Linnear 01 - The Ninja (21 page)

Satsugai was not a large man, either in terms of height or of bulk. Yet for all that he was nevertheless quite remarkable. He was massive through chest and belly with squat legs and arms that appeared to be far too short for his body. His head seemed to be cemented onto his shoulders without the benefit of an intervening neck. His head was a perfect oval covered on top by jet black hair cut en brosse, which, to Nicholas at least, added to his military bearing. His face was flat but not in a typically Japanese manner. His eyes, for instance, were distinctly almond-shaped and as glossily black as hard chips of obsidian but they slanted upwards at their outer corners and this oddity, combined with his flat, high cheekbones and the deep yellow colours of his skin, bespoke his Mongol heritage. Nicholas could think of him, without much difficulty at all, as some reincarnation of Genghis Khan. This was not so outlandish as it at first might seem for, recalling his history, Nicholas brought to mind the Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281. Fukuoka, in the south, was their chief target because of its nearness to the Asian shore. Satsugai, Nicholas knew, had been born in the Fukuoka district and though he was, in all ways, purely Japanese - tradition-minded, wholly reactionary - who could say that his ancestors had not been among those most feared mounted nomads?

One might think that, in giving all these particulars of his physical appearance, one should thus be able to define the man. Not so, however. Satsugai was, quite clearly, an individual who was born to lead. Being a native of a land dedicated to the ideal of duty to the group - family elders, the daimyo and, ultimately, the shogun who represented the concept of Japan more forcefully and in a much more real sense than did the Emperor for a span of some two hundred and fifty years - he was nevertheless forever a man apart. Outwardly, quite naturally, this was not so, for he was totally dedicated to Japan, his Japan, and to this end he belonged to many groups, not merely one of the zaibatsu conglomerates. Yet it became manifestly clear to Nicholas on the night of the party that, inwardly, Satsugai believed himself superior to others. This, curiously enough, was at least part of the basis for his ability in leadership. The Japanese were born followers; they had been bred to follow with blind obedience the dictates of the shogun even unto death. Was it so surprising then that Satsugai should find a wide following of fanatic supporters? It was a subtle pillow upon which he slept - had Caesar done otherwise? - but none the less it was a prime motivational factor in his life.

Always Itami was by his side. Near him, too, was Saigo as if he were bathing in the energy of a companion sun. However, that night there was a fourth person with them and, from the first moment he saw her, she captivated Nicholas. He leaned over, asked his mother who the girl might be.

‘That is Satsugai’s niece. From the south,’ Cheong said. ‘She has come for a brief visit.’ By her tone of voice Nicholas could tell that, as far as Cheong was concerned, the visit could not be brief enough. He meant to ask her why it was she disliked the girl but already Satsugai had her in tow and was introducing her to Cheong and the Colonel.

She was slim and tall - willowy, a Westerner might call her. Her dark hair was very long; her eyes seemed enormous, liquid and feral. Her skin was like porcelain, possessing an inner glow quite impossible to duplicate via cosmetics. Nicholas thought she was quite stunning. Her name, so Satsugai informed him when he introduced her separately to Nicholas, was Yukio Jokoin.

She had come with Saigo. He made this plain by keeping within her shadow for most of the evening. Though Nicholas tried, he could not tell whether she wanted this attention or not.

For most of the evening he stewed inside himself, debating whether to ask her to dance. He knew that he wanted to do it; he just did not know what waves his action might cause. Not that he was intimidated by Saigo’s close princely protection of her, rather he was burdened by the secrecy of the father, whose relationship with the Colonel was stormy at best.

There was no one’s counsel he could seek but his own and, in the end, he decided that he was worrying about something that had significance only for him.

Accordingly, he approached them. It was Yukio herself who provided, the opening, for she immediately began to ask him questions about Tokyo, which she had not visited for some time; his immediate impression was that she was fairly well confined to Kyoto and its environs.

Saigo, as might be anticipated, took a rather dim view of his interference and was about to voice his displeasure when his father called for him and, reluctantly, he excused himself.

As he led her onto the dance floor, Nicholas had time to admire her kimono. It was dove-grey with platinum-coloured threads running through it. It was embroidered with the design of a midnight-blue wheel-and spoke pattern typical of the standard of a daimyo in feudal times.

