A Bridge for Passing: A Meditation on Love, Loss, and Faith

  When this conviction dawned upon me I made up my mind. I would go back to Japan and resume my work on the picture. My co-workers had been busy. They had found locations, a fishing village which they thought ideal for our picture, a terraced farm, an empty beach, a fisherman’s house, a gentleman’s house. The volcano we had. They were ready for me to return to the job. When was I corning? I said, immediately. It was nearing the end of August. The girls would go back to school soon, and they could live with their elder sister. There was no family reason to hold me at home and I welcomed the thought of work and Japan.

  Two

  THE ATMOSPHERE INTO WHICH I descended once more from the jet on the airfield near Tokyo was one of welcome and quiet unspoken sympathy. The deeper the feelings, the Japanese believe, the less should be spoken. We Americans find it necessary to speak, to send letters and cards of condolence. Hundreds of letters had poured into my office before I left home and I had read them all because it was good to know in what esteem he was held and in so many places in the world. And people, friends or strangers, had stopped me on streets and country roads to tell me. “I am so sorry to hear—”

  In Tokyo nothing was said, yet everything was conveyed. Consideration was delicate but complete. My room in the hotel was bright with flowers and baskets of fruit. The little maids were ever present and solicitous. I understood, for in Japan even love is not to be expressed in words. There are no such words as “I love you” in the Japanese language.

  “How do you tell your husband that you love him?” I once asked a Japanese friend.

  She looked slightly shocked. “An emotion as deep as love between husband and wife cannot be put into words. It must be expressed in attitude and act.”

  Nor are there Japanese equivalents of our love words—sweetheart, darling, dear, and all the rest. Certain young Japanese are beginning to use the English words, but even they not seriously, perhaps. But perhaps again no one uses these words seriously any more. I hear American directors scattering them carelessly and casually upon the loved and the unloved alike, in the fashion of Hollywood and Broadway, and I always remonstrate. To a writer all words are significant and valuable, individual words as well as words in association, each to be used only in its fitting place, like jewels. The English language is peculiarly rich in the words of love, their roots deep in ancient Anglo-Saxon soil. To hear a man call a secretary or an actress or perhaps only a girl whose name he does not remember by the precious words of love always makes me—well, angry! It is a desecration of true feeling, the deepest in the human heart. For me nothing in life equals or even resembles in value and treasure true love between man and woman, with all it implies. The words we have used for centuries to express this love are not to be tarnished, for they belong to all of us. If they are tarnished by careless misuse, how shall we express true love? We are robbed of something that cannot be replaced. Any woman who has heard the man she loves call her his sweetheart, his darling, his love, can only be profoundly angered when these words are destroyed.

  “How can you misuse these words?” I demanded of an American.

  He laughed, uncomprehending. “It makes the girls feel good,” he said lightly. “It’s informal—like—you know—friendly.”

  The Japanese girls did not feel “good” about it, nor did they consider it friendly. Those few who did were problems. They thought that love words meant love, and they became serious and consequently troublesome. The others, who were not looking for love from American men, with consequent benefits, considered such an American unduly interested in sex and therefore insulting. It took explanations before they could be placated. They were usually too polite to complain in his presence but behind his back what scorn!

  “I’ll sue him if he says it again,” a young actress exclaimed, her black eyes bright with fury … And sue him she did. Yes, we had our problems.

  Our locations were set, although I had not yet seen them except on film; the next task was to find our cast. Since the story of The Big Wave is altogether Japanese, the cast was to be Japanese, and we had already engaged a Japanese crew and cameraman. For the first time an American film company was making a picture in Japan, co-produced by a Japanese film company, the largest and in some ways the best, and with Japanese crew and cameraman. It was an experiment, a profoundly interesting one. I had seen motion pictures made before of my books, but none like this, and with me. I did not intend to interfere with directing or in any of the professional aspects, for I know my areas of ignorance, but I was to have the privilege of being anywhere I liked, and to speak when I wished. On the whole, I believed my fellow workers had confidence in my ability to be silent. I would not speak much or often. I am, in fact, a quiet woman by nature, unless oppressed by what I consider injustice when I become, I am told, excruciatingly articulate.

  Certainly I enjoyed sitting in on the casting. We were given office space in the handsome building owned by our Japanese co-producers, and each day I went there early and stayed late, looking, listening, judging, disapproving or approving, while those in command gave auditions to actors and actresses, adults and children. Our first concern was to find the children, two boys, two girls, who were to begin the story. Therefore children came to us, accompanied by mothers.

  I have seen many stage children, and they can be sad children. These Japanese stage children, however, were not sad. They were like all other Japanese children, healthy and happy and exuding a general atmosphere of being much loved. Neither they nor their mothers were tense, as so many of our American stage children and mothers are tense, which difference I can only ascribe to the possibility that competition is not as important in Japanese life as it is in ours, and the desire to excel is second to the consideration of human feelings.

