sequel-2

THE SEQUEL

Chapter 2--The Trip to Japan

      Also on June 5, 1975, sitting around the picnic table after a light dinner, Shoko had suggested that those gathered there--Henry and she,   Jack and Laura, and Christine--agree to read Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji the last half of that year, as they'd be in the early stages of filming Romeo and Juliet, so should have time, and could meet either at Shangri La or the lake to discuss it. Then they'd all be current on the great Japanese classic if they could manage to go to Japan in the near future, as both Betty and Jordan would have liked to do. They planned to finish the book on New Years Eve, as Shoko and Jack had done with the countess in 1962.
     By then Laura Burns had finally become Laura Curtis. Just before they began the actual filming, for which Henry had negotiated the contract, they'd had a double wedding at the lake. Shoko had never pressed the matter, but Henry asked her to marry him just weeks before their baby was to be born, prompting Jack to suggest to Laura that they get married, too, after all those years they'd lived together while he was still married to Betty--Laura knowing he'd never divorce her. Laura had lived in New York for years, after she had moved there to help Henry, and Christine had joined her there when she was twelve. Then Shoko had become Henry's eyes, in New York, then there in California. She also read to him for hours every day--as they all absorbed The Tale of Genji together, discussing it whenever they could.
     Shoko and Henry had a healthy boy in the fall of 1975, close to Christine's 19th birthday, and the 5th anniversary of Mishima's seppuku, so the boy was almost a year old when they did, in fact, go to Japan, taking him with them.
     Jack had shown the Romeo and Juliet cast the two versions of the film of Mishima's Forbidden Colors his company had completed the previous year in Japan, casting bilingual actors and shooting each scene in both Japanese and English.

     Ben had known that Jack had done this film because he thought Forbidden Colors was Mishima's best novel. Jack said, "I had the word of a great critic of Japanese literature. The countess thought it was Mishima's greatest novel, and she'd read them all in Japanese, hadn't she, Shoko?"
      "She hadn't read everything Mishima had written, but I think she'd read all his novels. She told Mishima she thought Kinjiki was his best when we met him in Tokyo in the early '60s, and he laughed that peculiar laugh of his. She considered Plato's Symposium Plato's greatest dialogue, I think, and called this novel Mishima's Symposium. Mishima had studied that dialogue--in the original Greek--at Tokyo University while writing the novel, and refers to it directly a couple of times. The countess said that Mrs. Kaburagi was the wisest character in the novel, Mishima's Diotima, and that his portrait of her showed how philosophical he could be."
      "I wish the countess could see our film. It's largely set in the homosexual underworld of Tokyo in the early '50s, as Yuichi, a handsome homosexual, is used by Shunsuke to get revenge on three women who'd rejected him."
     "I understand Shunsuke was based on Kawabata," Shoko said.
     "Which reflects the influence of Japanese literature on Mishima.   And the opening, when Shunsuke meets Yuichi, seems based on the opening of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, showing the influence of European literature as well."
      "And he knew his Plato, too," said Henry. "Impressive."
      "That scene at the end, where Shunsuke is dying, and really talking to his Idea of Yuichi, not the young man standing there hardly listening to him, we might call Platonic. And the scene where Yuichi watches his wife give birth to their child by Caesarean section, and, in spite of the fact he doesn't love her, sees her as another human being and identifies with her bloody vulnerability, might also be called philosophical. In many respects, the novel may be based on Mishima's personal

