Bridge for Passing

Two

THE ATMOSPHERE INTO WHICH I descended once more from the jet on the airfield near Tokyo was one of welcome and quiet unspoken sympathy. The deeper the feelings, the Japanese believe, the less should be spoken. We Americans find it necessary to speak, to send letters and cards of condolence. Hundreds of letters had poured into my office before I left home and I had read them all because it was good to know in what esteem he was held and in so many places in the world. And people, friends or strangers, had stopped me on streets and country roads to tell me. “I am so sorry to hear—”

In Tokyo nothing was said, yet everything was conveyed. Consideration was delicate but complete. My room in the hotel was bright with flowers and baskets of fruit. The little maids were ever present and solicitous. I understood, for in Japan even love is not to be expressed in words. There are no such words as “I love you” in the Japanese language.

“How do you tell your husband that you love him?” I once asked a Japanese friend.

She looked slightly shocked. “An emotion as deep as love between husband and wife cannot be put into words. It must be expressed in attitude and act.”

Nor are there Japanese equivalents of our love words — sweetheart, darling, dear, and all the rest. Certain young Japanese are beginning to use the English words, but even they not seriously, perhaps. But perhaps again no one uses these words seriously any more. I hear American directors scattering them carelessly and casually upon the loved and the unloved alike, in the fashion of Hollywood and Broadway, and I always remonstrate. To a writer all words are significant and valuable, individual words as well as words in association, each to be used only in its fitting place, like jewels. The English language is peculiarly rich in the words of love, their roots deep in ancient Anglo-Saxon soil. To hear a man call a secretary or an actress or perhaps only a girl whose name he does not remember by the precious words of love always makes me — well, angry! It is a desecration of true feeling, the deepest in the human heart. For me nothing in life equals or even resembles in value and treasure true love between man and woman, with all it implies. The words we have used for centuries to express this love are not to be tarnished, for they belong to all of us. If they are tarnished by careless misuse, how shall we express true love? We are robbed of something that cannot be replaced. Any woman who has heard the man she loves call her his sweetheart, his darling, his love, can only be profoundly angered when these words are destroyed.

“How can you misuse these words?” I demanded of an American.

He laughed, uncomprehending. “It makes the girls feel good,” he said lightly. “It’s informal — like — you know — friendly.”

The Japanese girls did not feel “good” about it, nor did they consider it friendly. Those few who did were problems. They thought that love words meant love, and they became serious and consequently troublesome. The others, who were not looking for love from American men, with consequent benefits, considered such an American unduly interested in sex and therefore insulting. It took explanations before they could be placated. They were usually too polite to complain in his presence but behind his back what scorn!

“I’ll sue him if he says it again,” a young actress exclaimed, her black eyes bright with fury … And sue him she did. Yes, we had our problems.

Our locations were set, although I had not yet seen them except on film; the next task was to find our cast. Since the story of The Big Wave is altogether Japanese, the cast was to be Japanese, and we had already engaged a Japanese crew and cameraman. For the first time an American film company was making a picture in Japan, co-produced by a Japanese film company, the largest and in some ways the best, and with Japanese crew and cameraman. It was an experiment, a profoundly interesting one. I had seen motion pictures made before of my books, but none like this, and with me. I did not intend to interfere with directing or in any of the professional aspects, for I know my areas of ignorance, but I was to have the privilege of being anywhere I liked, and to speak when I wished. On the whole, I believed my fellow workers had confidence in my ability to be silent. I would not speak much or often. I am, in fact, a quiet woman by nature, unless oppressed by what I consider injustice when I become, I am told, excruciatingly articulate.

Certainly I enjoyed sitting in on the casting. We were given office space in the handsome building owned by our Japanese co-producers, and each day I went there early and stayed late, looking, listening, judging, disapproving or approving, while those in command gave auditions to actors and actresses, adults and children. Our first concern was to find the children, two boys, two girls, who were to begin the story. Therefore children came to us, accompanied by mothers.

I have seen many stage children, and they can be sad children. These Japanese stage children, however, were not sad. They were like all other Japanese children, healthy and happy and exuding a general atmosphere of being much loved. Neither they nor their mothers were tense, as so many of our American stage children and mothers are tense, which difference I can only ascribe to the possibility that competition is not as important in Japanese life as it is in ours, and the desire to excel is second to the consideration of human feelings.

They came in, one after the other, each mother unobtrusively following her particular star, and they bowed with the grace bestowed by that extra hinge which seems to have developed in the Japanese back. It is unique, this bow. The Chinese bobs his head cheerfully at greeting and parting and the Korean makes a proud inclination. The Japanese performs obeisance, deep but also proud.

Only one boy in the endless procession seemed reluctant or rebellious. He came in early one morning, flanked by his mother and his aunt, the only boy who needed the escort of two women and it soon became evident why. He was a handsome fellow, but sulky, his bow was just short of courtesy and at first he would not talk. His mother and his aunt, in gentle distress and apology for such behavior, informed us eagerly that he was a champion swimmer. This was good, the part called for a good swimmer and we congratulated the boy, who only continued to look sulky. We invited him to sit down and he sat down, still sulky. He condescended, after several whispered pleadings from his lady relatives, to answer our questions briefly — too briefly — all the time staring at the wall. Yes, he said in answer to direct question, he was in school — Japanese school. Yes, he did speak English — sometimes. He had been three and a half years in Cairo, Egypt, and there he went to English school but he preferred not to speak English. … He liked Japanese school better than English school. … He did not wish to remember Cairo. Well, it was a city, and that’s all. … He grew more and more sulky. Something occurred to us. We put a final question.

“Do you want to be in this motion picture?”

He lifted his head, his face brightened for the first time. He shouted.

“No!”

We put one more arrow question. “Do you ever want to be an actor?”

He shone now like a neon light. “No!”

We burst into laughter and he looked at us hopefully.

“The interview is over,” we told him, “and you are a wise man. You know what you don’t want.”

He tramped out, unsmiling, a lordly male, his female relatives trotting after him, pained but acquiescent. It was obvious that he had won a family victory and that he was accustomed to such victories.

Days passed and the actors narrowed down to the impossibles and the possibles, the latter by far the smaller group. Japan has many excellent actors of both sexes and all ages, but we were looking for excellent actors who also spoke English, since the dialogue was to be in English. At first we hoped, unrealistically, that their English would be perfect. Later we merely hoped their English could be understood well enough so that it could give the illusion of Japanese.

Which illusion reminds me of an incident of my own life in China. I was stopping to rest one day at a wayside inn in a remote province. An old woman came to pour tea into my bowl. I thanked her in Chinese and asked her how she did. She stared at me in terror and dropped the teapot. “The gods save me,” she gasped. “What is the matter with me? I can understand English!”

Something of this we hoped to achieve, but there were times when we wondered if we were fools to hope. The variety of accents in English-speaking Japanese is astounding but they have one characteristic in common. The consonant “L” seems foreign to the Japanese ear as well as to the Japanese tongue.

In such diverting work the day passed until evening fell, and the trouble with every day was that at the end of it there was always night.

For the first time in my life I was sad when evening came. The others went to their husbands and wives, but I came back alone to my hotel room. The windows looked over the roofs of new Tokyo — as I have said, not beautiful, for there has not been time enough to create beauty. The city was hastily rebuilt after the war, a pity, for after it was thoroughly flattened by bombing it would have been well, if possible, to design a city with wide streets and parkways, a modern city but beautiful in the Japanese fashion. It was not done. The war had been harsh, people were desperate to begin living again, and the government was all but bankrupt. Houses went up helter-skelter. Today it is still almost impossible to find a house by its number or even by its street. One can only entrust one’s self to the unknown.

Evenings in lonely hotel rooms are impossible, at least for me. I had friends in plenty, and invitations in plenty, more than I could accept, but these did not fill the need. One had always to maintain a front, or a poise, and this could be done during the day’s work when the mind was engaged. It was different when one had to respond individually to others. In despair and loneliness I took to wandering the streets at night, unknown and free. Tokyo is rich in theaters and motion picture houses and usually I stopped by in one or the other. Though I did not understand the dialogue, the drift of the story was easy to catch, and I could be mildly amused, superficially at least, by what I saw. The houses were always packed, the audiences grave and intense until a comic moment brought loud, staccato laughter, stopped instantaneously by intent gravity again.

On one such evening I chanced to see an American woman of about my own age wandering as I was wandering. We stopped, startled each by the other, then I spoke. She was from Los Angeles, her husband had gone to Formosa, where she did not wish to follow, her daughter had a dinner date with a young American man, and she was indulging in a long-concealed wish to wander about Tokyo alone. By this time, however, she looked uncertain, though not frightened, and I proposed that we see the picture together, which we did, to our mutual enjoyment. The acquaintance ripened into a friendship, and later a dinner with her family, and another still later in Los Angeles. The point of this incident is that I did not realize how an American woman looks in a Japanese crowd. When I saw her, I forgot, of course, how I also looked among thousands of Japanese.

I had, actually, a warmly comfortable feeling when I was alone in a Japanese crowd. This must have been a lingering memory of the atmosphere of my childhood when, accompanied by my Chinese nurse, I sat in a Chinese theater or out-of-doors on a village threshing floor or in a temple courtyard, to watch a play. The play was always the thing in China, and the star system was unknown, unless of course one went to Shanghai, or Peking, there to attend the performance of such a star as, for example, Mei Lan-fang, or Butterfly Wu. As a child I had no such privilege, but I enjoyed the miracle plays and the long historical dramas through which the Chinese everyday folk learned religion, philosophy and the history of their own people. They accepted me as a frequent member of the audience, and I lost myself, a fair-haired American child in the Asian multitude — a kindly multitude in those days and I was never held responsible for the sins of colonialism as all white folk are nowadays and by all Asians, it seems. I was conscious only of being surrounded by pleasant and humorous people. In Tokyo now I found the same people, though of a different nation and country, and they accepted me merely because they had become used to Americans as part of the world landscape. They know the best and the worst of us from the long years of the Occupation and we cannot surprise them any more, either by good or evil.

Tokyo has, of course, its darker aspects. There were streets in which I did not enjoy walking alone any more than I do in certain parts of New York and Philadelphia where I have learned that it is dangerous not only so to walk, but also even to ride with the doors of my car unlocked. Cities are cities and hooligans are to be found in all.

