Quin’s Shanghai Circus

Mama

Life is brief and we must listen to every sound.

High above Tokyo, Mama sat in her apartment painting her fingernails. Twenty-four floors below lay the Imperial palace, the swans in the Imperial moat little white dots, the pines on the Imperial slopes no bigger than bonsai. As with the aristocrats of old, she kept her nails long to show that manual labor was beneath her. Mama had last cut her nails in 1938 prior to the labor that brought forth her second son.

It was late morning and Mama had just taken her fifth bath of the day. No matter how late she stayed at her nightclub, Mama always rose at six o’clock in the morning to take her first bath. Then she breakfasted on tea and three raw oysters and arranged herself in front of the window, on a raised dais in the shape of a lotus that sat on the back of an ivory elephant.

Her posture was one of contemplation. Her legs were crossed, with the ankles tucked over the knees. Her hands assumed the attitude of the fist of knowledge.

This mudra was Mama’s favorite when facing the rising sun. The right hand was curled, with thumb touching forefinger, as if ready to grasp a cylindrical object. The left hand was held directly below, the thumb clasped by the three lower fingers, the forefinger pointing rigidly in the air. When all was in order the forefinger of the left hand slid up into the slot of the right hand.

The cosmic soul enclosed the individual soul, the sun rose in the sky. Thus did she come to terms with the dawning day.

The fist of knowledge also had erotic connotations. The left forefinger that rose with the new sun could be interpreted as a lingam, the receptive palm or sky of the right hand as a yoni. But Mama was not one to question an ancient Tantric stylization. If the sexual act occurred during meditation, so much the better.

There was another reason why the fist of knowledge appealed to her. In that mudra the five senses of the left hand rose and found themselves completed by the sixth sense of the right hand. Physical nature entered into gnosis.

Or in everyday language, the woman took the position above, the man below. Over a period of years Mama had found that men grow heavy. The woman above, the man below, was a pleasing concept to her as well as a comfortable position.

Or as Lao-tzu had said, seize the way that was so you may ride the things that are now.

Or in everyday terms, choose the position of childbirth. The woman straddles the man so the manchild can be born, which is what the saga meant when he advised seizing the way that was. When the woman rides on top there will be a spurt of new life, for the couple at that moment is following the way of wisdom.

Complex metaphysical subjects. Mama would not have bothered with them had she considered herself an ordinary woman. As she looked down on the Imperial palace she recalled the words of the ancient Chinese chroniclers, the graybeards of the Han dynasty.

East and south of Korea there lies a kingdom known as Wa. The people are much given to strong drink, respect is shown by squatting. The men tattoo their faces and adorn their bodies with designs, the size and pattern indicating their rank in society.

And as the later graybeards of the Wei dynasty had remarked, the curious kingdom of Wa is a queen country, curiously ruled by a queen.

Now Mama was tattooed from neck to ankle and had been since she was a child, so who was to say? It might be that the curious kingdom of Wa had been ruled by one hundred and twenty-four successive generations of male emperors, but the curious question remained, who had ruled curiously in the beginning?

In any case temporal history interested Mama less than spiritual, and the religious situation was much clearer. After years of meditation she could not deny that she and the Kannon Buddha had certain characteristics in common.

First, the Kannon was the only woman in the crowded pantheon of male Buddhism, just as Mama was the only woman who had ever worked in a brothel in Kobe without subsequently getting married. Second, like that goddess, she always followed the path of compassion and mercy.

Among the many males there were chanting and silent Buddhas, laughing and crying Buddhas, Buddhas for every purpose and occasion. But among all the confusing statues to be found in the temples of Japan there was only one woman, and she alone seemed to have a distinct personality.

Of course Mama had never actually seen a statue of the Kannon using the fist of knowledge. But as everyone knew, the statues had all been carved by men. What would have happened if women had been allowed to join the carvers’ guild? Would the Kannon always be shown with open hands, passive and accepting?

In addition to the fist of knowledge Mama used twelve other mudras.

Sincerity.

The empty heart.

The unopened lotus.

The newly opened lotus.

Intentions clearly made known.

Holding one’s water.

Seeking refuge.

The backhand or hindside.

The difficult back to back.

The equally difficult position of middles touching

while the rest is held apart and erect.

The variation where middles touch with both hands

on their backs.

The final position where both rest in the clasp of

covering hands.

One mudra, in short, for each stage of the sexual act.

Mama sat on her ivory elephant contemplating the sky until eight o’clock. By then the sun had risen high enough to establish the pattern of the day. She then took a bath every hour on the hour until noon, when she lunched on tea and six raw oysters. Prior to her afternoon meditation she took another bath. At six in the evening she took her eighth and final bath before changing into an evening kimono and going to her nightclub.

One measure of her influence in Japan was her apartment, the only one in the skyscraper where she lived. The Imperial chamberlains had objected strenuously to a skyscraper beside the Imperial moat, and the only way it got built was through a promise that the building would be used strictly for offices, that it would always be empty at night.

The chamberlains felt that the Emperor, although not a god since the end of the war, still deserved some privacy at night. At the beginning of the century, after all, there had been one hundred and thirty-four living gods registered with the relevant ministry in Peking, and of these only the Japanese Emperor still survived as an institution.

Mama had used her business connections to make an exception of herself. Because there could be no lights in the skyscraper after dark, her apartment was furnished with infrared lighting invisible to the naked eye. From below, the immense tower looked deserted but high on the twenty-fourth floor, unknown to the twelve million inhabitants of Tokyo, a small elderly woman in infrared goggles watched over them. Every night she smiled benignly down on the world’s largest city as she ate her last meal of the day, tea and twelve raw oysters.

Although she was today the most powerful woman in Japan, life had not begun easily for her. She had been born to a peasant couple in the Tohoku, the poor northern district of Japan. Each year thereafter her parents had another child whom they suffocated at birth, the regular practice among farmers living in poverty. Mama was eight years old when the silk market in America collapsed for a season, leaving her parents no choice but to sell her to a brothel.

A house in the licensed quarter of Kobe offered the highest sum, and that was where she went. Her father blamed her mother for the silk disaster in America, since her mother was an Ainu and therefore of Caucasian origin. Before he went off to drink at night he beat her as hard as he could.

The year Mama left home a son was born to the couple. They kept him because their daughter was gone. After the war this man, who had the body hair of his mother, confessed a long list of crimes to Geraty, a heinous record of torture and arson, killing and sexual perversion that stretched from Siberia to Mukden to Shanghai and up the valley of the Yangtze, that included among many atrocities the murder of Miya’s son and the murder of the Japanese General responsible for the rape of Nanking. It was from him that Geraty stole the military greatcoat he was wearing the night he first met Quin, not by accident, in the bar in the Bronx once owned by Geraty’s father.

As for Mama, she never knew she had a brother, neither then nor years later when the night came for him to murder both her surviving son and Hato, the freighter passenger on the Pacific crossing who had worn a false moustache and false sideburns and so angrily kept the secret of his shoeboxes from Quin and Big Gobi.

Although she was only eight years old when she went to the house in Kobe, Mama soon came to know the customs of the world from the sailors who passed through that busy port. Throughout her childhood she was tattooed a part at a time, as was customary at the beginning of the century for Japanese children entering a serious life of prostitution or crime.

When puberty came her body was entirely covered with tattoos with the exception of her face and her hands and feet. The tattoos recounted the epic story of a dragon. The dragon’s tail curled around her waist, its fiery breath licked her stomach, its tongue forked into her crotch, its eyes peered from her nipples.

On her backside, in even more terrifying guises, the theme was repeated with variations.

Thus when a visiting knight sagged in bed, thinking he had met the challenge and triumphed, slain the dragon and earned a night’s sleep, Mama had but to whisper to him in the candlelight to prove that facts were always illusionary when compared to myths.

Turn me over, she suggested.

And sure enough, as soon as the tired warrior turned her over the dangers of the night returned and he was faced with a whole new saga of battles and miracles.

The dragon tattoo was a masterpiece, the most intricate anybody had ever seen. Her epic became legendary in the ports of Asia and soon she was in great demand.

In particular she appealed to opium addicts, who were convinced they would never be able to make love to a woman again. But Mama showed them there could be more to puffing the magic dragon than they had ever suspected.

Mama worked first in the Chinese wing of the brothel, since the Chinese were not only the principal opium addicts but also the principal seducers of virgins. The older Chinese men, bent on deflowering the world now that they had reached an advanced age, would pay almost any price if they thought they were getting a virgin. Being small, Mama was able to serve this lust in the Chinese wing for several years.

From there, for seasoning, she was sent to the Korean wing with its rich smells of garlic and fermenting cabbage, then back to the sailors’ section to relearn any of the international traits she might have forgotten from her childhood.

Lastly, sixteen years old and fully experienced in all carnal matters, she was certified an apprentice Japanese woman and allowed to enter the Japanese wing on trial.

Mama studied fortune-telling, music, conversation, and especially the match-stick games with which Japanese men were sexually aroused. She learned to arrange stones, to pour water over tea, to fold a piece of paper into the shape of a crane. In return she was given diamonds and emeralds and cameras, which were just then being developed.

