Linnear 01 - The Ninja (34 page)

The other forearm broke against the left side of his face, pressing at his ear. The force was enormous. The first arm held the rest of his body immobile. Homeland expanding outward, outward into - snap.

II

Tokyo Suburbs, Autumn 1963

‘This is the perfect place to watch the sun set,’ Cheong said. She turned to Tai, handed her the lacquer tray. Tai, bowing, took it and silently left them alone in the kitchen.

‘You see, I had your father take the shoji out and put the glass in.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘It scandalized Itami, of course. She would never do a thing like that in her house.’ She sighed, perfectly serious now. ‘Sometimes your aunt can be extremely trying, I am most ashamed to admit.’

‘Itami is not blood, Mother.’

She put a slender hand over his and smiled. ‘Sometimes, Nicholas, the spirit is more binding than the blood. You may find such a thing out for yourself as you grow older.’ She took her hand away. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Tai has made your favourite.’ She showed him.

‘My favourite is dim sum,’ he said. ‘Tai does not make them as well as you do, though you tell her what to do.’

Cheong laughed and leaning over, kissed his cheek. ‘All right, she said lightly. ‘This weekend I’ll make you dim sum.’

‘How many kinds?’

‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Enough.’

She stared out of the window. The sky near the horizon was as lemony as custard but, high aloft, the blue was as deep as midnight. ‘You do not get to see this sight often enough, do you?’

‘Bujutsu takes a great deal of time, Mother.’

‘I know.’ She hesitated fractionally. ‘Your school work isn’t suffering.’ It did not seem to be a question.

‘There’s no problem.’

‘You know, my father’ - she called So-Peng her father just as if he had sired her - ‘used to say, it makes a great deal of difference where you have been. Your ancestors live on in your blood.’

‘I don’t know,’ Nicholas said. ‘I have a number of American friends who do all they can to break away from such things. You know, their parents and -‘

‘Then you tell me, my son, if their ancestors have not set the course of their lives?’

He looked at her, thinking that she must, after all, be quite correct.

‘Everything your grandfather was, am I,’ Cheong said. ‘This he bequeathed me long before I left Singapore with your father. In Asia, this is quite special, quite’ - she sought for the proper word - ‘unique. Now I am able to do the same thing for you.’

“But I know so little about him.’

‘In time you will learn. You are young yet.’

‘But you were far younger than I am when you began to -‘

‘Those were different times. Dangerous times. I am very grateful that you could be spared such misery. No one should have to suffer so.’ Her beautiful face broke into a smile. ‘But let us speak of more pleasant matters.’

I want to know, he told her in his mind. I very much want to know what happened. But, of course, this was something he could not say to her. Never. If she chose to tell him one day… But she would not. He doubted whether even his father knew. Only Cheong and So-Peng. And he was long dead now.

‘Your aunt asked about you today,’ she said, breaking into his train of thought. ‘She always does when you are not around.”

‘It was kind of her to think of me.’

‘Yes.’ Cheong smiled and touched him. ‘You should tell her that. It will make her most happy.’

‘I cannot think - that is to say -‘

‘Nicholas, Itami thinks of us - all of us - as part of her family. She is very fond of you.’

‘Sometimes - it’s very difficult to know with her.’

‘Yes, well, people are complex. They need getting to know. Seeping in. Patience. This is perhaps, difficult for you. Your father makes it so. He is patient and impatient.’ She shook her head, as. if bewildered. ‘Very inconsistent, yes. This is still strange to me.’ She stroked the nape of his neck. ‘You are so much like him in that way. He does not make friends easily as most foreigners seem to do. But then, he is no foreigner.

Asia is his home, as it is mine. We are both children of the East, forging our own pasts.’

‘It sounds so difficult, so complex.’

She smiled. ‘We could live no other way.”

Increasingly now, Satsugai and Itami came to dinner. His aunt had always been somewhat of a fixture around the house - Cheong saw to that. However, now her husband began to accompany her more frequently.

Listening to Satsugai talk, Nicholas began to understand how Japan had been led blindly into the disastrous war by this man and others like him in the powerful zaibatsu. Not that Satsugai ever spoke of events before the war or even of the war itself. As far as he was concerned, the war might as well never have occurred. Ostrich-like, he seemed utterly blind to the still quite visible scars strewn throughout the cities and the countryside.