experience at this critical point in his life. After visiting Greece, he is determined to change himself from the 98-pound weakling who'd been rejected for military duty during the war into a weight-lifting muscle man, a black belt at kendo. I hope we've caught something of that tension in the film. That was my responsibility, as the writer."
      "I think you did, Jack," Laura said. "It's a very impressive movie . . . in the language I can understand."
     "In Japanese, too," Shoko added, and Christine agreed.
     So this brought things Japanese strongly to their attention, and their inner circle all decided they'd like to go to Japan soon. Why not, since they had time, right after filming Romeo and Juliet, and before worrying about The Tempest?
     Jack had been studying Japanese literature since he'd first settled at Shangri La, following the countess's enthusiasm for such contemporary authors as Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, whom she'd known personally. Then he'd had Shoko as language teacher for years before he finally began to spend time in Japan (except for a few days during the Korean War), but now, having recently spent a lot of time there, he had a workable language fluency, many friends, professional and social, and many things he wanted Christine to see.
     Shoko had taught Japanese to all three, and was confident that Christine would soon have greater language fluency than Jack, or than Betty ever would've had, since Christine had started studying the language before unconscious linguistic habits made an accent inevitable. "A few months in Japan speaking Japanese with native speakers should give her a remarkable fluency for an American," Shoko said.
     Shoko herself had been home long enough to get reacquainted with the few relatives she had left, and friends, particularly other women in her graduating class from high school, just after the countess had died, and now wanted to show off

her baby to them, and introduce them to her husband, Henry. She knew these friends wouldn't be especially pleased that she had married an American, as so many Japanese women did during the American occupation just after the Pacific War, but thought they'd come to like Henry's gentle nature, and respect the fact that he could manage his life very well for a blind man.
     Laura might seem to have had the least motivation to go to Japan. She, too, had left Jack twice--first with Tom Hazen, the football player, then to go to New York to help Henry after he'd been blinded at the lake. Tom had given her the property at the lake, as a kind of consolation prize, and she and Jack had built the cabin there when Christine was still in grade school. They had lived there for some years, and it was, in a sense, her dowry as she and Jack were married. But Laura wasn't into the study of Japanese and Japanese literature herself--hadn't fallen under the countess's influence. Jack had embraced that mystique during the first period she'd left him, when he'd also had his resident affair with Shoko at Shangri La. Betty was the one interested in Japanese literature--as Jack was, thanks to the countess--so Laura identified that with her.
      But, while Laura resisted moving back to the lake with him, she did invite Jack to come live with Christine and her in New York. And that was what she wanted now, for the three of them to live in New York at least half the time, since she was representing New York actors for the most part, and Jack would now be involved in doing things with the Players Company, beginning with directing The Tempest.
     Still Laura knew that Christine and Jack wanted to go to Japan together. Jack had spent half his time there since Randall had arranged for him to work on Japanese film projects, then, finally, had extended his commitment to do the film version of Mishima's Forbidden Colors after Mishima had committed suicide so dramatically in 1970. So Laura felt that she, too, had a vested interest in Japan--now that Betty

was gone--and agreed that a trip to Japan was a good idea between Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, three weeks with two very different guides--Jack and Shoko. But both said the early fall was the best time of year to be in Japan.
     Encouraged by Jack, climbing Mount Fuji was one of the first things they decided to do--since none of them had, and this was probably the best time of year for that, too.
     When they were discussing it, Jack told them about his first trip to Japan, during the Korean War, when he flew 27 missions as a B-29 navigator based on Okinawa. "I remember the first time I saw Mount Fuji, before I'd ever been on the ground in Japan at all--one of my most memorable experiences from those six months on Okinawa. Our crew took one of our wing's B-29s up to Tachikawa AFB, outside Tokyo, for a week's complete check-up, while we had R & R at Fujiview Hotel.
      "But on the way up we flew, at about 20,000 feet, just a few miles to the East of Mount Fuji, with its 12,000-foot peak. I was navigator, and could see the peak nicely on the radar screen when the aircraft commander, Captain Paulsen, called me on the interphone to come up front, that he had something to show me. When I was standing between the two pilots, he just pointed. There was Mount Fuji, or the top 2000 feet or so, covered in snow, as you've seen it in some of the pictures taken in the winter, or the Hiroshige prints, rising out of a level cloud cover up to about 10,000 feet, with no higher clouds, and the sun setting in the West behind it.
      "I've wanted to climb it ever since--but not in the middle of winter. Then the countess told us about climbing the mountain in the year of the Tokyo earthquake, in 1923, with the man who was to become Admiral Yamamoto and his friend--which reinforced that desire. Of course, if we climb it now, in the early fall, there won't be any snow, and, if we