  They came in, one after the other, each mother unobtrusively following her particular star, and they bowed with the grace bestowed by that extra hinge which seems to have developed in the Japanese back. It is unique, this bow. The Chinese bobs his head cheerfully at greeting and parting and the Korean makes a proud inclination. The Japanese performs obeisance, deep but also proud.

  Only one boy in the endless procession seemed reluctant or rebellious. He came in early one morning, flanked by his mother and his aunt, the only boy who needed the escort of two women and it soon became evident why. He was a handsome fellow, but sulky, his bow was just short of courtesy and at first he would not talk. His mother and his aunt, in gentle distress and apology for such behavior, informed us eagerly that he was a champion swimmer. This was good, the part called for a good swimmer and we congratulated the boy, who only continued to look sulky. We invited him to sit down and he sat down, still sulky. He condescended, after several whispered pleadings from his lady relatives, to answer our questions briefly—too briefly—all the time staring at the wall. Yes, he said in answer to direct question, he was in school—Japanese school. Yes, he did speak English—sometimes. He had been three and a half years in Cairo, Egypt, and there he went to English school but he preferred not to speak English. … He liked Japanese school better than English school. … He did not wish to remember Cairo. Well, it was a city, and that’s all. … He grew more and more sulky. Something occurred to us. We put a final question.

  “Do you want to be in this motion picture?”

  He lifted his head, his face brightened for the first time. He shouted.

  “No!”

  We put one more arrow question. “Do you ever want to be an actor?”

  He shone now like a neon light. “No!”

  We burst into laughter and he looked at us hopefully.

  “The interview is over,” we told him, “and you are a wise man. You know what you don’t want.”

  He tramped out, unsmiling, a lordly male, his female relatives trotting after him, pained but acquiescent. It was obvious that he had won a family victory and that he was accustomed to such victories.

  Days passed and the actors narrowed down to the impossibles and the possibles, the latter by far th
e smaller group. Japan has many excellent actors of both sexes and all ages, but we were looking for excellent actors who also spoke English, since the dialogue was to be in English. At first we hoped, unrealistically, that their English would be perfect. Later we merely hoped their English could be understood well enough so that it could give the illusion of Japanese.

  Which illusion reminds me of an incident of my own life in China. I was stopping to rest one day at a wayside inn in a remote province. An old woman came to pour tea into my bowl. I thanked her in Chinese and asked her how she did. She stared at me in terror and dropped the teapot. “The gods save me,” she gasped. “What is the matter with me? I can understand English!”

  Something of this we hoped to achieve, but there were times when we wondered if we were fools to hope. The variety of accents in English-speaking Japanese is astounding but they have one characteristic in common. The consonant “L” seems foreign to the Japanese ear as well as to the Japanese tongue.

  In such diverting work the day passed until evening fell, and the trouble with every day was that at the end of it there was always night.

  For the first time in my life I was sad when evening came. The others went to their husbands and wives, but I came back alone to my hotel room. The windows looked over the roofs of new Tokyo—as I have said, not beautiful, for there has not been time enough to create beauty. The city was hastily rebuilt after the war, a pity, for after it was thoroughly flattened by bombing it would have been well, if possible, to design a city with wide streets and parkways, a modern city but beautiful in the Japanese fashion. It was not done. The war had been harsh, people were desperate to begin living again, and the government was all but bankrupt. Houses went up helter-skelter. Today it is still almost impossible to find a house by its number or even by its street. One can only entrust one’s self to the unknown.

  Evenings in lonely hotel rooms are impossible, at least for me. I had friends in plenty, and invitations in plenty, more than I could accept, but these did not fill the need. One had always to maintain a front, or a poise, and this could be done during the day’s work when the mind was engaged. It was different when one had to respond individually to others. In despair and loneliness I took to wandering the streets at night, unknown and free. Tokyo is rich in theaters and motion picture houses and usually I stopped by in one or the other. Though I did not understand the dialogue, the drift of the story was easy to catch, and I could be mildly amused, superficially at least, by what I saw. The houses were always packed, the audiences grave and intense until a comic moment brought loud, staccato laughter, stopped instantaneously by intent gravity again.

  On one such evening I chanced to see an American woman of about my own age wandering as I was wandering. We stopped, startled each by the other, then I spoke. She was from Los Angeles, her husband had gone to Formosa, where she did not wish to follow, her daughter had a dinner date with a young American man, and she was indulging in a long-concealed wish to wander about Tokyo alone. By this time, however, she looked uncertain, though not frightened, and I proposed that we see the picture together, which we did, to our mutual enjoyment. The acquaintance ripened into a friendship, and later a dinner with her family, and another still later in Los Angeles. The point of this incident is that I did not realize how an American woman looks in a Japanese crowd. When I saw her, I forgot, of course, how I also looked among thousands of Japanese.