‘The communists have always been a problem in Japan, Colonel,’ Nicholas recalled his saying one chill autumn evening. The sky was darkening from russet to plum and there was a bitter edge to the wind as it moaned through the pines and the neighbouring cryptomeria, a harbinger of the coming winter. A fine rain fell obliquely, streaming against the large study windows, rolling like silent tears. One wretched wren puttered nervously in a tightening circle beneath the inadequate awning of a carefully pruned hedge just outside the window where the rain had caught like pearls on the oval overlapping leaves, a liquid spider’s web spun in glistening precision across the expanse of the foliage. The wren kept its head cocked, eyeing the sky, impatient to be .off.

‘The Party is not so large, even now,’ the Colonel had replied. He tamped down the tobacco in his pipe and carefully lit up. Sweet blue smoke filled the room.

‘My dear Colonel,’ Satsugai said, ‘one cannot use mere numbers to define danger, especially here in Japan.’ He spoke as if Nicholas’s father were some visitor to the country. ‘One must take into account the virulence of the enemy. These are more than dedicated people we are discussing. They are fanatics to the cause of world communism. One mustn’t make the mistake of underestimating them. That is the way they achieve their first foothold.’

The Colonel said nothing, being busy achieving the proper draw on his pipe. It was an umber, rough-hewn brier with a curved stem and a high bowl. It had been with him all through the war and, as such, had become quite dear to him. It was a private symbol to him and, though he had well over twenty-five pipes in his collection, this was the one he invariably smoked now.

One gets some peculiar notions in war, the Colonel thought. Perfectly understandable really because, in the end, when the days are dark with death and the overcast nights filled with a jungle terror, when commanders are mowed down by machine-gun fire and mates are blown to bits by mines a pace away from you or slit from throat to navel by a silent invader, those peculiar notions are all that stand between you and utter madness.

The Colonel had got it into his head that as long as he had that pipe, as long as he could pull his hand away from the hot grip of his smoking Sten gun, reach inside his uniform pocket and feel the irregularity of the outside of its bowl, everything would turn out all right.

He recalled with vivid clarity the morning in the early summer of 1945 when his unit had begun its assault on the perimeter of Singapore. They had just broken camp and were making their way slowly southward, the units in constant walkie-talkie contact.

In the jungle, the Colonel had reached for the comforting bowl of the pipe, found it gone. He paused, peering at the ground behind him, but could find nothing in the muddy tangle of gnarled roots but centipedes and leeches. A creeping sense of panic had overcome him and, without thinking further, he called for his men to backtrack with him until they had returned to the camp area. He found the pipe half-buried in the silty soil and, brushing it off, was about to order his men out when he heard the first of the rolling reports. The ground shook as if in an earthquake. Southward, they saw the violent geysering of earth and foliage, stained red.

Silently, the Colonel waved them out and they crept forward, zigzagging through the dense jungle only to find the entire company ripped apart; those who had not been caught in the cleverly planted minefield had been taken by sniper fire. The Colonel felt in his pocket for the pipe. The brier was warm under his calloused fingers. He hefted his Sten gun and took his men west, through the stinking mangrove swamp, skirting the bloody deathscape, before turning south again. In the dead of night they came upon the Japanese encampment from the rear. They took the perimeter guards out without a sound, stringing them up in the trees as mute witnesses. The Colonel sent half his men into the southeast. At 0400 hours precisely, the Colonel and his men opened fire from their position just south of the encampment. Lead sizzled the air and the Sten guns smoked merrily. Fully half the encampment went down under that withering fire. The other half were not so fortunate. They retreated directly into the line of fire of the second contingent of the Colonel’s unit. Caught in a crossfire, they danced like psychotic marionettes until their bodies literally disintegrated.

At another time the Colonel might have thought it a terrible waste of precious ammunition, but not that searing blast furnace night; a Walpurgisnacht.

‘Satsugai,’ the Colonel said calmly, the war still vibrating behind his eyes as he languidly blew out a cloud of aromatic smoke, ‘you know the history of your country as well as anyone, I daresay. Communism is not a reality for Japan, you know that. There is far too much tradition against that kind of idealized egalitarianism. The idea of communeizing Japan is ludicrous; the people would never stand for it.’

Satsugai’s face held a hint of a steely smile. ‘Whatever I believe is of little importance, hai? It is what the Americans believe that matters. They understand the communist menace; they know that we of the zaibatsu are this country’s greatest bulwark against communism. You can’t fight it with liberal reform. Your MacArthur found that out in 1947.’

