Jasmine Read online

  The wall of his cabin had a large porthole in it. When he pulled back the faded yellow curtain, he saw plumes of fog come flying towards him from across the deck. With nothing else to do, he wound up dozing on the sofa.

  The sun set in the fog. He went down to the dining room for dinner. Set out on a counter were cold plates of stir-fried meat and vegetables. He selected one, paid for the meal at the register, took it to a table, and began to eat. The food tasted awful. So much for the anticipated pleasures of beautiful scenery and fine dining.

  The other first-class passenger was seated alone in a corner by a porthole, drinking beer. Their eyes happened to meet, and they could not avoid exchanging perfunctory bows. Who is this guy? Aki wondered with a bit of suspicion.

  He soon retreated to his cabin and stretched out again on the sofa to read, sipping Scotch from a leather flask he’d brought along. The book was a collection of poems and paintings depicting the fountains, rugs, and gardens of Arabia and Persia. A good five hundred pages long.

  Had the tip of the column not bent in shame,

  The fountain would have returned all its bounty to the rain.

  He read the lines aloud.

  The ship lurched about as it left the Kumanonada Sea and entered the Tosa offing. The cabin lights began to flicker; now reading was impossible. Nor was that all. When he went to take a shower, there was only a dribble of hot water, and when he called the purser to inquire about it, he was subjected to a long lecture about shipboard rules regarding water use. Fine. That made four pleasures he would have to forego. Resigned, he got into bed. The ship continued rocking as it surged along.

  Time lagged until finally, like a car with a stalled engine, it ground to a halt. Or so Aki started to believe. Must he do without the pleasure of sleep as well?

  It was the film director Xie Han who had told him: Waki Tanehiko might still be alive.

  As chief director of the Special Research Group for Huxley Associates in Japan, Aki was involved in research on Official Development Assistance (ODA) projects relating to China.

  In 1972, acting on the assumption that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, Mao Zedong had moved quickly to establish diplomatic relations with the United States and Japan as a strategic ploy vis-à-vis the USSR. Despite their ideological differences, China and the United States were fellow victors who had fought side by side in World War II, and so relations were re-established with little difficulty. But with the vanquished nation of Japan, the issue of war reparations was still unresolved. The money involved was sure to be a whopping, unheard-of sum. Yet Mao chose to abandon reparations claims in order to normalize diplomatic relations with Japan in a hurry. That’s how urgently the Soviet threat had loomed.

  Japanese ODA to China, which began in 1979, was widely perceived in both countries as a quid pro quo.

  The amount of assistance rose annually until, in 1986, China became the top recipient of Japan’s bilateral ODA, and in 1987 the annual total of all aid, gratuitous and onerous, reached 170 billion yen. How was this enormous amount of money being used? Recently, concern over the invisibility and inefficiency of fund distribution was increasing. Every year, the Foreign Ministry issued a white paper on ODA, but regrettably, the report was made under the influence of interested parties. The situation called for a fair and accurate assessment by a third-party body. Based on a survey of the actual situation, Aki’s team was expected to suggest a more effective and efficient scheme of disbursement. Almost half of the ODA projects in China were based on yen loans and, as financing arrangements restricted contracts to Japanese businesses, his team’s proposal was bound to attract attention among Japanese firms eager to be involved. Moreover, he’d also been asked to look into the presence of projects based on development financing by the World Bank. The idea was that the Chinese would be less wary of dealing with capable Japanese partners than with white people. The voluminous report was almost finished.

  Huge amounts of government financing inevitably gave rise to vested interests. In Japan, this meant conservative politicians known as the pro-Chinese faction and businessmen with connections in the Conservative Party; in the recipient country, this meant the top echelon of Mango and their sons and daughters. They were known as taizidang (“princelings”) or “China whites.” Naturally, Aki’s investigation took in special interest groups in both countries, affording him glimpses of various corrupt practices.

