Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Page 20

  And so he took it easy all through the upheaval of the war—from the Japanese invasion of China to the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of two atomic bombs—playing his trombone in Shanghai nightclubs. The war was happening somewhere far away. Shozaburo Takitani was a man who possessed not the slightest hint of will or introspection with regard to history. He wanted nothing more than to be able to play his trombone, eat three meals a day, and have a few women nearby. He was simultaneously modest and arrogant. Deeply self-centered, he nevertheless treated those around him with great kindness and good feeling. Which is why most people liked him. Young, handsome, and good on his horn, he stood out like a crow on a snowy day wherever he went. He slept with more women than he could count. Japanese, Chinese, White Russians, whores, married women, gorgeous girls, and girls who were not so gorgeous: he did it with anyone he could get his hands on. Before long, his super-sweet trombone and his super-active giant penis made him a Shanghai sensation.

  Shozaburo Takitani was also blessed—though he himself did not realize it—with a talent for making “useful” friends. He was on great terms with high-ranking Japanese Army officers, Chinese millionaires, and all kinds of influential types who were sucking up gigantic profits from the war through obscure channels. A lot of them carried pistols under their jackets and never walked out of a building without giving the street a quick scan right and left. He and they just “clicked” for some strange reason. And they took special care of him. They were always glad to open doors for him whenever problems came up. Life was a breeze for Shozaburo Takitani in those years.

  Fine talents can sometimes work against you, though. When the war ended, his dubious connections won him the attention of the Chinese Army, and he was locked up for a long time. Day after day, the others who had been imprisoned like Shozaburo Takitani were taken out of their cells and executed without trial. Guards would just show up, drag them into the prison yard, and blow their brains out with automatic pistols. It always happened at two o’clock in the afternoon. The tight, hard crack of a pistol would echo through the yard.

  This was the greatest crisis that Shozaburo Takitani had ever faced. A literal hair’s breadth separated life from death. He assumed he would be dying in this place. But the prospect of death did not frighten him greatly. They’d put a bullet through his brain, and it would be all over. A split second of pain. I’ve lived the way I wanted to all these years, he thought, and I’ve slept with tons of women. I’ve eaten a lot of good food, and had a lot of good times. There’s not that much in life I’m sorry I missed. Besides, I’m not in any position to complain about being killed. It’s just the way it goes. What more could I ask for? Millions of Japanese have died in this war, and lots of them in far more terrible ways than what is going to happen to me. He resigned himself to his fate and whistled away the hours in his cell. Day after day he watched the clouds drift by the bars of his tiny window and painted mental pictures on the cell’s filthy walls of the faces and bodies of the many women he had slept with. In the end, though, Shozaburo Takitani turned out to be one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave the prison alive and go home to Japan. By that time the other man, a high-ranking officer, had nearly lost his mind. Shozaburo Takitani stood on the deck of the boat repatriating him, and as he watched the avenues of Shanghai shrinking away in the distance, he thought, Life: I’ll never understand it.

  Emaciated and bereft of possessions, Shozaburo Takitani came back to Japan in the spring of 1946, nine months after the war ended. He discovered that his parents had died when their home burned to the ground in the great Tokyo air raid of March ’45. His only brother had disappeared without a trace on the Burmese front. In other words, Shozaburo Takitani was now alone in the world. This was no great shock to him, however, nor did it make him feel particularly sad or miserable. He did, of course, experience some sense of absence, but he felt that, eventually, life had to turn out more or less like this. Everyone ended up alone sooner or later. He was thirty at the time, beyond the age for complaining about loneliness. He felt as if he had put on several years all at once. But that was all. No further emotion welled up inside him.

  Yes, Shozaburo Takitani had managed to survive one way or another, and as long as he had managed to survive, he would have to start thinking of ways to go on living.

  Because he knew only one line of work, he hunted up some of his old buddies and put together a little jazz band that started playing at the American military bases. His talent for making contacts won him the friendship of a jazz-loving American army major, an Italian American from New Jersey who played a pretty mean clarinet himself. An officer in the Quartermaster Corps, the major could get all the jazz records Shozaburo Takitani needed straight from the U.S. The two of them often jammed together in their spare time. Shozaburo Takitani would go to the major’s quarters, break open a beer, and listen to the happy jazz of Bobby Hackett, Jack Teagarden, or Benny Goodman, teaching himself as many of their good licks as he could. The major supplied him with all kinds of food and milk and liquor, which were hard to get ahold of in those days. Not bad, he thought: not a bad time to be alive.

  Shozaburo Takitani got married in 1947. His new wife was a distant cousin on his mother’s side. They happened to run into each other one day on the street and, over tea, shared news of their relatives and talked about the old days. They started seeing each other after that, and before long ended up living together—because she had gotten pregnant would be a safe guess.

