Would the Japanese pilots, five thousand of whom were kamikazes, whose ashes and body parts were scattered, have reassembled and resurrected themselves to re-commit suicide by diving into U.S. naval units? Or, with the supply of able-bodied young men almost depleted, would willing and able young women have climbed into the cockpits of planes that had reconstructed themselves from their own debris and as dedicated kamikazes have wreaked havoc on the naval forces supporting the invasion? Who in what planes would have intercepted and destroyed flock after flock of our fighters and bombers?
Would the millions of corpses rotting in jungles and caves and those devoured by raptors on beaches of the islands that dot the Pacific have come back to life and joined the reported million ground troops and the vast home guard and the hordes composed of civilians, like the skeleton and the little teacher of English, who had survived the bombings of their homes, schools, hospitals, and factories, and armed with the World War I vintage rifles stacked on the battered docks of Yokohama, have driven off the amphibious legions spewed from LST's, LCT's, LCI's, and LSM's, bearing Garands, Browning automatic rifles, and grenades, supported by field guns, howitzers, mortars, armored personnel carriers, and tanks, that were invading their homeland?
Would the untold dead in Yokohama, where his own eyes had witnessed the utter devastation, in Muroran and Mito, whose destruction he'd participated in, to say nothing of Tokyo and Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, and Sapporo, have produced the necessary armaments and munitions? Were these the components of the mighty fearsome force that would have taken the life of an American soldier, sailor, airman, or marine for every foot of Japanese soil they fought over? Perhaps the Divine Wind, with an unimaginably exponential strength of the typhoons his ship had gone through, would have blasted the attacking planes out of the sky, swamped the approaching naval force, drowning every last man of the invaders, while sparing the sacred soil of those who had summoned it.
Such was the "reality" the military had projected, a reality that compelled and justified the dropping of the first weapon of mass destruction ever used. And the only, except for the second.
With trembling hands, he returned the document to his briefcase. Despite his urge to hurry in order to account for the length of time he'd been gone, he shambled into the dining room where his third martini was waiting for him. As was his wife.
#
And Yuko Miyataka, who was sitting at their table chatting with Alma. A glass with a couple of fingers of red wine stood in front of her. Untouched martinis were at Alma's place and his.
"Welcome to the gentleman," Yuko Miyataka said, bowing over the table as he sat down across from her.
"Sorry to take so long," he muttered. Then, giving no ear to the conversation in progress, he began slugging down his third martini. Neither woman seemed to care about, or even notice, his aloofness, as he carried on the dialogue with himself.
Oh, the hoax of history! For two generations the myth had persisted, until it had become fact in the mind and conscience of a nation. Reliving at this late date what his eyes had seen, his ears had heard, his hand had done exposed the grand lie. It also had compelled a self-judgment. And now that guilt had been confirmed, finally and convincingly, wasn't he therefore bound, like Dante's sinners, to administer his own punishment? Interfused with that still-living past, doubling its horror, was the abomination of the ongoing present, which was blighting what was left of his life.
It was between himself and himself. He wouldn't declare it, even to Alma. Like what lurked behind the black veil of Hawthorne's minister, it was a scene from his life over which a curtain was drawn, concealing complicity, cowardice, shame, and guilt. Was extending his silence all the way to his wife meant to protect and prevent her, a citizen who'd lived through World War II, from having to face a monstrosity? An easy rationalization. What then was inhibiting him from confiding in and confessing to her he couldn't articulate, except to acknowledge it was everything he despised. He could smell its rottenness, taste it.
And what of the obligation he had to the world at large, to future generations, to the misguided and naive, and especially to those victims and their descendants who were still alive, one of whom might well be Yuko Miyataka? He couldn't take it on. He was no polemicist, not a trained historian, even though in his head he was correcting and rewriting history. Was just a second-rate writer of fiction. And his story was fact, not fiction. So with his responsibility unmet, he'd have to bear the burden of his knowledge. Himself death's spy and messenger, his conscience unclean, what gave him the right to indict those, some unwittingly, some cynically aware, who were creating a new myth to serve as the history that would justify the devastation of their declared enemies, the slaughter of the innocent, the corruption of the humanity of their own people by dropping bombs and firing missiles of mass destruction?
