Harbour

I.

It’s Sunday night, June 20, 1937. The pilot can’t sleep. She swelters in the tropical heat, choked by the veil of mosquito netting that cocoons her four-poster bed. Her coverlet itches, her pillowcase is soaked with sweat, and the humidity is wreaking havoc on her sinuses. And then there’s the dread: God help her, it’s growing in her heart, and its needs must be quenched.

In a fit of lucidity, she tries to calm herself. There is no reason to worry, she thinks. The day’s journey from Bangkok was a mere thousand miles: a virtual heartbeat in her aviation career. Her Lockheed Model 10E Electra now sleeps soundly in a hangar at the Kallang Aerodrome, a jewel of a terminus without equal in the Far East. Meanwhile, the American Consul-General and his wife have been perfect hosts, ensuring that she’s as clean and well-fed as she would be, were she back at her grandmother’s house in Kansas.

Yet her skull is flooded with mucus, and next door, her navigator snores like a buzz saw. “Fuck it,” she says aloud to the darkness. She’s had enough. She hauls herself out of bed, pulls on her checkered shirt and gabardine trousers, and slips out of the mansion into the gas-lit road.

She walks for half a mile, then hails herself a rickshaw, bargaining herself a deal based on the fact that her wallet’s still full of American dollars. A brisk ride later, she’s at the junction of Malay Street and Kandahar: the legendary pleasure district she’s heard whispers of amongst the oil-slicked mechanics of Calcutta and Rangoon; a pavement praised in drunken song amongst colonial officers in London pubs.

Strolling along, she melts easily into the crowd of tattooed sailors and gamblers, secret society members and opium addicts. No one questions her presence; with her cropped hair and small breasts, she passes easily for a man.

All eyes are on the women, anyhow. They come in all colours: Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Austronesian. Lashes mascaraed, lips daubed with carmine, faces powdered with rice dust, they sit and stand in the glow of red lanterns above their bordellos. Some laugh as they court their clients, playing mahjong or chap ji kee. Some strum on the pipa, chanting mournfully in Cantonese. And others stand sullenly, directing their eyes only at the spaces between the men. They find no joy in this business, and will not pretend.

And amongst them, there’s her. A tiny creature on the pavement, sitting cross-legged, dressed in a kimono, valiantly exorcising the heat with a silk fan printed with peonies. On closer examination, she’s no longer young: her once delicate features are ravaged by age. Yet her spine is erect and her gaze is unflinching.

Eventually, their eyes meet. They size each other up: a barely perceptible nod, a brief discussion of prices, and the transaction is sealed. Clasping her hand, she guides the pilot through a beaded curtain. The rabble of the street barely notice as they disappear.

II.

The karayuki-san’s name is Yoriko. She has lived in the city for thirty years now, and she has bedded countless men, of all colours and creeds, of all nations and professions and ages. This, however, will be her first woman. She does not relish the experience. She smears medicated oil on her hands and sets to work.

Her client, who wishes to be addressed as Millie, lies naked and facedown on her mattress. By the light of the kerosene lamp, she kneads the knots out of her back, smoothing the muscles with her practised fingers, just as she would for any stevedore or rubber-tapper who came to her door.

“I’m travelling around the world,” Millie says, quite suddenly. Her voice is American, light and young. “Where are you from? Maybe I’ll be in your neck of the woods.”

Yoriko thinks of her village on the island of Amakusa, named for its sweet grass. A place of famine, where little girls grew up knowing they might be sold at the first bad harvest. A land where folks were so poor, they never tasted fish, even though they lived next door to the boundless sea.

Try as she might, she finds she can barely remember the faces of her parents, her playmates, her infant siblings. Only the smell of an empty pigsty, a cowshed without a cow, the jetty and the beach where she stood in file to be taken away.

“I’m from Japan,” she says.

“Shame. I’m not headed that way. But I am crossing the Pacific to Honolulu. You know Honolulu? Lotsa Japs there.”

An awkward silence.

“You must miss home, huh?”

“No.”

“Come on, hon. You can tell me.”

“No. Once we leave, we do not return. Better not to be a burden. Better not to think of home.”

She does not speak of the money she has sent home through the decades to ease her family’s hunger and debts, nor the letters of thanks she has received, describing the auspicious weddings of her sisters, the graduation ceremonies of her brothers. These thoughts fill her with pride, but it would be too, too crude to speak of money. Even in front of an American. Even in front of another woman.