climb at night, as is the custom, we should be able watch the sun rise in the East from the top of that 12,000 foot peak, a metaphor for the spirit of Japan, as symbolized by their flag."
     Shoko agreed that it was a thing all Japanese wanted to do once, but few planned to do more than once.
     Christine was as excited about the idea as they were. Laura was pleased to go, as well, once she was told it wasn't like climbing the Matterhorn--you didn't have to be a trained mountain climber. It was just an exhausting uphill hike, as one of a stream of people, including children and old people, on the trail at the same time, in that constant flow of humanity over the ages up the slope of that symbol of the nation, the top half of which could be climbed in less than six hours.
     Henry, too, had been willing to accept the challenge, if the others would help keep him on the path, linked to them by a mountain climber's rope perhaps, but Shoko vetoed that idea as undignified, insisting that he stay behind with Hajime and friends, and promising to tell him about the sunrise she'd seen from the top when they got back.
     Henry finally agreed there were some things he didn't need to prove a blind man could do--climbing mountains probably one. And he didn't want to spoil the experience for her. He could work on mastering the Japanese counting system. Shoko had been teaching him the names of the numbers, and how to use the abacus. He had a particular interest in the abacus now that they were in Japan, where many used one in business transactions. He carried one in his pocket, another kind of "clean, well-lighted place," allowing him to see things he couldn't see. That was something a blind man could be doing when the others were occupied with things he couldn't see to do--like climbing mountains. He would also work with it when they were waiting for a train, or even at a play, trying to develop his facility in multiplying numbers both from the right and from the left, mastering the patterns for division,

and getting so that reciting the numbers in Japanese under his breath would become second nature for him. He felt that this was something he could soon help Shoko work with Hajime on, since children learn to work with numbers early.
     Henry also said to Jack, "But speaking of navigation, you know that I'm discussing mathematical abstraction now with Charlie. We'd like to talk about trigonometry with you, since it's so fundamental to navigation. We'd like you to tell us what the special properties of triangles are for a navigator."
     Jack laughed. "I had 4500 hours as an Air Force navigator, and I'd be happy to discuss it. I might have to refresh my own mathematics, but can describe what happens in general terms. In navigating an airplane, you fix time and place at Greenwich, England--which stands for a single point on the surface of an ideal sphere. You assume the center of the earth is the center of the geometric system you're using in triangulating--so I'd say that's pretty abstract."
     "Any problem we undertake to solve in mathematics depends on idealizing the problem, it seems," Henry said. "You might be able to help me prove that to Charlie."
     So, at the end of their first week in Japan, the other four arranged for a friend of Jack's to drive them up to station 5 about 9:30 in the evening and pick them up there for "brunch" the next morning. That friend had made the climb before and felt that Jack had enough company. The climb was exhausting, in a light rain almost all the way.
     They thought the weather might prevent it, but the sun broke through in the East just at dawn so they could get nice pictures of the sunrise. Laura was pleased with this, said, "That view made a miserable climb in the rain worth it."
     Then, as the countess had said, the trip down took less than half the time, was almost at a run--which, Shoko noted, "would have been difficult for Henry."   Christine called it "a rare adventure."