  The northwestern province of Xinjiang was an area of desert, underground mineral resources, and nuclear testing, inhabited by a Muslim Turkic people called Uyghurs. In the eighties, several pro-independence uprisings had taken place. With the support of seven hundred million yen’s worth of gratuitous funds, a “high-quality cottonseed plant” was supposed to be under construction in the farmlands of the Tarim Basin – yet there was no sign of it anywhere. When asked, people said only, “Oh, there’s nothing there. You shouldn’t move around this area without permission, either. You never know where there might be a forced labour camp. You could be hauled in as a spy.”

  Aki’s team decided to draw up a side report addressing such opaque, questionable issues. An essential part of all such surveys, the side report was given top-secret status within the organization, and any external use was strictly prohibited. Side reports drawn up by the eighty-three company branches located in forty-four countries around the world were housed deep in the Information Management Centre of the main Huxley office in New York, known informally as “Pandora.” The accumulation of innumerable such reports from past surveys had given Huxley an almost mythical authority.

  Two years ago, before getting started on the ODA survey, Aki had received a phone call from his friend Shuichi in Beijing.

  “You know the movie director Xie Han?”

  “Sure, he’s famous. I saw one of his movies in Tokyo once.”

  “Well, he’s now making a spy flick set in Shanghai in the 1930s, and guess what? Your old man – Waki Tanehiko, right? – is one of the main characters. I went to Shanghai on a lead the other day, and while I was there I visited the film studio and interviewed Xie Han. I heard it straight from him. He and your dad went to college together, and they worked together at Huaying, too. When I told him Waki Tanehiko had a son who’s a friend of mine, he got all excited. I gave him your address. I have no doubt you’ll be hearing from him. By the way, Mitsuru’s coming to Beijing next week.”

  “Yeah, first time for her. Thanks for showing her around.”

  It was on this trip that Mitsuru’s romance with Shuichi had begun.

  In due course a letter came from Xie Han, and Aki wrote back to answer the director’s questions. Mostly they concerned the house where his father was born and his life in Kobe after the war.

  Aki picked up a curious piece of information from that first letter: Xie Han was unaware that his father had gone back to Shanghai in 1955 – this despite the fact that the director had never left Shanghai himself. In his second letter, Xie expressed great surprise at this revelation. Then it was Aki’s turn to be astonished: apparently his father had appeared as a comic actor in a dozen or more movies for Huaying, under the name of Han Langen. This certainly came as news to him, and to his mother as well.

  In the course of these exchanges, his ODA survey had begun, taking him back and forth to China frequently.

  After graduating from college, Aki had gone to work for a major trading company, only to quit in less than two years to enrol in a graduate program at his alma mater. Once there, however, despite encouragement from his advisor, he became disenchanted with the academic side of economics and dropped out to join the prestigious firm of Huxley Associates at its Tokyo office. He had studied Chinese fairly intensively in college and grad school, and he always made a point of conducting in-house meetings with Chinese staff in their own language, so he had little difficulty with the language on site. His work mostly took him to Beijing and Shenyang, Changchun, Dalian, and other places in the north and northeast, or out to the western regions of Qin
ghai and Xinjiang, but never as far south as Shanghai. Finally, last spring, he’d had occasion to visit the Baoshan Iron and Steel Company there. He stayed for only a couple of days, and was able at last to meet Xie Han on his last afternoon there.

  Aki remained sceptical that some Chinese comedian named Han Langen could really have been his father. During the Cultural Revolution, Xie Han had burnt all his old scripts, letters and other papers, as well as his old photographs. He could offer no proof that the two men were the same.

  “How much time have you got?” asked Xie.

  “About two hours.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  With that, he bundled Aki into the studio car and drove off at maniacal speed. They crossed over Suzhou Creek and entered the Hongkew district. The car stopped at the entrance to a dimly lit alleyway in a lilong, an old neighbourhood with a maze of narrow lanes. Two- and three-story brick row houses stood packed together in a haphazard way, a cross between local farmhouses and London working-class housing. Narrow channels threaded through the length and breadth of the lilong like fine Shantou embroidery.

