When I finished rubbing my face with the palms of my hands, I looked up.
We’d switched venues. Surprise.
All this hopping about was making me feel like I was on a bargain-basement, all-stops package tour through pandemonium.
I chose to close up shop. ‘God, I’m so tired of this. Can we take time out?’
‘Don’t be like that,’ I could hear Kohana whisper. ‘This one’s fun.’
‘Why?’
‘Just because.’
‘You really have to work on your powers of persuasion,’ I said, determined not to give in to the girl.
‘Oh, be a devil. Look around!’
So I did. Apparently, determination had fled its post.
I don’t know that I would call it fun. Around me was a huge, crowded arena, full of Japanese people dressed as if they’d stepped out of the old 1960s American TV comedy Bewitched—which was one of my family’s favourite shows as a kid, but it had dated. Still, some of the men did have on thin, snazzy ties.
We were positioned in hard wooden alcoves—seats?—a few rows from a raised ring, which was made from a combination of clay and straw.
I was in a closer row, three back from the ring’s sandy edge. Kohana was seated directly behind me, in the next row, looking very Audrey Hepburn in a simple black dress and pearls, her hair up in a beehive. She was sandwiched between two gentlemen, poles apart.
On her left was a man in his late fifties.
He had short-cropped, white hair and a moustache, with remarkably large lips. He was smoking, and I noted that once he butted out one cigarette, he straight away lit up another.
On the other side of Kohana, to her right, was a beefy-looking forty-year-old, with thick, scowling brows and a head of wavy black hair.
I could tell both men were with Kohana, since each had a hand discreetly touching the thigh closest to them. As I leaned over the back of my chair, seeing that sight, I felt—I don’t know—vexed?
Kohana was oblivious. She leaned over to speak softly in my ear.
‘It’s December 1963.’
‘Well, now. I was almost born.’
‘There you go.’
‘How come we’re skipping ahead fifteen years?’
‘Nothing much happened in between. We introduced television, the US occupation ended, our Crown Prince got married, and we built Tokyo Tower—but that was a cheeky copy of the Eiffel Tower anyway. Oh, and I quit being a geisha.’
‘No prison term for you?’
‘Nah. I spent this time on the loose.’
‘You got away with murder?’
‘I did. Can we drop the subject now?’
‘Very well. I have to say, you don’t look the part of someone who’s careered forward fifteen years.’
‘Why, thank you. The benefits of a good makeover and soft lighting.’
‘Possibly they help.’
‘Would you like to know where you are?’
‘I’m sure you’ll tell me.’
‘We’re in the Kuramae Kokugikan in Tokyo—later closed and replaced by a bigger sumo stadium, in Ryogoku. But you may be pleased to know that this is the same one Sean Connery visited a few years later, in You Only Live Twice. There is something about the spectacle of two exceptionally fat rikishi—in a nation of skinny people—clad only in loincloths, shaped like a sexy G-string, that is, well, hilarious.’
Kohana applauded, after one of the behemoths stumbled out of the ring.
‘Don’t you think?’ she added.
‘Astounding.’ I’m unaware if I meant the comment. It really didn’t seem to matter what I thought. ‘I see you’ve dragged along two boyfriends. One isn’t enough these days?’
‘Oh, they’re just companions.’
‘Does either man know that? Or realize you have two playmates?’
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘Like what? They’re looking territorial, though my money would be on the younger fellow. He’s a genuine gorilla, Kohana. I’m surprised he’s able to sit down for any length of time. The gent on your left looks too civilized and a dash seasoned—he’d likely end up with his neck wrung.’
Kohana unfurled a grape-coloured fan and pretended to be shy. Her eyes, somewhat heavily marked with black eyeliner, said otherwise.
‘You’d be surprised. Shimada is a more powerful man than he appears, and R has his vulnerabilities. R is a recent acquaintance, a famous wrestler who, sadly, will be stabbed in a club this very night and will die in a week from peritonitis—since he won’t bother going to hospital to get the wound examined properly.’
Kohana closed her fan.
‘Shimada I’ve known ten years.’
A spotlight came out of the ceiling high above, straight onto the older man on Kohana’s left.
The rest of the auditorium quietened, at the same time that the lights went down.
