Free The China Lover by Ian Buruma Page B

they passed through Manchukuo. She asked me about the most fashionable restaurants and cafés, where the most stylish people were to be seen. A new word had entered her vocabulary: “knowable.” Whenever I mentioned some celebrated figure, her first question would be: “Is he knowable?” Even though she was a movie star herself, and knew many famous Japanese already, Ri was still like an overexcited child on the eve of her birthday. I had not been back to Tokyo for several years, and certainly didn’t know everyone who was “knowable.” I tried to answer her queries as best I could, but she wasn’t really listening. Her mind had already arrived at our destination before we even reached Pusan.
    Amakasu, despite his rousing speech at Shinkyo Station, had not actually been in favor of this trip. He took a paternal view of his actresses and their personal lives were a constant worry to him. He regarded the artistic world in the metropolis as dangerously frivolous and bad for our morale. An added complication was that the Nichigeki gala concert was organized by the Oriental Peace Entertainment Company, and not by the Manchuria Motion Picture Association. Oriental Peace was backed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which Amakasu despised as soft and buttery. But even the Kanto Army was powerless in this case. Amakasu warned me that I should be held responsible if anything should happen to the actresses that would reflect badly on the superior reputation of the Manchuria Motion Picture Association.
    Sleep was impossible even on the second night of our voyage, aboard the ferry from Pusan to Shimonoseki. Meng Hua, a typical beauty of the north, tall and creamy, with a delightful beauty spot onher left knee, shared a cabin with Ri. I wouldn’t have minded a little fun with her, but business was business. I couldn’t afford any trouble on this trip. Like Yoshiko, she had never been to Japan before, but the prospect put her in a state of apprehension more than excitement, and she retired to her cabin alone, while Ri talked and talked in a wild mixture of Japanese and Chinese, determined to be awake at the first sight of the Japanese isles. When dawn finally broke, we were wrapped in a thick fog. The ship’s horn moaned like a wounded animal. Ri pressed her face to the window, trying to see through the dense gray soup. Nothing. And yet, at 7:30 a.m. sharp a woman’s voice announced through the ship’s loudspeaker that we were approaching our “beloved imperial homeland.” The voice continued: “If you look to the starboard side you will see the port of Shimonoseki, renamed as such in 1904, before which time it was known as Akamagasaki, a place famous for its natural beauty and redolent of our glorious national history, the site of the famous battle between Heike and Genji in 1185 . . .” On and on it went in this vein, as all faces turned to starboard, where dense fog was still all there was to be seen. Our national anthem was played through the loudspeaker, and everyone, including the Chinese and Koreans, jumped to attention.
    It was only just before the ship berthed that we could make out the outlines of the city, an ugly jumble of godowns, cranes, and warehouses, hardly the glamorous introduction that Ri had been hoping for. The maritime police boarded our ship with an air of immense importance. A thick black rope was strung across the main lounge next to the gangway, and a plump little man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache sat down behind a desk, with an attendant behind his chair whose duty it was to breathe on the stamps before handing them to the mustachioed official, who pressed them onto our documents after careful and lengthy examination. How I loathed the officiousness of my fellowcountrymen! Japanese nationals were ordered to line up in front of the rope and foreigners to stay behind. Ri was the first to rush into line. I could see a look of bewilderment on Meng Hua’s face. It was the first time she