When she was twenty she bought her way out of the brothel and established herself as an official second wife available by the year, month, week, or half-hour. Over the following four years an astonishing number of Japan’s future leaders passed her way, including, one weekend, an entire graduating class from Tokyo University that eventually produced three prime ministers, forty suicides, and the postwar head of the Communist party.

In 1929, at the age of twenty-four, she finally decided to stabilize her life by forming a permanent liaison. Because of the growing influence of the army in the country, she chose an army general, a man who happened to be not only wealthy but an aristocrat as well.

Baron Kikuchi’s fortune came from his large landholdings in the Tohoku, the same northern district where Mama had been born in poverty. He was the younger of twin sons, born eight minutes after his brother, so the barony had not originally been his. But when his elder brother converted to Judaism after the First World War, he inherited the title.

The twin boys never knew their father, a famous statesman in the middle of the nineteenth century who was one of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, the movement that overthrew the military dictatorship that had governed Japan for two and a half centuries and returned the Emperor to power. The old Baron, a close friend of the Emperor Meiji, was instrumental in opening the country to Western ways. In fact, he was so involved with modernizing the country he didn’t marry until his eighty-eighth year, whereupon he fathered twins and died.

The twins were raised by their mother, a gentle, strong-willed aristocrat sixty-four years younger than her famous husband. Unlike him, she took no interest in ships or railroads or Western education. She preferred to occupy herself with the traditional arts, painting and tea ceremony and the koto or Japanese harp, and especially with the intricacies of Go, an unusual avocation for a woman since the ancient game had military overtones and was always played by men.

During their early years the twins were educated at home on the estate owned by their ancestors since the thirteenth century, another famous statesman in the family having gone to the aid of the warriors in Kamakura at that time and received land in the north as a reward. But although the estate was large and the family’s wealth great, the twins and their mother lived austerely in keeping with the practice of the northern Japanese.

Their house was small. Their two or three servants lived with them more like aunts and uncles than retainers. The scroll on the wall might be the gift of an emperor, the Go set in the cupboard might be the work of a master craftsman who had made no more than eight such sets in his career, the koto in the closet might be a thousand years old, the bowls used in the tea ceremony might be so exquisitely turned as to be of inestimable value.

Yet the room where the scroll was hung, where the koto was laid out in the mornings and the Go set in the evenings, where the Baroness performed the tea ceremony for her sons every day at sunset, was a small room made of wood and straw and rice paper, as severe in line and simple in design as that of any peasant living on their lands.

And so with the other rooms in the house, with the bare corridors and the plain entrance and the narrow garden where one weathered stone lantern received the blossoms of the fruit trees in spring, the hard sun in summer, the Siberian gales in autumn, and the heavy snows in winter.

The effect the Baroness had on her sons was lasting, particularly the strength they felt in her presence.

From the Baroness the elder twin acquired his passion for painting, to which he devoted the first half of his life, and his love for the koto, which was his principal form of relaxation after he returned from Jerusalem as a rabbi.

From her knowledge of the game of Go the younger twin evolved his fascination with military maneuvering, while it was the rigorous discipline of her tea ceremony that proved to be his only escape, later in life, from the massive headaches that tormented him.

So excruciating were those headaches they would have made invalids of most men. And in fact when the General eventually revealed the cause of the headaches to Mama, a secret known only to his brother and to a doctor long since dead, he confessed that he would probably have committed suicide years before had it not been for a memory he carried within him, a vision of his mother turning a teacup three times at sunset, gently brushing the green tea into foam, her face utterly calm and at peace.

It was the memory of those moments that gave him the will to live through the attacks that were so blinding they seemed to be the lightning of death itself, an ultimate pain most men might experience only once in their lives but which the General knew would be back with him the next day and the next, next week and next month, a daily ritual of torture and execution that humbled him under a sword and hewed his mind.

The twins grew older, the time came for them to receive their formal education. Together they traveled south, the elder to study fine arts in Kyoto, the younger to enter the military academy. When the younger brother received his commission in the army, the two returned to the Tohoku to spend the holiday with their mother. It was toward the end of the holiday that she died, to them, unexpectedly.

It happened at sunset. The Baroness was performing the tea ceremony as always at that hour, the sliding doors open to the warm summer air. She prepared their bowls and then her own, turned it three times in her hand, sipped, stopped moving.

Three or four minutes went by. Simultaneously the twins rose and knelt beside her. Her eyes were open, her face was calm, the bowl rested in her cupped hands. She was gazing across the garden but she was dead.

That evening the servants told them the truth. Since before her marriage the Baroness had been suffering from an internal disease that kept her in constant pain. She had never told her husband or her sons about the disease because nothing could be done about it. The disease was incurable and in the end would be fatal.

As the twins made arrangements for the funeral of the Baroness they pondered this last lesson of hers, the mystery of pain and peace in life, the manner in which one might overcome the other, a mystery the elder of the two would one day penetrate, the younger never.

After the death of their mother the two young men drifted apart in their separate careers. Although they seldom saw one another, the bond between them remained strong, as Mama eventually discovered.

The elder twin, now Baron Kikuchi, pursued his study of painting both in the Orient and in Europe. The younger twin served routinely at various army posts in Japan until the war with Russia broke out in 1905, when he was sent to Manchuria to command a company of infantry. He was in Manchuria only a short time before he became a national hero.

On a barren plain near Mukden his regiment was surrounded by Cossack cavalry. The fierce horsemen swept repeatedly through the Japanese lines, cutting down the soldiers with their pikes. Kikuchi alone was able to hold his unit intact, a triumph attributed to his decision to use the dead horses of the Cossacks as a barrier against their attacks. Like most of the Japanese officers, his Buddhist background had bred in him an abhorrence of meat, but that didn’t stop him from saving his men in the only way open to him.

At the end of three days and three nights Japanese reinforcements broke through the Cossack encirclement to find the lost regiment largely massacred. Only Kikuchi’s company had survived, safe behind the walls of rotting meat, eight feet high, that he had erected. The young Captain was awarded Japan’s highest combat decoration and singled out as an officer likely to become the youngest general in modern Japanese history.

In any case there was little doubt he would someday sit on the General Staff.

In time Kikuchi fulfilled both these expectations, but not in a way anyone might have expected. It turned out that his decision to defy Buddhist custom on the plains of Manchuria had an immediately harmful effect on him. A fly feeding on the rotting carcass of a horse during the siege had infected his right eye. He was not back in Japan many days before the sight in the eye began to fail.

Kikuchi went to a specialist who was also a family friend. The doctor told him that the infection could be treated and the eye saved but that nearly total blindness was inevitable. He would be left with a gray film over the eye, an ability to distinguish light and darkness but not shapes.

Kikuchi asked if the gray film would make the eye recognizably blind and was told that it would. He then questioned the doctor about removing the eye and replacing it with a glass eye. The doctor said that could be done after they were certain the infection had subsided.

Why not until then? said Kikuchi.

Because if we opened it up before then, answered the doctor, while the infection is still virulent, there could be further damage.

What kind of damage?

To the nerves.

But if we wait it will be apparent to everyone I’ve lost an eye, and that means I will have to leave the army.

Yes.

Yes, so we won’t wait. We will do what we have to do now.

The doctor refused to perform the operation but Kikuchi insisted. Finally the doctor agreed. Kikuchi went on leave and the operation was secretly performed. Three days later a shattering pain burst in his head, a shock so severe the doctor gave him a morphine injection. Thereafter, however, Kikuchi refused the injections, it being inconsistent with Bushido, the way of the warrior, for a man to refuse or disguise the pain life brought him.

Kikuchi returned to active duty and continued to rise in rank and power. To avoid suspicion he trained himself never to move his good eye, to stare directly forward and move his whole head when he wanted to shift his gaze. In this way no one would be able to detect the immobility of his false eye.

In the end the daring that had first made him a hero, then blinded him in one eye, brought other rewards. Among regular army officers there was the habit of questioning the patriotism of politicians and industrialists in interminable diatribes, harangues so repetitious that even the most resolute careerist was bound to fall asleep at least once during an evening. When this happened the dozing man propped his head in his hands for an hour or so with his eyes closed, excusing himself when he woke up again.

Not so Kikuchi.

He napped as often as anyone else, but when he did only his good eye closed. The other stared without blinking at the speaker, at a painting on the wall, at the snow or the cherry blossoms falling outside in the garden.

The effect on other officers was uncanny. His juniors were terrified by him, his seniors both terrified and humiliated. The wholly unnatural way he moved his head when he was awake only added to the impression that here was not a man but a demon, unfeeling and remorseless, some sort of determined, bloodless creature the dark powers had placed on earth as their instrument.

The unclosing, unblinking eye was also responsible for the speculation that Major and Colonel and finally General Kikuchi not only never slept but never ate, that he existed on only one cup of water every three days because suspended before him was the vision of a wall of dead Cossack horses eight feet high, because the stench of rotting meat within him was as strong as it had once been on a Manchurian plain.

The General could never admit to his glass eye, and thus a sense of total inhumanity surrounded him, false yet inescapable.

