Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (8 page)

Yes, he knew all that, but if he lost this job he would have to leave Tokyo and go back to Ibaraki. No, he didn't think he could get another job this good. And did tattooing hurt?

Saburo was, I saw, a person caught in an archetypal situation; but he was already predisposed. The pain of being excluded was greater than the pain of having his skin needled.

- At least it wouldn't cost much. They said they'd pay half and the other half could come out of my wages. It's expensive, you know, tattooing.

It was not only the pressures he was thinking of. He was also thinking of the joys of conforming. And after all, he added, smiling,
shikataganai de sho
, it can't be helped, I suppose.

No, it can't be helped. Not even when it can. So he finished his cocoa and stood up, smiled, and thanked me for this opportunity to discuss his problem, to
sodan suru,
to help him make up his mind.

I did not see Saburo again until several weeks later. It was again at the bathhouse. This time he was seated on a low stool, and Fudo and Kannon were crouched on either side of him. Fudo was drawing hot water and testing it with his finger. Kannon with a soapy rag was carefully washing Saburo's back on which were the deep blue lines of Koi-Taro, a popular and husky little boy riding a carp up a waterfall.

- It's just bound to hurt a little bit at first, said Fudo solicitously: And the hot water is going to hurt a little more. But you just put up with it, you
gamman suru
, like a man,
otoko rashiku.

Kannon smiled in a motherly fashion and said: It's the red hurts the most. But Taro doesn't have much red in him so that's okay.

- He ought to lie down after, said Fudo, worried: Yes, you do that. We can cover for you easy at the shop. No, sir. You got to take care of yourself now that you're one of us.

Up to my ears in the hot water, I looked at the two of them as they soaped and rinsed the boy. He turned and saw me there.

And he smiled—a wide, secure, contented smile.

Though in his final year at university, just about to go out and make a living, he—unlike many—retained much of his childhood: liked stag beetles, would turn and watch moths or butterflies, stop to listen to the cicadas of late summer, loved trees.

Born in Kyoto, going to school in Osaka, he seemed in the midst of the concrete city to remember those bamboo groves and foothill forests left behind in the old capital.

On Sundays, after breakfast, he would sometimes want to go to Sumiyoshi Shrine and wander through the park.

- Why do you want to do that? Let's go to the movies, I would say.

- We can go to the movies later, he would answer in that reasoned, boyish way of his: But we can go to Sumiyoshi now.

Once there we never did much. He would walk about and admire the trees, sometimes running his hand over the bark. Though quite tall, on the basketball team, getting ready to leave school, he still looked very young.

But then he graduated and the next time I saw him he was wearing that expression one sees on young men just out of university, just into the real world. It is not exactly shock, but there is something dazed about it. It is the look of someone to whom something incomprehensible has happened.

The incomprehensible had been the sudden revelation of the world as it is, not as school and a sheltered life had indicated. Like most graduates, Kitakawa was unprepared.

In his own way, particularly so. He had wanted to study natural history but his parents had insisted on something practical—business management. What he had learned in such a discipline I never knew. He did not talk about it, did not seem interested in it. And now, suddenly, he was to make his living by it.

- Everyone goes through this, I said, unhelpfully.

We were not in leafy Sumiyoshi but in concrete Dotombori, having been to a movie about a sports champ who makes good.

- I didn't know it would be like this, though. Anyway, I passed the company exam. I go to work next week.

- What kind of company?

- A paint company.

A paint company—could anything have been further from his interests, I wondered.

A few months later he came to Tokyo, to visit the home office, as he put it. I suggested we meet at Hibiya.

As the sun went down and we were walking through the park, he said: It's so good to get outside like this again.

- You don't much in Osaka?

- Oh, no, they work you all the time ... You know, they paint just about everything in this company I'm with now.

- Well, that's their business.

- But even the most beautiful pieces of wood. Like the pillars in the house—the
tokonoma.
They've started to paint those now. Did you know that?

- No, I didn't. They must look rather strange.

- Awful, he said softly.

Then he looked up at the branches outlined against the evening sky, and I wondered how long this gentle person would last with his paint company.

Later I thought of him, back in Osaka, in cap and apron, stirring up batches of paint; saw him practicing brushstrokes, making sure the bright colors went on smoothly; envisioned him, now all dressed up—matching tie and breast-pocket hankie—going from door to door with his color charts.

As always happens to new employees, he was kept very busy. Coming in at the bottom, as one invariably did, there were many jobs to be learned before the business-management level was attained.

He could not come to Tokyo and I did not go to Osaka, so an entire year passed without our seeing each other. Then one weekend I went down. We arranged to meet in the lobby of a hotel near his office.

It wasn't that I didn't recognize him. Of course I did, but the change was there too, the subtle difference. The tall basketball player's body now seemed heavier, less supple. And the triangular face, usually that of someone younger, had matured, turned squarish, less mobile. We shook hands and his grip was firm.

- They really keep me busy, he said over dinner.

- Doing what?

- Well, I'm the only one in my section who majored in business management and so they need me for my skills.

- For your skills? I asked, surprised.

The surprise must have shown.

- Yes, he said, for an instant shy, then more nearly belligerent than I had ever, seen him: That was my major, after all.

Then, as though apologizing, he smiled. This was something I remembered. But once it had been a boy's smile; now it was merely boyish.

- They really run your ass off in that company of mine, he continued: Would you believe it—I don't get home till ten or eleven every night?