Those were the days, too, of the student riots in Tokyo, about which we North Americans had so much misinformation. I can only say that I was there, that I saw the crowds of young men and women, earnest, determined, informed. They were not anti-American. They were Japanese who liked their constitution although it had been engineered by Americans — at least by an American. They liked especially the part in which Japan as a nation promises never again to wage war. Now they, the Japanese, were being asked by Americans to take sides in case of war and with the West, although they were oriented toward Asia, and in the future must in common sense be a neutral people. With American bases on their soil they felt themselves forced to be partisan. It amounted to a situation which to them became unendurable in its confusion. The Japanese are a well-organized people, they have their different levels, they do not confuse their best selves with their worst. Whatever level they stand upon temporarily, it is that one and no other. Therefore they went on riot to proclaim their confusion, but they did not hate anybody. In confusion they are capable of assassination, not out of hatred necessarily, but merely to clear up confusion.

Students have always been an alarming and exciting and interesting part of my life. I do not mean the relatively placid students of North America, whose most active moments seem to demonstrate nothing more violent or even exciting than college pranks. I am accustomed to the students of Japan and India, Korea and Japan. In China the new age, whatever it was and we had new ages with bewildering and rapid change, was always announced by an uprising of students. The people respected these young men and women because they were persons who, if not learned, were nevertheless in pursuit of learning and therefore more privileged and presumably better informed than the average citizen who could not read or write. Books, the Asian peoples believe, are treasure houses of human wisdom and since students alone had access to books, the position of a student in Asia carried, and still carries, a prestige far out of proportion to age and class. They were a devoted group and risked death in every uprising. During the Nationalist regime in China I had seen many of them killed for being suspected of Communism. Doubtless some of them were Communists but most of them were simply dedicated young patriots, desperately desiring to better the conditions under which their people lived. They are the unnumbered and unnamed martyrs but they cannot be discounted, for all of that. If one wants to know what is about to happen in an Asian country, watch the students.

As for the picture, while all this was going on, we needed a tidal wave. Everything else we could find but the tidal wave could not be summoned at will. The story itself began in a tidal wave. Once, when I was spending a year in Japan on the island of Kyushu, I had become acquainted with a small and lovely fishing village on the southern tip of the coast. A dozen or so stone cottages were huddled together behind a stone sea wall. The houses had no doors, no windows, toward the sea. It was not that the fishing folk did not love the sea. They did indeed, for generations of the families had lived beside it and by it. Yet generations had known, too, the fury of those vast waves that rise out of earthquakes under the sea. Volcano and sea work together for death and I had seen them so work one bright September day. There had been premonitions. The water in the deep well, the fisherfolk told me, had been muddy for a few days. The well, dug in the beach, was only a few feet from the sea and at the foot of a high cliff, but the water was sweet. Thither the village women had walked, a mile each way, to carry all the fresh water the village used, and this for hundreds of years. When I suggested that this might be a hardship the men smiled incredulously. I must say the women did, too.

Earthquake, of course, comes first. The earthquake in Chile had sent a tidal wave rushing across the sea to northwest Japan, but usually the earthquake is in Japan, or under the sea nearby. Earthquake — I cannot even say the word to myself as I sit here upon the solid earth of my Pennsylvania farm home without a touch of that bottomless sickness of heart and body, that organic dismay, which falls upon a human being when the earth quakes beneath his feet. It is as if the very globe were dissolving into space. The one security we humans have is this earth which is our home, this globe to which we cling. Catastrophe befalls us, thunder and lightning roar and flash in the sky, winds come down from outer space, rain falls in torrents from the clouds, even the sea may rise in storm, but underneath everything we have the earth, or feel we have. We may have been spawned from the sea but we are land creatures now. When the land betrays us, when we cannot stand upon our feet, when the ground splits and swallows our homes and our people, then we are lost indeed. … Once in a violent earthquake in Japan the earth split and a running child fell into the chasm. The mother pursued her child and leaped in after him, and the earth closed again, leaving only her long black hair to lie like seaweed on the quivering surface. …

The second day after I came back to Tokyo, as I was writing at the desk in my hotel room, after midnight, I felt that deep troubled tremor of the earth and once more the old sickness rose in me. The quake was no more than a tremor and yet for that instant my hand went out of control, and the desk shook. Most of the people slept through it, but the morning newspaper reported a sharp tremor. Such tremors come often in Japan, hundreds, thousands of them in a year, on the average of four times a day, and each time it is a reminder to a courageous people that they live on dangerous islands. The effect on them of this eternal tension is obvious. They have extremes of temperament — an exaggerated gaiety, a profound and sometimes frenzied melancholy. A disciplined and studied surface, smiles and calm and casualness, is underlaid, without exception, I might say, by a dark sadness, born of the knowledge in child and adult that catastrophe is endemic in spite of the beauty of mountain and sea and the kindliness of life. This universal knowledge begets in them a consideration, a tender courtesy, as though to say that since the world may end at any moment, let us be kind to one another. When this inherent kindness has to be unlearned, as it does in times of war, when men must be taught to be brutal, they may be cruel beyond imagination … But I was speaking of earthquakes — and tidal waves.

We needed a tidal wave then. The earthquake we could reproduce by camera, but the tidal wave was beyond us. It was here that we had good fortune. Our Japanese co-producers had the finest special-effects studio in the country and, I was told, in the world. I did not know what special effects meant in film talk, but I discovered that it meant the reproduction, in miniature, of a scene in nature. The Japanese are supremely talented in such work and of all Japanese, Tsuburaya is the most talented. Fortunately Tsuburaya belonged to our Japanese co-producers and upon appointment we met him in their offices.

He is an artist and the first look at him revealed the fact. He wore work clothes, baggy pants, baggy shirt and a Japanese coat, and he greeted us with a charmingly natural courtesy. Yes, he said, he knew that we wanted a tidal wave and he had already make sketches to show us. They were startlingly accurate water colors of the rising horizon, the onrushing wave, and the towering crash of the crest. A tidal wave does not appear at first as a wave. Instead the horizon lifts, the sea mounts toward the sky in a smooth brimming line, it runs toward the land, a wall of water that may be two feet high or two hundred. A powerful suction gathers the sea into the wave, so that watching from a cliff, the bottom of the ocean beyond the beach is laid bare. Then the gigantic wave curls over its own base and overwhelms land, house and people.

I watched Tsuburaya’s face as he described the sequences he had painted. I wish I could paint this beautiful Japanese face, even in words. I say beautiful in the deep sense of the word. It was not handsome, in the superficial sense. It was worn with thought and concentration. It was as sensitive as a child’s face, a genius child, but not in the least childish. It was wise and gentle, yet fresh and strong and humorous, the face of an artist purified by the satisfaction of fulfillment through his art. We talked quietly. I listened while he described his plans. He would come to the fishing village with his cameraman and photograph everything. Then he would build the sets in the studio and recreate the scenes and adapt them to the film. This would be done later, when work was in progress. Meanwhile I had the private content of the writer who knows that work is understood and is about to be translated truthfully into another medium.

I have learned by experience that people who work in the theater are not to be judged by the standards applied to the rest of us. They are a group apart, by temperament, whatever their race, class or nationality. A Chinese actor, male or female, is like an American actor, and is like an actor of any other country because they are, first of all, actors. Directors are the same, whatever their age, color, religion, nationality, all prima donnas, without a single exception. I make this general observation as preliminary to our first real problem in making the picture. Everything had gone so pleasantly, so easily, that I might have expected, cheerful pessimist that I am, a storm on the horizon, a knot in the thread, a hitch in the machinery.

It came one hot summer morning when the air conditioning had broken down — in order to provide the proper temperature for coming storm, I suppose. The production manager approached me with an exaggerated courtesy. We were in his office as usual, the American director and I, and the production manager had been too cordial for safety. I should have known he had an idea. He ordered several pretty girls to bring us tea, and when the American said he preferred coffee, because this was the only place in Tokyo which had good coffee, the production manager shouted at another bevy of pretty girls to bring coffee. When we were all seated about the low round table, and after he had swabbed the perspiration from his well-nourished face and neck, he said, too casually, that since his firm’s reputation was also staked on our picture, they would like to supply a Japanese assistant director to the American.

I know that nothing in life is really casual. Hence when I saw a sudden alert in the American’s eyes, I made my reply casual. Of course, I said, we would welcome such aid. I wanted the picture to be true in every detail. It would be expected in my own country. The production manager mentioned even more casually the name of a director. I recognized it. It was the name of a famous Japanese film director now officially retired but still inexhaustibly a director.

“I would like to meet him,” the American director said also casually.

Everything seemed smooth and civilized, the production manager sighed happily and insisted on ginger ale in addition to the tea and coffee. He was a big man, tall and heavy, and he was temperamental. Indeed, I had been taken aside privately the day before we met and warned that he and the American director might not get on well, their natures not being in harmony. I inquired as to what this meant. It was explained to me in Japanese terms that the American was full of energy and determination, and so was the Japanese. The American did not easily yield on a point on which he considered himself right. Neither did the Japanese. Let us say bluntly that neither ever yielded. I had been disturbed by this, and now it occurred to me that a Japanese assistant director might act as a buffer.

When I mentioned this possibility to the American director, however, later in the day, he said shortly that he wanted no buffers. He liked the Japanese production manager because he was as frank as an American and so he could deal with him. I heard an edge in the American director’s voice, and I postponed further discussion. I reminded myself that time takes care of many things. Asia had taught me that.

Meanwhile the casting went on, no matter what else took place, a process not different in Tokyo or on Broadway. We sat by invitation behind the long table in the office and one by one actors or actresses appeared in turn. We had their photographs before us and studied them carefully for photogenic quality, while questions were asked.

English was the problem. There were many handsome young men and many, many pretty girls, and some older characters and their female counterparts. The questions were always the same:

“Your name?”

“How many pictures have you made?”

“What do you think was your best part?”

Somewhere in the thick of the questions, usually very soon, it became all too apparent that English was sadly weak, in fact nonexistent. The only perfect English sentence was the same one. “I cannot speak English.”

“Where did you study English?” we inquired.

“In school — yes.”

“How many years in school?”

“Six yahs.”

“Six years?”

A nod. We tried not to smile as these six years were repeated again and again. One of the young men least learned in English said, “Ten yahs.”

We tried repeating English words, bits of dialogue. A good ear may make it possible to teach the English dialogue. Sometimes the ear was very good. Usually it was not.

“Next time you make a picture,” I advised myself privately, “let’s stick to the English-speaking countries.”