He was an older man when Mama met him, a bachelor who had never married, obviously ambitious. This was apparent from the fact that he had chosen to make his career in the Kempeitai. Mama assumed quite naturally that he had selected the Kempeitai because there was more opportunity for plotting there than in any other branch of the army.

The position was sensitive, and there were rumors that Baron Kikuchi made free use of the spies and dossiers of the Kempeitai to further his own interests. But the army was notorious for its cliques and jealousies, and any general would probably have acted in the same manner. At least Baron Kikuchi favored no specific faction in the army and this, together with his family name, made him more acceptable to the other members of the General Staff than any of their fellow officers.

Even for a Japanese of his generation the Baron was small, standing no more than five feet tall. He had always been so devoted to his military life that Mama thought his interest in women would probably be minor. It was likely that he looked on them as someone to relax and joke with and enjoy the traditional arts of music and song. She surmised that either sex would be unimportant to him or that he had long ago sublimated his drives, like so many professional army officers, and become impotent.

Accordingly, the ruse she used to beguile him the first night was an old one, an artifice that often worked with aging military men who found themselves embarrassed when naked.

After the bath, while giving him a massage, she pretended to find some fluff in the crevice of his bottom, from the towel perhaps. She rolled the fluff into a little ball and bounced it in the air.

She giggled and clapped her hands. The General was delighted. For an hour they played with the little ball of fluff, batting it back and forth and chasing it around the room. The next night the General came back to suggest another bath and another massage. Again Mama clapped her hands at what she had found, again the General was enchanted, again they played ball for an hour or two.

Mama’s campaign progressed as she expected. At the end of a month the General asked her to move into one of his villas in the city. Mama acquiesced. Presents followed, diamonds and emeralds and cameras, which were much more sophisticated than they had been ten years before in Kobe.

Despite the simplicity of their first days together Mama quickly sensed the General was different from the other high-ranking military officers she had known. He experienced severe headaches, for example, yet at the same time his bowels moved with vigor.

This was contrary to the usual pattern. As Mama well knew, most general officers never had a headache but they did invariably suffer from constant indigestion, a result of their inability to expel the gases that accumulated in them in the course of a day spent agreeing with everything their superiors said.

Before the war more generals in Japan died from the rupture of a vital organ due to excessive gas than from any other cause. And although the public was unaware of it, having always been given more heroic versions, it was not until the very last stages of the war that the American B-29 bomber replaced indigestion as the leading cause of death among generals on the active duty list.

Baron Kikuchi proved not to be impotent, only inactive. The first year they were together he made love to her as much as once a week, but later this dropped to once a month or less and eventually to not at all. Mama was not bothered by this, however, having had some ten thousand men make love to her in the course of her sixteen years as a prostitute. She had begun early and in that sense she was older than her years.

As time went on there were other changes in the Gener-al. He became less interested in the fluff ball games, preferring instead to spend his evenings listening to her . play the koto while he sat beside her in his black kimono staring into space.

And there were changes in Mama as well, wholly unexpected changes that were all the more powerful because she had never imagined such a thing could happen to her. She was astonished and more than a little mystified, for the truth was that after knowing ten thousand men, after being intimate with every conceivable male combination of spirit and flesh, she had fallen in love with the little General and his gruff, gentle ways, fallen passionately in love for the first time in her life at an age when the love of most women was already turning to the quiet paths of affection and companionship.

She could not explain it to herself, but it was as if he were the first man who had ever touched her and held her, as if she had come to him a virgin at the age of sixteen and all the other years had never existed. She loved him completely, with abandon. More than anything else she wanted to give him a son.

She confided this to the General one night and he admitted it was his own secret wish. He wept then, his head on her shoulder, and whispered that for months he had been trying to arouse himself in bed with her but could not. His work, his age.

Something. He wept. It was too late.

Mama comforted him, less convinced than he that nothing could be done. She knew many ways with men and in time, she thought, she could bring him to do the impossible. In time she might have been able to, but time turned out to be the only thing they no longer shared.

On Mama’s thirtieth birthday, the anniversary of their sixth year together, the General announced that he was being transferred to the mainland.

In his new post he would be in charge of all intelligence activities for the Kwangtung army in Manchuria. At the time Manchuria was controlled by the Kwangtung army, the largest and best in the Japanese Empire. Further, it was the center of all the intrigues against China. It was the most powerful political force within the Japanese military, therefore within Japan as a whole. Much as he didn’t want to leave her, the position was too important to be turned down.

Mama knew he must feel honored by this great responsibility before him, yet she also sensed something else in his manner, fear perhaps. She knew it couldn’t be a fear of failure. The General was too confident for that, too aware of his own competence and discipline. There was no question of his failing.

A fear of success then?

It seemed strange to Mama. Something was out of place.

Later she never forgave herself for missing that opportunity to help him, to give him love in the way he needed it, by sharing with him his terrible secret. If she had pursued her feelings then, the two years that remained before his death might have been quite different for him, less anguished, at least less lonely. But at the moment she could only think of the son he had said he wanted.

She thought giving him a son was the way to make him happy. Not until just before the end did she learn that he needed only her, no one else.

When she had arrived at a scheme she called in the General’s chauffeur, a corporal.

The corporal was a man about her own age. Although he came from a family of respected surgeons, he had long ago slipped into degradation. The first step was expulsion from a private school for recurrent masturbation in the classroom. His shame over being expelled from the school was so great that he went directly to his father’s clinic and stole a large amount of ether with which to commit suicide.

Being afraid, he took too small a dose. The next day he tried once more, and the third day he tried again. A week or two went by and instead of vindicating his family’s honor he ended up becoming an ether addict.

For about ten years following the First World War, a period of relative freedom in Japan, he supported his habit by hiring himself out for masturbation scenes in pornographic movies. During the Depression he blackmailed his relatives into giving him small sums of money by stationing himself in front of their homes and masturbating in full view of the neighbors. More recently he had turned to begging and stealing. He came to the General’s notice when he broke into a Kempeitai dispensary in search of gas to support his habit.

Baron Kikuchi recognized his name at once, the young man’s father having been the surgeon who operated on his eye in 1905. Out of gratitude to the boy’s dead father he decided to help the boy if he could. He took him into the army and gave him medical treatment. He made him swear that he would never masturbate in public again. The corporal responded gratefully, so the General made him his chauffeur. He often had clandestine meetings in his car and the corporal’s loyalty to him was both deep and personal.

Mama knew all this. She knew the corporal was an invert incapable of performing the sexual act with a woman. But she also knew he was her only hope. There were no male servants in the house and no other man ever slept there, except the corporal when the General was with her.

She explained to the corporal that the General very much wanted to have a son but that he was unable to do what was necessary. The corporal understood at once. He hung his head and said he had a confession to make.

Mama reassured him. She said that she knew about his condition but there was still a way he could help if he wanted to. The corporal replied that he would do anything at all that was within his power.

She then asked him certain delicate questions. Somehow, despite his embarrassment, he managed to stammer out the answers.

She thanked him and excused herself, returning with a large photograph. She gave the corporal instructions and told him he had only three days in which to practice. Three days from then would be the right time of the month for Mama and she dared not wait another month.

It was a sign of the man’s profound love for Baron Kikuchi that he accepted the task of perfecting a technique, in only three days, that was entirely contrary to the habits of a lifetime.

Time was what she and the General lacked, timing was the hope of her scheme.

When the corporal masturbated he became ecstatically dizzy. He sank into a realm of fantasy. But if anything other than his own hand touched his penis while he was masturbating, the dizziness left him. The flight was over, immediately he wilted.

There was one exception to this and that was when his orgasm had already begun. Then his penis could be thumped or encased by any sort of foreign object and it would still remain erect for the two or three seconds the orgasm lasted. The difficulty, of course, was that he never knew when the orgasm was coming. In that other realm his mind was a blur. He was out of control.

These were the facts he had admitted to Mama. Her solution was the large photograph.

It was a formal portrait, the kind a family had taken on some very important occasion. Everyone was dressed in formal kimono, children and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and parents and grandparents, the one surviving great-grandparent, the nurse who had served the family for half a century. The members of the family stood in straight rows, unsmiling, staring into the camera. In the front row was a stiff young boy wearing the same timid expression the corporal had worn at that age.

The corporal knew the photograph well. Everyone in Japan knew it well. It was natural history, the world, existence.

Yet there was something more in this photograph. Another photograph had been superimposed upon it, or perhaps a clever drawing, or perhaps merely the suggestion of an image, vague and undefined. At first the corporal had difficulty making it out, but the longer he stared at the photograph the clearer the vague image became.

It was a ghostly naked boy lying on his back in front of the family. His elbow was bent, he was grinning, his fingers were flying.

Maniacal freedom right at the feet of the solemn, unseeing assembly.

The corporal practiced according to Mama’s instructions. He masturbated vigorously while concentrating on the ghost. The dizziness came, the ecstasy, he was out of control.