  I had, actually, a warmly comfortable feeling when I was alone in a Japanese crowd. This must have been a lingering memory of the atmosphere of my childhood when, accompanied by my Chinese nurse, I sat in a Chinese theater or out-of-doors on a village threshing floor or in a temple courtyard, to watch a play. The play was always the thing in China, and the star system was unknown, unless of course one went to Shanghai, or Peking, there to attend the performance of such a star as, for example, Mei Lan-fang, or Butterfly Wu. As a child I had no such privilege, but I enjoyed the miracle plays and the long historical dramas through which the Chinese everyday folk learned religion, philosophy and the history of their own people. They accepted me as a frequent member of the audience, and I lost myself, a fair-haired American child in the Asian multitude—a kindly multitude in those days and I was never held responsible for the sins of colonialism as all white folk are nowadays and by all Asians, it seems. I was conscious only of being surrounded by pleasant and humorous people. In Tokyo now I found the same people, though of a different nation and country, and they accepted me merely because they had become used to Americans as part of the world landscape. They know the best and the worst of us from the long years of the Occupation and we cannot surprise them any more, either by good or evil.

  Tokyo has, of course, its darker aspects. There were streets in which I did not enjoy walking alone any more than I do in certain parts of New York and Philadelphia where I have learned that it is dangerous not only so to walk, but also even to ride with the doors of my car unlocked. Cities are cities and hooligans are to be found in all.

  Those were the days, too, of the student riots in Tokyo, about which we North Americans had so much misinformation. I can only say that I was there, that I saw the crowds of young men and women, earnest, determined, informed. They were not anti-American. They were Japanese who liked their constitution although it had been engineered by Americans—at least by an American. They liked especially the part in which Japan as a nation promises never again to wage war. Now they, the Japanese, were being asked by Americans to take sides in case of war and with the West, although they were oriented toward Asia, and in the future must in common sense be a neutral people. With American bases on their soil they felt themselves forced to be partisan. It amounted to a situation which to them became unendurable in its confusion. The Japanese are a well-organized people, they have their different levels, they do not confuse their best selves with their worst. Whatever level they stand upon temporarily, it is that one and no other. Therefore they went on riot to proclaim their confusion, but they did not hate anybody. In confusion they are capable of assassination, not out of hatred necessarily, but merely to clear up confusion.

  Students have always been an alarming and exciting and interesting part of my life. I do not mean the relatively placid students of North America, whose most active moments seem to demonstrate nothing more violent or even exciting than college pranks. I am accustomed to the students of Japan and India, Korea and Japan. In China the new age, whatever it was and we had new ages with bewildering and rapid change, was always announced by an uprising of students. The people respected these young men and women because they were persons who, if not learned, were nevertheless in pursuit of learning and therefore more privileged and presumably better informed than the average citizen who could not read or write. Books, the Asian peoples believe, are treasure houses of human wisdom and since students alone had access to books, the position of a student in Asia carried, and still carries, a prestige far out of proportion to age and class. They were a devoted group and risked death in every uprising. During the Nationalist regime in China I had seen many of them killed for being suspected of Communism. Doubtless some of them were Communists but most of them were simply dedicated young patriots, desperately desiring to better the conditions under which their people lived. They are the unnumbered and unnamed martyrs but they cannot be discounted, for all of that. If one wants to know what is about to happen in an Asian country, watch the students.

  As for the picture, while all this was going on, we needed a tidal wave. Everything else we could find but the tidal wave could not be summoned at will. The story itself began in a tidal wave. Once, when I was spending a year in Japan on the island of Kyushu, I had become acquainted with a small and lovely fishing village on the southern tip of the coast. A dozen or so stone cottages were huddled together behind a stone sea wall. The houses had no doors, no windows, toward the sea. It was not that the fishing folk did not love the sea. They did indeed, for generations of the families had lived beside it and by it. Yet g
enerations had known, too, the fury of those vast waves that rise out of earthquakes under the sea. Volcano and sea work together for death and I had seen them so work one bright September day. There had been premonitions. The water in the deep well, the fisherfolk told me, had been muddy for a few days. The well, dug in the beach, was only a few feet from the sea and at the foot of a high cliff, but the water was sweet. Thither the village women had walked, a mile each way, to carry all the fresh water the village used, and this for hundreds of years. When I suggested that this might be a hardship the men smiled incredulously. I must say the women did, too.

  Earthquake, of course, comes first. The earthquake in Chile had sent a tidal wave rushing across the sea to northwest Japan, but usually the earthquake is in Japan, or under the sea nearby. Earthquake—I cannot even say the word to myself as I sit here upon the solid earth of my Pennsylvania farm home without a touch of that bottomless sickness of heart and body, that organic dismay, which falls upon a human being when the earth quakes beneath his feet. It is as if the very globe were dissolving into space. The one security we humans have is this earth which is our home, this globe to which we cling. Catastrophe befalls us, thunder and lightning roar and flash in the sky, winds come down from outer space, rain falls in torrents from the clouds, even the sea may rise in storm, but underneath everything we have the earth, or feel we have. We may have been spawned from the sea but we are land creatures now. When the land betrays us, when we cannot stand upon our feet, when the ground splits and swallows our homes and our people, then we are lost indeed. … Once in a violent earthquake in Japan the earth split and a running child fell into the chasm. The mother pursued her child and leaped in after him, and the earth closed again, leaving only her long black hair to lie like seaweed on the quivering surface. …