When at last an actor appeared who spoke perfect English, we tried not to accept him merely because he could speak. There were other requirements. So the days passed, not hopeful and yet not quite hopeless. Meanwhile the matter of the assistant director was not allowed to die. The production manager told us one morning that we were to meet the Japanese director. I was daily more impressed by the production manager, his efficiency and his chronic desperation. He must produce a motion picture every week for Japan’s film-hungry population. It was and is an intolerably heavy schedule, but he assured me it could not grow lighter until television improved and provided real competition, when, he said, the motion picture companies would have to produce better pictures and therefore not so many. Meanwhile he could not stop. He carried on conferences with directors, with everybody, it seemed, while he kept a finger in our pie, appearing and reappearing, always in shirt sleeves, his large face shining with sweat in spite of air-conditioned rooms. He had a very handsome face, in the Japanese classical tradition, although not as handsome as it used to be, doubtless, when he was young, before wine and whatever goes with it made its mark. It was too heavy now in the jowls, there were bags under the fine eyes. It lighted easily with laughter, nevertheless, and when he laughed it was with the roar of a lion. He put aside formalities whenever possible and begged us for frankness. He spoke in Japanese, his interpreter one of the pretty young women who softened what he said without destroying its force. She was very skillful. But I still did not really know him. That came later.

One afternoon then, we were led to another office where we were told to wait for our meeting with the proposed Japanese director. We waited. He entered after five minutes or so, looking vaguely like a Japanese Stokowski, but bigger. He was handsome for his age, his white hair swept back, his profile proud. He bowed but not too deeply and I noticed a coldness creep over the face of the American director. Two young men actors were about to create a scene for us. The Japanese director sat down. He understood English as well as the production manager did, but like him, he would not speak it. The American director explained that he wanted the two actors to do a scene between Toru and Yukio, the main characters in The Big Wave. The Japanese director seized a pen and began to write down what he thought the scene should be. The American director tried through our interpreter to stop this on the grounds that he did not want the scene to be fixed but fluid. The Japanese silenced her with an imperious wave of the hand. Steel shone in the American’s eyes and he instructed the interpreter again.

“Please tell this gentleman I do not want the scene written down. I wish the actors to improvise.”

The interpreter, awed by the Japanese director’s fame and hauteur, made an effort. Again the imperious wave of the royal hand! The American took over. When the Japanese leaned to give the paper to the actors with his own instructions the American removed it, saying in firm English, “I don’t want them to have written instructions.”

There was a moment of awed silence on the part of the actors. Whom should they obey? The American, they finally decided, and the Japanese sat back, looking formidable. I knew what was coming, but knew, too, that it must wait until we got back to the hotel. The American maintained perfect manners in public but when the scene was over, rather well done considering the tense atmosphere, we got up, bowed to the Japanese director and everybody else, and took our leave. The interpreter was in the car with us so nothing was said. As we got out, however, at the hotel door, the American spoke to me through clenched teeth. “I must talk with you before everything falls apart.”

I bowed to the inescapable. “Very well. Let’s have it now, in my rooms. I’ll expect you in fifteen minutes.”

I needed a few minutes in which to prepare myself for the ordeal of a conference with a prima donna. Define prima donna? Whatever the term is in the dictionary, in real life it means a person self-concentric — not necessarily egoistic or egotistical, and not entirely self-centered, but certainly one the nucleus of whose being is the self. Of directors, there are two kinds, generally speaking; the actor’s director, and the director’s director. The actor’s director is the beloved of actors. He woos them, charms them, defers to them, flatters them, binds them to him emotionally until they do their best for him. He calls this “developing their talents.” Sooner or later he also destroys them, especially if they do not release him from the emotional tie he has created between them. He expects to be released as soon as the play opens or the picture is made, for emotion has then served its purpose, and he is indignant if he is not released. Some actors — the females, to be more accurate — are so foolish as to want to continue the tie, and when it is cut off, they are destroyed, at least for a time. Yet so dependent are they in emotional terms that they will continue to speak of him fondly as “an actor’s director.” The director’s director, on the other hand, will avoid the use of emotion as a tool to develop the actor, male or female. He knows what he wants, and will have no truck with “development.” He tells the actor exactly what is to be done, in terms of art and the play, and the actor must perform accordingly. Without exception, so far as I know, Japanese directors belong to the latter group.

At this point of my analysis, there was a knock at my door and the American director entered in what is called ominous silence. He sat down and began as usual by pointing out certain minor mistakes I had made during the day — minor or major it did not matter, for by now every mistake was major and all were mine.

“Why,” he inquired with frightening distinctness, his eyes gimlets on my face, “did you have to greet that Japanese as though he were an old friend? Why did you have to thank him and say it was good to have his help?”

I muttered something about being polite in the Japanese manner, et cetera, but nothing could stop the inevitable. He did not waver.

“I must tell you,” he said, and I knew he must, “that unless this Japanese director is removed at once, I shall return to New York.”

I was speechless. Remove the Japanese after the production manager had invited him? It was to be asked to remove Mount Fuji from the landscape of Japan!

The American proceeded in frigid tones. “There can only be one director. It is I — or it is not I.”

The sky fell. I was crushed. The crisis I had dreaded had arrived. I had hoped that time would make it less violent, I had been foolishly optimistic and now I was desperate. I am not a good fighter at any time and when faced with a battle, I always try to follow the good old Chinese proverb, “Of the thirty-six ways of escape, the best is to run away.” The catch at this moment was that there was no place to run to. I could not run, therefore.

I got up from my chair. It was the end of the day, nearly six o’clock, and I would like to have sent for a pot of Japanese green tea, to which I am addicted, and then, sipping tea, to have read a Japanese novel while I waited for dinner. There was no possibility of either tea or novel. I thought of the worst and most frightening resort and could think of no other. I said,

“Let’s go to the production manager’s office now and tell him.”

I hoped that the American director would admire my courage. It was exactly the same as though I had said let us go to the zoo, find the biggest, fiercest lion and twist his tail. He showed no sign of admiration. He got up and we went, the interpreter timidly behind, paling as we explained our errand.

“Japanese director,” she gasped, “is very big man. So is production manager.”

It was my turn to pale. I began to hate this American director temporarily. And why did I ever yield to this idea of making a picture in Japan? But I was here. We were already in the building. We were going up in the elevator. We announced ourselves at the door of the production manager’s office. Yes, we must see him before he goes, we said. The pretty girl looked surprised, hinted that the production manager was very busy, et cetera, but we said we would wait. We were ushered in and we sat down. The production manager ignored us while he roared into one telephone and another. I noticed foolishly that the telephones were all turquoise blue in a green room. I counted the buttons on a pretty girl’s back as she telephoned into still another telephone, repeating the production manager’s roars in a gentle voice. Green tea was brought but I dared not try to swallow lest I choke. After a long five minutes, ten minutes, whatever the hours are, the production manager lowered his bulk into one of the circle of chairs and grunted at his interpreter. I understood perfectly that he was asking in his own way why the devil we were there.

I myself wondered. I wished that I were not there, but a glance at the American’s grim profile was enough to destroy question and answer. I plunged in, knowing that I was committing suicide. I began by assuring the production manager, who understood every English word I said but pretended he did not, that we were honored by his wish to help us but, under the circumstances, directors being directors, young and old — I meandered on, hoping to avoid the final issue, the last moment, when I must somehow say bluntly that we did not want the Japanese director — that is to say, the American director did not — that is to say, I was sure the production manager understood how embarrassing it would be for an American director making his first picture in Japan, to say to an elder director, one so respected, et cetera. The American found such an action impossible even to contemplate, not to mention the confusion of actors who would not know which one to — and so forth—

The interpreter struggled with my faltering efforts. As I knew, the production manager understood perfectly what I was getting at. He cut across faltering and interpreting. He banged his fat knees with his big handsome hands. He roared at us and in English! “American director must be strong! American director must say to everybody, ‘You are listening to me!’”

He beat his barrel chest to illustrate how the American director must behave. The American, however, was unmoved. He said with frightful calm, “I know how to behave like this in my own country. I will not behave like this in Japan. I must ask that the Japanese director be removed.”

The two men stared, not to say glared, at each other. I opened my handbag and took out the Chinese fan I keep for such emergencies. Although the room was well cooled, I found it necessary to fan myself. I tried to think about something remote and pleasant, the mountains of Vermont, for example, as seen from my living room window there.

I heard a loud gust of a sigh. It was the production manager. He got up and stalked about the room, rubbing his head with his hands. He was muttering, still in English. “I am fearing something like this to happen — oh yes, goddam!”

He sat down and pondered. I know my Japan and I understood that he was very unhappy. Somebody had to lose face, and it could not be the aged and famous Japanese director. Nor could it be ourselves, since as foreigners, we do not know enough to lose face. He lifted his head and sent me a reproachful look. You, he conveyed to me, you know better. You should have spared me this.

“I am sorry,” I murmured from behind my fan. “I am so very sorry. But what can I do? If I had not told you, if we had gone on location, trouble would have been worse.”

“Ah, sodeska,” he sighed. “True — better get it over.”

He relapsed into Japanese. He could not speak English any more. “Tell them,” he said to the interpreter, “tell them that I will attend to it. Tomorrow I will see them. I am busy but I will see them.” He turned his back as soon as possible, and we returned to the hotel.

“At least it’s done,” I told the American.

He refused to be cheerful. “We have not seen the end of it,” he said grimly.

Next day it appeared that he was right. We returned to the studios and resumed casting. Everything was as it was the day before except we did not see the production manager, upon whom we depended for everything. Pretty actresses came in, reported that they had studied English for six years, declared that they could not speak English and left us again. Handsome young men came in with ditto. We were enormously cheered by an older actor who could take the part of Toru’s father and spoke perfect English. And all this time there was no production manager. When we inquired of a pretty girl, she went away and returned to say that he could meet us in the city offices at two o’clock. He was very busy, et cetera. We were served delicious meat sandwiches — yesterday beef and today spiced pork. I pause here to say that the beef in Japan is made of beer-drinking Kobe cows, hand-massaged every day by devoted cowboys, and is tender beyond any beef I have ever tasted.

At two o’clock promptly we were in the city offices. No production manager appeared on the horizon of today or any day. The American became indignant and I became resigned. The pretty girls trotted off and returned to say that the production manager would see us at five o’clock the next day, or the next or the next. This meant a delay in deciding upon our cast which we simply could not afford. We went back to the hotel and complained to my special friend by telephone. It was useless to think of food or sleep if the production manager had abandoned us. There was a long wait. She called us. This time the American took the brunt. He explained his position, unaltered and unalterable. He listened to her reply and his face cleared for the first time in two days. I gathered that the matter of the Japanese director had been settled. He had been invited to resign. Everything would be all right, my friend said.