His prearranged signal was a sound that resembled a clap of the hands, the sharp knock of two blocks of wood made by the man who passed the house sounding the hour. When the corporal heard the clap he shifted his eyes from the reclining ghost to the other boy, himself, the one who wore a formal kimono and stood in the front row of the family, transfixed, timid.

Instantaneously he had an orgasm. It happened just as Mama had said it would. Due to the photograph he could control his fantasies to the second. The corporal practiced at the turn of every hour, day and night, and on the third day he was ready.

Mama had chosen raw oysters to serve the General that night. The basis of her sauce was ambergris, the grayish-white wax secreted from behind the ear of the sperm whale, a well-known aphrodisiac. To this she added musk and rhubarb and cinnamon for flavoring, lastly a dose of phosphorite. She hoped the General would benefit from the aphrodisiac, but if he didn’t the phosphorite would constrict his throat muscles, strangling him and thereby producing a sympathetic erection.

For as Lao-tzu had said, man is soft and weak in life but stiff and hard in death.

Timing.

The corporal and his family of respected surgeons.

An oyster and a sperm whale.

Poison and its antidote.

The scheme was dangerous because the antidote had to be administered quickly, otherwise the General would not only simulate strangulation but undergo it. And the antidote couldn’t be mixed beforehand. She had to do that part while the corporal was doing his.

Timing.

Time.

Mama decorated the platter with seaweed and placed it before the man she loved.

The General covered an oyster with sauce and swallowed. He gripped his throat. As he toppled backward his kimono fell open revealing an erection.

Mama slipped on top of him and moved up and down. The General seemed amazed and happy, but almost immediately his eyes began to close. Perhaps he had ejaculated, perhaps not. She left him unconscious on the floor and rushed into the pantry.

The corporal was waiting beside the medicine cabinet, masturbating, staring at the photograph. Mama raised her kimono and stepped in front of him, sharply clapped her hands, slid him into place. A few minutes later she was running back into the other room with the antidote she had mixed.

There was a smile on the General’s face when he fell asleep that evening. At the end of a month, just before he left for Manchuria, she was able to tell him she was going to have a baby.

The last night they stayed up together until very late. She played the koto as he sat with folded hands thinking of what was to come, the life he faced in Mukden. As the evening wore on she saw the signs come over him. She was sorry it had to happen then, for she knew he didn’t want her to remember him that way, the hands gripping each other and turning white, the good eye twitching more violently as it filled with water, closing finally under the weight of the sword.

The glass eye gazed at her helplessly, yet even then he still sat erect as she went on playing the quiet music for him.

The headache lasted longer than usual. Somewhere in the course of that intolerable pain the General once thought he heard a sound interrupt the music, a sharp sound, and another, a third, the sound made by a stone being slapped into place on a Go board, that ancient game of strategy and daring he had learned as a child. In fact he did hear the sound but it wasn’t made by black and white stones striking wood to acquire or lose territory. It was made by a hand on a face, her hand striking her face, a pathetic gesture of hopelessness because she could do so little for the man she loved.

The General went abroad early in 1935. In the spring of that year she received an invitation to visit his twin brother in Kamakura. Although she had never met him, she knew the history of this strange man who renounced his title and his wealth in order to become a Jew, whereupon he had at once begun to suffer uncommonly from hunger and thirst, to lose weight, and to pass an excessive amount of urine.

The more superstitious of his teachers in Jerusalem interpreted this as an immediate and sure indication that his conversion was in some peculiar way anathema to the Lord. They therefore inveighed against him to fore-sake what he had so recently achieved, to give up his dream of being a Jew and to reembrace his own culture where he was unmistakably, by birth and tradition, in the eyes of all who might look upon him, already both an honored man and an aristocrat.

But Rabbi Lotmann refused. He persisted. He had become a Jew and he would remain one. To allay the fears of his teachers he made reference to Elijah, his favorite prophet, and recalled for them that when the Lord had selected Elijah as His instrument and had feared for his life He had told him to turn eastward, to travel eastward, to hide by a brook before the Jordan where the Lord would then command ravens to feed him.

Now Rabbi Lotmann said that in his case, since he was Japanese, the Jordan must be the Pacific and the brook before the Jordan must be the brook that crossed an estate owned by his family in Kamakura. Thus he decided to turn eastward and travel eastward and go to that estate to await the sustenance God would send him, as He had once sent the ravens to Elijah.

As it happened, his reverence for Elijah saved his life. The level of medical practice available to the elite of Tokyo, many of whom lived in Kamakura, was far beyond anything to be found in Palestine. A routine medical examination immediately revealed that he was not suffering from some divine curse but from diabetes mellitus. Insulin injections had recently been discovered to be a totally effective mode of treatment, so he was on the estate in Kamakura, by the brook before his Jordan, but a short time before his hunger and thirst subsided and he ceased to pass excessive amounts of urine.

The General had spoken often of his twin, his elder by eight minutes, and Mama had long looked forward to meeting him. Ostensibly the occasion for the visit was a koto recital by Rabbi Lotmann. Mama went and found two other guests, both apparently good friends of the rabbi.

One of them was a priest, tall and gaunt, whom she would go to three years later with a request that was inconceivable to her then. But when the time came for her to go to him for help she knew he would do what she asked, for she had only to look once into his eyes on that spring afternoon in Kamakura to know he was a man who never refused anyone a kindness.

The other guest was also a foreigner, a short old man with a merry face who said the exotic name he went by, Adzhar, wasn’t his real name. Like the Rabbi, he was engaged in some massive translation project. After traveling half the world, he said, learning obscure languages and backing obscure causes, he had more recently turned his attention to women. And although he was seventy-eight, he had discovered that he could never be introduced to a woman without loving her completely and at once. So the moment the company of a priest and a rabbi proved tiresome to her he would be overjoyed to take her to his home and serve her iced vodka and iced caviar, which by coincidence he had set aside that very morning.

They all laughed as they moved into the garden, where a beautiful old koto and a second slightly larger one lay side by side on a raised platform.

Do you also play? she said, turning to Father Lamer-eaux.

In music, he answered, God has given me the ears of an angel and the hands of an ape. As a child I was so clumsy on the scales the piano had to be moved out to the barn.

Then you play, she said, turning to Adzhar, who gaily held up his stubby fingers in front of his face.

With these? There have been too many nails in my life, too many blows from the hammer. I have a soul but alas, I was born the son of a shoemaker and a shoemaker’s hands can’t make that kind of music.

And so? she said, turning to the General’s brother.

When I was young, he answered, my mother and I used to play every day on these two instruments. You’ll forgive me, but I’ve been told how well you play and I thought that perhaps today, for a minute or two, you would join me. Will you?

She bowed stiffly, color in her face, the first time she had known embarrassment with a man since she was a girl of eight. Rabbi Lotmann showed her to her place and she sat down beside him. She struck a chord, he answered her.

The recital lasted until the shadows of the pine trees beyond the garden reached across the platform. Nor was it merely an afternoon of music wherein the former Baron Kikuchi and the mistress of the present Baron Kikuchi touched the strings of their separate memories, for as the gaunt face of Father Lamereaux swayed gravely with the flowers, the fourth member of the musicale recited a tale, sang an epic poem he had learned somewhere in his travels.

The short old man with the exotic name spoke of wonders and miracles and voyages beneath the sea. He told of the adventures of a boy who was carried on a dolphin’s back to the emerald kingdom, where the boy met a princess who described the enchanted life that would be his if he remained there. But the boy elected to return home; he waved to the princess and rose above the waves again, waved to the dolphin and walked along the beach to find the trees moved, the houses gone, the familiar paths now leading elsewhere because one day on the dolphin’s back in the emerald kingdom was the same as one hundred years on earth.

Or was it a dolphin? ended Adzhar. Have I been bewitched by my own tale and confused my creatures? Let me ponder for a moment and make sure I have it right. Yes, I’m certain of it now. It wasn’t a dolphin at all. Wait.

They waited, the rabbi and Mama playing their music, the Jesuit nodding amid the flowers. Adzhar was staring at the small gold cross that hung from Mama’s neck, studying it as he had been all afternoon while recounting his verses. Now she looked up from her koto and their eyes met. He smiled and she returned it, plucked a string, knew exactly what his next words would be.

A dragon, announced Adzhar. Dolphins exist and dragons don’t. Of course it had to be a dragon.

They played the last chords. She said good-bye to Adzhar and Father Lamereaux in the garden and walked together with Rabbi Lotmann to her car. By the gate he stopped.

Today, he said, you reminded me of the Baroness. When she married my father she was about the same age you were when you met my brother. Did you know he came to me three years ago to talk to me about marrying you? He was very disturbed that day but not about you, it was something else that bothered him. Shall I tell you about it?

If you wish, she said.

Yes, I’d like to. He spent the weekend here. On Sunday afternoon I played the koto for him and then it was time for him to return to Tokyo. It was December and we had snow that year, if you remember. It was snowing that afternoon. Ever since he had returned from his tour of duty in Shanghai I had been aware that he always wore a small gold cross around his neck. Before he gave it to you, as you know, he kept it hidden under his uniform, but when he was staying with me and wearing a kimono he made no effort to hide it. I had never asked him about the cross and he never mentioned it, but when I saw it was gone that weekend I suspected he might have something to tell me. When I finished playing he didn’t move, so I sat at the instrument and waited.