‘I should tell you that “Shimada” wasn’t his real name,’ Kohana disclosed, through the transition. ‘It was a nickname we shared between us, a souvenir from a movie he was shooting when we first met. At that time, he was a famous actor, and worked with Akira Kurosawa. But he’d also just volunteered his services for the first Godzilla romp in 1954—something he would soon repent, becoming a habitual player in kaiju monster movies.’
The surrounding blackness and the spotlight remained the same, but we back-pedalled about a decade, judging from the years peeling away from Shimada’s face, his devolution in fashion, the darkening and thickening of hair, and the loss of his midriff paunch.
Kohana looked virtually the same, aside from a change in wardrobe, from Hepburn (Audrey) to Hepburn (Katharine)—she was now wearing a baggy pants-suit, all wide shoulders, and her hair long and straight with a curled fringe.
We were standing on a golf course, in bright sunlight.
‘I met him here.’
‘Is that so?’ I looked around. Aside from Shimada and Kohana, there were a group of strangers, mostly older men, milling near the green. ‘I didn’t pick you as a golfing aficionado.’
‘Oh, I can’t stand the sport. But I played occasionally, to be sociable. Shimada shared my abhorrence, which is one reason we got to talking. I also loved his performance in a recent movie I’d seen, in which he played a dying bureaucrat. I just had to tell him that. He looked much younger and far more handsome in the flesh—and he was funny! In a gloriously self-deprecating way.’
The scene did its flip-flopping thing, and the golf course became a bedroom, with Shimada dressed-down in a singlet and shorts and Kohana, well, in nothing whatsoever, flaunting a shocking peroxide hairdo.
‘I say, what’s with the—’
‘Hair? Your questions are getting predictable, Wolram.’
‘Even so.’
‘All right, all right. A few months before, I’d seen The Three Musketeers—you know, the one with Gene Kelly? It was finally released in Japan about four years after being made in Hollywood. What can I say? Lana Turner turned my eye.’
‘Head. She turned your head. I believe you’re mixing your idioms.’
‘Oh yes, with the blind eye one, right? Funny. Well, the next day, after I saw the movie, I went into a drugstore and bought bleach. It took several attempts to get my hair white, but it was strong and survived the process for a year or so, when I moved on to the next fad. My scalp, however, itched horrendously for months afterward.’
She and the man Shimada were sitting up in bed together. At least he was partially dressed, but I had to avert my attention from the girl’s nakedness.
‘Kohana, could you please at least pull up the blanket and show a modicum of discretion?’
‘My, aren’t you upright? I never thought you had it in you.’ Thankfully, she did as requested. ‘Happy?’
I peered over at the two people in bed together. They looked as excited about their proximity to one another as a husband and wife after thirty years of marriage.
‘Relatively,’ I said.
Shimada had a cigarette dangling from his lips, which Kohana borrowed, off and on, to take a puff.
‘I’m glad the shoot is over,’ the man was saying, in a gravelly voice. ‘I mean, it’s worrying that he’s grabbed so much of Kurosawa’s attention, but he does make me smile with those wild ways and the sense of humour. What did you make of him, Nora Inu?’
‘I like him,’ the woman said, as she coiled peroxide-white hair around two fingers. ‘He’s dangerous—but you’re right, he’s also funny. And together that makes him sexy.’
‘The boy has it all over me there.’
Kohana extracted the fingers from her hair to reach over and caress the man’s face. ‘No. It’s just different.’
He grinned in lopsided fashion.
‘Nora Inu?’ I piped up.
Kohana turned her attention fractionally my way. ‘Stray Dog. Shimada-san is the only person in the world I would allow to call me something so ribald—don’t get any ideas, okay?’
‘Roger.’ I gave her a mock salute. It was past time she got one back.
The left corner of the girl’s mouth rose as she returned her focus to the man in the bed.
‘You know, some people have doubts, because he grew up in China,’ Shimada was saying, ‘but the man proved he had enough balls to be Japanese during the war, and I haven’t seen an actor better skilled to alternate between gangster, rōnin, salaryman. He’s talented and fastidious—but he also has a self-destructive tendency.’