The loop of the rope on the load he'd have to carry was slung around his neck. The knot might still be tightened.
#
"So, how did you like Cock's Wold?" he began when a gap in the women's conversation invited him to enter.
"Well, very beautiful village. All stones are light, the color of honey, I read in the guide's book."
"Is it the size of this village?"
"Oh no. So little, no shops. Just pub and houses with gardens. Very beautiful flowers. And the church. Eight sides to its tower. An octave
"And did you find the grave you went to visit?" Alma put in.
"Oh sure." Yuko Miyataka flashed her smile. "Not big like Scarborough graveyards. Laurence Sterne has grave close against church wall. With much writing on it. Some too hard for me. He was the rectum there, I respected his grave."
"So Sterne was a clergyman?" Alma half-asked, unfazed by Yuko Miyataka's malapropism
"Oh yes. But I read in the biography the people in the church will turn backs to him when he preaches the sermons sometimes."
"How strange! I wonder why. Did you know that, Dan?"
"No. But I do know Tristram Shandy is seriously comic. An anti-novel long before there was such a thing."
Yuko Miyataka clapped her chubby little hands and trilled a laugh. "This gentleman is the scholar."
"Afraid not. Just a hack writer." At Rutgers he'd completed all the course work and passed his generals for a Ph.D. but had never finished his dissertation on Jonathan Edwards' influence on the American Renaissance.
"Hack writer? What is hack? Some kind of writing?"
"Yes, bad writing."
As if her right hand were a fan, Yuko Miyataka touched the tips of all five fingers to her lips, then giggled. "Pornographies?"
"Worse than that. Hack writing is writing no one will buy." He laughed in a way that would let Alma know he wasn't spewing bitterness, just being drolly realistic.
When Yuko Miyataka shook her head, he couldn't decide whether she was indicating she didn't understand or was suggesting he was being modest.
"I know too that Sterne's novel is bawdy. 'Bawdy' means it's pornographic and literary. Which makes it okay. Maybe because he was living in the rectumry while writing it, his parishioners turned their backs on him after they'd read it."
How much of his playfulness was going past Yuko Miyataka he couldn't tell. At least he was letting Alma know he was trying to be agreeable and entertaining. But he wasn't getting on with "it" and time was running out.
They'd had their starter, a crab bisque, and were eating their entrees. Having downed his third martini, he was keeping all three wine glasses filled with a Medoc, which Alma said had been recommended by the headwaiter, who also served as sommelier.
"Please charge everything to my account," he whispered, while Alma was explaining to Yuko that "bawdy" didn't really mean pornographic. Well aware of the looming hours of sleeplessness and depression, he felt energized at the moment by a welcome buzz.
With Sterne exhausted, Alma had kept things going by throwing questions at Yuko Miyataka about the Brontes. While trying to come up with a verbal primer for starting Yuko Miyata
ka to pump out what he was driven to have her reveal, he withdrew. All at once she provided him with the handle.
"Has the gentleman ever been to Japan?" As she asked she cocked her head, almost coyly.
"No," he answered without hesitation. Glancing at Alma, he saw she was staring at him for responding to an inconsequential question with another lie that seemed pointless. She knew how come the figurine stood on a shelf in his studio and a Japanese rifle was stored with old furniture in the eaves of their home in a village in Pennsylvania. To allay her fear that he might have sounded abrupt with Yuko Miyataka, he quickly went on. "Do you live in Tokyo?"
"Oh yes. The college which in I am teaching locates itself in Tokyo."
"Have you always lived in that city?" He was trying to make his tone casual, his manner congenial.
"Oh no. Before, I have gone to study in the University of Tokyo. Not the same which I teach. This is very much smaller, with lesser importance. All students are girls. A Christian college."
"Where were you before you went to the University of Tokyo?" He feared he was beginning to sound like a prosecuting attorney, but now that he'd started he couldn't stop himself. "Where did you grow up? Where were you born?"