I have to leave, he said.

I nodded.

It was a lovely weekend, he said in a low voice. I always enjoy the few hours I can spend here with you. It’s a good life you’ve made for yourself. Does the translation go well?

Yes.

And your health is the same?

Yes. I take my injections.

Of course, we do what we have to do. That’s what she taught us, after all, by performing the tea ceremony, turning the bowls at sunset. We do what we have to do.

I waited. He hadn’t had a headache all weekend and I could see he was worried he might have one now, before he could say what he wanted to say. But some things can’t be hurried. We’ve always been very close, the two of us, even though we seldom discuss personal matters. It’s the way it was in our family, I suppose. When I wrote to him from Jerusalem that I was converting to Judaism, he never asked me to explain myself although it naturally meant trouble for him in the army. He would have to work twice as hard in order to make up for having a brother who had embraced a Western religion, and not only embraced it but been ordained a teacher. Still he never questioned what I had done. His answer was to congratulate me and wish me happiness.

The tea ceremony, he repeated now. She turned the bowl three times because that’s the way it’s done. Well, brother, there are three of us again.

I’m glad, I said. Who is this woman you love?

She’s from a peasant family in the Tohoku.

They know a hard life.

She’s nearly thirty years younger than I am. She was a prostitute.

No matter.

From childhood and for many years.

No matter.

She’s known ten thousand men.

The number of creatures placed on earth by the Lord. In that case she understands many things and can love you well.

I’ve thought of asking her to marry me.

If you asked her, of course she would because she loves you, but is that best? She would be doing it only for your sake. If anything happens to you in the army the lands in the north would become her responsibility. Is it fair to make her the Baroness who owns the lands of the tenant farmers from whom she came?

I think not.

Rabbi Lotmann paused. He looked in silence at Mama for a moment.

That was as far as we got that afternoon. A headache struck him and he could say no more. I helped him into his car and he left. Do you remember that soon after that, in January 1932, he was away for a few weeks?

Yes, she answered.

Did he tell you where he went?

No.

It was Shanghai. A cousin of ours who lived in Shanghai was killed while he was there. It was an accident that he was killed but not an accident that he was attacked. My brother gave the orders, acting on higher orders. That was what he meant that day in December when he kept referring to doing what had to be done. He was thinking about that special assignment in Shanghai the following month. He wanted to tell me about it but couldn’t because of the headache.

I don’t understand. Surely he could have refused the assignment or even stopped it by saying a cousin of his was involved.

It seems to me he could and that’s what worries me.

Did he tell you about this later?

No. I suppose that after it was over he didn’t want to talk about it. I know about it because of the nature of his work, and because he had gone to Shanghai secretly, and because of the circumstances of what happened there.

I don’t understand any of it.

As far as that one incident is concerned, it doesn’t matter. As for the rest, I don’t understand it myself. I only have a feeling he may be something more than just an army officer.

I don’t know what that means.

Nor do I. But if there is anything I can ever do for you, or anything Adzhar or Lamereaux can ever do for you, you must come to us. They are close friends and you can rely on them as you would on me. That’s all. That’s why I wanted you to come today. To tell you that.

Thank you, she said. And thank you for what you said when he asked you about marriage.

He knew it himself, said Rabbi Lotmann. It was just his way of telling me the old koto had found a baroness again. I’ll be sending it to you now. I’ve had that in mind for a long time, but first I wanted to hear you play it with me. I’ve always been sentimental, I’m afraid.

He laughed as he opened the car door.

We’ve heard that tale of Adzhar’s many times, you know, many many times. He always has to tell it whenever I’m playing or Lamereaux is doing a scene from a No play. He’s an active man and it’s his way of taking part. He can’t abide being just a spectator. Today it wasn’t quite the same, though. For some reason he left out the last line.

And what is that?

A little trick of his that’s supposed to prove the tale’s authentic. At the end he waits a minute or two and then asks innocently if anyone is inclined to disbelieve him. When neither Lamereaux nor I say anything, he smiles.

Just as well, he says in the small voice of a child. Just as well, my friends. Just as well, as it turns out. For although I’m old now and it happened long ago, the boy on that dragon’s back was me.

During the next two years she saw the General more than she had expected, for he frequently flew to Tokyo for a meeting of the General Staff. Often he had no more than an hour to be with her but he never failed to come, encouraging her during her confinement and later admiring their son.

Her love for the General continued to grow while he was away. Thus her confusion was complete when she learned that despite the vague suggestion made by his brother in Kamakura, she had never known anything at all about his real life.

The revelation came in the summer of 1937. Although they didn’t know it, it was the last time they were to see each other. Once more the General was being transferred, this time to a high command post in central China. He was to lead one of the armies advancing on Nanking.

His visit coincided with O-bon, the midsummer Festival of the Dead, the day when dead souls returned to those who loved them to receive prayers and offer blessings in return. Having always been superstitious, she felt uneasy when he suddenly appeared that day.

He seemed restless when she played the koto in the evening, so she stopped and encouraged him to talk. Again she noticed in his manner the inexplicable hint of fear she had seen so briefly the night he told her he was going to Manchuria.

He began curiously. He talked about his childhood in the north, about the suffering he had seen among the tenant farmers who worked his family’s estates. He talked about China and the corruption of the Chinese government, the resistance the Japanese army was encountering in China, the power of militarism in Japan. He mentioned a Japanese monk who had been murdered in Shanghai in 1932, immediately reminding her of his brother’s reference to a cousin who had been killed there as a result of an order given by the General.

He grew more agitated. He began to pace the floor. He waved his arms, which was unlike him, and his voice broke, which was also unlike him. She wondered what he was trying to say when all at once he stopped in front of her. He took her hands.

I’ve loved one other woman in my life, he whispered. I loved her very much and we had a son. That was how it all began.

Her face showed no expression. She sat absolutely still. He dropped her hands and resumed his pacing, speaking in a low voice.

Some ten years before he had been sent to Shanghai as a colonel in intelligence. His main task was to gather information on the various Western espionage agencies operating out of Shanghai. An American came to his notice, but before he could learn much about his activities the American left for Canton. Still interested in the case, he arranged an introduction at a reception to the man’s wife, who was apparently staying on in Shanghai.

Baron Kikuchi was already middle-aged. The wife turned out to be very young. In those days he tried to cultivate a more open manner with foreigners, he had to for his work, and often he was successful. He talked with the young woman about literature and painting. They met again. She asked him about Japan, its traditions, its art and philosophy.

For his part, what happened was understandable. She was vivacious and beautiful, passionate about everything. But she was also thirty years younger than he was. Why had she become attracted to him?

A few weeks, no more, and they were living together. They had to keep their relationship secret because it would have damaged his reputation in the army if he were known to be living with a foreign woman. Perhaps that was what spoiled their life together, or perhaps she had only been infatuated with him because of what he could teach her.

In any case, it didn’t last long. When she left him she was pregnant, but she said she was going to have the child and she did. It was a boy whom she took to Japan. Later he heard she had joined her husband in Canton, without the baby.

During that time he discovered he wasn’t the first older man to have had an affair with her. Several years before, when she had first arrived in Shanghai, before she was married, she had lived with a Russian named Adzhar, a man close to seventy although he was said to look and act much younger.

Out of jealousy, vanity, a mixture of pains, Baron Kikuchi had his agents check into the Russian’s life. He found him to be a man devoted entirely to sensuality. Iced vodka, iced caviar, women. Those were his pursuits and his only companions. From a former wife, a rich Indian woman, he had inherited a fortune that allowed him to indulge in a totally dissolute life. There were still jokes told about his insatiable appetites and the ease with which he seduced the women he wanted.

Baron Kikuchi learned that she had become the Russian’s mistress an hour after they met. The information angered him. He was surprised and hurt.

She was gone from Shanghai a little over a year. Baron Kikuchi, newly promoted to General, was being transferred to Kempeitai headquarters in Tokyo. A few days before he was to sail she telephoned him. She wanted to see him. They arranged to meet on Bubbling Well Road and walk beside the river.

The General stopped in front of Mama.

She talked about our time together, he whispered, about how happy we had been. After a while we came to a houseboat tied to the bank and she said that was where she was living. She asked me on board. I followed her across the gangplank and suddenly a man was welcoming me, shaking my hand.

It was her husband. Quin was his name.

Maeve apologised for the trick, I just stood there. She put her hand on my shoulder and thanked me for coming. She smiled, at me, at her husband. Then she laughed the way she always laughed when she had done something she liked, something she was proud of.

It was an odd sort of laugh, timid in a way, appealing, almost coy, as if she wanted to be praised but would be embarrassed when the praise came. I don’t think I’m trying to make excuses for myself when I say there was a hardness in that laugh I hadn’t noticed before.

I mentioned that she was passionate about everything, life, people, ideas. But in the year we’d been apart I’d come to suspect that most of that passion had nothing to do with life or people or ideas. Somehow it always seemed directed toward herself, toward proving that she was whoever she thought she was. She was fervent, but what did it mean? Did she really care about people? How they suffered? What was right and wrong in the world? How she could help?

