The main thing was that Harry had learned how paranoid and crazy the navy was on the subject of oil. By December, eight months later, when he altered shipping ledgers in Yokohama and created a tank farm in Hawaii out of thin air, he figured the navy had only itself to blame.
13
OHARU WAS A perfect model, because her expression was as blank as paper. Kato would turn out a woodblock print of her posed by a teapot and brazier, an elegant kimono with a snow-circle pattern wrapped tight around her middle and loose at the neck, her hair piled in three tiers and pierced by a gilded comb and tortoiseshell pin. The first impression the print gave was of a woman lost in thought. The viewer noticed the striped shadows cast by the bars of a prostitute’s window. Steam spilling from the pot, suggestive of opportunities missed. In her sleeve, Oharu’s hand crushing an empty pack of Golden Bats. Only then would the viewer see by the context-not as in a single picture but almost as in the repeated images of a film-a woman whose pride had chased away her clients and now, at day’s end, the sun sinking into a red haze over the licensed quarter, had no prospects or cigarettes left when regrets were all too late.
Or not. The evening offered other patrons. The next print was of Oharu in a boat, surrounded by a constellation of fireflies that lit the water’s surface. She wore a fishnet-pattern kimono, and her hair was slightly disheveled, her mouth slack and tipsy. All that could be seen of the man she was with was a sleeve of army green. The sleeve of her kimono trailed as she stared at a reflection of the moon. In the faintly glimmering lights, she seemed to melt into the water, and the moon that floated in it could have been her own pale face. It was, the young Harry thought, the face of a woman who had surrendered everything.
But no, that was the next print. The model was not Oharu but Chizuko, the small dancer Harry had seen changing into a ballerina’s tutu on his first visit to backstage. Her hair, cut short as a schoolgirl’s, cupped her broad face. Kato had depicted her standing in the snow, dressed in a red, slightly soiled kimono, barefoot in stilted clogs, a paper peony in her hair and a rolled tatami mat slung across her back. The mat was the trademark of a “sparrow,” a prostitute with the coarsest sort of clientele. Although she was younger than Oharu, Chizuko’s eyes returned the viewer’s gaze with blunt directness. Her cheeks and her feet were flushed from the cold, and despite the snowflakes that swirled around her, Harry could feel her heat.
“You take them too seriously,” Kato said. He and Harry were wrapping up the prints amid the drop cloths, paints and easels of his studio.
“They’re only pictures. Oharu attracts one sort of customer and Chizuko another, they have different appeals. The customer tells me what he wants to see, and that’s what I give him. A good lesson for you, Harry, give the customer what he wants.”
“But the print of Chizuko isn’t like the others. There’s only one copy. You ordered the printer to smash the blocks.”
“That’s my agreement with the customer. It’s a very private issue. That’s why it’s important that you exercise discretion when you deliver it. You understand discretion, don’t you, Harry?”
On this particular run, Gen went along. At his insistence, they stopped at a teahouse so he could see the prints. He had been as infatuated with Chizuko as Harry was with Oharu, and the image of her as the lowest form of prostitute had the same impact it had for Harry.
Harry explained, “It’s just a picture, Kato says. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Gen wanted to tear the print in half but settled for watching Harry deliver it to a ground-floor apartment with pots of bamboo at the entryway. The door was opened by a tall, handsome man wearing a boater, white shirt and slacks as if about to go rowing in spite of the cold weather. He took delivery without a word, but Harry recognized him as the army officer who had been with Chizuko to the movie house.
“Did he invite you in?” Kato asked when Harry returned.
“No.”
“Good. If he ever does ask you in, think up some excuse.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think you’d do, Harry.” Kato stepped back from his painting, a view of the Seine, to glance at Harry. “You’re not beautiful enough.”
Harry’s interest was piqued. From the occasional word dropped by Kato or Chizuko, Harry learned the customer was a rich idler, an army officer, a noble, a self-made man. Kato tended to denigrate while Chizuko embellished. Whichever, the customer ordered an unusual number of prints. A tank rolling through shell bursts. Fabled swordsmen dicing up bandits, tigers, whales. Others more macabre: a treetop swarm of winged monkeys. A woman crucifying her lover in the dark of a cave. A demon suspending a pregnant woman upside down the better to remove her liver.
Kato put more and more trust in Harry. He could send Harry to the printer to bring back a fan print, mirror print or indigo, secure in the knowledge that Harry would select the right one. Besides, on rainy winter days or during Tokyo’s humid summer, it was much easier to have the boy run errands while Kato devoted his time to copies of Degas, Renoir, Monet. Kato produced his imitations for himself, not for sale. Harry would return to see Kato squeezing tubes of oil paints, glossy worms of cadmium yellow, ocher and carnelian that he daubed onto the canvas. Harry was a boy off the street, how could he tell the artist that his Japanese prints had grace and life and definition and that his French art was mud and that French flowers looked like frosting? In the meanest Japanese portrait was the dignity of a straw hat, umbrella, kimono. In comparison, French nudes looked stripped and awkward, with thick hams of pink and green. Also, French artists always seemed to be slumming. In Japanese prints, prostitutes were appreciated like royalty and heroes were made from actors, wastrels and gamblers.
Kato paused in midstroke. He was painting a blue cathedral. Blue speckled his hands, shoes, beret.
“Do you plan to be a missionary, Harry?”
“No.”
“If you stay in Japan, you should think about becoming a professional gambler. It suits your personality, and the Japanese are almost as fond of gamblers as they are of samurai. I’ll get you some dice.”
“I have dice.”
“See, you’re halfway there. Tell me about your parents. Why the American compulsion to make everyone else like them? And their Japanese? They don’t understand that Japanese is spoken best when it’s not spoken at all. You understand, Harry, because you are a thief, and thieves are good observers. You’ll never be Japanese, but I would bet that in a dark room you could fool anyone.”
It was true. On sultry August evenings, Harry would go walking with Oharu between shows and entertain her by imitating vendors, beating an empty sake tub like a drum and calling in a high-pitched, nasal voice, “Clogs mended, clogs mended!” or blowing a toy bugle and singing, “Tofu! Soft-as-a-baby’s-bottom tofu!” Up and down the street, housewives appeared at their doors with money in their hands. Oharu covered her laugh with her hand until she and Harry turned the corner to the theaters of the Rokku, their dominion, their part of Asakusa. Posters of the latest Hollywood epics lined the way, but what Harry liked most was the reflection in the poster case of him and Oharu strolling by, her sinuous skirt against a background of mincing kimonos, her half-moon eyebrows blandly taking in the world, her hand on Harry’s arm as if they were the Rokku’s crème de la crème. Fantasies of how he might become Oharu’s paramour and protector flitted through Harry’s mind all the time. If he could make her laugh, he could make her love him. If he rescued her from some sort of danger, then she would look at him in a whole new light. But she was fearless and needed rescuing from no one, and he understood that part of his attraction for Oharu was that she couldn’t take him seriously.