  At least that was the way Tony Takitani had heard it from his father. Tony Takitani had no idea how much his father, Shozaburo Takitani, had loved his mother. She was a pretty girl, and quiet, but not too healthy according to his father.

  She gave birth to a boy the year after they were married, and three days later she died. Just like that. And just like that she was cremated, all quick and quiet. She experienced no great complications and no suffering to speak of. She just faded into nothingness, as if someone had gone backstage and flicked a switch.

  Shozaburo Takitani had no idea how he was supposed to feel about this. He was a stranger to such emotions. He could not seem to grasp with any precision what “death” was all about, nor could he come to any conclusion regarding what this particular death had meant for him. All he could do was swallow it whole as an accomplished fact. And so he came to feel that some kind of flat, disc-like thing had lodged itself in his chest. What it was, or why it was there, he couldn’t say. The object simply stayed in place and blocked him from thinking any more deeply about what had happened to him. He thought about nothing at all for a full week after his wife died. He even forgot about the baby he had left in the hospital.

  The major took Shozaburo Takitani under his wing and did all he could to console him. They drank together in the base bar nearly every day. You’ve got to get ahold of yourself, the major would tell him. The one thing you absolutely have to do is bring that boy up right. The words meant nothing to Shozaburo Takitani, who merely nodded in silence. Even to him, though, it was clear that the major was trying to help him. Hey, I know, the major added suddenly one day. Why don’t you let me be the boy’s godfather? I’ll give him a name. Oh, thought Shozaburo Takitani, he had forgotten to give the baby a name.

  The major suggested his own first name, Tony. “Tony” was no name for a Japanese child, of course, but such a thought never crossed the major’s mind. When he got home, Shozaburo Takitani wrote the name “Tony Takitani” on a piece of paper, stuck it to the wall, and stared at it for the next several days. Hmm, “Tony Takitani.” Not bad. Not bad. The American occupation of Japan was probably going to last a while yet, and an American-style name just might come in handy for the kid at some point.

  For the child himself, though, living with a name like that was hard. The other kids at school teased him as a half-breed, and whenever he told people his name, they responded with a look of puzzlement or distaste. Some people thought it was a bad joke, and others reacted with anger. For certain people, coming fac
e-to-face with a child called “Tony Takitani” was all it took to reopen old wounds.

  Such experiences served only to close the boy off from the world. He never made any real friends, but this did not cause him pain. He found it natural to be by himself: it was a kind of premise for living. By the time he reached some self-awareness, his father was always traveling with the band. When he was little a housekeeper would come to take care of him during the day, but once he was in his last years of elementary school, he could manage without her. He cooked for himself, locked up at night, and slept alone. Not that he ever felt lonely: he was simply more comfortable this way than with someone fussing over him all the time. Having lost his wife, Shozaburo Takitani, for some reason, never married again. He had plenty of girlfriends, of course, but he never brought any of them to the house. Like his son, he was used to taking care of himself. Father and son were not as distant from each other as one might imagine from their lifestyles. But being the kind of people they were, imbued to an equal degree with a habitual solitude, neither took the initiative to open his heart to the other. Neither felt a need to do so. Shozaburo Takitani was not well suited to being a father, and Tony Takitani was not well suited to being a son.

  Tony Takitani loved to draw, and he spent hours each day shut up in his room, doing just that. He especially loved to draw pictures of machines. Keeping his pencil point needle-sharp, he would produce clear, accurate drawings of bicycles, radios, engines and such down to the tiniest details. If he drew a flower, he would capture every vein in every leaf. No matter what anyone said to him, it was the only way he knew how to draw. His grades in art, unlike those in other subjects, were always outstanding, and he usually took first prize in school art contests.

  And so it was perfectly natural for Tony Takitani to go from high school to an art college (at which point, without either of them suggesting it, father and son began living separately as a matter of course) to a career as an illustrator. In fact, there was no need for him to consider other possibilities. While the young people around him were anguishing over the paths they should follow in life, he went on doing his precise mechanical drawings without a thought for anything else. And because it was a time when young people were acting out against authority and the Establishment with passion and violence, none of his contemporaries saw anything of value in his utilitarian art. His art college professors viewed his work with twisted smiles. His classmates criticized it as lacking in ideological content. Tony Takitani himself could not see what was so great about their work with ideological content. To him, their pictures all looked immature, ugly, and inaccurate.

  Once he graduated from college, though, everything changed for him. Thanks to the extreme practicality and usefulness of his realistic technique, Tony Takitani never had a problem finding work. No one could match the precision with which he drew complicated machines and architecture. “They look realer than the real thing,” everyone said. His pictures were more accurate than photographs, and they had a clarity that made any explanation a waste of words. All of a sudden, he was the one illustrator that everybody had to have. And he took on everything, from the covers of automobile magazines to ad illustrations, anything that involved mechanisms. He enjoyed the work, and he made good money.