"In a city on the island of Honshu. Born and grow up."
"Near Tokyo?"
"Well, it takes the speed train one half hour. Fifty kilometers distance."
"Is it inland, west of Tokyo?"
"Oh no. Direction north. Near to the sea."
"What is the name of the city?" It was if he had her under oath.
"If you have not been the visitor of Japan you would never hear it. It is not very famous. Name of Mito."
He was stunned. Stunned silent. After what seemed minutes, Alma moved things along, innocently staying on the same track.
"Is Mito a very large city, Yuko?"
"A little large but not very. Not like London. Maybe I will say size like York, where I left ftom train to take the bus to here. Mito could have a little more people."
"Have you been teaching for a long time, many years?" As he took over again, he hoped he was coming off as nothing more than a boorish male, not the Grand Inquisitor putting words in her mouth.
"Well, I would say... thirty years. After seven more years I am retired."
"You must have been very young when you began."
"Oh, not very. You see, I married when a young girl. Then too soon my husband died. So at that time I left Mito and have gone to the University of Tokyo. Not many women then."
He knew he ought to slow down and seem less pointedly intense. To ask what her husband had died of would never do. So on sped his brain, recklessly improvising, single-minded as he was.
"I have a friend who was a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. In 1966 and '67, I'm quite sure it was. His field was the English novel. Might you have been one of his students? His name was Clayborn Weeks. Does Professor Clayborn Weeks sound at all familiar to you?"
Stealing a quick look at Alma, he saw that again her eyes were fixed on him in wonder. Had she been less self-possessed her mouth would have been hanging open. Clay Weeks was their slightly retarded handyman, who had no more visited Japan than he'd read Tristram Shandy.
"Oh no, I regret I must say. You see, I received my graduating degree when I was older student. Twenty-seven years. No Professor Weeks. Then I started to teach."
The gin and wine forced him to calculate with slow deliberateness, as if his mind were a slate and he was chalking numbers on it. She'd begun teaching when she was twenty-seven. She'd been teaching thirty years. So now she was fifty-seven. It was 2003. Two thousand and three minus fifty-seven equaled 1946, the year of her birth. In Mito. Which his ship had been bombarding on July 17, 1945. Beneath the table, he flicked out all his fingers except his left thumb. Nine. Nine months from July 1945 to April 1946.
"I am sorry to hear that your husband died so young," Alma said just as he'd finished his calculation, and she reached over and patted Yuko Miyataka's left wrist, which was lying on the table. So obsessed was he now that when the glint of a diamond on the middle finger of Yuko Miyataka's right hand caught his eye, he thrust Alma's expression of sympathy aside.
"I've been admiring your ring." Another lie. "Is it your birthstone?"
"The gentleman is very kind. It is a ring my mother has given me at her death. What is 'birthstone'?"
Yuko Miyataka's curiosity was an unwitting ally.
"A birthstone is a gem, a precious stone," Alma explained, providing him an opportunity to let up without allowing the conversation to veer off course. "A diamond is one. An emerald, which is green, is another. Whichever month you were born in, the stone connected with that month becomes what we call your birthstone. Many people wear rings with their birthstones in them."
"My birthstone, for example, is a sapphire, which is blue." He hoped uttering still another lie would encourage Yuko Miyataka to reveal what he was after. He kept himself from glancing at Alma. Yuko Miyataka failed to respond. But Alma, who couldn't possibly fathom why what would appear to be small talk was making him so compulsive, came to his rescue.
"If you happened to be born in April, Yuko, your mother's ring would also be your birthstone. The stone for April is a diamond."
Yuko Miyataka clapped her hands and trilled her little laugh. "Oh yes. It is so. April is the month for my birth. Now I will always remember the birthstone I have." She punctuated her delight with a nod, then held up her ring and touched it with her lips.
"That is a happy coincidence!" Paying no heed to the fact that Yuko Miyataka might not be able to grasp a spoken English word of four syllables, he heard himself shouting confirmation. And he couldn't stop his tongue from uttering more lies, necessary lies.