  Xie Han led Aki into the heart of it. They climbed dark, narrow stairs to a third-floor room where, under a skylight in the sloping ceiling, an old man sat dozing in a chair. His name was Zhao; originally Kawakita Nagamasa’s chauffeur at Huaying, he’d served later as company gatekeeper.

  “Zhao is the only person who still has secret photos of Huaying,” said Xie Han; he then rapidly explained to the old man who Aki was.

  Zhao nodded and gripped Aki by the hand. From the depths of a bureau drawer, he brought out a photo album. The spine was worn to shreds, bare linen fibres exposed. Aki peered at the album where Zhao opened it. There was a large oblong photograph spread over two pages. Printed at the top was the caption, “In commemoration of the first anniversary of the establishment of Chinese Film United, Ltd. May 12, the 33rd year of the Republic of China, Shanghai.” The 33rd year of the Republic would be 1944. Overall, the picture was slightly reddish in tone, and here and there it had swelled and cracked, the surface flaking off to reveal the white ground beneath. Even so, each person’s face was clearly visible.

  Kawakita, Zhang Shankun, Fuwa, Hanawa, Yanagida, Tsuji, Shimizu: one by one, the old man pointed to the faces and recited their names. Sometimes he would dart a look at Xie Han, seeking confirmation. One after another they were summoned forth, the principal directors and actors, male and female, from the prewar Shanghai film world. “This is me,” he said, indicating a young man in suit and necktie at the right end of the back row.

  When Aki informed him that Kawakita had died seven or eight years back, Zhao rested his fingertip on the photograph and stared up at the tiny skylight. On returning his attention to the photo, he pointed to a man seated at the left end of the first row. Then he swung his finger over to the figure of a man standing in the same row at the extreme right with his hands behind his back.

  “Can you tell who this is? See – the two faces are exactly the same. Take a good look.”

  Aki knew instantly that this was his father as a young man. But how could there be two images of him in the same picture?

  Xie Han explained. They had not been able to fit three hundred people into one long photograph using an ordinary camera. This photo was taken by panning slowly from left to right with a special camera that was the pride of Huaying. While the camera panned, the man had raced around behind from the left edge to the right, so that the lens caught him twice. It was actually one person. At the same time, it was two different people.

  The man on the left had a wide grin on his face; this was Waki Tanehiko. The man on the right was sullen, his face set in a scowl as if nothing ever amused him; this was Han Langen. He had modelled himself on his idol, Buster Keaton.

  Aki checked his watch and realized he would have to cut the visit short if he meant to catch his plane. With abbreviated thanks, they got back in the car and sped off to Shanghai Airport, arriving just in time.

  The third letter from Xie Han had come just two weeks ago. Old Zhao had died, he wrote. Then he reported some more surprising news: Aki’s father might still be alive.

  The Tiananmen Square protests came to a sad end, but as it turned out, that whole business brought a peculiar piece of news my way. From the founding of the Republic through the Korean War, then during the Great Leap Forward and the Great Cultural Revolution, Mango built a series of secret prisons which they used for not just Chinese citizens but a good number of foreigners, too. After the Tiananmen Square protests – of course, plenty of students and pro-democracy activists are still on the run, even now – some people escaped to the Loess Plateau. With its yaodong, cave dwellings carved right into the mountainside, it’s an ideal hiding place for people in the underground movement. The caves have been inhabited since ancient times.

  There’s a secret Mango prison in that area, too. Lodged in one of the caves, apparently, is an old Japanese man who was transferred there about ten years ago from a secret prison in Beijing. I heard this from someone who escaped recently to Shanghai. He says he never met the old man face to face, but the villagers call him “Xie,” using the second tone. There are seven or eight different characters that this sound could represent, but only two of them are likely to appear in a Japanese surname – including the one in yours (which I regret to say doesn’t have a very good meaning in Chinese). There’s no telling which one it is. If it’s true that your father, as I learnt to my surprise, came back to China after the war and was arrested here, then there’s a good chance that it is him. But for now there’s no way to be sure.

