Murder on the Cliff (6 page)

“I’m fascinated,” said Charlotte. “I wish I’d seen this before we filmed
Soiled Dove
.” Although she had studied the history books for her role, Aunt Vinnie’s display made history come alive.

She was especially taken by a mannequin wearing the impressive gold-embroidered uniform that Harris had worn on his visit to the shogun’s palace. Linc Crawford had worn an identical costume in the movie, right down to the cockaded hat with the gold tassels. She remembered their laughing about how funny he looked in it. Lillian was right: he should have stuck to Westerns.

“Wait until you see what’s next.”

“The surprise?”

“This is it,” he said, opening the door into an adjoining room.

Entering, Charlotte found herself facing a faded sepia-toned photograph of a young Japanese woman. She was elegant and dignified, with dark, limpid eyes, and a long, oval face. Although she wore a kimono, she didn’t look Japanese. In fact, she might have been a young Victorian beauty. The label next to the picture read, “Okichi at twenty-eight.” Charlotte was spellbound. Although she had played Okichi, she had never seen a photograph of her. In her hair, she wore the camellias that were her symbol. They were tinted a deep red.

“She was very beautiful, wasn’t she?” said Paul.

“Yes,” Charlotte replied. “I hadn’t expected it.”

“You believed the historians.”

She nodded. The historians had written Okichi off as little more than a street prostitute. If she had really been the geisha of beauty and talent portrayed in the legend, they argued, she would have left Shimoda to seek her fortune in the nearby capital of Edo.

“Historians are always trying to shatter legends,” said Paul. “But they always find out in the end that the legends have a basis in fact. Okichi-
mago
looks very much like her, as you’ll see when you meet. She’s still resting upstairs; otherwise I’d introduce you to her now.”

From the photo, Charlotte’s attention shifted to a glass-topped mahogany case of the kind used by the Victorians for displaying collections of butterflies and minerals. Inside was a shallow, wide-mouthed sake cup, fired with a luminous sea-green glaze. “The cup!” Charlotte exclaimed. She looked up at Paul. “There really
was
a cup.”

He smiled. “Yes, there really was.”

It was the sake cup that Harris had given Okichi. The cup from which she had drunk for the rest of her life. The cup that she had left at the edge of the cliff when she had plunged into the ocean exactly a hundred years ago.

“I always thought it was a screenwriter’s invention,” she said. Next to the cup was a yellowed, half-burned calling card. She could just make out the words ‘Harris. Consul and Plenipotentiary.’ “The calling card too!”

Before taking her life, Okichi had built a fire at the edge of the cliff and burned all her papers. Found among the charred remains after her death was Harris’s half-burned calling card. Like the cup, Charlotte had thought the calling card was the product of a screenwriter’s imagination.

“There’s more,” said Paul, directing her attention to another case.

Inside were an ornamental comb and a round hand-mirror. Both were made of gold lacquer inlaid with mother-of-pearl in an intricate camellia pattern; both were exquisitely beautiful. Okichi had also left the comb and mirror at the edge of the cliff before taking her life.

“Where did you get these things?”

“Aunt Vinnie picked them up in Japan. She’s the one who set up these rooms. The keeper of the flame. She went over to Shimoda after Okichi died. Someone must have given them to her there.” He turned to the wall. “Here’s something else I thought you’d be interested in.”

Hanging on the wall was a framed piece of paper on which a text was written in Japanese characters. The label said simply “Raven at Dawn.”

“I don’t believe it,” Charlotte said, shaking her head in amazement. “The screenwriter must have been here.”

Okichi had been famed as a strolling singer of
shinnai
, or love ballads. She was especially renowned for her rendition of “Raven at Dawn,” a bittersweet ballad about the ill-fated love between a courtesan and a young man. Charlotte had sung the song in
Soiled Dove
.

“Shall I translate it for you?”

She shook her head. “I think I remember the words.” Fragments drifted out of her memory: “… of last night’s vows of love, of lately whispered tales of tears and sighs, of a dear lover from the past …” And then, the refrain. She sang the words softly: “Sleeves wet with weeping, bosom torn with cares and sad regrets. The past will ne’er return: will drinking bring forgetfulness? Forget and drink—besides that, only to pluck the samisen with muffled fingertips. Once more I hear the raven’s cry at dawn: that memory … Night deepens on Shimoda’s waterfront. Tears falling, drop like red camellias.”

