Dreaming Spies (6 page)

One tends to think of Japanese women as timid, even submissive, but Miss Sato disabused me of that notion in no time. Once convinced that we were in fact interested in both language and customs, she assumed the rôle of a merciless instructor.

Only later did it occur to me that this was the first time I’d actually watched Holmes devour an extended course of information. To be honest, I had to stretch myself to the utmost to keep up with him—whoever coined the phrase about old dogs and new tricks never watched Sherlock Holmes truly apply himself. That first morning, the gears of my brain were on the verge of slipping when came a fortuitous interruption. The library door banged open and in crowded a herd of young men, nervously eyeing the books on the wall, loudly greeting Miss Sato: two Brits, three Yanks, and the matched pair of Aussies—Thomas Darley not among them. One of the Americans asked the steward if he had read all those books. The man smiled politely, and didn’t bother rising from behind his desk to help them.

There were only seven, but with the collective mass of several more. Three of them looked like football players (American football) and two like amateur boxers with their noses still intact. None was older than twenty-three, thus a shade younger than I, and they tumbled across the room like a litter of alarmingly oversized puppies.

“Howdy, Haruki,” said Clifford Adair, clearly the self-appointed wit of the group. “Class starting?”

“You have missed the first lesson,” she told him, friendly but firm. “Mr and Mrs Russell already have their vocabulary assignments.”

“Yeah, well, about that. We were talking, the guys and me, and we thought maybe you could just give us some tips about the other things. Like, the food and the … the baths and things.”

“Japanese customs, not Japanese language?”

“Sure. The kinds of things that, you know, might keep us from putting a foot wrong when we get there.”

It was a surprisingly sensible request. I was relieved when he went on to explain where it had come from.

“Me and Ed here, we were talking to the purser about maybe spending a few days seeing your country, but we’ve heard, well, you do things pretty different there. And we’re willing to give it a go, but the more we hear, the more it seems that we ought to learn the playbook first. The rules, you get it? One of the old guys at dinner last night, he was saying
what an almighty uproar there was in his hotel when he took his bar of soap into the bath-tub and started scrubbing his back. Ended up having to pay a fine—well, not a fine exactly, but an apology, even though it seemed to him that’s what a bath was for. So anyway, the purser said we should talk to you, and we were wondering if you could maybe give us a few, well, lessons, like, on what to eat and how to take a bath and—”

“And taking off your shoes!” Edward Blankenship contributed.

“—and that. And, and … bars and stuff.”

“Bars?”

I bent to murmur into Miss Sato’s ear. She looked up at the young giant in surprise. “Do you mean geisha house?”

All seven males turned bright red and examined their fingernails. She managed to keep control of her mouth, and nodded solemnly. “I see.”

The purser’s suggestion had no doubt been twofold: he not only wished to provide a service (indeed, his income went up when his passengers were kept satisfied), but pursers and stewards were always looking for some means of keeping boredom at bay for the civilians—particularly those large and energetic near-boys apt to work off excess energy by launching into a ship-wide game of tag or blind-man’s bluff, oblivious of any small children and aged ladies in the vicinity. And if he could offer an informal shipboard course with no cost to the ship, so much the better.

Miss Sato had no doubt intended the voyage to be a time of quiet before a busy homecoming. Instead, she was in danger of becoming the centre of an impromptu, three-week-long Japanese university.

“I don’t know that Miss Sato needs to spend her days doing what a decent guide-book could accomplish,” I said repressively, and began to clear away the bits of paper that had accumulated, to illustrate just how much work she had already put in that morning.

But Miss Sato would not be protected. “I do not mind in the least,” she said. “Perhaps we could arrange for use of the library in the afternoon.”

The library steward, whose job seemed to be reading his way through the books on his shelves, stirred, and not from an abundance of enthusiasm.
Without missing a beat, Miss Sato continued. “Or perhaps the Palm Lounge would be better. That would give us more room, if others were interested.”