Kohana took his dying cigarette, stamped it out, and lit a new one. ‘Tell me more about this big-lizard film you’re doing.’
‘Ah-hah, that. I took the man-in-the-rubber-monster-suit movie for the money,’ he muttered as he flicked through a book. ‘There’s not much to tell. That schlock has no future anyway. They’ll never make another one.’
‘What are you reading?’
‘Kurosawa recommended it to me. Do you know Dashiell Hammett?’
‘The name isn’t familiar.’
‘An American writer. The one who created those movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy, The Thin Man. Do you remember?’
‘Seems to me, I only recall chubby people in American movies.’
‘Perhaps you’re a little young.’
Kohana took another drag on his cigarette. ‘What’s the title of the book?’
‘That’s what disturbs me. This is a collection of short stories, about a San Francisco detective, the Continental Op, and it’s called Dead Yellow Women.’ Shimada glanced at his bed partner. ‘Americans seem to believe that we have yellow skin. Do you think we have yellow skin?’
Kohana placed the cigarette between her teeth so that she could hold both her bare arms straight up in the air. In doing so, the quilt tumbled down.
‘They look pale to me. Bordering on chalky. Perhaps most Americans have only met malnourished Asians, or Japanese suffering from jaundice?’ She returned the smoke to the man.
‘Hammett also seems to think all Asians are opium smugglers and gun runners.’
‘Are these particular people Chinese?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps he has a point.’
‘Nora Inu—really.’ He shook his head.
The bed vanished as we fast-forwarded back to 1963, to the older, somewhat sadder Shimada. The spotlight diminished, and the crowd returned around us.
Two excessively large men were facing each other in the nearby ring.
‘Well, I’ll give them this much,’ Shimada was saying, ‘ogling sumo wrestlers is easy, since the practitioners of the sport aren’t the waif-like types you geisha tend to be. I usually wear glasses—but who needs spectacles here?’
‘Former geisha,’ Kohana spoke up. ‘And are you implying sumo will put optometrists out of a job?’
‘Only the optometrists whose client base is made up of sumo-wrestling fans.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Kohana briefly laid a hand on the man’s arm. ‘What are you doing next week? Are you free for dinner?’
‘Actually, I’m going to be busy—did I mention we start shooting tomorrow? It’s for a film due to be released in a few months. In the year that Japan introduces its world-beating bullet train service, and hosts the Olympic Games for the very first time, I get to star in one more of those silly kaiju movies.’
He flicked his lighter at another cigarette.
‘I was wrong—men in rubber suits, playing monsters, do have a career future. This one is about a giant, three-headed beast called King Ghidorah, indulging in fisticuffs with Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra. Where they dig up the sophisticated scripts and the silly names, I have no clue. I’ve worked with Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Kobayashi, yet here I am spending my time with quarter-star directors barely out of high school, who care more about the placement of an overturned Tokyo Tower prop than the live actors in front of the camera.’
‘You told me the director is Honda-san—wasn’t he Kurosawa’s assistant? And isn’t he much older than you?’
‘Pushing sixty-three, I believe.’
‘Yet barely out of high school.’
Shimada chuckled. ‘Yes, you’re right, I exaggerate.’
‘I also think you enjoy the roles.’
‘I could play them in my sleep. This time, I’m a psychiatrist, but my guess is I’ll be holding up an office desk somewhere, and asked to look serious.’
‘Or the desk will be holding up you,’ Kohana giggled.
‘There’s a point—perhaps I can drink my way through proceedings. I could always sneak in a hip flask of shōchū. By the way, have you spoken lately to Mifune? There are troubles in matrimonial paradise, and I hear his relationship with Kurosawa is under some strain. Finances and whatnot. I’m sure he could use a friend.’
We hit the accelerator again, the crowd vanished, the lights faded, and the stadium shrunk into a tiny, poorly lit bar.
Did I mention the queasy sensation I get when we hurdle locations?
Probably, it has as much to do with the suddenly switched depths of vision and the abrupt changes in light. This time, however, the queasiness was minor. I think I was getting blasé about the experience.
Like the illumination and the surroundings, Shimada diminished before us.