  Shozaburo Takitani, meanwhile, went on playing his horn. Along came modern jazz, then free jazz, then electric jazz, but Shozaburo Takitani never changed: he kept performing in the same old style. He was not a musician of the first rank, but his name could still draw crowds, and he always had work. He had all the tasty treats he wanted, and he always had a woman. In terms of sheer personal satisfaction, his life was one of the more successful ones.

  Tony Takitani used every spare minute for work. Without any hobbies to drain his resources, he managed by the time he was thirty-five to amass a small fortune. He let people talk him into buying a big house in an affluent Setagaya suburb, and he owned several apartments that brought him rental income. His accountant took care of all the details.

  By this point in his life, Tony Takitani had been involved with several different women. He had even lived with one of them for a short while in his youth. But he never considered marriage, never saw the need of it. The cooking, the cleaning, the laundry he could manage for himself, and when work interfered with those things, he hired a housekeeper. He never felt a desire to have children. He had no close friends of the kind who would come to him for advice or to confess secrets, not even one to drink with. Not that he was a hermit, either. He lacked his father’s special charm, but he had perfectly normal relationships with people he saw on a daily basis. There was nothing arrogant or boastful about him. He never made excuses for himself or spoke slightingly of others. Rather than talk about himself, what he enjoyed most was to listen to what others had to say. And so just about everybody who knew him liked him. Still, it was impossible for him to form relationships with people that went beyond the level of sheer everyday reality. His father he would see no more than once in two or three years on some matter of business. And when the business was over, neither man had much of anything to say to the other. Thus, Tony Takitani’s life went by, quietly and calmly. I’ll probably never marry, he thought to himself.

  But then one day, without the slightest warning, Tony Takitani fell in love. It happened with incredible suddenness. She was a publishing company part-timer who came to his office to pick up an illustration. Twenty-two years old, she was a quiet girl who wore a gentle smile the whole time she was in his office. Her features were pleasant enough, but objectively speaking, she was no great beauty. Still, there was something about her that gave Tony Takitani’s heart a violent punch. The first moment he saw her, his chest tightened, and he could hardly breathe. Not even he could tell what it was about her that had struck him with such force. And even if it had become clear to him, it was not something he could have explained in words.

  The next thing that caught his attention was the way she dressed. He had no particular interest in what people wore, nor was he the kind of man who would mentally register each article of clothing that a woman had on, but there was something so wonderful about the way this girl dressed herself that it made a deep impression on him: indeed, one could even say it moved him. There were plenty of women around who dressed smartly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Totally different. She wore her clothing with such utter naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had wrapped itself in a special wind as it made ready to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman who wore her clothes with such apparent joy. And the clothes themselves looked as if, in being draped on her body, they had won new life for themselves.

  “Thank you very much,” she said as she took the illustration and walked out of his office, leaving him speechless for a time. He sat at his desk, dazed, doing nothing until evening came and the room turned completely dark.

  The next day he phoned the publisher and found some pretext to have her come to his office again. When their business was finished, he invited her to lunch. They made small talk as they ate. Though fifteen years apart in age, they had much in common to talk about, almost strangely so. They clicked on every topic. He had never had such an experience before, and neither had she. Though somewhat nervous at first, she gradually relaxed until she was laughing and talking freely. You really know how to dress, said Tony Takitani when they parted. I like clothes, she said with a bashful smile. Most of my pay goes into clothing.

  They dated a few times after that. They didn’t go anywhere in particular, just found quiet places to sit and talk for hours—about their backgrounds, about their work, about the way they thought or felt about this or that. They never seemed to tire of talking with each other, as if they were filling up each other’s emptiness. The fifth time they met, he asked her to marry him. But she had a boyfriend she had been dating since high school. Their relationship had become less than ideal with the passage of time, and now they seemed to fight about the stupidest things w
henever they met. In fact, seeing him was nowhere nearly as free and fun as seeing Tony Takitani, but still, that didn’t mean she could simply break it off. She had her reasons, whatever they were. And besides, there was that fifteen-year difference in age. She was still young and inexperienced. She wondered what that fifteen-year gap would mean to them in the future. She said she wanted time to think.

  Each day that she spent thinking was another day in hell for Tony Takitani. He couldn’t work. He drank, alone. Suddenly his solitude became a crushing weight, a source of agony, a prison. I just never noticed it before, he thought. With despairing eyes, he stared at the thickness and coldness of the walls surrounding him and thought, If she says she doesn’t want to marry me, I might just kill myself.