But late at my solitary dinner I found myself suddenly without appetite, although a delicious crabmeat salad was put before me. A horrid knowledge stirred in me, an echo of the past, my past in Asia. Everything was not all right — not quite, not quite. There is always a price for victory. What it would be I did not know. I still do not know. A debt remains unpaid. I can only hope the production manager will not — what? It is quite possible I shall never know. At any rate, the episode was over for the day.

And always at the end of the day, every day, there came the return to no one! After the problems, solved and unsolved, after the coming and going of many people, the doubt and concern, the excitement of discovery, the shared laughter, the growing confidence in the work, each day had the same end. I went back to my hotel rooms, unlocked the door, went in and locked the door again. Flowers were fresh, the rooms cool, letters heaped on the table — letters from no one. The one letter I longed for could never be written because he was gone. I did not open the others. Let them wait until my Japanese secretary came and I was forced to work in order that she could work. Invitations were many, but I had no enjoyment in accepting them. A few I must accept, those which had to do with the sad and anxious parents of retarded children, a few others from old friends for the sake of past kindness. I fell then into the habit of having dinner sent to my rooms and of eating alone, so that I need not be compelled to smile at strangers who might approach me with questions and praise. When night came, life was suddenly meaningless.

Yet I was not impatient with myself. I knew from experience that time is needed for the absorption of sorrow into one’s being. Once that adjustment is made, growth begins again and new life. It was too soon. I found it was impossible to sit alone in the hotel rooms. Had he been with me, it would have been the best part of the day. It always was the best part. Much of our life had to be spent in separation during the hours of day, for each of us had a profession, a work. But how eagerly we looked forward to the evening, and to what lengths we went in order to spend it together! We went together wherever we had to go, I yielding to his necessity, he to mine, depending upon the importance we attached to the specific. occasion. And in the twenty-five years of our married life we did not spend a night apart, until it became necessary for him to live and work entirely at home. Even then I refused all invitations that kept me away for a night, until he ceased to know whether I was there or not. And when he ceased to know, everything was different, except memory.

I have discarded that time of not knowing. When I think of him, I think of him as I knew him, vivid, alive, with infinite variety in thought and word, dominant, invincibly prejudiced in some matters, as I used to say impetuously when we disagreed, and he smiled and accepted the accusation with amusement and no intention of changing himself. But he knew I did not want him changed. Whatever he was, he was himself, and I liked that. For example, he could not drive a nail without pounding his thumb and therefore wisely he refused to drive nails. He took no part in household matters, however busy I was. He would not eat what he did not like, no matter how good the dish might be for him. At the same time he disciplined himself in amount and quality of what he did eat. When he spoke, none of us interrupted. He was the father as well as the husband, and yet he refused to have any part in disciplining our big family. I am no disciplinarian myself, being given to laughter over naughtiness unless I am angry, and neither mirth nor anger is the right atmosphere for discipline. Teachers of our nine children were unanimous in one comment, always made sooner or later to us, but particularly to me, for he would not attend parent-teacher meetings and I had to go alone. The comment was simple. “Your children are spoiled.”

I agreed helplessly. How could it be otherwise when they had a mother who laughed too easily, and if she did not get angry easily, nevertheless when she did, she was in such vast temper that the child looked on astonished and thought she did not mean it? As for him, the extent of his discipline was to stare at the refractory child with cool disapproval and then turn to me with a remark made so casually that it stunned me unfailingly into feeble retort.

“Do you allow this sort of thing to go on?” he would ask.

“Do you?” I would ask.

Silence after that, and the child, isolated by our silence, usually subsided after a few minutes of trying to maintain independence. Looking at these same children now, I can only say that so far as I know, they have turned out well. That is, none of them is delinquent or has been in jail. Of course there is still time for jail but I doubt they will ever come to it.

Am I being quite fair to him as a disciplinarian? Perhaps not, for there was one offense which he would not tolerate from any child, and this was act or word which he considered a sign of lack of respect for me. If a child so behaved, his response was instant, invariable and thunderous.

“Don’t you know your mother is the greatest person in the world?”

The absurdity of this remark wilted me at once into a state of embarrassment, which the children understood and suffered with me, especially as they never intended disrespect. I enjoyed free argument and spirited disagreement and his outburst killed communication. If we were at the table, our appetites failed and we sat in silence. What he thought of this silence I do not know, for he allowed no protest or discussion on the subject of respect for me, even from me, myself!

As for me, I obeyed him far too literally and this for two reasons. I had spent my life in China until we met, and I had been taught that woman should obey man, if possible. Second, I was disgracefully ignorant about my own country. I was born a late child and my parents had lived decades in China before I appeared in their life. They were young when they left home, my father twenty-eight and my mother only twenty-three, and both of them were idealists and intellectuals. They grew to maturity in Chinese culture and society and not in their own. When I came to live finally in my own country and we were married, he and I, he said that among other enjoyments it was fun to be married to me because I was so ignorant that he could tell me all the old American jokes and they were new to me. This was true, and he should have lived to tell them all, for he never got to the end. At any moment he would tell something that sent me into healthy laughter.

In only one family decision was he wrong, and I know now that I should have disobeyed him for practical reasons. Even at that he was right in principle. Here it is: he did not believe in homework for children. He contended, and rightly, that the school had the child all the best hours of the day. If the curriculum was carefully planned and all nonsense and waste of time eliminated, everything could be completed within school hours. He believed that family life in the evenings should not be destroyed by the child having to work on daytime school tasks. As usual, what he disapproved, he ignored. I had not been educated in the American school system, and knew no better than to agree with him. Consequently we all enjoyed our evenings together in music and games and reading aloud. The result showed, alas, in the children’s report cards, and in a general attitude, I must confess, of considering school a pastime rather than work. I repeat, I should not have obeyed him. I should have gathered the children around the big table at night, and seen to it that they did their homework, until they were old enough to assume responsibility for themselves. … Yet what would have been his fate, in that case? Lonely evenings and no happy evening memories, and I am glad that we lived as we did.

In such half-smiling, half-tearful reminiscence I relapsed too easily and it was necessary to take myself in hand. So, when dinner was over, and the little Japanese waitress, always solicitous when I left my plate only half-empty, had removed the table, I sauntered again into the streets of Tokyo. I went often to the Ginza, market, bazaar and amusement place, always diverted by the variety of people who came to enjoy the gaudy scene. Flags, balloons, paper flowers of every color tied to the eaves of the roofs floated above the streets and shops; open to the street were exhibitors who demonstrated their many wares. American cars, a proof of wealth, stood waiting by the curbs, the chauffeurs zealously polishing the chromium while their employers explored toys or silks or jewelry. Bicycles dashed madly through the swarming crowds and women clattered along on wooden geta, their babies strapped to their backs.

Most significant of all were the young men and women who wandered hand in hand in a state of dazed happiness, window shopping, or just wandering. It takes getting used to, this hand-in-hand business in modern Japan. It is something entirely new. In old Japan lovers met in secret and climbed volcanoes and threw themselves into the fiery craters to signify the depth of their hopeless love. Nowadays they walk hand-in-hand in the Ginza or go on picnics to the famous spots where once they committed suicide together. Have the parents changed or is it the young who have learned to demand their rights? Certainly there is some change in the parents. The four chief catastrophes of old Japan, if we are to trust an ancient Japanese saying, were “earthquakes, fires, floods and fathers.” Earthquakes, fires and flood are still to be feared, but fathers?

There is a change in fathers certainly, but the greatest change is in the mothers. No mother in old Japan would have dreamed of allowing her daughter to walk hand-in-hand with a young man in the Ginza or anywhere else, nor would the daughter have dreamed of disobedience. But I must take this change in the Japanese woman gradually and bit by bit. It is profound and overwhelming.

As for the Ginza, though the merchandise was astounding, garish, clamorous and sometimes beautiful, the people were my diversion — are my diversion wherever I wander. Thanks to them, I escape from myself. When midnight came and the crowd dispersed — for the Japanese go early to bed, except the gentlemen of the bars — I returned to my hotel rooms, let myself in again, locked the door, and went to bed.

In the strange floating existence of those days and nights, I went one evening to the Kabuki Theater by invitation of the star actor. The troupe had returned from a successful engagement in New York, but I had not gone to see them there. Somehow Kabuki seemed incongruous to me in that most modern of cities, and one time or another, perhaps, I would be in Tokyo again. The play that evening was the same one they had presented in New York, The White Snake. I knew the story well, for it is an ancient Chinese tale. The White Snake is a woman who assumes the form of a serpent for purposes of her own.

The night was clear and the streets of Tokyo were unusually crowded. I took a cab, and we arrived at the theater entrance, a vast place hung with paintings and filled with exhibits and crowded with people. Someone was waiting to meet me. The star had declared that he would not begin the show until he had met me and we had been photographed. I was led backstage and there he stood, made-up as a woman, the White Snake. It was a perfect make-up, sinister and graceful. He wore a close-fitting white kimono, without a trace of color. The headdress was white and his face, neck and hands were painted snow white. Even his lips were white, though lined at the inner edge with scarlet. The eyes were a snake’s eyes, black and glittering, their glance darting here and there. When he saw me he put out his hand, and I took it and it felt cold and smooth in my hand. I wanted to put it down because it was cold and smooth as a snake’s skin but it clung to mine, and thus, hand in hand, we were photographed. He talked for a few minutes, his stiff white lips scarcely moving, and then the gong struck and it was time for him to go on stage.

I went to my seat in the theater and there spent a few hours of pure pleasure. The stage was enormous, larger than any stage I had ever seen, and the spectacle superb. Amid masses of color and splendor, the White Snake moved with a sinuous composure, at once terrifying and symbolic, and I had never seen the play performed more powerfully and beautifully. There is no art in the world, in my opinion, which surpasses Kabuki in imaginative power. But perhaps this is partly because the stories of these plays have been a part of my childhood and I live through them again. At any rate the Japanese audience was absorbed as they can be only in this theater. When the play was over we walked out in a dream of silence.

The immense stage, the enormous cast, the splendor of the costumes and the extraordinary lighting made me realize again in contrast the cramped and narrow stage of Broadway. Year by year theater there has been compressed and diminished simply because of the cost of putting on a play. A great art is being strangled by craftsmen and mechanics in unions. Playwrights, directors and actors have offered a cut in their earnings but there is no such willingness on the part of the union workmen. I lingered after the play in the Kabuki Theater that evening and talked about it with Japanese friends over a bowl of tea. They had visited New York and they maintained that Japanese theater could never suffer such disaster. “We love art too well,” they said. “We realize the spiritual and emotional benefits of art. Even our workmen realize this, and they would never destroy such an important part of our life merely for the sake of personal greed.”