He was hunched over the bar, with almost no hair, knobby fingers clenched around a ceramic cup, while Kohana sat up straight beside him, an affectionate arm around his shoulders.
For once, I didn’t wait around to be spoon-fed information by my tour guide—I jumped up and played detective.
Not that there was much room in there to move. Behind a bored bartender with a receding hairline, a waistcoat, and a fat, burgundy-coloured velvet bowtie, was a calendar. I leaned on the bar to gain a better view.
Beneath an ukiyo-e picture of an eight-headed dragon, standing out amid the kanji, were the numerals ‘1-9-7-8’.
‘He’s seventy-three. I’m forty-nine,’ Kohana said from her stool.
I’d like to say she looked half her age, but would have shaved off ten years. An elegant late-thirties, with minor laugh lines around her mouth and eyes. The Farrah Fawcett-Majors hairstyle she sported—feathered, wavy, and voluminous, much like the roof of that temple we’d seen in Kyoto—wasn’t so flattering.
‘It was the ’70s,’ Kohana complained, having once again picked my brain.
Shimada was, then, only a year or so older than me when I kicked the bucket, but he seemed twenty years beyond that. He was struggling for breath and wheezing, and the cigarettes were nowhere to be seen.
‘I’m too old for Kurosawa, and I’ve stooped to playing bit-parts in domestic comedies like Tora-san,’ Shimada said in a weak, husky tone. ‘But it beats playing it straight in rubber-suited monster yarns.’
‘Oh, shhh. We both know how you really feel about the monster yarns.’
He laughed, but the sound came across more like a punctured tyre tube. ‘I do miss them. A thing of the distant past, Kohanachan, just like that sexual drive I misplaced between movies—and the ability to breathe easily, like anybody else.’
Kohana smiled and kissed his forehead. Then she looked straight at me. ‘Shimada died in 1982, just before his seventy-seventh birthday. I miss him.’
‘As much as you will miss me?’
‘Miss you? I’m stuck with you. Remember what they say about absence and fondness? In your case, we’re miles from that.’
And, bang, we were back in the sports arena in 1963, with the crowd shouting encouragement to two bulls of men pushing each other toward the ring’s cordoned edge.
The healthier, middle-aged Shimada was seated beside Kohana, and she was back to her Audrey Hepburn shindig.
‘So, here we are again at the sumo,’ she said as she leaned over to me. ‘Aren’t you excited? I remember you saying this was one of the things you loved in the James Bond movie. Take a good look. We probably won’t again see many two hundred kilogram men throwing themselves at one other.’
The bout ended quickly, and after much meaningless speech-making and a crooning by the referee, a couple more mostly naked men lined up against one another.
‘What most spectators don’t realize is that there’s so much more to the sport than its remarkably hefty wrestlers,’ Kohana whispered in my ear. ‘Behind the cataclysmic grappling that goes on are centuries-old traditions like the Shintō-related throwing of salt—see?’ She pointed her fan as one of the wrestlers lobbed a handful of white. ‘That one’s for purification.’
‘I remember my grandmother lobbing salt over her left shoulder, although I believe in her case it was to dispel demons hovering there.’
Kohana wasn’t listening.
‘See that remarkably revealing loincloth they’re wearing?’
‘Shimada was right—how could I miss anything about these people?’
‘Well, it’s known as the mawashi, and has a story too: it’s made of silk, is approximately thirty feet long, weighs up to eleven pounds, and sometimes bears the name of a sponsor.’
I pictured one of the sumo boasting a logo of an H-in-a-circle on their nether regions, and pined for my grandmother’s salt.
‘Oh, and the competitors’ hair, which you can see is precision-slicked into topknots, is coiffed using a waxy substance called bintsuke abura, the main ingredient of which comes from the berries of the Japanese wax tree—a member of the same family as poison ivy.’ Kohana wasn’t even pushing breathless. ‘It’s been used in hairdressing in Japan for around a thousand years, and is also used by geisha as a waxy base for our makeup.’
Straight after she finished her speech, one of the sumo competitors toppled out of the ring, down the slope, and onto a person sitting in the front row.
‘Itai—imagine two hundred kilograms in your lap!’
‘Rather brutal,’ I agreed.
Shimada stood up, applauding. ‘Encore!’