29

Moon Pearl keeps begging my parents to let me go with her to the new mayor’s birthday celebrations. She is convinced that her husband will be going with his mistress, and is determined to catch him in the act.

Mother couldn’t resist her tears. I find my sister’s jealousy despicable, but I do want to get out and see people… and Min may be at the party.

“Ladies, good evening…”

The footmen at the bottom of the stairs greet us with effusive little bows. One of them goes ahead of us, inviting us to enter through a red lacquered gateway, and we walk across three successive courtyards. As Moon Pearl doesn’t want her husband to see her, we have arrived after dark.

We are shown into a huge garden where about a hundred tables are dotted around under the trees and lit with good-luck lanterns to wish the mayor a long life. An orchestra in evening dress is battling desperately with its waltz tune against an opera troupe singing at the top of their lungs.

We wend our way discreetly towards a table sheltering under an umbrella pine and settle there like two huntsmen waiting for their prey. To dispel the chill of early spring, our host has lit braziers and torches, and as soon as she sits down my sister complains that the flames are blinding her and she won’t be able to recognize her unfaithful husband. I scour the area around us, looking for my brother-in-law, and I suddenly catch sight of Jing wearing a European suit and sitting alone at a table, away from the crowds. He is watching me.

I go and join him.

“Would you like some rice wine?” he asks.

“No, thank you, I can’t stand it.”

On a sign from Jing, a waiter appears and dots a dozen dishes around the table. With a pair of chopsticks, Jing serves a few slices of translucent meat into a bowl for me.

“Taste it,” he says. “It’s the pad of a bear’s paw.”

This meat, which is highly prized by the Manchurian aristocracy, slithers over my tongue. It doesn’t taste of anything.

“Here,” he says, “this is camel’s foot marinated in wine for five years. And this is the fish they call black dragon, taken from the depths of the River Love.”

Instead of tasting the food, I ask him whether Min is here.

“No,” he says.

To hide my disappointment, I admit that I was dragged here by my sister and that I don’t even know what our host, the new mayor, looks like. He points out a short, fat man of about fifty wearing a brocade tunic.

“How do you know him?”

“He’s my father.”

“Your father!”

“You’re surprised, aren’t you?” says Jing with a cold little laugh. “Before the rebels attacked, he was a council member to the former mayor. One man’s death is another man’s making. My father would manage to get himself promoted even in hell!”

Embarrassed by his admission, I can’t think how to move away.

“Look, that’s one of my stepmothers,” says Jing, pointing rather obviously at a woman who is greeting the guests like a butterfly alighting on flowers to gather nectar. She is wearing too much makeup and a richly embroidered tunic lined with fur, and a fan-shaped headdress sprinkled with pearls, coral and muslin flowers-clearly a priceless antique.

“She was a whore before she became my father’s concubine,” says Jing derisively. “She sleeps with a Japanese colonel now. Do you know why she dresses herself up as an imperial lady-in-waiting? She has always claimed to be descended from a deposed family of the pure yellow banner [11]… Now, this is my mother coming over. How can she accept that harlot under her roof?”

Following Jing’s gaze, I can make out the silhouette of a middle-aged woman. Behind her I suddenly catch sight of my brother-in-law with his hair slicked back and wearing an ostentatiously elegant suit. I ask Jing whether he knows him.

A smile appears at the corners of his mouth.

“Is that your brother-in-law? The informer?”

“Why informer? My brother-in-law is a respected journalist.”

Jing doesn’t answer. He pours himself a large glass of wine and drinks it down in one. He is a friend of Min’s, but he inspires a disturbing mixture of disgust and admiration in me. When I leave him, I am so confused that I can no longer find my sister’s table.

30

My friends persuaded themselves that I had fallen for the apprentice geisha and they invited her to our banquets as often as possible. I flushed every time she appeared. The winks and stifled laughs that my brother officers exchanged irritated me, though they also inspired an obscure feeling of pride and happiness.

Sunlight was shy and always left quickly after she had sung, but as time went by she agreed to serve us food and to have a drink. She had tiny hands, and her fingernails were like antique pearls. When she brought her glass up to her lips, the sleeve of her kimono slipped down her arm, revealing a dazzlingly white wrist. Would it be like gazing on a snowfield to see her naked?

My pay at the time only just allowed for me to arrange the occasional dinner and I was in no position to keep a geisha. Time went by and my ardor cooled; I needed more accessible women to brighten the austerity of military life.

Politically that year was like a leaden sky: we dreamed that the storm would break, letting the sun shine through once more. As soldiers, we could neither take a step back nor shy away from the situation, and a number of lieutenants [12] chose martyrdom. There were more and more assassinations, and the young assassins would then hand themselves over to the authorities to prove their loyalty. But neither their own terror nor these voluntary deaths could do anything to jolt our ministers out of their inertia. They were so afraid of a return to the Kamakura era [13] that their only thought was to keep the military as far from power as possible.

We were coming close to the moment of ultimate sacrifice: in order to conquer the world we had to cross a bridge made of our own flesh and blood. Seppuku [14] became fashionable again, a noble form of suicide that requires a long period of mental preparation, and this turned my thoughts away from the apprentice geisha.

One spring day I received a mysterious letter written in a beautiful calligraphy that betrayed its writer’s rigorous education. A woman I did not know asked me to meet her in a teahouse by the Bridge of Willows. Intrigued, I went to the rendezvous. With night falling, I could hear music and laughter in the distance, but the rustling of silk just the other side of the door suggested geishas were passing behind it. Then the screens drew apart and a woman of about forty greeted me with a bow. She wore a kimono in grayish-pink silk with glimpses at the neck of a second, olive-green kimono. A hand-painted cherry tree in blossom scattered its petals over her kimono right to the very ends of her sleeves.

She introduced herself as Sunlight’s mother and welcomed me. I had heard that she herself was a former geisha and that she owned a large teahouse. She told me that she had known my father; I knew that he had been very much in love with a geisha, and asked whether it was she.

She stared at me intently for a moment, then lowered her eyes.

“You have met my daughter,” she said. “Have you enjoyed the evenings you have spent in her company?”

I told her that I very much admired her talents as a musician.

“My daughter is seventeen. She should have moved on and been confirmed as a geisha last year. As you probably know, in this profession an apprentice geisha cannot be given an artist’s status until she has undergone the mizuage ceremony. My own experience was worse than a nightmare and I have decided to spare my daughter from a similar calamity. I have asked her to choose her man, and she has chosen you. I have taken the liberty of finding out about you, and you have been spoken of most highly. You are on the threshold of a great military career, but you are young and you would never be able to pay the sum required for this ceremony. That does not matter; I have chosen for my daughter to be happy and I offer her body to you. If you accept this humble request, I shall be eternally grateful to you.”