     Jack also introduced them to other friends he had made in the course of making three movies in Japan. He was proud of how impressed they were by Christine's Japanese, which was more fluent than his own, and, in most cases, better than their English. Most of them had had six
years of English in school, but almost all spoke with a heavy accent, while Christine, who had worked with Shoko for longer than that, and had inherited Betty's gift for languages, sounded much like her teacher. She now found herself talking to these professionals in film work as an "experienced" film maker herself. Most of them knew she'd done Shakespeare's Juliet both on the stage and now on film well enough to be seen as a promising young actress.
     Jack took them, including Henry, with his abacus, to the Kabuki-za one of the first nights they were in Tokyo. They found kabuki to be wide open theatre with actors supremely well trained, and Shoko could describe what they were seeing to Henry without seeming to bother anyone. One segment had an onnagata doing the lion dance, perhaps the same dance the countess had seen with Captain Yamamoto in 1923. Jack then introduced them to the variety of things available on stage in Tokyo, from Chinese Opera, to Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (performed at the top of the Parko Department Store with a petite Big Daddy), to American musicals and French plays, like Zola's Terese Raquin, and Russian plays, like Chekov's The Seagull.
     Jack told them, "Moscow's about the same distance from Tokyo it is from New York, after all. I'd call modern Tokyo the greatest theatre city in the world--better than London or Paris, or even New York. Any given year, you can probably see more Shakespeare in Tokyo than in any of the other great theatre cities, including London--but all in Japanese, of course, not designed for American tourists." He was pleased to recite Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy in three very different Japanese translations.

    Jack especially wanted to get the whole group to see Nobuo Nakamura and his daughter do Ionesco's The Lesson, done as an afterpiece every Friday night at the little underground Jean-Jean Theatre near Shibuya station. Laura and Jack had first done that short play as an afterpiece themselves, in English, to Betty and Marge's The Bald Soprano in Wellington--the first thing they had done together on stage, and the first thing that had brought Laura to Betty's attention. Henry still agreed that it was not only the best of Ionesco, but the story of his own life as a teacher. Jack and Christine had talked about doing the play in all three languages with the Players Company in New York, or perhaps even in Los Angeles, where there were many Japanese, doing it in French with Henry, in English with Henry or him, and in Japanese . . . well, they needed to recruit a good Japanese actor. Christine had been enthusiastic, saw it as the kind of thing Betty might have done, and, smiling at Shoko, said, "We might even get Shoko to play the maid--in all three languages-- if we can coax her on stage."
     They saw the production twice, on sequential Friday nights, each time after another play. Nobuo Nakamura was a famous film star, Jack told them, a star actor in Japanese Shingeki theatre, played Polonius to Akutagawa's famous Hamlet some years before, then had done many films with Ozu, then had adopted this short play by Ionesco.
       Jack had seen it several times before--and introduced the group to Nakamura and his daughter after the play. Christine told him, in Japanese, of their plans, which pleased him. She then asked him, in Japanese, if it might be possible for her to do the play with him one night. She did part of a scene with him, then met with him for a rehearsal once, and did the play with him the Friday night before they came home. He was as delighted about this as she was, and, after talking to her about Shakespeare, did a Polonius-Ophelia scene with her as well. He hugged her and said she now had a Japanese grandfather.

     But they didn't all go to everything with Jack, who was back in his element, seeing something every evening, usually with Christine, often with Shoko. Jack wanted them to see at least one Betsuyaku play, too, since he already had a rough draft translation of Machiuri no shojo as The Little Match Girl. He told them Betsuyaku was now one of the most important Absurdist dramatists in the world, who'd said the most important event in his own career had been the translation into Japanese of Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
      "That's an advantage the Japanese have over us," Jack said. "They know the important things from our literature, while we know little of theirs. They're the most literate people in the world, as you can see every time you ride on a subway or train, where everyone is reading. If you could only have one language to read the highest percentage of the world's great classics, that language would be Japanese, for they have translated both the Western classics from Greece and Rome and the Eastern classics from India and China as well. Mishima, for example, was well read in both, and modeled his own work on both."
       He took them to see Mishima's Madame de Sade, to demonstrate that point, and, finally, one Betsuyaku play, Kowareta Fukei (Broken Landscape). Jack said that Betsuyaku was a very reclusive man, but perhaps just with foreigners--like him. He admired his pride, however, for like Natsume Soseki, now becoming Jack's favorite Japanese novelist, had said late in his career, it seemed he was not interested in having his works translated for Americans
     Both Jack and Shoko wanted the group to visit Kyoto and Nara, for the contrast of the traditional Japanese cities to the modern city, Tokyo, so they took the Shinkansen to Kyoto the second weekend, and toured the famous temples, including the Ryoanji and the Kinkakuji, the setting for Mishima's Temple of the Golden Pavilion and Jack's Mishima. They walked around the temple grounds, but were especially interested in the Golden Pavilion itself, looking at it from across the lake.