I hope they are right.

It was long past midnight when I reached my hotel rooms. When I was ready for bed, I went to the window as is my habit wherever I am in the world before I sleep, and looked out over the quiet city. An old moon hung crookedly in the sky, and its pale light shone down upon the roofs. At this moment, I felt again the deep inner quiver of an earthquake. It began as a tremor and then rose into a rolling motion. A picture fell, books slipped from the desk, a bowl of flowers crashed to the floor. I clung to the window sill and felt my heart pound against my ribs. Was this to be dangerous …? No. … The earth grew still again. Only the moon hung there, unchanged and fixed. I waited a few minutes more, then put the books into place and filled the bowl with water for the flowers.

It was long before I could sleep. The earth tremor had somehow shaken the roots of my temporary world. I recognize the need in myself for roots. I suppose it is the result of my childhood in China. Well as I loved that country and must always so love it, nevertheless I was at the same time always aware of the turmoil over which we lived, the possibility that at any moment the angers and discontents existing for centuries against the western peoples might flame into crises in which we, innocent as we were individually, might lose our lives, as indeed we very nearly did and more than once. Perhaps this childhood remembrance of ever present uncertainty, over which I had no more control than a leaf in a storm, has always haunted me — or did until he came. Now that he was gone, the old subterranean awareness of danger returned again.

He had no such dark shadows. Resolutely cheerful, naturally gay, he never expected or suspected catastrophe. When compelled by the fact, he had an odd habit of deciding when he would face it. The method was simple but absolute. He marshaled all the blackest possibilities and wrote them down in his clear firm handwriting. Then he took from his desk his father’s large gold watch and decided upon the day and the hour when he would attack the total problem. It was always at the last possible moment. Until it came, he was his usual charming self. He always found solution, or at least escape, and if the latter, it was not by any of the Chinese thirty-six ways. He never ran away.

I had come to depend very much on his genius for dealing with the improbable, for solving the insoluble and achieving the impossible and this always without the help of friends. He had friends beyond number, high and low, some of them among the wealthiest men in the world, others poor. The wealthy did not help him in the two financial crises of his life. He weathered his crises alone and triumphantly. The poor borrowed money from him without shame. To my indignation, distributed on rich and poor alike, he maintained a smiling indifference.

“They mean no harm,” he would say.

I hated the earthquake. It roused old fears and old fears reminded me again that his unshakable good humor, his cheerful pessimism, his flashes of impatience, his affectionate cynicism toward mankind, above all his gay acceptance of life as he found it were now no more. The old uncertainty was with me again, and forever.

The most modern theater, by way of contrast to Kabuki, was more of a shock than even I could take. It came about in this manner. We went one day to the production manager with a list of our tentative characters. We entered his office, preceded by a pretty girl, and found him that morning businesslike and dignified. The jovial man about town had totally disappeared. He delayed a proper time to show how busy he was and perhaps how important, and we knew he was both busy and important and we sat waiting. Tea appeared but the production manager was still busy. Finally he joined us and we gave him our list of actors. He pointed immediately to two doubtful names. He could not speak English at all that morning, it seemed. The pretty girl interpreting, he said that he merely suggested, he was not directing — this with a bitter look at the American — but we should make better choices for the two leading men than we had done. We agreed promptly but reminded him that the man we wanted most had not been released to us by his firm. Hearing this, he got up, walked around, rubbed his head, groaned loudly several times and talked through three telephones at once. Nothing happened except no — no — no — from three directions. He attached a pretty girl to a fourth telephone, sat behind his desk, and twisted his hair in both hands and groaned again. Then he knocked himself on the head with clenched fists and turned to us, beaming. He had an idea. The final performance of Japanese rock-and-roll singers and musicians was taking place at that very instant in his own rock-and-roll theater. He would accompany us there, we could see all the best rock-and-roll young men and we could then take our choice. He would command any whom we chose to be our actors. They would listen to him. “I am big producer,” he said loudly and now in English.

We agreed with alacrity, he plunged ahead, a behemoth but amiable, and we followed to be packed into cars and delivered at the theater. It was a huge place, and when I was led to a seat in a box, the last and only seat in the enormous theater and reserved, of course, for the production manager himself, I was simply stunned by what I saw. All the teen-agers in Japan were assembled there, or so it seemed, certainly thousands and thousands of them.

I sat and stared at stage and audience alike. This was indeed a Japan new to me, rock-and-roll, dancing girls and singing boys, American songs, western songs sung in English, and only a very few Japanese songs. The girls screamed just as they do in my own country, and they sounded just as silly. What is this affliction of the young, spreading from land to land? Thousands upon thousands of young Japanese — oh, very young — the performers are in their teens or barely out of them, and very young girls in skirts and blouses ran out from the audience to hang wreaths of paper flowers and paper streamers on their male favorites. Only one girl sang, a handsome girl of eighteen with an excellent voice.

“What do the parents think of this?” I asked the production manager.

“It disgusts them,” he said, “but what can they do?” What can they do indeed, here or anywhere! Our business, however, was to find actors. After the grand finale we went downstairs into a small hot room and interviewed three or four young men viewed on the stage through opera glasses as possibilities. We were hopeful, for they sang in English so well that we were led to think they might speak English. Such was not the case. The only sentence they spoke well was the same one. “I cannot speak English,” and they had each studied English six years in school. Then we found one bright exception, a gentle-faced boy who is called the Eddie Fisher of Japan. He spoke beautiful English. The explanation was that his mother was half-English and he had learned at home. We asked him to come the next morning for an audition.

While all this was going on, I observed a change in the production manager. He was softening. He saw our problem of the six-year English and he felt concern. He invited us to have dinner with him, and asked if we wanted to go where he always goes, or to some more elaborate place. We accepted with grateful surprise, saying that we wanted to go where he went. We climbed in cars, again pushing through oceans of young people waiting for their favorite singers to emerge from the stage door, and soon we drew up before a restaurant which was not like any I had seen before. Obviously it was not a tourist resort nor perhaps a place for women. I was not daunted, however, and the production manager evidently reigned here as everywhere. It was a fascinating place, small but clean as only Japanese know cleanliness, the rough wooden tables and counters made of six-inch-thick unpainted log slabs scrubbed to snow whiteness. The production manager gave orders in the manner of one always obeyed but he was obeyed, two slabs were put end to end and he assigned our seats. Mine faced him, and so I had full opportunity to observe this extraordinary man.

For now a new man appeared. He even announced that he was not the same man we had seen heretofore, and proceeded to explain himself and his life. He was not married, he told us, and he insisted that he was the loneliest man in Tokyo. He lived with his mother, a wonderful woman whom he adored, but he was fifty years old. He did not look that age. He looked a somewhat battered thirty-nine. Meanwhile he continued to tell us about his wretched life. All day long he went from one conference to another, preparing the weekly film picture he was compelled to produce. He woke early every morning in spite of late nights, and in the cold chill of dawn he read.

“What do you read?” I inquired with interest. Perhaps he read poetry or Zen Buddhism. He answered between clenched teeth.

“I read screen play only — hundred — hundred — hundred — pouring on me every day. … Always I am depressed afterward. So every night I am here, drinking.”

The more he drank the better English he could speak. It was never perfect but it was expressive — and explosive. He did not cease also to speak Japanese. Indeed, he carried on an extraordinary bilingual monologue with the Japanese around us. He joked and when he saw that I was not drinking sake he ordered a wine jug filled with water and then announced loudly that I was drinking outrageously and he bellowed laughter at his own wit. Suddenly he poured advice on the American director. A director, he said, cannot be a pure artist — not pure, not pure! He must have evil in him — outside nice, inside evil, evil, otherwise people will not be afraid of him. The American listened without reply, smiling. Suddenly the production manager struck his own head with clenched fists. He had an idea again, a glorious idea!

“Drinking, I am fountainhead for idea,” he declared, enraptured with himself.

His idea concerned my friend’s son-in-law, a young actor of promise. His wife was proficient in English and could be very useful to everybody. If we would place them in our cast, all feelings could be saved and all hearts assuaged. He reminded us that he had suffered much pain when he had to tell great Japanese director he was not to work on the film with us. He had to assume full responsibility himself for a sad mistake and he had to bow to the lowest level and this hurt. But he could forgive us if—

We replied that of course we would like to see the two young people but the picture must be considered before feelings. He was already on the telephone, however, and after an outburst in Japanese returned to us, all good cheer and satisfaction.

“Now,” he exclaimed. “We must be happy. Bar or geisha house?”

We asked him to decide for us. “Bar, of course,” he declared. “Geisha is too old-fashion. In bar, relaxation. Top class bar. I go every night there.”

We took cabs again and rocked through crowded streets. Japanese taxi drivers are described in agitated detail by every American tourist, and I need not add to these descriptions except to say that everything said about them is true. They are zealously kind, emotionally involved with every passenger, and utterly careless about life, limb or property of anyone, including themselves.

The bar, as we entered, seemed to be a number of small comfortable rooms clustered around a bar. The production manager began relaxing immediately by loosening his belt and taking off his tie. The bar was small and crowded with business men and with pretty girls, of whom there were many. I was introduced to a slender handsome woman of young middle age, whom the production manager declared was best madame in Tokyo. She looked competent and modest and upon hearing my name fell into a state of emotion, declaring that she had read all my books. I had been her idol, et cetera. I was touched but slightly embarrassed. She introduced her girls to me after we were seated, very crowded, into a circular bench against the bar itself; these girls sat by me, one by one, and through one of them who spoke English, I became somewhat acquainted with them. Most of them were married and had children. No, they did not enjoy bar work, they said, but their husbands had poor jobs, or no jobs and this was easy work. I detected or imagined a certain patient sadness in their eyes and was reminded of a visit I made once in Paris, many years ago, to the Folies Bergère. I was humanly curious then as now, and after the show I left my escort and went backstage to get acquainted with the show girls. They too were not girls. They were women, most of them married, with home problems of deserting husbands, sick husbands, poverty, illness — and most of them were not young.

“Why such work?” I had inquired.

“At night the children are asleep and safe.”

“It is better than leaving them all day,” and so forth, the same in Paris as in Tokyo—

Our talk was now interrupted by the production manager. “My best friend,” he announced, and presented a very small girl.

Her face was a cameo of sadness. I had already noticed her. She had been sitting beside a fatuous business man and serving him with liquor and condiments. Once, with my accursed, noticing, novelist’s eye, I saw him put his arm around her too closely and she shrank away with a look in her eyes that for pity’s sake I will not describe. She sat beside me now, saying nothing, just looking at me with such deep quiet that I felt communication. Of this I do not speak.