She talked as if she did, but later I wasn’t so sure. I had a feeling she was acting without knowing it. All those words and opinions were costumes she wore in order to be able to say, this is who I am.

The baby, for example. She had it because she wanted to have the experience, but then she gave it away for someone else to raise, to bother with, to love. She knew she couldn’t love the child, yet she brought it into the world, which was selfish and even cruel. Another life was involved, after all, not just her own.

Love. How could she love anyone if she couldn’t love her own child? I suppose she did love her husband in a way, but certainly no one else, and certainly not all those abstractions she pretended to care so much about.

And even with him I’m not sure. You could say the way she helped him in his work proved she loved him, but did she, or was that just the ultimate costume, the ultimate role, the one deepest inside her? A final way of saying, I love him and therefore this is who I am. Who I am. Me.

I don’t know. I’m not sure. At the time all I understood was that somehow she wasn’t the person I’d thought she was a year before. But of course love does that to us. We hear with different ears and see with different eyes and I’m glad we do. The peace I saw on my mother’s face has kept me alive for years. For years, even though I’ve known for years it wasn’t peace but a mask hiding a lifetime of pain. Hiding it from my brother and me because she loved us.

Maeve. She laughed that laugh of hers, and then she went away and left the two of us standing there.

I was bewildered. Quin smiled and asked me to sit down. He poured me a drink and began to talk. Politics, China, Japan. He had a gift with words and he was fascinating to listen to. He had enthusiasm, a well-trained mind, an enormous grasp of history and its movements.

At some point he dismissed my affair with his wife. He said that kind of thing was inevitable when a husband and wife were separated for long periods. He told me it meant nothing to him and I believed him, for he was the kind of man who would have many women himself. He lived too much with ideas to be devoted to her or any woman. Other things were too important to him. She must have been only a small part of his life.

We talked for a long time and I found we agreed on almost everything, as I suppose he knew we would. Maeve and I had talked a lot when we were together. I suppose she had told him how I felt.

The General stopped in front of Mama again. He took her hands.

In other words, I was lying to you a minute ago. I’ve become so used to lying I do it all the time. Obviously the reason she was interested in me in the beginning, or pretended she was interested, was because she thought I would be useful to him. She loved him enough to do something like that for him. Or loved herself that much. I don’t know which it was.

Anyway, none of that matters now. I’ll just tell you what happened.

Quin and I became friends on the houseboat that afternoon. Originally, I imagine, he’d asked me there for some minor thing, but the friendship between us was real, we both felt it, we both felt it strongly even though I was old enough to be his father.

So in the end he told me who he was and what he was doing. He was working for Soviet intelligence to protect China and the Soviet Union from Japanese militarism. He asked me to work with him and I said I would. And so I have, giving him all the plans of the General Staff, where they have intended to move and when, months and years before it has happened.

And now more recently the most important information of all, information that may someday save Moscow from the Germans. For the Germans will surely attack the Soviet Union before long, and Japan will go to war before long, which means fighting the West, and then the Soviet Union will face the near impossibility of fighting on two fronts.

Or that is, they would have faced that possibility if we hadn’t told them otherwise. If I hadn’t been able to tell Quin that when the time comes the Japanese army will move south to seize the oil and rubber of Southeast Asia, not north into Siberia. That when the time comes, therefore, the Soviets can pull back their Far Eastern divisions to use against the Germans and not worry about the Kwangtung army in Manchuria, for although it will still be there in name, its officers and men will be fighting elsewhere and the Soviet Far East will be safe. That much we were able to tell Moscow, perhaps thereby to save it.

But although you don’t understand any of this, you mustn’t think I’m a traitor. What I’ve done has been for the good of Japan. I had to make a decision that afternoon and it was the right one. I believed what Quin believed in, I believed it then and I do now. I loved Go as a child and that’s probably how I got into the army in the first place, but what the army was doing to Japan and beginning to do to China was wrong. Wrong then, now it’s much worse.

So no matter what happens I know I made the right decision. I know it. And as for Quin, he’s been a brother to me. Whenever I had doubts or was exhausted or thought I couldn’t live through another headache, it was his courage that kept me going, his confidence in me, his will, his determination to finish what we had started, what we were doing together to help people, to help the Japanese and the Chinese by ending their horrible, futile war.

There have been terrible times, times I can’t forget. And people.

There was the morning I had to call in the gentle Western scholar who has assisted us by handling our courier system. A kindly man, a good man, a man who has taken many risks for the same cause I have. Of course he didn’t know who I really was and of course I couldn’t tell him, but I had to get him to change his behavior because it might have endangered our security.

So I insulted him. I blackmailed him. I humiliated him in the most despicable way. Humiliated him, my compatriot. Insulted the man whom I knew was one of my brother’s most treasured friends.

A small matter. Merely a case of insulting and humiliating a kindly man, a gentle human being. There were worse cases. There were cases of murder.

Once, about five years ago, I had to get to Shanghai to see Quin, to talk to him about the General Staff’s plan to invade north China. I absolutely had to get there but there was no way to leave Tokyo. My office was involved in the planning and my absence from Tokyo then, for any reason, would have been impossible to explain. I was desperate.

And then a way turned up. A disgusting, sickening way. It was ghastly.

The plan called for a man to be assassinated in Shanghai, some well-known Japanese. The assassination would appear to be the work of Chinese patriots, and naturally the repercussions would be great. It was to be the first step, the beginning. A year later the Japanese people would be more than ready for the invasion of China.

Someone on the General Staff suggested a certain Japanese monk who lived in Shanghai, a man who was loved by the Chinese and respected by the Japanese, an ideal target. What little remained of the good feelings between our people was the work of him and a few men like him.

That monk was my cousin, descended from my father’s younger brother. But no one knew this because his family had been in China since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and because they had adopted a Chinese name, and because I’d destroyed certain parts of the Kempeitai files so that no harm would come to him.

Now not only did I have to agree to the plan but suggest it was such a delicate operation it required my presence in Shanghai. Behind my back I saw them smiling at each other, whispering that the real reason I wanted to go was because I was a killer, a murderer, an executioner who liked to sniff and smell and taste the scene of an execution.

They hated me of course. They’d always hated me because I had the files of the Kempeitai behind me and knew too much about them. They’d have gotten rid of me long ago if they weren’t so jealous among themselves about trusting anyone else with my work.

So they smiled at me.

Yes, they said, an excellent idea. Perhaps you should deal with this matter personally. Nothing must go wrong, and with you there it won’t. It will be an efficient murder, that is quite certain, given your skill. Quite certain and most reassuring. An excellent suggestion, Kikuchi.

I had to let them smile at me and get up and walk out the door. I went to Shanghai and met with the agents, telling them that the monk was to be superficially wounded, one bullet in the arm and the rest in the air, nothing more. But in the end that little effort came to nothing. They lost their heads and fired indiscriminately.

Five years ago. There have been other things since then and others before then, things you can’t explain to yourself or anyone else, things that just sit there and sit there and never go away, wounds that won’t heal, wounds open to the wind, wounds that reach to the bone. Once I talked to Quin about it and he nodded to himself. He nodded to himself and said nothing, for there was nothing to say. Nothing. He knew what I was talking about.

The General released her hands. He had finished. He went over to the cupboard and took down an unopened bottle of Irish whiskey that had been left untouched for eight years, a gift from Quin at the end of that afternoon and evening on a houseboat in Shanghai. The General never drank whiskey, but tonight he poured himself a large glass and emptied it.

She watched him refill the glass. He sat down beside her and bowed his head so that she could not see his eyes, neither the one with vision nor the one without.

So tell me what you think, he said.

I think you are a brave man, she answered, and I think you’ve done what you believe in. And I feel sorry for that other woman who can’t love a man the way she wants to love him. And I feel sorry for him, for someday he may discover why.

But most of all I don’t think about them at all. I think of my love for you and that’s all I think about, when you’re with me and when you’re not.

Four months passed. Mama was preparing the special rice cakes with which to welcome the New Year. Late in the afternoon she was given the name of a caller. She bathed and dressed in her finest kimono. Lastly she looked in on her sleeping son.

It was snowing when she walked down the open corridor that crossed the garden, toward the soft light that lit the rice paper door of the room where she had played the koto for the General. She watched the snow for a moment before sliding back the door on its runners.

A haggard figure knelt in front of her, his forehead pressed to the tatami. She begged him to rise, to sit by the brazier and warm his hands, surely stiff from the harsh wind of many an unfriendly night. She poured tea and placed the cup before him.

Dead, whispered the corporal.

I know, she said.

But there has been no announcement.

I knew last summer.

The corporal kept his head bowed. He cradled the steaming teacup in his hands.

I feel uncomfortable sitting here, he said. This was his place.

You need not, my friend. You loved him and tried to make him happy. No one can do more.

The corporal shuddered, but not from the cold. The spasm came from the fires that still burned behind his eyes. He was too frightened to go on. He felt a hand touch his arm and looked up to see a very old face, a tiny woman smiling gently in the yellow light.