For a moment, there was silence. A lump rose in Charlotte’s throat as she thought of Line, her own “lover from the past.” It was as if the opaque screen that shielded those memories from her consciousness had been rolled back on the runners of her mind, just as their old Japanese housekeeper had rolled back the sliding wood-and-paper walls of their little villa overlooking the seaside village, to let in the morning air. Indeed, it was the mornings of those idyllic weeks in Japan that she remembered best: waking up in Linc’s arms on their silk futon under the gauze mosquito netting, golden threads of light seeping through the bamboo blinds; the sound of the cocks crowing and the wavering falsetto of the housekeeper’s voice as she chanted her monotonous incantations to the Shinto spirits; and, once the screens had been rolled back, the magnificent view of Mt. Fuji across the bay, serene and gleaming.

Paul broke the silence, smiling with his warm brown eyes. “That was lovely,” he said. “Would you like to see the prints now?”

“Yes, I would,” she replied, following him into an adjacent room.

The room was a gallery of woodblock prints. Charlotte wandered from print to print: lovers, courtesans, actors, sumo wrestlers—the denizens of the floating world. Each a triumph of two dimensions, relying solely on line and color to create a sense of movement and form. In their avoidance of perspective and shading, the Japanese had anticipated the modernists by two centuries.

“I’m stunned,” said Charlotte. “This is a collection worthy of a great museum.” It must also have been very valuable. Although
ukiyo-e
now cost a lot more than they once had, they had never been cheap. They had been in fashion since the end of the last century. Even Van Gogh and Degas had been collectors.

“I’ve been collecting for years,” Paul said proudly. “It’s my hobby, or rather, my obsession.”

On the far wall, she stopped to admire an Utamaro print of a young couple drinking tea. She loved the tall, willowy figures, the delicate features of the elongated faces, the brilliant colors of the elegant silk robes, the sensual curves of the folds in the fabric.

“From the ‘Poem of the Pillow,’” commented Paul.

The “Poem of the Pillow” was a famous album of erotic prints showing couples in various positions of love. The print on display was a cover sheet, an innocuous print suitable for public viewing.

“Yes, I know. When I was filming
Soiled Dove
, I used to visit an art gallery in Tokyo where they sold
ukiyo-e
. The dealer kept the
shunga
in a drawer under the counter. He used to show them to me.”

Shunga
was the Japanese word for erotic prints, a subcategory of
ukiyo-e
. But unlike Western pornography,
shunga
were works of art: except for some of the later ones, there was nothing sordid or vulgar about them.

“I imagine that you can buy them in the open now,” she continued. “But they were considered pornographic then.” It had always struck her as ridiculous that a great artist was suddenly scorned as a pornographer the minute he applied his genius to the subject of love.

“Things haven’t changed all that much. I have the other eleven prints from the ‘Poem of the Pillow,’ but I wouldn’t display them here.”

“You do!”

“In the next gallery. Would you like to see them?”

Charlotte replied that she would.

“The court order says that I’m allowed to use her rooms and she’s allowed to use mine, but we each have one room reserved to ourselves,” Paul said as he reached into his pocket for a key. “This is mine—God only knows what’s in hers.” He opened the door to reveal yet another gallery, at least as extensive as the first. The walls were lined with
shunga
.

Charlotte was amazed. Her Tokyo dealer had kept a few prints hidden away. Here was a whole roomful: print after print by the most famous of the woodblock artists. She wandered among them, marveling at the distortions of the limbs, the exaggerated sizes of the genitals, the lovely patterns of the bedclothes. They were a far cry from “Mount Fuji in Clear Weather.”

Harris stood by, his arms crossed smugly over his chest. “What do you think?” he asked. “I want you to know that you are one of the few people to whom I’ve ever extended an invitation to view my collection. It’s a pleasure that I usually reserve for myself.” He bowed slightly. “However, how could I do otherwise for the former Okichi?”

Charlotte smiled.