The night wore on. I rose to leave. The madame, whom the girls call “mama,” assembled a line to bow farewell. She herself came with me to the car and leaned in the window to talk, speaking English rather well. She had had an education and was not a shallow or silly woman. She kept looking at me with warmth and affection, pressed my hands, gave me a great bouquet, and let me go reluctantly.

Alone in the car I pondered upon this phenomenon of Japanese life, the night life of men apart from their families. It is a force destructive to family life, a relic of feudalism. The modern Japanese woman hates the bars and geisha houses which take their men away from home. Old-fashioned Japanese women accepted them as they accepted anything men did, but modern Japanese women long for real companionship with the men they love. Yet men still continue to stay away from home, “and I have learned,” as my little Japanese secretary said one day with a cold calm, “to nag him no more. I have even learned how to greet him with a happy smile at two o’clock in the morning.”

Yes, she could do it. The Japanese woman has always been stronger than the Japanese man, for, like the Chinese woman, she has been given no favors. She has never heard of chivalry or knights in golden armor. She was born a female — that is to say, an inferior person, a bearer of burdens, an obedient slave. In centuries of such existence, while she compelled herself to devotion and duty, she accumulated an inner strength which cannot be surpassed. She gave birth to man, tended him and cared for him, shielded and defended him without question. Why should she question when there was none to answer? She was betrayed by only one person, another kind of woman, the woman who did not marry, the woman who was not bowed down with household cares and children, the woman taught and trained and groomed to amuse men. She was betrayed by geisha. All that a man could not find in his uneducated houseworn wife, whom he needed, nevertheless, for comfort and household ease, he sought and found in the geisha, whose only duty was to please him, to attract his eye, to entice him with music, to win his mind by her education. The best geisha is a brilliant and intelligent woman. She has her counterpart in the Greek hetaira, against whom Greek wives also wailed their accusations.

I inquired one day of a beautiful geisha, “Do you feel no concern for the wife of this man whom you have captured?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “It is the men who create the demand. We are merely merchandise.”

A cynical reply, and her modern counterpart, the bar girl, is in every way her inferior. A well-trained geisha could be, in her own fashion, a woman of distinction and grace. Any woman, it seems, can be a bar girl. If her face is half pretty, she is lucky, but if it is not very pretty, she has other wares to sell. Her influence on men is even less fortunate than that of the geisha. She is less graceful, less distinguished in every way. She is sometimes no more than a dead-end kid and is nearly always a prostitute. Geisha can be prostitutes but are not compelled to be. They may keep their hold on men in other ways, if they so desire. The bar girl has few resources beyond her sex, and at this moment sex is more crude than ever before in Japan. Naturalism there has always been, but sex, per se, is used by women now as a lure and a weapon, and by men as an escape, comparable to alcoholism. Escape from what? Desperation and a sense of personal inferiority, I suppose. What else does the human male seek to escape?

Geisha and bar girls aside, however, something has happened to young Japanese women, and I rather imagine that the something is American men. Many Japanese women have been courted by American men, and the two, man and woman, have been surprised to find what each had been seeking for a long time — the woman, a man who appreciates gentleness and deference and a naturalistic attitude toward sex; the man, a woman who has been taught to defer to him, and to serve him, to believe that his sexual interest in her is all the love she should expect from any man. Although I do remember a certain young American man who complained that a Japanese woman made a wonderful wife when she first came to America, but after two years she was no better than an American, having learned American female ways!

Be that as it may, young women in Japan have not learned American ways. They are liberated, that is all. They move everywhere with delightful freedom and composure, at once daring and feminine, bold and shy, an enchanting combination of apparent innocence and actual sophistication which, if not permanent, is very attractive while it lasts. And perhaps if she lives in America, she may discover that the young American man is often a charming but perpetual boy, and what pleased and surprised her at first palls when the boy does not grow up. I know a certain American who brought a beautiful young Japanese wife home with him and introduced her with enthusiasm to his welcoming parents. A year later this same young woman announced that she wished to have a divorce because she had fallen in love with another man. The man, it appeared, was his own father, who had also fallen in love with her. The older man wanted an adoring wife, and the Japanese wife had been trained to adore, and the young woman wanted, as she said, “a more wise man.”

Perhaps there are no rules for this eternal game between man and woman. The Japanese man, so far as I could see, has not changed very much. I wonder if he will like his woman when he discovers what she really is. As yet he does not know.

That night when I went to my hotel room, full of such thoughts, it was raining, the streets were deluged with flood waters and the rain thundering down enclosed me in a box of sound. I am claustrophobic and I escaped through the silent corridors of the vast new part of the hotel, where my rooms were, to the old building put up by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was one of his early manifestations, and certainly it does not in the least resemble his later work, the Guggenheim Museum in New York or the Dallas Little Theater. Nor does it resemble anything in Japan. It is a curious heap of tessellated edges and corners and over-decoration. Its glory is that it has stood through all earthquakes and this because the architect discovered that Tokyo itself was built on a quivering sea of mud. Into this sea he sank thousands of Oregon pine logs and on that foundation built his monstrosity. It actually floats and can therefore adjust to anything.

Does floating lead to adjustment? I pondered upon the question as I sought one of the many corners in the dark old lobby. If so, then I must be adjusting. It seemed to me that I was not living, not even existing, only floating upon the surface of time. To rise in the morning and work, to walk alone at night, to sleep briefly and get up at dawn, not thinking of past or of future, but only of this one day, this one night, and pondering on men and women, I was reminded how rare an experience of marriage mine had been. I am not an easy-to-marry woman, or so I imagine. I am divided to the bottom of my being, part of me being woman, the other part artist and having nothing to do with woman. As an artist I am capable of cruelty, for artists are ruthless and must be.

“Can you bear it,” I once asked him, “if you see yourself in a novel? Not just as you are, of course — I always create my own people, but I steal whatever I need — the ways in which you asked me to marry you, for example, which I am sure no man ever used before. I might need a few of them sometime for other men and women.”

He smiled. He had a wonderful smile, beginning in his deep blue eyes — eyes wasted on a man, for they were pure violet with long black lashes, but I liked them, and so perhaps they were not wasted. “Take it,” he said. “It’s yours anyway. Take anything I have to give—”

The unique attribute he had was that he understood an artist. I doubt he understood women or cared to understand them. He had a low opinion of women in general. He did not dislike them but his attitude was impersonal and somewhat condescending. When I complained that he was unjust he replied calmly,

“I don’t look down on women at all. On the contrary, I think they could be much more than they are. They rate themselves too low if they are content to be cooks, cleaning women, and nursemaids when they can be anything they wish to be and do whatever they like. Nobody stops them except themselves.”

Since he himself had an English gentleman’s attitude toward housework — he was English on both sides and his mother was born in England — I felt a pervading injustice in these remarks, but I am not one to carry on an argument and certainly he was no puritan, so far as women were concerned. He began life early, graduating from Harvard as an honors man when he was only twenty and marrying at once. He was attractive to women and knew it, with blue eyes and black hair and brown skin. His manners were charming, deceptively so sometimes when he was talking with a woman. Yet he had his own invincible code. He would not, for example, call a woman in his employ by her first name or invite her to luncheon or arrange a meeting with her outside of office hours. He felt that any demand of a personal nature made upon an employee was unfair use of employer’s power. I remember that he had at one time a secretary who was an unusually young and pretty girl. When a male friend or business caller made teasingly envious remarks he was cold as only an Englishman can be.

“Miss Kirke is an efficient secretary or I would not employ her,” was his invariable reply.

The result of such an attitude was, of course, the total devotion of his secretaries. Even today, when Miss Kirke is married and has grown children, she and the others like her say to me in loving remembrance,

“He was so much fun to work for — and you could trust him. He never made passes at you. You could be yourself.”

A humble tribute, but how significant! And yet he could make me happily furious sometimes. For example, he liked to say that I was unlike any other woman he had ever known because, he said, I had the brain of a man in the body of a woman. I flew out at him, invariably, at such a notion. Why should a woman, I demanded, be said to have the brain of a man merely because she had a good mind? Did Nature give the supreme gift only to men? Was there a law of inheritance which denied brains to women? He laughed, pretended to seek shelter, and then said gravely that I was right.

“I apologize,” he said, his eyes twinkling, but of course he never apologized for what he believed.

What was precious beyond diamonds to me was the fact, indisputable, that he enjoyed my mind. He liked profound conversation on abstruse subjects. He enjoyed repartee. And far beyond diamonds and life itself was the fact that he understood I had to be alone when I was writing. He never asked what I was writing or even what the book was about. When a novel was finished and typed and ready to be given to the publisher I took it to him myself and presented it formally, Chinese fashion, with both hands. His office was next to mine, but there were two doors between. His was the older building, and the short passageway was once the smoke house, where farmers for a hundred years smoked ham and bacon. The two doors were always closed when I was writing and he never opened them, but he rose when I came in with the finished work and received it gravely.

“This is a big day,” he always said.

A big day it always was, and he put aside everything else and sat down to the task he loved, he told me, above all others, the reading of a manuscript I had written. He edited carefully but sparely. I do not remember that he ever made a change involving anything more serious than a misplaced preposition or a time confusion. The Chinese language has few prepositions and I have never quite learned to manage these refractory and precise little English words. As for time confusion, it was something from which I had always to be saved. I have no sense of time. I do not mean that I am unpunctual. On the contrary, I learned early to be punctual to a fault — I say to a fault for I am too punctual and waste my own time waiting for other people. My parents were two separately busy persons who lived on separate schedules into which I as a child had to fit. I live on schedule, too, as a separately busy person and so did he. No, I mean that I pay no heed to what year it is, what month, or what day. I cannot remember birthdays, anniversaries, or any of the important dates women are supposed to remember. A secretary has to remember for me and warn me in advance. He, on the other hand, had the disconcerting habit of perfect time recall. On any morning at the breakfast table, or at any time during the day, he could look at his watch and ask,

“Do you remember what we were doing ten — twenty — (etc.) years ago at this moment?”

At first, wanting to be perfect, I tried to remember. Later, resigned to myself, I said boldly that I did not remember. Then he would tell me.

“It was the first time I kissed you — or proposed to you — or you said you wouldn’t have me — or I took you by surprise in Yokohama, etc., etc.”

The chase had indeed been a long one. We were past our first youth when we first met, each resigned, we thought, to unsatisfactory marriages, and each well-known in our own fields. I had firmly refused him in New York, Stockholm, London, Paris, and Venice, and then had sailed by way of India for home in Nanking, China.