Its image was reflected so clearly it was hard to tell in the pictures which was the temple and which the image. The pavilion had been rebuilt after having been burned down by the young acolyte whose story is told in the novel. Shoko said this wasn't unusual in Japan, where most of the famous temples are wooden buildings, and the great Shinto shrine at Ise, which they visited a few days later, in the rain, is completely re-built on one of two alternating foundations every twenty years. They visited places they'd met in reading The Tale of Genji, from 1000 years before, when Kyoto was the center of civilization in Japan--probably the most civilized city in the world. They walked many of the same streets.
     They walked around the Imperial Palace, and visited Doshisha University, directly to the north, founded in 1860 by American Congregationalists, the same year they'd founded Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. They stayed at the Ichiume, a small Japanese ryokan on the east side of the Kamo River, and slept on futon on the tatami floor. Shoko suggested going up to the tower of the hotel across the street from the train station in Kyoto, where they could look out over Genji's city, and many of the things they'd seen, before going on down to Nara, about an hour by train to the south.
     Nara was the older capital, then moved to Kyoto in 794. It's a very small city, with deer roaming everywhere quite freely, which delighted Christine. They visited a Buddhist temple, the Todaiji, up on the hill, containing a huge statue of the Buddha, a passage cut at its base allowing people (mostly children--but others small enough) to crawl through. South of Nara itself was the Horyuji temple with some of the most priceless ancient art works. After visiting that temple, Laura said, "This whole region is a living museum." They all agreed.
     They went on down to the coast from there, and took a ferry out to Utajima, which Mishima had used as the setting for Shio Sai (The Sound of Waves), and where a movie

version of the novel had been made. They had all read that short novel, in preparation for that visit, and, as they went around the island, Shoko read passages from it describing the scene. At the ryokan where they stayed overnight, they had what Laura called "The greatest seafood dinner I've ever had," a special meal, about eight courses, all local catch.
     They went back through Kyoto, to see two Noh plays at the Kanzi Company, whose tradition of training actors dated from 600 years before. "The Noh is often compared to Greek tragedy," Jack said, "and is very different from most theatre, is more like a religious service. There is no clapping. You are supposed to tune your spirit to the ceremonial pine tree at the back of the stage, and the actor's mask, which he himself tunes to before putting it on to make that long approach down the hashigakuri to the stage. Many plays date back to the 1300 and 1400s. Some of those most often performed were written by the famous Zeami." He laughed. "It may be a while before our company is ready to do Noh in New York."
     Christine was pleased Jack had called it "our company."
     She wanted to do much more than there was time for, was also going places with Shoko, to see where she'd gone to school, and places she'd visited with the countess. She enjoyed helping her with Hajime, teaching him to count in two languages, and just playing with a cheerful child.
     At the airport, there was a problem with the reservation. They asked if any of them could take a later flight. Shoko and Henry agreed to stay, to take Hajime to visit some of Shoko's relatives north of Tokyo, and come on the next day's plane.
     Jack smiled, as he said to Christine, "But we'd better get back to get started on The Tempest, hadn't we? We'll come again another time. And see more Noh. I promise you that."
     Christine turned to Laura, "Let's come every year!"
     Laura smiled, too, and said, "It's been a good trip."