In retrospect, she supposed that her discovery of
shunga
had had a lot to do with the passion of her affair with Line. For a woman brought up in New England in the twenties and thirties, the
shunga
had been a sexual revelation. To the Japanese, sex was a natural event, and a beautiful one. The
shunga
displayed this casual attitude in the beauty, sensuality, freshness, and even humor with which sex was depicted. But then again, maybe it had been the warm ocean breezes, the forests of camellias, and being young—or younger. Certainly she had never experienced those same feelings again, on screen or off.

“I have thousands of
shunga
in my collection, but only the finest are on display here. There aren’t a lot of them, but”—he smiled—“what there is, is choice, to paraphrase one of your colleagues.”

“You must have one of the world’s most extensive collections,” she said.

“It’s hard to say. I suspect there, are still some sizable collections out there that haven’t surfaced yet. Like myself, a lot of collectors have amassed their collections in secret. It’s only been in the last twenty years that
shunga
have become even remotely respectable.”

It was an odd feeling, being led by Paul through these interconnected rooms in the servants’ wing. Charlotte had the impression that each room represented a deeper layer of her host’s psyche: preservationist, descendant of Townsend Harris, art collector, and now—the hidden side of the public persona.

He led her over to the left-hand wall. “They’re arranged chronologically,” he explained. “Starting with the earliest, which dates back to 1660 and ending with the Meiji Restoration.”

The earliest prints were lyrical portraits of young couples, most of them done in black and white. By the mid-eighteenth century, the subject matter had become more sexually explicit and the prints were in full color. These were her favorites: they were bold and modern, but still pretty.

“Do you like Shunchō?” asked Paul, as she stopped to admire an elegant series depicting a young couple making love, the bold patterns of their kimonos contrasting with their naked limbs and flesh.

“Yes. He’s my favorite.”

“I confess to liking the later ones myself,” Paul said. “It must be the perverse streak in me.”

By contrast with the early prints, the later ones that Paul favored were more abandoned, more primitive, and often more brutal. Even Utamaro had included a rape in his “Poem of the Pillow” album. Charlotte wasn’t a prude: the pan from the bed to the window wasn’t her style, but neither did she go in for brutality. But she could also see why Paul liked the later prints. They had a sense of force, vigor, and majesty that the earlier prints lacked.

Passing the “Poem of the Pillow” series, Paul paused at the last print. “My masterpiece,” he announced. “Hokusai, 1814. A book illustration.”

Charlotte knew the print; it was very famous. Famous, and disturbing: a nightmarish sexual fantasy. If the gallery represented the hidden side of Paul’s public persona, this print was the dark core of that inner self.

The print depicted a young geisha lying naked on her back on a rocky shore, green with algae. Between her open legs an octopus sucked greedily, its bulging eyes staring over her pale belly, its slimy tentacles enveloping her body. A smaller octopus was attached to her mouth. One of its tentacles was wrapped around her nipple; another, her neck. At her sides, her small, delicate hands gripped the tentacles of the big octopus.

What disturbed Charlotte about the print was the ambivalence of the expression on the geisha’s face. Her head was tilted back against the slimy rocks. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was slightly open, revealing a row of tiny white teeth that gently bit the octopus’s tentacle. Was she racked with pain? Was she swooning in ecstasy? Or was she already a corpse, half-drowned and beyond all feeling?

Her expression summed up the ambivalence of the floating world. For all its freedom and beauty, it was also a harsh and depraved world, a world in which one person fed upon another, a world in which pleasure was fleeting, in which there was little room for tenderness or romance.

What would be left of the geisha when the octopus had had its pleasure with her? Charlotte wondered, Would she be an empty shell, washed up on a rocky shore? It was how she thought of Okichi.

4

Charlotte sat with Connie in the living room at Briarcote, Connie and Spalding’s house on the Cliff Walk. Briarcote had been built in the twenties on land owned for generations by Spalding’s family, and was probably one of the most comfortable houses on the Cliff Walk. Unlike the mansions at the northern end, it was relatively small. But it was elegant: a white-columned Georgian densely furnished with well-worn antiques inherited from Spalding’s forebears and a mishmash of
objets d’art
collected from his diplomatic postings around the world. At the rear, a wall of French doors led onto a terrace overlooking the ocean. At this time of day, the setting sun reflecting off the water cast a golden glow over the room, warming the faded Oriental carpets and polished wood surfaces of the furniture.