- Door-to-door the whole time?

- No, no. I didn't have to do that for long. I told you. Business management. You see, it's a growing concern, so we all have to pull together.

After dinner I asked where he wanted to go.

- I don't know. Dotombori? But I can't stay late. Got to get up early. Conference tomorrow morning with the boss.

- On Sunday?

- On Sunday.

- Well, let's see then. How about a walk in Sumiyoshi?

- Sumiyoshi? It's dark ... Oh—you remember we used to go there. It was nice, wasn't it? But that was in the daytime when we could see things, right? They've got this new film on downtown.
The Bridge on the River Kwai.

There was a silence, each of us thinking of different things. Then: I wonder if trees sleep, I asked. It was indeed something I had sometimes wondered about. Fish slept with their eyes open. Perhaps trees slept too.

He looked at the gilded ceiling of the restaurant for a second, as though thinking, or as though looking through it to the sky above.

- Maybe, he said, then: No, I don't think so. They're asleep all the time.

- Or awake, I said.

He smiled, then looked up again, the movement I remembered, the mouth half-open, as though in wonder at the firmament.

- Just look at that, he said, gazing at the ceiling: I wonder who got that contract.

Short, youngish, eyes already ringed with fatigue and heavy smoking, he was a successful businessman—a publisher. His was a small company but, as he often said in his excellent English, "quite vital, actually."

It was "vital" in the field of children's books, and every year the Frankfurt Book Fair was brightened by stacks of his illustrated English versions of
Little Red Riding Hood
and
Hansel and Gretel
and other works in the public domain.

They were inexpensively made, the unit cost far below that of the competition, and they sold well—particularly to countries like Kenya—but Obayashi wanted more. More precisely, he wanted prestige. That was where I came in.

A published author, I had recently returned from a post at a famous American museum and was now presumably in search of a position. He believed that if he hired me I could help him attain prestige. He would publish books on art and literature and sell to countries other than those in Africa.

So he began to woo me. Having a friend in common made it easy for him to invite me for a friendly drink and then a friendly dinner. And since he wanted to impress me, the drink was at the old bar of the Imperial Hotel, and the dinner was at Kicho with its Kyoto food, electronic nightingales, and high prices. Afterward, there was this little place he knew, the notoriously expensive hostess club L'Espoir where the beautiful women, knowing at once who to make a fuss over, admired my tie, snuggled closer, and put a hand on my thigh, while Mr. Obayashi—no, you must call me Hiro, you're a friend—lit up yet another Hope.

After a number of such evenings, I finally agreed to work for this ambitious man and his vital company because I needed the salary—high—and the sponsorship—seemingly secure. Dom Pérignon was opened, a gentleman's agreement was shaken on, and the hostesses applauded.

When I reported to work, however, I found a new desk and an electric pencil sharpener but no duties. I had been acquired but as yet my employer had not decided what to do with me. Perhaps he thought I would simply generate my own work.

- You are to do as you want to. We are proud to have a person like yourself on our staff. As you know, we are having a modest success with our children's line but we would like to expand into something more prestigious—even if it's less lucrative. Here, my dear Mr. Richie, is where you play your part.

Being a gentleman publisher was appealing (though in real life I never actually met one), and I began a series of memos to the president which were as prestigious as anything he could have hoped for. I remember recommending an illustrated edition of the
Kojiki
, a publication which would have had all the sales potential of an illustrated edition of
Beowulf;
a multi-volume history of Buddhist art; and the first English translation of Paul Claudel's Japan diaries.

To each of these ideas Hiro paid what appeared to be close attention. He seemed to be considering their merits in a manner which did justice to my cultural acumen. And it was with what appeared to be actual regret that he found reasons for not adopting them. Never, however, because they would make no money, for he had already told me that prestige was something he could afford to pay for. In the meantime I was to consider his office as my own and to come to see him whenever I wished—he always had time for someone as prestigious as myself.

His house was also to be considered mine as well, and I was often invited to a dinner of Kobé steak and Mouton-Rothschild and asked to admire the majolica plates off which we were eating and the real Bernard Buffet lithograph on the wall.

His wife would sit with us (none of this old-fashioned keeping the spouse in the kitchen) after serving us. She was a vivacious woman, inclined to be talkative, but kept on a short leash. Hiro often interrupted her, never laughed at her social sallies, and when she mentioned Marie Laurencin told her she didn't know what she was talking about.

It was here that I saw his other side. He had been a kamikaze pilot during World War II, I knew—one of the few who either got back or were never sent—and he believed in discipline. Telling his wife to shut up and go and open another bottle was part of this.

So was browbeating poor Mr. Yago, his production manager, whom I would sometimes hear him shouting at—usually about getting the price down and not caving in to those rapacious paper dealers, those thieving bindery people.

With me, however, he was wise father and benevolent older brother. I was given no glimpse of the do-or-die kamikaze cadet, and it seemed I could do no wrong. At the same time, nothing I proposed ever got accomplished. I lowered my aim a bit and suggested the
Kojiki
as a children's book, maybe with a seven-headed dragon pop-up.

What a good idea, he said, but that pop-up would have to be all handwork and the people who did that were notorious robbers and he really didn't want to throw money away on them. So he smiled ruefully, reached for another Hope, and told me I was always welcome to come and talk with him; and if I had nothing to do, well, I had that new typewriter now and there were probably books of my own I wanted to write.