to use the same inventiveness with other characters in the book, again trying to stay as true to the events as I remember them.

  1

  One Fine Day

  The months and days are the travellers of eternity.

  The years that come and go are also voyagers.

  BASHŌ MATSUŌ 1

  Kaji Yukiko! I have your letters. I found them again after all these years. One is written, so neatly, so carefully, in blue ink. You typed the others on your Smith Corona portable. The paper is still creamy white and soft, as if it were made of silk. When I read your letters this afternoon, it was as if you were still speaking to me. I could hear your voice – strong, determined, wilful, elegant. You can tell from the tenor of my voice, I think, how emotional that moment was for me. You once said, when I was nineteen, that you read each of your letters out loud before you put it in the mail, so that when I opened the envelope I would hear the sound of your voice. ‘I will be a bird, sitting in a tree,’ you said. ‘If you keep my letters and read them again, you will hear me singing.’ That was in April 1959 in the seaport of Yokosuka, Japan. The long rainy season was beginning. It is now 2014 and the year is coming to an end. It is Christmas and, as usual, I am alone. Your letters are spread out on my bed. I have read them all again, closely. They demand to be read closely. Talk to me, Yuki! Talk to me, because there is not much time left. I am seventy-five now. You – if you still live – are at least eighty-six. I can hear your voice clearly but have been struggling to recall exactly how you looked when we knew each other more than half a century ago. It has been at least twenty-five years since the last black-and-white photograph I had of you was destroyed when my damned roof in Bisbee, Arizona, started leaking. All I can visualize now are the outlines of your face. Your Manchurian face. The hard lines of your face, as if it had been chiselled out of stone and never loved. The jet-black hair down to your shoulders, with your fringe cut straight over your fierce eyes. How serious you were.

  I remember that you were born in the depths of winter in Harbin, China. Your name, Yukiko, means Snow Child. When World War II was ending and the Soviets stormed into the Japanese colony in cold northern China, your family fled south to try to find a ship that would take you to safety in Japan. Your eyes were full of tears when you told me in the White Rose that your father had been killed and your brothers died, and then it was just you and your mother trying to escape.

  It was dark in that bar where we often met when my ship, the USS Shangri-La, was in port. In the gloom, you were a tall, thin shadow, like you are now when I imagine you. You thought it was so funny that I was a sailor on an attack aircraft carrier loaded with nuclear weapons but named after a mythical paradise. I remember you pulled out a dictionary and you found the word irony and you said, ‘When I am old, I am going to remember this very funny thing.’

  Maybe you are with your grandchildren now, your back bent, on your knees, the children demanding. Have you told them that for a few months you knew a young sailor who helped you with your English, who captured your heart and to whom you read poetry? I think probably not. You may still be the shy though assertive one. Are you an orderly, obedient Japanese? Now I am the one who is laughing! There is simply no way you could ever be submissive or just a face in the crowd. You were the woman who discussed the poet Bashō Matsuō with me soon after we met on 15 April, 1959. You waved dismissively in my face when I talked naively about Jack Kerouac. You were the woman who insisted that haiku was preferable, very much so, to On the Road’s stream of consciousness.

  ‘Haiku are shorter than short,’ you said in your careful English, ‘but the content is profound. A good haiku is like a single snowdrop peeping through the ice. On the Road goes on forever. It is like an airplane crash.’

  You didn’t like Johnny Cash and his ‘Hillbilly Heaven’ either, and I don’t blame you, because that is what they played so loudly at the White Rose when the sailors came to drag you out to the dance floor. You would stagger back to the booth where I sat, muttering, ‘Gershwin . . . Miles . . . Are they just a dream?’

  I do not have copies of the letters I sent to you. But I do have the poetry I wrote at your urging, whi
ch I included with every letter I mailed to you. It is probably better that I do not have my letters. What did I know about love and longing when I was nineteen? Japanese women often said with a giggle that I looked like Anthony Perkins. ‘Oh no, Paul-san,’ you said. ‘You look like me: a refugee.’ And there was some accuracy in that, because I was an immigrant kid on a four-year US Navy enlistment who was not yet an American citizen. I was only two years off the boat from Europe. I was a stranger in a strange land made even stranger by the shock of sudden immersion in things Japanese. The more that interest grew, the less I liked certain things about the United States. Ice-cold Coca-Cola – that was fine. Segregation. Guns. Ignorance. Intolerance. It didn’t take much for a kid like me, who carried a thirty-five-cent paperback copy of James A. Michener’s Sayonara in his kitbag, to realize that I would be a rebel and a ronin (masterless samurai) all my life, no matter where I was. You told me that. You also predicted in your letters that I would become a writer, all of which happened, although I suppose you do not know that.

  I still have that copy of Sayonara. It was printed on cheap paper, so its pages are yellowing. Maybe you remember the book? We talked about the story for hours, and I told you how Lieutenant Commander Charlie L. Peeples, the Protestant chaplain on my ship, did his best to warn the entire crew of 3,448 men that getting involved with a Japanese woman, and especially attempting to marry one, was against ‘command policy’, pretty much the way it was in Sayonara. You and I had to sneak into those sections of Yokosuka that were off-limits to navy personnel just to have an undisturbed conversation and sip coffee. Do you remember how angry I was, and how much I hated everything I thought was unjust and unfair? You were so worried. You didn’t want us to end up like the American officer and the Japanese actress, unhappy and torn apart by the rules. Here is that copy of Sayonara with the naked geisha on it which we passed from hand to hand many times when we talked about that love story. The cover is coming loose. I treated that book as a talisman. It went with me to Vietnam and Cambodia in the war years. For me, the story still rings true. I read the book in Saigon and Phnom Penh. During my long career as a journalist, it went with me to Manila, to Cuba, to China, to Argentina. I know how to lose myself in impossible love. You taught me that.