In six months he cabled me to meet him in Shanghai in order to hear “no” again and this time forever. I went alone after that to Peking for some months of research necessary for the completion of my translation of Shui Hu Chuan or All Men Are Brothers, and had been there less than a week when he appeared unexpectedly in the midst of a violent dust storm out of the Gobi desert. We parted again eternally and he went to Manchuria and I home again to Nanking to pack my bags for a summer visit to the United States to see that all was well there with my retarded child. I had my younger daughter and my secretary with me, and was in a resigned state of mind when I left, so far as he was concerned. I had, I thought, made the wise decision. I did not want turmoil in my life.

It was a fine July morning, I remember, and we were docking at the pier in Yokohama. I had planned not to go ashore, for I had been many times in the city. Instead I would work on my translation and my secretary would take my little girl to the park. I had no sooner settled myself to my lonely task when I heard the voice which was now the one I knew best in all the world.

“I’ve turned up again — I shall keep on turning up, you know — everywhere in the world. You can’t escape me.”

There he was, lean, brown, and handsome, and smoking his old briar pipe. … In spite of that, I said “no” every day on board ship and again in Vancouver and all winter in New York. But spring in that magic city was my undoing and we were married on the eleventh of June and lived happily ever after, together as man and wife, separately in our professional work.

He was a great editor — I have seen him take a muddle of a manuscript and make it a unified whole — but he would have been a fine critic. He would have judged the writer on how well he had accomplished the goal he had set for himself, and not have befuddled the reader by irrelevant remarks of his own. And he was a genius of his own sort in coaxing books out of writers who did not know they were writers. A notable example was a short manuscript that came to him one day from an American woman in Siam. He was then editor and owner of Asia magazine. I remember the article. It was entitled “The King’s English,” and the King was the King of Siam. The author had done a nice little piece of research into the King’s vernacular English, which was fearful and delightful. But he saw much more than the light little essay. He saw a character and a man, and he invited the American woman to write more about this King. A few articles arrived and at last, upon his persuasion and encouragement, a book-length manuscript. He set to work to create a book out of the material he found there and to demand what was not there. The result eventually was a fascinating book, which he called Anna and the King of Siam, and this book later became a fabulous musical on Broadway, The King and I, by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The list is distinguished. He was the one who brought Jawaharlal Nehru’s great books to Americans, and through his publishing company to readers all over the world. He was the one who discerned in the young Sukarno of Indonesia the promise of a future Asian leader and encouraged him to write his first book and so become known to the West. He was the one who published the first book in the United States of warning against Nazism, a prophecy so far ahead of its time, though not of reality, that it found few readers. And he was the one, too, who edited all of Lin Yutang’s best books and first established his reputation as a writer. He had the gift of a universal comprehension, an eclectic mind, a synthesizing judgment, enlivened by faith in talent wherever he found it.

He was proud of being a publisher and he felt it a noble profession. Making money was never his impetus. If a book was good enough to merit publishing, he accepted it with enthusiasm, and this whether or not he agreed with what it said. His own opinions were always firmly on the side of the intelligent liberal. In a strongly Republican family he voted for the Democrats, occasionally varying it for the Socialists as a protest vote. Yet he published authors who were conservative and sometimes in the narrowest sense. He believed that they too had a right to be heard and if they presented their opinions well, he gave their books the same editorial care he gave to all others. The range of the authors he developed was from Fritz Sternberg to James Burnham.

An editor, he believed, had the high privilege of discovering talent and the duty of helping it to develop to its best fruit and then of presenting it to the world. He was an impresario of writers and books, but a man of such tender understanding of the needs and delicacies and shynesses of talented persons, that he guided without seeming to do so, drawing forth their ideas by skillful questions and honest praise and appreciation. Of the numerous letters I received after his death many were from writers who said that until he helped them to understand themselves they had not been able to write.

And of myself what shall I say? It was he who saw something in my first small book, a tentative effort rejected by all other publishers until he perceived in it the possibility that its author might one day write a better book. His staff was equally divided against the book, and it fell to him as the president of the company to cast his vote. He voted for it, and on that narrow chance my life began.

Ah me, it does not do to dream too long. The lobby of the old Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was empty except for a sleepy clerk. The rain had stopped and a new moon was swinging above the clouds when I walked outside to breathe the cooled night air. The new moon? I had been in Tokyo for three weeks. For two months I had been alone.

Music has always been an important part of my life, background and medium for thought and feeling. For the picture I wanted Japanese music, not the synthetic nonsense that passes for Oriental in our American attempts, but original creation in Japan and by a Japanese. Moreover, it must be modern Japanese, for the change that has taken place in every aspect of Japanese life is nowhere more evident than in music. Music is the barometer — and thermometer, for that matter — of every culture, the art most revelatory of a people’s temperament, character and response to outer influence. I was pleased, then, when Toshiro Miyazumi said that he would like to write the music for The Big Wave. I knew his work, but I had never met him and it was a special pleasure to find him waiting for me one morning in my hotel sitting room. He rose and introduced himself and at the same time handed me a gift, a record of his symphony, Nirvarta.

“I am your composer,” he said modestly.

We sat down and I looked at his face frankly. It was a charming face, strong and gentle, quiet and poetic and without guile. An innocent face, I would have said, except that it was not the face of a child, although there was a child’s openness in the expression. I recognized this quality, for it is to be found only in highly gifted persons, wise as serpents and gentle as doves, as the old book puts it.

“I am fortunate,” I told him.

Toshiro Miyazumi is called the Leonard Bernstein of Japan and he does indeed resemble Bernstein in the brilliance of his talent. Unlike Bernstein, however, he devotes himself to composing music. True, he has conducted, but he prefers to compose.

“Please tell me about yourself,” I said.

There was nothing to tell, it seemed. He bit his lip, he tried to remember.

“You were born in 1929,” I reminded him.

A flash of gratitude lighted his charming calm face. “Ah yes, I was born but I began my life at six years of age, composing and playing the piano.”

“Then?”

He considered and finally spoke. “I went to the University of Tokyo.”

I was about to inquire, “Nothing between?” and decided not to speak. I would wait and let him present his life as he saw it. There was nothing, then, between six and the University of Tokyo.

He continued after reflection.

“When I was twenty-one I received a scholarship to Paris for one year, to the Conservatoire. There was a man, Tony Oben, teaching me. Very conservative, not interested in the new method of composing … So I was a bad pupil. Because the techniques there were formal, the rhythms old-fashioned somewhat and harmony traditional. … Creation is different. The energy is emotion. I cannot, because I use the twelve tone method. So I searched and went to Austrian composers — Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, who use new methods to express contemporary composition.”

“But you use classical themes, too,” I reminded him. “You are versatile—”

He accepted this with a smile. “It is very difficult to support my life on classical music alone, however I love it. I returned to Japan and for several years composed many kinds of music, orchestral, chamber, and so forth, as well as for musical films. I suppose television and radio music were my job, but I want always to be an artist. …”

There was a long pause, covering years. “So after five years I went back to Europe, and I went to music festivals in Sweden and Germany and other places where my music was played.”

“How does it feel to hear your music played across the world?” I asked.

He gave me an eloquent look and was too modest for words. “I came back to Japan and I made a group for contemporary music and some prizes were given to me. That is all.”

All is a good deal for a young man of thirty-one, but apparently his story was told. He was not in the least shy, and he sat relaxed and waiting.

“And this record?” I asked, indicating the gift.

“It was played in Tokyo, premiere in April, second day, 1958, after working about a year.”

“Are you interested in religion? The title suggests Buddhism.”

“The Japanese Buddhist temple bell,” he said. “It is a typical mixture of sounds. I am very fond of it, since I am interested in concrete music and electronic music, that is, creating musical structures out of sound energy, as Edward Varese suggests. In other words, the method of composition is by giving musical life to the energy inherent in the sound itself. So I bring new timbres into my compositions — for example, mixed tones. Combinations of several dozen pure tones have become dominant in my works.”

The calm face had suddenly become animated and beautiful.

“I am attracted by the voices of Buddhist priests chanting sutras — no melody, of course, but habitual intonation and rhythm, and when any priests take part together, the group produces a sort of musical noise through the mixing of the voices of varying pitches. I added to a full orchestra treble woodwind instruments and bass brass instruments, placed in different corners of the hall to achieve a directional sense by means of the crisscross of sounds over the heads of the audience—”

No silence now — the words poured from him in a flow of creating thought!

“Nirvana, the ideal state of being for the Buddhist, is symbolized by the toll of the bell. So perhaps I am religious. I composed this symphony with the idea of creating my own musical Nirvana. It is not religious music, I suppose, in the purest sense of the word. It is a sort of Buddhistic cantata. I hope you like it.” He smiled suddenly. “I talk too much.”

I broke the next silence. “What do you do next, after our picture?”

“I go to New York, to write music for the New York City Ballet. It will be played next season.”

“Quite different from a Buddhist cantata?”

“I like difference, but before I go to New York I will finish the music for The Big Wave. This picture is unusual, too, and altogether different. I have the music in my mind clearly, really romantic, not Wagnerian romantic, strong and delicate together, with contemporary Oriental philosophy. How is it you write like this? The emotion is Oriental.”

It was my turn not to know what to say. How can a writer say how she writes? But he had forgotten his question.

“I want a song in it,” he was saying. “I want a song that is like the sunrise, young and fresh and full of hope. Your young people, beginning their life again in their own time, at this moment, never before lived, I want that song.”

He leaned toward me, all demand and pleading. “If I write the music, will you write the words?”

“I cannot,” I told him.

There was nothing more to be said. We shook hands and he was gone. And the song was written by someone else.

He stopped at the office the next day at noon and looked in. Something was always going on there, and that moment was no exception. Hundreds of costumes were heaped on the floor, and several persons — men, boys and a girl or two — were pawing them over to a running accompaniment of Japanese at various tonal levels. They were looking for some garment demanded by the model for various parts in the picture. The model was a microscopic human being, male, of vague age but certainly not young. He stood something under five feet and if he weighed ninety pounds, it would surprise me. He was skin and bone, and if the skeleton was a child’s, the face was fascinating. Wrinkled, lively, full of fun and mischief, it was the face of an old faun. The top of the head was bald, but hair surrounded the large bald spot and stood straight out from the skull, as though the old faun were undergoing electric shock. He was certainly full of some sort of electricity for he was issuing orders without let, as he modeled a fisherman’s outfit made for a man four times his size. He was a good model, nevertheless. He clutched the trousers in at his waist, gave a twist to the belt, arranged the Japanese coat and became a fisherman. Everybody laughed and I sat down to watch.