She seemed weightless as they danced to the slow music and, holding her close, he felt the heat from her body, the subtle shifting of her flesh beneath the thin kimono.

‘We two are both too young to remember the war,’ she said, her voice husky. ‘Yet we are so much affected by it. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?’

‘Not really.’ He was breathing in the musk of her skin and it seemed to him as if her very sweat were perfumed. ‘Isn’t history continuous? Incidents don’t happen in a vacuum but cause ripples spreading outward, interacting with other ripples, changing their courses and, in turn, being themselves changed.’

‘My, what philosophy.’ And he thought that she might be mocking him until she laughed and said, ‘But I like that theory. Do you know why? No? Because it means that what we do here will affect our histories.’

‘What, you mean us?’

‘Yes. The two of us. A duo. White ,and black. Yin and Yang.’

Now while she spoke she had contrived, without Nicholas’s being in the least aware, to slide closer to him. Abruptly, as they swayed to the music he found her left leg between his. She pushed discreetly forward and he felt the hot contact with her thigh and then, incredibly, her pubic mound. She continued talking, staring up into his eyes, while she rubbed herself lightly back and forth against him. It was as if they were joined by a hardening fulcrum. Nicholas scarcely dared to breathe lest some precipitous move of his dislodge them from this position. It was an astoundingly intimate gesture, coming as it did in the midst of six hundred or so people, lavishly dressed, still disdainful of new ways or liberal viewpoints. Its highly clandestine nature thrilled him especially when, turning her around, his gaze fell upon Saigo staring at them from the edge of the dance-floor, still engaged in a discussion from which his father would not release him. It was the only time Nicholas would think kindly of the man.

They danced for what seemed like endless moments but when, at length, they parted - with not one word exchanged about the intimacy - he was unaware that he would not see her again for nearly four years.

On Sundays the Colonel slept late. This luxury he permitted himself perhaps because, on a day when he did not work, he was delighted to smash routine to smithereens; though he awoke six mornings a week at precisely six o’clock, he rolled out of bed whenever he wished on that first day of the week.

No one disturbed him then save Cheong, who seemed invulnerable’ to his infrequent wrath. At times she would stay on the futon with him until he was awake but at other times she was up early, working in the kitchen, having shooed the servants away.

Cheong prepared the meals at the weekend. She would have cooked every day, Nicholas knew, because she loved to do it, but the Colonel forbade it. ‘Let Tai do the cooking,’ he told her somewhat crossly one day. ‘That is what she is paid for, after all. Your time should be your own, to do with what you want.’ ‘Do what?’ she had said. ‘You know very well what I’m getting at.’ ‘Who, me?’ She pointed to herself. ‘Me only ignorant Chinee, Colonel-san.’ She said this in pidgin English, though she had superb grasp of that language. She bowed to him over and over. The Colonel was exasperated by her parodies - she was a brilliant mimic, picking up individual accents and idiosyncrasies with astounding rapidity - because they struck so close to reality. He did not like to recall those aspects of the hazed Asian shore so close to them across the genkainada: the utter disdain with which the English and the Americans alike treated the Chinese and the Malay; as if they were some subhuman species, suitable only for menial, and sexual labours. The Colonel had taken Cheong in his strong sun-browned arms and kissed her hard on the lips, holding her tight around, knowing from experience that this was the only way to silence her, that the expression of his anger would only egg her on.

That particular Sunday morning, Cheong was already up and slicing fresh vegetables when Nicholas came into the kitchen.

Oblique bars of sunlight jazzed the windows, turning them sparkly. The drone of a distant plane could be heard, preparing to land at Haneda. Low on the horizon he could see the flying V of the geese, moving away from the ellipse of the rising sun.

He kissed her and her arms went around him.

‘Will you go to the dojo today?’ she asked quietly.

‘Not if Father will be home.’

She split green beans. ‘I think he has a surprise for you today. I was hoping you would decide to stay.’

‘I felt I should be here,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be.’

‘There may come a time,’ Cheong said without looking up from her cooking, ‘when that will not be possible.’

‘You mean with Father?’

‘No, this applies to you.’

‘I don’t think I understand.’