A question occurs to Yoriko. She dismisses it as impolite, yet there is something about this woman that has loosened her tongue.

“Why?”

“Sorry?”

“Why are you going around the world?”

“For the fun of it,” she replies, but she looks uncertain of her words, as if they were rehearsed for a radio broadcast interview, in a place quite different from a whorehouse cubicle in Malabar Street.

“It’ll be a world record,” she continues. “I took off in Oakland, California, thirty-two days ago. I’ve passed through Burbank, Tucson, San Juan, Natal, Dakar, Khartoum, Karachi. Other folks have gone via Juneau, Hong Kong, London, but I’m doing it along the line of the equator. No pilot’s ever done that before. No man, no woman.”

There’s a moment of silence as Yoriko massages her temples, her cheeks, the lines of her neck. The names of the cities hang in the air, patient, inviting.

“You ever think about travelling?”

“No.”

“You never thought about what it’s like to fly? What it’s like to be up there, with the birds and the angels?”

She’s sitting up now, pulling at the hem of Yoriko’s kimono.

“No.”

“Lie back. Lemme show you how it feels.”

An hour passes, and then another. Then the two are conscious again, panting in each other’s arms. Millie’s chest heaves with grateful vigour: her sinuses are clear again, as they always are after lovemaking. In the low lamplight, she searches for something romantic to say.

But it’s Yoriko who speaks first. “America is a strong country,” she says.

Millie wonders if she should laugh at this, if it’s a compliment on her sexual prowess. Then she realises the moment is gone. She decides to be diplomatic instead.

“Not since the Depression, hon. Now we’re poor as a church full of mice.”

Yoriko shakes her head and buries her face in her arm.

“It is not the same. You have never been poor like us. You have never starved. You have never known a time when the one way to feed your children is to sell them across the seas.”

Millie drapes her arm around her, concerned.

“Cheer up, doll. Japan’s strong too now. You helped defeat the Krauts in the Great War, remember? And now you’re duking it out with the Chinese and Russians in, what do you call that again, Manchuria?”

Yoriko is lying on her side, eyes tightly shut, thinking of her brothers again. Both are now officers in the Imperial Army: sturdy young men, handsome in their tailored uniforms, and angry at the shame their land has endured. Both have told her in their letters that a Golden Age will soon be upon them, when Japan rules the entire eastern half of the globe. The races that have insulted her honour shall be mere vassals of their empire, they promise. For every indignity she has suffered, their women will suffer a hundredfold.

She clutches this white woman for a moment, absorbing the warmth of her body, imagining the war that will soon rage across the oceans as their nations battle for power. In the darkness, she sees the bombs falling across her city, incinerating them both. How their flesh will be scorched, perhaps into their very shadows.

“You should go back,” Millie’s saying. “They’re strong now. They’re rich. They have everything you could ask for.”

“No.”

“I’ve seen the photographs in the papers. It’s a whole new country.”

“That is why it is no longer home.”

Slowly, they rise from the bed. She lets Millie help her back into her kimono, arm by arm, teaching her to tie the obi about her waist. Then, with her finger and thumb, she snuffs out the lamp wick.

“It is not such a bad thing, you know,” she says in the unlit room. “To be lost, to never go home. It is a kind of peace. Perhaps it is even a kind of freedom.”

III.

Now it’s Monday morning, June 21, and the pilot is at Kallang Aerodrome once again. Her next stop is Bandoeng, in the Dutch East Indies, then Australia, then Papua, then the great expanse of the Pacific.

She checks her instruments, snaps on her goggles, then takes a whiff from her bottle of smelling salts, compensating for her lack of sleep the night before. The monsoon rains are coming, she reflects, and is surprised that her heart registers no fear, no trepidation at this danger. The runway crew give the signal for an all-clear, and she takes off.

Elsewhere on the island, a small woman is riding the bus, fanning herself with a triangle of silk and peony. She alights at Kranji, and walks the remaining two kilometres to reach the cemetery where the ashes of her sisters lie under nameless stones.

She sits with them, unspeaking. Then, without provocation, she raises her head and sees an aeroplane, crossing the sky towards the east.

She knows she will never see the pilot again. Nor will she leave this island, come flood or fire, war or drought. One journey has been enough. And yet she raises a hand as if to catch the strange metal eagle, and shuts her eyes.

I don’t know where I am, she thinks. But I’m flying. And I’m free.