  The postmark on the letter was not Shanghai but Nagasaki. Fearing the censors, Xie must have entrusted it to someone travelling to Japan. At the end of the letter, he urged Aki to return to Shanghai as soon as things calmed down.

  Aki got out a Chinese-Japanese dictionary and found that the character in his name was derived from a similar one meaning “to threaten.” And yet, he thought, the character was a common enough element in many Japanese surnames: Wakisaka, Wakimoto, Wakimura, Wakita, Kadowaki…

  His second night on board, he dreamt he was being chased around by the character for “waki” in his name, until the efforts he was making to escape woke him up. It was the middle of the night. He told himself, I am adrift on the rough waters of the East China Sea. There was keen pleasure in the thought. His irritation and his nausea had vanished. He couldn’t feel the ship tossing about anymore. He opened the curtain and saw the deck sparkling like glass in the moonlight, while on the calm surface of the water moonlight flowed and undulated like a dragon’s scales. The quiet was unbelievable.

  Stepping out on deck, he saw with surprise that other passengers were gathered in the bow area, talking among themselves in low voices. The engines had been cut. The ship was floating, motionless.

  An impression, oddly real, rose in his mind: he was aboard the mutinous Hispaniola in Treasure Island. Or was this a continuation of the dream in which he’d been chased by a Chinese character? No, mutiny was brewing. The Xin Jian Zhen had been seajacked. After the violence in Tiananmen Square, something could easily happen here. The passengers would be taken to Taiwan or Hong Kong, or maybe Singapore. Who was the ringleader? Who would play the one-legged cook, Long John Silver?

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind, and he turned to find the other first-class passenger standing there in green striped pyjamas. The fellow smiled, pushing up rimless glasses on his nose. The smile came from his mouth rather than his eyes. So this is the cook, thought Aki, still in Treasure Island.

  “A beautiful night, isn’t it?” said the newcomer in fluent Japanese.

  “What are they doing?” Aki’s voice was slightly blurred.

  “It’s the full moon. And the sea is finally calm.”

  The two men walked shoulder to shoulder along the deck. They were nearly identical in height and build.

  “Why has the boat stopped?”

  “Boats get sleepy, too
.”

  “Seriously.”

  “They have to adjust for the time. If we kept straight on at the rate we were going, we’d reach Shanghai before dawn. You’re travelling alone, I see. It’s rare to see a Japanese person going to China alone by ship – all the more so at a time like this.”

  Who the hell was this guy, and why was his Japanese so good? The eyes behind his glasses had intensely brown irises. A trick of the moonlight? The man removed a business card from the breast pocket of his pyjama top and handed it to him. Odd of him to be so well prepared.

  “My name is Cai Fang.”

  According to the card, he was a director of the Beijing People’s Foreign Friendship Association and responsible for entertaining visitors. Aki, wearing a T-shirt and chinos, had no business card on him to offer in return.

  “Actually, we’re already slightly acquainted. I remembered last night.” Cai Fang took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes repeatedly. “I believe it was last summer. You came to the government offices to inquire about plans to expand the railway service between Beijing and Qinhuangdao.”

  True enough. Aki had been taking a close look at the implementation of those plans, which numbered among the most important projects financed by ODA yen loans. But though he had certainly visited the government offices, he had no memory of meeting Cai Fang. His investigation had run into repeated obstacles.

  Aki shook his head slightly to indicate he didn’t remember, then said, “Reversing the comment you just made about me: it’s unusual for a Beijing government official like yourself to be returning to China unaccompanied, by ship, at a time like this.”

  Cai gave him another of those mouth-only smiles and said nothing.

  Out on the calm waters were the winking lights of innumerable fishing vessels. The passengers leant over the railing and then, in clusters of two and three, they began singing quietly – now a Japanese popular song, now a folk ballad he’d heard before, from one of the ethnic minorities in China’s western hinterland. One couple started to clap their hands and dance in time to the singing. Little by little, others joined in; a circle formed. Moonlight poured down on them. The ship was stopped in the middle of the East China Sea.