‘When your father and I left Singapore, So-Peng was already dying. It was to be a relatively slow death and he had much to accomplish before the end. But as he said to me, it would be the last time we would see each other; and he was right.’ Her hands moved in a blur along the wooden counter, blithely dissociated from her words. ‘I knew that I must take your father and leave Singapore behind forever; our life lay elsewhere; it lay here. But my heart broke at leaving So-Peng. He was my father; so much more than a. father and I so much more than a daughter. Perhaps that was so because we had chosen each other; it was our minds rather than our blood that were the same.

‘That day, as we left, I paused on the porch of his house as I had done so many times when, as a child, I was about to go out, when So-Peng put a hand on my arm. It was the first and last time he touched me as an adult. Your father was already somewhat ahead on the street. “Now you are me, Cheong,” he said to me in the peculiar Mandarin dialect we used only among ourselves in the household.’

‘What did he mean?’

‘I don’t know - I only suspect.’ She wiped her hands, dipped them in a bowl of cold lemon water, began to slice again, swiftly and deftly; this time it was cucumbers. ‘I cried all the way through the forest until we reached the clearing where the Jeep was parked. Your father, of course, said nothing, though I’ve no doubt he wanted to; he would not shame me that way.’

‘Did you have to leave?’ Nicholas asked.

‘I did, yes,’ she said, for the first time looking up from her work. ‘I had my duty to your father. That is my life. I knew it that day and so did So-Peng. It would have been inconceivable to him that I should stay with him, that I should abandon my duty. It could not happen. To abandon duty is to destroy that which makes any individual unique and capable of prodigious feats.

‘Duty is the essence of life, Nicholas. It is the only thing over which death has no dominion. It is true immortality.’

As it turned out, the Colonel had the entire day free and, it being spring, he took Nicholas to the Jindaiji Botanical Park in the city for the traditional cherry-blossom viewing.

On the way they dropped Cheong at Itami’s; she had promised her she would go with her to see her uncle who was ill.

The morning’s haze had lifted and a strong easterly wind had already banished the lowlying mist; wispy cirrus arced like a series of Impressionist paintings newly hung in a museum’s vast gallery.

So, too, the park seemed to have been dropped wholesale from out of the heavens. The heavily flowering trees, their long branches bent low under the weight of the palest pink blossoms, took on an ethereal other-worldliness. At other times of the year the park perhaps showed its rather austere beauty. But this was April and the splendor displayed here was breathtaking.

Kimonos and brightly coloured oiled paper parasols were much in evidence as they made their leisurely way along the winding paths beneath the two skies, one low and fragrant, the other far out of reach. They stopped by a vendor selling sweet tofu. The Colonel bought them each a portion and they ate the confection slowly as they moved on. Laughing children passed them, indulged by their parents, and young couples, arm in arm. There were many Americans.

‘Father, will you tell me something about the zaibatsu?’ Nicholas asked.

The Colonel spooned a bit of tofu into his mouth, chewed reflectively. ‘Well, I’m sure you know quite a bit already.’

‘I know what the zaibatsu are,’ Nicholas said. ‘Four of the largest industrial complexes in Japan. And I know that for a brief time just after the war many of the zaibatsu’s top executives were tried for war crimes. I don’t really understand that.’

The Colonel was obliged to stoop slightly as they passed beneath low-hanging branches. They might have been flying, passing through rose-coloured banks of clouds. Modern Tokyo seemed never to have existed, to be, rather, a manifestation of some science fiction tale. An Easterner walking here at this time would have no difficulty in understanding this. Symbols abounded in Japan, acquiring their own potency. For the Japanese there was perhaps no more powerful symbol than the cherry blossom. It stood variously for renewal, purification, love and ineffable, timeless beauty: basic concepts to the Japanese spirit. All this passed through the Colonel’s mind as he decided where to start.

“As in all things Japanese,’ he said, ‘the answer is not a simple one. In fact, its origins lie elsewhere: in Japan’s long militaristic history. With the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan made a strong and concerted effort to turn away from both the isolation and the feudalism that marked the two hundred-plus years of the powerful Tokugawa shogunate. This also meant turning away from the traditionalism which, many felt, was the backbone of Japan’s strength.’