It’s all right, she said. You can tell me. Life is brief and we must listen to every sound.

December 1937.

Nanking.

The ancient capital of the south was the only stronghold on the Yangtze River still under Chinese control. The Japanese armies had advanced from victory to victory. Whole Chinese divisions broke ranks, were slaughtered, surrendered. The better regiments had already been isolated or defeated. Radio messages told the General that he was ahead of the other columns. That day, he knew, he could reach Nanking if he pushed his troops hard enough.

The General called in his senior officers at five o’clock in the morning. He told them what he intended to do. His deputy and several colonels disagreed. The men were too exhausted, they had seen too much killing in the last few days. Some had been caught looting, fires were breaking out. It was dangerous. The breakdown in discipline could be contagious.

The General shook his head. He was tired, he no longer wanted to talk to people. He wanted it all to end. In the name of the Emperor he gave them his orders.

The heels clicked, the troops shouldered their packs and began to march. The pace quickened throughout the morning, by noon the forward elements thought they could see the city in the distance. The infantry units swept through the weak resistance, outdistancing their armor, their supplies, their artillery, racing across the frozen paddy fields and the few remaining miles.

Late in the afternoon the lead elements of the General’s army were fighting in the outskirts of the city. Their officers tried to slow the advance. Their battle plans called for regrouping, but the soldiers were no longer under their control. All day they had been running and shooting, by nightfall they were no longer an army. They stumbled along in packs, in gangs, numb and hungry, totally worn out. The city was empty of enemy forces. Only women and children and old men were left. The unfit, the helpless, the cripples.

The General had not slept for many nights. During that whole last day he had spoken only once, to curse the fires he could see springing up on the horizon.

The radio in his command car crackled and he ignored it. Motorcycle couriers sped beside the car waving dispatch cases, pointing at the insignia they wore, theater command. The General gazed straight ahead and told the corporal to drive faster. Headquarters would tell him to stop, to hold up his advance until the other Japanese armies were in line. But the General was too tired to stop. He wanted to reach the end.

The sun had just set when they passed through the gates of the city. Again the General remarked on the fires, more apparent now because of the darkness. It was several degrees below zero, the wind was rising.

They entered a large square. The General looked around him and said something strange was happening out there. These were Japanese soldiers, the best disciplined in the world. What were they doing?

The staff car had been tightly sealed against the winter weather. They could neither hear nor see clearly what was going on outside. They could only make out scattered movements in the darkness, shadows, faces flaring in the headlights, torches flickering. The General ordered the corporal to stop. He gripped his sword and stepped down into the square.

The corporal moaned, he hid his face in his hands. Mama listened to the snow falling on Tokyo. She turned her teacup in her hands, revolved it three times before she drank. Then she rested her hand on the corporal’s arm again.

Go on, she said. We must hear it all.

The men, moaned the corporal, they weren’t even animals. A soldier speared a baby with a bayonet and threw the baby in the air. A soldier stabbed a woman and skinned her legs. A soldier got over the hind quarters of a horse and pushed himself in. A soldier had a belt of human hair and was eating something. A soldier was playing with a little girl, cutting holes in her, pushing himself in. There was a head in the street. There was a whole row of heads beside a building. They were lining people up and shooting them, building fires around them, tying grenades to them. They threw them out the windows, they dropped stones on them. They tied them under trucks. They used machine guns and pistols and blew up rooms and set fires and pushed people into the fires and cut off parts and roasted the parts and ate them. A soldier ran in circles shouting army regulations, shooting people, stabbing people, clawing his own face down to the bone. They raped and raped and then they raped with bayonets, with rifles, firing the rifles. They used grenades that way to blow women up. A soldier sat on a pile of bodies screaming. A soldier held a pistol to a girl’s face and made her drink his urine. He made her lie down and did something on her face and crushed her face with his boot. They cut out eyes and buried people and made them crawl through glass. They beat them with their rifle butts. They broke teeth with their rifle butts. They beat them in the face and clubbed them over the head with their rifle butts. They broke fingers and arms and legs with their rifle butts. A soldier rode on an old man’s back stabbing him with his knife. The old man fell and the soldier kicked him and hit him in the head and fired bullets into his head and kept on kicking him. They made them kneel and do things to each other. They made them bend over and do things to each other. They held a girl’s hand and made her castrate her father. They cut off a boy’s nose and made him chew it. They beat him between the legs with their rifle butts and beat his chest with rifle butts and poured gasoline over him and set him afire. They went on shooting people and lining them up and shooting them and there was nothing but screams, shadows and screams and fires and screams, and machine guns and fires and rifle butts and pistols and bayonets and knives and screams, and shadows and bodies and faces and screams, and filth and blood and screams and fires and people being shot and stabbed and clubbed and kicked and beaten and trampled, crawling people, screaming people, old men and children screaming, women screaming, people burning and running and falling in the fires and the shadows and the darkness, soldiers shooting and people screaming, screaming.

The corporal moaned. His head was in his arms. He was crying.

Mama gazed at the rice paper door and saw the frozen fields in the north where she had been born. She saw the poor farmhouses, the barren schoolrooms, the little Japanese boys bent over their books in winter trying to learn a thousand Chinese ideograms so they could read their own history and write their own names. She saw the schoolrooms burn, and the farmhouses, and the pine groves of the temples. She saw the little boys rip up the graceful Chinese characters and shoot them and stab them and defile them, devour them. She saw it all.

He began to shout, whispered the corporal. He was running after them, yelling at them to stop. I tried to keep up with him but there were too many shadows, too many fires, too many screams. I didn’t find him until the next morning.

The corporal looked away.

He was naked. Someone had murdered him and pulled off his clothes. His right eye had been ripped from the socket. There was excrement on his epaulets, which lay beside him. His testicles were tied around his neck.

That night, after the corporal left, Mama sat up alone meditating. The next day was New Year’s, her birthday as it was the birthday for everyone of her race.

The cough struck her son a short time afterward, struck him quickly and violently as if the world could no longer tolerate the passage of time. Its course was brief, nothing could be done. She held him and watched his spirit go, one tiny sacrifice to an era where Nanking was but the first act of the far grander circus that was to follow.

She wanted to leave Tokyo and Japan as well. Only one enclave remained on the mainland where a Japanese could still mix with foreigners, Shanghai, an outlaw city where the chaos and despair might equal her own.

She found it all she had expected and more. Among the foreigners who were still there, who had nowhere to go, nothing was left untried. Mama began taking laudanum, the solution of opium in alcohol preferred by many because of its combination of effects.

She spent her time with a group of companions who met nightly to narcotize themselves, to take part in orgies or watch them. Like them she slept during the day and went out only at night. Her nameless companions disappeared regularly, victims of suicides or intrigues, to be replaced by other weary faces who would disappear in turn.

To ease their pain they gave up using each other, or having others used in front of them, and took to watching pornographic movies, a lifeless display of mutilations and fecal sandwiches and tubercular saliva so unreal they could bury themselves in the long nights and dream nothing around them existed.

Of all the people who passed through her life during that period of forgetfulness, only one remained in her memory, the projectionist who showed the movies.

He was a huge man, an American, a giant with a pockmarked face. His body was bloated and his eyes bulged from the quantities of alcohol he consumed. As soon as he arrived in the locked, shuttered room and set up his battered projector there was a sense of relief because the lights could be turned off. The projector whined, the reels rattled, the flickering images crept across the wall as Mama and the others sank into their couches.

The projectionist had a strange habit of taking off his clothes. Apparently this was because the machine he used was an old one that quickly overheated. Or so Mama assumed as she watched him fumbling with his garments during the course of the evening, pulling them off one by one until at midnight he was naked save for a towel over his loins.

Like others in the room, Mama often slipped over to the machine after midnight to whisper to the giant. When she did he listened to her impassively, not commenting, occasionally nodding his head. As the weeks went by Mama found herself telling him more and more about her life, eventually confessing everything.

It was a unique experience for her. At the time she couldn’t have said why he had this effect on her, why she felt the need to slip over to him and whisper in the darkness. Perhaps it was because he accepted everything she said, perhaps because the huge shadowy profile cast by the dim light of the projection lamp was totally anonymous.

Or perhaps simply because he was naked. An immobile naked giant who heard everything and saw everything, from whom there was nothing to fear.

Nor was the bloated American merely her confessor in that locked, shuttered room. He was also an impostor and a clown.

For a long time, it seemed to Mama, the images on the wall had been becoming dimmer. One night she asked the huge naked projectionist about this and he waved his arms extravagantly. He said that maybe he couldn’t get the proper bulbs. Or maybe the electrical system in the city was failing. Or maybe this and maybe that.

He kept on talking, muttering. He looked down on her with a smile, and all at once she knew the confessor was confessing, confiding some monstrous private joke to her about Shanghai. About the hopelessly despairing men and women who came to whisper to him in the shadows. About life.

She went back to her couch and watched the films more closely. She made a discovery.