"Alma and I have a coincidence also—of birthdays. We were born in different months and years. To look at her you would have to believe she is at least ten years younger than I. But I am certain she will not be displeased that I tell you—will you, Alma, my beautifully preserved wife—people cannot believe she is only three years younger than I am. The coincidence is that we were born on the same day of the month. So we can have a double celebration each seventeenth of July, her birthday, and of September, mine. She is ruby, I am sapphire. Might your birthday be the same—the seventeenth of April? That would make a triple coincidence."
Not only was he fabricating, he was spouting nonsense, when cleverness and adroitness were called for, at a speed that gave Alma no opportunity to interrupt with a humorous correction of more lies she didn't know the reason for. He never forgot her birthday, the fourth of February, she his, July twenty-eighth. Although he did know the birthstone for July was ruby, he had no idea what the stone for February was, let alone September.
"Oh no. In Japan, you see, all persons celebrate birthday on the day of the New Year, a great holiday. For month and day we do not care. All birthdays come on one same day."
"But if by chance," he persisted, "you happened to be born on the seventeenth of April, Alma and I could include you in our minds when we celebrate our birthdays. We would be remembering you."
Again Yuko Miyataka made no reply, either because she failed to understand what he was trying to say or she found it absurd.
"What Dan means, Yuko, is that if you happened to be born on the seventeenth of April, that would remind us of the pleasure we've had with you here. Do you know which day of the month you were born on, Yuko?"
While blessing Alma for her help, he couldn't imagine why she was going along with what to her had to be a ridiculous direction for mere table talk.
Yuko Miyataka looked down at her nearly empty plate, as if studying it. At first he thought she was feigning pensiveness, either to be polite or to seem to be playing along with a game she couldn't understand. Then he wondered whether she might be straining to remember a fact that had no significance for her, or perhaps be calculating in order to come up with the day and month of her birth. He'd eaten all he could, not much more than half of the Dove
r sole on his plate, and was squeezing his hands, their fingers interlocked, beneath the table.
"Oh no," Yuko Miyataka finally sighed. "You cannot celebrate me with you. Twenty-one of April is my born day."
Nine months and four days after he'd spent an anxious night on watch, waiting for return fire from Japanese shore batteries or whatever naval units might be within range, or for a dreaded kamikaze to plunge into the battleship he was on as for hours it bombarded Mito with sixteen-inch shells, each weighing more than a ton. There Yuko Miyataka had been brought into this hellish world. That night no answering fire or planes had come.
He took a large gulp of wine. Feeling tears that swelled in his eyes about to spill over and stream down his cheeks, he feigned a spasm of coughing. While pretending to be catching an explosion of germs that might contaminate Yuko Miyataka, his wife, diners at neighboring tables, he managed to dab his eyes as he covered his mouth with his napkin. A coincidence, far more remote and wrenching than any of the improbable notions he'd begun broodingly entertaining not long after he'd laid eyes on Yuko Miyataka in the inglenook of the bar, was proving to be history.
He might take it as the final judgment, judgment with a vengeance. This middle-aged Japanese schoolteacher, sitting at table with him and his wife in the dining room of an inn in a pastoral village in Yorkshire, must have been conceived close to or at the very time his ship had been bombarding the city her parents were living in. If it had been on that terrible night, when could they have made love, she being the love they'd made? Most likely it had to have been before the first shell had hit. Had it been after, how could they have had the heart? As for during the shelling, inconceivable as it might seem, it was not outside the realm of possibility that while the world the parents lived in was being destroyed and their lives were a hostage to each moment of chance, an egg of fear in the mother was receiving a spurt of woe from the father, and Yuko Miyataka had begun to be. And it could well have happened that at the instant her father had projected his gush of love into the womb of her mother, where its fate was to hit and unite with the target it sought, a shell fired from his American battleship would have blown the lovers to gobs of flesh, shards of bone, splatters of blood, ending the life of Yuko Miyataka before it had begun.