He knew all the characters in The Big Wave, it appeared, and he modeled them all. When he modeled a man he faced us. When he modeled a woman, he turned his back. I recognized each character, even the young girl Setsu. How an old man could pose so that he suggested a gay young girl, even from the back, is something I cannot explain. I wished for the millionth time that I understood Japanese, for whatever the old faun was saying the audience was convulsed. Every now and again he was dissatisfied and threw off a costume, or rejected what was offered and pawed among the confusion of the piled garments with all the fierce intensity of a monkey looking for fleas.

At this moment someone had an inspiration. “He’s what we’ve been looking for — a wonderful attendant for Old Gentleman. Does he speak English?”

The old faun smiled with all his teeth, none of them in good repair, and shook his head to the English.

To the rest he replied that he would think it over and let us know tomorrow. The next day, the old faun, modeling more costumes, and dancing about on his spindly legs, brightened as I entered the room. A stream of Japanese flowed from him, which, interpreted, was that he would join the cast, but only if we promised not to cut his hair. He said he would not come with us if we cut his hair.

I regarded the circle of electrified black wire surrounding the bony bald skull. “Tell him,” I said, “that I would not think of cutting that hair. I promise it will not be cut.”

We all stared gravely at the valuable hair.

“Hai,” the cheerful faun said with a smile that reached across the room. Suddenly the smile disappeared. Japanese chatter poured from where the smile was.

The patient interpreter explained. “He says, does he have to speak English? If so, he can’t.”

“He has only two lines and we will teach him every day,” we promised.

More Japanese and the interpreter reported. “He says he must have a good teacher. He must speak English perfectly.”

“He will have a good teacher,” we promised.

Later we found that no amount of teaching could prevail over his invincible Japanese accent. We cut his lines to two essential words, “yes,” and “no.” These he says in the picture, impressively and with pride. He had, he said, waited his whole life to become an actor, but the nearest approach had been to work with costumes. I shall never forget his beatific face when he knew he was to have the part. So far as he was concerned, he was a star. He gave us a great smile and the faun became monkey again, pawing among the clothes, but now he was searching feverishly for his own costume.

That night for the first time since he left, I felt a release, slight though it was, from the dull oppression of — what shall I call it? Shock, desolation, loneliness, whatever its compound, it had laid a burden upon me from which I could not escape. I did not wander the streets that night. Instead I decided upon a Japanese massage, dinner alone in my room, a long letter to the children at home, and a book. This is a program ordinary enough, but I had not achieved it since being alone. Laughter had provided the possibility now. I laugh easily, since the world is full of funny people and incidents, but I had not laughed often in the past months and never without the self-forgetfulness that somehow the little faun had inspired that afternoon. It is the peculiar talent of the artist that he is able to enter the being of another person and this is particularly true of the novelist. We had discussed it often, he and I, and he had forgiven me always when, temporarily, I was absorbed in someone other than himself. It is a strange absorption this, and I do not know how to describe it except to liken it to the focus of total interest essential to the scientist theoretician. Such a scientist is by temperament an artist too and none of us can escape what we ourselves are.

I had not been able to absorb myself in anyone, however, since his death and until this afternoon when for an hour the old habit returned. I felt elated and almost hopeful. At least I was relieved, however briefly, of the miasma of sadness in which I had walked for so many weeks. I laughed with all my heart and for an hour was healed. I can report that I carried through my program for the evening and went to bed at a reasonable hour, also for the first time in all the weeks. The fact marked a beginning.

The abalone diving girls — have I spoken of them? I think not and I must, for they were a unique tightly knit little group in our all-Japanese cast. Abalone clams are a delicacy in the Japanese cuisine but they are difficult to obtain for they cling to rocks with a powerful muscle and they live far down where the sea is dark and the water icy cold. Japanese fishermen prudently refuse to dive for them and allot the task to young women, who are more able to endure the cold and the danger. Men row the boats to the clam beds and wait patiently while the women plunge into the sea, clad only in shorts and belts into which they thrust the long heavy iron knives necessary for hacking the clams from the rocks.

To my amazement, their costume, so natural to them and so sensible, became a matter of concern and even controversy with our American producers. American audiences, it seemed, could not tolerate the sight of the bare breasts of the women divers. In Europe the sight would be quite acceptable, even pleasant, but decency has absolute standards in the breast-conscious United States.

“How?” I inquired. “A woman is a woman and she cannot properly be anything else.”

“Bras,” the American delegate said laconically. He relented slightly when he saw my amazement. “We’ll take two shots of them, one with and one without.”

That is what we did, and I was amused to see how embarrassed the women were when compelled to wear pink brassieres over their round brown breasts. They felt really naked, as Eve did in the garden, doubtless, when she was told to wear a fig leaf.

A peculiar satisfaction in translating my story from one medium to another, from printed page to film, was that the characters came alive in flesh and blood. We found Setsu one day and I shall never forget the moment of pure angelic pleasure when, looking at a young woman, I recognized her. She was a young star of his own company, the production manager told us. More important to me was her lovely little face and large melting eyes of soft brown. She was so small in stature that she was, she told me, a member of the Transistor Club, whose members must all be under five feet. This transistor girl, however, was even smaller. When she stood by our six-foot, grown-up Toru in the film it was exactly right as he looked down upon her, laughed and said, “I like you because you are so small and funny.”

Our cast was complete at last. They could all speak English or could learn the few words they must speak — except Toru’s mother. She was simply too shy to attempt an English word. But she had so sweet a face, besides being a well-known actress in Japan, that we cut her lines and let her act instead of speak. Meanwhile three weeks had passed. All contracts were signed. It was a fine cast, Sessue Hayakawa the star best known in the western world. All the others were stars in Japan, except grown-up Haruko, a new actress chosen especially for the ferocious abalone diving girl, who fell in love with Toru and fought for him against gentle Setsu.

When we were ready to leave Tokyo at last, the cast assembled, the camera and crew waiting, Old Gentleman invited us to a party at a geisha house, and thither we went one evening, he having called for us in state to take us there in his own car. I had grown used by now to evenings spent in quiet inns with Japanese friends. A good inn, in Japan, is never to be found beside a highway. One must descend from car or bus and walk for at least a hundred yards, and likely more, down a mossy path to a secluded spot, where under trees, if possible, low roofs spread over rooms open to gardens and small pools. To such places, as often as I had felt inclined, friends had invited me, professors in universities, writers, playwrights, literary people and artists, groups of talented women.

Such evenings passed in restful conversation, comparisons in customs, and memories of peace and war and peace again. I enjoyed beyond expression the new freedom with which we could talk. Some barrier seemed to have rolled away in the years in which I had been absent from Japan, not from me but from them. I can only attribute it, at least in part, to the experience they have had with Americans during the years of Occupation and after. There had been misunderstandings, but understanding had prevailed.

The evening at the geisha house was not like the quiet evenings among congenial friends. We stopped at a sumptuous new restaurant and then entered a huge room where the longest low table I had ever seen was already surrounded by guests, all of whom, our host assured us, were the highest of their class. Thus we were introduced to an aged prince surrounded by geisha girls, of whom there were plenty, then to a minister of the present cabinet, then to a young giant seven feet tall and three feet wide, who was the champion wrestler in Japan, and so on and on. Each male guest had several geisha surrounding him, and even I was given two to attend me, right and left.

Between dishes, we were entertained by the traditional dancing and singing of trained geisha. What was new, however, were two young girls, magicians. They were among the best I have ever seen, and I have seen magicians in every country because I adore them. These girls, in contrast to the geisha, were in western dress, their arms bare to their shoulders. There was no nonsense therefore of hiding rabbits and fowl and pots of water up their sleeves. They simply did marvelous tricks and I have no idea how.

After some four enjoyable hours the evening came to an end. Reflecting upon its incidents, a bit of fluff sticks in my mind. The American Ambassador’s wife had described to me, at a luncheon in my honor, the formal dresses still required of foreigners attending any function at the court or palace of the Emperor. The dresses, she told me, must be long and must have high necks and long sleeves. Later in the day I asked a Japanese friend of literal mind why foreign women must wear high necks. She answered promptly and exactly. “It is so when they bow the Emperor must not be embarrassed to look down their naked bosoms.”

Our last night in Tokyo, the geisha party over, I sat by my window in the dark before I slept and looked out over the brilliant city, a mass of glittering modern buildings, in the center of which is the high and ancient wall surrounding the imperial palace. Yes, there is a moat. In the division of old and new, which is today’s Japan, I am reminded of a courtesy call I had made that morning to the president of another great Japanese film company. He had been kind enough to lend to us one of his young stars to be our grown-up Toru.

In his way, this executive was remarkable, too. He is a small man, slender and healthy and full of energy. He has keen eyes and a brisk manner. I expressed my gratitude, and he said he wanted the picture to be a success. At this moment I observed high on the wall a miniature Buddhist temple. He is an ardent Buddhist, as I knew, and we talked for a few minutes about that great and ancient religion. I remembered that my scholar father once wrote a long monograph upon the subject of Buddhism as a source for certain Christian beliefs. There were more than thirty such resemblances and I told the distinguished Japanese Buddhist about them. He was deeply impressed, and said my father was entirely right — there is much in common between the two religions, and this not by accident, he was convinced, but by shared experience in history.

The next day, our very last, we obeyed Japanese custom by giving a party for cast and crew before we set out on great adventure. The big room we had rented from the hotel was crowded. All our actors were there, our cameraman — of him much more, for assuredly the gods sent him to us — the make-up artist, the best in Japan, we were told, and many others. Reporters had clamored to be present and were.

Our child actors were in their best party clothes, Little Setsu, Little Toru and Little Yukio, and their big dittos. Our entire cast, in fact, made me swell with pride. They were handsome, they suited their parts, and they were enthusiastic. Our co-producers were pleased, too, even the production manager. He stayed throughout the party, he made a speech in Japanese which was doubtless excellent, since there was loud applause. Our star, Sessue Hayakawa, also spoke in Japanese, the reporters took notes, cameras flashed again and again, and the party was on. There was plenty of food and drink and everybody soon knew everybody.

It was a lovely party. We were slow to part, and we said good-by with assurances that we would soon meet again and work together on The Big Wave. Tomorrow — tomorrow — and may all tomorrows shine as brightly as that one shone ahead, I told myself that night.

Again I did not wander forth alone into the night. Instead I opened the window and sent my secret message into space, with love. Wherever he is, he heard, or so I dreamed, for a new comfort descended upon my heart and brought to me my first intimation of eventual peace. It was his blessing.