The Colonel’s eyes blazed. ‘We all had high hopes for the future of Japan, then -‘

‘Hopes, Colonel, are for the naive,’ the other said blandly. ‘Realities must be faced. The mainland is only just across the genkainada from Fukuoka. Their threat is quite real, I assure you; they will never stop trying to infiltrate, to subvert the government of Japan. That’s why we require firm measures and the strictest enforcement of regulations. Liberalism cannot be tolerated here. Surely you can recognize that.’

‘I see only a country being twisted for the ends of certain interests, just as it was during the war.’

For a moment the eyes of the two men locked and it was as if sparks flew from the dynamic friction of the contact.

‘If things had been the way they are now in 1873,’ Satsugai said softly, ‘the seikanron would never have gone down to defeat.” He was speaking of the Genyosha’s advocacy of a military campaign against Korea in that year. Its failure to be passed instigated the first overt act of violence by the Genyosha against the Meiji government, an attempted assassination of Tomomi Iwakura. ‘Do not forget, Colonel, that if the seikanron had met with success there would have been no fighting in Korea; the communists, when they came, would have been bottled up in Manchuria. As it is’ - he shrugged - ‘the Americans hurl themselves from war to war without any wholeheartedness.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? You yourself fought in the jungles of the Asian continent. There American tanks and artillery and even large-scale bombing are not the answer. The communists are far too well organized and, in any event, they have a virtually inexhaustible supply of men.’

‘Vietnam is no concern of ours.’ The Colonel’s pipe had gone out but he appeared not to notice.

‘Excuse me, my dear sir’ - Satsugai crossed his legs, smoothing down the centre creases of his worsted trousers - ‘but in that I must say that you are most certainly wrong. If Vietnam falls, Cambodia must certainly be next and then what happens to Thailand? No, the so-called Domino Theory is all too real a possibility; a chilling one, at that.’

The Colonel appeared to be half asleep. His cold blue eyes were hooded, the irises dark beneath. His cold pipe was still stuck firmly in the corner of his mouth. He listened to the hypnotic rattle of the rain against the windowpanes, on the eaves, his thoughts filled with history.

So much idealism. It had started out that way, in any case. But MacArthur was such a paranoid bastard. By 1947, the time of the American ‘reverse course’ in Japan, the United States was no longer so desirous of strict war reparations as such. After all, Japan was demilitarized; that was enough. What began to concern them more and more was that Japan should become their watchdog against communism in the Far East and to this end they began two separate but contiguous courses of action. First, they restored many of the formerly suspect powerful right-wing politicians and businessmen to power and, second, they poured millions of dollars into the Japanese economy until now over 80 per cent of the old prewar structure and industry were back in operation. In doing so, they allowed a totally Japanese-inspired campaign to scour out suspected communists and leftist radicals, doing what they had done in Spain and Iran and South America. Over and over. Only this time, it had hit home.

Outside, the wind had picked up, throwing the rain in hard brittle bursts against the windowpanes. There was no colour left in the low sky.

That small but intrepid group of men so full of enthusiasm in 1945, certain that their far-reaching vision for a truly democratized Japan, free from feudal encumbrances, was the correct choice for the country. How naive we all were! the Colonel thought sadly, echoing Satsugai’s words. All of them, all my friends are gone now. He watched the rain streaking the glass like tears, cold and forlorn. A violent eddy of wind caught the wet leaves that had fallen since Ataki had last been at the house, sent them skimming through the air, whirling and spinning like miniature airships of alien design. In his twenty-three years in the Far East, the Colonel had never felt more of an alien than he did now. His isolation seemed to him both complete and irreversible. One by one, the members of that inner circle of minds linked in friendship, that core of policy advisers to MacArthur, were either transferred or dismissed. In truth, they were unaware of the political machinations that went on around them or of the increasing instability of MacArthur himself. Still, they had hung on tenaciously, even after the reversal in 1947, hoping against hope that their combined influence could help stem the tide and return the new Japan to the beginnings of democratization. Now, in retrospect, it was so obvious; easy to see just how impotent they had been all along. Policy had been determined on the other side of the world and they were expected to implement, not comment. No one had told them that in the beginning. Terlaine had spoken out and had been summarily dismissed; McKenzie had been crushed, transferred back to the States; and Robinson had left two years ago, retired, having been ground down into the dirt as long as he could take it. Only the Colonel remained, the iron man, outwardly the same. But inside he was sick at heart and terribly disillusioned. He could not bear to believe that his life’s work had been utterly meaningless; that what he had fought for so long and with such unwavering intensity would never become a reality.