There were great numbers of animals and humans in the films, but none of the scenes was remotely pornographic. She couldn’t be sure, the films were so scratched they were nearly invisible, but as best she could tell they were documentaries of some kind, crudely done documentaries that seemed to be explaining the basic techniques of animal husbandry. The animals were common barnyard varieties, underfed, the men and women looked like Russian peasants.

Primitive instructive movies from the early days of the Russian Revolution. Where had he found them and why? How was he able to show them and make the depraved people in that room think they were watching a dazzling tableau of debauchery?

A kind and lonely man. As kind and lonely as a clown.

A rumor passed among the companions that one night soon there would be a special circus, an entertainment such as no one had ever seen, a performance that in some unknown way would bring ultimate satisfaction to all those who witnessed it. The companions were excited. They could not disguise their longing for the mysterious spectacle.

Only Mama was unsure. The clown’s trick had made her think of oysters.

To her the oyster had always been a theological symbol because it was encapsuled and complete, because it resembled the gray jelly of the brain, because Lao-tzu had once spoken of a substanceless image existing before the Yellow Ancestor. To Mama it seemed likely the oyster might be that image. More than once in her despair she had dreamed of becoming an oyster.

But that was before the clown had smiled at her. There was magic in the illusions he worked with his films, a magic so simple it had made her smile for the first time since the death of the General, made her smile and realize she was not yet ready to join these other voyeurs in a circus of death. Instead she decided to visit the circus master alone, before he gave his performance.

She stopped taking laudanum to clear her mind. She meditated, something she hadn’t done in a year. The night before the circus she came to the filming room as usual.

The couches were arranged in rows, the windows shuttered, the door bolted. She waited until after midnight before she sneaked out of the room. By then the companions were dazed with opium smoke and the clown was snoring fitfully, his bulk spread over three or four large chairs beside the stalled projector. After years of use the ancient documentary had finally snapped. The machine still purred, a reel flapped around and around, but the frame on the wall remained the same, a peasant hovel with a large indistinct animal pressing at the door. Perhaps two frames had been trapped in the lens when the machine stalled.

No one saw her leave. She slipped into a rickshaw, closed the curtains around her, and began the long ride down Bubbling Well Road.

Her destination was an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city. The building was square, window-less, with tall skylights. A muffled shriek, a squeal drifted to her on the wind.

She passed down a canvas corridor, the draped cages of the sleeping animals. Strange costumes, spangled and hairy, hung from the packing boxes. The warehouse itself turned out to be a vast open space lit by moonlight. The ceiling vaulted toward the sky, the corners were left in darkness. Here echoes could have no end, for the great empty area was no less than a cavern of the mind.

He was standing in the sawdust ring. He wore a black bowler hat, a lavender frock coat. In one hand he held a megaphone, in the other a whip. He was standing with his head back and his arms spread, staring at the sky.

She went up to him and bowed. She told him who she was and why she had come. She said that she was one of the group that had commissioned the circus but that she had decided not to come, despite her misery. So she was here alone to learn from the master the meaning of his final performance.

He broke into a gloomy laugh and began striding around the ring cracking his whip, hissing orders through his megaphone. He talked about faith, deception, disguises. He swept his arms through history gathering up emperors and peasants, barbarians, poets. He sank into a confused monologue on love, love that was and love that might have been.

The words cracked, the whip flew, the megaphone defied an imaginary audience. This man, she realized, had lost his way in a land of strange beasts and savage costumes.

She couldn’t understand the nature of his despair, but as she watched him stalk himself in the ring a curious image stirred within her. She saw a naked giant slumped beside a lamp that dimly projected meaningless figures on the wall.

The image was so vivid it startled her. Why had it come to her then? What connected these two anonymous men, a nameless projectionist and a nameless circus master?

She gazed at the skylight, at the invisible corners of the warehouse, at the tiny sawdust ring. She listened to the raving voice of the circus master and heard within it her own voice whispering, whispering night after night to a silent fat man who sat naked and immobile, impassive, oblivious to every horror she recounted, untouched by the terrors she wished upon herself.

Quickly then she slipped off her clothes and went up to the circus master, stopped his pacing, and took from him the megaphone, the whip, emptied his hands, and held him in her arms until the sobbing quieted, until the spasms subsided and he felt in her a blessing that he had lost long ago, a blessing that she had lost as well, forever she thought, not having known until that moment that the gift had been returned to her by the naked giant who nodded forgiveness.

Their act of love lasted until dawn. When she left him she walked for miles, making her plans to return to Japan.

That night she sat by an open window looking at the stars. Midnight passed, the hours wore on. She considered her past grief, she reflected on the torment of the circus master who at that very moment was introducing the ghosts of his years in their terrible costumes, opening the cages of the savage beasts, celebrating his circus of death. But at that very moment, as well, new life was moving within her.

In the course of knowing ten thousand men she had conceived only once. Now she knew it had happened again. Through the intercession of the naked giant she had learned once more to love, she had loved well, and now she would bear the circus master’s son.

The boy was born in the General’s old villa in Tokyo. Because he was half-Caucasian she could not keep him. War was coming with the West and it would be unfair to have him grow up in Japan. Despite herself, she had to get him out of the country while there was still time.

She went to the one man she felt could help her, the missionary who was a friend of the General’s brother. Father Lamereaux listened to her story and agreed to send the baby to America. Sadly she gave him up.

War with the West came, then defeat. Before the war doors were never locked in Japan, but now desperate men stole everything they could find. Her house was broken into nightly, a new gang of starving thieves entering as soon as one had left.

The General’s chauffeur, who had come to work for her at the end of the war, suggested hiring one of these gangs of combat veterans to guard the house and keep the others away. But Mama had a different idea, one consonant as always with the Tao. She quoted Lao-tzu.

When there is Tao in the empire, the galloping steeds are turned back to fertilize the ground by their droppings.

But what does it mean? asked the corporal.

It means, she said, that these men who were heroes yesterday, who are thieves today, will one day be heroes again. They are galloping steeds, and if we treat them with the wisdom of the Tao their droppings will fertilize the future.

Droppings? said the corporal.

A man has several, answered Mama. There are still three or four women servants in this house, and I am sure there are other women near here who are lonely after so many years when the men were away fighting. So instead of posting guards we will invite every passing steed into the house. You will see.

The corporal feared what might happen, but the Tao was in Mama and she knew it. Before many years went by a new Japan began to emerge, an ingenious and industrious Japan, energetic, prosperous.

Many of the old ways had changed, but none more noticeably than the tradition Mama had become skilled in as a child, perfected in girlhood, and left as a young woman, the delicate and profound knowledge of men that for centuries had made the entrance to a Japanese brothel, no matter how humble it might appear to the passing stranger, one of the few truly exquisite gateways in the world, a portal unparalleled save by the path of mystics seeking comfort not in this world but another.

The elaborate brothels of the prewar years gave way to the garish bars of the early postwar years, but then the American soldiers left and Japanese men settled down to learning the lessons of the war and the Occupation. Having been defeated in their venture at Asian conquest, the Japanese combat veterans embraced peace and built industries to supply the Americans, who in turn, having been victorious, were now fighting wars all over the continent, bringing a devastation everywhere that required ever more Japanese goods and industries to replenish what was destroyed, bringing a prosperity to Japan that no warlord or ultranationalist could have conceived possible two decades earlier.

But the unexpected turn of history whereby Japan achieved the goals of the war by losing the war, was not without its victims. Somewhere in the hectic confusion of democratic expansion the traditional Japanese brothel disappeared, taking with it the Orient’s artistic contribution to originality and one of man’s rarest creations, the Japanese whore.

No longer was anyone willing to pay money for a woman’s educated body, a woman’s aristocratic smile, a woman’s subtle remarks and incomparable cleverness at match-stick games. The businessmen in the new Japan were preoccupied with their wares and the wares that were soon to be theirs, so when the hour came for relaxation they preferred lying on their backs in a massage parlor staring through the steam at the ceiling, calculating profits, considering new markets, dreaming alone and grandly as a firm, anonymous hand reached out from the mists to masturbate them with swift efficiency.

Or they preferred a pornographic film parlor, where such individual democratic acts could be recalled and anticipated.

As was necessary, Mama adapted to the times. She remembered the films shown in Shanghai before the war by a naked clown and built The Living Room with those films in mind. And the combat veterans she had entertained after the war, before they had learned the ways of the new democracy and become successful, certainly didn’t forget the little woman who had provided for them when they were penniless.

They remembered and they returned, gratefully spending large sums of money at Mama’s nightclub, the most famous place of entertainment in Asia, a club that was almost as much of a legend as its mysterious owner, a tiny old woman whose compassion and mercy were so great that many wondered if she might not be a reincarnation of the Kannon Buddha.

War, disaster, turmoil. Despite it all Mama had followed the Tao.

And now more recently in her old age she had acquired the kind of retreat she had always wanted, a quiet shrine where she could contemplate the sunrise high above the Imperial moat and the Imperial palace. From there she descended to the world below only in passing to accrue some minor transitory wealth, some award or honor, before returning to her real home far above the city, a spiritual temple carried on the back of the mythical dragon that had guided her through the years of loss and love.