The young hearties looked as relieved as the steward, if for different reasons. A time was arranged, and the pack eagerly fled the disapproving gaze of a thousand book spines. Miss Sato’s smile was amused.

“Sorry,” I told her. “I don’t imagine you’d intended to spend your whole voyage teaching Westerners.”

“It will help the time to pass quickly.”

The purser proved happy to host Miss Sato’s Lectures for Young Men. In fact, so happy was he that, following the boat-wide lifeboat drill, a notice was posted on the boards beneath the day’s news headlines, directing the passengers’ attention to a talk by Miss Haruki Sato on the topic of Japanese Customs, in the Palm Lounge at 2:30.

When Holmes and I walked in, we found potted palms shoved back to the walls, rows of chairs arrayed before the band’s stage, and a surprisingly large portion of the First Class eager for enlightenment, or at least entertainment. While the purser’s men were bringing more chairs up from the dining room, he bent his head to consult with Miss Sato. Behind them on the low stage stood a half-circle of older Japanese persons, two women and a man. The two older women were snugly wrapped in bright native dress. The man wore a suit and high collar. All held fans.

At 2:31, with sufficient chairs added, the purser and Miss Sato turned to the room. On her face was the firm, expectant look of an experienced school-teacher. Chatter quieted, attention was paid. She gave the room a bow of approval, bowed more deeply to the purser, then took a little step back to grant him the floor.

“Good afternoon,” he said, a vestigial Australian accent emerging as he raised his voice. “You know why you’re here, so I won’t delay matters, but before Miss Sato begins, I’d like to know if anyone here has seen the occupant of cabin 312? Her name is—yes?”

His attention had been caught by a stir at the back of the room. After a minute, Clifford Adair spoke up. “Oh, it was nothing—just that Tommy here has the next rooms.”

“Sorry, I didn’t see her,” Tommy replied: Thomas, Viscount Darley. The purser craned his head a bit to see the second speaker, who was considerably shorter than his hulking fellows.

“Did you hear her at all? Moving around?”

“I probably had the gramophone going,” young Darley said.

“Ah, yes.” The purser might have added,
So, you’re the one the complaints have been about
. But he did not voice his rebuke, merely returned to the question at hand. “The young lady’s name is Miss, er, Roland—Wilma Roland? An American lady, travelling by herself. Did anyone see her? No? Well, no matter,” he said by way of reassurance. “Miss Roland seems to have got left behind, so we’ll ship her cases back to Bombay once we reach Colombo. With no further ado, Miss Haruki Sato.”

Neither Holmes nor I joined in the polite applause, Holmes because he was unconscious of it, and me because I was watching him with growing consternation. He wore his hunting-dog look, as if the purser had just sounded the horn.

“Holmes, what—” But he was up and away, following the purser through the side door.

I half-rose, then sank back: whatever was on his mind, he couldn’t very well leave the ship without me.

At the front of the room, Miss Sato and her fellows were straightening from a group bow. She then turned and bowed to them, a salutation they returned, before all four Japanese citizens sank gracefully to the floor, settling onto their heels, backs straight and hands in their laps. Their fans began to move the sultry air. Heads craned side to side as fifty-some Westerners wondered how on earth two grey-haired women could look so comfortable with their knees on hard boards.

“This is how we sit,” Miss Sato told the room. “In Western-style hotels and restaurants, you will find chairs, but we Japanese live simply, on the floor. Those floors are fitted with soft, clean mats called ‘tatami,’ very thick, woven from a kind of grass. Tatami are quite uniform. Our houses are built around them, so they fit together to keep out draughts from below. Every year, we take each house to pieces and clean it, from attic to foundation: this is required, by our government. Even then, so sorry, you
will often find fleas. All—” She broke off, confused by the chuckles. With a glance at her fellows, she waited until the response subsided, then she resumed. “All year, we sit on the tatami. We take our meals from low tables set on tatami, which also serve our children for doing homework. At night, the tables are moved aside and bedding is brought out from cupboards, and we sleep on the tatami.

“I begin with tatami so you will understand why taking off one’s shoes is so basic to everything in Japan. Think of them not as carpeting, but upholstery. A muddy pair of boots will ruin the house.”

She paused, allowing every mind’s eye to picture the catastrophe of footprints across pristine woven grass. Then she went on.

“But why do we not have floorboards, tiles, and carpeting, like you have in the West? It is not, as you may have heard, because we are a primitive people. Yes, we lived behind locked doors until seventy years ago—but picture, please, what your country would look like if your grandparents had been born into the technology of Elizabethan times.

“However, it is not simply our long isolation. Tell me, how many of you have experienced an earthquake?” Another stir ran through the room, fed by the images that had dominated newspapers for weeks, the previous September. The two largest cities in Japan had been flattened by a huge tremor. Those buildings that survived the shaking later burned in the terrible firestorms. Few of us had been through such a thing ourselves—I had spent part of my childhood in San Francisco, where the 1906 earthquake was an omnipresent memory—but we all nodded our understanding. “Please allow me to warn you: if you find yourself in a brick building when the earth begins to shake, get away from it as quickly as you can. Brick and stone collapse. In Yokohama, half of all the brick buildings fell. Hundreds died. I lost friends, in Tokyo.”

A low murmur of sympathy ran through the room, which she did not acknowledge.

“In Japan, the earth moves often. In a Japanese house, roof tiles may fall, cups and plates may smash, but the house itself is soon repaired. It is built of wooden beams that lock together and move.” She held up her intertwined fingers, by way of illustration. “Traditional Japanese house
not even—
does
not even have windows. If an earthquake destroys a house—or a city—in Japan, it is because of the fire, not the shaking. In September, the earthquake came at a terrible time: at noon, when all the cooking fires were lit. Mr Yamaguchi here is an architect, and he will talk to you about the way the house is made.”

Low bows were exchanged—his not quite so deep as hers—and he began to speak. Mr Yamaguchi’s English was more heavily accented than hers, but clear, and at the end of ten minutes, even the native brick-dwellers in his audience had a glimmer of how this utterly foreign style of house was created. Miss Sato bowed, and then she and the others talked about their homes, not only as machines of shelter but as places of comfort and welcome.

At the end of an hour they rose—rocking back onto their heels and flowing upright as gracefully as they had knelt—and bowed to our applause.

As a lecture, it had been quite impressive, not only leaving fifty strangers with a sense of how the cities they would see functioned, but the inevitability of the choices made by the country’s traditional builders—and why such things as removable shoes and sliding walls were necessary. I had little doubt that even the muscular young men, who had come with little more in mind than lessons in colourful customs, had received instead a degree of insight into how the land, the houses, and the lives that went on inside them were as interlocked as the joints of post and beam, mortise and tenon.

The day was heating up, the Palm Lounge temperature becoming uncomfortable. Many of the audience made for the doors. However, quite a few moved in the other direction, towards the front, to have words with the speakers—or, in the case of the women, to have a closer look at the kimonos. One of those who moved forward had come in towards the end: Lady Darley.

Tiny thread of moon
.

Vast bright cavalcade of stars
.

Dark water beckons
.

I was, as one might imagine, interested in the wife of a blackmailing earl. Charlotte Bridgeford Darley—the name on the printed passenger list—was in her early thirties, with no sign of grey in her shining chestnut hair. She was of medium height and curvaceous enough to look faintly ridiculous in modern fashion geared towards those with my own stick-like torso. Fortunately, she made no such attempt, but chose soft fabrics that draped and complemented, cut in a way that made the young women around her look childish. The rest of her matched: hair short enough for fashion while avoiding the extremes, hands manicured but not showy, necklace and earrings tasteful, solid, and comfortable.